African American Book review

Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

Some time ago I was in a hotel lobby in Washington, D.C., talking with a friend from another university. The occasion that brought both of us and eighty-two other scholars to the nation’s capital was the annual competi- tion for the Ford Foundation Dissertation and Post-Doctoral Minority Fel- lowships Program, hosted by the National Research Council. After two days of intense review sessions of proposals from qualifiedminority schol- ars, we had fulfilled our responsibilities and were taking a moment to re- flect on the many fine proposals that deserved funding but which—due to limitedmoneys—would only receive “honorablemention.”Whilewewere engaged in conversation, a middle-agedwhite male approachedmy friend and me and asked if either of us was the bellman. We were both taken aback at this man’s query, since although both of us are African American males, neitherwas dressed as a bellman. In fact, my friend had been teasing me about my dapper style of clothing, complete with a 100 percent virgin wool Kango hat and matching topcoat, accented by Stacey Adams shoes, an expensive suit, French-cuffed white shirt, and tie. I, in turn, had been “signifying” on his more than casual style of dress, for he had chosen to “dress down” after the sessions by donning the garb of the hip-hop gen- eration, with a baseball cap, Air Jordan tennis shoes, jeans, casual shirt, and a trendy athletic warm-up jacket. We responded to this man’s query by telling him that not only was neither of us the bellman, but also that a bellman traditionally distinguishes himself from others by wearing a par- ticular uniform, which neither of us wore. As the man walked away, we continued to comment that not only did we not look like bellmen, but each of us carried a briefcase, usually a signifier of professional status. Now that I have achieveddistance from this event, I think therewasmore

to this man’s question than one might first suspect. While he was certainly trying to locate the bellman so that he could get some help in signaling a cab and carrying his luggage, his inability to differentiate between myself, my friend, and the bellman—three African American males—may reflect

130Souls of Black Folk One Hundred Years Later, edited by Dolan Hubbard, University of Missouri Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=3570754. Created from uaz on 2018-03-15 17:11:03.

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“Of the Coming of John,” “Kabnis,” and Self-Representation 131

his unwillingness to allow my friend and me the privilege of sharing with him the public space usually reserved for white males, except in the sub- servient role of bellman. Even though both of us hold faculty rank at our respective institutions and were in Washington, D.C., at the invitation of the National Research Council—which is usually perceived as a sign of a national scholarly reputation—thisman’s question collapsed the difference between us as black intellectuals and the bellman as a service worker into a homogenized black other, the black subject. This confrontation was even more problematic since we were aware that

this man meant us no harm—he simply wanted to locate the bellman. But his representation of a bellman was nonspecific. For him the bellman was a social construct that represented the black subject, the African American male, irrespective of class, social status, or physical appearance. When he looked at us, theman actually sawa bellman, a formless black body.W. E. B. Du Bois, writing inDusk of Dawn, recalls a similar experience while attend- ing college at Harvard. Even though Du Bois embraced the small black student body at Harvard and attempted to “forget as far as was possible that outer, whiter world,” he found that

naturally it could not be entirely forgotten, so that now and then I plundered into it, joined its currents and rose or fell with it. The joining was sometimes a matter of social contact. I escorted colored girls, and as pretty ones as I could find, to the vesper exercises and the class day and commencement so- cial functions. Naturally we attracted attention and sometimes the shadow of insult as when in one case a lady seemed determined to mistake me for a waiter.1

Perhaps Ralph Ellison expressed our conundrum best in the prologue to Invisible Man: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approachme they see onlymy surroundings, themselves, or fig- ments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.” Indeed, my friend and I felt like Ellison’s nameless protagonist, who com- plains about being “bumped against by people of poor vision.”2

This sensation of being “bumped against” by “people of poor vision” expresses the dilemma of self-representation for African Americans. The culture of dominance that initially produced slavery, and later, a racial hierarchy, constructed black people as a race of bodies valued only for its market value as a commodified physical subject. These tropes of the

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940; reprint, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1984), 35. 2. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Modern Library, 1952), 7.

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132 Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

body substantially influenced the ability of African Americans to repre- sent themselves from the point of view of their own culture that sought to assert the primacy of the totality of subjecthood. It restricted their repre- sentation to tropes that corresponded with the dominant hegemony. These fragmented tropes became fixed within the cultural texts of the Western world, and divided the black subject into two separate selves: mind and body. Racist discourse emphasized the representation of African Amer- icans as material bodies and delimited the mind as a signifier of black identity. This mind/body binary is grounded in Christianity since it first evolved

from the Apostle Paul’s assertion that Christians must mortify the flesh in order to achieve spiritual purity and was later refined by St. Augustine who, in his Confessions, argues that the body is sinful and must be negated in order to reach spiritual communion with God. This body/spirit binary gives rise to the body/mind paradigm, since the European Enlightenment, heavily influenced by Christianity, held that the intellect endowed Euro- peans with the ability to deny the body, resist its natural carnal nature, and impose the order of human agency on an object that resists such restric- tions. Conversely, the balance of mind and body indicated the inability to control the body as material subject; it was perceived as a sign of intellec- tual weaknesses, cultural backwardness, and savagery. W. E. B. Du Bois, utilizing double-voiced discourse that signifies on the

submerged mind/body binary in nineteenth-century American life, ex- presses the dilemma of self-representation for African Americans in his seminal text The Souls of Black Folk, when he writes

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: un- asked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?3

Similarly, Jean Toomer writes

Generally, it may be said that the Negro is emergent from a crust, a false personality, a compound of beliefs, habits, attitudes, and emotional reactions superimposed upon him by external circumstance. . . . First, there are those factors which arise from the condition of being a black man in a white world. Second, there are those forms and forces which spring from the nature of our civilization, and are common to Americans . . . 4

3. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: Norton, 1999), 9. All citations in this essay refer to this edition. 4. Jean Toomer, in Frederik L. Rusch, ed., A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished

Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 87.

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“Of the Coming of John,” “Kabnis,” and Self-Representation 133

The common thread that runs throughmy experience of being “bumped against” by the man’s question, Du Bois’s reference to the “unasked ques- tion” by those of the “otherworld,” and Jean Toomer’s analysis that “black- ness” is the social construct of “whiteness” is the inability of African Amer- icans to represent themselves from the perspective of their own cultural traditions or, in other words, in other than mind/body binaries. Surely, Du Bois and Toomer were aware that this was not a new problem. In 1841, the abolitionist movement published The New England Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1841, a “how to” book that directed abolitionist editors of slave nar- ratives to “speak for the slave” and “write for the slave,” since “they [the slaves] can’t take care of themselves.”5 This idea of slaves as subjects and abolitionist narrators as their authenticating narrative voice belies the im- plicit goal of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century slave narratives— to justify slavery—and expresses a hegemonic relationship between the silenced slave and empowered narrator. It begins, within American cul- tural texts, a tradition that is a trope against the self representation of the African American personality. The inability of African Americans to rep- resent themselves publicly, however, can be traced back as early as the late eighteenth century, with the controversy surrounding the authenticity of Phillis Wheatley’s poems, and throughout the nineteenth century, in its emphasis on the minstrel tradition as an authentic representation of black life. Indeed, Eric Lott, in Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Ameri- canWorking Class, demonstrates admirably both the construction of “black- ness” through theminstrels and the tendency ofwhiteworking-classmales to insist that thewhiteminstrels accurately representedAfricanAmericans. The performance language created for minstrel characters, dialect, was in fact a way of representing the belief of many whites that African Ameri- cans were less intelligent, barely human, and incapable of grasping even the most basic concepts of the English language. Later in the nineteenth century, the plantation era attempted to justify slavery through revising tropes of the mind/body binary, in which black subjects were represented as black bodies deprived of minds and rational intellects who actually en- joyed their experience of slavery. While this cultural assault on the personalities of AfricanAmericans ren-

dered impotent their attempts to represent themselves from the point of view of their own cultural traditions, political legislation insured that they would not gain control of their own social narratives by insisting that the African American was a fractured, incomplete, inauthentic person, less valuable than his or her white counterparts, and suitable only to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. The underpinnings of both processes were centered in the beliefs, first, that African Americans were not citizens, but property, and thus enjoyed only the advantages guaranteed to them by

5. The New England Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1841 (Boston, 1841), 1.

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134 Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

laws that governed property rights, and second, that if African Americans were to exist as free men and women, they could not share the same social, political, and economic space as whites, but instead had to be relegated to that space ascribed to them by those who had initially constructed “black- ness” to represent the racialized other. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois attempts to represent what he calls

“the world within the Veil,” the spiritual world of African Americans by articulating, from the perspective of African Americans, an identity that is fixed rather than permeable. His often quoted statement on “double- consciousness” expresses, for Du Bois, the otherness that lies at the core of black identity. Although Du Bois’s statement has been criticized as overly simplistic, in that it is primarily a male construct that fails to acknowledge class and gender, this double identity is central to twentieth-century racial discourse, including Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), because he also attempts to fix racial identity through the construct of doubleness. Du Bois decon- structs the trope of bodies, derived from the mind/body binary, by fixing black identity in the mind/spirit binary and privileging the spirit. While Du Bois locates the problem of self-representation in the African Ameri- can’s struggle to merge his twoness—American andNegro—Toomer iden- tifies this problem in African Americans’ psychological and material diffi- culty in embracing their spirituality. Both Du Bois and Toomer, however, though physically distant from the

actual existence of black people, find that in the South, they first locatewhat Donald Gibson calls their “bodies,” their social essence. In a sense, both writers locate the “black essence” through what Paul Gilroy calls “routes,” not “roots.”6 That is to say, they both find that geographical routes, the black South, allow them to represent African Americans accurately. Re- flecting about his experience inGeorgia, Toomerwrote in “Outline ofAuto- biography”:

There, for the first time, I really saw the Negro, not as a pseudo-urbanized and vulgarized, a semi-Americanized product, but theNegro peasant, strong with the tang of fields and the soil. It was there that I first heard folk-songs rolling up the valley at twilight, heard them as spontaneous with gold, and tints of an eternal purple. Love? They gave birth to a whole new life.7

“Of the Coming of John,” chapter 13 in The Souls of Black Folk, and “Kab- nis,” the ending narrative in Cane, are Du Bois’s and Toomer’s linguistic representations of racial doubleness, in which they claim the privilege of representing black identity from the point of view of their culture.

6. Donald Gibson, introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Don- ald B. Gibson (New York: Penguin, 1989), xiii; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 11. 7. Toomer, “Outline of Autobiography,” in Rusch, Jean Toomer Reader, 2.

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“Of the Coming of John,” “Kabnis,” and Self-Representation 135

In “Of the Coming of John,” a story set at Wells Institute, an academy for racial uplifting in Johnstown, Du Bois engages in linguistic play in repre- senting two Johns, onewhite, the other black. The academy is a preparatory schoolwhose black students “have fewdealingswith thewhite city below.” Using tropes that anticipate Jean Toomer’s Cane, Du Bois constructs fore- boding images of the city and students. He writes, “When at evening the winds come swelling from the east, and the great pall of the city’s smoke hangs wearily above the valley, then the red west glows like a dream-land down Carlisle Street. . . .” Similarly, he refers to the “forms of students in dark silhouette against the sky. Tall and black, they move slowly by, and seem in the sinister light to flit before the city like dim warning ghosts. Perhaps they are . . .” (143). Du Bois says that John Jones, the “black John,” is

one dark form that ever hurries last and late toward the twinkling lights of Swain Hall,—for Jones is never on time. A long, straggling fellow he is, brown and hard-haired, who seems to be flowing straight out of his clothes, and walks with a half-apologetic roll. He used perpetually to set the quiet dining-room into waves of merriment, as he stole to his place after the bell had tapped for prayers; he seemed so perfectly awkward. And yet one glance at his face made one forgive him much,—that broad, good-natured smile in which lay no bit of art or artifice, but seemed just bubbling good-nature and genuine satisfaction with the world. (143)

Here, DuBois’s language suggests that John embodies the representation of nineteenth-century black males—undependable, innocent, happy, and lacking responsibility and purpose. In fact, the white folks of Altamaha, Georgia, his hometown, “vote” him a “good boy,” “a fine plough-hand, fool in the rice-fields, handy everywhere, and always good-natured and respectful.” The representation of John is set against the pastoral imagery of the community, “away down there beneath the gnarled oaks of South- eastern Georgia, where the sea croons to the sands and the sands listen till they sink half drowned beneath the waters, rising only here and there in long, low islands” (143). This depiction of a harmonious community in which John is commodi-

fied as a black subject is reinforced when his mother sends him off to Wells Institute to study. While the black community proudly follows him to the train station carrying his baggage, the white folks reject higher education for blacks and exclaim: “ ‘It’ll spoil him,—ruin him,’ . . . and they talked as if they knew” (143). Here Du Bois appropriates the language of nineteenth- century racist discourse that asserted that higher education for blacks was not only improper and unfitting for them, but also was disruptive to the racial hierarchy that insisted on the superiority of whites and the servile nature of blacks.

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136 Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

In spite of the potential disruption in this racial paradigm, John leaves Altamaha bound for Wells Institute, while a blues refrain resounds as a cultural subtext within “they that stood behind.” The refrain to which I refer here is the line in a blues song that is repeated throughout. It serves both as a structuring mechanism for the composition—since it centers the lyric discourse by calling the speaker and hearer back to it repeatedly— and as a central theme for the song. As the temporal sequence of the blues song unfolds, the language of the speaker begins a descent into a world of problems. The refrain prevents the blues structure from collapsing under its own weight of discourse that problematizes human experiences by re- turning the speaker and hearer to the ethical center of the blues narrative. This allows the blues narrative to function as a cultural catharsis for the hearers, since nomatter howbad the experience rendered in the song is, the blues refrain allows both the speaker and hearer to exit the seemingly end- less abyss of human problems and return to the ethical center of the lyric. The narrator in Du Bois’s short story identifies this refrain as “one ever- recurring word,” “When John comes,” suggesting its musical nature. This refrain embodies the logos of the community; they expect him to return from the institute prepared to teach. Upon his return, “then what parties were to be, and what speakings in the churches; what new furniture in the front room, —perhaps even a new front room; and there would be a new schoolhouse, with John as teacher; and then perhaps a bigwedding; all this andmore—when John comes.” The utopian discourse of the black commu- nity is balanced against the foreboding disposition of thewhite peoplewho “shook their heads” (143–44). While this refrain initially structures the cultural narrative that gives

voice to the black community’s logos, it is transformed into a “legend” during the seven years of John’s absence. The narrator tells us that at first, John expected to come back for Christmas, but that he does not because his vacation time was too short. Later, he had no money during the summer, and since the school was so costly, he worked, instead, in Johnstown. The community, once solidified through adherence to the “one recurringword” of the refrain, is transformed: “playmates scattered, andmother grew gray, and sister went up to the Judge’s kitchen to work” (144). Although the re- frain had once given voice to the community’s attempt to represent itself as upwardly mobile through the symbolic act of John going away for training and returning a teacher and race leader, the phrase loses its cultural power: It “lingers” as a legend, and it suggests the community’s difficulty in coun- tering the negation of their self-worth by the “white folks,” who continue to represent them through nineteenth-century racist discourse. The refrain is even more problematic since it is double-voiced, multi-

vocal. The judge, a powerful white man, is introduced through a powerful image—“the Judge’s house.” The narrator tells us that while the black community finds it difficult to sustain the refrain as both the ritualistic

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“Of the Coming of John,” “Kabnis,” and Self-Representation 137

repetition of the anticipated return of John, and the cultural glue that holds the community together, people in the judge’s house—suggesting the Bahktinian notion of hearing one’s discourse reflected in the speech of the other—like the refrain; the judge also has a John, his son, who has been accepted to Princeton University. This John is the racial double of John Jones. He is “a fair-haired, smooth-faced boy, who had played many a long summer’s day to its close with his darker namesake” (144). Here the word “played” signifies the nature of the racial hierarchy, for while both the white and black Johns are allowed to “play” as children, their child’s “play” does not defer meaning; they are unequal and alienated from each other as adults. The language the judge uses to represent his expectation for his John is oppositional to the white community’s judgment of John Jones as he leaves the town for the institute. While the judge commodifies John Jones as a black subject who will be spoiled by higher education and unfit for the subservient role of servant, the judge proudly says, “ ‘Yes, sir! John is at Princeton, sir. . . . Showing the Yankees what a Southern gentleman can do. . . . It’ll make a man of him . . . college is the place’ ” (144).8

There is a multivocal discourse between the white John, who is in the pro- cess of becoming a man at Princeton, as the embodiment of Southern man- hood, and the black John, who is expected to accept the role of the racialized other, as one “fixed in a consciousness of the body as a solely negating ac- tivity,” as Bhabha put it. This dynamic argues against the judge’s attempt to depoliticize and domesticate race relations under the rubric of racial ho- mogeneity. It embodies what Bhabha calls a “simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of differ- ence (which the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a prob- lem for the representation of the subject in significations of psychic and so- cial relations.”9 The play of difference requires the white community—the judge—to recognize the multiple community mirrored in both Johns. The village awaits the “coming” of the Johns, although “neither world thought the other world’s thought, save with a vague unrest . . . it was singular that few thought of two Johns,—for the black folk thought of one John, andhewas black; and the white folk thought of another John, and he was white” (144). Du Bois constructs a binary opposition between the white John’s evolv-

ing into manhood through success at Princeton and the black John’s initial failure at the institute. The faculty sees him as “the clay” that “seemed un- fit for any sort of moulding. He was loud and boisterous, always laughing and singing, and never able to work consecutively at anything. He did not knowhow to study; he had no idea of thoroughness; andwith his tardiness,

8. In “Father and Son,” Langston Hughes treats the issue of the black subject whose black body invades public white space, where the plantation economy and the racial- ized double is a source of unending enmity; The Ways of White Folks (New York: Knopf, 1934). 9. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 75.

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138 Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

carelessness, and appalling good-humor, wewere sore perplexed” (144). In response to his refusal to conform to the representation of race leadership that is promoted at the institute, the faculty vote that he, “ ‘on account of repeated disorder and inattention to work, be suspended for the rest of the term’ ” (144). The language used here to describe “Jones” constructs another binary in this narrative; it is opposite to that of racial uplifting em- bedded in Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901).10

Upon being told by the dean that he is being suspended, Jones strikes a bargain with him not to tell his mother and sister: “ ‘But you won’t tell mammy and sister,—you won’t write mammy now will you? For if you won’t I’ll go out into the city and work, and come back next term and show you something’ ” (145). The suspension not only causes Jones to as- sume the posture of humility, the necessary prerequisite for racial uplift- ing, but it also transforms him from the nineteenth-century carefree min- strel archetype to a man with “sober eyes and a set and serious face” (145). Jones’s physical appearance reflects his psychological and spiritual change: “he grew in body and soul, and with him his clothes seemed to grow and arrange themselves; coat sleeves got longer, cuffs appeared, and collars got less soiled. Now and then his boots shone, and a new dignity crept into his walk” (145). When he passes out of the preparatory school into college, the narrator tells us the experience “almost transformed the tall, grave man who bowed to us commencement morning” (145). Jones’s transformation into a new kind of man, a new genus, is centered

in his awareness of the need to represent himself from the perspective of racial leadership. His previous failure, which the narrator attributes to a “queer thought world,” is supplanted by a racialized identity that forces him “back to a world of motion and of men” (145). This perspective, distin- guished by its difference from “blackness” as the social construct of “white- ness,” brings Jones to the awareness of the “Veil.” Jones

grew slowly to feel almost for the first time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; 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. He felt angry now when men did not call him “Mister,” he clenched his hands at the “Jim Crow” cars, and charged at the color-line that hemmed in him and his. (145–46)

While Du Bois uses the term veil to signify the social separation of blacks and whites, he also believes that one’s sense of race comes from the expe-

10. See Robert B. Stepto for a discussion of The Souls of Black Folk andUp from Slavery, in his From behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, 2d ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

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“Of the Coming of John,” “Kabnis,” and Self-Representation 139

rience of depersonalized group oppression. In spite of Du Bois’s insistence that African Americans are “born with a veil,” he does not feel that racial consciousness is inborn. In The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (1968), in the chapter “My Birth and Family,” he discusses his racialized self as a con- struct that is estranged from his social identity. The veil withwhich African Americans are born is, for Du Bois, a caul, the inner fetal membrane that, at times, emerges from the womb wrapped around the head of a newborn child.Within the dialogic system of the black South, the caul or veil is a sign of difference that points to a special divine dispensation of gifts or purpose as human agency. The meaning of the veil, however, becomes inverted; though it begins as

a fixed indicator of divine favor, it becomes what Stuart Hall would call a “floating signifier” that denotes the curse of racial consciousness, black- ness. Jones’s awareness of the “Veil that lay between him and the white world” generates what Frantz Fanon calls the need for violence, however symbolic, as the cleansing agent for his damaged psychology.11

Just as his racial awareness creates within him anger, it also alienates him from the black community in his hometown. Jones manifests the charac- teristics of Frantz Fanon’s newcomer in that he “otherizes” his indigenous community in spite of his initial desire to return to it and assume the role of race leader. After weighing his options, he “seize[s] with eagerness the offer of the Dean to send him North with the quartet during the summer vacation, to sing for the Institute” (146). The spatial movement here, from rural South to urban New York is, of

course, symbolic of one strand of thought within nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century black thought for racial uplift. The northern cities were a trope within the African American dialogic system against the delimited nature of southern social, economic, and political life. Jones attempts to appropriate this route by enthusiastically accepting the dean’s offer, but he neglects to realize that the role hewill play is that of an entertainer, a singer, probably for the purpose of raising funds for the institute, and not that of a potential race leader as teacher. This trope is against the attempts of whites to commodify black art. The singer, rather than teacher, represents Wells Institute in New York because northern whites are more likely to accept African American males when they restrict their public representation to the social spaces circumscribed for them.Needless to say, this “black space” does not include intellectual pursuits; it is delimited to performance for the delight of whites. In this way, Jones’s representation of the institute com- modifies him as the black subject for the purpose of deconstructing racial-

11. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1966); see also Stuart Hall’s videotape, Race: The Floating Signifier (New York: Media Education Foundation, 1996), for his discussion of race as a floating signifier.

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140 Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

ized paradigms that differentiate between public space forwhitemales and private space for black males. Unaware of his restricted public representation, Jones casts the city of

New York in the romantic images characteristic of the pastoral nature of rural Georgia: The men remind him of the sea, an image of the vitality of life. Invigorated by this construct, Jones declares, “This is the World.” His utopian vision is centered in entertainment. After purchasing a ticket for five dollars to enter “he knew not what” (146), he is depersonalized by the white John with whom he played as a child. John Henderson’s un- named companion tells him,

“you must not lynch the colored gentlemen simply because he’s in your way. . . . You will not understand us at the South. . . . With all your profes- sions, one never sees in the North so cordial and intimate relations between white and black as are everyday occurrences with us. Why, I remember my closest playfellow in boyhood was a little Negro named after me, and surely no two,—well!” (146)

The white John’s language here is interesting. Although he chides his female companion for taking offense at Jones’s attempt to share her public space, he appropriates racist southern discourse that deconstructs his ro- mantic paradigm of “intimate relations between white and black” which he characterizes as “everyday occurrences.” On one hand, his idea of inti- mate relationsmaintain the structure of southern race relations through the perspective of the plantation era that sought to offer an apology for slavery by constructing harmonious images of social relationships between blacks and whites. On the other hand, his vision of racial intimacy is demystified by the metaphor of childhood play between himself and the black other whom, he insists, was named after him. The racial doubling created by the white John’s belief that John Jones was named after him is striking here; it suggests that John Jones’s social identity is constructed through a naming process in which he is cast as the racialized double of the white John but without the privilege of sharing his racial double’s public space. Further, at the white John’s urging, Jones is escorted out of the hall; the

manager tells him he is sorry he made the mistake of selling him a seat that was unavailable and offers to refund his money. But Jones’s inability to assert his identity as an upwardly mobile black leads him to rush away, telling himself, “John Jones, you’re a natural-born fool” (148). In an act that recalls the refrain, now legend, he pens a note: “Dear Mother and Sister—I am coming—John.” His “coming” signals the fulfillment of the commu- nity’s hopes. On the train back to Altamaha, Jones resolves that his duty is to “help settle the Negro problems there.” After a seven-year hiatus, John’s “coming” reunites the black community; “darkMethodists and Presbyteri- ans were induced to join in amonster welcome at the Baptist church” (148).

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“Of the Coming of John,” “Kabnis,” and Self-Representation 141

In spite of the optimism of both John and the community in anticipation of his “coming,” upon his arrival, John perceives the people in the town, including his own family, as the other:

An overwhelming sense of the sordidness and narrowness of it all seized him; 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 least eager old aunty, to her open-mouthed astonishment. (148)

The community responds to John’s inability to locate his own mother’s “body,” his estrangement from his sister, whom he identifies only because she calls himbrother, and the psychological and physical distance he places between himself and the people in the town by speaking to them in “a short, dry word here and there,” and refusing to linger “neither for hand- shaking nor gossip,” with confusion. His transformation from the jovial, warm, and friendly person to a distant, unemotional man causes them to ask, “This silent, cold man,—was this John? Where was his smile and hearty hand-grasp? ‘ ’Peared kind o’down in the mouf,’ said theMethodist preacher thoughtfully. ‘Seemed monstus stuck up,’ complained a Bap- tist sister” (148). The contrast between the community’s expectations of John’s “coming” and his physical presence suggest that John represents a mind/body binary of the community. The community’s memory of John is that of a man who embodies their logos and whose black body gives voice to their self-representation. The material presence of John, however, indicates that he has privileged his mind over the emotiveness attributed to the black body. The difference between the community’s representation of John and

the person whose material essence—“silent, cold,” unsmiling, with a cold handshake, and “monstus stuck up”—they greet at the train station is ex- pressed in nature’s response to John’s “coming.” The cultural glue that unites the community through John’s return is countered with the binary response of the natural environment. The meeting at the Baptist church fails. The sharing of a communal meal, which is the center of the social fabric of the religious community, is aborted, since “rain spoiled the barbe- cue, and thunder turned themilk in the ice-cream” (149). These naturalistic tropes suggest impending tragedy in the relationship of John to his com- munity. Later, at the church service, the spontaneity in the religious fervor of the community, set against the preparedness of the three preachers, is silenced by the presence of John, who

seemed so cold and preoccupied, and had so strange an air of restraint that the Methodist brother could not warm up to his theme and elicited not a

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142 Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

single ‘Amen’; the Presbyterian prayerwas but feebly responded to, and even the Baptist preacher, though he wakened faint enthusiasm, got so mixed up in his favorite sentence that he had to close it by stopping fully fifteenminutes sooner than he meant. (149)

