Queer Times, Queer Becomings

Return from the Future

Return from the Future James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography Valerie Rohy He did not want to compose another Quixote—which is easy—but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes. —Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” I will speak, therefore, of a letter. —Jacques Derrida, “Différance” In Borges’s parable of literary repetition compulsion, a quixotic author takes on the task of rewriting Don Quixote in the precise language of the original , producing a second novel that is both identical to and different from the first. The idea is less absurd than it might seem, at least where The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is concerned. James Weldon Johnson’s work of African American modernism exists in two versions attributed to different authors, texts that are at once the same and crucially different. The book was first published anonymously in 1912 by the firm of Sherman, French, and Company in Boston. Fifteen years later, after Sherman French went bankrupt and the original edition fell out of print, Knopf produced a 295 296 VALERIE ROHY new edition with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, crediting Johnson as author.1 With that attribution the second edition revealed the text as a fiction: the memoir abruptly became a novel. Inviting the credulous reader, the Autobiography begins in a confessional tone: “I know that in writing the following pages I am divulging the great secret of my life” (1).2 But its great secret is that it has no secret to tell: the narrator’s story is not that of the author. Van Vechten notes that although “the work was hailed on every side, for the most part, as an individual’s true story,” in fact “in the matter of specific incident, [the Autobiography] has little enough to do with Mr. Johnson’s own life” (25).3 When Johnson did write his autobiography, Along This Way, in 1933, he remarked on the difficulty posed by the title and anonymous publication of his earlier Autobiography : “When I chose the title, it was without the slightest doubt that its meaning would be perfectly clear to anyone; there were people, however, to whom it proved confusing. When the book was published (1912) most of the reviewers, though there were some doubters, accepted it as a human document. This was a tribute to the writing, for I had done the book with the intention of its being so taken” (238). While Johnson insists that he intended to present the text as a realistic autobiography, its canonical reputation turns on the failure of that aim: only with the 1927 edition did the text appear as a modernist novel, unbound from the truth-claims that had characterized African American autobiography, notably slave narratives, in the previous century. The second edition’s ironies, then, include the way in which Johnson was credited with authorship when another author put his imprint on the text, and the Autobiography joined the modernist avantgarde after the fact. This retroactive temporality, defying the grammatical clarity of past, present, and future tenses, operates in and around Johnson’s novel at several critical junctures, touching on both race and sexuality. We must read the second edition from the vantage point of the original (whose status as origin is, of course, retroactively constructed), while also regarding the 1912 edition with the hindsight that 1927 affords. But this queer temporality is not just a paratextual oddity; it is intricately involved in questions of same-sex love, both in the Autobiography and beyond it. The 1927 Autobiography, I will argue, reflects with exquisite accuracy the central racial and sexual problematics of the text, and replicates the reversal of temporal sequences that structures Johnson’s meditation on passing. Toward that end, I will examine the 1927 edition’s curious orthographic shift; the racial resonance of repetition with a difference; the ideological dimension of the turn away 297 RETURN FROM THE FUTURE from British orthography in the United States; the erotic dynamics of the Autobiography, through which same-sex desire passes as surely as blackness; and the relevance of the novel’s queer temporality for today’s questions of sexual identity. While presenting a timeline that...