SOURCE: Woolley, Lisa. “From Chicago Renaissance to Chicago Renaissance: The Poetry of Fenton Johnson.” Langston Hughes Review 14, no. 1-2 (1996): 36-48.

[In the following essay, Woolley uses the writing of Fenton Johnson as an example of the way in which authors and writing concerns illustrated an interdependency across cities and races, particularly in relation to the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago School of writing.]

The use of the word “renaissance” in the literary history of early twentieth-century America nearly reverses the connotation of that term as it pertains to Europe. The New York Little Renaissance, Southern Renaissance, Chicago Renaissance, and Harlem Renaissance, for example, all refer to relatively short, regionally based movements that did not always encompass all of the arts or constitute a “rebirth” at all. Robert Bone further complicates the use of “renaissance” by arguing that, if we preserve the label “Harlem Renaissance” to refer to the period in African American literary history from 1920 to 1935, then we must adopt as well the appellation “Chicago Renaissance” when speaking of the years 1935 to 1950 (448).¹ Complication occurs because Chicago Renaissance now refers to two different periods, virtually back-to-back, one belonging to the study of American realism, naturalism, and the new poetry, and the other to the field of African American literature. My point is not to quibble with the use of “renaissance” or to coin different names for these time spans. Nor am I arguing that they fail to delineate distinct eras, for at best periods are heuristic, and the categories Harlem and Chicago Renaissance(s) allow teachers and students to study groups of authors in relation to their particular historical circumstances. Periodization, however, often results in anomalous authors falling through the cracks of literary history. With them go important counterpoints to canonical authors, continuity from one period to another, and a sense that ideas and techniques, although often best employed by an individual, are produced by many minds. Fenton Johnson (1888-1958) is one such pivotal figure in Chicago's literary history; he links the city's early twentieth-century writing to its Depression—and World War II-era literature. Some of his poetry included the urban setting, understated free verse, and depiction of down-and-out citizens important to the first group of Chicago writers to win fame. Other segments of his opus tapped folk traditions, the ways of the rural South, and the African signs prized by the writers associated with Harlem. Still other poems embraced the experimental versification, political dissent, and racial consciousness adopted by the second major group of Chicago writers. While not unique in illustrating the interdependency of the literature of Chicago and Harlem, his case demonstrates the give and take between black and white authors in their various renaissances, as well as the dangers of not belonging to any one movement or school.

Part way through his career, Johnson, a black poet, author, editor, and activist who spent most of his life in Chicago, turned from old-fashioned tributes and dialect verse to the “new poetry” movement. Even though Poetry published his work, the often segregated nature of Chicago life gave him a low profile during the World War I era that has become known as the Chicago Renaissance. White critics nevertheless saw him as an imitator of Carl Sandburg and African American critics dismissed him for the same reason. Fitting more than one literary historical niche has not been to the advantage of his reputation. Barbara Dodds Stanford, for instance, writes that Johnson “was active in literary circles, belonging more to the ‘new poetry’ movement of White poets than to the Negro Renaissance” (303).

From the turn of the century and well into the 1920s, many aspiring writers could find what they needed in Chicago. Although Theodore Dreiser had left the city, he returned to encourage novices. Opportunities for artists to present and discuss their work occurred at Hull-House, founded by Jane Addams, regional theaters, meetings of the Cliff-Dwellers, the Little Room, and an unnamed group of younger writers associated with Floyd Dell and Margery Currey. Edited in Chicago but read nationally, journals like Poetry, the Dial, and the Little Review drew attention to midwesterners, especially Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Sherwood Anderson. Newspapers, including the award-winning Chicago Daily News, gave authors their start as reporters, reviewers, and humorists. Despite some literary organizations established by African Americans and the presence of journalists and activists Ida B. Wells and Fannie Barrier Williams, Johnson and other black writers found themselves with fewer opportunities for publication and critical exchange than did their white counterparts.² Frank Marshall Davis, who arrived in Chicago in 1927, found that “there was no contact with the white writers of that period; our worlds were still separate. I recall an abortive attempt to start a writer's group back in 1927. Fenton Johnson, a small, dark brown, very retiring man who had been one of the pioneers in the free verse revolution of the previous decade, was among those attending” (Livin' the Blues 131).

The evolution of Johnson's poetic style situates him within a conversation among black authors as to how to translate African American oral forms through writing. Like James Weldon Johnson, he abandoned dialect and then created the sort of sketches of urban life that Davis would favor. He did not develop, however, techniques that would free younger writers from either adherence to standard written English or reliance on stereotypes of black speech. These breakthroughs—attributed to Zora Neale Hurston and Sterling A. Brown (Gates, Signifying Monkey 174)—nevertheless occurred during the 1930s, when dollars being paid in support of African American literature were coming more noticeably from Chicago than Harlem, due in large part to the WPA's Illinois Writers' Project. Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Katherine Dunham, Frank Yerby, Horace R. Cayton, and St. Clair Drake were a few of the young writers on Chicago's WPA payroll. Some of them made Davis' acquaintance through the South Side Writers' Group. Both black and white authors joined the Chicago chapter of the League of American Writers, which included Jack Conroy, Nelson Algren, Meyer Levin, and Stuart Engstrand. Gwendolyn Brooks was also living and working in the Windy City. As was the case with the Harlem Renaissance, not all the important writers of the era lived in the same locale, but a new metropolis had become the symbolic headquarters. “One way or the other,” Arna Bontemps remembers, “Harlem got its renaissance in the middle ’twenties, centering around the Opportunity contests and the Fifth Avenue Awards Dinners. Ten years later Chicago reenacted it on WPA without finger bowls but with increased power” (FWA 47). Despite being in the right place for the second rebirth, Johnson is not widely known in this context.

His published volumes of poetry, A Little Dreaming (1913), Visions of the Dusk (1915), and Songs of the Soil (1916), consisted mainly of conventional love lyrics, dialect poetry on plantation life, and commemorations of such figures as Toussaint L'Ouverture, Nat Turner, and W. E. B. DuBois. Joan R. Sherman writes that antebellum poets began a tradition of writing “martial or sentimental tributes to saviors of the race” (xxiv). Especially in his second volume, Visions of the Dusk, Johnson follows the tradition of extended accolades and histories, as exemplified by “Douglas” [sic]:

He came when tyranny was ripe, a torch
That lit the darkened avenue of hope,
He came from cabin, ragged, poor, and starved,
And walked among the honoured of the earth.

(60)

Sherman writes that with the increasingly dangerous climate following the rescinding of the 1875 Civil Rights Act, African American poets “show a decided bias for neoclassical decorum, heightened poetic diction, and technical virtuosity” (xxvi). Although Johnson's motivations for writing this way may differ from those of nineteenth-century poets, his first volume, A Little Dreaming, includes many examples of “nonracial” poetry. He demonstrates his agility with the conventional love song and proves himself adaptable to contemporary trends in popular verse, including the representation of immigrants and their speech, a subject that also interested fellow Chicagoan Finley Peter Dunne. “Kathleen” refers to a Scottish woman; another poem begins “Mine Rachel iss der Ghetto rose” (58); and a third ponders what happens “When I speak o' Jamie, sunny lass” (62).

European-American contemporaries like George Ade tried their hand at black dialect as well, prolonging with Johnson and other black authors another nineteenth-century tradition. Johnson's dialect poetry proves difficult for audiences today because of the sheer number of words diverging from standard written English. Reading phonetically becomes tiresome, as is also the case with Ade's Pink Marsh or Dunne's Mr. Dooley. The following stanza from “Fiddlah Ike” exemplifies the problem:

De hull plantation gathuh roun' his do',
An' w'en he play daih haids go drappin' low,
De houn' dawg quit his howlin' all de night,
De lonely moon put on huh brightes' light,
Fu' all de worl' would lak to heah de chune
Dat Fiddlah Ike's been playin' thoo de June.

(Visions of the Dusk 27)

According to Jay Saunders Redding, African American poets at the turn of the century had to accept stereotypes of black speech. Discussing James Edwin Campbell and Paul Laurence Dunbar, he writes that “the conventions as to language and racial character-concept were well established by the time Campbell wrote. They had been sung and stammered, pantomimed and danced home by the minstrels. Campbell translated them into rhyme. It remained now only to conform” (53). Johnson clearly continues this conformity. Indeed, the title of A Little Dreaming alludes to Dunbar's poem “The Sum.” If Johnson modifies Dunbar's example, he leans toward the lyrical, rather than the narrative, for inspiration, a direction in keeping with the rise of imagism.

The artistic success of Johnson's dialect poems varies as much as his position in the heated debates of the Harlem Renaissance over how African Americans best should be represented. In his introduction to Songs of the Soil, Johnson states, “There is a group within my own race who bitterly oppose the writing of dialect. To that group I say that unless one gains inspiration from the crudest of his fellows, the greatest of his kind cannot be elevated” (iv). Yet, he did not simply admire all vestiges of the plantation tradition. “Nothing disgusts me more than to read in a metropolitan newspaper an interview with a colored man in which dialect is employed,” wrote Johnson (ii). His own use of dialect sometimes resembles a minstrel tradition of slow-moving, contented slaves and at other times hints at some of the qualities Henry Louis Gates, Jr., identifies in African American vernacular tradition, e.g. “the concrete imagery the lines can carry” (“Dialect” 110) and “its capacity to carry imagery compactly” (112). “Washin' Day” combines a few of the best and worst features of Johnson's dialect poems in the sense that a defiant spirit predominates despite the formal awkwardness. The poem communicates vividly and concisely a resilient woman's sense of humor, as we can see by the first stanza:

Weddah beats de dickens,
Heat wid sweat am mixin';
Pappy wants some bac'n,
But he's sh' mistaken
On dis washin' day.

(Visions of The Dusk 64)

The use of “phonetic” spelling, on the other hand, makes little sense. Why change the “ea” in “weather” but not in “beats,” “heat,” and “sweat”? Moreover, why put an apostrophe in bacon when the “o” receives little emphasis no matter who is pronouncing it? Discussing the problem of “eye dialect,” Sylvia Wallace Holton writes that “these features are somewhat decorative, but they do not represent real dialectal features. Eye dialect calls the reader's attention to the ‘difference’ of the speech without really contributing to its ‘realism’” (58).

Although the form of much of Johnson's early poetry recalled the nineteenth century, its spirit often belonged to the twentieth. In the preface to their anthology, Richard Long and Eugenia W. Collier state, “Fenton Johnson is included in the annals of black American poetry not only because of his poems themselves, but also because his works anticipated the Harlem Renaissance” (283). Bernard Bell writes that Johnson's use of “levee songs like Shuffle ‘Long’ and ‘The Song of the Fish Market’ provide a sharp contrast to the plaintive note of the plantation songs and are a harbinger of the phenomenal success of the musical Shuffle Along (1921)” (350). Like the Harlem Renaissance writers, Johnson recognized the poetry of the African American spirituals, composing versions of “The Lost Love,” “How Long, O Lord!,” “Who is That A-Walking In The Corn?,” “A Dream,” and “The Wonderful Morning.”

Perhaps most interestingly, Johnson resembled contemporaries in his application of what Wilson Jeremiah Moses calls “the poetics of Ethiopianism” (156). Moses outlines the historical use of the Bible verse “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (Psalm 68:31) to foretell the coming glory of Africa. He explains that “the theme of the rise of Africa became a tradition of reinterpreting the Biblical passage to speak to the experiences of the Anglo-African peoples” (158-59) and that along with this reinterpretation went a vision of “the decline of the West” (159). By the twentieth century, Ethiopianism infused the rhetoric of black nationalists and admirers of Marcus Garvey. Moses writes that:

Ethiopianism may be defined as the effort of the English speaking black or African person to view his past enslavement and present cultural dependency in terms of the broader history of civilization. It serves to remind him that this present scientific technological civilization, dominated by Western Europe for a scant four hundred years, will go under certainly—like all the empires of the past. It expresses the belief that the tragic racial experience has profound historical value, that it has endowed the African with moral superiority and made him a seer.

(160-61)

Although Moses explains this mythology in connection with W. E. B. DuBois, Ethiopianism also helps to place Johnson's poetry in the context of early twentieth-century black nationalism (despite his emphasis on reconciliation between the races). His “Ethiopia” begins with an invocation that the poet might use an ancient lyre to sing of “Ethiopia the Queen” (42) and later describes the exile of “the men of dusk” (44). The poem then moves through history, celebrating black heroes along the way. The poet vows to keep singing Ethiopia's song in a strange land until the “sons of Libya” ascend to the throne (Visions of The Dusk 48).

In later poems, Johnson puts Ethiopianism in less symbolic terms when he predicts the downfall of the West through World War I. This transition is not surprising since black people became disillusioned as a result of their continuing low status in the United States after sacrifices made by black soldiers in the war. Disillusionment became a common theme among black writers and one impetus for the Harlem Renaissance. Noteworthy characteristics of Johnson's war poems include the irony he sees in black soldiers dying for Europe's freedom (a sentiment also expressed in R. C. Jamison's “The Negro Soldiers” [J. W. Johnson 195]) combined with an apocalyptic vision of the fate of the West Johnson writes, for instance, of African soldiers fighting in “Europe's last conflict”:

Zulu, robbed of land and home,
For the robber bares his heart,
Kaffir, giving Europe gems,
Europe pierces with a dart. …

(Visions of the Dusk 19)

In “War Profiles,” God hears the cries of the oppressed and declares:

“Go, thou Angel of Wrath, into the four corners of the earth and spill the seeds discord!

“Freedom shall prevail.”

The Angel of Wrath is riding the winds of the earth. Look up, Ethiopia, and be comforted!

(Crisis 65)

Many poets, black and white, wrote in response to World War I, but the basis of Johnson's protest in Ethiopianism clearly links him to the racial pride of the Harlem Renaissance.

Johnson, the new poets, the modernists, and the writers of the Harlem Renaissance all adapted folk materials to modern times. Robert Kerlin categorizes an armistice poem “The New Day” as “one of the newer methods of verse, and yet with a splendid suggestion of the old Spirituals” (102). More than suggesting the old spirituals, Johnson makes a new spiritual part of another form. After six lines of free verse describing “the happy shouting of the people,” angels enter, singing a spiritual in tetrameters:

Nevermore shall men know suffering,
Nevermore shall women wailing
Shake to grief the God of Heaven.
From the East and from the West,
From the cities in the valley,
From God's dwelling on the mountain,
Little children, blow your trumpets!

(Kerlin 103)

The original voice returns in free verse for six more lines then yields to the fallen black soldiers, who speak of their sacrifices and right to liberty in a manner reminiscent of Johnson's early poems of tribute.³ While written in Johnson's most modern form, “War Profiles,” published in The Crisis in 1918, still employs black history and Ethiopianism. Stanza by stanza, Johnson alternates historical, biblical, and mythical characters with the more ordinary people of his Chicago portraits. As in “The New Day,” free verse is interrupted by a song, sung this time by soldiers. The second stanza moves to Port au Prince, where Toussaint L'Ouverture rouses men to fight for France. The third and fourth stanzas switch to State Street and the Chicago Armory:

No longer walk the merchant, lawyer, doctor, thief and toiler along the
lighted path of this merry thoroughfare. The khaki makes all men one.
Old men are peddling dreams of a new Ethiopia; old women and young
women long for the laughter of State Street grown sober.

(Crisis 65)

Here the literary interests of Chicago and Harlem clearly overlap. Less obvious is Johnson's anticipation of the techniques of the 1930s, especially Sterling Brown's and Frank Marshall Davis' use of song lyrics and changes in rhyme scheme, line length, meter, and implied audience within a single poem.

Bell cites Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters as influences on Johnson's later, uncollected poetry (350) and, in introducing Johnson in his Poets of America, Clement Wood makes such a comparison the basis of his praise. Wood describes Johnson's “Tired” as “in a mood as casually ultimate as Sandburg's better things” (108). According to Frank Marshall Davis' poem “Roosevelt Smith,” such an assessment eventually became a cliche with regard to African American poetry. “At twenty-three he published his first book … the critics / said he imitated Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters / and Vachel Lindsay … they raved about a wealth of / racial material and the charm of darky dialect,” Davis writes of the young Smith (Black Man's Verse 82). Although Johnson has been classified as an imitator of Sandburg, their mutual interest in spirituals, folk songs, the spoken word, and the lives of common Chicagoans indicates the degree to which Chicago writing had been black all along.

