Tess and Brock travel to Wiscasset, ME, to investigate the scene of James Weldon Johnson’s tragic death in a train accident. Author Russell Rymer gives us a glimpse of Johnson's life as a Black poet, diplomat, novelist, and activist—Johnson was a jack of all trades, master of all. Poet C.S. Giscombe discuss Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and finds surprising similarities to the tv cartoon Futurama. Tess and Brock also meet with Melanie K. Edwards, Johnson’s great grandniece, who gives some insight into what her famous uncle was doing in Maine in the first place.
Tess and Brock travel to Wiscasset, ME, to investigate the scene of James Weldon Johnson’s tragic death in a train accident. Author Russell Rymer gives us a glimpse of Johnson's life as a Black poet, diplomat, novelist, and activist—Johnson was a jack of all trades, master of all. Poet C.S. Giscombe discuss Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and finds surprising similarities to the tv cartoon Futurama.
Tess and Brock also meet with Melanie K. Edwards, Johnson’s great grandniece, who gives some insight into what her famous uncle was doing in Maine in the first place.
Mentioned:
The house:
Tess Chakkalakal is the creator, executive producer and host of Dead Writers. Brock Clarke is our writer and co-host.
Lisa Bartfai is the managing producer and executive editor. Our music is composed by Cedric Wilson, who also mixes the show. Ella Jones is our web editorial intern, and Mark Hoffman created our logo.
This episode was produced with the generous support of our sponsors Bath Savings and listeners like you.
TESS CHAKKALAKAL Literary houses are, like, the Disney Land of literature.
BROCK CLARKE I get the attraction of writers’ houses. It’s a thing you do when you’re extraordinarily bored. Is that thing you experience, though, when going to writers’ houses? Like, do you have the-the version—
TESS Do you know I-what my experience is, like “God, some of these writers were rich!”
[LAUGHTER]
BROCK This is Dead Writers, a show about great American authors and where they lived.
TESS I’m Tess Chakkalakal.
BROCK And I’m Brock Clarke.
TESS A decade ago, I became obsessed with saving Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house in Maine. And I did save it. And I’m still obsessed with literary houses—not just Stowe’s.
BROCK I wrote a novel called An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, because I couldn’t figure out why anyone goes to writers’ homes, let alone tries to save them.
TESS You’d think I’d hate Brock.
BROCK But you’re my colleague. You can’t hate me.
TESS It’s true. That would be awkward.
BROCK So instead of hating each other, we made this show.
BROCK It was almost 6:30 in the morning of Sunday, June 28th, 1938, and raining hard. The car had just crossed the bridge into Wiscasset, Maine, and was about to cross the train tracks. There was a train coming. But the rain was pounding on the roof of the car and the windshield was thick with water. The car’s driver and its famous passenger didn’t see or hear the train. Or they did, but only once it was too late.
TESS Brock and I are in Wiscasset. It’s known, at least according to the sign that greets visitors as they drive along Route 1, to be “the prettiest village in Maine.” A town that we’re also getting to know as the site where the great author, songwriter, and civil rights activist James Waldon Johnson was killed by a train. A horrible end to a remarkable life that took him here, there, and everywhere, and that began thirteen hundred miles south of that train crossing in Wiscasset.
[MUSIC]
RUSS RYMER I think he was, first of all, never a celebrity. So he wasn't in areas that would have kind of endeared him automatically to late 20th century America. He wasn't an athlete. He wasn't things that were—America was glad to accord a lot of respect to black participants.
TESS That’s the journalist and writer Russ Rymer. He’s talking about all the things that the late, great James Weldon Johnson was NOT. Who? James Weldon Johnson. Russ will tell you who he was and why we should know Johnson better. He was a…
RUSS RYMER A Black diplomat, Black pioneer professor wasn't something that people knew how to slot into their consciousness. And so my theorizing, this is my irresponsible theory on it, is just that no one knew where to put that kind of brilliance and so they let 'em slip.
BROCK And also partly the way you're talking about him, he's hard to pin down. I mean, you think any number of the things you've mentioned would be enough to make him enduringly famous, and some things have remained in the consciousness, but not necessarily him as the person who made them. It's a career. I have a hard time imagining anyone mirroring it today. Like, who's going to be all these things? Who's going to be council and songwriter and novelist and major NAACP president? I mean, it's possible to imagine all these things in one person, let alone four.
