












































[Expositions 13.1 (2019) 93–111] Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

“Of the Coming of John”: W.E.B. Du Bois,  

Lohengrin, and the Marriage Function of Truth 
 

STEPHEN ANDREWS 

Grinnell College 

  

 

My history is hidden, 

these questions are forbidden: 

to ask from whence I came 

or seek to know my name. 

 —Lohengrin I, iii 

 

 

In The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois, Arnold Rampersad devotes chapter four to an 

analysis of The Souls of Black Folk. In discussing “Of the Coming of John,” the thirteenth chapter 

of Du Bois’s masterwork, Rampersad writes the following: “Of the Coming of John” elaborates 

the duality of the black soul. There are two Johns. One is “brown” and struggling; the other is the 

white son of Judge Jones, the main citizen of the small Georgia town where they live” (75). It is, 

Rampersad goes on to say, a “tale of miscegenation, murder, and suicide” that “is discreetly but 

powerfully told” (75). While few would argue with Rampersad’s basic summary, most readers of 

Souls would be taken aback, at least initially, at the description of the “other” John as “the white 

son of Judge Jones.” As readers of Souls know, the surname of the white John and his father, the 

Judge, is “Henderson,” not “Jones.” Such misidentification, had it been heard by the fictive Judge 

Henderson, would no doubt have brought his blood to a boil. But we critics should be grateful for 

whatever force—call it contingency—is responsible for turning “Henderson” into “Jones.” 

Without that misidentification we might not so readily make the overcorrection of turning “John 

Jones” into “John Henderson.”1  

In what follows, I propose to turn that “error” into the centerpiece of an interpretation of “Of 

the Coming of John” wherein the scandal of the unacknowledged patronym links the Jones and 



W.E.B. Du Bois, Lohengrin, and the Marriage Function of Truth  94 

Henderson families in ways more intricate and intimate than has hitherto been noted. The unnamed 

narrator, who narrates in first-person plural, utilizes a series of repetitions, sometimes lexical and 

sometimes structural, that, “if read with patience,” as Du Bois had hinted in “The Forethought,” 

positions the reader to appreciate “the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the 

Twentieth Century” (vii). But here, in the penultimate chapter and the only one cast in the form of 

a fictional story, Du Bois attempts what R.A. Judy calls a “formal experiment,” something that Du 

Bois had elsewhere described as an attempt to “interpret historical truth by use of creative 

imagination.” In doing so, Judy explains, “[i]t is the formal performance that achieves its political 

significance” (214). Part of that “formal performance” involves referencing significant portions of 

earlier chapters, such as “Of the Dawn of Freedom” and “Of the Training of Black Men,” and in 

positioning the reader for thoughts yet to come in “Of the Sorrow Songs.” Du Bois’s great 

biographer, David Levering Lewis, gives the palm for “strongest academic piece” to “Of the Dawn 

of Freedom” (283), and he describes “Of the Sorrow Songs” as one of “the best” of the five new 

essays written specifically for Souls, going on to suggest that the songs themselves, as Du Bois 

utilizes them in his epigraphs, are designed to “counter” notions of European cultural supremacy 

(278). My intertextual reading might not convince Lewis that “Of the Coming of John” rises above 

the “bathos and crimson” to which he consigns it (278), but it might nevertheless prompt readers 

to understand the story as an integral continuation of the political arguments made in those earlier 

chapters alluded to above. Du Bois relies on the elliptical nature of a well-wrought story to link 

political to aesthetic theory.  

Far from being a come-down, “Of the Coming of John,” as story, becomes an epitome of what 

Lewis suggests Souls itself is designed to do. It makes audible—(“hear my cry”)—the “voices of 

the dark submerged and unheard” (278). In so doing, it foregrounds experimentation on the part 

of readers by way of compelling us to focus on formal arrangements that simultaneously say more, 

and less, than mere surface might suggest. Thus the return of John as the putative subject indicated 

by the title “Of the Coming of John” is punned by its reproductive double, framed in the form of 

an implied question, How did John come to be? It is the reproductive frame, wherein is described 

“the struggle over the control of female sexuality and sexual reproduction,” that prompts Hazel 

Carby to criticize Du Bois for projecting his “imagined black community” as being “determined” 

by “the struggle of men over the bodies of women” (25). But as we shall see, in “Of the Coming 

of John,” Du Bois has his narrator deploy those “discrete” but “powerful” formal techniques of 



95 Andrews 

repetition and parallel construction in order to credit more fully the role that John’s mother, Peggy 

Jones, plays in his education. As the story unfolds, we will see that Peggy revises slavery’s logic 

of partus sequitur ventrum (often translated as “the child follows the condition of the mother”), to 

better ensure that her child follows the conditions laid down by his mother.2  

In Chapter 6 of Souls, “Of the Training of Black Men,” Du Bois proffers one answer to the 

question of “how John came to be” by reference to what he calls “the panacea of Education” (91). 

