This fictional autobiography and narrative achieved belated critical and commercial success during the Harlem Renaissance. The novel’s first audience took it to be a straight autobiography, much to the surprise of Johnson, who noted that it was no “human document.” He had written a novel about a Black man passing for white that itself passed as autobiography, but he fully intended it to be outed. Eventually, he wrote a real autobiography to set the record straight.
Far from being a straightforward “human document,” the novel is intensely parodic. It borrows from the genre of the slave narrative, complete with familiar features like an authenticating preface, a cottage where the narrator’s white father installs his Black mother, a trip south in a linen closet, and an escape north. But Johnson’s imitation is repetition with a difference. He writes the preface himself, imitating white publishers; embeds the memory of slave auctions in the scene where the narrator’s white father puts a keepsake coin around his neck; and complicates his hero’s relationship with his mother beyond the expected veneration of the slave mother. He also parodies the digressions of 19th-century fiction, as well as the 20th-century African American immersion ritual, as outlined by critic Robert Stepto, who recognizes in Johnson’s Autobiography what he terms an “aborted immersion ritual.”
Johnson maintains an ironic distance from his narrator, whose decision to pass he condemns. The anonymous “ex-coloured man,” antihero of a novel that Johnson almost titled The Chameleon, moves from persona to persona toward ultimate blankness and ends his narrative on a note of high tragedy, having sold his “birthright for a mess of pottage.” He is often incapable of self-analysis, noting only a “vague feeling of unsatisfaction, of regret, or almost remorse,” and acknowledging that it would be “a curious study . . . to analyse the motives which prompt me.” He is a man of mixed emotions throughout, and uses the word half repeatedly, almost desperately, in an attempt to communicate internal division. He is, for example, “divided between a desire to weep and a desire to curse,” prone to experience life as a series of clumsy paradoxes, such as his “little tragedies,” on the first page.
When he discovers ragtime, with its syncopated melody line played against a straight or routine accompaniment, we see that he has finally found a potentially positive metaphor for his selfhood: a bundle of conflicting motifs that are somehow harmonious. But he persistently demonstrates too extreme an interest in style over substance, believing that “eloquence consists more in the manner of saying than what is said.” His lack of self-awareness, along with the numerous textual evasions and elisions, undermines his very attempt at autobiography. In doing so, the text goes beyond the rhythms of ragtime, which did maintain a straight line alongside syncopation. His narrative also serves the opposite purpose of the slave narratives, which traditionally narrated a Self into existence; this unreliable narrator, with a void past and numerous shifting identities, in fact syncopates himself off the page, and narrates himself out of existence.
Early in the novel, in a symbolic destruction of his heritage and roots, he digs up the African glass bottles in his yard, and later repeats this gesture when he tries to “mine” the slave songs of the South. Johnson, writing against the passing of slave culture, makes a claim for the value of historical memory, and so his alienated narrator often seems to be Johnson’s alter ego, exorcised in fiction. The narrator, in turn, identifies his alter ego, his Black self, in the victim of a lynching; the violent incident prompts his flight from the South and his decision to let the world believe him to be white. Witnessing the death of his past self, he leaves that self behind.
This tragedy of blankness and lost identity is the result, however, of the situation in America that W. E. B. Du Bois called “the problem of the color-line.” Johnson’s ex-coloured man is Du Bois’s famous “double self-consciousness,” or “second-sight in this American world,” made flesh. The narrator views the “coloured man” as “an adaptable creature,” with a “dual personality.” He bemoans the “literary concept of the American Negro” that has made it “almost impossible to get the reading public to recognize him.” His double consciousness means that he looks at the “fine specimens of young manhood” at Atlanta University and sees the “patriarchal ‘uncles’ of the old slave regime”: the students seem to have a double existence, straddling two moments.
Later, when we realize that the man who lets the narrator ride in his porter’s closet to Jacksonville has probably made this imprisonment necessary by stealing his money and clothes, we reread “doubled up in the porter’s basket” with new attention: like the Atlanta students, the narrator has a double existence at this moment, for he is both himself and a slave in a slave ship, transported by the man who took away his means of traveling freely. Through the repeated use of sudden plot twists, we feel the presence of several parallel lives: he writes “so changed the whole course of my life,” or later, “another course of my life brought these dreams to an end,” and again, “another decided turn was brought about in my life.” Approaching and denying possibility after possibility, he demands that we imagine his life had he attended Atlanta University, or married a young schoolteacher and remained in Jacksonville, or continued as a gambler at a “Club.” We feel not just a “dual personality” but a multiple one.
Blacks are “a mystery to the whites,” the narrator realizes, and eventually to themselves too, for, as Du Bois puts it in The Souls of Black Folk, they possess the sense of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”
Sources
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago, Ill.: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903.
Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. Boston: Sherman, French, 1912.
Fabi, M. Giulia. Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Goellnicht, Donald C. “Passing as Autobiography.” In Critical Essays on James Weldon Johnson, edited by Kenneth M. Price and Lawrence J. Oliver, 17–33. New York: G. K. Hall; London: Prentice Hall International, 1997.
Kostelanetz, Richard. “James Weldon Johnson.” In Politics in the African-American Novel: James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
Sundquist, Eric J. “These Old Slave Songs: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.” In The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.
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