The Tropics in New York

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1922

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context: The Harlem Renaissance

McKay was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, which was an African American literary, musical, and artistic movement that emerged in Harlem, New York City, in the 1920s and continued into the 1930s. This was a new era in which many African Americans felt a wave of confidence, racial pride, and creativity as Harlem became known as a cultural mecca. Social and political activism aimed at enhancing the civil rights of African Americans also increased during this period.

In addition to McKay, one of the most prominent figures in the movement was Langston Hughes, who published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, in 1926 and a novel, Not Without Laughter, four years later. Hughes wrote movingly and honestly about the experience of working-class Black people. Another Harlem Renaissance poet was Countee Cullen, who published his first book of poetry, Color, in 1925. Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist and playwright who is best known today for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Poet and novelist Jean Toomer made an impact with his novel Cane (1923).

Jazz musicians Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and blues singer Bessie Smith, were part of the Harlem Renaissance, as was pianist, composer, and singer Fats Waller. Popular Harlem venues for music were the Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club.

Writer and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson, who became the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1920 was another well-known Harlem Renaissance figure. Johnson’s review of McKay’s 1922 volume Harlem Shadows did much to establish McKay’s reputation. Johnson wrote admiringly:

He [McKay] is a poet of beauty and a poet of power. No Negro poet has sung more beautifully of his own race than McKay and no Negro poet has equalled the power with which he expresses the bitterness that so often rises in the heart of the race (Johnson, James Weldon. “A Real Poet.” The New York Age: The National Negro Weekly, 20 May 1922).

Three years later, in his essay “Harlem: The Culture Capital,” Johnson described the cultural reach and allure of Harlem during this period:

Harlem is indeed the great Mecca for the sight-seer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious and the talented of the whole Negro world; for the lure of it has reached down to every island of the Carib Sea and has penetrated even into Africa (Johnson, James Weldon. “Harlem: The Culture Capital.” The New Negro: An Interpretation, edited by Alain Locke. Atheneum, 1925).

In his novel, Home to Harlem (1928), McKay also captured the flavor of life in Harlem in the 1920s. McKay wrote that novel not in Harlem but on the French Riviera. Although he lived in Harlem for many years between 1914 and 1923, in the second half of the decade he was mostly traveling and living in Europe. When he returned to the United States in 1934, the Harlem Renaissance was very much on the wane, and the Great Depression had set in.

Authorial Context

McKay is best known as a fierce poetic advocate for racial justice. In many of the 75 poems that appear in his most celebrated work, Harlem Shadows (1922), he denounces racism with a force and a passion that has not lost its power to startle. One famous poem is “If We Must Die,” which was written in 1919 in response to race riots that year in Chicago and other US cities. The speaker adopts a belligerent and defiant tone; oppression must be resisted, whatever the cost:

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead (Lines 5-8)!

In “The White City” the poet makes a virtue of hatred; it is a “dark Passion” (Line 6) that “makes my heaven in the white world’s hell” (Line 7). In other words, his mission in life is to hate the racism that keeps Black people down, and nourishing this hatred fuels his life energy. Presumably the city of the title is New York, although it remains unnamed, referred to only as the “mighty city” (Line 9). In the chilling poem, “The Lynching,” the body of a Black man who has been lynched at night is still hanging in the same spot at dawn the next morning, and crowds come to view the disturbing sight. Blue-eyed white women and small boys assemble to stare, but they show no pity, and the poem ends with a dark vision of more lynchings in the future:

The women thronged to look, but never a one

Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;

And little lads, lynchers that were to be,

Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee (Lines 11-14).

However, many of the poems in Harlem Shadows do not mention race at all, and at least a dozen echo the themes of “The Tropics in New York”: nostalgia for a homeland left behind many years prior, and a contrast between the delights of life in a rural setting and the trials and tribulations that the city dweller must endure. Poems that address these themes include “Home Thoughts”: “Amid the city’s noises, I must think / Of mangoes leaning o’er the river’s brink” (Lines 3-4), two lines that could almost have been taken from “The Tropics in New York.” In “I Shall Return,” the poet is hopeful that he will return to the land he loves so much: “I shall return to loiter by the streams / That bathe the brown blades of the bending grasses” (Lines 5-6). When he returns, it will “ease my mind of long, long years of pain” (Line 14). In “Winter in the Country” he imagines he is among trees and birds and can feel the “sea-laden breeze” (Line 2) and watch the “soft sunset” (Line 23). Nevertheless, he must bring himself back to grim reality in the city, in lines that suggest more explicitly what “The Tropics in New York” only hints at: