"Alone triumphant": Jack Johnson and American culture from popular melodrama to Faulknerian modernism.
Smalley, Matthew
The elastic ropes surrounding a boxing ring ostensibly demarcate a
site of recreation and entertainment, a comforting enclosure that
isolates a violent spectacle from the rules and orderings of the
everyday. At the most basic level, it is helpful to note that within the
confines of the ring, boxers win bouts by performing actions that would
result in felony charges if they were committed in an ordinary public
space. There is, then, something carnivalesque about a boxing ring
because it is a socially accepted space that creates new rules, licenses
otherwise criminal behavior, creates intersections otherwise
unimaginable in broader society, and, most importantly, offers the
possibility of the temporary reversal of cultural hierarchies. In The
Art and Aesthetics of Boxing (2008), David Scott describes this
temporary disruption of order and its eventual re-establishment as
central to the psychological pleasure derived from boxing or being
spectator to a bout: "the audience usually experiences the same
feeling of relief and acquiescence at the end of the match as the
participants--though the level of intensity of these feelings is
variable--as order and civilization are restored after the alluring but
dangerous detour through the primitive and the primeval that the boxing
match represents or enacts" (Scott xviii). On one hand, then, the
boxing ring frames violence in a manner that allows both participants
and spectators a momentary reprieve from the strictures of the mundane
and offers a safe catharsis for what Freud describes as an innate
aggressive instinct (Freud 58).
On the other hand, the boxing ring fails as an enclosure; it is an
enclosure that is not. Especially, in the early twentieth-century, what
happened in the ring did not stay safely enclosed or insulated, but,
rather, exploded throughout American culture and destabilized
established hierarchies, most notably racial hierarchies. Perhaps the
profound cultural impact of the sport could be anticipated by more
carefully considering the nature of the ring itself. The ring exists not
only in a horizontal relationship to society, cordoning off the violence
from the surrounding space, but also in a vertical relationship to that
culture as a type of pedestal or stage. What happens in the ring also
happens on the canvas, and--like any prominent work of art or highly
visible drama--the conspicuous display reverberates throughout the
culture.
This essay will not only examine melodramatic responses drawn from
popular culture and mass literature surrounding the most highly
publicized interracial boxing matches of the early twentieth century,
but will also explore the surprising influence of interracial boxing on
the high arts. Drawing on Barbara Babcock's claim that "what
is socially peripheral may be symbolically central," I argue that
despite its associations with low culture, boxing occupies a central
position in the symbolic landscape of early twentieth century America,
particularly in terms of racial discourse (qtd. in Stallybrass and White
20). More specifically, I am interested in how the racial oppositions
dramatized by representations of Jack Johnson's most famous
bouts--oppositions we see cast in Manichean terms in popular literature,
media, and discourse--are carried over and re-interpreted in the
modernist painting of George Bellows and the novels of William Faulkner.
Though much has been written about the influence of boxing on the work
of Faulkner's rival, Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner's own
engagement with the sport remains insufficiently theorized. At one level
this is to be expected, because unlike Hemingway, who engages the sport
directly, Faulkner primarily engages boxing through a variety of
maneuvers central the sport itself: feints, dodges, and misdirection. By
locating Faulkner's coded representations of interracial boxing
within his cultural milieu and comparing them with Bellows
representations of the sport, I extend existing analyses of
early-twentieth-century American culture's relationship to
interracial boxing in order to argue that according to these artists,
America's enthrallment with the sport depended significantly on its
inherent commingling of violent competition with forbidden homosexual
and interracial desire.
From 1908 to 1915, Jack Johnson was boxing's heavyweight
champion and the first African-American champion in the sport. His
sports career and personal life generated more popular attention than
any African-American during the first two decades of the twentieth
century (Gilmore 9). Though African-American's were frequently
involved in unofficial prizefighting bouts long before 1908, official
heavyweight boxing remained a "whites-only" affair. Writers
and boxing aficionados celebrated boxing as a sport that demanded both
physical and intellectual superiority, a balance supposedly unavailable
to non-whites. Yet this racist exclusion became increasingly conspicuous
and called into question the accuracy of the title "heavyweight
champion of the world" because while reigning champions boasted of
their prowess and ferocity, they simultaneously voiced concerns about
entering the ring with any non-whites. In a sport where pre-fight
posturing and boasting constitute central rituals of the bout, it
remained difficult not to grow suspicious when John L. Sullivan--the
reigning heavyweight champion in 1892--issued the following boast:
"In this challenge I include all fighters--first come first
served--who are white. I will not fight a negro. I never have and never
shall" (qtd in Gilmore 26). The numerous caveats strip this boast
of its rhetorical force, and transform it into a clear statement of
anxiety. According to Johnson's biographer, Al-Tony Gilmore, the
reluctance to lower the color barrier involved both cultural taboos
about interracial contact during the Jim Crow era and sociopolitical
concerns about what would happen if an African-American won the fight.
Gilmore quotes an outraged spectator of a lower-level interracial bout
that occurred in 1897, saying, "The idea of niggers fighting with
men. Why if that scoundrel would beat that white boy the niggers would
never stop gloating over it, and as it is we have enough trouble with
them" (26).
