“New Negro” Men, World War I, and African American Masculinity in Guy Johnson’s Standing at the Scratch Line

Cultural and social historians of World War I have emphasized the central role that the experiences of African American troops overseas played in the changing definitions of African American manhood in the early twentieth century.¹ As Adriane Lentz-Smith observes in Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (2009), those experiences “altered how these soldiers saw themselves as citizens, workers, heroes, and lovers and transformed how they interpolated those identities into their worldview” (7). This process of reconstructing and reconceptualizing the black male citizen in the public and private spheres of American life resulted in various black masculinities rather than in a single construct. As Martin Summers emphasizes in Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930 (2004), the outcome was multiple and diverse because the gradual transformation in understanding black manhood was not only an act of resistance to white male supremacist understandings of manliness and manhood but also an active, multifaceted process of black male agency and self-assertion that took place both “across a range of relationships” within the African American community and in dialogue with the world beyond (13).

Despite the important role World War I played in the early-twentieth-century refashioning of black American manhood, very few current African American novelists have attempted to offer retrospective renderings or interpretations of this war’s complex and tension-ridden significance in black male identity formation in the United States. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Great War was present in various ways in several African American literary works,² and permanently traumatized veterans also make a memorable appearance in the Golden Day episode of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). However, late-twentieth-century novels depicting the experiences of African American World War I soldiers or veterans are rare, the most notable exception being Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), with its sensitively drawn portrait of Shadrack³; nor has the Great Twenty-First-Century African American Novel about World War I yet been written. Focusing on the contemporary literary imagination, this essay turns to popular fiction to discuss the brief World War I segment in Standing at the Scratch Line (1998), the debut novel of Guy Johnson.⁴ Written in the traditions of the dime and action-adventure novel, Standing at the Scratch Line primarily operates in the sphere of highly masculinist popular culture and entertainment.⁵ Nevertheless, rather surprisingly, given the hypermasculine ambience of the remaining narrative, the novel’s short World War I segment offers a glimpse into cultural negotiations among multiple and varied constructions of African American manhood before, during, and after World War I.

Standing at the Scratch Line tells the story of a fictional African American male protagonist, LeRoi “King” Tremain. On the run after killing two corrupt white deputies in his native Louisiana in 1916, LeRoi escapes trouble on the home front by signing up to fight the Germans in Europe. At age nineteen, he finds himself an infantryman in France. He first serves in what Johnson terms the “Three hundred Fifty-first Regiment,” a unit commanded by a racially prejudiced white American officer. He then becomes a soldier in the renowned 369th Infantry Regiment of the 93rd Division, the “Harlem Hellfighters.”⁶ The main function of the novel’s war segment is to demonstrate LeRoi’s development into an adept and fearless killer, a disposition that serves the action hero well in his later adventures. Immediately after the war, he battles the Italian Mafia in Harlem and the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana, establishes a life for himself and his newly-wed wife in a black township in Oklahoma, and eventually becomes a wealthy man in San Francisco. As even this brief synopsis suggests, the mode of maleness with which Johnson’s narrative primarily sympathizes is the muscular masculinity represented by testosterone-driven LeRoi. When taken as a whole, Standing at the Scratch Line promotes a patriarchal and hegemonic understanding of manhood. However, the novel’s war segment—with its noteworthy triad of an emphatically...