Brown girls rouged and painted like dark pansies. Brown flesh draped in soft colorful clothes. Brown lips full and pouted for soft kissing. Brown breasts throbbing with love.
Several reasons exist for Jake Brown—gone AWOL during World War I for not being given active combat duty and ever since living in England with a white woman—desires to return home to Harlem. But the first expression of that desire through the narrator’s penetration into his thoughts are these. Women. Sex. Repeat.
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts. We can’t be civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things that pimps would be ashamed of.”
In contrast to the novel’s protagonist, Ray is an intellectual and anti-social. He is academic, bookish and politically idealistic, but socially pessimistic. Rather than taking advantage of the socially advantageous position he lands by being accepted by Harvard, he dismisses it for its complete lack of racial awareness. He has come to Harlem from Haiti but also differs from Ray in being able adapt well enough to retain his sense esteem while still accepting foundational unfairness of the racially rigged system. Eventually, he expatriates himself yet again, this time to Europe where he can retain his political purity by working as a mess boy to get there.
Soon he would become one of the contented hogs in the pigmen of Harlem, getting ready to litter black piggies.
These are the thoughts of Ray as he considers the implication of marriage to a beauty parlor employee named Agatha. Ray is emotionally needful of Agatha and could not help but be physically attracted to beautiful girl with the amorous eyes. And yet, vacillator that he is who seemed destined to forever live the life of the mind, he cannot stop himself from equating union with Agatha to becoming part of the great dehumanized herd all packed homogeneously into a tiny little can called Harlem.
“Why, let’s go to Chicago, then.”
The novel concludes on perhaps a little bit of comedic irony. One does not typically choose to insert a city into the title of their novel and then end that novel with the pronouncement by the protagonist that he is leaving it behind unless one has at least some sense of puckish irony. The book opens with Jake returning from London and closes with him deciding to leave with his girl Felice for Chicago because he hears it is a marvelous place. So, from the perspective of the early 21st century, at least, there is a big dose of irony in the reason he decides to leave home from Harlem.
