Home To Harlem

Signs of spring have come to Harlem one day as Jake walks down Seventh Avenue. When hegets to the Bronx, he sees housing construction and an affectionate black couple.Hesits amid some dandelions blooming on a mound of dirt and revels in their common beauty and that of the spring day. He thinks back over all the times he has made love, from his first time in Virginia to ports in Europe. The beauty of this particular day reminds him most of the brown girl he met on the day he came back to Harlem, though.

Later, Jake is leaving a pool hall with Billy when they come across a brawl. “A yellow youth, a chocolate youth, and a brown girl” (281) are fighting and have attracted the attention of a crowd. One of the young men turns out to be Yaller Prince, and the young woman is urging the other man to beat him up. Billy tells Jake that Yaller Prince was once the woman’s pimp but let her go because she beat up another woman who sold sex for him.

The woman taunts Yaller Prince about his skin color, tells him he has never done a day of work, and asks the darker young man, Obadiah, to bloody his mouth as if this is the thing she most desires in the world.