From that chapter’s perspective, John’s “coming” is, in part, a product of a liberal education from 

Wells Institute, where our unnamed narrator is a member of the faculty. Such an education, Du 

Bois goes on to suggest, situates lived experience as “a matter of infinite experiment and frequent 

mistakes” (92) that yet might assist the John Joneses to leverage out a place in this world on the 

basis of something other than the “accidents” of birth or of the “stock market” (91). But in the 

network of repetitions with which our narrator structures his story, it is possible to make a case 

that, in this case, the “panacea” is necessarily a function of the willful desire on the part of Peggy 

that her son should have access to just such an education as Du Bois describes.  

Getting Jones to that point where “error” was more a function of experimentation than of 

ignorance was no easy task. The narrator declares that “up at Johnstown, at the Institute, we were 

long puzzled at the case of John Jones” (231–232). The “case” before them was “loud and 

boisterous, always laughing and singing, and never able to work consecutively at anything. He did 

not know how to study; he had no idea of thoroughness; and with his tardiness, carelessness, and 

appalling good-humor, we were sore perplexed” (232). “And yet,” as the narrator had earlier 

recounted, “one glance at his face made one forgive him much,—that broad, good-natured smile 

in which lay no bit of art or artifice, but seemed just bubbling good-nature and genuine satisfaction 

with the world” (229). Compare that description with the following from “Of the Training of Black 

Men,” where Du Bois ventriloquizes the belief of the “older South” that “somewhere between men 

and cattle, God created a tertium quid, and called it a Negro—a clownish, simple creature, at times 

even lovable within its limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk within the Veil” (89, emphasis 

added). The trick, then, was to transform Jones, through the alchemy of a liberal education, so that 

rather than being “foreordained” to life behind the Veil, he instead “grew slowly to feel almost for 

the first time the Veil that lay between him and the white world” (234). A precondition, then, of 

the success of his education was that Jones become genuinely dissatisfied with the condition of 

the world around him. Once again, the path led through error. “[O]n account of repeated disorder 



W.E.B. Du Bois, Lohengrin, and the Marriage Function of Truth  96 

and inattention to work,” the narrator relates, the faculty “vote[d]” to suspend Jones for a term 

(232).  

Jones is understandably confused and appalled by this devastating news. But rather than 

bemoan his situation, as one might expect, with inwardly directed angst, Jones is quick to proffer 

a deal to the Dean, cast in the form of a conditional: “if you won’t [write to my mother] I’ll go out 

into the city and work, and come back next term and show you something” (232). John’s mother-

focused reaction to his suspension now brings home for us the extent to which the narrator has left 

to our imagination the backstory of Peggy’s raising of John and his sister, Jennie. But even so, the 

narrator does offer just enough by way of hint to suggest how much of Peggy’s willpower and 

agency are motivating John’s conditional. These hints, spread out through the middle of the story, 

beg the question of what constitutes a “strong-willed and driven woman,” something that 

Christopher Powers suggests “do[es] not appear in The Souls of Black Folk” (66). Granted, very 

little narrative exposition is focused on Peggy, but what there is indicates a strength that should 

not be discounted. John Jones does not get to the Institute without Peggy’s drive and will.  

At the send-off for John at the Altamaha station, we readers are apprised that Peggy had held 

firm in her wish to have her son go to Wells Institute in spite of insistence from white folks that 

“It’ll spoil him, ruin him” (230). The idea of spoilage is repeated by way of contrast when the 

Judge brags to Jennie about his John going off to Princeton: “‘It’ll make a man of him,’ said the 

Judge, ‘college is the place.’ And then he asked the shy little waitress, ‘Well, Jennie, how’s your 

John?’ and added reflectively, ‘Too bad, too bad your mother sent him off,—it will spoil him.’ 

And the waitress wondered” (231). 

Clearly, college is reserved for the fashioning of white manhood; as Du Bois explained in “Of 

the Training of Black Men,” the white Southern perspective imagined that “an education that 

encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character 

rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black” 

(94). Such a “delusion” is underscored again in “Of the Coming of John” as something that would 

only “spoil” John Jones, whom the white community of Altamaha had “voted” a “good boy,” and 

who was deemed to be “a fine plough-hand, good in the rice fields, handy everywhere, and always 

good-natured and respectful” (230). The adjective “good,” thrice repeated, modifies “boy,” labor, 

and personality, thus rendering the pre-baccalaureate John the post-Reconstruction subordinate 



97 Andrews 

par excellence and prompting the reader to reflect that education might well turn black folk into 

spoiled goods.  

