Home to Harlem

Jake Brown

Jake returns from two years overseas to a Harlem that burns in his blood, and he moves through it with a rough, magnetic charm that makes buddies want to fight for him and women want to keep him. He loves life too much to be careful, drinking and carousing until a relapse lands him under a doctor's warning and his landlady's gin-soaked sermons about sin. His hunger for pleasure and his refusal to be tamed drive the novel's early wandering, making him both the life of every room and a man always one step from wreckage.

Ray

Ray returns to New York after a diner run and goes straight to check on Jake, alarmed by the relapse in a way that reveals how easily his fine-strung nature responds to sensations Jake barely registers. Where Jake laughs off the doctor and the landlady's warnings, Ray absorbs them, caught between a world of rough vitality and his own searching, bookish mind. His tenderness and introspection give the novel its counterweight, a man whose body rides the rails while his thoughts reach for something Harlem's fever can't satisfy.

Zeddy Plummer

Zeddy greets Jake in Uncle Doc's saloon with kisses and French slang, the two veterans trading stories of Brest and the graves they crawled out of. But in Harlem his buddies snicker that he's kept under Gin-head Susy's skirt, a skirt-man teased even by Billy Biasse, and he's had to fight a fellow in Dixie Red's poolroom over the insult. His wounded pride and taste for gambling pull Jake deeper into the Belt's poolrooms and back rooms, showing how quickly a man's standing can curdle in the gossip of the avenue.

Felice

Jake wakes in perfect peace to coffee, cream, and doughnuts, then finds the folded note in his pocket signed by a baby girl to a honey boy, and Harlem suddenly feels like his. He checks himself from running back, telling himself never to let a woman think he's too crazy about her, even as he calls her a particularly sweet piece of business and plans to see her again that night. Her gift and her absence set the early arc in motion, a woman whose independence turns Jake's easy conquest into a pursuit he can't quite control.

Gin-head Susy

Susy throws sociable evenings for yellow poolroom youngsters and bellboys, holding a congenital contempt for women and a vain desire for a lover who will stay once she's cleaned him up and straightened his hair. Her guests drink her Gordon Dry, swap rakish stories, and leave her for pleasures elsewhere, while the boys crack jokes about her ugly spade and B-flat trotters. Her new friendship with the putty-skinned Lavinia Curdy begins to change her, and her gin-soaked front room becomes one of the Belt's essential stages, a place where Harlem's appetites and cruelties are poured out nightly.

Congo Rose

Rose shops on Fifth Avenue as if she were a dark foreign lady of title, then takes a taxicab uptown to the house where she keeps Jake's address and her claim on him. When Madame Laura arrives asking after him, Rose pops her head from the window, descends, and turns the doorstep into a battle, insisting he's her man and threatening to spit in the woman's eye. Her jealousy and theatrical pride make her a force in Jake's Harlem, and the story she spreads afterward shows how thoroughly the Belt runs on gossip, rivalry, and the performance of possession.