Despite its blending of elements from Chicago and Harlem, the “new poetry” written solely in the colloquial diction favored by white Chicago authors divides the reception of Johnson's work into two phases. Bontemps, for example, comments that Johnson wrote in the manner of Dunbar and then “succumbed to a more rugged influence” (American 221). Furthermore, the question of despair commonly arises only in connection with this later poetry. “His poetry deals with real-life situations,” Long and Collier write, “which it conveys in simple, concrete language. In halting rhythms and jagged lines he portrays the chaotic world of the black man, caught in the illogic of racism. He hits existential depths more characteristic of later generations than of his own” (283). Similarly, James Weldon Johnson muses:

he disregarded the accepted poetic forms, subjects, and language, adopted free verse, and in that formless form wrote poetry in which he voiced the disillusionment and bitterness of feeling the Negro race was then experiencing. In some of this poetry he went further than protests against wrong or the moral challenges that the wronged can always fling against the wrongdoer; he sounded the note of fatalistic despair.

(140)

Bell tempers this image of the despairing poet when he discusses Fenton Johnson's magazine editorships. In 1916, Johnson founded The Champion Magazine, which surveyed African American accomplishments in sports and the arts, and served as its editor for the year that the periodical stayed in business. Next he founded The Favorite Magazine and, for its three year existence, wrote all its contents under different pen names. In a 1921 issue, he explained that the magazine was part of “The Reconciliation Movement,” which, he wrote, “is not a movement of submission. It is a movement of love, that love that reconstructs life through gentle but firm methods. … We are materialists, such materialists as Jesus of Nazareth was, as Abraham Lincoln was and as Toussaint L'Ouverture was” (qtd. in Bell 351). These hopeful efforts notwithstanding, Bell concludes that “the tremendous power of these later poems overshadowed Johnson's early optimistic vision and won him the misleading image as the poet of utter despair” (351).

Certainly Johnson had plenty of reasons to despair, including race riots and discrimination in employment and housing. “I know that my dream of a magazine is about to end in the cold gray awakening because of the heavy debt hanging over it and the lack of desire Americans seem to have for the reconciliation of the races,” he wrote in Tales of Darkest America (1920). “I know that my dream of success in literature is fading because every story I have ever offered a standard magazine has returned to my desk” (8). Despite the increasing number of reasons for Johnson to lose hope over the course of his career, I would argue that his later poetry constitutes a continuation of, rather than a radical break with, his earlier work.

Indeed, a spirit of experimentation unifies Johnson's pursuits, whether he was writing dialect in defiance of his colleagues' opinions or borrowing from European-American midwesterners and their manner of social criticism. This eclecticism, however, made him look like a misfit to critics arguing for an African American literary tradition. In comparing Johnson's hard-hitting poems with those of Langston Hughes, for instance, Redding admits to seeing some similarity but adds, “Essentially, Johnson was a despairing poet, stuffed with the bitterness of DuBois. The attitude of despair, common among the early ‘New Negroes,’ in Johnson's case is ineffectually sustained” (87). From Redding's vantage point, Johnson is a remnant from an earlier literature of protest, rather than a harbinger of a new urban realism.

To make his point, Redding chooses Johnson's poem “Tired,” which begins, “I am tired of work; I am tired of building up somebody / else's civilization.” The speaker suggests to his wife that they take up drinking.

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.

(qtd. in Redding 87)

Redding writes that the lines about disposing of the children “are supported neither by strong emotion nor apt expression. They are false to the emotion of despair as the Negro feels it, and run counter to an essential quality of spirit” (87).

Redding's point about the poem's lack of strong emotion can be illustrated by comparing the opening of “Tired” to the opening of Sandburg's “Mag”:

I wish to God I never saw you, Mag. I wish you never quit your job and came along with me. I wish we never bought a license and a white dress For you to get married in the day we ran off to a minister. …

(13)

After complaining about all the bills, the speaker concludes, “I wish to God I never saw you, Mag. / I wish to God the kids had never come” (13). Sandburg's poetry generally conveys emotion by representing its suppression. The speaker of “Mag,” for instance, clearly feels loathing for their situation but voices it by wishing they had not experienced hopeful moments together. Repetition intensifies the emotion but also emphasizes the flatness of its expression; Mag's husband has few ways to say what he feels, and the means of communication he does possess are distinctly unpoetic.

Fenton Johnson's late poems lack the “essential quality of spirit” to which Redding refers insofar as they fail to allude the musical, oratorical, or vernacular traditions that often give African American literature a distinctive character. Ralph Ellison, for example, understood Richard Wright (who would surpass Johnson's “existential depths”) in terms of the blues, which Ellison defined as “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” (199). Decidedly unlyrical, Johnson's vignettes portray people barely capable of feeling any longer. Unlike Masters' creations, they do not speak from the cemetery; instead, they are the living dead. In “The Minister,” for example, a clergyman explains that, despite “master[ing] pastoral theology, the Greek of the / Apostles, and all the difficult subjects in a minister's / curriculum,” he is replaced at Mount Moriah by Sam Jenkins, who can make the “congregation shout.” The poem, like the voices of those sleeping on the hill, concludes on a philosophical note:

Sam Jenkins can tear a Bible to tatters and his congregations destroy the pews with their shouting and stamping.
Sam Jenkins leads in the gift of raising dollar money.
Such is religion.

(Kreymborg 80-81)

Not only does the poem create sympathy for the minister not gifted in a “folk” tradition of preaching, but it also eschews such devices itself. Stephen Henderson, whom Gates revoices, has identified traditional features of “black linguistic elegance,” including “virtuoso naming and enumerating” (33), “jazzy rhythmic effects” (35), “virtuoso free-rhyming” (37), “hyperbolic imagery” (38), “metaphysical imagery” (39), “understatement,” “compressed and cryptic imagery” (40), and “worrying the line” (41). Few of these techniques are to be found in Johnson's later free verse. Critical reaction implicitly based on such omissions suggests that while, for African Americans looking for modernist sources of inspiration, Sandburg and Masters may have come closest to their own social, political, and aesthetic agendas, their poetics would have to undergo crucial transformations in sensibility in order to serve black writers. Dudley Randall considers Johnson's poems “marred by cliches and conventional expressions” but otherwise “new and different in their mood of frustration and despair” (233). That they could be found both conventional and new speaks to the hybrid nature of Johnson's poems. As evidenced by James Weldon Johnson's and Redding's responses, stuffing African American “disillusionment with America” (Randall 233) into the deadpan, colloquial forms used by Sandburg and Masters certainly created a new and different, if not altogether pleasing, effect.

Johnson himself began modifying the mood of the realist sketch. For instance, both Sandburg and Johnson wrote poems describing washerwomen. Sandburg's “Washerwoman” “sings that Jesus will wash her sins away. … Rubbing underwear she sings of the Last Great Washday” (105). Johnson begins his poem “Aunt Hannah Jackson”: “Despite her sixty years Aunt Hannah Jackson / rubs on other people's clothes.” Aunt Hannah Jackson talks about how the man she once loved was a fool and how women of every race, class, and creed are equal in that they are fools for having loved foolish men. The poem concludes:

For rubbing on other people's clothes Aunt Hannah Jackson gets a dollar and fifty cents a day and a worn out dress on Christmas.
For talking to herself Aunt Hannah Jackson gets a smile as we call her a good natured fool.

(Kreymborg 78)

Instead of addressing questions of final salvation, Johnson gives the washerwoman a personal history, surrounds her with loved ones, and puts her in an economic context where the only jobs available for blacks involve doing menial service for whites. Unlike the earlier dialect poem “Washin' Day,” the new poetry does not present indestructible personalities but does allow for protest. Johnson's innovation is his indictment of injustice combined with the communal spirit of his early poetry.