The negative consequence of such spoilage is further underscored in the Judge’s comments to 

Jennie: the repeated phrase, “too bad, too bad,” with which he prefaces his “reflection” places the 

blame squarely on Jennie’s mother, Peggy. Jennie’s own reaction is simple, but nevertheless 

intriguing, and begs a question or two. Why would the narrator tell us that “the waitress 

wondered”? And about what, exactly, is she wondering? Is Jennie wondering if education will, 

indeed, spoil her brother? Or is she herself reflecting on the “reflective” manner in which the Judge, 

who elsewhere speaks “brusquely” (242) or “plunge[s] squarely into the business” (243), 

comments on her mother? It is too early to do too much with this, but I would ask my reader to 

keep in mind the interjection—“well”—with which the Judge addresses Jennie. This will be one 

of the first of several repetitions with which our savvy narrator will tell a tale that otherwise cannot 

be told outright.  

Looked at from the perspective of a thicker understanding of Peggy’s agency, we can surmise 

that John’s conditional isn’t necessarily compelled by fear. The agreement rather shows, I think, 

deep respect on the part of John and the Dean, who, at a moment of no little shame and 

embarrassment, can still “promise faithfully” to abide by its terms (232). (That verb-adverb phrase, 

“promise faithfully,” will prove even more significant when the narrator takes us to New York to 

hear and witness Lohengrin.) For now, though, what this transaction makes appreciable, if not as 

visible as some critics would like, is Peggy’s labor and defiance—the hours and hours and then 

the extra hours she must have worked to save enough to send John to the Institute, and the quiet 

strength with which she resolves to defy the codes and expectations of the white community, 

including the redoubtable Judge Henderson. In regard to the economic and cultural clout wielded 

by “five million women” who “are today furnishing our teachers,” Du Bois in “The Damnation of 

Women” (1920) emphasized the impact that women like Peggy had on African-American cultural 

institutions: “If we have today, as seems likely, over a billion dollars of accumulated goods, who 

shall say how much of it has been wrung from the hearts of servant girls and washerwomen and 

women toilers in the fields?” (104).   

In the post-bellum world of the New South, however, we might do well to wonder, along with 

Jennie, why Peggy should care what Judge Henderson thinks, or why he should care in regard to 

her thoughts. Ironically enough, a better case as to the “why” can be made when John Jones finally 



W.E.B. Du Bois, Lohengrin, and the Marriage Function of Truth  98 

returns to Altamaha. However, we must follow the narrator in deferring that long-awaited arrival 

in order to better situate Peggy’s relationship with Judge Henderson. For that, we need the 

backdrop of Lohengrin.  

Upon graduation from the Institute, John Jones accepts an offer from the Dean to travel North 

with the Institute’s “quartette.” In a foreshadowing of events that will unfold at the conclusion of 

the story, Jones describes the trip as “a breath of air before the plunge” back into the spaces nearer 

to home that are patrolled by the codes and conventions of Jim Crow (Souls 235). Thus, September 

finds Jones in New York, where, swept along by the crowd, he nearly unconsciously spends five 

precious dollars on a ticket for a performance of Lohengrin. Jones unwittingly offends a white man 

and woman in line behind him who suffer the indignity of bumping up against a black man standing 

“stock-still, amazed” at what he has just done. The female companion gently chides her “fair-

haired escort”: “Be careful […] you must not lynch the colored gentleman simply because he’s in 

your way” (235). It is clear from the escort’s stock response that he is a Southerner. “With all your 

professions,” he declares, “one never sees in the North so cordial and intimate relations between 

white and black as are everyday occurrences with us. Why, I remember my closest playfellow in 

boyhood was a little Negro named after me, and surely no two,—well!” (235). This interjection, 

with which the speaker cuts short his reply, indicates his recognition that the man seated next to 

them is the same “Negro he had stumbled over in the hallway” (236). The verb “stumbled” affirms 

the scandal—the stumbling block—of what we will come to see as a massively hypocritical 

projection of racial transgression, and the young man immediately engages the usher to begin 

procedures for redress.3  

We shall have occasion, in a bit, to draw once more from that “well!”—but for now, as the 

narrator relates, John Jones is blind to all of these proceedings, caught up as he is in the sublime 

beauty of the opera. As Jones “grasped the elbows of the chair,” he “unwittingly” touches the 

lady’s arm. She “drew away,” but the transgression of the color line has not gone unnoticed by her 

Southern escort. While previous arrangements remain to be enacted, “a deep longing swelled” in 

Jones’s heart (236). The performance of the music opens up in John a series of political questions: 

“Who had called him to be the slave and butt of all? And if he had called, what right had he to call 

when a world like this lay open before men?” (236–237). As “the movement changed,” Jones turns 

these political questions into resolutions for action directed at “some master-work, some life-

service” (237). The narrator then relates that when “at last a soft sorrow crept across the violins,” 



99 Andrews 

John thinks about his mother and his sister (237). In using that key noun “sorrow,” the narrator is 

reminding us that this event, Wagnerian though it be, is not to be understood as a one-way path 

whereby European culture is deemed to be the ultimate purveyor of intellectual depth and universal 

feeling. It need not, as Keith Byerman suggests it does, “carry with it the corollary of deracination” 

(33). That key affect, sorrow, reminds us instead that Jones is sitting where he is because he has 

agreed to be a member of a quartet expected to “sing for the Institute” (234–235).4 We can infer 

from the preposition that the tour is intended to raise a little money for the college. Now, the 

narrator makes no claims as to whether the Institute Quartet are as good as the Fisk Jubilee Singers. 

