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33 with a playful breeze that shifts direction north, east, south, and west. Midday found most laborers at the Cleaveland Fiber Factory returning to work from their lunch break, only to discover the entire city block, including the factory, aflame. By the time the playful breeze had turned into gusts and gales, the fire had spread through the neighborhood, where most of the city’s black residents lived, and was heading south along the coast through the business district. Eight hours later, the fire had done most of its damage: the business district was destroyed, and an estimated ten thousand people were homeless. Jacksonville’s Great Fire of 1901 proved to be one of the worst disasters in Florida’s history and was the largest urban fire in the southeastern United States. Johnson recalls of the incident that the firefighters spent “all of their efforts saving a long row of frame houses just across the street on the south side of the factory, belonging to a white man named Steve Melton.”1 Narrating the event in his autobiography, Along This Way (1933), Johnson repeats: “By nightfall more than one hundred and fifty blocks are smoldering ashes. But the row of frame houses belonging to Steve Melton, across the street from the fiber factory, is still standing” (ATW, 164). When the fire engulfed Jacksonville, Johnson, age thirty, and his brother, twenty-eight, were riding their bicycles from the eastern part of town toward the west. As they rode in the early afternoon light, 1 Biography of the race musical Comedy and the modern soundscape of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man Sound is an intrusive phenomenon: we can avert our eyes from sights we wish to ignore, but sounds enter our ears whether we want them to or not. If sound contributes to the shaping of the self, then control of the acoustic environment—the “soundscape”— becomes an issue with real social and political consequences. —David Suisman, Selling Sounds Jacksonville, Florida, 1901. It was a sunny May day, the kind 34 c h a P t e r O N e they noticed a dark curl of smoke that, as they grew closer, “spread wider and grew darker” (ATW, 163). Johnson continues: “Now, under and through its mass we could see the lurid glow, and now, the vivid, darting tongues of the flames” (ATW, 163). As people fled, the Johnson brothers attempted to save Stanton School, the all-black grade school of which Johnson was principal, in order to make it a refuge. Not one fireman has been spotted in the area of the school, however. Johnson writes: “Where are the firemen? We haven’t yet seen a single stream of water. We run down into the street, where we find a half-dozen firemen pulling on a line of hose. We appeal to them. . . . [T]hey look at us listlessly and make no answer” (ATW, 163). Concluding that the school “is to go,” Johnson and his brother take out the principal records of the school and rush home, where they find their house, located in a predominantly white neighborhood, safe, “whether due either to the reported race prejudice of the fire chief or to the direction of the wind” (ATW, 164). For two weeks, the Johnson household was a temporary shelter for about twenty-five friends and acquaintances—“our family,” as Johnson calls them (ATW, 165). Displaced and destitute families needed relief in the form of money, food, clothing, and lodging, which the Johnsons and others provided. In the meantime, civil law had been replaced with martial law, drawing state militia from western and central counties to form a “provost guard,” in the words of Johnson. Tensions were high, as journalists descended to capture incidents of “looting” by making black men and boys pose for pictures. According to Johnson, he was forced to move on by members of this guard when he attempted to persuade the men and boys not to pose for the pictures. This would not be Johnson’s last confrontation with one band of the roving militia. His second clash had far more serious repercussions because it involved the taboo of black male interaction with a white woman. The beautiful woman journalist Johnson met two weeks into Jacksonville’s occupation by National Guardsmen had dark eyes and hair that “blanched the whiteness of her face” (ATW, 165): she was a black woman who appeared to be white. Seeking Johnson’s advice as a prominent black citizen...

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