John as the speaking black subject no longer voices the logos of the com- munity but instead speaks in a manner that alarms his hearers. He differ- entiates himself from other black leaders by calling for a new age of lead- ership, of what he terms “new ideas” that consciously establish difference from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries’ self-effacing representation of blacks. He focuses on the “broader ideas” (148) of hu- man brotherhood, destiny, and the rise of charity and popular education, in particular the spread of wealth and work. While John’s initial speech causes his audience concern, the question he raises evokes wonderment: “What part the Negroes of this land would take in the striving of the new century” (149). Moreover, his vision of his representation as race leader in the commu-

nity lacks a historical trope that will allow his listeners to appropriate and bring it into fruition. His vision includes a new Industrial School, organiz- ing charitable and philanthropic work, saving money to establish banks and businesses, and ending the divisiveness among religious denomina- tions. Revising Booker T.Washington’smodel for racial uplifting, he asserts that blacks will not be ushered into the fullness of American life because of denominations or even their adherence to Christianity, but depending upon whether they are “good and true” (149). The community members’ response to John’s visionary discourse indi-

cates both their embrace of their cultural logos and the pain caused by aborting racialized essentialism. Once John ends his speech, “a painful hush seized the crowdedmass,” for they had not understoodmuch ofwhat he had said. The narrator tells us that, except for a reference to baptism, John spoke, from the community’s perspective, “an unknown tongue,” a biblical trope that usually signifies divine inspiration but here, in a secular usage, suggests the alienation of John from his community. In response to John’s discourse, an old man ascends to the pulpit, Bible in hand, and speaks in a manner that moves the crowd to emotional frenzy. Just as his hearers did not understand John’s speech, John did not understand what the oldman said; “he only felt himself held up to scorn and scathing denun- ciation for trampling on the true Religion, and he realizedwith amazement that all unknowingly he had put rough, rude hands on something this lit- tle world held sacred” (149). The old man’s speech is a corrective to that of John’s. It voices the community’s distrust in and disapproval of John as the representation of a black man who challenges their historical fabric that is undergirded by their adherence to difference in religious practices.

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“Of the Coming of John,” “Kabnis,” and Self-Representation 143

John’s perception that he “had put rough, rude hands on something this little world held sacred” indicates his awareness that he has violated the community’s ethos without demonstrating cultural empathy, and demon- strates his tendency to otherize them. John attempts to insulate himself from the antagonism that is represented

here as a class division within a racial paradigm by leaving the church and, accompanied by his little sister, walking to the sea. As they talk, John and his sister attempt to establish a community of hearers that are responsive to his discourse.

“John,” she said, “does it make every one—unhappywhen they study and learn lots of things?” He paused and smiled. “I am afraid it does,” he said. “And, John, are you glad you studied?” “Yes,” came the answer, slowly but positively. She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said thoughtfully, “I

wish I was unhappy,—and—and,” putting both arms about his neck, “I think I am, a little, John.” (150)

The relationship here between happiness and formal education is the subtext that structures the community’s rejection of John’s material “com- ing.” Here it seems that happiness is the product of limited insights re- sulting from inadequate education. It echoes the perspective toward the involvement of blacks in higher education voiced by the white postmaster on John’s return to the community: “That damnNigger . . . has goneNorth and got plum full o’ fool notions; but they won’t work in Altamaha” (148– 49). The “fool notions” here that are derived from higher education and experience in the North deconstruct happiness, since the necessary pre- requisites for this happiness are the denial of educational pursuits and the correct assessment of the cultural signifiers as indicators of black space. Higher education, when combined with the northern experience, moves the black subject as material body from black space to white space without the comfortable tropes that buffer this shifting racial paradigm. John’s presence as a black body in white space decenters him within

the community. When he goes to the Judge’s house to ask for permission to teach at the Negro school, the Judge stares at him “a little hard” and brusquely tells him to “go round to the kitchen door . . . and wait” (150). When Judge Henderson finally gives John an audience, he does not in- vite John to sit down but instead lectures him that while he “likes colored people,” John’s going away led him not to help him and his family more because

“the Negro must remain subordinate, and can never expect to be the equal of white men. In their place, your people can be honest and respectful; and

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144 Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

God knows, I’ll do what I can to help them. But when they want to reverse nature, and rule white men, and marry white women, and sit in my parlor, then, by God! we’ll hold them under if we have to lynch every Nigger in the land.” (151)

We should notice here that John’s privileges, as the black subject whose black body invades public white space—the judge’s house—are circum- scribed through the trope of private black space: the kitchen door; remain- ing subordinate; staying in his place; and not reversing “nature” by trying to rule white men, marry white women, or sit in his parlor. The black per- son whom the judge likes is the “colored” person who acquiesces to fill the black space to which he is assigned; the ones whom the judge abhors and wants to lynch are thosewho seek equalitywithwhitemen, in otherwords, those who attempt to share public white space. The judge asks John if he is going to teach “the darkies to be faithful servants and laborers as your fathers were,—I knew your father, John, he belonged to my brother, and he was a good Nigger . . . are you going to be like him, or are you going to try to put fool ideas of rising and equality into these folks’ heads, and make them discontented and unhappy?” (151). John’s awareness of the nature of racial hierarchy in Georgia leads him to deconstruct the judge’s desire for him to fulfill the historical role of “good Nigger” by voicing his status as the black subject—he responds that he is going to accept subservient status. In spite of having struck a “fool’s bargain,” so to speak, with the judge,

Jones opens the school only to find that his work is more difficult than he first anticipated. In language that revises the trope of racial uplifting con- structed by Booker T. Washington, the dispassionate narrator tells us that the “Negroes were rent into factions for and against him, the parents were careless, the children irregular and dirty, and books, pencils, and slates largely missing” (152). Once he decides to persevere, he finds that the “at- tendance was larger and the children were a shade cleaner this week. Even the booby class in reading showed a little comforting progress. So John settled himself with renewed patience this afternoon” (152). The language here not only reflects the discourse of racial upliftment through higher ed- ucation, but it also signifies on the dialogic system of nineteenth-century black educators who believed that the indicator of racial betterment was adherence to the demands of formal education. John Jones’s “coming” and the opening of the Negro school is paralleled

by the return of his racial double, the white John. Much like the black com- munity’s response to the coming of John Jones, the white people respond with pride and gladness. The “other John came home, tall, gay, and head- strong. The mother wept, the sisters sang. The whole town was glad. A proud man was the Judge, and it was a good sight to see the two swinging down Main Street together” (151). But while the judge had hoped his son

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“Of the Coming of John,” “Kabnis,” and Self-Representation 145

might become mayor of Altamaha, a representative to the legislature, and maybe even governor of Georgia, his son, much like John Jones, sets him- self at odds with both his father and the town, “for the younger man could not and did not veil his contempt for the little town, and plainly had his heart set on New York” (151). Although the narrator insists that he is “not a bad fellow,—just a little spoiled and self-indulgent, and as headstrong as his proud father,” John casts the town as a symbolic prison where “there isn’t even a girl worth getting up a respectable flirtation with” (152). When his father tells him that he expects him to settle down and work in the town, John responds, “you surely don’t expect a young fellow like me to settle down permanently in this—this God-forgotten town with nothing but mud andNegroes?” (151). The linguistic construct equating John’s dis- pleasure with the town with its two dominant characteristics—mud and Negroes—is obvious. Suffice it to say that while the earthy quality of his discourse suggests the humanity of blacks, it also indicates the strong racial and class hierarchy. The deconstruction of the white John’s “coming” is mirrored in the

Judge’s report from the postmaster that John Jones is “ ‘livenin’ things up at the darky school,’ ” with “ ‘his almighty air and uppish ways. B’lieve I did heah somethin’ about his givin’ talks on the French Revolution, equality, and such like. He’s what I call a dangerous Nigger’ ” (151). The binary representation of John Jones, first as a “good Nigger,” when he voices to the judge that he will accept the subservient status to which he and other blacks have been assigned, and later as a “dangerous Nigger,” who has an “almighty air,” “uppish ways,” and dares to engage in public dis- course about the French Revolution and equality, is striking. Jones’s self- representation as race leader disrupts the comfortable construct for black education that both the black and white communities have accepted as the social norm. Upon hearing of Jones’s rebellious behavior, the white John asks the

identity of the John who is “ ‘livenin’ things up at the darky school’ ” (151). When the judge tells his son that the dusky fellow is “ ‘little black John, Peggy’s son,—your old playfellow,’ ” the white John reveals to his father that “ ‘it’s the darky that tried to force himself into a seat beside the lady I was escorting—’ ” (152). The judge and his son use different language to represent Jones; the Judge characterizes Jones in words that recall the custodial relationship of whites to blacks, the black childish body frozen in time, the “little black John,” his son’s “playfellow,” and the white John speaks of Jones in language that signifies the representation of the adult black other by “whiteness.” The representations, however, share a com- mon origin: nineteenth-century racist discourse. In an attempt to control the “dangerous Nigger” that Jones had become, the Judge abruptly closes the school because “the white people of Altamaha are not spending their

