Chronopolitics and race, rag-time and symphonic time in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Bruce Barnhart

Although the patron is ultimately unable to convince the narrator to drop his plan to return to America, the nature of the narrator's rebuttals show that he has partially adopted the patron's logic of detached self-interest. The strength of the patron's argument forces the narrator to extend his deliberations for a couple of weeks, and when he finally makes his decision, he asserts that he "settled the question on purely selfish grounds, in accordance with my millionaire's philosophy" (147). He puts his concluding argument to himself in the following form: "I argued that music offered me a better future than anything else I had any knowledge of, and, in opposition to my friend's opinion, that I should have greater chances of attracting attention as a colored composer than as a white one" (147). The narrator wins his argument with the patron and with himself, but only by proving the merit of his plan in the patron's terms. The narrator's inability to confound the patron's logic leaves the patron's voice ringing in his head and indicates the extent to which his admiration for his millionaire "friend" continues to influence his thinking even after he has left him. The patron's effect on him is present in the very shape of the narrator's musical project. In his intention to translate African American content into "classic musical form," the narrator perpetuates the patron's philosophy and hierarchy of values as much as he will in his later life as "an ordinarily successful white man" (211). In other words, despite his physical break with the patron, his return to the US engages him in a project that treats the music that he sees as material for his symphony in a manner remarkably similar to the way that his patron had treated him and his music. (9)

The narrator writes: "I gloated over the immense amount of material I had to work with, not only modern ragtime, but also the old slave-songs--material which no one had yet touched" (142-43). In looking forward to his trip to the US South to gather material for his project, the narrator sees the music that he will encounter as a form of raw material remarkable as much for its being untouched by other hands as for any intrinsic musical character. (10) At another point, the narrator describes the musical richness of a "big meeting" (a kind of stationary religious camp-meeting) as "a mine of material" (173). The use of a mining metaphor here tellingly indicates the narrator's adoption of what I have described as the patron's "free market theory of art." The narrator imagines his trip to the South as a mining expedition in which he aims his headlamp at the obscure backwaters of small southern communities in search of the most valuable veins of musical ore to chisel out of their surroundings. These musical "nuggets" clearly will be taken far from their original settings and contexts, for the narrator repeatedly expresses his urgent desire to "get to some place where [he] might settle down and work" (182). He views the social setting of the music that he makes his material as no fit place for the kind of artistic construction that he has in mind. Instead, he imagines a solitary workshop where he can run his newly acquired material through "the alembic" of his genius, distilling and purifying it into a form fit for expression in classical music form. (11)