LaVilla: Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing Park

by Tim Gilmore, 11/24/2023

cont’d from James Weldon Johnson’s Birthplace and Home

Now, along one berm, the phrase “Lift Ev’ry Voice” rises toward the corner that descends into “And Sing.” A century and more moves over this site since James Weldon Johnson and Paul Laurence Dunbar stay up late arguing about dialect poetry here in Johnson’s home. The main line of the poem Jim writes in the year 1899 that his brother John Rosamond Johnson, Rosy, sets to music courses in giant letters where the brothers lived their early lives. The song becomes known as “the Black National Anthem.” Johnson cries when he writes the words.

A single LaVilla shotgun house, one of thousands of such structures that once made themselves home in this city, stands lifted on a moving truck, yet to be refurbished and set.

Nobody knows now, in 2023, just what the Johnson house looks like in 1871, or 1901, the first house or the replacement where Dunbar stays, but Augustus Koch’s highly accurate hand-drawn maps provide good clues. The fact that a shotgun house, that icon of Black Vernacular architecture, will inhabit this park, echoes a poetic populism that both Johnson and Dunbar aim for in writing “dialect.”

What would Jim think, having argued with Paul right here and watched his performances nearby, to see the design for this park at his birthplace? What would he think of the fact of landscape architect Walter Hood’s Blackness, of his being from the South, of his stature in the world of the arts in the early 21^st century?

And will the next artists in Hood’s tracks, and Johnson’s, make their way in the South, instead of – for Hood – Oakland, California, and – for the Johnson brothers – the New York of the Harlem Renaissance? Maybe even in a place like Jax? That James Weldon Johnson left Jacksonville after nearly being lynched, either at Riverside Park or the “picnic grounds” that would soon become Memorial Park, tops a list of hundreds of artists and writers and musicians who left this town to make it elsewhere.

Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing Park lies waiting this Sunday morning, under construction, dewy in hot Florida November. A couple of older white men with pony tails and baseball caps sweep the site with metal detectors. One of them says he’s found Civil War bullets and 19^th century coins here before, but nothing this morning.

Hood designs LEVS Park amidst a trend in architecture and public sculpture that makes words into landscape, text into texture. It’s the inverse of what I argue perpetually for my own work – that the landscape overflows with narratives, that at every moment stories surround you far more than do buildings, or trees, or any other visible objects. So also say sculptural projects like Hood’s Witness Walls in Nashville or Cliff Garten’s I Am a Man Plaza in Memphis.

I walk, this morning, this grassy berm, looking out over these belated landscape letters, this poetry made three-dimensional, finally, at long last, in a neighborhood city leaders sought to erase entirely. I walk and I run my hand along the letters of the most famous poem ever written in my hometown. I stand atop the word “Sing.” I lay down on “Voice.” I run my fingers into the void where an apostrophe should be. (Johnson placed it; so should we.) I move amongst the words of this city’s poet, the South’s poet, Black people’s and America’s poet, like I usually do a house or old steel and limestone skyscraper or long lost ruin or garden.

Even after Johnson’s and Dunbar’s conversations about dialect poetry here at his house, Johnson publishes dialect lines in his 1917 ‘Fifty Years’ and Other Poems – “I’m back down in ole Georgy w’ere de sun is shinin’ hot, / W’ere de cawn it is a-tasslin’, gittin’ ready fu’ de pot.” Or, even worse: “De little pickaninny’s gone to sleep, / Cuddled in his trundle bed so tiny, / De little pickaninny’s gone to sleep, / Closed his little eyes so bright an’ shiny.”

The same collection, however, details the gruesome crimes of lynching a Black man and picking souvenirs off the man’s burnt corpse, and elsewhere has Johnson’s speaker crying out, “O black slave singers, gone, forgot, unfamed, / You — you alone, of all the long, long line / Of those who’ve sung untaught, unknown, unnamed, / Have stretched out upward, seeking the divine.” Yet even that poem, “O Black and Unknown Bards,” troubles its own premise, ending by defining the value of those lost anonymous poets, enslaved in America, as missionaries to the pagan African: “You sang a race from wood and stone to Christ.”

A decade later, when Johnson publishes God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, he addresses dialect poetry in his preface, writing, “At first thought, Negro dialect would appear to be the precise medium for these old-time sermons: however, as the reader will see, the poems are not written in dialect.” Johnson, surely with Dunbar in mind, says, “Traditional Negro dialect as a form for Aframerican poets is absolutely dead.”