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146 Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

money on black folks to have their heads crammed with impudence and lies” (152). Du Bois’s racial doubling is best expressed in the “great black stump”

(153), a revised trope from nineteenth-century slave narratives. The “great black stump” signifies both a whipping place for blacks who were judged incorrigible and the site of impending judgment for blackmaleswho dared violate white space. Both the white and black Johns’ tragedies are centered in this trope. While pondering his fate in the prisonlike village, the white John sits on the “great black stump” and concludes that the village offers no desirable females with whom he would like to become involved, or have “a respectable flirtation with.” John settles for a disrespectable one by pur- suing Jennie, Jones’s sister, the racialized black other, the black fragmented erotic body who works for the judge as a kitchen maid. He tells her, “Why, you haven’t kissed me since I came home” (153). When she resists his ad- vances and runs, John chases her through the tall pine trees, catches her, and tries to force her to acquiesce to his sexual demands. This scene, revised from historical narratives that voice the rape of black

women at the hands of white men, reflects the relationship of black men and women to powerful white men that leads to Jones’s double tragedy. Just as he attempted to buffer the old man’s rebuke in the black church by walking to the sea, Jones goes to the water after the Judge closes the Negro school and resolves within himself to shield his failure from his mother, find a job elsewhere, and send for her andhis sister. The naturalistic tropes signify against John’s attempt to bring a harmonious resolution to his quandary: “The great brown sea lay silent. The air scarce breathed. The dying day bathed the twisted oaks and mighty pines in black and gold. There came from the wind no warning, not a whisper from the cloudless sky” (153). If the first part of Jones’s tragedy is concluded with the closing of the Negro school, the second part is initiated when he sees his sister fighting the white John, grabs a fallen limb, and strikes him “with all the pent-up hatred of his great black arm; and the body lay white and still beneath the pines, all bathed in sunshine and blood” (153). Here, the di- alectical relationship between the white John’s still white body, “bathed in sunshine and blood,” and Jones’s “great black arm” suggests the paradigm of the victimized white male at the hands of the brutish, savage nature of the black male. In this image, Jones is materially decentered—he is rep- resented only as a “great black arm,”—while the white Jones is depicted through the revised trope of the innocent depersonalized white male. The “great black stump” that initially offers both a resting place and a

site for the white John to ponder his options becomes at once both the “great black arm” that strikes him with “pent-up hatred,” and the trope for Jones’s eventual demise. After he walks back to the house, he tells his mother: “Mammy, I’m going away,—I’m going to be free” (153). Looking

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“Of the Coming of John,” “Kabnis,” and Self-Representation 147

at the North Star, a trope within the nineteenth-century African American oral tradition that signifies freedom, he tells his mother that he is going north, a desire once shared by his racial double. As he seats himself on the same “great black stump” on which the white John pondered his impris- onment in the small town, he recalls images of innocence between himself and the “other John,” how, as children, he and the dead boy had played together beneath the trees. Then, as he wonders what became of “the other boys at Johnstown” (153,my emphasis), he includes himself in the category of “other”: “And Jones,—Jones?Why, hewas Jones, and hewonderedwhat they would all say when they knew, when they knew, in that great long dining-room with its hundreds of merry eyes” (153). Jones’s disembodied discourse here suggest his alienation from himself as the black subject. This decentered language gives way to his personal tragedy that is completed with the sound of men on horses galloping nearer in search of him:

he saw in front that haggard white-haired man, whose eyes flashed red with fury. Oh, how he pitied him,—pitied him,—and wondered if he had the coil- ing twisted rope. Then, as the storm burst round him, he rose slowly to his feet and turned his closed eyes toward the Sea. And the world whistled in his ears (154).

Jones’s double tragedy echoes the blues refrain that structures the com- munity’s consciousness. Just as he initially attempts to deconstruct the rep- resentations of black males as commodified black bodies that serve the in- terests of the dominant hegemony, the refrain, “When John comes,” offers the possibility to the communitymembers to represent themselves as other than servants, the subservient racialized others, of whites. Jones’s inability to represent himself through the duality of mind/spirit ends in the tragedy implicit within the tropes of the mind/body binary that privilege the black body. This is signified by the refrain that degenerates into legend and is unavailable to the community for constructing identity. His inability to claim “that form of negation which gives access to the recognition of dif- ference” reduces him to a signifier of “race as anything other than its fixity as racism.”12

In the closing song within this narrative, Du Bois disrupts the Romantic moment and frustrates closure with an intertextual play on the wedding march fromWagner’s opera Lohengrin.Du Bois changes the song’s original text from “treulich geführt, ziehet dahin” to “freudig geführt . . . ,” or, in English, a change from “faithfully led, pass along to that place” to “joyfully led. . . .” It is as if gaiety and bliss must be denied; the South must lose two sons because the black John represents the South’s most dangerous night- mare: the word made flesh as a “dangerous Nigger,” as the embodiment

12. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 75.

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148 Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

of the negation of blackness fixed in the tropes of the black body. In other words, John represents the danger of literacy that stands at the center of racial discourse in the South. Before the black John “comes” in all of the senses the word implies, a violent and repressive social text exists that de- limits black achievements and being. Hence, onemay see the ending of this narrative as a closed cultural text in that there is no blues catharsis, no way out of the tragedy. Du Bois uses European high art to point out the moral and theological bankruptcy of theAmerican South, a land that cannibalizes its sons.

Themovement of descent in the blues structuring of DuBois’s text ismir- rored in Jean Toomer’s “Kabnis.” The refrain “when John comes,” which determines the community’s discourse and Jones’s representation, is much like that in “Kabnis,” with the repeated phrase “I’ve got to get myself to- gether”; “Come, Ralph, old man, pull yourself together” (85, 86, 87). This refrain is central to the representation of Kabnis, since he is depicted as a fragmented individual who initially struggles to give primacy to his mind and spirit to order the horrifying possibilities that living in Georgia offers. Terrified at night while in his cabin, “Ralph Kabnis, propped in his bed, tries to read. To read himself to sleep.”13 His attempt to privilege his mind and spirit over his body, however, is futile, since his material surround- ings fortify his fears: His cabin room is “spaced fantastically,” the oil lamp “burns unsteadily,” the “hearth and chimney” are “whitewashed,” a con- struct borrowed from biblical discourse that suggests its surface signifies one thingwhile its nature is quite another; the cracks between the boards in the walls are “black,” permitting the “night winds” to whisper their blues- structured song:

White-man’s land. Niggers, sing. Burn, bear black children Till poor rivers bring Rest, and sweet glory In Camp Ground. (83)

The double-voiced discourse of the night wind’s song indicates the rep- resentation of African Americans, including Kabnis, through the tropes of the dominant racial hegemony of the South. Lines 1, 3, and 5 voice the de- limited nature of blacks as divided selves, black subjects, whose value is restricted to the market rate of their participation in the southern econ- omy. Lines 2, 4, and 6 reflect the cultural response of the black subjects

13. Jean Toomer, Cane (1923; reprint, New York: Norton, 1988), 83. All citations refer to this edition.

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“Of the Coming of John,” “Kabnis,” and Self-Representation 149

in their efforts both to resist commodification through social labor and to structure communal discourse that embodies the community’s logos. The former voice presents the black subjects at the whims of the whites who own the land; the latter offers the spiritual response of these black subjects to their otherized status. This blueslike song structures the narrative’s discourse. Kabnis, who

is represented as a mulatto, has difficulty locating his physical body. His “thin hair . . . streaked on the pillow,” “slim silk” mustache, “brown eyes,” “lemon face,” and thumb that attempts to “be trying to give squareness and projection” (83) to his chin, occupy the other end on the scale of color differentiation within the black race represented by Du Bois’s “dark sil- houettes” (143). They are equally problematic in that both lack material essence. When Kabnis speaks, he wonders if he is “the real Kabnis” or if he is a “dream”: “And dreams are faces with large eyes and weak chins and broad brows that get smashed by the fists of squared faces” (83). After receiving a warning for him to leave town that is written on a pa- per wrapped around a stone and thrown through Fred Halsey’s window, Kabnis becomes a “splotchy figure,” a “scarecrow replica” of himself, and “awkwardly animate” (93). The imagery here reflects the relationship of blacks as dreams to the whites, the “squared faces,” who smash the “soft” faces of dreams. In language oppositional to the trope of dreams, Kabnis questions

whether he has “come to the South to face it,” if, in fact, he “could be- come the face of the South” (83–84). Continuing the blueslike structure of the night wind’s song, Kabnis offers that if he can deconstruct the tropes of mind and body that have rendered himwithout a unified identity, his “lips would sing for it, my songs being the lips of its soul” (84). Much like John Jones, however, who rejects the tropes of the black body that suggest the African American is little more than the commodified black subject who asserts identity through the cultural texts of the gospel tradition, Kabnis rejects the soul as the core of black identity: “Soul. Soul hell. There ain’t no such thing” (84). His attempt to privilege mind over spirit reflects his urge to break with the delimiting representations of blacks that rested at the center of nineteenth-century racist discourse. While he differs with representations that sustain the relationships be-

tween blacks and whites, Kabnis finds no solace in his attempt to gain control over the chaos of racial harmony and his own mixed heritage: Un- settled by the night wind’s song, he “slides down beneath the cover, seek- ing release” (83). The images of commodified black subjects saturate his consciousness: “Dust of slavefields, dried, scattered . . .” (84). Likewise, Kabnis inverts the tropes of barnyard animals, usually signifiers of har- mony between human beings and nature, into hostile images. In a complex scene that combines images of bothKabnis’s representation of theGeorgian

