"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

For Du Bois to define manhood intellectually, John must dissociate himself from his schoolmates to the same extent that he sought their company before the change, for manhood requires solitary reflection and contemplation. The transformation in intellect brings a transformation in how John sees the world around him, and particularly the color line. A number of changes occur in John's outward perception: "He first noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh" (250). In addition to gaining seriousness, the genial, good-natured boy becomes a sarcastic and bitter man. John grimly sets his teeth to accept the work of transforming the black children of Altamaha into responsible citizens. His dream is the attainment of the sort of citizenship embodied in the equality, fraternity, and liberty of the French Revolution.

Du Bois shows John's solitary struggle for self-development, a struggle against restrictions that transforms him into a man, as a prelude to his lynching. Upon John's return to Altamaha, local white men want to remind John of his boyhood status. The estrangement accompanying John's return is similar to the estrangement that accompanies Roy's return to Hopkinsville, but John is also estranged from the black community. When John arrives at the station, he is preoccupied with the Jim Crow accommodations. Immediately the "sordidness and narrowness of it all seized him." As a result, "he looked in vain for his mother, kissed coldly the tall, strange girl who called him brother, spoke a short, dry word here and there; then, lingering neither for hand-shaking nor gossip, started silently up the street, raising his hat merely to the last eager old aunty, to her open-mouthed astonishment" (255). The disaster of his arrival is compounded by his speech at the Baptist Church. He wants the audience to move beyond religious differences and even the importance of religion itself. As a result, an old religious gentleman from the community holds John up to scorn "for trampling on the true Religion, and he realized with amazement that all unknowingly he had put rough, rude hands on something this little world held sacred" (257). Because Du Bois isolates John from the black community, lynching becomes an anomaly not only because very few black people could gain an education, but also because only someone educated would dare confront the system and be conscious of its injustice. However there is hope that John has influenced his sister Jennie and the students of his school.

Articulation, in the form of intellectual and cultural attainment, does not doom John, but it is a problem in "Of the Coming of John" insofar as it fails to solve the race problem. Racial violence, since it is not logical, will not yield to the logic of articulation. Arnold Rampersad has argued that "the finest achievement of the story is its rendition of the emotional and spiritual paralysis that overtakes John from the beginning of his education" (76). But John very admirably negotiates the expectations of his teachers at the Wells Institute, as his emotional and spiritual center shifts to classical literature and classical music. Ronald Radano argues that, "while holding the secrets to power and knowledge, culture can also--as the reason behind a history of enslavement--turn against its possessor" (78). John comes to recognize the power of the irrational while attempting to teach in the South. Indeed, it is the force of the irrational that makes him realize that he should leave for the North. And his intellectual training serves him well as he negotiates the Southern racial system, pushing against its vulnerable points. Thus, rather than representing a "deathly trance" (Posnock 339), John's return to Wagner at the end of the short story ironically expresses hope and faith in the American ideal of equality. Rather than representing paralysis or death, John's turn to classical music is a turn to a spiritual reserve of strength.