RUSS RYMER And at the same time, but similarly, he was a witness to a passage of history in the South that is profound but is not as emblematic, I guess, as the histories that we like to receive in our Black History for Dummies and cliff notes on American Black history, because his background left him with very adamant race sentiments. But his history left him also with full awareness of the subtleties.
TESS It was that history that made Russ a James Weldon Johnson fan. Johnson grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. He came of age during reconstruction when Black and White people lived peacefully together in the town. Just to give you an example of how unique an environment it was, Johnson, who was Black, had a White wet nurse, and that didn’t raise any eyebrows in Jacksonville. Until, of course, it did.
RUSS RYMER Jacksonville had Black mayors, Black judges, Black representatives in the State House. It was such a flourishing example of an integrated society that it had to be shut down by Tallahassee, by the state capitol. They passed legislation to stop this.
TESS It wasn’t just the white lawmakers in Tallahassee who put a stop to this integrated society. When a fire in 1901 burned down much of Jacksonville, its remaining pieces of its integrated society went down with it.
RUSS RYMER And the people who came to rebuild it were crackers out of the hinterwoods. And that ended this era of amity between the races.
TESS Jacksonville became more like the rest of Florida, which was then the lynching capital of the U.S.. Something that Johnson is made aware of almost immediately. Johnson, who at this point is 30 years old, the principal of a prestigious high school, a lawyer, an esteemed figure in town, is attacked by a white mob while he is out walking with a light-skinned black woman who they mistake for white.
RUSS RYMER So here's somebody who grew up suckling at the breast of a white woman attacked by a mob or supposedly walking with a white woman. And in that contrast is an encapsulated history that he took to heart, and, you know, it infuses Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, or Along This Way, he's not able to be dogmatic about things that he's actually enraged to the limit on.
BROCK Like if this were a story, his story were a student's story, this is probably what's so interesting about, well, why we're talking to you about this writer coming from—we’re coming from Maine—is that it doesn't make the kind of narrative sense you would want it to. As a writer who's so focused in Florida and then in New York and in Guatemala and Nicaragua, he had a lifetime appointment at Fisk, and then he dies in a train crash in coastal Maine. So maybe that's part of the awkwardness of the story, which is probably what interests us. How did this happen and how do we put it in context? How do we make sense of it? And maybe there's not actually a way to make narrative sense of it.
RUSS RYMER No, I agree. It was not the way he was supposed to go. It was by a mishap.
BROCK Yeah. It's like an anvil fell on his head.
RUSS RYMER A mishap got him. And he'd already faced some of the marquee dangers of life on the planet. I mean, being a Black ambassador to Nicaragua and Guatemala at a time of uprising and intense violence, being in Haiti during that period, being at Jacksonville during that period, I mean, he'd already survived every danger. And being at the NAACP, investigating going to East St. Louis after the riots there, after the rampage and investigating it and writing it, he was undaunted and was courageous. He was just —something chose not to kill him in those places and then nailed him at a train crossing in Wiscasset, Maine, on his way to vacate. I agree. It's worrisome.
BROCK This probably isn’t what Maine had in mind when they chose the nickname Vacationland.
TESS Right. Come to vacation in Maine and get killed by a train.
BROCK It helps to laugh.
TESS Does it?
BROCK I have no idea. Russ is right: the whole thing is worrisome. Especially for us, the co-hosts of a podcast about the Maine houses of dead writers. But James Weldon Johnson doesn’t even have a house in Maine. All he has is a bench.
TESS Woah, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The bench comes at the end of the episode. First, we need to talk more about who James Weldon Johnson was, and his most famous novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.
[READING AN EXCERPT FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN] “I know that in writing the following pages I am divulging the great secret of my life, the secret which for some years I have guarded far more carefully than any of my earthly possessions; and it is a curious study to me to analyze the motives which prompt me to do it. I feel that I am led by the same impulse which forces the unfound-out criminal to take somebody into his confidence, although he knows that the act is liable, even almost certain, to lead to his undoing.”
BROCK For those of you who don’t remember, or haven’t read it yet. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a slim novel about a fictional young biracial man living in the US at the turn of the last century. Throughout his life, he has long periods where he lives and passes as a white man to live in safety and the comforts of a middle class white life. But towards the end of the novel—spoiler alert–—he feels like he’s abandoned his race and let himself and everyone else down. The end.
