"A real honest-to-cripe jungle": Contested Authenticities in Helene Johnson's "Bottled"

In 1931, anthologist and critic James Weldon Johnson edited the second edition of The Book of American Negro Poetry to demonstrate that "there has grown a general recognition that the Negro is a contributor to American life not only of material but of artistic, cultural, and spiritual values; that in the making and shaping of American civilization he is an active force, a giver as well as a receiver, a creator as well as a creature."¹ Here, Weldon Johnson alludes to a commonplace of the period for all writers—culturally representative objects assert cultural power. There are, of course, contested meanings in the interpretations of objects that represent the authenticity of a culture, or that represent contested cultural identities. I place my reading of Helene Johnson's poem "Bottled" within the context of the discipline of anthropology and the idea of culture, both of which were undergoing radical changes in the early decades of the twentieth century. Anthropologist Franz Boas, his student Zora Neale Hurston, and others were theorizing and writing about the concept of culture—what later became known in anthropological circles as the "culture concept"—with the aim of disrupting and replacing the racist evolutionary comparativism's school of thinking with theories of cultural relativism.² Evolutionary comparativism held that cultures existed on a spectrum, from primitive to civilized, and that race was a key factor in determining which culture needed to evolve (these were assumed to be non-white and non-European) and which culture was already evolved (assumed to be white and European). Boas's assumptions of cultural relativity held that all cultures were equally valuable and viable.³ As a friend of and correspondent with Hurston, poet Helene Johnson would have been well aware of modernist theories of culture.⁴ In "Bottled" (1927), Johnson puts authentic and inauthentic into dialogue when she puts an imagined African jungle into a poem set on the real streets of New York City.⁵ The speaker of the poem admires the (imagined) cultural adornments and proud dancing of a man in the streets of Harlem. The speaker reports that he dances to jazz, American music that has some of its roots in Africa but is not in and of itself wholly African; she also imagines this man as he would be if he were in Africa. He functions as a cultural object in the poem, a cultural object with contested authenticities. Johnson's use of a mixture of cultural tropes reveals her awareness of and attentiveness to theories of cultural relativism. Her poetry asserts an authenticity for objects of culture while it simultaneously calls that authenticity into question. The effect is to contribute to the concept of culture as a fluid, ever-shifting construct.

Without an authentic object, performance, or person to show the evidence of a culture, without objects of culture produced by the participants of that culture, how can that culture be taken as real, as authentic? The elision and erasure of black self-representation in literature and in other arts concerned Weldon Johnson and other black leaders. To that end, he chose to collect poems written by black poets into a representative anthology; he included Helene Johnson (1907–1995) in his second edition, introducing her poems by writing that she had "taken, so to speak, the racial bull by the horns," and, that she "bears the stamp of a genuine poet" (ANP, 279). I note this phrase—genuine poet—and I wonder what might make Johnson fake? Weldon Johnson does not define "genuine poet" beyond his assertions in his prefatory note to her poems that a "number of her best poems are done in colloquial style" and that "she realizes the hard fact that an effective poem in colloquial style demands as much work and workmanship as a well-wrought sonnet. Miss Johnson also possesses true lyric talent."⁶ There is here an assumption of a natural connection between authenticity, subjectivity, and originality. Too often, authenticity is associated with a poet only through one element of subjectivity— race or gender, say—elements that make up what John Paul Riquelme, during our Chicago seminar, called a "positive disruptive multiplicity."

Another seminar colleague, Jane...