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  “The Death of the Last Black Man” Repetition, Lynching, and Capital Punishment in Twentieth-Century African American Literature Not your time! My time! High noon my time my time! —Suzan-Lori Parks, Devotees in the Garden of Love W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk () bridges the gap between the despair of many late nineteenth-century African American novels and the relative optimism of the Harlem Renaissance. Looking to the past in order to understand—and to the future in order to exceed—a dire present, Hopkins, Dunbar, Chesnutt, and Griggs prepared the ground for Souls, which in turn writes an epitaph for their revisionary and visionary projects . Du Bois’s rich blend of genres and disciplines—political and social history, personal narrative, philosophy, music history, and so on—thus resolves perhaps most readily into elegy. “Surely,” laments Du Bois, “there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free.”1 Just as he is mourning here “the passing of the first born,”2 his son, he is mourning what might have been had Reconstruction not failed, and had legal solutions for racial injustice not become “dead letters.”3 In the two decades after the publication of Souls, writers of the Harlem Renaissance all but abandoned the past as content. Rather astonishingly, slavery nearly vanishes as an explicit concern of African American writers in the s. Zora Neale Hurston writes in : Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said “On the line!” The Reconstruction said “Get set!” and the generation before said “Go!” I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind “THE DEATH OF THE LAST BLACK MAN”   and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it.4 Hurston’s view of New World slavery here sounds uncomfortably like Hegel’s assessment of black access to modernity. Even taking into account her possibly tongue-in-cheek tone in this passage, Hurston represents an extreme in this blithe dismissal of a slave past; yet she is not alone among Harlem Renaissance writers in focusing on the present rather than on the past, even the recent past. As I will argue later in this book, with the significant exception of the period’s deep interest in the sorrow songs, the Harlem Renaissance’s studied presentism distinguishes it sharply from much of the African American literature that preceded it and much that would follow it. The failure of reform after the first several decades of the twentieth century, like the failure of Reconstruction in the late nineteenth, to deliver reparative or corrective justice to African Americans sets the stage for African American writers’ return to despair and to strategic anachronism in the s and beyond. Nowhere does this affective-temporal combination emerge more clearly than in fictional representations of the time-bound experiences of African American men within U.S. judicial and penal systems. What John Edgar Wideman has chillingly termed the “living bodies of dead men” populate African American fiction throughout the century.5 In the twentieth-century African American texts that deal centrally with the lynching or the capital punishment of a black man—and there are many—time and justice (or, more often, injustice) conspire to bring about his grim fate. Such texts represent two sorts of being “out of time.” First, the man faces an inevitable death sentence and has therefore literally run out of time—as in “His Last Day,” a  short story by Chester Himes about the final hours and minutes of a black death-row inmate who will soon be “taking the lightning ride.”6 Second, the texts themselves are often out of step with the prevailing literary forms of their day—as in Claude McKay’s militant yet formally conventional  sonnet “If We Must Die,” written amid the emergence of high modernist poetic forms as well as the “Red Summer” of , when antiblack race riots erupted in a number of cities across the United States, including Atlanta, Tulsa, and Chicago, and resulted in...

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