Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era

2 / Passing into Diplomacy: US ConsulJames Weldon Johnson and The Autobiographyof an Ex-Colored Man

2 / Passing into Diplomacy: US Consul James Weldon Johnson and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man When Richard Wright dismissed the African American writers who preceded him as “prim and decorous ambassadors” who “curts[ied] to show that the Negro was . . . human” (“Blueprint” 53), he took aim at the African American middle class (the college bred, the bourgeoisie, the talented tenth) who had worked, especially during the first three decades of the twentieth century, as apparently self-appointed spokespersons for the nation’s black masses. Yet Wright’s objections to African America’s artistic ambassadors went beyond mere misgivings regarding the representation of the masses by the elite few. Wright’s concern was also methodological . He resented the indirect aesthetic argument (i.e., the “curtsying ”) that the ambassadors advanced as they “went a-begging” for the humanity they supposed would warrant civil rights for black US citizens. He objected to the type of aesthetic indirection that culminated in what David Levering Lewis has called the Harlem Renaissance’s operative principle of “civil rights by copyright” (When xxiii, xxviii). Or, to put it in terms of Wright’s own ambassadorial metaphor, Wright resented that the New Negro race representatives employed the ambassador’s signature method: diplomacy, the effort toward advancement through strategic indirection. Prominent among the early twentieth century’s artistic ambassadors was James Weldon Johnson, whose oblique aesthetic methods might be taken as emblematic of the indirection that Wright criticized. For instance, rather than calling for direct protest in his 1922 preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry, Johnson suggested that African passing into diplomacy / 43 Americans could best change the “status of the Negro in the United States” through “a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art” (vii). Clearly, the aesthetic performance of individual African Americans was to function as an indirect argument for African American civil rights more generally. One might ask how such obliqueness was sustained as a modus operandi during the first decades of the twentieth century, especially when W. E. B. Du Bois had rung in the new century by calling for a new directness, for an end to equivocation (Souls 42). To provide at least a partial answer to this question, we do well to turn toward the geopolitical routes of one of the era’s touchstone novels, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. In 1927, Johnson affixed his name to the second edition of this novel, which had before only appeared anonymously in 1912. Whereas the 1927 publication found Johnson acting as a Renaissance -era artistic ambassador, The Autobiography’s previous publication found him working in international diplomacy as a US consul in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela (1906–1909), and Corinto, Nicaragua (1909–1913).1 Out of this earlier diplomatic milieu, the novel emerged not only as a treatment of the phenomenon of racial passing, as it has traditionally been read, but also as a geopolitically inspired literary exploration of the type of strategic indirection Johnson later influentially imported into the Harlem Renaissance. The Poetics of Revolution With the aid of Booker T. Washington, Johnson in 1906 received a consular appointment that transformed his image from that of a bohemian songwriter-musician to a “race man of merit” (Goldsby, “Keeping” 254). Working as a consul situated Johnson as a participant in the United States’ interventionist program for Latin America, and this was especially true during his time in Corinto. His consular notebooks reveal that as the United States plotted to overthrow the Nicaraguan president, Johnson surveilled the activities of Nicaraguan gunboats, wrote reports for the State Department on these activities, and used a secret code to convey the intelligence to the captain of a US gunboat that visited Corinto repeatedly.2 After a US-supported revolution successfully overthrew the Nicaraguan president, Johnson spent time evaluating counterrevolutionary sentiment among Nicaraguans, thereby supporting the United States’ efforts to arrange for the rise of a US-friendly Nicaraguan leader. In November 1910, for example, Johnson sent the State Department a 44 / representative characters translation of one of many newspaper “articles of an incendiary nature regarding what [anti-US Nicaraguans] term ‘The American Intervention .’” This article quoted a “young man” who declared, “Gentlemen, here is my hand, it is ready to do justice, with it I shall bury my dagger . . . into the heart of that yankee, who comes to give our country...