Franklin Strong University of Texas at Austin

Baroque in Harlem: James Weldon Johnson’s Spanish Tinge

I. Introduction

Early in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored

Man, the narrator, finding himself without the funds to pay

for his first semester at Atlanta University, travels to

Florida to look for work. Arriving in Jacksonville, he stays

at a boarding house run by a mixed-race and mixed-

nationality couple. The wife is “a rather fine-looking,

stout, brown-skin woman of about forty years of age.” Of the

husband, a “light-coloured Cuban” (67) who waxes poetic on

the subject of Cuba’s independence, the narrator tells us:

He was an exile from the island, and a prominent

member of the Jacksonville Junta. Every week sums

of money were collected from juntas all over the

country. This money went to buy arms and

ammunition for the insurgents. As the man sat

there nervously smoking his long, ‘green’ cigar,

and telling me of the Gómezes, both the white one

and the black one, of Macéo and Bandera, he grew

positively eloquent. (71)

Amanda M. Page notes that “[b]y presenting heroes of black

ancestry and emphasizing the interracial alliances of

revolutionaries in the fight against Spanish imperialism,

the exile reveals an entirely different concept of race

outside of the U.S. context” (29). This foreign, fluid, non-

binary concept of race dominates the section. As Johnson

becomes acquainted with his fellow boarders, he only learns

later that two of them are fellow African-Americans, such is

the confusion in which he finds himself, unable to tell who

is black, who is white, who is American and who is not.

The Autobiography, of course, is a novel, not an

autobiography. But it does incorporate autobiographical

elements from Johnson’s life. The Jacksonsville interlude is

one example. Johnson grew up in Jacksonville, which even

then was, on the one hand, the South, but on the other hand

Florida: a tri-cultural society where the Cuban immigrant

community, centered in the city’s cigar factories and

hotels, provided an important counterbalance to the binary

black and white racial divide that characterized the

predominant North American notion of race. According to

Johnson’s (actual) autobiography, Along This Way, his best

friend worked in a cigar factory and his father, who worked

in one of the city’s large hotels, knew Spanish quite well,

and frequently interacted with Cubans and Cuban-Americans.

Johnson started his life surrounded by a concept of race

that challenged the North American notions that he would

work against for his whole career.

This paper will examine the related influences of

baroque aesthetics and Latin American racial constructs on

James Weldon Johnson’s writings. Using Johnson’s translation

of Afro-Cuban poet Plácido’s poem “Despedida a mi madre” as

a key for reading The Autobiography, I argue that both texts

bear traces of what scholars of Latin American literature

have called the New World baroque, and that Johnson employed

baroque techniques for subversive purposes similar to those

that motivated the (very different) writings of his

contemporary Nicolás Guillén. Specifically, I argue that as

Guillén and other Latin American writers of the 20th Century

were challenging Western, European hegemony by appropriating

the official baroque style and converting it into an “art of

counterconquest,” Johnson’s was using Latin American baroque

techniques to challenge white supremacy in the US. My title

comes from Jelly Roll Morton’s famous comment that “if you

can’t manage to put tinges of Spanish into your tunes,

you’ll never get the right seasoning, I call it for jazz.” I

propose that Johnson’s writing also incorporates Spanish

tinges, and that these tinges can best be identified as

manifestations of the New World baroque.1

II. Towards a Harlem Baroque

It’s still a bit unorthodox to talk about African-

American cultural expressions as baroque, though the idea is

gaining currency. In a recent special issue of PMLA

dedicated to New World baroque theories, Patricia Yaeger

1 In music, the “Spanish tinge” is the mix of rhythms (usually identified as the habanera, cinquillo, and tresillo) that early jazz music shared with much of traditional Cuban music, owing to the close proximity of the American South, especially New Orleans, to the Caribbean, and the many interactions that occurred between North American and Latin American musicians. Fora study of these interactions see Acosta (2003) or Washburne (1997).

insists that scholars examining non-Latin-American texts

“need to toy with the neobaroque” (14). Perhaps inevitably,

this “toying” has included explorations of the baroque

nature of African-American expressions. Lois Parkinson

Zamora, for example, writes that jazz is “perhaps the most

baroque” of US music forms, owing to its improvisatory and

hybridizing character, and Christopher Winks writes that

“[t]he manifestation of an African presence in literature,

inherently disruptive to the pretensions of official

colonial [and postcolonial] US literary culture, can indeed

be said to always already baroque” (599-600).