Indeed, it may very well be the case that they are not. In “The Sorrow Songs,” the concluding 

chapter of Souls, Du Bois notes that the Fisk singers have been much “imitated,”—“sometimes 

well, by the singers of Hampton and Atlanta,” and “sometimes ill, by straggling quartettes” (253). 

But whatever the quality of this “quartette” might be, it seems clear that Du Bois is pressing us to 

imagine more of a reciprocal relationship than many critics acknowledge. Sometimes that 

reciprocity is a function of reading ahead or of reading back. Just as the “infinite beauty of the 

wail” of Lohengrin’s swan “lingered and swept through every muscle of [John’s] frame” (236), 

likewise the Jubilee singers are described in the next chapter as having “conquered” Europe with 

“the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas” (251). 

Understanding that reciprocal relationship adds greater poignancy to the next scene in which the 

usher finally returns to ask John Jones to vacate his seat. It is here that John and the fair-haired 

gentleman acknowledge each other for the first time as “Jones” and “Henderson” in a scene that, 

like double consciousness itself, offers no true recognition. It is shortly after this encounter, riding 

south on the train, that Jones comes to terms with his “manifest destiny,” his “duty” to the black 

folk of Altamaha (238).  

Both Johns return to their southeastern Georgia town of Altamaha. Each is alienated in his 

respective way from comfortably fitting back into the flow of small town life. John Jones, however, 

has made the conscious attempt to do something with his life in spite of his growing awareness 

that his classical education, achieved by dint of great struggle and rigorous study, has unfitted him, 

as had been predicted, for the life of obedient subordination:  

 

he […] noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, 

differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood 



W.E.B. Du Bois, Lohengrin, and the Marriage Function of Truth  100 

days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh. He felt angry now when men 

did not call him “Mister,” he clenched his hands at the “Jim Crow” cars, and chafed 

at the color-line that hemmed in him and his. (234)  

 

Whereas Jones chafes at the thought of being consigned to a life of separate and unequal treatment 

based on fictions of race and social convention, Henderson, coming home from Princeton a month 

after Jones returns from Wells Institute, finds Altamaha and his father’s plans for him to be too 

constricting. The younger Henderson wants nothing to do with his father’s “cherished ambition”: 

“‘Good heavens, father,’ the younger man would say after dinner, as he lighted a cigar and stood 

by the fireplace, ‘you surely don’t expect a young fellow like me to settle down permanently in 

this—this God-forgotten town with nothing but mud and Negroes?’ ‘I did,’ the Judge would 

answer laconically” (244). The Judge’s response—“I did”—is one among several structural 

replacements, or desired replacements, that in this story reinforces the notion of repetition as a 

proxy for inheritance. The Judge wants John to follow in his footsteps, and, if possible, to go a 

little further than he did. In fact, the political options mapped out by the elder Henderson—mayor, 

legislator, governor (244)—are precisely options foreclosed to Jones. The very idea of a “Judge 

Jones” is an error not to be countenanced within what Judy calls the “socially and legally enforced 

grammar of segregation” (219). The fact that John Henderson is so dismissive of his father’s 

political desires for his future incites a smoldering anger in the elder Henderson that can hardly be 

contained. As we shall see, the opportunity for release presents itself in the scapegoat figure of the 

other John.  

There are structural replications figured by the Jones family as well. When John interviews with 

the Judge to take over the teaching position at the black school, the Judge makes clear that progress 

is to look an awful lot like a repetition of the recent past: “Now, John, the question is, are you, 

with your education and Northern notions, going to accept the situation and teach the darkies to be 

faithful servants and laborers as your fathers were,—I knew your father, John, he belonged to my 

brother, and he was a good Nigger. Well—well, are you going to be like him, or are you going to 

try to put fool ideas of rising and equality into these folks’ heads, and make them discontented and 

unhappy?” (243–244). The Judge’s expectation, of course, is that John Jones will be “like” his 

father, who belonged to the Judge’s brother. But there’s an interesting slippage here. By first saying 

like “your fathers” (I emphasize the plural), and then, after a strategically placed em-dash, by 



101 Andrews 

repeating and replacing it with “your father” (singular), the Judge ostensibly reinforces 

identification of like to like, of “darkies” to “darkies” and Joneses to Joneses. But in using the 

plural fathers, and in establishing that John’s father was owned by Judge Henderson’s brother, 

thereby reminding John that it’s all a family affair, the Judge also subtly destabilizes the very 

notion of John’s paternity.  

