By some measures, Fenton Johnson is a marginal figure to the Black Chicago Renaissance. He published nothing during its most vibrant period and after the late 1920s seemed to willfully slide into complete and total obscurity; his loyalty to a sardonic, imagist poetic technique, similar to that of fellow Chicago poet Carl Sandburg, would, on the surface, make him out of step with either the general critical social realism or modified high modernism that generally held the day in black Chicago through the 1930s and 1940s. African American poet Arna Bontemps worked diligently to ensure that later work by Johnson had a presence in a late 1940s anthology of African American poetry that he edited, but that brief and tantalizing selection of four poems had to stand for what remained of a once real and vibrant ambition. Indeed, from another angle, that very ambition may make Johnson indispensable to the emergence of a substantive cohort of black artists, writers, critics, and entrepreneurs in Chicago that could command national and international attention. By a similarly reasonable measure, then, Fenton Johnson could be remembered as black Chicago’s pioneering literary entrepreneur such that without his modest successes and significant failures, the energy behind the South Side Writers Group, the South Side Community Arts Center, and Negro Story are simply unimaginable. Much recent attention to the Black Chicago Renaissance has focused upon its foregrounding of a critical realism within the Popular Front, an intimate relationship between literary and civil rights activity, and the integration of urban and literary concerns that lead to the emergence of a vital “black arts” scene. If the black Chicago Renaissance had a future, it most certainly had a past, and Fenton Johnson is a crucial part of that history.1
Fenton Johnson was born in 1888 to Elijah and Jessie Johnson and into a comfortable, if complex, middle-class existence on Chicago’s South Side. Elijah was a Railway Porter, a distinctly respectable and secure position for African American men of the time, and had had some success purchasing real estate. The late 1880s and 1890s were transitional times for black Chicago. Patterns of permanent residential segregation had not wholly settled in and it would not be unusual for someone like Johnson to have had an upbringing that included contact with the great diversity of Chicago’s immigrant communities, and, moreover, it most certainly would have been an upbringing that included class ambition and expectation. By the time of Johnson’s high-school years at Englewood and Wendell Phillips High Schools, however, Chicago would be gradually formulating its own version of Jim Crow, and thus laying the groundwork for a nascent and necessary cultural nationalism by its black inhabitants. Johnson’s maturity would coincide with the establishment of an important network of schools, hospitals, clubs, banks, businesses, theaters, and newspapers, a virtual black metropolis, eager to serve a thriving and growing community uneasily surrounded by nonblacks often equally eager to scapegoat Blacks as they were faced with the hardships of industrialization and modernization.
Regardless of whether or not Johnson was shaped most completely by either the assimilationist hopes of one portion of the black middle class, or the nascent nationalist dreams of another, he had no difficulty imagining for himself a thoroughly literary existence. By twelve years of age, he had published his first poem, and by nineteen by some accounts (no record has yet been found) had plays produced at black Chicago’s important playhouse, the Pekin Theatre. Arna Bontemps recalls Johnson telling of his family’s electric car and the scene he made driving the vehicle around the city; he was a literary man, most certainly, if not a self-conscious dandy and dreamily (if not realistically) upwardly mobile. The fluidity of Johnson’s (if not the whole community’s) class experience can be marked by the rumors that some of his earliest literary and theatrical ventures were funded by his uncle John “Mushmouth” Johnson, black Chicago’s most accomplished cabaret operator and suspected gambling kingpin. As in troubled decades to come, the line between underground and traditional economies was not impervious. If racism sought to circumscribe black opportunity, talented entrepreneurs would simply sidestep respectability altogether to gather wealth and other trappings of success.
Not unlike his contemporary, African American poet and fiction writer Jean Toomer, and perhaps because of the complexity of his family support and network, Johnson seemed permanently restless and actively tried on different middle-class identities. He spent time studying at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago and seems to have considered at various moments a career in the clergy and in teaching. The clergy was probably never a realistic life choice, and, after one year at the State University of Kentucky at Louisville (now Simmons University), he was quite sure that teaching was also not to be his calling or vocation. After publishing his first volume of poetry, A Little Dreaming (1913), he headed to New York to study journalism. There were opportunities as a stringer for the Eastern News Service and as a theater correspondent for the New York Daily News, but there is no indication that these efforts settled him or satisfied his literary and intellectual ambitions. He returned to Chicago at the height of the First World War and into the ferment of the first Chicago literary renaissance. It is unclear how he decided to focus his attentions in magazine publishing, or how he began to enter into conversations with influential anthologist and critic Harriet Monroe and the crowd around Poetry magazine, but in 1916 he established The Champion Magazine and was firmly part of the Chicago literary universe.