By 1908, however, the sport was in economic decline due to a
variety of factors. These factors coalesced to create a window through
which Johnson could gain access to a title bout. In 1905, the American
James Jefferies retired from the sport while still holding the
heavyweight title. Jefferies was a talented fighter and an extremely
popular public figure. His retirement led to a decline in public
interest in the sport in the United States, a decline that was
exacerbated by the fact that the fighters who followed him lacked his
talent and charisma (Sammons 34). Additionally, influential social
reform movements decried boxing as uncivilized and barbaric, limiting
the growth of the sport (Gilmore 26). Finally, the champion from 1906 to
1908 was a German-Canadian who went by the name of Tommy Burns, and the
American public had trouble rallying behind a foreign champion. The net
effect of these factors was that boxing had become less profitable to
promoters, fighters, and fight organizers. Additionally, boxing had
become a less valuable news item, and sportswriters began to express
desire for a good fight, for something that would make news and sell
papers (Sammons 35). Jack Johnson had established a reputation as a
dangerous boxer and legitimate heavyweight challenger by 1907. And, in a
somewhat surprising turn of events, sportswriters who had previously
celebrated the "color line" began to call for a Johnson-Burns
title bout.
Sports historian Jeffrey Sammons notes that two distinct opinions
regarding interracial fighting can be detected in the sports writing of
the early twentieth century. First, many writers seemed to hold that
sport was "sacred, isolated from larger society ... [it] provided
an escape from a world dominated by politics, by unfair competition, by
impersonal and uncontrollable forces" (35). This separation between
sport and society was imagined as mutual. That is: sport was isolated
from society, and external society was isolated from the sports world.
Sammons also notes that for many less naive sportswriters, the broader
social implications for the bout were clear. Yet, these sportswriters
promoted the fight because it promised to generate public interest and
sell newspapers. Furthermore, under operating firmly within the racist
cultural value hierarchy of their era, many newspaper writers found it
difficult to imagine that an African-American could defeat a white
heavyweight champion in a fair fight. The intellectual and physical
superiority of whites was, according to Social Darwinian narratives of
race, a scientific fact. Boxing, it is important to remember, was
celebrated as a sport that involved much more than mere application of
force. The sport depended on disciplined footwork, rigorous training,
efficient movements, and tactical acumen. Boxing, thus, functioned as a
display of integrated athleticism, the mind and the body working in
concert to confuse and defeat an opponent. Though some writers expressed
concern that the less-than-spectacular Tommy Burns might be vulnerable,
they affirmed that even if the defiant Johnson won, his reign would be
short-lived. His eminent defeat would "symbolically reaffirm white
racial supremacy ... [and] would serve as a lesson akin to a public
lynching for blacks who did not know their place in American
society" (Sammons 35). A number of American writers who were
growing increasingly concerned about African-American advancement
movements, such as those associated with George Washington Carver and
Booker T. Washington, desired such a display of racial superiority. But,
acting in his economic interest, Burns repeatedly declined to fight
Johnson and, instead, persisted in seeking out easier contenders.
George Herriman took Burns's reluctance to fight Johnson as
the subject of his cartoon published in the LA Examiner on February
19th, 1908 (illus. 1). The comic shows Tommy "The Pugilistic
Alchemist" Burns evading an obsequious Jack Johnson. In the third
frame, Johnson fawningly tells Burns, "Ahse willin' to do mos
anyfing Misto Burns--Ah'll jump ovah de singer buildin' if yo
say so." Burns responds, "Now sir, let us talk things
over." Meanwhile, the small duck--apparently representing the voice
of a boxing-starved American public--encourages Burns, "Take him up
Tommy." In the final frame, however, Johnson sits in a dark room,
his candle burning lower, apparently spurned by Burns again. Though the
comic centers on Burns's reluctance to schedule a bout with
Johnson, this comic is significant because Herriman's
representation of Johnson establishes the primary trope through which
Johnson would be represented in the media throughout most of his career.
Herriman portrays Johnson as a clownish minstrel character, anticipating
the many Sambo cartoons that would appear in newspapers during the years
he held the title (Boddy 182).
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Pressured by the media, the desire for a large payment, and Johnson
himself, Tommy Burns and his management eventually agreed to a bout. The
fight was scheduled to take place in Sydney, Australia on December 26th,
1908. Gilmore astutely observes that by entering the ring, "Johnson
had overcome the most serious obstacle of all previous black aspirants
to the heavyweight title--the 'color line'" (28). The
outcome of the bout itself was never in doubt after the first round.
Johnson taunted Burns throughout the fight. He smiled and joked with the
crowd when he and Burns wrapped each other up. In the ring, Johnson
deliberately defied the pro-Burns crowd and projected an image exactly
opposite to the media's representation of him as deferential and
obsequious. In the fourteenth round Johnson delivered a series of
combinations to Burns's head and body. The local police stepped
into the ring to stop the bout. Prior to their entry to the ring,
however, policemen who had been stationed on the camera platform turned
off the video cameras (Streible 202). Johnson's victory would
certainly lead to cultural unrest, but perhaps that unrest could be
mitigated if footage of the final moments of the bout did not exist.
Predictably, Johnson's victory was viewed as a scandal among
white American culture, but because the pre-fight publicity had been
relatively minor and the bout occurred in Australia, American reactions
were muted in comparison to Johnson's later bouts. Additionally,
unlike subsequent bouts, the Johnson-Burns bout was not initially billed
as a contest for racial superiority. Nevertheless, within days of the
bout Iowa passed legislation banning any public display of the video
footage. Felix Isman, a New York impresario, sought a prohibition
against screening the film arguing that to show them was beneath the
playhouse (Streible 205). Jack London, who sat ringside in Australia,
wrote a famous response to the bout that perpetuated the stereotypical
image of Johnson as a minstrel show actor. London described
Johnson's "golden smile" and wrote that his face
possessed the "happy carefree innocence of a little child"
(qtd. in Boddy 182). London's depiction located Johnson within the
established narrative of "black shiftless gaiety peddled by
'coon songs' popular since before the Civil War" (182).
