Banjo

Claude McKay set this 1929 novel among the drifters, dockworkers, and stranded seamen who gathered along the waterfront of Marseilles, a rough quarter he called the Ditch. At its center is Lincoln Agrippa Daily, an American vagabond and street musician who goes by Banjo and dreams of pulling a band together from the men who wash up there. McKay gave the book the subtitle ‘A Story Without a Plot,’ and true to that it moves by mood and talk rather than tidy incident, circling questions of race, work, colonialism, and where a Black man might feel at home in the wider world. Its pride in vernacular Black life later fed directly into the Negritude movement. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.