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

The specific construction of an urban identity for African Americans at the turn of the century is an important development in the narrative history of African American literature, and yet it has remained for the most part unexamined. (2) Prior to Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods, the role of the city in African American fiction was, at best, rather minimal. It existed primarily as an undifferentiated space indistinguishable from the country; the city was just another space to play out the same textual themes that constituted the bulk of African American fiction in the 1880s and 1890s: working for racial uplift, protesting the racist practices of white Americans, and developing a sense of racial pride. For example, the primary emphasis in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892) is on addressing the race problem as a lingering result of the Civil War. Harper's desire was to awaken in her readers "a stronger sense of justice and a more Christlike humanity in behalf of those whom the fortunes of war threw, homeless, ignorant and poor, upon the threshold of a new era" (282). While Harper's text presents scenes in the North, the South, the city, and the country, these spaces are not presented as discernibly different. Harper does highlight the problems that African Americans, and specifically African American women, face in the United States, but she does not discriminate between the different types of space that her characters traverse in the text, and problems are almost exclusively presented as national ones. (3) The closest that Harper comes to distinguishing between the different spaces in her text is in representing the different classes of blacks that she positions in the novel: On the one hand, there are the refined and cultured characters, represented by Iola, Lucille Delany, Dr. Latimer, and Reverend Carmicle, and, on the other hand, there are the folk characters, like Aunt Linda and Uncle Daniel. The discourse of racial uplift dominates Harper's novel, and Iola's decision to return to the South with Dr. Latimer at the end of the novel is based upon her class position, on her ability to choose to spend her life working among her own people in the South in order to help educate them.

In Harper's text, uplift becomes the alternative narrative strategy used to create change; she notes the limited opportunities and unequal conditions that African Americans face, and she presents perseverance and self-sacrifice as the forces that can overcome such straits. But the strategy of uplift closes back in on itself. As Iola recounts to Dr. Gresham, "'The negro is under a social ban both North and South. Our enemies have the ear of the world, and they depict us just as they please' " (115). Harper's textual intervention engages with the power her "enemies" currently have over African Americans; she assumes that her text can offer a counter-narrative that will help resolve her own struggles that much more quickly. But Harper's text remains trapped within the representational framework of the pastoral: The influence accorded to the pastoral that allows her "enemies" to "depict [African Americans] just as they please" has not been overturned by the end of the narrative. Instead, overcoming the continued pernicious effects of the pastoral is one of the goals left to be accomplished at the novel's conclusion. In Harper's fictional world, uplift is still required to overturn these categories, even if the reader recognizes through the course of the novel that the pastoral codes used to represent blacks are incorrect.