John’s sister, Jennie, is also implicated in these structures of replication. We are initially 

introduced to Jennie just after we are introduced to the fact of another John in Altamaha, the 

Henderson’s John (238). It is in this scene that we are apprised by the narrator that this John, and 

his “darker namesake,” John Jones, were once playmates. While the idea of a “namesake” is 

suggestive in regard to the point I wish to make, here it also serves as a bit of misdirection. It 

compels us to focus on the identity of their first names, a fact that is reinforced when the Judge 

asks Jennie, “how’s your John?” (emphasis added).  

Jennie figures in another replacement/repetition scenario when, after her brother’s return, she 

and John both stand overlooking the bluff above the sea, he with his arms around her, and she 

crying on his shoulder. This is the scene where Jennie asks John if “it make[s] every one—unhappy 

when they study and learn things.” After hearing confirmation from John that the suffering is worth 

it, Jennie pauses, then says, “‘I wish I was unhappy,—and—and,’ putting both arms about his 

neck, ‘I think I am a little, John’” (242). Here Jennie’s “putting both arms about his neck” replicates 

John’s placing “his great arms about his mother’s neck” upon departure to the Institute (230). 

John’s excitement at the train station, and Jennie’s unhappiness here, are both expressed in the 

context of education, but Jennie’s case begs the question as to just what kind of education she 

might be getting that is making her so inexpressibly “unhappy.”  

For an answer to the matter of Jennie’s unhappiness, we have to be willing to entertain one 

more replacement/repetition, one that begins with a question. Given the color line, how is it that 

John Jones and John Henderson can have been such close playmates as children? Probably because 

Peggy, John and Jennie’s mother, worked for the Hendersons. Why else would the narrator state 

that the two Johns had “played many a long summer’s day to its close” (231)? Now the matter of 

Peggy’s employment is not stated directly, but I do believe it is inferred structurally. As rumors 

begin to swirl as to white folks’ perception of John Jones’s various insubordinations, John 

Henderson asks his father “"Who is this John?" And he is told, “Why, it’s little black John, Peggy’s 

son,—your old playfellow” (245). These three noun phrases can be viewed as appositions, since 



W.E.B. Du Bois, Lohengrin, and the Marriage Function of Truth  102 

all three denominate John Jones. The first two are genetically connected and the third is separated, 

segregated we might say, by the em-dash. The first two—“little black John” and “Peggy’s son”—

refer to “John Jones” in a peculiar way, if the reader will allow the pun: “Peggy’s son” denotes 

the possessive condition whereby “black” John is to be differentiated from his playmate, white 

John.  The “peculiar” condition previously referenced is syntactically reinforced by the em-dash 

and grammatically highlighted by the possessive pronoun used to bind John Jones to John 

Henderson—your old playfellow. One thus presumes that the origins of that relationship are 

grounded in the close proximity engendered by Peggy’s being tied—through servitude and perhaps 

even through enslavement—to the kitchen of the Henderson house. She is thus the missing X in 

the family structure kept under wraps by Judge Henderson when Jones interviewed for the teaching 

post: Judge Henderson’s brother is to John Jones’s father as Judge Henderson is to X. Structurally, 

Peggy plausibly fills that void.  

Let me return now to the smallest of the replicating structures, the interjections “well” and 

“well, well” that are repeated in such a way as to create parallel structures of larger narrative 

moments. In each of these instances, these interjections are uttered only by the Judge or by his 

white son and no one else. Even those who have had the good fortune to arrive with a degree from 

Wells Institute do not have access to that interjection. In the textual economy of this story, then, 

these interjections (shown below) are the exclusive property of white masculinity, and as such, 

they underscore the extent to which black and brown bodies are at the mercy of white masculine 

entitlement:  

 

“Well, Jennie, how’s your John?” —Judge Henderson (231) 

 

“[…] my closest playfellow in boyhood was a little Negro named after me, and 

surely no two,—well!” —John Henderson (236) 

 

“Well, John, I want to speak to you plainly.” —Judge Henderson (243) 

 

“—I knew your father, John, he belonged to my brother, and he was a good 

Nigger. Well—well, are you going to be like him […].”—Judge Henderson (243) 

 



103 Andrews 

“Very well,—we’ll try you awhile.” —Judge Henderson (244) 

 

“Well, I declare, if it isn’t Jennie, the little brown kitchen-maid! Why, I never 

noticed before what a trim little body she is.” —John Henderson (247) 

 

The first two interjections—page 231 and page 236—connect the Judge and his son around the 

telling detail of the two Johns having been childhood “playfellows.” In the first scenario, it is the 

narrator who broaches that fact in advance of the Judge bragging about his son being educated at 

