Restaging the Racial Contract: James Weldon Johnson's Signatory Strategies

In his autobiography Along This Way (1933), James Weldon Johnson describes his confrontation with a white man in a bicycle shop in Jacksonville, Florida, at the end of the nineteenth century, soon after Johnson had been appointed as a high school principal in the city. The shop "rivaled the barber shop as a place for the exchange of masculine talk and gossip," and on this occasion, Johnson joined a conversation with a relatively unfamiliar group of white men. ¹ After steering the topic toward racial injustice, he received "a mild warning": "I was expressing some of my opinions when I was interrupted by a nondescript fellow, who remarked with a superb sneer: ‘What wouldn't you give to be a white man?'" Less threatened than irate, Johnson collected himself to reply: "‘I am sure that I wouldn't give anything to be the kind of white man you are. No, I am sure I wouldn't; I'd lose too much by the change.'" While the white man assumes that he is in the superior position, not only with respect to this verbal exchange but within an economy of raced identity, Johnson, by rejecting the terms of the latter, wins the upper hand in the former: "The young fellow himself seemed to realize that to beat me up would not improve his position in the eyes of the witnesses to the incident. He was spiritually licked. I rode away satisfied" (ATW, 135–36).

But Johnson's satisfaction is tempered, not only by the frequency with which the man's question—"What wouldn't you give to be a white man?"—is posed or implied throughout his life but also by his need to "go over this question frankly with myself . . . and give myself the absolutely true answer." His method of self-investigation resembles that of a psychoanalyst: "I watched myself closely and tried to analyze motives, words, actions, reactions. The conviction I always arrived at was that the answer I gave the young man in the bicycle shop was the true one; and true not only so far as it went, but farther" (ATW, 136). As evidenced by the ways Johnson executes this analysis, his need for reiteration is fed less by internal insecurities or unexamined subscription to racial hierarchies than by his continuing investigation into the interarticulations of ideological and juridical power that grant social privilege to whites at the expense of others. Instead of replicating the terms of exchange dictated by the white man in the bicycle shop, which ascribe to Johnson a lack of whiteness, Johnson erases the white man altogether by recasting the question in terms of the "Arabian Nights–like thought of the magical change of race." He creates a fantasy in which a "jinee" offers him four gifts: "any amount of wealth," "some boon you desire," "any person into whom you would like to be changed," and "any race of which you would like to be made a member." Johnson accepts the first two offers by naming a reasonable sum of money and by listing democratic rights as his fantasy boon: "Grant me equal opportunity with other men, and the assurance of corresponding rewards for my efforts and what I may accomplish." But he is "at a loss" when responding to the chance to become another person or to change his race; as with the white man's hypothetical racial transformation, he would lose himself "in the change" (ATW, 136). In Johnson's imaginary dialog, the benefits of democracy—equal opportunity and equal rewards—are bequeathed at no personal cost.

While Johnson's exchange with the jinee echoes the self-evident "truths" of the natural equality of "all men" imagined in the Declaration of Independence, the scene in the bicycle shop rehearses the racialized contingencies upon which the inception and practice of the social contract of American democracy is based. ² When translated into the Constitution, the social contract reveals...