The Champion is most certainly Johnson’s most significant and lasting contribution to African American cultural history, and is perhaps so because he somehow surrounded himself with a significant range of literary, political, and financial intelligence. Ironically, given that Johnson’s later reputation was for introversion and withdrawal, he had managed to gather up a goodly portion of the black and Pan-African intelligentsia for his venture. Critic Lorenzo Thomas, noting the magazine’s debt to W. E. B. DuBois’s The Crisis, speculates that it is the presence of writer William Ferris, the future editor of Marcus Garvey’s The Negro World, who as associate editor gave the magazine credibility and vision.2 It is also reasonable to assert that it was once again the presence of close family members that gave Johnson confidence. His cousin, Henry Binga Dismond, a successful athlete and aspiring poet, edited a section in the magazine on sports, while their uncle, the famous Chicago financier and entrepreneur Jesse Binga provided significant financial advice, support, and guidance. Johnson’s New York journalism contacts were also no doubt crucial in his securing contributions from historian Benjamin Brawley, writer Alice Dunbar Nelson, and poets Georgia Douglas Johnson and Joseph Seamon Cotter, among others. The magazine was a lively collection of essay, opinion, poetry, and reportage from Chicago and throughout the diaspora. Despite its urgency, relevance, and intellectual diversity, it was either never able to solidify a significant circulation or was never financially backed to the extent that it could find firm footing. It ceased publication a little over a year after it began.
While he now had a firm foothold in literary life, and had married Cecilia Rhone, there was no indication that this was to translate into any kind of economic or intellectual security. He was willing, and perhaps needed, to give magazine publishing another try. The Favorite Magazine, which ran from 1918 through 1921, seemed more clearly a vanity vehicle. It did not have the same access to or coverage by the Pan-African intelligentsia (although it included at least one contribution from popular historian J. A. Rogers) and was more desperate and pleading in tone. It is not wholly surprising that in the aftermath of the 1919 Chicago race riot Johnson seemed to get pulled into the unproductive vortex of postmortem social diagnosis and had his optimism for the future of the African American community and race relations in the city deeply wounded. The magazine alternately and not cohesively pleaded for “racial reconciliation” (a mainstay of Johnson’s social vision) and simultaneously railed against the perceived threat of left-inspired agitation within the African American community.
A partial source of this ideological confusion and anger is most probably J. Edgar Hoover’s Report on Negro Radicalism. There is some indication that The Favorite (if not Johnson’s whole network of “bohemian” contacts) had caught the future FBI director’s attention and that subsequent observation had discomfited Johnson. The irony is that if there was a strong strain of cultural radicalism in Johnson’s past, he was no economic threat or prophetic voice against capitalism. Whatever the reality of political duress or pressure from “red panic,” there is no evidence that Johnson had any vision for or ability to provide the more personal venture of The Favorite with editorial clarity. More and more of the magazine content was provided directly by Johnson himself, and much other writing not delivered under his byline may have been pseudonymously presented.
