Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific. Vince Schleitwiler

disingenuously unmarked—“it was not necessary,” he tells himself, “to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead” (115).

      It is not clear, however, that there is a decision at all; already passing “incognegro” as a witness to the lynching bee, he becomes trapped in this condition, looking for reasons after the fact: “It was not discouragement, or fear, or search for a larger field of action and opportunity that was driving me out of the Negro race. I knew that it was shame, unbearable shame. Shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals. For certainly the law would restrain and punish the malicious burning alive of animals” (115). From within his new racial status, he distances himself from a shame he attributes to blackness, due less to the denial of its humanity than its expulsion from the protection of the law. But a few paragraphs earlier, before he’s “made up his mind” (115), this shame appears first in a notably different form. Coming out of the fugue state he’d passed into during the lynching, he comes to consciousness before its material remains—“a scorched post, a smoldering fire, blackened bones, charred fragments sifting down through coils of chain, and the smell of flesh—human flesh”—and walks off to sit and “clear [his] dazed mind”: “A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive” (113). Consciously or not, Johnson is unmistakably reproducing the structure of Du Bois’s famous formulation of double consciousness, that narrative subjectivity split in two along the contradiction of nation and race, American/Negro (Du Bois, Writings 364–65).

      In the post-multicultural present, in which the grammar and lexicon of cultural diversity supply the dominant language of racial justice, the celebration of identity abstracted from historical and social analyses of racial inequality provides affirmative pathways for inequality’s continuation and expansion. Following the logic of his own rationalization, then, it is easy for present-day readers to accept the ex-colored man’s severing of this formulation of doubled shame, forgetting his initial emphasis on his ethical implication as a member of a national body marked by exceptional violence, and condemn him for the sin of racial self-hatred. Yet the agony of the ex-colored man’s passing, that joke which turns back onto him as tragedy, is that he never ceases to love and value black culture, even as his belief in uplift abstracts that love from the experiences of any particular black people he might know. In the logic of the narrative, the project of uplift is aborted only to be aggrandized, for the novel is a cautionary tale, staged to encourage readers to affirm the narrator’s famous conclusion that he “sold [his] birthright for a mess of pottage” (127).

      The shame the narrator remembers to confess—that the violence incarnates blackness, given birth as expulsion from the protection of the law—is what transforms him into the ex-colored man, driving him into whiteness. But because he confesses it, first in private, prior to marrying a beloved white woman who bears him two white children, and then, after her death, in the pages of his book, he lays open his shame to expose what Harryette Mullen explains is whiteness’s own shared secret. Following Goldsby, you might read the novel as the author’s own exposure of that same shame, the secret of Johnson’s encounter with lynching, laid open to advance a race’s transformation into race men dedicated to Negro uplift. In sum, if something in the ending leaves present-day readers uneasy, it cannot be attributed to the repression of a racialized shame. Rather, it’s how easily the narrator toggles between his dream of uplift and his assumption of whiteness that is striking, now that uplift is no longer the dominant form of racial justice. The distinction between Negro uplift ideology and racial passing, on which the novel turns, proves troublingly difficult to maintain, and if this might seem bizarre to Johnson, it would be the very theme of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing.

      This uncanny doubling becomes easier to understand if you recall the confession that the ex-colored man forgets to remember, the shame of membership in a political body constituted by the violence, of belonging to a state exceptionalized by lynching. This shame does not derive from an identification with whiteness, but with a civilization constituted and regenerated in the devolution of violence upon blackness. This is the shame of the American Negro as civilized subject, as the token of benevolent tutelage, which must be forgotten once his mind is made up to pass. It risks revealing, among other things, that what passes for freedom across the color line, the mastery of civilization white status entails, which Negro uplift would contest, is merely the illusory privilege of standing on the lee side of the violence, a trick of perception that can be maintained only by separating oneself from what the violence bears away. For the violence has no master, only servants who hope to redirect its force onto others further down its course. Here you may recast the tradition of the passing novel, running through Johnson and Larsen, to understand its continuing salience as a challenge for reading. It asks, How is it possible to perceive the difference between whiteness, or racialized privilege, and freedom?

      In short, Negro uplift ideology comes to seem indistinguishable from passing because of this second shame—because it is a manifestation of U.S. civilization’s gospel of violence. The unbearable encounter between the tokens of uplift’s benevolence and its violence reveals, beyond the author’s intention, that the protagonist’s dream of catching the spirit of the Negro in his relatively primitive state is homologous with both passing and lynching. Each posits the internalization of a black essence—refined, consumed, secreted, but at all costs mastered—in producing a reconstituted racial subject fit for modern civilization. Lynching exposes the logic of the violence that extends uplift’s loving embrace. Following Goldsby’s insight that “lynching’s narrative force … compels the narrator to tell his story backward, with the result that the novel develops according to a process akin to that of photography” (217), you may understand the relation of passing to lynching as that of a negative to a photograph: one fabricates a white body, and the other fabricates its black essence, but the process they comprise together establishes the perception of the racial image.

      Returning to Du Bois, you may recognize what lies before him as the scene of perceptual training in an aesthetics of racial terror, which he evades in the movement of an improvised countertraining. In the close encounter between two varieties of the racial token, each is empowered to speak only by silencing the other; each draws power by reference to the other but can express that power only in the other’s absence. But Du Bois does not risk actually coming into the presence of the lynching trophy; instead, silenced, he turns away. This is not merely prudence, the justifiable fear of being overwhelmed by the violence and mistaken for its proper target, but the unsettling premonition, on its way to surfacing as (double) consciousness, that he is already implicated in it, prior to intention or will, in his very constitution as a civilized American Negro subject. This is why he does not reschedule his appointments at the Constitution or submit his statement by post—why his modernizing scientific project is unsettled at its very core.

      The U-turn down Mitchell Street may seem a retreat—repairing to the security of the university to theorize a response to unforeseen conditions—but retrospection identifies the detour as the opening of Du Bois’s journey, an ongoing improvisation whose narration is itself the theorization it demands. The text, recall, is not an autobiography of the development of its historical subject, but an essay toward an autobiography of a race concept—a literary exercise marshaling the empirical facts of personal history in the service of a conceptualization. The turn away from the presence of the lynching trophy may therefore be understood as a narrative theorization of hesitation and detour. The text refuses to witness the token of lynching’s violence, to represent the overwhelming sensory experience of the blackened knuckles, the char and stench, so as not to reproduce and reenact the lynching form.

      This is in some sense, illusory, for Du Bois swerves away from the trophy only to run right back to and through it,32 but the narrative introduces a kind of lag in this movement, tearing at the discrepancy in the doubled vision of uplift’s twinned tokens at the site where they would be fused, in order to disrupt uplift’s aesthetic protocols. An extemporaneous motion, the swerve opens Du Bois to an agency arriving from outside all that his knowledge and training has prepared him to perceive—which is to say, the act is prophetic. This is the strange red ray, cutting across his scientific