TESS That’s right. It’s a remarkable book, but it’s also, like its author and his death, it’s a difficult book to classify. It has a strange sense of plot, of cause and effect. It moves suddenly, across great distances, often fueled by coincidence, by happenstance. Its disregard of normal novelistic conventions can be thrilling; its narrator’s penchant for speechmaking can be off putting. But the book doesn’t seem to care if you’re put off, which makes the book thrilling again. Mostly. It’s a hard book to get your head around. So we decided to get some help.
[MUSIC]
TESS Poet C.S. Giscombe read Autobiography of An Ex-colored Man for the first time twenty years ago and disliked it. It was wooden and aggravating. But when he was prepping for a class on narratives of racial passing at the University of California at Berkeley in the spring of 2024, he decided to pick it up again,
C.S. GISCOMBE It's not a bildungsroman. You identify with the character and the character goes through, goes through trials and tribulations and triumphs and triumphs over them. That's what autobiography is. You're supposed to, and Douglas is the obvious example of this. You're supposed to arrive, arrive at a good place at the end.
TESS But not here. We don't arrive at a good place at the end of this novel.
C.S. GICOMBE No, we arrive at a very strange place.
TESS Could you describe that place where we arrive at the end of this weird novel?
C.S. GISCOMBE Well, we arrive at a mix of, as I said, his endorsement of his own heroes, certainly our own heroes in terms of 20th century blackness. And his own kind of staring at them and realizing it to some extent that he's not part of them. But I hesitate to think of him as a real character. And, in fact, I'll confess something to you. Maybe you can cut this out of the podcast. You know, reading this, the thing that I thought of was—are you familiar with the work of Matt granting?
TESS No. What has he written?
C.S. GISCOMBE The Simpsons.
TESS Oh, of course I am.
C.S. GICOMBE Yes!
TESS They reminded you of The Simpsons? Reading James Weldon Johnson reminded you of The Simpsons?
C.S. GICOMBE No, it reminded me, not of The Simpsons—that's the one that I'd expect you to be familiar with—
TESS Oh, okay. Right.
C.S. GISCOMBE But of Futurama.
TESS Oh, right. His other cartoon series.
C.S. GISCOMBE Other cartoon series in which there's the character, the main character is somebody named Fry, who is incredibly, incredibly naive—laughably naive. And I can talk a lot about Fry, but my students don't know Futurama, so I can't— I bring it up, and they say, “What are you talking about?”
TESS But the narrator, let me get this straight, the narrator of Johnson's novel reminds you of Fry from Futurama.
C.S. GISCOMBE Sure, yeah.
TESS And what's the connection? Their naivete?
C.S. GISCOMBE Their naivete. They're not getting things, and they're incredibly self-serving. And so he is a very profoundly self-serving person. But in spite of that, in spite of the main character’s, the character’s, the narrator’s, the speaker’s, self-servingness, there's a lot of other stuff that's packed into the novel, including, it seemed to me, comments on the form. On the form itself, which is the thing that I'm profoundly drawn to at this moment.
TESS Cecil has actually been to Wiscasset Maine at least once. He’s telling me about a 44 mile bike ride he did in the 1980s from Kennebec County all the way to Reid State Park, passing through Wiscasset. At that time he didn’t know anything about James Weldon Johnson’s connection to Wiscaasset and Maine. But that’s since changed.
C.S. GISCOMBE I think about Wiscasset…it's become kind of a place in this very ragged, very ragged and very interesting series of locations, of Black locations.
TESS Wiscasset is Black location?
C.S. GICOMBE Is now. Yeah.
TESS Because you rode your bike through there and James Weldon Johnson died.
C.S. GISCOMBE Because that's where James Waldon Johnson died. He got hit by a train. And so there's the things that we have, we have in common. He's a poet. I'm a poet. We're black. We're both Black, and it's Maine. We are unlikely—we're both very unlikely visitors.
TESS To Wiscasset, Maine.
C.S. GISCOMBE To Wiscasset, Maine.Yeah.
TESS Fortunately, unlike James Walton Johnson, who was struck by a train, you made it through unscathed.
C.S. GICOMBE I wouldn't say unscathed. All of our experiences do scathe us, I suppose, and do complicate us.
TESS Cecil tells me that although he hadn’t been to Wiscasset before that bike ride. He had been to Maine.