His rapidly changing career goals and his increasing personal frustration with a disintegrating racial dialogue was in some ways matched by a rapidly changing aesthetic sensibility. At worst, such change could appear to be a desperate search for approval; this need for endorsement can be seen in his slim correspondence with Harriet Monroe, but it would be too cynical to conceive this search entirely as mere opportunism. There is evidence that he (and, for that matter, much of the cohort of emerging African American literary artists) was confused as to the most productive way to ground their poet aesthetic. In his first three books, poetically, Johnson had moved from repetition of genteel themes, classical reference, and biblical allusion, to a belated consideration of dialect and cultural distinctiveness, and finally to a partially realized folk sensibility. These changes, and indeed each stop along the way, were not without intellectual substance or accomplishment. African American poet Robert Hayden’s judgment in his anthology Kaleidoscope that these early efforts by Johnson were miserably incompetent may be too harsh, but it is fair to suggest that patience was not a Johnson strong suit. While open to the charge of a kind of poetical tourism, and even relentless amateurism, he is better accused of unchecked ambition.3 Still, at each step along the way, there are important, and pioneering, signs of a thoroughly modern cultural pride and enthusiasm. Johnson had nothing if not good instincts about opportunities for the black artist and intellectual in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
Having opened with a plea to his reader to see him as a “poor minstrel,” A Little Dreaming (1913) is often overwrought with mundane and uninteresting odes to nature and moral platitudes but also stepped out toward a vibrant Africanist sensibility. “The Ethiopian’s Song” and “To an Afro-American Maiden” are suggestive of what he would eventually come to refer to as the rich racial treasure of the African past. Somewhat melodramatic in its orientation, “Rich old Ethiop and Greece are there / In the swarthy skin and dreamy eye, / And the red man of the forest grants / Raven hair and figure tow’ring high.” “To an Afro-American Maiden” is at least direct in its willingness to take up the opportunities of racialized identity. Somewhat predictably, this cultural turn backward is marked first off by a poem for and about African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, an almost inevitable influence and obstacle. Of course, the book also contains an ode to and about the Victorian sentimentalist Charles Swinburne and, despite its efforts to break away from Victorian and genteel modes, seems to want to hedge its bets. The volume also hints at the future vers libré style in the “The Plaint of the Factory Child” (“Mother, must I work all day? / All the day? Ay, all the day?”) and is suggestive of at least a more restrained sensibility, a controlled modern cool that will eventually embrace a variety of social realism with a nod toward existential angst. In some ways, such jarring juxtapositions are indeed what remain memorable about the volume. It is an introduction to an ambitious but profoundly inchoate consciousness.
There is little question that Johnson was urgently in need of a strong editorial hand, or, perhaps more pointedly, access to a critical, supportive, and active group of friends with real literary sensibility. Over the course of the three volumes published between 1913 and 1916, he included over 160 poems. This is a straightforward path toward mediocrity and points to the dilettantism with which Johnson constantly flirted.
Indeed, it is crucial to an appreciation and criticism of Johnson that we acknowledge that we have few resources by which to measure changes at this early formative moment. There are hints in the slim archival record that he received some support and mentorship from the journalist William H. A. Moore in Chicago but no details about their relationship. Similarly, there is no question that Johnson had made literary and cultural contacts in his switch to New York, but we currently have no way of knowing whether these contacts translated into sustained conversations about craft, aesthetics, or politics.
Somewhat cynically, one might suggest that Johnson may have received more marketing than stylistic advice. Visions of the Dusk (1915), his second volume, turns in an interesting and belated way to the question of dialect and the overworked territory of the plantation and ante- and postbellum romance. Given Johnson’s time in New York theater circles this is not wholly unsurprising; there is the distinct hint of the minstrel show and its more modern theatrical “coon show” derivative, although no poem in this mode is so distant or neutral as to not express clear sympathy (if at the same time withholding identification) with the black grassroots. The dialect experiments were themselves multiple; he posed in a Scots-Irish voice on occasion and invoked the specter of Scottish folk poet Robert Burns. Johnson’s experiments with the African American spiritual are of much greater interest and lasting impact than his ventures into folk dialect. Whether or not Dunbar is regarded as so strong a poet and forerunner that readers inevitably sense derivation and repetition, the dialect poems seem un-original and unimportant. The poems influenced or inspired by the spirituals, however, are distinctive because they self-consciously mean to allude to a broad cultural mode rather than assert authenticity. Johnson wrote in presenting these first experiments: “These songs we offer, not as genuine Negro spirituals, but as imitations. We attempt to preserve the rhythm and the spirit of the slaves, and to give a literary form and interpretation to their poetic endeavor. Here and there we have caught a phrase the unlettered minstrels used; here and there we have borrowed of that exquisite Oriental imagery the Africans brought with them.”4
Whatever discomfort we might have with the invocation of “Oriental” and its imperial overtones, there is no question that this combination of “imitation” and “interpretation” is an important breakthrough. In the third “Jubal” poem, Johnson wrote
Ring the church bells, honey,
Jubal’s free;
Set the chimes a-pealing,
Jubal’s free;
God above is shouting,
Devil goes a-pouting,
Earth and sky is meeting,
Freedom is their greeting,
Jubal’s free.
Like African American anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston and others to come, Johnson intuits that significant poetic work can be accomplished by seeking to recover the force or meaning of a particular form rather than meeting a crasser audience desire through mere replication. Given how this kind of reflection and research grounded much of the African American artistic accomplishment during the years of the Harlem Renaissance, this was an important experiment.
