Biography, McKay's Jamaica Years

McKay

According to Tyrone Tillery’s Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity, Claude McKay was born on September 15th, 1890, in the small village of Sunny Ville, in Clarendon parish, Jamaica (Tillery, 4). Other sources, including William J. Maxwell’s Complete Poems: Claude McKay and Winston James’ A Fierce Hatred of Injustice claim that he was born in 1889, in Nairne Castle, Jamaica (Maxwell, xiii), (James, 3).

A copy of Claude McKay’s birth certificate, listing his birth year as 1889

Jamaica

Clarendon parish

Born “Festus Claudius” (Cooper, 7), McKay was the youngest of eleven children, “eight of [whom]…lived to maturity” (James, 4). He was born to a peasant family who had prospered (Tillery, 4). Maxwell points out that “casual biographies are wrong to endorse [McKay’s] description of himself as a peasant” (Maxwell, xiii), because, although McKay was descended from the Jamaican peasant class, his family was quite affluent by the time of McKay’s birth. As Wayne F. Cooper notes, “[The McKays’ story] was the story of transplanted Africans forced to cultivate an alien soil. They survived to claim it as their own” (Cooper, 1).

Biography, McKay's Jamaican Years, Continued

Clarendon parish: watercolor by Charles Edwin Long

Claude McKay’s parents, Thomas Francis and Hannah Ann Elizabeth McKay were leaders among the black peasant community. McKay described his father as “a tall, graying man with an impressive luxuriantly kinky head” (Gayle, 23). Thomas was descended from the West African nation of Ashanti, but he was also the product of the “intense Christian fundamentalist indoctrination” he had received in his youth. As a result, Thomas McKay “tried to live a completely honest life, avoided the use of curse words, and totally abstained from drinking and dancing” (Tillery, 4). He spurned the superstitions of the other Jamaican peasants, believing that people were harmed by natural catastrophes and by the actions of other human beings, not by magic or by the whim of the West African god Obeah. He was a community leader, and one of the few Africans “prosperous enough to qualify to vote” (James, 16). However, due to his “puritanical personality,” Thomas was unable to develop close relationships with his children (Tillery, 4).

McKay’s mother, on the other hand, freely loved and nurtured all of her children, especially Claude. He notes, “I was the baby of the family and the favourite of my mother” (James, 19). However, neither his siblings nor anyone who knew her wanted for Hannah’s affection; McKay recalls, “My mother…loved all people. It was a rich, warm love” (Cooper, 9). McKay inherited his mother’s keen sense of the aesthetic, and his father’s inability to maintain interpersonal relationships (Tilley, 5).

Biography, McKay's Jamaica Years, Further Continued

Although McKay was born more than fifty years after emancipation, both sides of his family had experienced slavery. McKay’s mother was descended from slaves from Madagascar. Thomas McKay would often reprimand his sons by reminding them that their grandfather had been a slave and “knew how cruel the white man could be. You boys don’t know anything” (Cooper, 4). His parents grew up during the tumultuous postemancipation period. His family history of slavery, as well as his parents’ personal experience of postemancipation and the new peasant class, helped to shape McKay’s poetry and prose work (Cooper, 9).
When McKay was eight, his mother sent him to live with his oldest brother, Uriah Theophilious (called U’Theo or U. Theo), a schoolteacher in the northwest of Jamaica (Tillery, 5). Although McKay himself gave conflicting accounts regarding how long he stayed with his brother, it is safe to estimate that he spent at least four years in his brother’s care (Cooper, 11). Under U’Theo’s tutelage, McKay found that he had a voracious appetite for literature. McKay notes, “These were…the indelible years of my first reading of anything…thrilling just for the thrill” (Cooper, 14). During this period, McKay was also educated by Walter Jekyll, an Englishman who compiled the first collection of Anansi stories, as well as other Jamaican folklore.

Jekyll’s Anansi collection

Jekyll was the first to acknowledge McKay’s talent with verse. Jekyll would later encourage McKay to write poetry in his native Jamaican dialect. He claimed that McKay had a “chance as a native boy [to] put the Jamaican…into literary language” (Maxwell, xiii).

Biography, McKay's Jamaica Years, Still Further Continued

Around age fourteen, McKay returned to his parents’ home and began to prepare for the exam to become an elementary school teacher. However, after receiving a scholarship for trade school, he moved to Browns Town to prepare for certification as a wheelwright. At eighteen, he returned home, disheartened and “convinced that he would never be any good at a trade” (Tillery, 6). Less than six months after his return home, his mother died. McKay wrote, “The only one I loved was gone” (Cooper, 26). Devastated by her death, McKay left for Kingston, where, after working in a match factory briefly, he joined Jamaica’s constabulary (Tillery, 7) in June of 1911 (Cooper, 29).

McKay in his constable’s uniform

The Jamaican constabulary was an island-wide police force. Men enlisted for five years and received military and civil instruction. The constables carried only batons and handcuffs, but could be issued handguns in an emergency situation. While working as a constable, McKay continued writing dialect poetry and visiting his mentor Jekyll. Cooper claims, “Although it was never explicitly stated, the evidence suggests that Jekyll was homosexual” (Cooper, 30). Evidence indicates that McKay’s primary orientation was homosexual, although he had sexual relations with women as well. Cooper posits, “A homoerotic component most likely underlay the relationship Claude developed with Jekyll” (Cooper, 30), while Tillery claims, “It is entirely possible that McKay’s feelings for Jekyll were simply those of a student for an admired mentor” (Tillery, 12).
McKay disliked the constabulary, and wrote a volume of dialect poetry titled Constab Ballads to express his feelings. He “respectfully and gratefully dedicated” this volume to Lieutenant-Coloneal A.E. Kershaw, the Inspector-General of the constabulary, and Inspector W.E. Clark, under whom McKay served (McKay, Constab Ballads, 6). With Jekyll’s help, he left the constabulary after serving only seventeen months (James, 45) and returned home to Clarendon parish in 1911 (Tillery, 8). His two volumes of dialect poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, were both published in 1912 (Cooper, Preface to The Dialect Poetry of Claude McKay).

In the spring of 1912, McKay left Jamaica to study agronomy at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, claiming “Jamaica was too small for high achievment” (Tillery, 19-20). Both Jekyll and McKay’s friend T.H. MacDermot were against this move. MacDermot warned, “Claude, we hate to see you go because you will be changed, terribly changed by America” (Cooper, 56).

A history class at Tuskegee in 1902