Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem

Abstract

Near the end of this rollicking, uneven, newly discovered novel, the Ethiopian envoy Lij Tekla Alamaya says to Gloria Kendall, his new romantic interest, that it’s “better to be the individual slave of love than to be the mindless slave of a movement” (247). This is just one of many remarks of its kind in Amiable with Big Teeth, by Claude McKay, and the sentence appears at a point in the novel where both Kendall and Alamaya have just gone through a process of unmasking in a narrative that is full of masquerades and unmasking, all in the service of repeatedly unmasking the Comintern and its politics, as those politics related to the African American community and the Ethiopian Crisis of 1935. As such, the “mindless slave of a movement,” a common enough trope of anti-Communist fiction, appears here in a kind of masking of its own, as this comic tale focuses less on social movements or fleshed-out fictional characters, and more on a set of ideas that were animating both national and African American discourse during the years in which this novel was written. This book is something of a literary phenomenon. Then-Columbia graduate student JeanChristophe Cloutier discovered it while he worked as an archivist in the Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library at the university. The manuscript was found among the papers of Samuel Roth, a smalltime publisher and pornographer who would serve prison time for his efforts. How the manuscript came to be among Roth’s papers is something of a mystery, Cloutier informs us, in an introduction to the book that he and Columbia University English Professor Brent Hayes Edwards co-wrote. In a 2013 article he published on the novel, Cloutier also contextualizes Amiable with Big Teeth’s place both within McKay’s own life and work, and within the literary and political situation that prevailed while the novel was being written. McKay’s own relationship with the Communist movement was complex. He was one of the leading intellectuals of the U.S. early-1920s left, as an editor of the Liberator magazine; his most famous public association with the Communist movement was his speech as an unofficial delegate to the 4 Congress of the Communist International, and his involvement in the movement lasted for several years after that. Meanwhile, he had become one of the leading participants in the Harlem Renaissance, with his poems, especially “If We Must Die,” and his novels, beginning with Home to Harlem, serving as major expressions of what was also known as the “New Negro” movement. He spent several years abroad, and by the time he returned to the United States in 1934, he had become a stanch anti-Communist critic. Amiable with Big Teeth focuses on the movement that emerged in the wake of the 1935 Italian Fascist invasion of Ethiopia, and tells the story of two organizations that were competing to channel protest energies in opposition to the invasion. On the one hand, there is the all-black Hands to Ethiopia, headed by Pablo Peixota, a former numbers runner turned businessman,