These critics find warrant in the expansive definitions

of the New World baroque that were traced in the second half

of the last century by a number of Latin American scholars

and writers, chief among them the Cubans Alejo Carpentier,

José Lezama Lima, and Severo Sarduy. While their definitions

varied, they all agreed that at the heart of the baroque is

a sense of play, or parody, and an urge towards reconciling

the irreconcilable. What’s more, they called attention to a

subversive function in New World baroque expressions: while

the baroque is traditionally seen as a European form,

imposed in the Americas on indigenous peoples and on the

Africans brought over as slaves, these writers pointed out

the ways that members of oppressed groups used the aesthetic

characteristics of the baroque to undermine their oppressors

and enact forms of cultural survival. As Lezama Lima put it,

in the Americas, the baroque, the art of the

counterreformation, became an art of “counter-conquest.”

In response to these developments, Michael Feith has

outlined what he calls a “Blueprint for Studies in the

African-American (Neo)Baroque” (2009). Extrapolating from

Angela Ndalianis (2006) and Omar Calabrese’s (1987) studies

of neobaroque tendencies in contemporary mass media and his

own observations of baroque tropes (the mirror, doubles, the

bubble and the rainbow) and techniques (especially parody)

in novels by John Edgar Wideman and Percival Everett, Feith

ties the Duboisian concept of double-consciousness to

Sarduy’s notion of the double-centered ellipse, and argues

that these novels are better viewed as neobaroque texts than

postmodern ones. Feith sees the neobaroque and the

postmodern as “overlapping sets, with a large intersection,

but areas of undetermined size on either side, which would

represent the postmodern that does not use baroque forms,

and the neo-baroque that escapes the postmodern, potentially

allowing us to reinterpret it in novel ways” (Feith).

Like Feith, we will lean heavily on Gates’ theory of

African-American literature, particularly his notion that

the black literary tradition in the US is characterized by

Signifyin(g), which Feith sees as a baroque emphasis on

representation. Indeed, the similarities between the

characteristics of African-American literature and the New

World baroque as defined by critics in Latin American

studies are striking: Gates calls Signifyin(g) “repetition

and revision, or repetition with a signal difference”

(xxiv), and writes that its signal modes are parody and

pastiche, and that its chief characteristics include self-

consciousness, an emphasis on performance, and

intertextuality. This description dovetails strikingly with

both Sarduy’s and Carpentier’s (very different) ideas about

baroque expressions in the Americas.

This study will also follow Feith in his awareness of

the many and extensive connections that exist between

African-American authors and the Latin American and

Caribbean authors that have traditionally been understood as

baroque, and on his emphasis on those connections—rather

than the barriers that divide African-influenced cultures in

the Americas. Feith writes:

Even though writers like [Toni] Morrison or

Wideman, for example, have no historical

connection with the Caribbean, they have read West

Indian authors and appropriated some of their

literary strategies. Morrison has incorporated

into her work the ‘magic realism’ of Gabriel

García Márquez (Colombia) and Alejo Carpentier

(Cuba), to the point of setting one of her novels,

Tar Baby, in an imaginary island named l’Isle des

Chevaliers. Wideman gets quite close to it in The

Cattle Killing, when he deals in prophecies and the

reincarnation of ‘certain passionate African

spirits’ who ‘achieve a kind of immortality

through serial inhabitation of mortal bodies,

passing from one to another, using them up,

discarding them, finding a new host’ (15). As Eye,

the protagonist, meets several women who might be

only one and the same woman, he becomes part of a

narrative ‘that presents extraordinary occurrences

as an ordinary part of everyday reality’ and, like

Carpentier’s and Morrison’s, stage an

epistemological conflation between Western notions

of reality and literary realism, and ‘the residual

influence of the belief systems of the African

American slaves’ (Bowers 131/93) (Feith)