Songs of the Soil (1916) pushes further down this road toward a vital encounter with the folk and anticipates the poets Langston Hughes and most especially Sterling Brown. What is distracting and confusing is that Johnson seems unwilling to wholly commit himself to the radically interpretive gesture of the spiritual experiments. He continues to produce an undistinguished body of dialect poems, and does so because of the endorsement he receives from some portion of the white critical establishment. While the goal is to produce something that is distinctly not anthropological in its meaning, the work of this final complete volume of poetry is ultimately limited by the poet’s very limited contact with the “soil” that he would represent or conjure. In his preface to the volume, Johnson correctly writes that “Behind the Negro there is a wealth of buried tradition,” which has added “droll racial instincts” to “Americanism.” He’s more energetic still when he writes that “To the Negro, slavery is his epic hour. The freedom from restraint he enjoyed in his own circles kept alive those qualities he brought with him from Africa.” And Johnson recognized the dangerous ground he was upon and wrote “I do not hope to complete my career as merely a singer of the plantation.” Whether by luck or instinct, this final volume includes another poem that seems distinct and different from what came before. In “Harlem: The Black City,” perhaps the earliest known poem to describe the Manhattan neighborhood as an emergent black metropolis, Johnson not only sounds resonant and prophetic, with a powerful vision of what became the Harlem Renaissance a few years later, but is also on the verge of a stylistic and tonal breakthrough that will serve him especially well. After pointing to an emerging urban life that is ruled by a perverse dialectic of respectable work and destructive pleasure, he concludes
We ask for life, men give us wine,
We ask for rest, men give us death;
We long for Pan and Phoebus harp.
But Bacchus blows on us his breath.
O Harlem, weary are thy sons
Of living that they never chose;
Give not to them the lotus leaf,
But Mary’s wreath and England’s rose.
The poem remains distant from the great breakthroughs of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown in the 1920s because it still feels ruled by the discourse of “respectability” but it is inching toward a resonant respect and concern for the absurdities of city life.
Johnson’s three published volumes are of primary importance for what they tell us about the challenges facing the black writer in the pre–Harlem Renaissance years. Haunted by the strong presence of Paul Laurence Dunbar and minstrel-rooted poetics on one side, and the class promise of a more genteel literary manner on the other, at the very moment when both the minstrel and genteel modes were collapsing upon themselves, it took real courage to imagine new modes of creative expression with little critical feedback from the community. His continued exploration of black cultural forms, his unapologetic “Ethiopianism,” his instinctive Pan-Africanism, and especially his experiments with the spiritual tradition are noteworthy for their vision and enthusiasm. Having noted that innovation, it is, however, neither surprising nor unjust that none of the poems from the three published volumes was ever regularly anthologized or became part of the emergent African American literary canon. Whatever the nature and depth of the crisis in his personal and intellectual life that grew out of his magazine publishing ventures and the Red Scare, it is only during the late years of the second decade of the century that real poetic distinction began to emerge. Enveloped within the energy of the imagist and free-verse–driven Chicago Renaissance, and perhaps observing both the plain speaking of Carl Sandburg and Midwestern poet Edgar Lee Masters and a broad and general spirit of cross-cultural experimentation, Johnson began to produce a poetry reduced to an interesting set of essentials. “Aunt Hannah Jackson,” “Aunt Jane Allen,” “The Banjo Player,” “The Barber,” “The Drunkard,” “The Gambler,” “The Minister,” “The Scarlet Woman,” and “Tired,” are Johnson’s very best work and are especially noteworthy for asserting a deep moral and human complexity at the heart of urban black life. The influence of Masters’s Spoon River Anthology is most certainly there, as are Sandburg’s odes to Chicago working life. These separately published free-verse poems that appear between 1919 and 1927 are the legitimate basis of an ongoing poetic reputation and are regularly anthologized as exemplary of the best of non–Harlem-based black writing from the 1920s. In African American poet Frank Marshall Davis’s estimation, Johnson emerges at this moment as the foremost black pioneer of free-verse poetry in the United States.5
It is possible to argue that Dunbar also looms here again as an influence. The tone of some of these poems can be discerned within Dunbar’s pioneering naturalist novel, Sport of the Gods (1903), but Johnson’s accomplishment is perhaps more daring still. The poems are deeply and simultaneously sardonic and meditative, and sometimes work by way of understatement and irony and sometimes by the most straightforward and disarming pessimism. They speak to the ways in which common ambition and social expectation are undone by the constrictions of a city increasingly defined and organized by race. “All the stock I had,” says the narrator of “The Scarlet Woman,” “was a white girl’s education and a face that / enchanted the men of both races.” Sometimes Johnson’s skillful irony is not rooted in intercultural restriction so much as intracultural expectation. The less anthologized poem, “The Minister,” tells of a highly educated black pastor who loses his charge “because I could not make my congregation shout.” But the best simply communicate an accumulation of wear and tear on the spirit:
For rubbing on other people’s clothes Aunt Hannah
Jackson gets a dollar and fifty cents a day and worn
out dress on Christmas.
