Banjo: A Story Without a Plot

"Lincoln Agrippa Daily ("Banjo"), the thematic figure of McKay's freewheeling novel, doesn't see what slavery has to do with music. He plays the banjo because he likes to, and wants nothing more that to form a little orchestra. He is just one of an international colony of drifters who have settled on the tough waterfront of Mareilles in the 1920s - white men, brown men, black men. It is the blacks McKay centers on here - Banjo, Malty, Ginger, Dengel, Bugsy, Taloufa, Goosey, and even Jake of Home to Harlem. They panhandle by day, and at night they do the rounds of brawling bistros. They drink, look for women, dance, play music, make love, fight, and they talk - about their homes in Senegal, the West Indies, or the South; about Garvey's Back-to-Africa movement; and about being black. Into the group comes a writer, Ray, who rediscovers his African roots and feels at last he belongs to a race "weighted, tested, and poised in the universal scheme" -- Page 4 of cover.