TESS I'm wondering if that 1983 visit to Maine was your first time to Maine.
C.S. GISCOMBE Oh, no. My first time to Maine was in 1960. We had a summer place.
TESS Is your ex-wife, ex-wife White or also Black?
C.S. GISCOMBE Yeah, she's white. But my parents were Black. And that's where the summer place starts.
TESS Your parents had the summer place in Maine.
C.S. GISCOMBE Yeah. How about that?
TESS So it wasn't uncommon then that Black people had summer homes in
Maine?
C.S. GISCOMBE I think it was very uncommon!
TESS Okay!
TESS As uncommon as it was for Cecil’s parents to have a summer home in Maine, James Weldon Johnson did not.
C.S. GISCOMBE Maine is fairly remote, and James Weldon Johnson is kind of the wrong guy in Maine.
TESS He's the wrong guy. What does that mean?
C.S. GISCOMBE Mean? Meaning that he's Jim Weldon Johnson, the anthologist of Black writing.
TESS That's right. He should be somewhere else. He should be somewhere else collecting Black material. Instead, he's in White remote Maine.
C.S. GISCOMBE Yeah, he should be, but he's not. See, that's what makes stuff interesting.
TESS Yeah.
C.S. GISCOMBE Because you do stuff that you're supposed to do and you do it all, you do five days a week.
[MUSIC]
TESS We catch Johnson’s great grandniece Melanie Edwards walking home from work in New York City on a busy spring evening. She’s telling us something that has been bugging me all along: why her great uncle was in Maine to begin with?
MELANIE EDWARDS He was very good friends with a man named George Payne.
TESS The two men knew each other from working together at the NAACP. And George Payne was a nice preacher's kid from Tennessee. A southern white man. It was through Payne that James Weldon Johnson got his position as a professor at NYU where he became the first African American to hold that title, another one of his many accomplishments. And Johnson and Payne became good friends, and they did what friends do. They hangout. They visit each other's homes. The Johnsons had a summer home in Great Barrington in Massachusetts and the Paynes had a home in Dark Harbor, on the midcoast of Maine where James Weldon Johnson and his young wife, Grace, would visit in the summer,
MELANIE EDWARDS It doesn't seem a significant act now, but for the Johnsons and people of that era to have Black and white and Jewish people barbecuing and visiting each other's homes and all was rather a bold thing to do, and it was socially precarious.
TESS Melanie thinks that this friendship is emblematic of Johnson. But she’s quick to say that we shouldn’t take Johnson’s own close friendship with Payne as a sign that he was happy with the way things were for African-Americans in the U.S.
MELANIE EDWARDS As with many African-Americans who have had some political weight, James Weldon is being flattened by just being the author of God's Trombones or associated with the NAACP. So people mistake or ignore his ability to articulate anger with not being angry at all. And I've read a few essays and I'm just like, “Ha ha, ha ha.” Just because he didn't throw bricks through windows doesn't mean that he was not angry and not defeated. However, he believed that America could be made to make good on the promises it offered. He was well aware that a lot of people were going to spill some blood getting that to happen. But he ultimately believed that America would allow Black people initially and others, Jewish people—whoever was othered—would get a closer place at the table.
TESS I think this poem “We To America” by Johnson gets to some of that anger that Melanie is talking about and some of that expectation of having to express his plight as an African American in a specific way for white people to accept it. Here’s Johnson reading it himself at Columbia University on Christmas Eve, 1935.
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON READING “WE TO AMERICA”]“How would you have us, as we are?/ Or sinking ’neath the load we bear?/Our eyes fixed forward on a star?/Or gazing empty at despair?//Rising or falling? Men or things?With dragging pace or footsteps fleet?Strong, willing sinews in your wings?Or tightening chains about your feet?”
TESS Melanie went to college at Emerson in Boston. Her family had a house on the Cape, so New England isn’t new to her. But Maine is. She didn’t really have a relationship to Maine when she was first contacted about a memorial for her great uncle in the small town of Wiscasset. And I can’t help but wonder if it doesn’t feel weird to her to have her great uncle memorialized in this somewhat random place that the family has no connection to?
MELANIE EDWARDS It is what you see. A place that has suddenly been thrust into the custodianship of a man with whom they have no connection ethnically, politically, geographically. And now they're kind of coerced into being a host of sorts. And the bench was the effort of one person who saw the benefit and the honor of having this odd relationship with this person of such great renown.
