Banjo: A Novel

From the author of Home to Harlem, a novel about dreams, diaspora, and drifting back home

Lincoln Agrippa Daily, known to his drifter cohorts on the 1920s Marseilles waterfront as “Banjo,” passes his days panhandeling and dreaming of starting his own little band. At night, Banjo, Malty, Ginger, Dengel, Bugsy, Taloufa, Goosey, and even Jake of Home to Harlem prowl the rough waterfront bistros, drinking, looking for women, playing music, fighting, loving, and talking—about their homes in Sengal, the West Indies, or the American South; about Garvey’s Back-to-Africa Movement; about being Black. When Ray, a writer, joins the group, it triggers his rediscovery of his African roots and his feeling that, at last, he belongs to a race, “weighted, tested, and poised in the universal scheme.”