In his 1933 autobiography, Johnson writes, “No Negro poets are today writing the poetry that 25 years ago was considered their natural medium of expression.”

In the Trombones preface, Johnson points first to the birth of dialect poetry in minstrelsy, then says “the Aframerican poet” still “needs to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without,” something “freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor.” The first of his experiments toward that form, he writes, is the poem, “The Creation.”

Walter Hood chooses these lines from that poem to reside on the side of that relocated shotgun house: “As far as the eye of God could see / Darkness covered everything, / Blacker than a hundred midnights / Down in a cypress swamp.”

And though Jim’s debates with Paul late at night in that long gone house on this very site change Johnson’s artistic trajectory, help pivot him into the writer he’s becoming, Black writers keep grappling with the question of Black voice. White writers, meanwhile, are not white; they’re Hoosier or Yankee or Southern, or Irish or French or English. Or, most blissfully, just writers.

In 1937, Black novelist Richard Wright criticizes Zora Neale Hurston’s dialogue in her great novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Wright, author most famously of the 1940 novel Native Son and ’45 memoir Black Boy, argues that Hurston’s dialogue “voluntarily continues in the novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes ‘the white folks’ laugh.”

The next year, Hurston, criticizing Wright’s fiction collection Uncle Tom’s Children, writes, “Since the author is himself a Negro, his dialect is a puzzling thing. One wonders how he arrived at it. Certainly he does not write by ear, unless he is tone-deaf.”

And after White Flight and Redlining, after Civil Rights and the Klan’s Act III, after the suicide of the American city in the 1970s and ’80s and the destruction of 50 square blocks of LaVilla for “urban renewal” in the early ’90s, still does Jacksonville embattle itself, chagrined and embarrassed, a hard luck town with an inferiority complex. (The 1980s populist Democratic mayor Jake Godbold always says Jax should learn to love itself as much as he does.)

“Where is the statue of James Weldon Johnson?” some few citizens demand in 1985 and ’95 and 2005. Preachers and businessmen and sculptors make proposals; nothing happens. Someone plants a marker designating Johnson’s birthplace on the wrong LaVilla street corner. The marker disappears. On the right corner, someone keeps pinning cardboard signs, saying, “James Weldon Johnson was born here.”

Strange place for a writer to emerge: a city that doesn’t tell its story. For most of its existence, the city doesn’t know itself. It has no vision. It lies in its own sand and marshy muck like a beached mute giant, occasionally turning over and blithely smothering portions of its population it does not know exist.

In 1933, Johnson writes that back in the 1880s, Black people regarded Jacksonville “as the most liberal town in the South,” but that as Jim Crow laws replaced Reconstruction, Jax became “a 100 percent Cracker town.” As Jax moves through James Weldon Johnson’s adolescence and early 20s, its population shifts dramatically. Once a town that largely supports the Union in the Civil War, a majority of its population born in the Northeast, by 1910, Jax is largely Georgia-born. Its identity metamorphoses accordingly.

For most of the 20^th century, as the “capital of South Georgia,” Jacksonville is where Georgia goes when the crops fail, a city of broken farmers.

The stories fill the landscape, but require excavation. I put my ear to the ground at the top of “Sing” and listen a century back for Jim and Paul’s late night conversations. “I didn’t start as a dialect poet,” Paul says, while in non-dialect poems, he decries the role his success ensnared him to play.

“Why should the world be over-wise, / In counting all our tears and sighs? / Nay, let them only see us, while / We wear the mask.” & elsewhere: “He sang of love when earth was young, / And Love, itself, was in his lays. / But ah, the world, it turned to praise / A jingle in a broken tongue.”

Lately, when I’m falling asleep, I feel that if I aim my imagination right, I might walk into that house, a century and a quarter back, like a memory of yesterday yet from before I was born, all those seasons and winds and wars and deaths and nights ago, and listen. If I’m respectful enough. If I’m sensitive enough. If I’m rightly attuned. All those attributes required to hear the voices and understand aright.

So I listen to James Weldon Johnson, remembering in his 1933 autobiography how, back in 1899, when he writes “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” he “experienc[es] the transports of the poet’s ecstasy,” tears running down his face, how even after serving as U.S. diplomat to Venezuela and Nicaragua, as field organizer for the NAACP, as campaigner for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, as a major novelist and poet of the Harlem Renaissance:

“Nothing that I have done has paid me back so fully in satisfaction as being the part creator of this song.” He adds, “I am always thrilled deeply when I hear it sung by Negro children.”

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, / Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us; / Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, / Let us march on till victory is won.