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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