Home to Harlem

The thing that stood out most about this book to me is the emphasis on the appearance of the characters. Mckay always introduces a character by describing his physical features. The characters appearances seems to be directly tied to a deeper description of the character's personality. A good example is the character Zeddy. Zeddy is described as being heavy set and round, almost aggressive looking. His physical description parallels his personality he is aggressive physical and sometimes even emotionally unstable, such as when he almost kills Nije, the loan shark. Also worth noting is the emphasis McKay puts on the difference in skin tone of the characters in his book. His first description of his characters starts with what shade of black they may be. When Jake first sets eyes on his love interest at the beginning he says "She was brown, but she had tinted her leaf-like face to a ravishing chestnut." His insistence on  mentioning what shade of black a character may be shows a separation amongst the African-Americans in Harlem at the time. This separation or discrimination is showcased when the Baltimore is raided. The narrator says that owners of the other black clubs would not let a person with a lighter tone of skin to come into their clubs. It is hard not to notice how much of this book, thus far, is concerned with physical appearance. 

What do you think is the significance of the physical descriptions Mckay  provides of his characters?