For talking to herself Aunt Hannah Jackson gets a
smile as we call her a good natured fool.
Johnson’s “Tired” predates Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and an argument can be made that it is Johnson’s poem that most urgently clears the last remains of the genteel tradition so that Hughes’s blues sensibility can come to the fore. It is most certainly the poem that has the firmest hold in the African American literary canon. Poet, critic, activist and historian James Weldon Johnson included “Tired” in his pioneering 1922 anthology of “Negro Poetry” even though the poem’s sensibility deeply disturbed him. The poem begins by invoking a term highly charged in the early decades of the twentieth century: “I am tired of work: I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilization.” Fenton Johnson’s invocation of “civilization” recalls the resurgence of eugenicist and racialist thinking and systematizing that marred a common social philosophy of the early twenties even as he points to its dismissal. The narrator’s voice goes on to a reverie upon the end of his enforced work and an end to remembering. Its infamous conclusion, with its sense of resignation to defeat, has been jarring to generations of readers:
Throw the children into the river; civilization has given
us too many. It is better to die than it is to grow up
and find out that you are colored.
Pluck the stars out of the heavens. The stars mark our
destiny. The stars marked my destiny.
I am tired of civilization.
It speaks to the power of the poem that a reader as skilled as James Weldon Johnson might be distracted by the common critical error of assuming that the poem’s speaker was transparently the voice of the author. Lorenzo Thomas argues instead that “Tired” exemplifies the “hyperbolic dramatization” that is consistent with and characteristic of the blues, and, as such, Johnson is voicing a real energy within the black community, but hardly making a political argument.6 African American literary and cultural history records the stories of many individuals and groups who considered suicide or even infanticide as a response to slavery, but Johnson’s poetic suggestion was jarring to many not ready to capitulate. The poem speaks to a focused, total, and even pragmatic pessimism that can be both an individual cry and a collective gesture by the community that is meant to undermine a culture of official optimism. Fenton Johnson is never again so total or destructive as he is in “Tired,” but his series of portrait poems begins to build the poetic equivalent to the urban fictional space shaped by African American writer Rudolph Fisher. As Johnson figures it, the Great Migration—in combination with Jim Crow segregation—is costly in terms of the isolation, disappointment, and often false promise it offers to African Americans.
Johnson’s plan seems to have been to gather all this work into a manuscript to be called African Nights. Despite the change in tone and strategy, the title suggests real continuity with the cultural nationalist project he seemed to invoke on many occasions in the prior decade. (In an account of the history of African American poetry that he wrote for the WPA’s Writers’ Project, he specifically asserted that he belonged in a group with other “nationalist poets.”) The manuscript has never surfaced in its totality, but, if it was meant to include work produced for Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, for critic Alfred Kreymborg’s Others magazine, and other occasional pieces from the 1920s, it would have most certainly by far have been his most successful volume.
Johnson also collected a series of essays and short stories into two volumes, For the Highest Good and Tales of Darkest America, both published in 1920, but, like the early poetry volumes, these were sloppily done, despite often revealing his increasingly dark humor and disappointment with the contemporary cultural scene. In a preface unlike any other in the African American literary tradition, Johnson wrote desperately in his introduction to Tales that “I know that I am facing ruin and starvation … I know that my dream of success in literature is fading.” It is important to keep in mind that Johnson’s eventual retreat from the public sphere has meant that there is a significant dearth of information about events that may help us understand the aesthetic and cultural distance between texts, and even less information on the very specific personal and financial crises that seemed to dominate his thoughts in these years. There is no reliable information as to how Johnson lived the last years of his fully active literary life; we know he had married in the late 1910s, but we have no information on the success of this marriage or how long it may have endured. Given his class and social roots, an inability to build for himself (and his wife) a comfortable existence must have been personally devastating.