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150 Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

landscape as the other and the embodiment of southern romance, he en- gages in domestic battle with a hen who has invaded the privacy of his cabin, chases and catches the “she-bitch,” and “with his fingers about her neck, he thrusts open the outside door and steps out into the serene loveli- ness of Georgian autumn moonlight” (84). Although Kabnis succeeds in separating the chicken’s head from her

body, this oppositional discourse introduces revisions of tropes of judg- ment and apocalypse. Like the smoke of the city that “hangs wearily above the valley” (143) in Du Bois’s narrative, “a band of pine-smoke, silvered gauze, drifts steadily” across the autumn landscape (84) in Toomer’s nar- rative. Toomer inverts the half-moon, a familiar trope of unrequited love, to underscore Kabnis’s alienation: “The half-moon is a white child that sleeps upon the tree-tops of the forest” (84). This discourse structures the double-voiced narrative of thewhitewinds,

which croon,

rock-a-by baby . . Black mother sways, holding a white child on her bosom. when the bough bends . . Her breath hums through pine-cones. cradle will fall . . Teat moon-children at your breasts, down will come baby . . Black mother. (84)

The blueslike structure represents discourse between the romanticism of the South in verses 1, 3, 5, and 7, and the commodification of the black mother as the black body whose value is restricted to her ability to nur- ture white children. In an attempt to impose order on the chaos he con- fronts, Kabnis represents himself as “Earth’s child,” and says “the earth my mother.” Yet, his effort does not bring symbolic closure in his quest to confront the South as the other. He curses God as a “profligate red-nosed man about town” and constructs his own identity as a “bastard son” (85). The contrast between the discourse of the white winds’ song and Kabnis’s representation of the earth, specifically the land of the South as his mother, suggests that his construct of bastardy is not restricted to religion. Rather, it is a trope against the negation of his historical consciousness through European colonial and American racist discourse that casts a paradigm of the person of African descent as a cultural bastard. This trope embodies every speech that denotes Kabnis and his race as bastards, including the designation of Africa as the “dark continent” deprived of history and civ- ilization that has its genesis in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European discourse, and the generally held belief in America from the seventeenth through the late nineteenth centuries that people of African descent who

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“Of the Coming of John,” “Kabnis,” and Self-Representation 151

were born in America had no history, culture, or traditions, and therefore, were the bastards of the American slave institution. This conception led many nineteenth-century historians, such as JohnClarke Ridpath, to desig- nate Africans and their descendants in America as “Hamites,” the bastard race that had no cultural integrity in themselves, but rather pointed to the signifiers within American immigrant cultures for authentication.14

Kabnis’s internalization of secular bastardy leads him to represent him- self by negating Christianity, considering it a religious system that had failed to serve the interests of African Americans in their attempt to rep- resent themselves through the tropes of sacred discourse. He constructs a binary between the “radiant beauty” (85) of the night, a trope within the African American tradition that signifies the relationship of blacks, slave and free, to the dominant hegemony represented by the daylight, and the “ugliness” of the moral injustices that God allows. In a poetic double-voiced monologue that signifies on the discourse of prayer, Kabnis says,

“God Almighty, dear God, dear Jesus, do not torture me with beauty. Take it away. Give me an ugly world. Ha, ugly. Stinking like unwashed niggers. Dear Jesus, do not chain me to myself and set these hills and valleys, heav- ing with folk-songs, so close to me that I cannot reach them. There is radiant beauty in the night that touches and . . . tortures me. . . . What’s beauty any- way but ugliness if it hurts you? God, he doesn’t exist, but nevertheless He is ugly. Hence what comes from Him is ugly. Lynchers and business men, and that cockroach Hanby, especially.” (85)

Kabnis’s tendency to equate social injustice with God, especially Hanby, the principal of the school at which he teaches, leads him to say, “God and Hanby, they belong together. Two godam moral-spouters” (85). The win- dow of Fred Halsey’s home “looks out on a forlorn, box-like, whitewashed frame church. . . . Above its squat tower, a great spiral of buzzards reaches far into the heavens. An ironic comment upon the path that leads into the Christian land” (88).Hedescribes Professor Layman as a “tall, heavy, loose- jointed Georgia Negro, by turns teacher and preacher” (88). During a con- versationwith Halsey and Layman, Kabnis rejects the spirituality of blacks by saying that rather than taking direct action against racism, blacks are a “preacher-ridden race. Pray and shout. Theyre in the preacher’s hands. . . . And the preacher’s hands are in thewhiteman’s pockets” (90). BlackChris- tianity, for Kabnis, is little more than a commodified structure that serves the ends of both “whiteness” and “blackness.”

14. Blacks as bastards of the West is a leitmotif in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) and his classic essay “Stranger in the Village” (1955). On blacks as “Hamites,” see John Clarke Ridpath,Great Races of Mankind VI (Cincinnati: Jones Broth- ers, 1893), 473–580.

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152 Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

The tension in Kabnis’s discourse generates a blues refrain that struc- tures his narrative. After pondering his relationship to the other—which he personifies here as beauty, ugliness, and God—he tells himself, “Come, Ralph, old man, pull yourself together” (85). After listening again to the nightwind, anddeconstructing his owndiscourse, Kabnis “totters as aman who would for the first time use artificial limbs. As a completely artificial manwould” (85).He experiences difficulty locating the “large framehouse, squatting on brick pillars, where the principal of the school, his wife, and the boarding girls sleep”; it “seems a curious shadow of hismind” (85). The only essences he can locate are “white minds, with indolent assumption,” which “juggle justice and a nigger” (85–86). Toomer’s linguistic play on “mind” here constructs an image that recalls the body/mind binary. While he attempts to privilege his mind as human agency over the primacy the South ascribes to his black body, he can only perceive as “real”whiteminds that maintain privileges by otherizing black subjects. This blues refrain structures Kabnis’s consciousness, since he can only

“see” or locate images of the dominant southern hegemony—the land, Augusta—as dynamic, while he perceives the North, Washington, as dor- mant: “Washington sleeps,” and New York is “a fiction” (86). Further, this blues structure is intensified by Kabnis’s inability to buffer himself from his “mind” by sleeping, and his observation, albeit untested, that “Negroes within it [Georgia] are content. They farm. They sing. They love. They sleep” (86). Unable to go to sleep, Kabnis’s “mind” again attempts to order chaos, but he finds that his efforts only regenerate the blues refrain. In the tormenting stillness, during which he imagines that he is in a place where “they burn and hang men” (85–86), and the appearance of ghosts, a trope against the construct of the black body, Kabnis tells himself, “Come, Ralph, pull yourself together” (86). The tropes of the night cause Kabnis to repeat the refrain three times in anticipation that the next day, Sunday, will come swiftly. In a final bid to escape his mind, Kabnis closes his eyes, slips under the sheets, and tells himself,

“Think nothing . . a long time . . nothing . . nothing, nothing. Dont even think nothing. Blank. Not even blank. Count. No, musnt count Nothing . . blank . . nothing . . blank . . space without stars in it. No, nothing . . nothing . .” (87)

His attempt to deconstruct creation and his own mind by appropriat- ing this nihilistic structure, thinking nothing, “space without stars in it,” is undermined by the subtext of the night wind’s foreboding blues song. Fred Halsey’s home is the logos for Kabnis’s narrative. Halsey, a racially

mixed African American, described as a “well-built, stocky fellow, hair cropped close” (88), fills his house with cultural artifacts that establish continuity between the African past, slavery, and the present status of

