Life & Wisdom Quote by James Weldon Johnson

There is a quiet dare tucked into Johnson's word choice: he didn't just enjoy Paris, he enjoyed it "wholesomely". In a city long coded in American imagination as decadent, permissive, and morally unmoored, that adverb reads like both shield and signal. Johnson knows his audience. As a Black intellectual moving through the early 20th century's tight moral accounting, he can't afford the stock Paris narrative of artistic dissolution. So he preempts the suspicion that pleasure abroad must equal vice, especially for a man already living under racist scrutiny at home.

"Taking all things into consideration" is doing heavy work, too. It's the language of a careful ledger, the tone of someone weighing freedom against consequence. Paris offered a relative release from Jim Crow's daily humiliations, but it also came with the complicated optics of expatriation: who gets to be carefree, who has to be exemplary, and what America expects a Black artist to represent. Johnson's restraint isn't prudishness; it's strategy. He claims pleasure while refusing the caricature.

The line also hints at the paradox of "wholesome" enjoyment: an insistence that joy can be disciplined without being diminished. Johnson doesn't romanticize Paris as an escape hatch. He presents it as a place where one can live fully and still remain intact, a subtle rebuke to American moral panic and a reminder that for some travelers, even happiness must be argued for.