Wealth & Money Quote by James Weldon Johnson

Luck, in James Weldon Johnson's telling, is a wobbly stool: it might hold you up for an hour, then drop you flat in front of everyone who knows your name. The line moves with the blunt rhythm of confession, but its real craft is the way it yokes two economies together - the glittering fantasy of the gambling table and the humiliating math of rent and meals. Johnson isn't romanticizing risk; he's staging the whiplash between brief, intoxicating surplus and the social reality of debt.

The specificity of "fifty to a hundred dollars" matters. It's not a poetic haze; it's a ledger. That concreteness signals a modern sensibility, almost journalistic, and it undercuts any temptation to read gambling as harmless vice. The wins are measurable, but they're also fleeting, because the sentence is engineered to pivot: "sometimes" becomes "other times" with the inevitability of a tide going out. What follows isn't just poverty; it's dependence. Borrowing "from my fellow workmen" quietly shifts the moral center from individual failing to communal scaffolding. Pride is swallowed so life can continue.

Contextually, Johnson - a poet who also moved through law, education, and civil rights leadership - understood how narratives of respectability get weaponized against Black ambition. This admission refuses that sanitizing impulse. The subtext is stark: talent and discipline do not cancel precarity. Even when the story includes moments of winning, the system's baseline is instability, and the cost is paid not only in dollars but in dignity and social obligation.