Abstract: How do James Weldon Johnson’s visualized verses and Aaron Douglas’s amplified visions in God’s Trombones combine into a multimedia volume? How does the combination lend the volume the staying power that has us reading, hearing, and seeing it, today? This article answers that the collection’s sounds combine Johnson’s sermons and Douglas’s impressions to visualize the audio, subvert the lexical, and circumvent the print conventions of minstrel dialect. The sights synchronize Douglas’s cubism with Johnson’s work, as biblical-Egyptian times coincide with Harlem-based, yet Pan-African motifs. Their collaboration’s appearances run from ekphrastic poetry turning into illuminated lettering, to published poems seemingly returning to the spoken word, to sermons, read in solitude, reimagined, as if they were heard in crowded listening rooms. Seeing, reading, and hearing God’s Trombones as an intermedia collaboration complicates entrenched ideas of sole authorship and any one predominant, Harlem-Renaissance medium.
Adam Sonstegard (Sun,) studied this question.