Poet, critic, and memoirist Frank Marshall Davis arrived in Chicago around 1927 and recalls meeting Johnson at “writing club events” but has no details to deliver. This certainly suggests that Johnson’s reclusiveness was perhaps never as total as some commentators have suggested. Indeed, a report for the “Negro in Illinois” group of the Illinois Writers’ Project of the WPA (IWP) placed Johnson amid at least one writing and reading group of black Chicagoans. Known as the “Letters” circle, none of the individuals within the group were distinguished as literary artists, but it did include journalist and social worker Dewey Jones and educator and Civil Rights activist Horace Bond. However this alters our understanding of Johnson supposedly abandoning literature sometime in the late 1920s, we still know nothing about how Johnson made a living after the collapse of The Favorite, until he resurfaces in the offices of the Illinois Writers’ Project of the WPA in the late 1930s. Given the centrality of the “Negro in Illinois” project to the Illinois team, his arrival was opportune. Johnson was assigned tasks related to black literary and theatrical traditions in Chicago from the early part of the century, as well as more particular assignments to draw biographical profiles of significant African American figures in the city’s history. He pursued these tasks with some vigor and also seemed to become a prime informant to other writers seeking to complete entries on aspects of the city’s black cultural history.
The most compelling historical puzzle now facing critics and historians is determining whether Johnson’s work with the project led to significant interaction with figures from what we now call the Black Chicago Renaissance who had WPA connections (novelists Richard Wright and Frank Yerby, dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, and poet Arna Bontemps), or relations to other major cultural configurations such as the South Side Community Arts Center or the South Side Writers Group. The other possibility, of course, is that Johnson’s own participation in the emergence and activities of these organizations and collectives actually led to his work with the Writers’ Project. It is quite provocative to reflect on the kinds of advice, guidance, and caution that Fenton Johnson would have given a new generation of black artists and intellectuals full of Popular Front fervor. Johnson was well-positioned to deliver a cautionary tale about permanence and the lack of a direct connection between respect and personal wealth. If there is no clear aesthetic inheritance to the Black Chicago Renaissance to be found, there are most certainly compelling family resemblances. Through the poetry of Frank Marshall Davis, and, to a lesser extent (and much less directly), the work of poet Gwendolyn Brooks and fiction writer and journalist Frank London Brown, we see the emergence of rich imagist techniques toward the construction of complex (and often dark and foreboding) urban profiles. Each writer hovers around or deeply shares a suspicion of the effects of modernity, and can be seen repeating and extending Johnson’s troubling alienated contemporary consciousness. Black writers and artists of 1920s and 1930s Chicago may have taken from Fenton Johnson a deep commitment to irony as a fundamental literary mode. Because Johnson had deep roots in that community, his and their use of that mode does not displace social criticism so much as direct greater attention to the emotional and personal aspects of African American existence.
In somewhat dramatic or melodramatic fashion, after having been released from the FWP, Johnson left a manuscript of poems on the desk of fiction writer and project staffer Jack Conroy. The manuscript was eventually titled (but not published) by Arna Bontemps as The Daily Grind: 42 WPA Poems. Bontemps eventually used five poems from the manuscript for his mid-1960s anthology American Negro Poetry. The Daily Grind is alternately moving and morbid. There are moments when Johnson is able to recapture the striking detachment associated with the best poems of the 1920s, when he reveals himself to be a skilled observer of urban life and sensitive to the complex nexus of urban life, ambition, and survival, especially as it was framed by the economic depression and the New Deal. In “The WPA Gang Foreman,” more than twenty-five years after Hoover’s wrongheaded assertion that The Favorite might harbor radicalism, Johnson does meditate upon the nearness of revolution: “I shudder not for these men I command, / I shudder for those who scoff at them. / I am human, even as they are human. / When one leans on a shovel he thinks. / There is dynamite in your thinkers.” As it was at the beginning of his career, however, he was desperately in need of sharp and impartial editorial guidance and the quality of the work varied greatly. Critic Hammitt Worthington Smith has argued that the final gathering of poems is significant in that they represent a novel and sustained attempt by Johnson to shape a continuous meditation on the concept of love. There is indeed evidence of such an investigation and it is not simple pathos, but, as in earlier volumes, Johnson has never been at his best when pursuing a more philosophic lyrical mode. The meditations on love, however insistent as theme, are rarely successful. Much more successful are those lyrics that operate as theological meditation. In the title poem, “The Daily Grind,” Johnson adapts the sardonic voice that has previously served the short, imagistic urban profiles:
Naught can you do
but watch that eternal battle
between Nature and the System.
