"Like a violin for the wind to play": lyrical approaches to lynching by Hughes, Du Bois, and Toomer

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by Kimberly Banks

Where Hughes reveals Roy's dream through its displacement in Hopkinsville, Du Bois emphasizes John's dream in "In the Coming of John" through its development away from his hometown. John comes to realize his potential, only to have that realization undercut by a subsequent realization that few opportunities exist for black men to excel. When John leaves for school, "full half the black folk followed him proudly to the station, and carried his queer little trunk and many bundles. And there they shook and shook hands, and the girls kissed him shyly and the boys clapped him on the back.... he pinched his little sister lovingly, and put his great arms about his mother's neck" (246-47). There is a clear affection and affinity between John and those he leaves, but this affinity is worn away over the years of John's absence. While he is unsuccessful in school, he remains unchanged from when he first left his hometown. Once he is suspended for a semester and works in the city, he attacks his studies with more determination and earnestness and becomes successful. With this success his hometown comes to represent "the choked and narrow life" (250-51). Such a major transformation in John's perspective leads him away from the jovial and good-natured boy he was to the serious and contemplative man. To the same degree that Hughes defines manhood through compassion, Du Bois defines manhood through intellectual curiosity. With the attainment of manhood, John is no longer fit for life in his hometown.

One of the central questions of the short story is how the intellect confronts the irrationality of racial violence. Gavin Jones suggests that articulation of racial violence is the answer because it is only through articulation that self-consciousness can occur. At the same time, he argues that articulation must be ambiguous if it is to address the paradoxes of the color line. Language does not provide the range of ambiguity provided by music, which offers a different grammar of articulation. Language can illuminate the inconsistencies that accompany racial violence without providing a method for eradicating the violence. If racial violence is illogical, then its challenge and refutation must also be illogical, which paves the way for the importance of music and lyricism as representations of lynching. Although John begins to satisfy his intellectual curiosity at the Wells Institute, it is only in New York at the performance of Wagner's music that he realizes the potential within the world: "The infinite beauty of the wail lingered and swept through every muscle of his frame, and put it all a-tune.... A deep longing swelled in all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of that low life that held him prisoned and befouled. If he could only live up in the free air where birds sang and setting suns had no touch of blood!" (252). Music provides the momentary imaginative realization of an ideal that is thwarted from social realization. Music transports John away from illogical racial boundaries, supposedly boundaries of blood, to an equalizing spiritual plane.