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

African American Review, Summer, 2006 by Heather Russell Andrade

After the narrator decides to return to America from Europe to contribute to "the race" through his musical talents, "his millionaire" patron tries to convince him that such idealism is futile because of the vexed racial landscape to which he will return: "This idea you have of making a Negro out of yourself is nothing more than a sentiment .... I can imagine no more dissatisfied human being than an educated, cultured, and refined colored man in the United States" (106). Here the patron proclaims race merely a construct; that is, that racial identity can be "made," "acted out" and "performed" like one of the narrator's virtuoso piano performances for primarily white onlookers. This perspective on race reifies the patron's endorsement of consumer capitalism. Why relinquish monied performance in the arcane black folk province of "race"?

However, the patron subsequently delivers an impassioned speech on the ignobility of human nature and the dispossession of blacks caused by the institution of slavery. His speech is a clear thematic departure, particularly because up until this point in the narrative, the reader has not heard him comment on racial politics at all. In fact, he speaks very little. Yet at the critical juncture in question he is grandiloquent:

   We light upon one evil and hit it with
   all the might of our civilization, but
   only succeed in scattering it into a
   dozen other forms. We hit slavery
   through a great civil war. Did we
   destroy it? No, we changed it into
   hatred between sections of the country
   ... the degradation of the blacks
   through peonage, unjust laws, unfair
   and cruel treatment; and the degradation
   of the whites by resorting to these
   practices, the paralyzation of the public
   conscience, and the ever over-hanging
   dread of what the future might
   bring. (106)

This fervent discussion of the evils wrought by enslavement and racism enables Johnson to write his text into "black [male] heroic liberational discourse."

The patron's reference to the "paralyzation of the public conscience" proffers profound social commentary and characterizes him as a learned and skilled rhetoritician; the reader wonders why we have not heard him speak--and certainly speak so urgently before. The discussion between the narrator and "his millionaire" marks a narrative instance in which Johnson attempts to negotiate the dichotomy between representing a character who cannot persuasively (in terms of character integrity) claim such critically conscious views and the necessity of vehemently denouncing the current American social arrangement. Hence, intratextual and intertextual demands clash, conspiring to destabilize narrative unity. The patron, in effect, becomes not only a "second" character, but falls "out of character" and speaks ironically on behalf of "the race."

Johnson's social authorial voice also intrudes in the section depicting the segregated Jim Crow railway car, designated for white passengers. The car is a potent metaphor, for in Along This Way, Johnson describes his protest against having to sit in a segregated car; he views the Jim Crow car as an affront to his manhood. The railway car is, of course, also a motif used by Du Bois in Souls. Stepto has argued that Du Bois figures the car as a "ritual vehicle," a site in which he steps within the "veil" as he "immerses" himself literally and figuratively into the Black Belt of America. Hence for Du Bois, the railway car provides a space for a positive affirmation of racial identity. (10) Fo Johnson, the Jim Crow car is symbolic of institutionalized racism. Neither conceptualization works for the narrator of The Autobiography, however; in accordance with his prototypical selfishness he "passes" in the "white only" car, not as an act of subversion (as does Johnson), but in the interest of his own comfort while traveling. Narrative unity is intact.