You cannot blame God,
you cannot blame Man
for God did not make the System
neither did Man fashion Nature.
You can only die each morning
and live again in the dreams of the night.
If Nature forgets you,
If the system forgets you,
God has blest you.
Other poems, like “Dust” and “The Old Repair Man” also operate successfully in this mode and are suggestive of what Johnson might have been capable if he had been surrounded by able critics and editors.
The volume’s most coherent and sustained attention is paid to the situation of a writer enveloped by the WPA itself, which appears in Johnson’s poetic vision as simultaneously safety net and prison. “Producers,” “Rewrite Man,” “Rookie Field Worker,” “The Senior Writer, Professional,” “Rosemary for Chicago Poets,” “The Artist’s Chicago,” and “A WPA Director” make up a lucid meditation upon the paradox of “writing” to serve government demand. Given few, if any, alternatives, the opportunity to work as writer, as idea producer, is crucial to survival. At the same time, for Johnson, there is incoherence, even punishment in the placement of the writer in the midst of an evolving bureaucracy. Some of this anxiety seems consistent with a longstanding ambivalence in Johnson toward the coming of a full modernity, while there is also some hint of a slightly less noble complaint that this work is just somehow beneath him. In the final manuscript, Johnson can be seen settling scores old and new. Kicking back at “supervision,” he is also replaying the past and trying to make sense of the circumstances that led to the complex trail of loss and disappointment. “‘We’re getting somewhere on the road to Art’” says the narrator of “The Re-Write Man,” “Sixty thousand words of field workers’ copy—/Grind it down, Bussel, into twenty lines,” where the speaker of “Rookie Field Worker,” says “I have trod many, many miles for a foolish job.” In “An Artist’s Chicago,” and in a voice that feels more transparently that of Johnson, we hear that “I was only a dreamer, / and you broke me as easily / as you break brittle straw.”
The single best poem in the volume is modest and sad and, perhaps, a literal transcription. “A Negro Peddler’s Song” harks back to Johnson’s hopeful nationalist project and recalls too the powerful urban profiles of the 1920s:
Good Lady,
buy for Mary and for John,
and when the work is done
give a bite to Sadie.
……..
Good Lady,
I have corn and beets
onions, too, and leeks
and also sweet Potaty
This brief, even ethnographic fragment, most importantly reminds us what a good eye and ear Johnson had. While he is never able to conjure a full or ironic nostalgia, the final manuscript does help to explain the fragmented perspective of earlier efforts. Johnson on the one hand craves a previous utopian and organic construction, the rich “racial tradition,” but he remains on the other an unreconstructed lonely urbanite at heart.
Fenton Johnson died mostly alone in a Chicago nursing home in 1958. His legacy to African American literature is a diverse and experimental poetics that provided the basis for future poets to build a sophisticated synthesis of modernism, nationalism, and existentialism. The best of his work has a rich interest in the possibilities of the African American past even as he came to a moment in his career where he recognized the necessity of an urgent experimentation and forward-looking aesthetic. He innovated as a black intellectual and as a cultural entrepreneur even as his experience in those areas was fundamentally cautionary.
1. Relevant archival materials are to be found at Special Collections, Fisk University Library; Cullen-Jackman Collection of the Arnett Library, Atlanta University; Harriet Monroe Collection at the Regenstein Library, University of Chicago; Vivian Harsh Collection at the Woodson Branch of the Chicago Public Library. Professor Hammett Worthington-Smith of Albright College in Pennsylvania worked for decades on a project to document Johnson’s life and was gracious enough to give me his research notes and files. Some of the biographical details related here have come from the correspondence with early black Chicago literary and cultural figures that are in his collection.
2. Thomas, Lorenzo. Extraordinary Measures Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000, 18–19.
3. Hayden, Robert, ed. Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro Poets. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967, 40.
4. Johnson, Fenton. “Introduction.” In Visions of the Dusk. New York: Trachtenberg, 1915, n.p.
5. Undated letter, Frank Marshall Davis to Hammett Worthington-Smith, in the author’s possession.
6. Thomas, Extraordinary Measures, 34.
Brown, Sterling. Negro Poetry and Drama. Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937.
