Home To Harlem

Chapter 10 opens with the chef of a railway dining car yelling at the waiters and explaining to the cooks, including Jake (the third cook), that insulting the waiters is the perfect way to get better service out of them. Jake, however, gets along well with the waiters by refusing to act like the chef. Jake took the job to get away from Harlem, make a clean break with Rose, and get away from the “ship-and-port-town life” he had been living (126). Aboard the railway car, there is a social line between the genteel waiters—important figures in African-American society—and the working-class cooks.

One day after gambling with his fellow cooks, Jake strikes up a conversation with a waiter reading Sapho, a book about a beautiful, promiscuous woman by French writer Alphonse Daudet. Jake’s curiosity about the book catches the waiter’s attention, while the discovery that the waiter is a French-speaking native of Haiti, founded by slaves who revolted against their masters during the age of the French Revolution, intrigues Jake. When the waiter tells him about the romantic and tragic story of the revolution’s leader, Toussaint Louverture, Jake is impressed and wishes he could have been in such an army.