III. TransLatin Johnson

Though Morrison and Wideman may have no historical

connection to the Caribbean, Johnson certainly does, and he

certainly highlighted those connections throughout his

writings. As Page notes, Johnson even begins his

autobiography, Along This Way, by tracing his own trans-

Caribbean heritage from his Haitian great-grandmother to his

Bahamian grandfather. New World baroque theory is thus an

especially useful lens for reading the work of Johnson,

which is bound at almost every stage to its author’s

interest in, connections with, and experiences in Latin

America and the Caribbean. Johnson wrote The Autobiography

while in Nicaragua; later, he wrote extensively about the US

occupation in Haiti. Not surprisingly, Latin American

perspectives on race repeatedly appear in Johnson’s writings

as a foil to US racial constructions. In The Book of American

Negro Poetry, which he edited in 1922, for example, he spends

a long digression in the preface commenting on poets from

Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and Martinique, concluding that “up to

this time, the colored poets of greater universality have

come out of the Latin American countries rather than the

United States” (xxxviii), and that, in contrast with black

authors from the US, “the colored poet of Latin America can

voice the national spirit without any reservations” (xxxix).

In that preface, Johnson pays particular attention to

“Despedida a mi madre,” his translation of which appears as

an appendix. We will return to this sonnet in a moment, as

it is one of the places where Johnson’s writing most clearly

intersects with baroque aesthetics. But first it might be

convenient to look back at The Autobiography, a text that I

will argue is exceedingly baroque. To do so, though, we will

start by considering Johnson’s contemporary, the Afro-Cuban

poet Nicolás Guillén.

IV. Gongorismo, Nicolás Guillén, and The Autobiography of an Ex-

Colored Man

In Celestina’s Brood (1993), Roberto González Echevarría

makes a somewhat surprising argument for the barroquismo of

Nicolás Guillén, basing his case on a comparison to the

sixteenth-century Spanish poet Luis de Góngora. I call the

argument surprising because, where Góngora is known for his

serpentine diction and his erudite allusions, Guillén’s

poetry is characterized by its slang and dialect-heavy

representations of black society in Cuba. González

Echevarría justifies the comparison by writing:

Yes, Góngora is obscure, but only because his

poetics worked at the margins of Western

tradition, at the point where the tradition

subverts itself by nurturing forces that negate

its mainstream ideology. Góngora is, in fact,

ornamental, artificial, obscure, because for him

beauty is not found (paradoxically) in the tenets

of the Greco-Latin tradition that he supposedly

attempted to emulate. Góngora’s poetry is

inclusive rather than exclusive, willing to create

and incorporate the new, literally in the form of

neologisms. He is anxious to overturn the tyranny

of syntax, making the hyperbaton the most

prominent feature of his poetry. It is for this

reason, not by some quirk, that Góngora was the

first to write poems imitating the speech of

blacks, or better yet, in the speech of blacks.

(197)

González Echevarría also observes that despite his culteranista

reputation Góngora freely blended elements of “high” and

“low” forms of representation, and that his poetry

incorporated what González Echevarría calls “base or

heterogeneous elements” while focusing less on reality and

more on its representation (197). But González Echevarría

insists that this semantic play has an ideological basis: it

subverts hegemonic power and finds the marginal at its

center.

Building from Lezama’s assertion that the great

syncretisms of the New World are racial, González Echevarría

suggests that the New World baroque, therefore, places

blackness at the center of whiteness. He connects Guillén’s

poem “El abuelo,” which takes as its theme the inherited

blackness of a seemingly blonde white woman, to “the baroque

desengaño so dear to Góngora and other poets of his time”

(201). Of “El abuelo,” González Echevarría writes:

The truth hidden beneath the lady’s white skin,

the secret protected by her blond hair, is

revealed in the curls. These are all baroque

figures, including the curls, but particularly the

fact that the truth is concealed, encrypted in a

proliferation of visual, yet false, signs. The

Rubensian pinkness of her skin is rushing headlong

toward a darkness that is her true origin. Black

is truth, white falseness; a reversal, an

inversion of the traditional European meaning of

these signs manifests their instability, their

dependence on an economy of social exchange that

devalues the real. (201)

González Echevarría argues that by taking part in a baroque

aesthetic in which “there is no interiority,” Guillén’s poem

cycle Motivos de son “perform[s] a kind of cultural catharsis,

a public purge that showed Cuban society its black

component, a component that was everywhere visible but

generally repressed” (202).

