Themes and Cadences: James Weldon Johnson's Novel
1979; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
Resumo... Johnson was a Southerner and the lifestyle he eventually carried to New York and around the world was And the cadences of his poetry and the themes of his prose are Southern. Saunders Redding, A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature. The life which James Weldon Johnson describes in Along this Way (1) is that of a highly talented man to whom writing was a serious but secondary interest. Johnson's primary interest was the work of the NAACP, and from 1916 until 1930 he was the Field Secretary of that organization. But even this work failed to consume him. During his sixty-seven years James Weldon Johnson had many interests and several careers. Born in 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida, he served for a time as principal of a grammar school there; he helped found and was the first editor of The Daily American, the first Negro daily newspaper; he was admitted to the Florida Bar in 1897; by the early 1900's he and his brother, Rosamond, were writing successful Broadway musicals; he served as consul to Venezuela during the administrations of Presidents Roosevelt and Taft; he compiled The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) and The Book of American Negro Spirituals (with Rosamond in 1925), created the seven Negro sermons in verse that make up God's Trombones (1927), and wrote his autobiography, Along this Way, (1933). He also wrote The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), a novel I wish to examine with some care. Johnson's later years were filled with honors. He was awarded the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP for his achievements as author, diplomat, and public servant. He received the Harmon Award for God's Trombones and was elected a trustee of Atlanta University. Talledega College and Howard University conferred on him the degree of Litt. D. In 1929 Johnson was awarded a fellowship from the Julius Rosewald Fund to allow him to devote a year exclusively to writing. In 1930 he became the Adam K. Spence Professor of Creative Literature at Fisk University, a position he held until his death in 1938. Despite all this, it is as a writer that Johnson is best remembered. And like other black writers from the South, Johnson is a recognizable part of a Southern literary movement that includes both blacks and whites. As had Charles Waddell Chesnutt, whose importance as a black Southern writer I have treated elsewhere, (2) James Weldon Johnson drew upon both Negro folklore and his own experiences as a Southern black for the subject matter of his writing. Chesnutt presented Negro folk tales in his conjure stories; Johnson collected spirituals and in God's Trombones preserved the cadences of the Negro folk sermon. But Johnson was a more restrained, conscious artist than was Chesnutt. (3) Like Joel Chandler Harris, Chesnutt used dialect extensively in his conjure stories and, when depicting the speech of uneducated blacks, in his novels; Johnson avoided dialect because he felt it was looked upon almost exclusively as a source either of pathos or of humor and these were not the effects he was after. (4) Yet in works such as God's Trombones, Johnson clearly suggests Southern Negro church speech through his reproduction of the Southern black minister's characteristic rhetorical devices--the repetitions, the alliterations, the pauses, the echoes from the King James Bible, the folk images--all of which show that he was as conscious of dialectical nuances as was Twain in writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Faulkner in writing the Rev'un Shegog's Easter sermon in The Sound and the Fury, Johnson's ability to create the effect of dialect without using its typical spellings or illiteracies is one of his greatest skills as an artist. Johnson's fiction evidences a similar skill. Like earlier Southern writers black and white--Cable, Twain, Chesnutt--Johnson dramatizes the theme of the tragic mulatto. As with Chesnutt's protagonists in The House Behind the Cedars and The Marrow of Tradition, the central issue confronting the hero of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is his identity in a society where racial caste determines who one is. …
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