The Essential Writings of James Weldon JohnsonEdited...

The Essential Writings of James Weldon Johnson

Edited and with an introduction by Rudolph P. Byrd

Modern Library: 322 pp., $15 paper

This collection of poetry, fiction, criticism, autobiography, political writing and two unpublished plays by James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) spans 60 years of pure triumph over adversity. Johnson, born nine years after the Emancipation Proclamation, wrote during what Charles Johnson in his foreword calls “the most entrenched period of American apartheid -- the 1920s and ‘30s,” through the Great Depression, through the “rise of racial eugenics, and black lynchings throughout the South.”

How, Charles Johnson asks, “in such a racially restrictive world could Johnson confess that he once had an ‘unconscious race-superiority complex’? “ James Weldon Johnson believed that education provided a “means of living, not of making a living.” His nobility, his inspiration shine forth from these pages, setting moral and artistic standards. In his novel “The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man,” the protagonist somehow transcends the shame of being human as he watches another black man burned at the stake. From “Fifty Years,” written on the 50th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation: “No! Stand erect and without fear, / And for our foes let this suffice -- / We’ve brought a rightful sonship here, / And we have more than paid the price,” or from his 1928 article “The Dilemma of the Negro Author”: “[W]hen a Negro author does write so as to fuse white and black America into one interested and approving audience he has performed no slight feat, and has most likely done a sound piece of literary work.”

“The proper political leaders for us,” he wrote in “Negro Americans, What Now?” “will need to be above the average of political leaders in general. They must be leaders who are not only sagacious but who are of unquestionable integrity. Leaders who can, if necessity arises, make the sacrifice of putting the best interests of the race above their personal interests . . . . If they do not rise or if we fail to discover them, we shall not derive the fullest benefits from Politics as a factor.”

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Home Schooling

Stories

Carol Windley

Atlantic Monthly Press: 226 pp., $22

Short stories are wonderful for capturing the mysteries of life and the power of secrets held through generations. Carol Windley’s characters in “Home Schooling” are burdened and shaped by their secrets, so much so that they often fail to travel well through daily life. The landscape of the Northwest where Windley lives -- that transparent air and those watchful dark trees, “Vancouver Island, where the air was fragrant, moist, palpable, somehow, and the mountains of the Coast Range were respectably distant” -- provides the perfect setting for these incandescent stories.

Here, even the mystery of life’s slow, sure passing provides action to move a plot forward: “It gave her a strange feeling,” a young woman daydreams, “to think of normal life going on in a house that was slowly dissolving into the soil, its rotten apple smell mingling with the salt air.”

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com