The Autobiography makes blackness similarly central to US

identity, as does much of Johnson’s writing. “Over and over

again,” he wrote in 1916, “we have made the statement that

there is nothing of artistic value belonging to America

which has not been originated by the Negro” (“The Negro in

American Art” 262). We can describe The Autobiography as just

the sort of “public purge” that González Echevarría sees at

work Guillén’s poetry, a “cultural catharsis” that shows

American society its own black component. Regarding Guillén,

González Echevarría stresses that this catharsis involved

not just revealing blackness, but also presenting it:

González Echevarría notes that in Motivos de son, Guillén

deconstructs “the social as a form of playacting; life as

theater” (202). And, for Guillén, this involved offering his

readers black individuals as a series of “types”: the negro

bembón, the mulata, etc. González Echevarría writes, “All of

the characters are black, and all judge each other and

themselves according to rumor, hearsay, and the reactions

that their most visible features will elicit. In other

words, they live tortured by the anticipation of what other

people will think or say about them” (203).

The Autobiography offers a similar public purge and

presentation, in that through the course of the novel

Johnson presents dozens of varieties of black existence in

the United States of the turn of the twentieth century, from

the poor blacks of the South that the narrator observes in

his travels for his ethnomusicological research, to the

subterranean and nocturnal lives of musicians he observes in

Harlem, to the rigid racialized hierarchies he notes among

urban blacks. González Echevarría writes that Guillén, in

his poems, shows a whole word of blacks, among whom

“visibility is that which one avoids at all costs or wishes

to cover with clothes, jewels and other status symbols”

(203). Johnson’s narrator’s Jacksonville interlude offers a

similar exploration on racial types and visibility. In that

section, the narrator outlines three “classes” of blacks:

the “desperate class,” made up of “the men who work in

lumber and turpentine camps, the ex-convicts, the bar-room

loafers;” a second class made up of “the servants, the

washerwomen, the waiters, the cooks, the coachmen;” and a

third, educated and “well-to-do” class. Ironically, the

narrator notes, in entering this class, a black man or woman

loses his or her visibility to whites:

I was walking down the street one day with a young

man who was born in Jacksonville, but had been

away to prepare himself for a professional life.

We passed a young white man, and my companion said

to me: ‘You see that young man? We grew up

together; we have played, hunted, and fished

together; we have eaten and slept together; and

now since I have come back home, he barely speaks

to me. (79)

“I concluded,” says the narrator, “that if a coloured man

wanted to separate himself from his white neighbors, he had

but to acquire some money, education, and culture, and to

live in accordance” (79). The irony in that statement is

that, by doing those things, the narrator ultimately ends up

living among his white neighbors. But his existence is

invisible in a real sense, an invisibility that the narrator

undoes with his narrative. Later, the narrator will muse

“the United States puts a greater premium on colour, or,

better, lack of colour, than upon anything else in the

world” (155). Again, as with Guillén’s poems, Johnson’s

narrator stresses the value of invisibility—and, again,

Johnson’s narrative inverts that value, making the invisible

visible.

V. Translatin(g) Johnson

Johnson’s novel, then, works at the margins of his national

tradition in the same way that Guillén’s poems work at the

margins of Cuban culture, and for similar ends. The novel,

like Guillén’s “El abuelo,” is full of baroque figures and

relies on baroque techniques, most notably the novel’s

intertextual play with W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk

(Thompson 102-7). Even the novel’s title can be seen as a

gesture of baroque illusion: The Autobiography is not an

autobiography.