Princeton and in advance, too, of the interjection with which he begins his question to Jennie about 

“how’s your John.” In the second, John Henderson is using the playmate angle as evidence of the 

South’s equanimity in regard to race relations, linking father and son, and thus underscoring the 

heritability of family history as a metonym for Southern custom. The interjection in that context 

serves as an ironic indication of the hypocrisy lurking within that line of reasoning as the very 

black man he may have wished to “lynch” is assigned the seat next to his female companion. The 

next three instances occur within a context in which the post-graduate John Jones is interviewing 

with the Judge for the teaching position at the black school. We get here the backstory of the 

extended Henderson-Jones family saga in relation to the Judge’s self-described “friendliness” to 

John’s “people.” It is noteworthy that these interjections also syntactically frame the only mention 

of John’s father in this story. This particular scene ends with Jones promising to subordinate his 

liberal educational values, along with his “Northern notions,” to Southern racist customs—the 

varying shades of that custom are attested to by the Judge’s appositives for black folk that run the 

gamut in a linear sequence from “your people,” “colored people,” “the Negro,” “Nigger,” and 

“darkies.” In the last instance, involving Jennie, young Henderson sexualizes service in the 

Henderson house by linking Jennie’s “brown” skin to her place of service in the kitchen. An 

additional interjection— “why”—reduces her to “a trim little body.” The reduction of female black 

body and the presumption of white masculine privilege are both affirmed syntactically and 

logically by virtue of beginning the sentence with an interjection and ending it with the copula 

“is.”  

Thus Jennie, in becoming the Henderson’s “shy little waitress,” has replaced her mother in the 

Henderson household. This replication helps make structural sense of John Henderson’s sexual 

assault on Jennie. Henderson, refusing to be a “faithful servant” to the Judge’s designs for his 



W.E.B. Du Bois, Lohengrin, and the Marriage Function of Truth  104 

political career, nevertheless replicates what had happened again and again in Southern 

slaveholding households, including, I suggest, in the Henderson household: he tries to have his 

way with the help because he feels he is entitled to do so. In “Of the Training of Black Men,” Du 

Bois declares in an apostrophe to the “Southern Gentleman” that “[t]he rape which your gentlemen 

have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads 

of two millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood” (106). Here I would point out that 

both John (229) and Jennie (247) are described as having “brown” skin. Because of the larger 

replicating structures that the narrator sets up by way of these verbal interjections, tracking these 

interjections allows us to plausibly claim that Judge Henderson’s son is trying to do to Peggy’s 

daughter what the Judge had done to Jennie’s mother—or perhaps even begun to do to Jennie 

herself. Might this not be the genesis of the “little bit” of unhappiness that Jennie admits to her 

brother, an unhappiness that the narrator takes care to connect to education, just as Du Bois had 

done in “Of the Training of Black Men?”  

Kwame Anthony Appiah gets us on the right family track when he links “Of the coming of 

John” to Johann Gottfried Herder’s poem “Die Brüder.” As Appiah glosses it, Herder’s is a poem 

“about a black boy and a white boy who have been raised together—Milchbrüder (foster brothers), 

of course, not Blutbrüder (blood brothers)—and whose fraternity is undone when the white 

brother, grown to manhood, proves to be another ‘white devil’ and turns on his black brother” (48). 

Need I add that I will here insist that John and John are actually blood brothers?  

Du Bois had earlier set his readers up for this very possibility in Chapter 2 of Souls, “Of the 

Dawn of Freedom.” There, in discussing the difficulties attending the establishment and 

management of the Freedman’s Bureau, he proffers a personification of the Southern color line in 

all its pathetic complications:  

 

Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming ages,—the one, a 

gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose sons lay 

in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery because its abolition 

threatened untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined 

form, with hate in his eyes;—and the other, a form hovering dark and mother-like, 

her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white 

master’s command, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and 



105 Andrews 

closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife,—aye, too, at his behest had laid herself 

low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark boy’s 

limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after “damned Niggers.” 

(29–30) 

 

Early on in “Of the Coming of John,” Judge Henderson is described as a “broad-shouldered gray-

haired” man (231). And as John Jones awaits his fate upon the bluff at the conclusion of the story, 

with the lynch mob bearing down on him, we have every right to presume that their leader, “that 

haggard white-haired man, whose eyes flashed red with fury” (249), is Judge Henderson himself, 

hell bent on making certain that his Peggy’s “dark boy’s limbs [are] scattered to the winds.”  

Imagining John Jones and John Henderson as blood-brothers gives us another angle from which 

to appreciate the symbolic value Du Bois ascribes to Lohengrin in “Of the Coming of John.” In 

Act I, Scene 3, Lohengrin establishes to Elsa the ground rules by which their wedding may 

proceed: 

 

Elsa, if I become your husband, 

if I’m to set your people free, 

if nothing is to tear me from you, 

to this demand you must agree. 