Combined with the proliferation of racist imagery through comics and the
simultaneous suppression of actual video imagery of Johnson in the ring,
this account sought to shape American culture's imagination of
Johnson. London called for the return of former heavyweight champion Jim
Jefferies and referred to him as the "the great white hope," a
phrase that evokes Kipling's famous call for his readers to take up
the "White Man's Burden" (182). Press coverage of the
victory was scant in most of the major newspapers. And, where the
coverage did exist, the announcement of Johnson's victory was
paired with a direct attack on Johnson's race. For example, the
coverage of the bout in the Dallas Morning News included a cartoon
caricature of Johnson holding both the championship belt and a
watermelon saying, "Golly, old Santy sho' was good to me"
(Gilmore 29).
In the immediate aftermath of the event, African-American reactions
tended toward the opposite direction, but black spokespersons remained
restrained in their celebration. The strongest initial celebrations came
from Johnson's hometowns of Chicago and Galveston, where he was
regarded more as a local hero than a racial exemplar. An important
exception to this general restraint was The Richmond Planet, an
African-American weekly newspaper that underscored the racial
significance of the event (Illus. 2). The bold-print headline of the
January 2nd, 1909 publication reads "A Southern Negro is the
Heavyweight Champion of the World. Jack Johnson of Galveston, Tex
defeats Tommy Burns. Graphic Description of Contest. Victor Challenges
All Comers. No First Class Pugilist As Yet Ready to Meet Him. Jefferies
Says He Would Not Fight Him For A Million Dollars." The article
specifically highlights how Johnson confused Burns with his brilliant
footwork and mocked him throughout the fight. Additionally, the Planet
article obscures the individuality of Johnson and Burns and, instead,
portrays the fighters as racial icons. For example, the description of
the thirteenth round refers to the boxers as "the colored man"
and "the white man": "Blow after blow the colored man
rained upon him, and the gong alone saved the white man from defeat, for
he was reeling and groggy as it rang" (Planet 8).
In her insightful study Boxing: A Cultural History, Kasia Boddy
notes that almost as soon as the bout was over the search for an
Anglo-American boxer who could beat Johnson began. Theodore Roosevelt,
who had advocated boxing and linked it with ideal masculinity, invited a
former champion to the White House to discuss which white fighters stood
the best chance of defeating Johnson (204). The heavyweight title had
apparently become an issue of concern for the executive office.
Initially, however, the search for the next "Great White Hope"
progressed with much seriousness but little urgency. However, in the
year following his victory over Burns, Johnson easily defeated five
white challengers. By 1909, anxiety over Johnson's success had
escalated considerably. This anxiety grew in proportion to
Johnson's remarkable financial success, his habit of flaunting his
wealth, and his penchant for dating white women. Upon his return to
America he purchased luxury automobiles and hired a white chauffeur. A
1909 comic strip entitled "Incidents of Jack Johnson's Trip To
Vancouver Pictured By Fitzmaurice" captures white anxiety regarding
Johnson (Illus. 3). The image shows a well-dressed Johnson being waited
on by a variety of assistants and driven through Vancouver by his white
chauffeur. Clearly, these first two images are designed to engender
outrage among the reader because the final image shows Jim
Jefferies--the retired undefeated champion who was widely regarded as
the white man most capable of defeating Johnson--sitting in a bathtub,
reading a paper, unconscionably unconcerned about the fact that a black
man owned the title belt.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Both print and visual media began to deploy the familiar
conventions of melodrama in order to provide a narrative in which white
America could locate Johnson's disturbing rise to fame. Luckily for
sportswriters of the era, boxing proves quite accommodating to such a
narrative. After all, the canvas is a type of stage. In Melodrama and
the Myth of America, Jeffrey Mason argues that "the essential
function of melodrama is to polarize its constituents, whatever they may
be--male and female, East and West, civilization and wilderness, and
most typically, good and evil" (16). Melodrama demands a Manichean
vision precisely because the pleasure of melodrama depends on the
triumph of a threatened cultural value over an outside menace. Melodrama
insists on clarifying the nature of oppositional moral forces in order
that virtuous or good forces might be celebrated as the drama reveals
"the nature of virtue" (17). According to Mason," [t]he
absolute imperative of melodrama is the restoration of the moral,
social, and domestic order--and consequently, the reassurance of the
audience--by subjecting its characters to a high degree of risk and
uncertainty and then lifting them out of danger" (17). This impulse
for conservative restoration deeply structures American melodrama and
the imagination of its audience. Within this familiar structure, an
iconoclastic villain might be read as a guarantee of future social
restoration, especially when a virtuous hero arrives on the scene. A
Popular Pastime (illus. 4) promotes precisely this narrative. Johnson
grins menacingly at a host of inept Anglo challengers, a clear
disruption of the white social order. In the foreground of the image,
however, James Jefferies contemplates challenging Johnson. The young
child, a symbol of the innocence that must be protected by the
'good man,' pushes him forward, saying, "Go on Jeff be a
sport and hit the coon."
