Poem Analysis: Harlem Shadows By Claude Mckay

Harlem Shadows

In the poem Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay, the poet talks about how blacks during the Harlem Renaissance time period lived in poverty and it was hard for people to keep their family under their a house and maintain money. He portrays this through little girls walking about in the streets making money by using their bodies for sex, or being prostitutes. He is trying to depict how black people would be forced to do almost anything they had to do during that time period to make a living, whether that meant resorting to prostitution. During the time period of the Harlem Renaissance minorities such as black people did not get equal opportunity compared to the caucasian society. If little black girls had to be outside from dawn to midnight doing nothing but walking back and forth waiting for someone to pay them for sexual favors, they would do it. Not because they want to it, but because they had to do it.

The author

The references to feet are used to portray the girls in the poems as travellers on a journey. They have no choice but to continue on the journey using their feet. They must continue on the journey using whatever means they can. We conclude that the fact that they have chosen to become prostitutes is not their fault. They have “slippered feet” which means they are young and innocent (McKay 5). Their feet are “little” and “gray”, “tired” and “timid”, “sacred” and “brown” (McKay 8, 11, 15, 16). Because their feet are made of “clay”, we get the image that they are only human.

The author uses repetition on the word ‘little’ to not only emphasize the youth of these girls, but to also emphasize how these girls are being forced to grow up quickly in order to live a decent life in Harlem. That gives the reader a message that the poet is quite saddened at the fact that there are little girls in these situations and not just any