Revising critical judgments of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

African American Review, Summer, 2006 by Heather Russell Andrade

"Who is my Father? Am I a Nigger?"

In a pivotal moment of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, after having discovered he is black, the narrator demands of his mother: "Where is my father? Who is he?" (12) His query raises an issue of paternity that speaks directly and profoundly to African American historical experience in the United States of America. (Shades again of the "red stain of bastardy.") In her germinal essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," Hortense Spillers explores the impact of the hegemonic structure governing filial relations during US slavery. Whether forcibly or voluntarily bound by social proscriptions, the biological father, whether slave master or slave, could not fulfill a traditionally "paternal" role in the lives of their progeny. As a consequence, Spillers argues, the slave child had to look to the mother, or to external sources, for "gender construction and identity development"--what Spillers terms the "law of the Mother." This "law," Spillers insists, signifies "only and precisely because legal enslavement removed the African American male not so much from sight as from mimetic view as partner in a prevailing social fiction of the Father's name, the Father's law" (80). Spillers's critical apparatus provides generative material for "reading" the narrator of The Autobiography in terms of his problematic gendered and racial representation. It is curious that the narrator's questions regarding paternity are spoken at the precise moment that he queries his racial origins: "Am I a nigger? ... Well, am I white?" (12).

Inherent in the youthful narrator's query regarding race is the knowledge that to be black is to be unmanned, to be a "nigger." It seems relevant that the narrator doesn't ask whether or not he is colored or white, he asks if he is a "nigger" or "white." The significance of this moment is carried further in the mother's response: "No, I am not white, but you--your father is one of the greatest men in the country--the best blood of the South is in you" (12). This charged and ambiguous reply assures that the narrator's confusion surrounding his racial identity is never resolved. His full-fledged emergence as both a gendered and racialized subject is stunted by, as it were, "the law of the Mother." (6)

In extending Spillers's formulations, I would argue that the "law of Race," or the public declaration of racial pride, often displaces the "law of the Mother." It is clear that the "law of the Mother," as Spillers convincingly demonstrates, is fraught with intrinsic tension for black men, within both the symbolic and public/institutional orders. Rejecting the "law of the Mother" and unable to name the Father, the "law of Race" thus becomes guarantor of racial and masculine identity. Hence, the "law of Race" becomes a metonym for the Father's name, the Father's law. Du Bois's theoretical construct regarding double consciousness is germane here.

According to Du Bois's paradigm, to be "black" and a "man" is an American oxymoron. At the turn into the twentieth century, according to prevailing white standards, successful negotiation of masculinity in America rested upon material gain, unrestricted access to the public sphere, and unlimited acquisition of goods and land. By contrast, the successful negotiation of African American masculinity, by African American standards, was to fight for social equality and racial justice. (7) As a result, there existed two competing and irreconcilable definitions of masculinity, but only one viable option for African Americans--unless, of course, one could "pass." Having his narrator pass, Johnson both "ex-colors" and "ex-mans" his anti-hero who chooses material success, and assumes an identity to which he can only (via his mother's answer) ambiguously lay claim. (8)