The public outcry for Jefferies to challenge Johnson intensified
tremendously during the remainder of the year. Somewhat reluctantly,
Jefferies agreed to fight Johnson and repeatedly identified himself as
fighting with the purpose of restoring dignity to the white race
(Sammons 37). The press carefully documented Jefferies's intense
training regimen as he sought return to his fighting weight. They also
documented Johnson's comparatively nonchalant training and
interpreted it as proof positive of the intellectual inferiority
inherent to his race (Gilmore 37). The fight was scheduled to take place
in Reno, Nevada on the Fourth of July, 1910. The significance of the
date was not lost on the American public. Either Johnson would validate
the independence and freedom of black Americans, or Jefferies would
re-establish the superiority of the Anglo race, liberating his people
from Johnson's reign. White sportswriters predicted the latter
result, suggesting that Jefferies "had Runnymede and Agincourt
behind him, while Johnson had nothing but the jungle" (qtd. in
Boddy 182). Writers continued to narrate the bout as a living melodrama,
and precisely because of this narration a white victory seemed
inevitable. A popular song entitled "Jim-a-da-Jeff" evinces
the pre-fight racial hysteria and confidence. The song is written in a
faux-Italian dialect common in Vaudeville Theater, and the female
speaker of the song tells the challenger to:
Commence right away to get into condish,
An' you punch-a da bag-a day and night,
An'-a din pretty soon, when you meet-a da coon,
You knock-a him clear-a out-a sight.
Who give-a da Jack Jonce one-a little tap?
Who make-a him take-a one big-a long nap?
Who wipe-a da Africa off-a da map?
It's da Jim-a-da-Jeff. (Sammons 38)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The song not only underscores the racial lens through which many
Americans viewed the bout, but it also reveals hostility toward the
entire continent of Africa. The fact that Johnson was born in Galveston,
Texas counted for little in terms of national belonging, apparently.
Though some members of the black press distanced themselves from
Johnson, many black leaders rallied behind Johnson and compared his
fight to the larger black struggle against oppression. Reverend Reverdy
Ransom, a Chicago clergyman, responded to the support another pastor
gave to Jefferies by saying, "what Jack Johnson seeks to do to
Jefferies in the roped arena will be more the ambition of Negroes in
every domain of human endeavor" (qtd. in Sammons 39). The
fight's promoter, Tex Rickard, capitalized on the power of race to
excite the American audience and explicitly described the fight as a
contest for racial superiority (Boddy 182). He asked President Howard
Taft to referee the match. Taft declined. Rickard then extended the
invitation to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who also declined. Eventually,
Rickard named himself the referee.
The bout was billed as "The Fight of the Century," and
certainly no boxing match held more cultural significance for America.
The actual fight itself, however, failed to live up to its billing. When
Johnson approached the ring for the bout, the band delighted the
pro-Jefferies crowd by playing "All Coons Look Alike to Me"
(Gilmore 42). It was likely the highlight of the day for Jefferies'
supporters. Johnson controlled the bout, and in the fifteenth round
Johnson knocked Jefferies out of the ring. Jefferies's corner threw
in the towel in order to protect him from further harm or embarrassment.
As Boddy notes, after Johnson's decisive victory, "assertions
of white supremacy suddenly seemed a lot less certain" (183).
Furthermore, Jefferies's defeat violated the deterministic
structures of melodrama, leaving "evil" unpunished and a
"menace" on the loose. As Mason says, according to the
conventions of the genre, "'Good' is the world as it
should be, stable, safe, and at rest, while 'evil' sends the
planet hurtling uncontrollably toward some ineffable future" (18).
For many white Americans, their culture seemed suddenly to be in a state
of upheaval.
Across America, crowds gathered near telegraph machines to hear the
result. When Johnson's victory was announced, a rash of racially
motivated violence spread throughout numerous cities. In Houston, a
black man who was celebrating the fight had his throat slit by a white
man; in Delaware some blacks attacked a group of whites who returned the
aggression with 'a lynching bee'; in Pueblo, Colorado, thirty
people sustained injuries due to a race riot; in New York, a black man
was beaten to death; in Shreveport, Louisiana, white assailants killed
three black men (Guttman 119). Historians estimate that injuries
sustained in these riots numbered in the thousands (Gilmore 61). In a
cartoon published in the wake of these riots, a stick of dynamite
gestures toward a group of rioters and says, "I couldn't have
caused half so much damage!" (Illus. 5). The visual rhetoric is
noteworthy, however, because black men brandishing weapons occupy the
center of the riot and all the injured men are white. The record of
African-American fatalities, however, suggests a different reality.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Several newspapers also utilized print media in an attempt to shore
up America's threatened racial value hierarchy. On July 6, 1910,
the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial titled "The Fight and Its
Consequences" that demanded that African-Americans forget that for
the past six months the bout had been described as a contest of racial
superiority:
Even if it were a matter of great racial import, the whites can
afford the reflection that it is at best only a triumph of brawn over
brain, not of brain over brawn. The black pugilist may be able to
deliver stunning blows, but the stupidest mule in Missouri can hit
harder ... Pugilism and civilization bear no direct connection, but are
inverse in ratio ... In war (a vastly higher type of conflict) there are
those who consider the African fresh from the jungle the making of the
best soldier in the world. But the question is, how would they fare in
battle commanded by one of their own race with an army of Europeans
under the leadership of Napoleon, Gen. Grantor Von Moltke ... [The white
man's] superiority does not rest on any huge bulk of muscle, but on
brain development that has weighed worlds and charmed the most subtle
secrets from the heart of nature ... and now a word to the black man. Do
not point your nose to high. Do not swell your chest too much. Do not
boast to loudly ... Remember you have done nothing at all. You are just
the same member of society today you were last week. Your place in the
world is just what it was. You are on no higher plane, deserve no new
consideration and will get none ... If you have ambition for yourself or
your race, you must try for something better in development than that of
a mule. (Los Angeles Times II4)
But, to many blacks, such rearguard defenses fell on deaf ears. The
bout disproved the Darwinian narrative of race, and many
African-Americans saw Johnson as a messianic and liberatory figure. A
postcard from 1910 links Jack Johnson with Abraham Lincoln, identifying
them as the heroes of the African-American people (Boddy 184).