But the extent of Johnson’s barroquismo becomes clearer

when one considers his work translating Plácido’s “Despedida

a mi madre.” Again, the translation appeared as an appendix

to his Book of American Negro Poetry, and Johnson dedicates

considerable attention to it in his preface. There, Johnson

provides some background for his readers: Plácido (a pen

name for Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés) was a mulato

Cuban, both a renowned poet and an important revolutionary

figure, who helped spark an attempted nationalist revolt

from Spain and was executed as a result. He was also left at

an orphanage at an early age, and he briefly knew his father

but never knew his mother. “Despedida a mi madre” was

written in the hours before he faced a Spanish firing squad.

Johnson, as he informs his readers, was not the first

American to translate the sonnet: that honor belongs to the

Romantic writer William Cullen Bryant. Johnson includes

Bryant’s version in his appendix, along with Plácido’s

Spanish orginal. The differences between the versions are

instructive: despite the fact that Plácido is often

considered a Romantic writer, Johnson’s version shows an

attempt to reclaim the poem’s baroque nature. Johnson makes

two key changes. First, he pares down the poem’s language.

Where, for example, Bryant translated “Baste de llanto” as

“Cease thy moral weeping,” Johnson writes: “Weep not.”

However, Johnson does not simply strip the poem’s language;

more precisely, he merges high and low, simple and ornate.

As we’ve seen, this is a very baroque, gongorista technique,

and one that looks forward to his search— mentioned in the

preface to God’s Trombones (1927)—for an “instrument of wider

range” than traditional dialect, one that could be natural

and “realistic” while still reflecting the full eloquence of

blacks in the US.

Johnson’s second big change is his restoration of the

poem’s first word: if. Bryant’s version has Plácido telling

his grieving mother not to weep for him; Johnson’s version

says (paraphrased) “If you’re thinking of me now, weep not.”

In other words, Johnson reconnects the poem to the poet’s

biography, and thereby to the poet’s doubt that his mother

in fact would be thinking of him at that moment. Thus

Johnson restores the poem’s ambiguity (does the mother shed

a tear for the son?) and reveals the dark, even bitter humor

in Plácido’s comparison of his last words to the glorious

innocence of an infant’s cry.

Both changes can be said to restore the poem’s baroque

nature: with the first, stylistic change, Johnson deflates

the Romantic pomp of Bryant’s version, connecting with the

notion of the baroque as an “art of dethronement and

dispute” (Sarduy 289). While the poem’s subject is not

exactly playful, when paired with Bryant’s translation the

irreverence of Johnson’s becomes clear. With the second

change, the restoration of the poem’s original ambiguity,

Johnson connects with the notion of the baroque as an art of

the hidden truth. In this way, Johnson’s translation of

Plácido’s sonnet recalls The Autobiography, which, as we have

seen, is also built on the notion of a hidden truth—that

black culture is the engine that drives white civilization.

If Johnson’s decision to dwell on Latin American poetry

in the preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry shows his

familiarity and enthusiasm for the writing of the region,

his specific decisions in translating Plácido’s sonnet

reflect a clear understanding of the Baroque aesthetic that,

according to Lezama, Carpentier, and Sarduy, pervades the

region’s cultures. Beyond that, we can say that the Baroque

aesthetic that Johnson finds so clearly in the Latin

American poetry he collects also pervades the author’s own

work.

But we should be clear in making this claim: just as

it’s not exactly correct to say that African-American jazz

picked up its “Spanish tinge” from Cuban music—the pathways

of influence ran both ways, and African-American musicians

were as vital in shaping music in Latin America and the

Caribbean as vice versa—it is also imprecise to suggest that

Johnson picked up his baroque aesthetic in Latin America.

Again, in a certain sense he was born into a baroque

worldview, and it is entirely possible that his travels and

readings in Latin America represented more of a rediscovery

or an affirmation than an encounter with something new. What

is clear is that Johnson’s writing shares a number of

affinities with the baroque forms he celebrated among Latin

American authors; I hope this paper has shown how Johnson

used those forms to challenge the racial assumptions of US

society.

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