Home to Harlem is part of the Harlem Renaissance genre of literature, birthed from the chronically low-income community in New York. The mostly black community has often been the victim of mistreatment, police brutality, and outright racism throughout its history, but the literature from that environment is jazzy, sexy and undeniably beautiful. Home to Harlem is a wonderful example of these ideas in practice.
For starters, the entire premise of the novel hinges on Jake's willingness to desert a bleak service to an army that treated him as a slave. The racism in the novel is gruesome and often severe. There is a sense in which Jake is a hero for his brave resistance to the status quo, but that doesn't mean that he won't have to pay for his crime. At the end of the novel, he is forced to uproot his life and take his lover to a new city, a new life on the run. This is meaningful, because it indicates the fact that even though the system is broken and biased (especially in the 1920's!) that doesn't mean that real people don't have to face consequences for their actions. It's a lose-lose. If you stay, you're mistreated. If you leave, you're a traitor and a coward. This is a wonderful depiction of the catch 22 of racial injustice.
But the racial component of the novel pales in comparison to the thrust of the novel, which is the power and drama of the characters, the blunt sexuality of the story, and the jazzy, gritty resistance against the system. The story is a beautiful story about a renegade, a man who saw through the empty brokenness of his reality and seized a life for himself where there wasn't one to be had. It's the story of the resilience and strength of the black community in Harlem.