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“Of the Coming of John,” “Kabnis,” and Self-Representation 153

black subjects. The family clock that does not run suggests these three eras are fused into one continual present distinguished by its ritualistic repeti- tion on tropes that sustain the dominant racial hegemony. The portraits of Halsey’s family lend insight into his racial heritage: His great-grandfather, “an English gentleman,” has “black hair, thick and curly. The eyes are dar- ing. The nose, sharp and regular.” The mouth of his great-grandmother, who is of undeniable “Negro strain,” “is seen to be wistfully twisted. The expression of her face seems to shift before one’s gaze—now ugly, repul- sive; now sad, and somehow beautiful in its pain.” The portraits of the rest of his family show his father as “rich brown. Themother, practically white. Of the children, the girl, quite young, is like Fred; the two brothers, darker” (87–88). These images signify the cultural hybridism that mirrors Kabnis’s initial self-representation. Kabnis’s hybridism manifests itself in race and class structures. Just as he finds difficulty in locating his material essence in the geography of rural Georgia, he also feels the difference between himself and other blacks who are indigenous to the region. Moreover, Halsey and Kabnis themselves represent the mind/body bi-

nary: Halsey embraces black subjecthood, working with his hands and re- jecting higher education for blacks, while Kabnis assigns primacy to his mind and negates the tropes of the black body. During a discussion on lynching among himself, Layman, and Halsey, Kabnis attempts to estab- lish a difference between the trio, a “gentleman—fellows, men like us three here—” (89), and the black other, by implying whites would not lynch any- one like them. Layman, the teacher-preacher who has traveled over most of Georgia, responds by collapsing Kabnis’s construct in a blunt corrective to his conspiratorial misreading: “Nigger’s a nigger down this way, Pro- fessor. An only two dividins: good and bad. An even they aint permanent categories. They sometimesmixes umupwhen it comes t lynchin. I’ve seen um do it” (89). Layman’s discourse suggests that “blackness” in Georgia is a floating signifier, constructed by “whiteness” to represent black subject- hood. While Kabnis embraces the duality of mind and body, he rejects the

mind/spirit binary. When he hears a woman’s voice swell “to shouting,” in a “voice, high-pitched and hysterical,” and “perfectly attuned to the nervous key of Kabnis” (his own voice) (92), Kabnis’s “face gives way to an expression of mingled fear, contempt, and pity” (90). His rejection of the body/spirit binary is embodied in his rejection of the emotionalism, especially shouting, of the black church. He says “that stuff gets to me. . . . Couldnt stand the shouting, and thats a fact. We dont have that sort of thing up North. We do, but, that is, some one should see to it that they are stopped or put out when they get so bad the preacher has to stop his sermon for them” (91). Layman, offering a “logical” analysis that explains both the type of black who shouts and his or her reasons for demonstrating

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154 Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

such excessive emotionalism, responds to Kabnis’s attempt to have shout- ing halted in the black church by saying that he agrees shouting should be suppressed:

“An its th worst ones in th community that comes in th church t shout. . . . You take a man what drinks, th biggest licker-head around will come int th church and yell th loudest. An th sister whats done wrong, an is always doin wrong, will sit down in th Amen corner an swing her arms an shout her head off. Seems as if they cant control themselves out in thworld; they cant control themselves in church.” (91)

Layman’s discourse here suggests that he, like Kabnis, privileges the mind over spirit, even though Layman is a preacher himself. After some- one hurls a stonewrapped in paper through thewindow ofHalsey’s home, with the inscription, “ ‘You northern nigger, it’s time fer y t leave. Git along now’ ” (92), Kabnis, consumed with fear, joins the others, remembers the “words, and [begins] to shift them about in sentences” (93). Layman even construes them grammatically. Yet, Layman insists that the black mind, confined to the black space of subjecthood, lacks the social being to negate the tropes of racist discourse. He says, “White folks know that niggers talk, an they dontmind jes so long as nothing comes of it.” (92). As he constructs a narrative that horrifies Kabnis, Layman tells him about Mame Lamkins, a black woman who was murdered in the street for trying to hide her hus- band from a white lynch mob. While in public, the mob kills her on the street “ ‘and some white man seein th risin in her stomach as she lay there soppy in her blood like any cow, took an ripped her belly open, an th kid fell out. It was living; but a nigger baby aint supposed t live. So he jabbed his knife in it an stuck it t a tree” (92). Kabnis’s construct of southern racial hierarchy is deconstructed when

he finds that the note attached to the stone was meant for Lewis, who is described as a man who looks like Kabnis, and was thrown by black folks who, Lewis says, “have grown uncomfortable at my being here.” (97). Kabnis initially feels a bond with Lewis, whom Halsey says rejects black subjecthood and “ain’t bowed t none of them. Nassur. T nairy a one of them nairy an inch nairy a time. An only mixed when he was good an ready.” (98). Halsey further represents Kabnis as the racial double of Lewis; he otherizes both Lewis and Kabnis by saying that Lewis ought to know something about Kabnis, because “one queer bird ought t know another, seems like t me” (110). Kabnis, the narrator reminds us, appears to Lewis as “a promise of a soil-soaked beauty; uprooted, thinning out. Suspended a few feet above the soil whose touch will resurrect him” (98). While Kab- nis feels a strong impulse to reject Lewis, he notices that “His eyes call, ‘Brother’ ” (98).

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“Of the Coming of John,” “Kabnis,” and Self-Representation 155

Kabnis’s refusal to privilege the black spirit is tempered by the church choir’s spiritual narrative:

My Lord, what a mourning, My Lord, what a mourning, My Lord, what a mourning, When the stars begin to fall. (93)

This gospel song signifies the black subjects’ attempt to construct identity through the tropes of spirituality rather than those of racist discourse.15 But Kabnis, after the paper-wrapped stone is thrown through Halsey’s win- dow, is unable to appropriate these structures; he runs to his cabin and, at the sound of someone approaching, grabs a poker, then realizes that Halsey and Layman have followed him home. In an attempt to calm Kab- nis’s fears, Halsey tells him, “Nobody’s after y, Kabnis, I’m tellin y. Put that thing down an get yourself together” (94). Kabnis is unable to construct identity through the tropes common to blacks indigenous to Georgia, and Halsey imposes order on the chaos in Kabnis’s mind. Rather than engag- ing Kabnis in the process of getting himself together through spirituality, Halsey asserts a blues structure—he offers him a bottle of liquor. The patrician Hanby represents Kabnis’s desire to cast himself as an or-

ator rather than as a preacher. Hanby is

awell-dressed, smooth, rich, black-skinnedNegrowho thinks there is no one quite so suave andpolished as himself. Tomembers of his own race, he affects the manners of a wealthy white planter. Or, when he is up North, he lets it be known that his ideas are those of the best New England tradition. To white men he bows, without ever completely humbling himself. Tradesmen in the town tolerate him because he spends his money with them. He delivers his words with a full consciousness of his moral superiority. (95)

The images here of Hanby are oppositional to those constructed of the black subject. Instead of singing spirituals, working in the cane fields, and confining himself to black space, Hanby is well-dressed, “smooth,” “rich,” “bowing to white men but never completely humbling himself.” Yet Hanby, the colored school’s “humble president,” collapses black iden- tity into a paradigm of racial essentialism and asserts that “the progress of the Negro race is jeopardized whenever the personal habits and examples set by its guides and mentors fall below the acknowledged and hard-won standard of its average member” (95). Hanby’s statement suggests that race leaders must deconstruct the tropes of black subjecthood through maintaining “personal habits and examples” that construct identity that

15. Du Bois’s magisterial reading of the spirituals, including this one, serves as a useful intertext. See “The Sorrow Songs,” in The Souls of Black Folk.

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156 Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

establishes difference from racial paradigms constructed by nineteenth- century racist discourse. Convinced that Kabnis has violated the “hard- won standards” by drinking liquor on school premises, Hanby demands Kabnis’s resignation from the faculty. While Halsey counters Hanby’s insistence that Kabnis resign and leave

the school premises with his own assertion that Kabnis is to work for him, Kabnis responds to both demands to gain control of his self-representation either as a worker in Halsey’s shop or race leader as teacher by attempt- ing to “rise and put both Halsey and Hanby in their places. He vaguely knows that hemust do this, else the power of directionwill completely slip from him to those outside. The conviction is just strong enough to torture him” (96). Kabnis’s recognition that he must control his own representation, ex-

pressed here through the directional metaphor rise, is further developed when he states that he must regain control of “the power of direction” or it will be relegated to “those outside.” The internalizing of human agency here asserts the blues structure of the narrative; it leads Kabnis to resolve his attempt to regain control of his representation byworking for Halsey in “an old building just off themain street of Sempter,” characterized by little- used utilitarian objects that suggest the owner “has no worth-while job on foot” (99). While Halsey’s workshop is the center of the narrative, “The Hole,” the cellar that is both the home of “a very old man,” Father John, and the seat of human agency for Halsey, serves as the logos in Kabnis’s attempt to represent himself. In “The Hole,” Kabnis is initially depicted as a child in need of the custo-

dial care of Halsey, as “awkward and ludicrous, like a schoolboy in his big brother’s new overalls” (99–100). After botching the job of fixing Ramsey’s, a white customer’s, hatchet handle, he follows Halsey, Lewis and Layman, “hangdog-fashion” (102). Ramsey, depicted as “a shriveled, bony white man,” tells Halsey, “still breaking in the new hand, eh, Halsey? Seems like a likely enough faller once he gets th hang of it” (102). Resisting Ramsey’s attempt to represent him through the tropes of the black subject as laborer, Kabnis “burns red,” “feels stifled” (102), and sees Ramsey as the embodi- ment of the entire white South that burdens his consciousness. Influenced by liquor, Kabnis is depicted as “a ridiculous pathetic fig-

ure in his showy robe” (110). Cora and Stella, two black prostitutes whom Halsey defines through the tropes of slavery as a “commonwenches” (110), embody subjecthood as the black erotic other that is constructed by the lust of white and black men. While Cora, at the urging of Halsey, sits Kabnis down in a chair, sits down in his lap, squeezes his head into her breasts, and “almost stifles him,” Stella attempts to fulfill her femininity through mothering Kabnis; she would “like to take Kabnis to some distant pine grove and nurse and mother him” (112).