Similarly, southern folk song tradition tacitly suggested that
Johnson's victory was tantamount to religious salvation:
Amaze an' Grace, how sweet it sounds,
Jack Johnson knocked Jim Jefferies down.
Jim Jefferies jumped up an' hit Jack on the chin.
An' then Jack knocked him down agin.
The Yankees hold the play,
The white man pull the trigger;
But it makes no difference what the white man say,
The world champion's still a nigger, (qtd in Boddy 190)
Sung to the tune of "Amazing Grace," the song captured
the outpouring of racial pride that the event occasioned. Despite the
fact that southern blacks remained deeply aware of their sociopolitical
oppression, the song suggests that in Jack Johnson's victory they
had something that even the whites "who hold the play" could
not control.
The claim was true in terms of the psychological and cultural
impact of Johnson's championship; however, in the years following
the Reno bout the American legal system actively sought to circumscribe
Johnson's impact on culture in two ways. First, the film for the
Jefferies-Johnson fight was banned in all southern states, and many
northern cities. As Dan Strieble shows in his meticulously detailed
analysis of this reactionary film suppression, within a day of the bout
the movement to prohibit images of the fight had become a national
crusade (222). Numerous Christian reform groups spearheaded the
movement. These groups found allies in the national press and the
legislative branch. Chicago, Johnson's hometown, upheld the ban
citing its consistency with "the 1907 ordinance forbidding
'obscene and immoral kinetoscopes and cinematographs'"
(Strieble 230). Secondly, in 1913, the federal government charged
Johnson with a violation of the Mann Act, a law that prohibited the
interstate transportation of women for immoral purposes. The law was
intended to deter vice rings, but Johnson was a cultural threat perhaps
only slightly less concerning than the mob. Belle Schrieber served as
the key witness for the prosecution. Schrieber was a prostitute at one
of the most elite brothels of the early twentieth century, the Everleigh
Club. She and Johnson had maintained a relationship from 1909 to 1911.
After he ended the relationship, she was willing to provide the
government with the information it needed to gain a conviction.
Johnson's relationships with white women--especially his wife,
Lucille Cameron--had long been widely criticized, especially by
conservatives in the American south. Indeed, Johnson and Cameron's
intermarriage was mentioned specifically in a 1912 congressional hearing
regarding introducing a federal ban to interracial marriages (Gilmore
108). At the sentencing, Judge George Carpenter said, "This
defendant is one of the best known men of his race, and his example has
been far-reaching, and the Court is bound to consider the position he
occupied among his people" (qtd. in Gilmore 119). Carpenter
sentenced Johnson to a year and a day in federal prison. Johnson and his
wife fled the country, and did not return to America until 1915.
Johnson's escape embarrassed federal authorities, but Jefferey
Sammons notes that despite this embarrassment "one major objective
had been accomplished: Johnson had been removed from American society.
An unfair, racist system had done what no individual could--remove that
golden smile from Jack Johnson's face" (41).
The victory of the racist legal system was a cause for celebration
in some American cities, but the fact that the victory happened in a
courtroom rather than a boxing ring ensured that the racial anxiety that
Johnson's victories engendered remained active. A comic from 1913
captures this sense of the shallowness of the legal victory (Illus. 6).
The drawing shows a disembodied arm labeled "Federal Court"
delivering a knockout punch to Jack Johnson. This image provides a
fitting end to this study of how the popular press translated
interracial fighting into racial melodrama, because the victory of
America over Jack Johnson was hardly the dramatic reinstatement of
domestic, social, and moral order demanded by melodrama. Johnson had
publicly revealed contemporary 'scientific' narratives of
white racial superiority to be false. For many--though certainly not
all--African-Americans, his actions in the ring qualified him as an
enduring folk hero. White American culture, however, remained perplexed
and haunted by his legacy.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In his study Negroes in America (1923), Claude McKay discusses the
lingering damage Johnson's victory over Jefferies inflicted on the
communal psyche of white America. According to McKay, the "American
bourgeoisie never could forgive the insult which was done to its dignity
by a black man" (54). Similarly, in Black Boy (1937), Richard
Wright observes that Jack Johnson is one of four men that southern
whites do not mention when in the presence of southern blacks (252;
Boddy 180). Notably, the other three unspeakable names are Ulysses S.
Grant, Abraham Lincoln, and General Sherman. Thus far, my attempt to
provide a cultural history of Jack Johnson has focused on melodramatic
images, songs, and newsprint related to his career. I now wish to turn
toward the ways that Jack Johnson's legacy had a deep impact on one
of the most important American authors of the twentieth century: William
Faulkner. Faulkner's fiction emerges out of the southern culture
that Wright describes, a culture committed to repressing Johnson's
legacy. In Faulkner's fiction, the repressed returns--as Freud
argues it must--in transmuted forms. Though Johnson's career became
the centerpiece of a polarizing racial melodrama that captivated early
twentieth-century America, in Faulkner's novels, Johnson's
career does not suggest a Manichean opposition between black and white.
