“Theah’s Life Anywheres Theah’s Booze and Jazz”: Home to Harlem and Gingertown in the Context of National Prohibition

Abstract

“Harlem was the paradise of bootleggers,” Claude McKay recalls in Harlem Glory (1999), his brief, posthumously published account of this prominent African American community during the 1930s, and he further notes that “Prohibition had made the defiance of the laws general and racketeering respectable” (15). McKay’s retrospective assessment of Prohibition-era Harlem was fairly accurate; like many urban neighborhoods, Harlem was awash in bootleg liquor during the nearly fourteen years of National Prohibition (1920–1933). McKay himself was a habitual violator of the Prohibition laws, and underground drinking establishments such as cabarets and buffet flats frequently surface in his fiction. Yet McKay seldom commented in his writing specifically on the federal liquor legislation that so dramatically changed American life. However, understanding the context of National Prohibition and the significant effects it had on American society in general and the Harlem community in particular allows twenty-first century readers to appreciate better the political undertones of McKay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928) and his collection of short stories Gingertown (1932), both published prior to the 1933 repeal of Prohibition. When National Prohibition went into effect in January 1920, the saloons and cabarets that dominated the social life of Harlem closed their doors. In their place, scores of illicit speakeasies and nightclubs sprang up to supply bootleg liquor to their thirsty patrons. Protection money paid to police and underworld kingpins allowed these businesses to avoid raids and remain in operation. Harlem establishments ranging from the swanky Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn to the low-down speakeasies such as the Coal Bed, the Air Raid Shelter, and the Glory Hole not only served illegal alcohol but also provided entertainment in the form of jazz singing and dancing (Lewis 242). In his 1927 essay “Negro Life in New York’s Harlem,” Wallace Thurman describes a “typical” speakeasy, located in a “musty, damp basement behind,” called the Glory Hole: It is a single room about ten feet square and remains an unembellished basement except for a planed down plank floor, a piano, three chairs and a library table. The Glory Hole is typical of its class. It is a social club, commonly called a dive, convenient for the high times of a certain group. The men are unskilled laborers during the day, and in the evenings they round up their girls or else meet them at the rendezvous in order to have what they consider and enjoy as a good time. The women, like the men, swear, drink and dance as much and as vulgarly as they please. . . . Such places as the Glory