“The Dark Sunshine Aboveground”: Questions of Progress and Migration in Toomer and Ellison

Abstract

James Wheldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man fluctuates between Southern and Northern locales as the narrator is repeatedly drawn back to a place he associates with ancestral origins. However, the profound pull of the region is irrevocably severed when the narrator witnesses the lynching of a black man. Notably, the scene provides the text’s only turn to gothic tropes to emphasize the trauma and monstrosity of the event, and to articulate the ways both the victim’s and narrator’s humanity are negated by the violence. Under the weight of “unbearable shame” (Johnson), the narrator returns to the North and begins to pass for white. Johnson’s travel narrative alludes to the Great Migration in black culture as numerous masses fled from extreme brutality to refashion themselves outside of the racial violence and traditions of the South amid a presumably less destructive Northern culture. Yet, as the protagonist’s determination to bury his blackness and pass upon reaching the North implies, the region offered other problems. It too proved a site of ambivalence and loss as blacks repressed and sacrificed parts of tradition in the hopes of escaping oppression.

As long as you are South of the Canadian border, you are South.

Malcolm X

If anything, black is about the troubled quest for identity and liberty, the agony of social alienation, the longing for a real and at times a mythical home.

Charles S. Johnson, Being and Race