Heaving along from side to side, like a sailor on the unsteady deck of a ship, Lincoln Agrippa Daily, familiarly known as Banjo, patrolled the magnificent length of the great breakwater of Marseilles, a banjo in his hand.
It is not often—certainly less so than one would think—that the opening line of a novel provide as much essential background information as this example. What the reader will discover soon after reading this opening paragraph is that sailors are vital significance to the narrative even though in this instance the sailor reference is only a metaphorical image implicated through similie. In addition, the primary setting of the story is laid bare here. And not only is the title identified as being a name, but a nickname. That would be enough, surely, but here’s the big surprise: it is a nickname and the actual name of the character is identified. Just for added insurance, perhaps, one’s likely suspicion of the origin of nickname serving as the title is also revealed. That’s a lot of useful information to pack into any sentence, much less the opening sentence.
Shake to the loud music of life playing to the primeval round of life. Rough rhythm of darkly-carnal life. Strong surging flux of profound currents forced into shallow channels. Play that thing! One movement of the thousand movements of the eternal life-flow. Shake that thing! In the face of the shadow of Death. Treacherous hand of murderous Death, lurking in sinister alleys, where the shadows of life dance, nevertheless, to their music of life. Death over there! Life over here!
Although McKay penned several novels as well as a few book of non-fiction, his legacy within the Harlem Renaissance rests mostly upon his contributions to verse. To suggest that any writer is a poet before they are anything else is a bit presumptuous, but if this passage proves anything, it is that McKay even wrote much of his fiction with a focus on rhythm and imagery that is usually associate with poets. This is a description of jazz being played in “hole-in-the-wall” drinking establishment or, as described by Banjo, a “dump.” And don’t for a second think the excerpt extracted above is the whole thing. In fact, it represents about a third of the entire descriptive passage which is, in itself, something very akin to listening to what the writer is describing.
When reading the full thing, one can be excused for wishing McKay had desired or, if he did so, had felt comfortable enough to pursue an experimental novel written entirely in such dense, almost surrealistic prose. It would have been closer to a prose-poem most likely and if the other rare occasions which mirror this style of almost hallucinogenic prose-as-poetry which occasionally populates this novel is any indication, it would have been a masterpiece. But enough of what-ifs: while the rest of this novel does not rise to the heights of those passages, the frequency of passages like this makes the rest worth the trip.
The Africans gave him a positive feeling of wholesome contact with racial roots. They made him feel that he was not merely an unfortunate accident of birth, but that he belonged definitely to a race weighed, tested, and poised in the universal scheme.
The novel carries the curious subtitle “A Story without a Plot.” That it is an accurate description perhaps also says something about the true nature of McKay’s place within literature. After all, poetry does much better without a plot than novels, at least for some people. But then, Banjo is not really constructed as a novel about a story so much as it is a novel of discovery. The episodic structure of the novel reflects the tradition of improvisation in jazz where a musician doesn’t really need to care about where he is going or where he winds up as long as the getting there stayed true to the course. And the destination set for Banjo is implied back in that very first opening line of the book: he needs to get to a place where he is no longer “heaving from side to side” but enjoys a sense of stability through identity, belonging and purpose.
