Week 4, entry one

9/16 from Home to Harlem

“Are Jake and Ray rejecting society’s institutions or are they outside of them trying to find their way in?”

From the excerpt it would appear Jake and Ray are both rejecting at least part of their society’s institutions. Jake observes the energies of industrialized Pittsburgh, being consumed by them by being enveloped in a cloud of smoke from an incoming train, the wonderful metaphoric description of Wiley Avenue, with its bleak looking shops along an uphill street, shrugs, and says, “I don’t like its ‘pearance nohow” (McKay, 371). It’s a wonderful line that acknowledges the surface of things, seemingly making Jake look foolish, but pronouncing within Jake’s character there is a concerted effort to not get swept up in the grandiose import of his life—that “romance of being black” as Ray describes it in his mind. There seems some contentedness by Jake with his economical realities—why take satisfaction from what you purchase (the pie) when the woman selling it offers more succor? Why gamble when you already won enough money at it? For Jake, there is always some niche within his economic reality to detract from the hardships he does indeed face. Rather than sleep in a bug-ridden place, he goes out, has his share, and then comes back to the same squalid place to pass out. Jake’s actions defy society’s morally and intellectually edifying institutions, thereby rejecting them.

While Jake is accepting of his economic realities he seems hopelessly lost pinning down his social life and figuring out what he wants from that sphere. When he initially looks at the world of opium and drugs, that place with a separate threshold a part from the bar (almost signifying you are in some serious stuff if you walk through those doors into this new place), he seemingly rues: “It’s a great life ef youse in on it…” (McKay, 375). But Jake can’t seem to bring himself to accept all that comes with that life—only the casual drop in to scratch and old habit. I feel Jake recognizes the transience and fruitlessness in drug highs because they aren’t as “mahvelous” as Jake’s feelings. While Ray is conflicted with his intellect, Jake seems nagged by his emptiness. When he touches down in Harlem, instead of being enveloped by the energies of the city (no smoke this time!), he is forlorn over not having any woman to share this beautiful day with.

Ray’s character is harder to judge in terms of his rejection or seeking of society’s institutions. As we discussed in class, he seems afflicted with a sense of dignity. For that prestige to strike a man of Ray’s circumstances instills a sense of restlessness within Ray. Ray reads the weighty black publications, Ray talks like an educated person, Ray may have even gone to Howard University. Ray initially seems attempting to work his way into the social institutions. But it doesn’t seem by any accident that Ray and Jake first meet at what is described as a social nexus for low-lives and shop of ridiculous religious iconography, a pool hall on dirty Wiley Avenue. For all of Ray’s efforts this is where he finds himself. His frustration doesn’t seem to come ahead until the scene where he lies awake, begging to sleep, but kept awake by his conscience screaming at him for his social situation in the broader context of race relations. Ray seemingly throws in the towel by stealing Jake’s drugs. What troubled him became distorted: “Taboos and terrors and penalties were transformed into new pagan delights, orgies of Orient-blue carnival, of rare flowers and red fruits, cherubs and seraphs and fetishes and phalli and all the most-high gods…” (McKay, 379). And with that action, the “tuning in and dropping out” long before the 1960s ever happened, Ray got his sleep. The word “capitulate” I think is an interesting word choice. There are connotations of loss from the word’s definition of drawing up the terms of surrender.