Rather, for Faulkner, interracial boxing suggests a radical and
unsettling fusion of the races. Indeed, this fusion is so thorough and
intense that interracial boxing becomes linked to both homosexual and
interracial desire.
Faulkner's most obvious engagement with interracial boxing
occurs in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), a novel focused on anxieties
regarding miscegenation. Throughout the novel, various narrators attempt
to account for the sudden rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a man from a
poor mountain community in West Virginia who becomes a plantation owner
in antebellum Mississippi. At the end of the first chapter, the outraged
narrator describes Sutpen's disregard for the racial segregation
when he engages in interracial fighting, a ritual that apparently had
been going on for the previous six years. The narrator, Rosa Coldfield,
provides the account based on the testimony of her sister and Thomas
Sutpen's wife, Ellen. Ellen enters the stable and sees:
... down there in the stable a hollow square of faces in the
lantern light, the white faces on three sides, the black ones on
the fourth, and in the center two of his wild negroes fighting,
naked, fighting not like white men fight, with rules and
weapons, but like negroes fight to hurt one another quick and
bad. Ellen knew that, or thought she did; that was not it. She
accepted that--not reconciled: accepted--as though there is
a breathing-point in outrage where you can accept it almost
with gratitude since you can say to yourself, Thank God this is
all; at least I know all of it ... (20).
At this point in the narrative, Ellen discovers that her husband
has been organizing fights between his slaves, a practice that
contemporary boxing historian Paul Magriel identifies as common in the
antebellum south (Sammons 32). Efforts to distinguish such unofficial
prizefights from official boxing matches remained unsuccessful well into
the twentieth century (Wiggins 7). Faulkner's imagery recalls an
early-twentieth century boxing ring, not merely a crudely organized
prizefight. The fighters stand in the center of a 'hollow
square' of light. Furthermore, they are unnaturally surrounded by a
square of men, with the black men forming one of the four sides,
suggesting a segregated seating section of a boxing venue. Though
clearly outraged, Ellen accepts this practice, and expresses gratitude
that she knows where her husband had been going in the evenings.
However, sometime later she returns to the stable because she cannot
find her children and fears that Sutpen allowed them to follow him to
the fights. She enters the stable and sees:
... Not the two black beasts she had expected to see but
instead a white one and a black one, both naked to the waist
and gouging at one another's eyes as if their skins should not
only have been the same color but should have been covered
with fur too. Yes. It seems that on certain occasions, perhaps
at the end of the evening, the spectacle, as a grand finale
or perhaps as a matter of sheer deadly forethought toward
the retention of supremacy, domination, he would enter the
ring with one of the negroes himself. Yes. That is what Ellen
saw: her husband and the father of her children standing
there naked and panting and bloody and the negro just fallen
evidently, lying at his feet and bloody too save that on the
negro it merely looked like grease or sweat ... (21).
If McKay and Wright are right--as I believe they are--that
Johnson's victory remained a trauma for white America (especially
in the South), it is possible to identify Thomas Sutpen as a fantasy of
a victorious "great white hope." But, Sutpen's victory
remains significantly less central to this passage than his
transgression against his culture's prohibition against racial
integration, a transgression that suggests a union with the black
combatant. Doreen Fowler astutely points out that Rosa's syntax, a
telling parapraxis, insinuates a merging of races: "[Rosa] does not
say, 'he himself would enter the ring with one of the
negroes.' Rather, by saying, 'would enter the ring with one of
the negroes himself,' Miss Rosa seems to identify Sutpen as one of
the negroes" (110). Fowler does not link this specifically to
boxing culture, however, or the surprising way that boxing--a sport
seeming dependent on binary oppositions--becomes an analogue for sexual
union. Kasia Boddy does link this scene to interracial boxing, but
describes Rosa's description as relying on "a kind of demonic
Darwinian imagery" (202). The text does suggest animalistic
violence, a return to the primal struggle of "red tooth and
nail." But, Rosa's narration also depends on overtly sexual
imagery, and it, therefore, records the anxiety of illicit sexual union.
Indeed, the brutality and sexuality depend on each other. The text
repeatedly underscores the combatants' nudity; their repeated
gouging at each other suggests sexual penetration; they exchange bodily
fluids and must wipe these off after the fight is over; and finally,
Sutpen pants exhaustedly at the end of the bout while his partner lays
at his feet looking as if he's covered in sweat. My reading of this
scene strengthens Boddy's claim that this passage foreshadows the
"terror" that propels the narrators as they attempt to
recreate Sutpen's history, "the terror that one cannot tell
black from white" (202). However, I want to go further than Boddy
does to suggest that in this scene interracial fighting not only
"prefigures" the novel's obsession with interracial sex,
but, in fact, displays interracial fighting as an inherently sexual act.
Boddy perceptively connects this passage to the moment in the novel when
Rosa herself has physical contact with Sutpen's mixed race
daughter, Clytie. Rosa's comment provides the novel's clearest
articulation of a similarly between violent and erotic physical contact.