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“Of the Coming of John,” “Kabnis,” and Self-Representation 157

Stella’s attempt to domesticate Kabnis by symbolically subsuming him within the tropes of black motherhood are set against Kabnis’s desire to construct his identity by establishing difference from the paradigm of race leadership represented by black preachers. He represents himself as an orator, “born and bred in a family of orators,” not preachers, whom he characterizes as “wind-busters” (111). In discourse that begins to shape his identity, Kabnis says that while Halsey is “all righ f chopping things from blocks of wood,” he “was good at that th day I ducked th cradle. An since then, I’ve been shaping words after a design that branded here. . . . Been shaping words t fit my soul” (111). Kabnis’s emphasis on expressing his soul through shaping words is significant. Not only does he assert his identity through the tropes of the black oral tradition, but his speech also otherizes Halsey. His words, which shape his soul, are sometimes “beau- tiful and golden an have a taste that makes them fine t roll over with y tongue” (111). Then, he tells Halsey that his tongue “ain’t fit f nothin but t roll and lick hog-meat” (111). Kabnis’s language here is interesting be- cause he represents himself through the discourse of the dialogic system of African American folk culture rather than that of racial uplifting, but in doing so, “signifies” on Halsey with speech that both assumes antagonism and defers meaning. Although Halsey counters Kabnis’s verbal play by telling Stella to give

him a shovel, the protagonist’s newly constructed voice continues to assert his identity. Constructing a speakerly text, Kabnis asserts the priority of words that “feed” or structure his soul,

Not beautiful words . . . Misshapen, split-gut, tortured, twisted words. Lay- man was feedin it back there that day you thought I ran out fearin things. White folks feed it cause their looks are words. Niggers, black niggers feed it cause theyre evil an their looks are words. Yallar niggers feed it. This whole damn bloated purple country feeds it cause its goin down t hell in a holy avalanche of words. (111)

Kabnis’s belief that only his words, not those of the preachers, can feed his soul is partly the result of his desire to distinguish himself from lower- class blacks by insisting that his ancestors were southern blue-blooded, upper-class blacks who could have passed for whites, to which Lewis of- fers a corrective, “and black” (108). Seeking to collapse difference between blacks centered in color differentiation, Kabnis responds, “aint much dif- ference between blue and black” (108). Perhaps Kabnis’s attempt to privilege words or mind over the tropes

of the black body is best depicted in his confrontation with Father John, whom Kabnis calls Father Satan. Father John, who lives in the Halseys’ cellar, and is described as both deaf and blind, gains voice in response to Kabnis’s verbal attacks that characterize him as a “dead fish man, an black

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158 Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

at that” (115) who died “way back there in th’ sixties” (114). In response to Kabnis’s discourse, in which he speaks of “sin” as a floating signifier, a spiritual error that is specific to the situation and audience, that points to “whats done against th soul” (116), Father John speaks through discourse that unites the tropes of slavery, Africa, and southern segregation. He fixes sin, through revising and repeating the discourse of slave narratives, in white misrepresentations of Christianity through misreading the Bible. He distinguishes between the true gospel of Jesus and “th sin th white folks ‘mittedwhen theymade th Bible lie” (117). Seemingly unaffected by Father John’s deconstruction of his discourse, Kabnis responds by revising Father John’s construct of sin: “So thats your sin. All these years t tell us that th white folks made th Bible lie. Well, I’ll be damned” (117). Just as Father John’s voice establishes continuity between the tropes of

black resistance to the dominant racial hegemony, Carrie K., “the pure, un- touched Negro soul, throbbing with the promise of life and love, a kind of fertility symbol—the ideal lover and the potential earth mother,”16 creates a spiritual bridge between Father John and Kabnis. Carrie, who attends to Father John’s needs in “The Hole,” a trope of black genocide during the Middle Passage, offers a resolution to Kabnis’s hybridism. After voicing her criticism, within the dialogic system of the black religious commu- nity, of Kabnis’s attempt to deconstruct Father John’s discourse by saying, “Brother Ralph, is that your best Amen,” she

turns him to her and takes his hot cheeks in her firm cool hands. Her palms draw the fever out. With its passing, Kabnis crumples. He sinks to his knees before her, ashamed, exhausted. His eyes squeeze tight. Carrie presses his face tenderly against her. The suffocation of her fresh starched dress feels good to him. Carrie is about to lift her hands in prayer, when Halsey, at the head of the stairs, calls down. (117)

Carrie’s impact on Kabnis suggests both faith healing and religious con- version. Toomer seems to offer a structure that may resolve Kabnis’s prob- lem of self-representation in Carrie and Lewis. Taken together, they com- bine the black soul buttressed by the strength of the black’s ancient spirit drawn from the life force of the soil and history of the primal past, with “purpose guided by an adequate intelligence” (117) into the logos that can provideKabniswith themoral center fromwhich to construct identity from the perspective of the African American folk dialogic system. Even though this paradigm offers interesting possibilities, Toomer tempers the applica- bility of his model by insisting that Kabnis must reject both nineteenth- century black bourgeois ideologies and moral-religious cultural codes that

16. Frank Durham, Studies in Cane (Columbus: Charles E. Merrill, 1971), 112.

Souls of Black Folk One Hundred Years Later, edited by Dolan Hubbard, University of Missouri Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=3570754. Created from uaz on 2018-03-15 17:11:03.

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“Of the Coming of John,” “Kabnis,” and Self-Representation 159

sustain “blackness” as the social construct of “whiteness.” Carrie’s attempt to heal Kabnis’s soul is less an act of faith healing than the providing of a spiritual continuum that reconnects him to the black ancient spirit repre- sented by Father John. Her aborted attempt to pray for him suggests that divine intervention is not necessary, since her hands “draw the fever out” (117) and heal his black body. Although Kabnis sinks to his knees before Carrie and assumes the sym-

bolic posture of repentance for sin and religious conversion, the tropes of salvation, specifically prayer, are supplanted by Halsey’s blues dis- course: “Well, well. What’s up? Aint you ever comin? . . . Take you all mornin t sleep off a pint? Youre weakenin, man, youre weakenin. The axle and th beam’s all ready waitin f y. Come on” (117). The tension between Halsey’s blues and Carrie’s salvific discourse suggest that Kabnis’s self- representation exists between the two poles. After Halsey interrupts her prayer for Kabnis with the demand that the protagonist represent himself through the tropes of black labor, Carrie walks to Father John and “slips to her knees before him. Her lips murmur, ‘Jesus, come’ ” (117). The dialecti- cal relationship between Kabnis’s ascending the steps from the cellar and Carrie’s directional discourse that invokes Jesus as Savior to come down to “save”Kabnis signifies that his salvation is centered in a blues structure, his upward movement to participate in black labor. Carrie’s aborted attempt to heal Kabnis’s spirit denies him the possibility of liberation from fixity as a signifier of the tropes of the black body. Just as Kabnis’s dilemma of self-representationmay be resolved through

the structure represented by Carrie and Lewis, it may also be centered in the figures of Carrie and Father John. While Carrie and Lewis offer an al- ternative to the representation of Kabnis as the black subject commodified through the tropes of black labor, Carrie and Father John posit a resolution centered in the tropes of the black religious experience through salvific dis- course that signifies against the delimited social construct of “blackness.” Toomer’s narrative revises and repeats tropes of black subjecthood that

are at the center of Du Bois’s construct of double-consciousness. While Toomer locates the essence of African Americans by reestablishing a rela- tionship between differing representations of black bodies, Du Bois identi- fies the black essence through the construct of racial doubling. Both Toomer and Du Bois, however, establish the black logos in the dialectical tension between blues and gospels. The blues offers the refrains—“When John comes” for Du Bois and “I’ve got to get myself together” for Toomer—that structure black discourse by signifying on the tragic nature of black sub- jecthood. The gospels, meanwhile, allow each author to revise the tropes of salvific discourse that signify against the sins of the dominant racial hege- mony. Du Bois’s “Of the Coming of John” and Toomer’s “Kabnis” depict

Souls of Black Folk One Hundred Years Later, edited by Dolan Hubbard, University of Missouri Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=3570754. Created from uaz on 2018-03-15 17:11:03.

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160 Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.

the dilemma of self-representation in that both John Jones and Ralph Kab- nis attempt to construct identity through the tropes of nineteenth-century race leadership but find their efforts generate a disturbing conundrum: The blues refrain delimits their representation to the tropes of black sub- jecthood, the racialized other.

Souls of Black Folk One Hundred Years Later, edited by Dolan Hubbard, University of Missouri Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=3570754. Created from uaz on 2018-03-15 17:11:03.

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__MACOSX/._Souls_of_Black_Folk_One_Hundred_Years_Later_----_(Du_Bois's_Of_The_Coming_Of_John,_Toomer's_Kabnis,_And_The_Dilemma_Of_S...).pdf