The Mirror and the Veil: The Passing Novel and the Quest for American Racial Identity - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by John Sheehy

This passage clearly aligns with both the theme of transgression and "spiritual" punishment Ramsey identifies as its center, as well as with Horton's idea that the passing figure fantasizes a return to childhood culture. It is difficult, however, to overlook the profound and unresolved ambivalence the passage still reflects. Even at the end of his sentimental narrative, Johnson's ex-colored man remains a profoundly liminal figure. The biblical reference here to Jacob and Esau tends to reinforce a reading of his character in terms of polar oppositions - the chosen vs. the unchosen, the white world vs. the black - yet beneath and beside the dominant chord of racialized angst in this passage is a subtle, subversive note. When the ex-colored man declares "I am glad that I am what I am," he moves beyond the language of the color-line, declares for himself, finally, an identity that is neither black nor white. Clearly this identity is marginal, ambiguous (the words, after all, if we are to continue to look for biblical references, are those of God) - but it is his own, both a reflection and a creation of his own experience, and thus what Gates would call a true Signification on his "white" identity. The creation of such an identity, with all its ambiguity, is crucial in allowing the ex-colored man to work through the complexities of the dialogue of race in America: It is the seizure of a power to create what he sees both in the mirror and beyond it, and the recognition of what even the most fundamental received notions of identity design to repress. It is important to stress, though, that this dimension of the ex-colored man exists simultaneously with a more conventional sentimental reading: Beside and within the story's obvious preoccupations with transgression and punishment is always another story that celebrates the ex-colored man's transgressive identity.

The simultaneous existence of two diametrically opposed readings of the same text should lead to the question of authorial intent; in this instance, however, such a question is inevitably misleading, since The Autobiography only points to the fact that Johnson himself was ambivalent about the ex-colored man's "transgression." It may be more useful, then, to consider the ex-colored man as Johnson's perhaps unconscious evocation of the Signifyin(g) trickster figure, whom Gates figures as the Yoruba "Esu," the androgynous inhabitant of the crossroads, the master of language and Signification, the (semantic) liar who speaks only (rhetorical) truth. What Johnson has perhaps stumbled upon in the ex-colored man is a liminal figure who can speak from within a melodramatic structure without, ultimately, falling victim to that structure's moralistic constraints. And whether he does so because of, or in spite of, Johnson's intent is somewhat beside the point. The passing figure as Signifyin(g) trickster breaks the bounds of the text, Signifies upon and subverts it. As Tejumola Olaniyan has said in a different context, "Whenever there is any attempt to congeal [racial] identities... Esu unfailingly lies in ambush, sharpening h(is)er deconstructive arrows" (538).