According to Rosa, both types of contact temporarily collapse social
hierarchies created by culture and language:
I know only that my entire being seemed to run at blind full tilt
into something monstrous and immobile, with a shocking impact too soon
and too quick to be mere amazement and outrage at that black arresting
and untimorous hand on my white woman's flesh. Because there is
something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp
and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering,
which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both: touch
and touch of that which is the citadel of the I-Am's private own:
not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to
take in any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh
touch flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste
and color too. (111-112, italics mine)
A similar connection between interracial fighting and interracial
sex also informs Go Down, Moses (1940). In "The Fire and the
Hearth," Zack Edmonds, the white heir of the McCaslin family, has
been living with Lucas Beauchamp's wife, Molly. Lucas and Molly are
both black. Lucas decides to avenge the dishonor done to him by Zack and
Molly's affair. He enters Zack's house in the morning, armed
with a razor. He enters the white man's bedroom and sees Zack
sleeping with his neck exposed. Zack awakes, and the men begin talking.
Zack demands that Lucas puts down the razor. Lucas throws the razor
across the room and responds, "I don't need no razor. My
nekkid hands will do" (52). Throughout their confrontation, the
narrative oscillates between describing the men as individual subjects
and avatars of their race. The men eventually decide to have a duel
wherein a single pistol is laid in the center of Zack's bed. They
begin to grapple with each other. Using his left hand, Lucas breaks free
from Zack's grip and delivers a punch with his right fist. Lucas
gains the pistol, but hesitates to pull the trigger. As they face each
other across a bed:
The white man sprang, hurling himself across the bed, grasping at
the pistol and the hand that held it. Lucas sprang too; they met over
the center of the bed where Lucas clasped the other with his left arm
almost like an embrace and jammed the pistol against the white
man's side and pulled the trigger and flung the white man from him
all in one motion, hearing as he did so the light, dry, incredibly loud
click of the miss-fire. (56, italics mine)
For my purposes, what is most important in this passage is the
image of the fighting men embracing on top of the bed. I contend that
the mattress metaphorically suggests a canvas. But, of course, the bed
also remains a bed, and as such suggests sexual union. The fighting
action itself recalls boxers' attempts to "wrap up" their
opponent, a counterintuitive move in which embracing the other combatant
is a means of defense. Robert Haywood describes this maneuver and
observes, "Not all of boxing is forceful or violent. There are
moments of pause and rest when two boxers, exhausted or seeking
protection, lean on and embrace each other in support. In boxing, these
moments of touch and intimacy are countered by regained energy and more
powerful blows" (13).
As in Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner's narration of interracial
fighting draws heavily on boxing imagery in order to highlight the
erotic nature the sport. This commingling of sport and eroticism should
not surprise us because boxing, like many rituals, "is highly
eroticized and engages the viewers on a number of levels, not all of
which are in the heat of the action consciously apprehended" (Scott
xxxi). Similarly, Haywood suggests that boxing involves an inherent
"confusion of brutality and sexuality in which the former hides the
later ... the homoeroticism that boxing attempts to escape is
inescapably built into the action" (14). Faulkner insists on
revealing the variety of desires that powerfully, but often
unconsciously, enthrall boxing spectators. In Absalom, Absalom! and Go
Down, Moses, he reveals that part of interracial boxing's appeal
lies not only the displacement of homoerotic desire but also of
interracial desire.
George Bellow's Both Members of the Club (1909) offers a
helpful comparison to this passage from Go Down, Moses. Bellows, one of
the masters of twentieth-century American realism, famously chose boxing
as subject for a number of his most controversial and celebrated works.
Boxing provided Bellows with an atmosphere in which he could explore the
human form in motion, and it offered him rich culture in which he could
explore the imbrications of violence, sexuality, gender, and voyeurism.
In 1922 Bellows wrote: "A fight particularly under the night light,
is of all sports the most classically picturesque. It is the only
instance in everyday life where the nude figure is displayed" (qtd
in Haywood 8). His violent brush strokes replicate the brutality and
energy of the sport. As is typical of Bellows's boxing paintings in
this period, the fighters' individuality is minimized. Their locked
arms obscure their faces. The composition privileges neither fighter
over the other; rather, the painting emphasizes their simultaneous
conflict and contact. Like Lucas and Zack, they are clasped in what is
"almost an embrace." The boxers' bodies form a triangle,
and their locked wrists are the primary focus point of the image.
Interestingly, however, Bellows does paint the faces of the
spectators. Many of the men are smiling or cheering; the faces of the
spectators on the far left of the painting are red, suggesting their
participation in the bloody ritual. Bellows emphasizes these faces in
order to examine the relationships between sports spectatorship,
voyeurism, pleasure, and violence. Art critic Robert Haywood argues that
Bellows's representation of spectatorship implies that "the
boxing match is an acting out, a sadomasochistic fantasy made real"
(12). By composing the painting in this manner Bellows means to make the
viewer a spectator to the bout. Like Faulkner, Bellows implies that
America's fascination with boxing is multi-layered, a spectacle
that appeals to an audience precisely because it allows for the
displacement of a variety of forbidden desires.
Interestingly, Go Down, Moses also includes Faulkner's most
direct engagement with historical boxing champions. In "The
Bear," a young Ike McCaslin notes that Boon Hogganback and several
men on the train "talked about Lion and Old Ben as people later
would talk about Sullivan and Kilrain and, later still about Dempsey and
Tunney" (220). What the men do not say in this exchange seizes the
attention of literary critics interested in the relationship between
sport and culture. The omission recorded in this text is as revealing as
the text's explicit import. In 1889, John Sullivan beat Jake
Kilrain in the last bare knuckle boxing championship. Sullivan went on
to become a major celebrity of the late nineteenth century. Almost forty
years later, in 1927, Jack Dempsey lost to Gene Tunney in a
controversial bout known as "The Battle of the Long Count."
