James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan and the Kingdom of American Culture

African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Michael Nowlin

(8.) According to Wintz, Blanche Knopf urged Johnson to write another novel after The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man had been reprinted with his name on it in 1927 (170-71). Johnson hoped to use some of the time granted him by the Rosenwald fellowship to write another novel as well as to finish his work on Black Manhattan (Levy 289-90). A second novel never materialized, however.

(9.) Cf. Locke's account of the Austrian modernist director Max Reinhardt's response to the Negro revues: "It is intriguing, very intriguing ... these Negro shows that I have seen. But remember, not as achievements, not as things in themselves artistic, but in their possibilities, their tremendous artistic possibilities. They are most modern, most American, most expressionistic. They are highly original in spite of obvious triteness, and artistic in spite of superficial crudeness. To me they reveal new possibilities of technique in drama, and if I should ever try to do anything American, I would build it on these things." Locke then describes himself and fellow interviewer Charles Johnson as somewhat nonplussed by Reinhardt's qualified enthusiasm: "Eliza, Shuffle Along, Runnin' Wild! We had come to discuss the possibility of serious Negro drama, of the art-drama, if you please" (qtd. in "Negro and the American Stage" 81).

(10.) Johnson recalls the Ethiopian Art Players' 1923 production of Wilde's Salome, Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, and black playwright Willis Richardson's The Chip Woman's Fortune as "the most ambitious attempt Negroes had yet made in the legitimate theatre in New York." Lamentably though somewhat predictably, in his view, only the latter play met with full critical approval: "The Ethiopian Art Players had run up against one of the curious factors in the problem of race, against the paradox which makes it quite seemly for a white person to represent a Negro on the stage, but a violation of some inner code for a Negro to represent a white person" (BM 190-91). On the one hand, Gregory had recalled the same event in his piece for The New Negro with deference to the standard wisdom: "even great acting could not atone for an unwise selection of plays. This untimely collapse of a most promising enterprise should hold a valuable lesson for other promoters of Negro drama" (158). In the same collection, on the other hand, Fauset held out the same hope as Johnson, deploying the myth of an African American instinctual dramatic gift as the most logical support for her view that black actors might serve higher dramatic culture better than whites: "with chameleon adaptability we are able to offer white colored men and women for Hamlet, The Doll's House [sic], and the Second Mrs. Tanqueray; brown men for Othello; yellow girls for Madam Butterfly; black men for The Emperor Jones" (167).

(11.) For important discussions of Johnson's self-consciously modern perspective on (and ambivalence towards) both the spirituals he sought to preserve in his 1925 and 1926 Books of American Negro Spirituals and his early career as a popular songwriter, see Sundquist and Ruotolo. Granting as they do, however, a primary importance to Johnson's ironic novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (the focus of both essays), both scholars exaggerate Johnson's guilt about his early career in popular entertainment (Sundquist 13, 19, 24-25) and thus his downplaying it (Ruotolo 251-52). Chapters 9-11 of Black Manhattan and chapters 17-20 of Along This Way document Johnson's unabashed commitment to making black commercial entertainment a hallmark of the cultural memories of both collective African America and the nation as a whole.