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.Instead, Johnson s text renders thepossibility of such homecoming outside the scope of its narration, whichis told from the viewpoint of a protagonist (significantly, an ex-coloredman) who has permanently crossed the line. As a result, the Autobiography both thematizes, and is actively struc-tured by, a nostalgia for closure that lies forever beyond the unnamednarrator s reach.Try as he might, the ex-colored protagonist of John-son s text is unable to assuage the vague feeling of unsatisfaction, ofregret, of almost remorse (1 2) that haunts his narrative, depriving hisvoice of interiority and depth.Moreover, rather than fulfill the ex-colored man s desire for closure, the autobiographical enterprise, usuallyassociated with the narrative production of a stable self, accentuatesthe instability of the ex-colored man s I through the circularity of hisnarration.Like the protagonist, who must merely reproduce his fail-ure to secure a stable raced or gendered identity in the process of auto-biographical narration, Johnson s text ends where it begins: in dissatis-faction and sorrow, as the ex-colored man contemplates his yellowingmanuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a deadambition, a sacrificed talent (154).In its view of the protagonist as a failed race man, the Autobiogra-phy explicitly engages the early-twentieth-century ideology of racial up-lift.As Kevin Gaines has explained, racial uplift names that belief systemthat casts African American economic, educational, and professionalelites as standard-bearers of the race, and hence as prototypes for thesocial and economic rehabilitation of the black masses, including thethousands of worker-migrants from the rural South.21 In addition toimagining a solution to the collective experience of racial subordina-tion and social exclusion in explicitly classed terms (bourgeois valuesand standards being those assigned political and ideological priority),racial uplift underwrote racializing national ideologies of progress and civilization that were implicated in the elevation of norms of genderedand classed domestic virtue as the political standards of black woman-hood. A response to de jure racial segregation, which imposed blanket Racial Negotiations in Passing Narratives 37restrictions on African Americans citizenship rights, racial uplift ideol-ogy enforced self-imposed measures of racial authenticity and commu-nity, enshrining ideals of progress on the shifting and unstable groundsof race. Yet racial uplift is more than a historical backdrop for John-son s narrative; it is that specific class, national, and gender discourse ofrace that mediates his representation of the ex-colored man s failure. By mediates, I mean that it cuts both ways: Just as it is through thelens of racial uplift that the Autobiography interprets and critiques the ex-colored man s desire, so it is through the lens of this desire that the novelinterrogates the project of uplifting the race. Throughout Johnson s text the central dilemma the narrator facesis how to reconcile legally and socially contradictory birthrights, thefirst of which is associated with a musical tradition passed on to himby his mother, through her singing of spirituals and her encouragementof her son s musical talents; the second of which is associated with theeconomic and social entitlements of white patrilineal inheritance thatare denied the ex-colored man although he is descended from the bestblood of the South.This dilemma is seemingly resolved when, morethan three-quarters of the way into his narration, the ex-colored manhears a German pianist improvise on a ragtime song in order to pro-duce a classical piece.Inspired by the German s example, the narra-tor resolves to travel through the southern United States to conduct astudy of black musical traditions, intending to put his talents to use asa colored composer of classical music based on Negro themes.Yetthe prospect of narrative and personal closure that such a plan promisesis abruptly interrupted when in the course of his travels the ex-coloredman becomes the unwitting witness to the lynching of a black man:Before noon they brought him in.Two horsemen rode abreast; be-tween them, half dragged, the poor wretch made his way throughthe dust.His hands were tied behind him, and ropes around hisbody were fastened to the saddle horns of his double guard.Have you ever witnessed the transformation of human beings intosavage beasts? Nothing can be more terrible.A railroad tie was sunkinto the ground, the rope was removed, and a chain brought andsecurely coiled around the victim and the stake.There he stood, aman only in form and stature, every sign of degeneracy stampedupon his countenance.His eyes were dull and vacant, indicating not 38 Crossing the Linea single ray of thought.Evidently the realization of his fearful fatehad robbed him of whatever reasoning power he possessed.He wastoo stunned and stupefied even to tremble.(136)The scene of the lynching, which Johnson based on his own experi-ences as a witness to lynchings as an naacp representative, intrudes intothe narrative in multiple ways.Not only does it literally interrupt the ex-colored man s travels, but it disrupts his fantasy of recuperating a stable black self through a self-conscious immersion in black musical tradi-tions.More important, through the spectacle of the lynching the nar-rator himself is violently confronted with the contradiction of his ownnoncitizenship in a country that promises to be the great example ofdemocracy to the world (137) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]