Hutchinson, James P. “Fenton Johnson: Pilgrim of the Dusk.” Studies in Black Literature 7 (Autumn 1976): 14–15.
Johnson, Fenton. “Absalom’s Death.” Chicago Broad Axe, February 24, 1900, n.p.
———. A Little Dreaming. Chicago: Peterson Linotyping Co., 1913.
———. “The Black Fairy.” The Crisis 6 (1913): 292–94.
———. Visions of the Dusk. New York: Trachtenberg, 1915.
———. Songs of the Soil. New York: Trachtenberg, 1916.
———. “De Witch ’Ooman.” In The Chicago Anthology: A Collection of Verse from the Work of Chicago Poets, edited by Charles G. Blanden and Minna Mathison. Chicago: Roadside Press, 1916, 104–5.
———. “The Call of the Patriot,” “The Sunset,” and “Rulers.” The Liberator 1 (1918): 25.
———. “War Profiles.” The Crisis 16.2 (June 1918): 65.
———. “The Last Love,” “How Long, O Lord,” and “Who Is That A-Walking in the Corn?” Poetry 11 (June 1918): 136–37.
———. “The New Day.” In Victory! Celebrated by Thirty-eight American Poets, edited by William Stanley Braithwaite. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1919.
———. “Tired.” Others 5 (January 1919): 8.
———. “Aunt Hanna Jackson,” “Aunt Jane Allen,” “The Gambler,” “The Barber,” and the “Drunkard.” Others 5 (February 1919): 17–18.
———. “The Artist” and “Dreams.” Others 5 (April–May 1919): 20.
———. For the Highest Good. Chicago: Favorite Magazine, 1920.
———. Tales of Darkest America. Chicago: Favorite Magazine, 1920.
———. “A Dream,” and “The Wonderful Morning.” Poetry 19 (December 1921): 128–29.
———. “The Lost Love,” “How Long, O Lord,” and “Who Is That A-Walking in the Corn?” In The New Poetry: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Verse in English, edited by Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson. New York: Macmillan, 1923, 218–19.
———. “Sweet Love O’ Dusk.” The Crisis 34 (October 1927): 265.
———. “The Banjo Player,” “The Drunkard,” and “The Minister.” In An Anthology of American Poetry: Lyric America, 1639–1930, edited by Alfred Kreymborg. New York: Tudor Publishing, 1930, 537–38.
———. “Children of the Sun,” “The New Day,” “Tired,” “The Banjo Player,” “The Scarlet Woman,” and lines from “The Vision of Lazarus.” In The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931, 141–46.
———. “Rulers,” “The Banjo Player,” “The Scarlet Woman,” “Tired,” “Aunt Jane Allen,” “When I Die,” “The Lonely Mother,” and “Who Is That A-Walking in the Corn?” In The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949, edited by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps. Garden City: Doubleday, 1949, 61–64.
———. “The Daily Grind,” “The World Is a Mighty Ogre,” “A Negro Peddler’s Song,” “The Old Repair Man,” and “Counting.” In American Negro Poetry, edited by Arna Bontemps. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964, 25–28.
———. The Daily Grind. Heritage black poetry pamphlet 2. London, U.K.: The Heritage Press, 1994.
———. 42 WPA Poems. Unpublished ms. c. 1935–40.
Kerlin, Robert. Negro Poets and Their Poems. Washington, D.C.: Associate Publishers, 1935.
Lumpkin, Shirley. “Fenton Johnson.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 45: American Poets, 1880–1945, First Series, edited by Peter Quartermain. Detroit: Gale Group, 1986, 214–20.
Redding, Jay Saunders. To Make a Poet Black. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939.
Redmond, Eugene. Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A Critical History. Garden City, N.J.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976.
Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976.
Woolley, Lisa. “From Chicago Renaissance to Chicago Renaissance: The Poetry of Fenton Johnson.” Langston Hughes Review 14(1–2) (1996): 36–48; see also Joseph Harrington, “A Response to Lisa Wooley,” 49–51.
Worthington-Smith, Hammett. “Fenton Johnson.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 50: Afro-American Writers before the Harlem Renaissance. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book, edited by Trudier Harris. Detroit: Gale Group, 1986, 202–5.
———. “The Poetry of Fenton Johnson.” Unpublished ms. in possession of the author. n.d.