 

My history is hidden. 

these questions are forbidden: 

to ask from whence I came 

or to seek to know my name. 

  

Stanley Brodwin claims that Du Bois “meant to suggest symbolic parallels between John and 

Lohengrin” in regard to the shared motif of a secret identity. “Lohengrin must keep his identity a 

secret in order to do good,” Brodwin declares, “John must find his identity” (317, emphasis added). 

The identity that Brodwin finds for John is that of a “doomed” culture hero, an “individual and 

‘collective’ hero” in whom “reside[s] the souls of black folk” (318). Russell Berman, on the other 

hand, views Lohengrin’s “inclusion” in the concluding scene of Du Bois’s story as a “reference to 



W.E.B. Du Bois, Lohengrin, and the Marriage Function of Truth  106 

the tragedy of egalitarianism, the elusive possibility of justice, and the desire for a race-blind love” 

(130). The desire for justice, as well as the quest to find one’s identity, are both exacerbated by the 

missing patronym that would allow us to acknowledge that “Jones” is “Henderson.” In that way, 

Lohengrin as culture hero and John Jones as culture hero are structurally mirror opposites: 

Lohengrin’s desire to keep his name and lineage a secret so that Elsa will love him for what Berman 

refers to as his “absolute specificity as a human” and not for “the secondary attributes of rank or 

race” (129) meets its mirror double in the figure of John Jones, on behalf of whom Du Bois would 

have the true patronym revealed, if for no other reason than to expose the hypocrisy of white, 

patriarchal panic that uses violence to regulate the color line yet continuously transgresses it in 

what Du Bois referred to as white concubinage.  

For Robert Gooding-Williams, Lohengrin, within a post-Reconstruction American context, 

portends the “‘impossible marriage’” between the “all too profane world of Jim Crow” and the 

“desire” of John Jones to “act in that world” (121). The conjugation of that impossibility is 

exemplified in the twice repeated “swelled” with which the narrator describes the action of Jones’s 

“longing” (236) and, later, the action of the “fuller, mightier harmony” (237). It is difficult to assess 

whether this tumescence of soul incorporates, and thus controls, the interjecting “well” lodged 

within its precincts, or whether the interjection, having done its job too well, infects even the 

longing for spiritual transcendence above and beyond the Veil. I reinforce Gooding-Williams’s 

point in order to suggest that the “marriage” we are discussing may be impossible but it need not 

be metaphorical. 

Both blood relationship and moral hypocrisy are tragically exposed by Du Bois in the chapter’s 

concluding paragraphs. While walking off the anger and frustration of having been removed from 

his teaching position by Judge Henderson, John discovers Jennie “struggling in the arms of a tall 

and fair-haired man,” who is, of course, the younger Henderson. “[S]eizing a fallen limb,” and 

“with all the pent-up hatred of his great black arm,” John Jones smites John Henderson dead (248).  

In the post-mortem aftermath, the narrator has Jones seat himself on the very same stump on which 

young Henderson had earlier bemoaned the lack of erotic opportunity. As Jones replaces 

Henderson atop that “great black stump” (248), what had been Henderson’s thoughts of sexual 

release and his subsequently violent attempt at miscegenation are replaced by “the faint music of 

the swan,” by a recognition of the necessity, as Lawrence Kramer figures it, “of freeing desire 

from ideology, ‘impossible’ though it be in John Jones’s America” (62). In commenting on Jones’s 



107 Andrews 

shift from the music of the swan to that of the bridal march, Christina Zwarg suggests that John, 

and by extension, Du Bois, is shifting from a romance of vengeance toward an “identification with 

the bride’s provisional state of longing” to “know” her husband’s name and origins (23). Here, in 

the contact zone of the color line, the name of the father was rarely the name of the husband. 

However, in the hands of Du Bois’s narrator, Jones’s unacknowledged patronym is obliterated by 

the killing of young Henderson and by the educational condition that Jones’s mother, Peggy, lays 

out for him. Judge Henderson may be his blood father after all, but Jones, with his liberal education 

and his refusal to submit passively to the rape of his sister, is indubitably his mother’s son.  

