In James Weldon Johnson’s
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
For the novice reader, James Weldon Johnson’s fictional odyssey of a biracial individual is difficult to classify. It neither is an autobiography on race relations nor is it a celebration of racial identity. Rather, it is a compelling narrative on an individual’s perception of race. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man also provides awareness of how racial identity influences the connection to community identity or dampens the bond. The author’s narrative provides a stark portrait of a young man’s coming of age in a world that he cannot fully embrace. Through 11 comprehensive chapters, the unnamed anecdotalist charts his journey from childhood to adulthood with dispassionate frankness concerning his self-identity and ties to any community.
While the educated and sophisticated chronicler experiences various types of communities in his travels in late 19th century America and Europe, conflicts about race limit his ability to connect effectively with any community for a prolonged time span. Due to his identity limitation, the nameless author remains frozen in the original concept of a familial community formed with his mother where he holds on to the idea of being solely white represents the best projection of his self-worth. Although he explores and lives in other communities, the sojourn traveler is mostly a disinterested observer of rural, intellectual, and socioeconomic communities in different parts of the United States and Europe. The one distinct community identity occurs at the boarding house in Jacksonville, Florida (Johnson ch. 5). However, it never reaches a complete fruition. At the end of his complex journey and exposure to various communities, the unknown writer realizes that his real community remains limited to his childhood concept of white identity.
The impersonal relater’s happiest moments remain frozen in his identification of being solely white. As related in the middle portion of Johnson’s first chapter, the familial community formed with his mother in their second home was where he felt comfortable and happy. In a small Connecticut town, mother and son establish their luxurious cottage refuge consisting of “horse-hair-covered chairs in the parlor, and a little square piano;a stairway with red carpet on it leading to a half second story and a few books in a glass-doored case” (Johnson ch. 1). Due to these descriptors, the narrator values a material and superior lifestyle associated with his concept of whiteness. The idea of superiority also extends to how he dresses when he mentions that his mother dressed him very neatly and how he considers this period of being “a perfect little aristocrat” (ch. 1). It is in this world that he forges his musical talent but “formed no close friendships” (ch. 1) with any of his playmates. The unknown relater and his mother did not want to establish any vital links with any member of the small Connecticut town.
In analyzing this chapter’s portion, the reader comprehends the contrast between the secret teller’s Southern infancy and his formative Northern childhood. Although the author gives hints about his racial heritage, his place and time of birth, and his shame regarding these events (ch. 1), he seems mostly disconnected from these early events. The future musician recalls those formative moments as occurring in a “dreamlike way things that seem to have happened ages ago in some other world” (ch. 1). Clearly, he disassociates himself from his post-Civil War beginnings in rural Georgia. Yes, these moments transpired, but their relevance reduces to otherworldliness as if someone else experienced them. The early childhood memory of his unidentified father remains fixed in his mind. Nevertheless, the irregular paternal presence does not cause admiration. Instead, what causes this sentiment is his progenitor’s material possessions that he wore. The reader comprehends that the gold watch and chain combined with the shiny shoes are essential objects in projecting the desired identity.
The artificial reality alters when the anonymous writer discovers his biracial legacy. The carefully constructed world shatters, as his mother cannot confirm their whiteness (Johnson ch. 1). She can only provide little comfort, affirming his white lineage through his unknown father. This turning point becomes “a radical change [that he] did not fully comprehend” (Johnson ch. 2). In summarizing “that fateful day in school” (ch. 2) that transformed his world, the future traveler does not accept this reality. Although he states that his thoughts, words, and actions were now colored after he discovers his racial truth (ch. 2), he cannot accept the new reality. In the following sentences, he objectifies and distances himself from his black history. When he refers to African-Americans, he excludes himself from the faction and refers to his ethnic group in the third person. He rejects any community identity, as they are “colored people of this country” (ch. 2). The observer never includes himself as a full member of the black community.
As his mother’s death and the convulsion caused by his unaccepted duality force his wanderings, the unidentified commentator must deal with economic realities and must construct a working identity that lets him survive in different communities. While still in transition from his personal loss and theft of his savings, he begins to form a connection with his boarding house residents and local Jacksonville community. It is in this mixed environment of “colored Americans” (Johnson ch. 5) and Cuban foreigners that he finds a first “entrance into the race” (ch. 5) and associated “with the best colored people in Jacksonville” (ch. 5). For a brief timespan, the conflicted speaker finds community, stable employment, and romance. In these tentative years, he describes his entrance into this world as “the freemasonry of the race” (ch. 5) of which he previously theorized but now “was getting the practice” (ch. 5). For the nameless journeyer, being a member of an African American community remains a novel experience. He observes it with a detachment of someone who does not fully embrace his maternal legacy. As an outsider, he views greater progress for the colored man but sees the conditions of white Americans as more “deplored than that of the blacks” (ch. 5). Race was an issue that no great American could reconcile, wasting positive energy and reducing racial conflict to extreme violence.
While there was a moment where Jacksonville represented a permanent home with the possibility of having a family for the narrator, the community bond was ephemeral. When his job as a cigar maker unexpectedly ends, so does his ties to the local region. Although he recounts further travels in American and in Europe, he remains unsatisfied with his ethnicity. Even when he marries a white woman and becomes a father to two children, he cannot resolve this inner turmoil. He relates that he “has never really been a Negro [and has] only a privileged spectator of their inner life” (Johnson ch. 11). During other moments, he feels himself “a coward, a deserter and I am possessed by a strange longing for my mother's people” (ch. 11). In the end, he rejects his black roots to return to the white lineage represented by his absent father and tangible children. He justifies his decision in defense of his children who are not aware of their ethnicity. The faceless storyteller completes the circle started in childhood when he solidifies his particular community to that of his offspring. Near the end of the narrative, the separation from his mother’s cultural origins is complete. At a public event, he describes Booker T Washington and men like him as “small but gallant band of colored men” (ch. 11) who only have “earnestness and faith” (ch. 11) to publicly fight for their cause. It is the defining moment where the narrator officially becomes an ex-colored man. The ordinary man comprehends that he accepts his muted destiny and trades his birthright for the love of his children.
Works Cited
Johnson, James W. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Project Gutenberg--[EBook #11012], 2004. Web. 15 Feb. 2016.