TESS And that was exactly what was done. Former Wiscasset Selectmen Heather Jones made a bench for James Weldon Johnson. Or, rather, for anyone else who wants to sit down in Wiscasset and contemplate Johnson or life.
HEATHER JONES I had a big chunk of wood in my shop that kind of looked like that. That kind of was the start of my idea of how to make it look. So…
TESS What kind of wood is that?
HEATHER JONES That's white oak and purple heart
TESS and BROCK Purple heart?
HEATHER JONES Yes.
BROCK I’ve never—have you heard of that?
TESS No.
BROCK No.
TESS Is that a type of tree?
HEATHER JONES Yeah. Well, it's from South America and I don't know what they call it down there.
TESS Oh, okay.
HEATHER JONES Here they call it purple heart.
TESS We’re standing by the bench which is almost at the top of a grassy hill next to the main thoroughfare in town. From where the bench is, you can see the Sheepscot River glittering, and barely, barely make out the train tracks that cut straight across the base of the bridge that takes vacationers across the river and up the Midcoast to places like Dark Harbor, or Acadia National Park.
TESS And how did you guys decide where you would put this bench? Did everyone decide collectively that you wanted it right here in front of the—is this the town hall? It's not the town hall is it? It's the First Congregational Church.
HEATHER JONES No, that's the First Congregational Church. That's the courthouse and that's the library.
TESS Heather was on a task force together with Melanie, who we just talked with, and Rachel Talbot Ross, the speaker of the Maine House of Representatives. They were looking around trying to figure out how and where to best commemorate Johnson.
HEATHER JONES And what we were talking about that day was how James Weldon Johnson is sort of represented really well in this place because he was a lawyer; he wrote poetry and sermons and prayers, and a writer. So the library's here.
TESS Oh, that's true.
BROCK It's interesting.
TESS It kind represents these different aspects of his identity.
BROCK How much did you know about him before becoming the Selectman of the town of Wiscasset?
HEATHER JONES None.
BROCK No?
HEATHER JONES No, I didn't know about “Lift Every Voice”. I didn't know there was a Black national anthem. I guess all the football fans know it now.
BROCK Yeah, that's right.
HEATHER JONES I was a football fan growing up, but we didn't know that.
BROCK Huh.
HEATHER JONES So yeah, I got to learn about him and glad I did. It’s inspirational.
TESS “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was written by Johnson and set to music by his brother Rosamond, Melanie’s grandfather, specifically as a celebration of President Licoln’s birthday at the school in Jacksonville where Johnson was a principal. Over the years, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” has become known as the African American anthem. And since 2021, it’s been performed at the Super Bowl. So maybe there are more people who know something of James Weldon Johnson than they thought they did? But what about his poetry or novels?
HEATHER JONES A lot of his poetry—the bench I made sort of inspired by his poem, “Listen Lord”, which is a prayer, and to me sounds like a prayer of someone who's being prepared for service.
TESS Two lines of that poem, “Listen Lord, A Prayer”, were especially inspiring to Heather: “Pin his ear to the wisdom-post, And make his words sledge hammers of truth—”
TESS Heather believes that everything happens for a reason, and the reason for Johnson’s unlikely and untimely death in Wiscasset was exactly this. So that people like her, and the other selectmen of—an unlikely bunch—would still be talking about his life and writing some 84 years later.
BROCK Yeah, it’s a nice thought. But it’s tempting to say that not everything happens for a reason, or that maybe it does, but the reason isn’t good enough. Think of what else the great James Weldon Johnson might have written, might have accomplished, if it hadn’t been for the rain, the train. Wouldn’t it have been better if he’d lived longer and we could have commemorated that longer life and not his early death? Or is that asking too much? Should we just be grateful that we have Heather’s beautiful bench and moments like this won?
[SUPER BOWL SOUNDS]
TESS You have listened to Dead Writers with me, Tess Chakkalakal.
BROCK And me, Brock Clarke. Our managing producer and editor is Lisa Bartfai.
TESS Cedric Wilson has created our theme music and mixed the show.
BROCK Ella Jones is our web editorial intern. Thanks for listening.
TESS And a very special thanks to our generous sponsors, Bath Savings, and listeners like you.
BROCK You can find more information about the writers, their books, and their houses at our website on MainePublic.org. Thanks for listening.