I wish now to make one more turn on Lohengrin, specifically in regard to the Bridal March. As 

has been noted by various critics and in various editions of Souls, Du Bois “misquotes” the opening 

words by replacing “treulich” (faithfully) with “freudig” (joyfully).5 Given the language Du Bois 

himself uses to describe what the opera meant to him, the replacement of “faith” for “joy” makes 

a great deal of sense. In a brief article in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1936, Du Bois said of Lohengrin 

that “[i]t is a hymn of Faith. Something in this world man must trust. Not everything—but 

Something. One cannot live and doubt everybody and everything. Somewhere in this world, and 

not beyond it, there is Trust, and somehow Trust leads to Joy” (130). Lest we find the value of 

those words somewhat diminished by virtue of being anachronistic in regard to the publication of 

Souls, we should ask ourselves why, for readers of Souls, those words sound so familiar. It turns 

out that we have heard those words before in reference to the spiritual meaning of the sorrow 

songs. “Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate 

justice of things,” Du Bois writes. “Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, 

sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whatever it is, the 

meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by 

their skins” (261). The fact that John Jones hums that hymn of Faith in advance of his suicide is 

Du Bois’s way of suggesting that John has found that Something worth trusting in, that something 

worth dying for.6 

In the famous conclusion of Chapter 6, “Of the Training of Black Men,” Du Bois provides what 

I think is a compelling rationale for that faith. In that chapter, Du Bois is speaking on behalf of the 

benefits of a liberal education. While admitting that the “manual training and trade schools” have 

their uses, Du Bois, contra Booker Washington, claims that they are not enough. “The foundations 

of knowledge in this race, as in others,” he goes on to say, “must be sunk deep in the college and 



W.E.B. Du Bois, Lohengrin, and the Marriage Function of Truth  108 

university if we would build a solid, permanent structure” (107). For Du Bois, then, “the function 

of the Negro college” “must seek the Social regeneration of the Negro” (108). In order to do that, 

he felt that black men needed to have the opportunity to experience just the kind of transformative 

learning that John Jones had undergone—even at the risk of feeling the kind of alienation, the 

sense of homelessness or exile, that necessarily attends the assumption of what Martha Nussbaum, 

following the Stoics, has called the “lonely business” of becoming “a citizen of the world” (83). 

In such a space, as Du Bois famously declares, “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not” (109).  

Du Bois concludes “Of the Training of Black Men” with a matrimonial trope that foreshadows 

John Jones’s humming the Song of the Bride in “Of the Coming of John”: “So, wed with Truth, I 

dwell above the Veil” (109). In addition to complementing the “Song of the Bride,” this 

matrimonial trope resonates with the way Du Bois’s Harvard mentor, William James, discusses 

the marriage function of truth in “What Pragmatism Means.” “New truth,” says James, “is always 

a go-between”; it “marries old opinion to new fact” (35). For James, and I think for Du Bois as 

well, “purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human 

satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience played no role whatever, is nowhere to be 

found. The reason why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for ‘to be true’ means 

only to perform this marriage function” (37). John Jones, humming the “Song of the Bride” as the 

Name of the Father bears down on him, is a new truth in the world of Altahama, a new fact 

confronting the ugliness of old opinion. In trying to ensure that Jennie might still become the “free 

woman” that Du Bois extolled in “The Damnation of Women,” a woman who has “knowledge” 

and “the right of motherhood at her own discretion” (96), John Jones, even unto his death, becomes 

a model that bears repeating.  

 

 

Notes 

1. This article is developed from a paper presented at the W.E.B. Du Bois and Liberal 

Education Conference at Villanova University, September 14, 2018, organized by the 

Villanova Center for Liberal Education. I wish to thank Dr. John Doody and Assistant 

Director John-Paul Spiro for being such generous and attentive hosts. And I am especially 



109 Andrews 

grateful to John-Paul for the patience and generosity which he has consistently extended 

on my behalf.  

2. For an excellent history of the “reproductive logic” of slavery as a function of heritability 

derived from the mother, see Morgan.  

3. I rely on David McCracken’s excellent summary of the relationship between the Greek 

word skandalon and its English translation, “stumbling block,” in his “Introduction: The 

Offense and Us” in The Scandal of the Gospels.  

4. Robert Gooding-Williams is one of the few critics who points out the post-graduate context 

of the “quartet” in which Jones is touring. However, he does not connect that fact to the 

idea of cultural reciprocity occasioned by the Sorrow Songs. See Gooding-Williams 121.  

5. I place quote marks around the word “misquotes” in respect of Charles I. Nero’s fascinating 

reading of “Of the Coming of John” in which he posits both “a classically unreliable 

narrator” and a strategically intentional substitution on the part of Du Bois of “freudig” for 

“Treulich.” He also mentions the Courier item on Lohengrin. See Nero 263–264.  

6. Many critics commit to the logic of lynching that the narrator sets up. But I think it makes 

no sense to have Jones wait for the lynch mob with its inevitable emasculating tortures and 

mutilations—even if that violence is left to our imaginations. In line with Rampersad, I 

think suicide here makes more sense given Jones’s stoical conflation of “going North” with 

freedom and death. It further makes sense in regard to setting, in that he is waiting atop the 

bluff, so proximate to the very location where he had killed John Henderson. The whistling 

in his ears is the whistling his body makes in its plunge off the bluff—the “breath of air” 

(235) that his plunge now makes—thereby depriving the lynch mob of the opportunity to 

turn John Jones into Sam Hose.  

 

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