The city as refuge: constructing urban blackness in Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Thomas L. Morgan

James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, e Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods, confronts the representational conventions facing African American characters in American literature. (17) While Johnson s text does not get much further than Dunbar's in terms of restructuring narrative practice, Johnson does succeed in overcoming the representative dilemma that immobilizes Dunbar's novel. In Johnson's novel, the narrator's decision to stay in the North ultimately leads him to claim that "I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage" (Autobiography 154), mirroring Dunbar's claim that the Northern urban environment is available to black characters only by paying an internal price. This realization places the narrator within the same troubled relation to urban space that Dunbar's characters experience, but with one important difference. While Dunbar's characters return to the South, the narrator in Johnson's text consciously abandons the pastoral South in his move to the North, abandoning both the physical space and the representational logic it uses to depict black identity. This decision is predicated upon the narrator's ability to pass--or, more particularly, his decision to "let the world take me for what it would" (139) (18)--but the narrator's decision to follow such a path is itself a bit more complex. To understand Johnson's use of passing in the text, two other factors need to be examined to qualify the rhetorical ploys that Johnson implements to negotiate the urban space he presents: first, the manipulation of autobiographical form that Johnson uses to represent the narrator and, second, Johnson's simultaneous presentation of the detrimental effects that the socially constructed framework of racial identity has on characters in the text, both black and white. Johnson's narrative strategies are all centered on the narrator's re-narration of the events he experiences. Taken together, Johnson's strategies enact a critical transformation of the literary conventions that configure his African American characters, a reconfiguration that creates the space that Dunbar's text could only imagine.

Johnson, like Dunbar, was well aware of the representational limitations placed upon blackness in literary production. His song-writing career with his brother Rosamond and Bob Cole in New York City in the early 1900s familiarized him with the stereotypical depictions of blacks currently in use, and his ability to exploit this form successfully was seen in the popularity of such songs as "Nobody's Lookin' but de Owl and de Moon" (1901), "Under the Bamboo" (1902), and "Congo Love Song" (1903), which collectively sold more than 400,000 copies (Price and Oliver 2). Johnson's negotiation of dialect song writing was similar to Dunbar's; he wanted to use this form to help steer white expectations away from traditional stereotypes. As Dickson Bruce, Jr., points out, the "demands of producing such material gave Johnson special awareness of white literary expectations and a unique appreciation of the importance of those expectations to him as a writer" (244). This awareness is documented in Johnson's essay "The Dilemma of the Negro Author," published in American Mercury in 1928. Here, Johnson describes the "peculiar difficulties" that black writers faced in addressing the "double audience" (477) of blacks and whites: