Prophesying Citizenship in Edward A. Johnson's Light Ahead for the Negro

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

In Edward A. Johnson's little-known speculative novel Light Ahead for the Negro (1904), protagonist Gilbert Twitchell departs New York City in 1906 aboard a dirigible airship bound for Mexico City and awakens in Phoenix, Georgia, one hundred years later. He finds that a century's worth of changes include an abolished Congress, electric cars, and a legally protected form of African American citizenship still lacking in “social equality.”1 Born enslaved, Johnson penned this early example of Black speculative fiction while working in Eastern North Carolina's district attorney's office. The tension he creates as his text alternates between the turn of the century and the ostensibly utopian turn of the millennium aims to persuade. I argue that the formal features of Johnson's temporally complex, generically hybrid text work both to depict the contested nature of Black citizenship during and after Reconstruction and to challenge the prevailing historiography of Reconstruction in Johnson's time.Though rarely studied, Light Ahead for the Negro builds on and complicates the utopian works of Johnson's contemporaries. It boasts a socialist United States reminiscent of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1899) but radically expands Bellamy's vision by theorizing a multiracial citizenry defined by “political standing” that requires universal education, fair media, and a form of land reparation for African Americans. It both complements and diverges from Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood (1902–03) and Sutton Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio (1899), broadening the landscape of turn of the century Afrofuturist literature. Like Griggs and Hopkins, Johnson's utopian text engages with the fantastical to reveal the limits of realism. While all three texts use the speculative mode to depict reverberations of a traumatic past in the present, Johnson pushes generic conventions even further than Griggs or Hopkins. Part speculative fiction, part pastiche of fictional and historically accurate primary source documents, and part historical analysis, Light Ahead is a disorienting mix of fact and fiction. Like William Wells Brown's Clotel, it makes use of actual primary documents but it also embeds fictional documents, making the text sometimes difficult to untangle. Johnson's lengthy footnotes cause readers to continually flip from text to subtext as the form subverts the conventions of historiography. In his preface, Johnson asserts that the delivery of facts is his priority, and that the “story weaved into the work is subordinate to the discussion of facts, and not paramount” (vi). His claim here is central to undersanding the novel as historical intervention. It also indicates a strategic use of hybridity as he weaves “story” with “facts.” I argue that the novel's hybrid narrative structure is essential to and enacts his message.As intriguing and impressive as his novel, Johnson's biography also deserves further attention. “There is a blind man in New York City who is cheerful and contented because he looks back upon a life of unusual usefulness and accomplishment,” begins an article lauding Johnson in an April 1933 edition of W. E. B. DuBois’ Crisis.2 Born enslaved in Raleigh, North Carolina, just before the end of the Civil War, Edward A. Johnson built an illustrious legal and political career. Educated at the Washington School, one of the first schools for African American students, he turned down Oberlin College to attend Atlanta University and then Shaw University's law school. Johnson held positions as a teacher, principal, attorney, and dean of Shaw's law school before beginning a political career.3 In public service, he was a delegate to the Republican National Conventions in 1892 and 1896, served as alderman in Raleigh for a term, and worked as assistant to the district attorney of Eastern North Carolina from 1899 to 1907. In 1907, due to the difficulties of practicing law in the Jim Crow South, Johnson moved to New York and opened a law practice. He became the first African American elected member of the New York State Legislature, where he “introduced and fathered” the Levy Civil Rights Bill. According to the Crisis, this bill was “probably the best bill of its kind in the United States” in 1933. Among his other accomplishments, Johnson established the first free labor employment bureau in the nation and worked tirelessly against discrimination in various forms. He retired at the age of sixty-eight after an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1928 but remained politically active in retirement.4Just as Johnson's legal career pushed the nation toward racial justice, his writing attempted to persuade in the court of public opinion—both by accurately documenting the past and forecasting the future. In 1890, more than a decade before Light Ahead, Johnson published the first textbook on African American history adopted by the states of Virginia and North Carolina for use in Black schools. Entitled A School History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1890, With a Short Introduction as to The Origin of the Race, the text radically challenges white historiography by identifying and revising the erasures in the historical record. It decries “the sin of omission and commission on the part of white authors” in their recording of history. For example, Johnson's chapter on slavery in the colonies of 1619 includes a section on the “Negro Heroes” of Jamestown which documents gaps in the historical record. He trenchantly observes that any African Americans “who may have exhibited their heroism in many a daring feat during the early history of Jamestown are not known. It is unfortunate that there was no record kept except that of the crimes of his ancestors in this country.”5 His text openly criticizes the refusal to document African American contributions from the nation's beginning, inviting a critical look at how history has been recorded.In addition to identifying these erasures of African American history, Johnson works to revise them. He argues that the “true historical record” proves that African Americans have been “among the most patriotic of patriots, among the bravest of soldiers” as well as “God-fearing, faithful producer[s] of the nation's wealth.”6 In the revised edition of his textbook he includes an addendum, The History of the Negro Soldiers in the Spanish American War (1911). In the tradition of William C. Nell's The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855) and Paul Laurence Dunbar's “The Colored Soldiers” of the Civil War (1913), this work takes a special interest in the role African American soldiers have played in the U.S. military, citing military service as a reason white citizens should respect African American patriotism, courage, and ultimately personhood.Writing a decade and a half later, after witnessing the white supremacy campaign in North Carolina where he served as an attorney and alderman, Johnson takes a different tack in Light Ahead for the Negro. He also addresses a different audience. Instead of African American teachers, he dedicates Light Ahead to white southerners. Like many nineteenth-century novels of purpose, the persuasive nature of the text aims to inspire its readers to social action. He specifically addresses “the thousands of sympathetic and well-wishing friends of the Negro race” who are “willing that [he] should have a freeman's chance and work out his destiny as best he can.” He states his aims plainly: “to show how the Negro problem can be solved in peace and good will rather than by brutality.”7Johnson makes several large historiographic claims in his novel. Written at the end of what is often termed the long Reconstruction period, Johnson re-periodizes this era and terms it “re-reconstruction.” He defines this period as one of regression, a backward movement in the aims of racial equality and specifically in African American citizenship. He characterizes this “re-reconstruction” of the southern states as the completion of what he calls the “decitizenization” of African Americans, referring to widespread Black disenfranchisement in the South. It is essential to remember that Johnson served as an alderman in Raleigh during the time of the Wilmington coup and massacre of 1898 (v-vi). As a man who had witnessed tremendous racial progress in the first part of his life, he would have had watched closely as African American rights lost tremendous ground economically, politically, and socially at the turn of the century. It is no accident that Johnson uses a time-travel novel to characterize the late-nineteenth century as a period of regression. With the Wilmington massacre just two years after Plessy v. Ferguson, both southern whites and the Supreme Court had issued chilling warnings that forward movements in chronological time did not guarantee racial progress.Before discussing the formal features that Johnson uses to make his historiographical claims, a brief plot summary may prove useful. After directly addressing his readers, Johnson dives into the action. At the outset, Johnson's Yale-educated, white protagonist, Gilbert Twitchell, has committed to work as a missionary among the African American population in Georgia. Before his tenure, he decides to vacation in Mexico City with a wealthy friend. The two depart by Parisian airship from the aerial pier at West Fifty-ninth Street and suffer an accident mid-air when the motor explodes. Gilbert's companion falls overboard and Gilbert loses consciousness. He awakens a century later in Georgia and is nursed back to health by the white man on whose lawn he has crashed, Dr. Newell, and his niece Irene, Gilbert's eventual love interest.The narrative proceeds with very little plot, primarily as a series of conversations and documents shared between Newell, Irene, and Gilbert on the political and social changes that have taken place since Gilbert's accident. For the bulk of the novel, the narrative voice is mediated through various forms—Gilbert's written reflections on the state of the nation in 1906, a “found” prize-winning speech by an African American southern man, and historical newspaper reports. While the novel centers on U.S. politics, American imperial aims are subtly acknowledged. By the end of the novel, Irene's intended husband perishes in the Philippines, making for a happy ending for Gilbert and Irene, who marry.Using a conceit similar to Bellamy's popular novel—a time traveler from one century eagerly learning about the future—Johnson's temporal leap in Light Ahead happens due to air travel rather than mesmerism. While Bellamy's time travel is temporary, Johnson's is permanent. His protagonist never returns home to the century of his birth. While speculative in genre, the novel is far more occupied with a retrospective telling of the past than in describing the future. His text analyzes his present and issues a warning about what might happen if current conditions continue. This type of counterfactual narrative, as Paul Saint Amour asserts, serves a purpose that is “admonitory rather than retrospective.” These “analyses warn that we have embarked on a reprehensible course. Failure to abandon that course, the argument goes, will lead either to a future in which reparation for the present will become necessary or—even worse—to a future so misshapen that it will be unable to deplore the injustices that produced it: a legally irreparable future.”8 At the point at which “what has been done cannot be undone,” Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman argue, the option available becomes “embracing the limited scope of the possible in face of the irreparable.”9 Clearly, Johnson believes there is still time to correct course.Both speculative and retrospective, Light Ahead for the Negro confounds narrative convention and disorients its readers repeatedly. Defying chronology, time slows, speeds, and bends in Johnson's novel. The introductory chapter sets the stage for the temporal complexity to come when the airship loses its motor. As the balloon rises, Gilbert's descriptions of time and space are characterized by absences and lack of sensation. He finds the earth “almost indistinguishable,” his feelings “indescribable.” He slowly loses consciousness as the ship “ascend[s] more rapidly every moment. Finally [he becomes] as one dead” (5). Gilbert is rescued and finds himself “reborn” in 2006. “[B]ewildered—[his] brain . . . in a whirl,” he “lapse[s] into a trance-like state” (7). Fanciful at best, the reliability of the narration is questionable from the start.Gilbert, a disoriented traveler and our disoriented narrator, prepares us for what will become the reader's own confusion on the following pages. Structurally, the novel's shifting time frames do not end with Gilbert's arrival in 2006. Timelines continue to shift throughout the novel as Gilbert and Irene tell their stories. When Gilbert speaks, the prose functions as analepsis: a past event narrated at a point no later than its chronological place. In contrast, Irene narrates her past, which was Gilbert's expected future (albeit one which now has become his past!). His past is unattainable, either as a future state to live in or as a past to remember. Whenever readers imagine themselves on solid temporal ground, the timing changes yet again based on the layered and changing narrative voice. The effect of these unstable moments, in part, is to represent the long Reconstruction as its own counterfactual moment. Johnson employs the “what if” of counterfactual fiction to express both his discontent with the present and his hope for racial justice. He works within what Cindy Weinstein calls a “temporal state of possibility.”10Christopher Looby's notion of “the sense of impending” proves useful to make sense of the complex chronology of Light Ahead. This “sense of impending” describes the experience many antebellum Americans shared leading to the Civil War, living in a moment when a crisis loomed. For Looby, this has two elements, a teleological dimension and a “countervailing measure of temporal uncertainty.”11 Put another way, the fact of crisis was inevitable, but its timing was uncertain. This waiting creates a sense of a slow, anxious time, one that refuses immediacy and resolution. One way to mitigate the discomfort of living in this temporal tension, Looby argues, is to imagine a future in which the anticipated crisis will have already occurred and will have already been resolved. Much like the writers Looby discusses, Reconstruction writers and thinkers also lived in the tension of expectancy and anxiety. They often imagined a world not yet fully fulfilled yet partially attained. African American citizenship had been legally granted by the fourteenth amendment, but not fulfilled in practice. Hard-fought voting rights had been won but then suppressed. Johnson's fiction is clearly written from the vantage point of one living in the “sense of impending.” From his own present he projects a future and then reverses course to explain what must happen in order for his “now” to one day be recalled as the precipitating events of a racially just, imagined future.Johnson's formal preoccupation with time extends to Gilbert's discussion of Black citizenship. Gilbert uses temporal language to describe the disenfranchisement and pseudo-citizenship of African Americans at the turn of the century. The complexity of this discussion is compounded as an African American author writes white characters discussing “the negro problem.” Much like his contemporary Charles Chesnutt, Johnson, through the conversation between Dr. Newell and Gilbert, describes a fragile citizenship for African Americans in 1904 that is at the mercy of public opinion. He argues that this reliance on public opinion offers only “an ephemeral existence dependent on the whims and caprices of friends or foes.” Instead, “true citizenship must be deeper than that and be measured by the law of the land—not by the opinion of one's neighbors” (105). Johnson's use of the word “ephemeral” to describe African American citizenship in 1904 challenges the oft-assumed relationship between progress and time.Discussing the decision to grant legal protection to fortify African American citizenship, Gilbert again uses temporal language. He is grateful that by 2006 “the American people have resolved no longer to temporize with measures or men, but [a]re determined to have the government run according to the original design of its founders, upon the principle of the greatest good to the greatest number” (104, emphasis mine). This word “temporize” evokes a double meaning. Defined as either “to avoid making a decision or committing oneself in order to gain time” or “to temporarily adopt a particular course in order to conform to the circumstances,” the word conjures up a sense of a white populace who stalls, hesitates, and delays the rights of full citizenship to African Americans long after they have been legally granted. Learning