James Weldon Johnson's Modern Soundscapes

Chapter 8: Not the story of my life: Along This Way

167 framed by Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and Along This Way (1933), his most productive years of writing. In between Johnson’s works, autobiography becomes revolutionized, unanchored from its moorings in convention and chronology, as it swings between biography and the interior self, between a collective people whose name and status are continually altered from within and without , and a defiantly private, persistently individual self. Autobiography is an innovative, sometimes furtive, sometimes outwardly defiant form that facilitates in the figurative use of “swing” or play between these individual and collective forms of expression and ways of knowing. In Along This Way, autobiography is the means through which Johnson articulates a black diasporic identity and a poetics of self.1 Through his autobiographical intertextuality of selves within and between his works, Johnson narrates modern black expressive culture, drawing attention to the violent history producing it. But this practice does not amount to a nation-building story of origins, as his prose writings have often been interpreted. Criticism has placed emphasis on Johnson’s nationalist, assimilationist, and in some views accommodationist investment in a narrative of black cultural origins. These readings obscure his intentional disruptions of that kind of story. Rather 8 not the story of my life Along This Way Mr. Erlanger . . . rushed down the aisle shouting, “Rossmore (the name by which he always called my brother), we’ll have to take that woman out and get somebody who can sing the part.” Rosamond jumped up from the piano and shouted back, “How in the world can you expect her to sing when you keep yelling at her?” A silence . . . fell on the theater. . . . The silence gave Rosamond opportunity to realize the enormity of his act. —James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson Autobiography operates in crucial ways in the period 168 c h a P t e r e I g h t than represent himself as a romantic, organically developed hero, Johnson presents a body through which pass the currents of black cultural experience and expression in the Americas.2 Thus Johnson wrote “not the story of my life” but the story of New World black modernity, its transmissions and repeating frameworks of experience. The automatic biography of Johnson that rolls out like the music of a player piano is the result of his self-authoring. His inevitable biography in brief, its perpetual repetition, works as a counternarrative, one that competes with Johnson’s modernist tensions of self, which he articulated in Along This Way through autobiographical reverberation. In text and sound, Johnson selectively positioned, repeated, recontextualized , and revised his autobiography from its prior forms and works. Just beneath the surface of the seemingly automatic, seamless biography of American success lie the intentional ambivalence, complexity, and contradiction of Johnson as author and subject, as both creator and expressive medium. It is the tension between these narratives and the latter, previously obscured narrative of Johnson with which this chapter is concerned. In his groundbreaking history of Harlem, David Levering Lewis, continuing a tradition of critical reception of Johnson initiated by Black Arts writers such as Amiri Baraka and Jean Wagner, presented Johnson as a member of the black upper class whose position sheltered him from the realities of black existence, belonging to a “lineage” that “placed him among the tiny elite of Afro-Americans whose families had been free, literate, and prosperous before the Civil War.”3 Dismissing the “ambivalences ” expressed in Johnson’s writing and thought as “uniquely Johnson ’s own,” Lewis explained away his contradictory stances on a range of political and literary issues as emblematic of the limitations of New Negro ideology.4 Dismissing out of hand critical treatments of Johnson as “‘rootless,’ ‘marginal’ (except in a statistical sense), a ‘racial hypocrite ,’ or ‘among Negroes . . . the first modern,’” Lewis instead chalks these seeming “ambivalences,” contradictions, and “inconsistencies” up to Johnson’s “Talented Tenth” class consciousness: To fall away from orthodox religion, to mine the black folk tradition for its barely known riches, and to cheer the marines in the Caribbean and the capitalists at home were not aberrations but the reasonable reflections of genuine convictions of upper middle-class status. Yet the class was part of the race, and the generality of the N O t t h e S t O r y O f m y l I f e 169 race was...