Today is the birthday of Claude McKay and I just completed his novel “Amiable with Big Teeth,” and it was the first novel in years that COMPELLED me to finish it, and I wonder why. I realized why, and I want to share why. I am not motivated to finish most novels that I am asked to read. However I was motivated to finish this novel because the way McKay wrote his Pablo Peixota character moved me like no other character I’ve read. I wanted Pablo and his organization to succeed.
In this novel, McKay shows the natural life-and-death progression of Black-run organizations in the West trying to connect with Africa but getting hampered or stopped by Western philanthropy and propaganda. McKay’s Pablo Peixota is chair of the Hands to Ethiopia organization. As the reader, you want the organization to succeed. It is hosting the envoy from Ethiopia named Lij Alamaya. Alamaya’s job is to deliver a letter from the Ethiopian emperor to Peixota. In the Introduction written by Jean-Christophe Cloutier and Brent Hayes Edwards, the president of Dutton, John McCrae who had the option to first publish this novel, said that the novel was “so bad and poor” (xl).
Viking declined to publish Hurston’s Barracoon. And Dutton also declined to published McKay’s Amiable. Dutton thought it was “bad” because the novel is such a strong indictment of Western philanthropy. In the end, like Paule Marshall’s character Harriet Amron, the white philanthropist dies because of their own arrogance and the chaos they created.
The reader is encouraged to see Alamaya deliver the letter, however Alamaya loses the letter. Peixota’s daughter Seraphine retrieves the letter after finding out it was stolen by the chair of Friends of Ethiopia, Maxim Tasan. The novel becomes more suspenseful where the reader wants to see Seraphine retrieve the letter and strengthen the connection between Ethiopia and “Aframericans” as the novel states. Peixota’s allies include the Reverend Zebulon Trawl who prays: “show me the way to defeat the machinations of the strong white ones against thy poor black sheep.”
Seraphine falls in love with Alamaya in way that shows the difficulty of Black parents raising Black children in a white world. McKay writes a full background for Peixota as a former numbers runner-turned-successful businessowner. McKay makes Peixota sympathetic as a Black parent who wants the best learning and career opportunities for their child yet, not a career that assaults the relationship between Aframericans and Ethiopians. When Peixota does not approve of Seraphine’s pursuit of Alamaya, she leaves the house in anger and consciously works for Maxim Tasan, leader of his rival organization that, as McKay shows, tried to undermine Hands to Ethiopia on several fronts.
Tasan said: “now that we have Alamya on our side and he’s going to work with the White Friends, we must see that he doesn’t keep up his contact with Peixota and Dorsey Flagg and their gang” (127). He also tried to prevent the Hands member Dorsey Flagg from accompanying Alamaya on his tour of the States. Tasan’s goal is to essentially stop aid from Peixota’s group, and to have as many people as possible join the “Popular Front” which was popular Communist group that was the arbiter of bourgeois democracy across the world.
He also helped get Peixota framed up. The trial and criminalization of Marcus Garvey looms throughout this novel. As you see how unfairly Western philanthropy, Tasan’s funder, stereotypes Peixota, you can’t help but think of how the same thing happened to Marcus Garvey, who ran the Negro World newspaper, that McKay wrote for before he pursued his solo writing career by 1927.
The narrator later tells us that Alamaya “had quickly perceived that the unfavorable publicity given the man’s arrest was an underhanded attack on the Hands to Ethiopia” (155). However, as McKay revealed in a letter mentioned the Introduction, his character Alamaya was not as strong as he wanted him to be, because he ultimately succumbs to the propaganda, to the machinations.
And after attacking Peixota’s organization, Peixota’s connection to Alamaya, Peixota himself, Tasan goes after Peixota’s daughter Seraphine. The narrator says that Tasan was perfectly satisfied in having Peixota’s daughter (181). Although the criminal case against Peixota was dismissed, the dismissal was ignored by the mainstream media. As James Baldwin in Giovanni’s Room, and as Morrison in God Help the Child, McKay wants the reader to question the narrative presented by the mainstream news media. McKay’s reader should see the power of philanthropy in shaping a narrative, even though that narrative is false.
After this break, the story shifts to the machinations of Maxim Tasan. The reader follows him to his death. McKay shows the consequences of Tasan’s effort, albeit successful. Tasan loses his life when he tries to separate Professor Koazhy from his supporters–a group that is reminiscent of the masses who were faithful readers of the Negro World and supporters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. For this, which was part of his pattern of creating chaos and cultural separation, he dies. Although Tasan dies his damage is done. However McKay gives agency most to the group in Harlem who APPLY their knowledge of the anticolonial struggle. -RF.