Dempsey was the most popular heavyweight champion of the two decades
following Jack Johnson. This passage in Go Down, Moses is important for
two reasons. First, it shows Faulkner's awareness of approximately
forty years of boxing history. Secondly, the passage is important
because Ike records the ways that discussions of boxing history in the
south evade the most significant bout during of that forty-year period:
the Johnson-Jefferies fight of 1910. In recording this culturally
convenient history of boxing, Faulkner confirms the Wright's claim
that southern whites repressed the memory of Jack Johnson.
Finally, in Light in August (1932), Faulkner explores the
relationship between interracial fighting and interracial sexual
prohibition. In Light in August, Joe Christmas, a man of ambiguous
racial identity, continually struggles against white prejudice, and his
struggles often evoke Jack Johnson's career. Though the scope of
the present study precludes an extended reading of Joe Christmas's
narrative as Faulkner's meditation on Jack Johnson, such a reading
would undoubtedly enrich our understanding of the novel and the ways
that modernist fiction sought to engage Johnson's remarkable
career. Light in August differs from the two novels discussed above
because the fighting itself is not portrayed in sexual terms. However,
interracial sex and interracial fighting exist in a cyclical
relationship in which each perpetuates the other. In a key scene in the
novel, Joe's adopted father, a severe Calvinist named Mr.
McEachern, discovers that Joe has lied to him. McEachern's anger
relates primarily to what he believes is Joe's habit of
"whoring" (164). The one-sided confrontation that follows
recalls the imagery of a boxing match, especially as it describes the
men as beginning the confrontation "toe-to-toe":
And then [McEachern] acknowledged that the child whom
he had adopted twelve years ago was a man. Facing him, the
two of them almost toe to toe, he struck Joe with his fist ... Joe
took the first two blows; perhaps from habit, perhaps
from surprise. But he took them, feeling twice the man's hard
fist crash into his face. Then he sprang back, crouched, licked
blood, panting. They faced one another. 'Don't you hit me
again,' he said (164-165).
Despite the fact that Joe does not return McEachern's blows,
he issues a challenge that echoes the mantra of the 'New
Negro': "when he gets hit, he hits back." Numerous
writers identified Jack Johnson as the first 'New Negro'
(Boddy 189). Later, when McEachern discovers his son dancing with a
white prostitute and flaunting his money, he imagines himself as an
avatar of divine justice and his son as some sort of demon:
"Perhaps they were not even his hands which struck at the face of
the youth whom he had nurtured and sheltered and clothed from a child,
and perhaps when the face ducked the blow and came up again it was not
the face of the child" (204-205). McEachern advances on Joe with
his fist raised, but Joe strikes back and hits McEachern with a chair.
As he rides away from the scene of the crime, Christmas exalts at
"having put behind him now at once and for all the Shall Not, of
being free at last of honor and law ... He cried aloud 'I have done
it! I have done it! I told them I would!"' (207). Like Jack
Johnson, Joe follows his victory over the symbol of white authority in
his world with numerous relationships with white women, one similar to a
common-law marriage and the others involving white prostitutes.
Yet--again like Johnson--neither Joe's fistic skill nor his
wealth can protect him from a culture in which "the white man pulls
the trigger." At the end of the novel, Joe is murdered and
castrated by a fanatical national guardsman, an embodiment of
prejudicial American law. His murderer justifies the violence by saying
it is necessary for the protection of white women. But, his wrongful
murder does not mark the end of Joe's impact on culture. Several
members of the community gather around Joe as he's dying and as he
passes away "the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories
forever and ever. They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys,
beside whatever placid streams of old age ... It will be there, musing,
quiet, steadfast, not fading, not particularly threatful, but of itself
alone serene, of itself alone triumphant" (465). Thus, the
narrative records a curious ascension as Joe transitions from the realm
of the everyday to the realms of myth and memory.
This study enriches existing studies of Jack Johnson's impact
on American culture by focusing on the ways that through print and
visual media, his career became the subject of a racialized melodrama
that ended up defying the central imperative of that genre, namely: the
restoration of a previously existing social order. Thus, Johnson's
legacy became especially problematic for white Americans who struggled
to understand his career within existing narratives of race. Yet, that
troubling memory of the black man who was "alone triumphant"
generated a surprising variety of responses, including William
Faulkner's meditations on the linkage between interracial fighting
and interracial sex. Of course, Faulkner was not alone among writers of
serious fiction in responding to this cultural event, and, if
successful, this essay will suggest further and deeper investigations of
Johnson's influence on other writers and artists. The most
interesting areas for future research, it seems to me, would be
Johnson's enduring influence on black writers and artists. Though
other critics, most notably Kasia Boddy, have begun to trace the
influence of Johnson on movements such as the Harlem Renaissance, these
studies could certainly be amplified and extended to include much later
dates in American history. What, for example, should scholars of
American culture make of Miles Davis's decision to title his 1971
album "A Tribute to Jack Johnson"? Flow does the meaning of
Johnson's career change shape as it moves through various artistic
forms, literary genres, and moments in American history? The career of
Jack Johnson constitutes of the central narratives of race and culture
in early twentieth-century America, and scholars of American culture and
literature continue to be impressed by how deeply that narrative shapes
so many of the stories we have told and the stories we continue to tell.
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Caption: Illus. 1 George Herriman, 1908: "Tommy Burns,
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Caption: Illus. 2. The Richmond Planet, January 2, 1909
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Caption: Illus. 6. John Campbell Cory, 1912: "At Last!
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