Held in Checks: Du Bois, Johnson, and the Figurative Work of Financial Forms

Abstract

This essay investigates the personal check as it appears in two novels, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece and James Weldon Johnson's he Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. In these novels, checks move money between a wealthy white individual and an African American; a close analysis of the check's form and function shows how Du Bois and Johnson revise mid-nineteenth-century connections among feeling, money, and social change by exploiting, rather than challenging, the abstraction of this financial form. The checks in Du Bois and Johnson present the logic of reparations. In doing so, the checks make a material difference in the lives of black beneficiaries, tying them to the flow of money made possible by finance capitalism, a flow from which most African Americans were excluded. At the same time, the check's figuration of the drawer's emotional motivations salvages the potential for progressive individual actions in those whose self-interest limits their willingness to act decisively for the benefit of others.