That Johnson's career did not do a complete reversal either thematically or emotionally when he crossed the color line is indicated by the vestiges of Ethiopianism in his later work. Once more, comparison with Sandburg illustrates Johnson's methods. Sandburg writes a poem called “The Junk Man”; Johnson writes one called “The Old Repair Man.” In Sandburg's words: “AM glad God saw Death / And gave Death a job taking care of all who are tired of living” (75). When a clock no longer works, Death says, “You gotta come / Along with me,’ / How glad the clock is then, when it feels the arms of the Junk Man close / around it and carry it away” (76). Johnson writes: “God is the Old Repair Man. / When we are junk in Nature's storehouse he takes us apart. / What is good he lays aside; he might use it some day.” Survivors may mourn, but

Some day the Old Repair Man
Will take the good from its secret place
And with his gentle, strong hands will mold
A more enduring work—a work that will defy Nature—
And we will laugh at the old days, the troubled days,
When we were but a crude piece of craftsmanship …

Even though both poems deal with personal salvation, “The Old Repair Man” has meaning for a community, whose members will see an end to “the old days, the troubled days” and ultimately “a more enduring work” (qtd. in Bontemps American 27). I would argue that this poem is the old Ethiopian vision put in terms of the new poetry. Johnson has infused the new form with the old rhetoric about the rise and fall of societies; the poem creates a promising vision according to which the apparently junky status of African Americans can be transformed. Another example of Johnson's old mythology informing the new work is “Aunt Jane Allen.” Johnson opens the poem: “State Street is lonely to-day. Aunt Jane Allen / has driven her chariot to Heaven” (Kreymborg 78). Whereas white poets from Chicago responded to the spirituals, they did not mix registers in this way. With the exception of Vachel Lindsay, none of them would have put a chariot on State Street, and only Johnson's poetry, with rhetoric referring to Aunt Jane Allen's sons as “the seed of Ethiopia” (Kreymborg 79), would serve as a reminder that Chicago was a seat of black nationalism. Although referring to himself, rather than Johnson, Davis perhaps best sums up an attitude that combines near-despair with realism, humor, and a celebration of survival. In “Frank Marshall Davis: Writer,” Davis deliberates on the charge that he is “a bitter bitter cynic” (68): “Wormwood wine? / Vinegar? / Gall? / A daily diet— / But / I did not die / Of diabetes …” (American Negro 69).

Although Johnson's experiments with the new poetry did not exactly set younger African American writers on fire; they too worked in free verse, drew on black history, and formulated modern Ethiopian statements, as in Davis' “What Do You Want America?” Davis concludes his chronicle of black contributions to American life with the statement that “Black eyes saw the Pharaohs rise, the Kaiser tumble into / the dust, strong ox nations whimper and cry before / stronger ox nations … where is the Rome of Caesar? / … what lives but the dust which covers all?” (Black Man's Verse 23). In Southern Road, Sterling A. Brown used similar images from Ethiopianism in “Memphis Blues”:

Memphis go
Memphis come back,
Ain' no skin
Off de nigger's back.
All dese cities
Ashes, rust. …
De win' sing sperrichals
Through deir dus'.

(61)

Brown found a new diction that was neither the old dialect nor the new poetry. For other writers of the 1930s (such as Wright and Davis), Marxism would replace Ethiopianism. Johnson's poetry may bear slight resemblance to the successful work that followed, but, struggling in Chicago throughout both the glamorous days of the Harlem Renaissance and the early years of the Depression, Johnson foresaw the need to reconcile a vital oral and literary tradition with the harshness of urban America and the conventions available for representing it.

By working within an historic shift in African American literary diction, a modernist context of adapting the vernacular to literary purposes, and a Chicago tradition of representing urban life, Johnson bridges the Chicago Renaissance of Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and Sherwood Anderson and the Chicago Renaissance of Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Frank Marshall Davis. Personalities, historical circumstances, and sources of funding arguably make these phases of Chicago's literary history different, but Johnson's career calls attention to both the continual renewal of the city's literary life by ideas from other parts of the world and the constant presence of African American thought from Chicago Renaissance to Chicago Renaissance.

Notes

1. Bone prefers “Harlem School” and “Chicago School” but concedes to the prevailing use of “renaissance.” As I use the term “Harlem Renaissance” in this essay, the period begins somewhat before the year 1920, which demarcates a literary generation for Bone.

2. For accounts of life in Chicago during this period, see Duffey, Duncan, and Spear.

3. Such a juxtaposition of old and new augurs the modernist collage of Jean Toomer's Cane.

This essay was originally presented before the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature at the Midwest Modern Language Association Annual Meeting in Chicago in November 1994.

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