that in 2006 the African American vote is protected, Gilbert, who is white but cares about racial uplift, is grateful for the “triumph of reason over partisanship and demagoguery” that had “at last been reached” (103), a conclusion that still speculative in Light Ahead, functions not only as a way to citizenship or depict the nature of it also It a of history. a Gilbert time make in people and This of time to the of the historical record works as a warning to white citizens of The his white southern readers that is may be the and the popular of may be later of the The voice at an emphasis on and Johnson's a warning to a world not yet justice. Johnson evokes this sense of time, as when discussing to racial of the When Gilbert Irene if has The Irene as a in with history had not but who lived only in and as of will and between who are on the of history. at this moment Gilbert to in love with of plot, Johnson that can only there has been an of in the Gilbert at Irene's the and for her of for the [he] had been to of over in the of greatest This into as he Irene as his and addition to complex Johnson's generic hybridity challenges the historiography of Reconstruction and his One example is his use of footnotes as a way to back to the record. as are primary in Johnson's His footnotes are often accurate and include actual primary but are to fictional documents in the novel. this way, the footnotes readers and the of how history is by on the rather than the text of the first Johnson uses a is to an example of the of to public with during Reconstruction Among other uses of the he of of Negro and in an to his readers of the for He argues that the of the people the newspaper as because they never between the and the of He then footnotes the of a that would have three African American who for a they did not He also uses these footnotes to from and in the Johnson's footnotes in the contemporary of the time of the novel's the and historiography of of the past, these and between text and subtext as the form subverts historiographic most challenges to be directly the of William who published his on Reconstruction just years before Light Ahead. central on which remained the one for that of the and their in political was a of that the of Johnson an article a and the Negro It argues against the that the of Reconstruction can be on African American argument on several Johnson's complex The “found” document includes a that two and a half pages. The fictional author Congress for to and claims that African American citizenship was by and it African American to the American any more in Congress than the African American citizens are to citizens of and who are also the documents and footnotes white Johnson's Light Ahead to the white southern of from a to full racial the novel a of racial equality in 2006 while a of includes For example, when Gilbert African American the Gilbert that “the of social equality is not He with his own He to do his work and expected to by his In a he that to the Negro an not his Johnson a lengthy about A. A. who against for African Americans at the Johnson claims that will lead to social equality and Johnson to be the scope of his of equality in order to to white southern a of African American fiction written at the time, Johnson's text is with of His novel, the text that often or for a Black Johnson's of white in his textbook and in the rights he for in his career us to the in the novel as to persuade his imagined white southern contemporary of Light Ahead for the Negro published in the on 1904 that Johnson's was in white the “Negro a the that Johnson's novel to that the negro is not by the people of the South, and he also to Dr. and that it was not necessary to use in what is termed negro The on to explain that the novel includes of the of many of the negro In Johnson's has partially the in a way that to to a limited At the time, the not the hybridity of For example, he the novel's of as a particular example of Johnson's of the of many of the negro This written by an Negro from the state of North who and won the by a an chapter of the novel. Entitled “The of the Negro it argues for public schools as an to In a moment that to Griggs’ speech in Imperium in readers would that an would its to the Johnson's text enacts a form of that readers to the of what this as of his own as a socialist Johnson's future looks at It that this is due to the limits of Johnson's or It is more an intended effect of Johnson's and sometimes prose to and persuade white southern readers, while in only to be by African American In addition to this the novel's complexity based on the time of its For readers in the text as a novel describing events beginning two years after its For readers after the novel functions as a counterfactual history narrative, describing the century in often difficult to or While clearly to describe progress as Gilbert as with the past as [he] it to the future that Johnson is still not one in which full citizenship for African text further and complex and generic hybridity all challenge the historiography of Reconstruction by like and like With this novel, Johnson early Black speculative fiction writers Griggs and to of progress in racial in the United the and as Gilbert's time experience in the novel that of its who have lived through Reconstruction and its and in our current moment. He has had the or he lived in two Like the of the past would continually before in with the The word the fact that this novel's in the tension between the past and the future narrative both past events and future events expected to continue. These both and This chronological confusion at and the and of racial in Johnson's in his imagined and at our present moment.