Content area
Full Text
Published in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Crisis magazine in 1922, Robert W. Bagnall’s “Lex Talionis” is an Afrofuturist text that has much in common with George Schuyler’s better-known satirical novel Black No More (1931).1 Prefiguring Black No More, which imagines the invention of a process that turns black people white, “Lex Talionis” presents the “what if” scenario of a white man’s transformation into a black man. Even though it was published in the same issue as the first appearance of Jean Toomer’s “Song of the Son,” a poem that is central to his 1923 Harlem Renaissance masterpiece, Cane, Bagnall’s short story has been largely overlooked.
Bagnall (1864–1943) is not widely recognized today as a key player in Jim Crow networks of literary production and activism despite his various roles in the NAACP—most notably as Director of Branches from 1921 to 1931—or the publication of his stories and essays in magazines such as the Crisis and the Messenger, and his out-spoken criticism of Marcus Garvey.2 During his tenure at the NAACP, he worked closely with Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Walter White before he turned to work as an Episcopal minister (Wilson 409). Bagnall’s literary output was inseparable from his political work. As part of his involvement in the campaign to end lynching, Bagnall wrote, a month after the publication of “Lex Talionis,” that “[t]he American Negro must learn, and indeed is learning [that] . . . the fundamental and enduring rights which he seeks can come only through the exercise of power, power possessed by the Negro and exercised by him” (“Fighters or Cowards” 8). This “exercise of power” is a driving force of “Lex Talionis,” a title that means essentially “an eye for an eye” in Latin.
Bagnall is better known for his activism today, but his literary output cannot be separated from his political work. Two years after the publication of “Lex Talionis,” Bagnall would publish an antilynching short story titled “The Unquenchable Fire,” in the Messenger; this Gothic story depicts a white man who receives his comeuppance for his instigation of a lynching of a young black man. Taken together, these two stories reveal Bagnall’s experimentation with genre to highlight the horrors of lynching.