Passing as autobiography: James Weldon Johnson's 'The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.'

African American Review, Spring, 1996 by Donald C. Goellnicht

Criticism of Ex-Coloured Man since 1927 has traditionally focused on the issue of whether the text is autobiographical fiction, a question raised in all its complexity, but left hanging in ambiguity, by Van Vechten in his introduction to the Knopf edition: "The Autobiography, of course, in the matter of specific incident, has little enough to do with Mr. Johnson's own life, but it is imbued with his own personality and feeling, his views of the subjects discussed, so that to a person who has no previous knowledge of the author's own history, it reads like real autobiography" (v-vi). It was not until the appearance of Joseph Skerrett's 1980 article on the ironic detachment between Johnson as author and his unnamed narrator, the Ex-Coloured Man, that the question of the text as autobiographical fiction was definitively answered in the negative.(2) Skerrett interprets the narrator as Johnson's "anti-self" or alter-ego, a figure based on a life-long friend identified by Johnson only as D, but revealed in Eugene Levy's biography of Johnson as Judson Douglass Westmore.(3) Skerrett's article is a brilliant piece of investigative criticism, for which we are in his debt, because he has made it virtually impossible to identify Johnson with the Ex-Coloured Man at the level of biography. But further complications remain to be explored: We underestimate the complexity of the text when we pose the question of the narrator's position as an either/or proposition - either the anonymous narrator is to be taken as the autobiographical mouthpiece of Johnson's conservative views on race and class, or he is to be read as the butt of Johnson's irony, a view that identities Johnson as politically more liberal.(4) There are a number of levels of irony at play here: The narrator is frequently self-consciously ironic in his treatment of significant issues concerning himself and his race, and thus appears to be a subject of considerable self-knowledge; but at other times he is blind to the narrowness and bigotry of his own perspective and thus becomes the object of Johnson's, and our, ironic gaze.

An important part of establishing the text as complexly ironic is an examination of the crucial, but largely ignored, question of why a novel about a black man who passes for white would itself pass as a genre it was not: autobiography. The decision to engage in this generic passing - parallel to the Ex-Coloured Man's genetic passing - was one that Johnson took after a good deal of deliberation, at least according to the account he gives in his own autobiography, Along This Way, published in 1933, in part to prove that he was not the protagonist of his novel. In his autobiography he writes:

I turned over in my mind again and again my original idea of making the book anonymous. I also debated with myself the aptness of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as the title. . . . In the end, I stuck to the original idea of issuing the book without the author's name, and kept the title that had appealed to me first. But I have never been able to settle definitely for myself whether I was sagacious or not in these two decisions. When I chose the title, it was without the slightest doubt that its meaning would be perfectly clear to anyone; there were people, however, to whom it proved confusing. When the book was published (1912) most of the reviewers, though there were some doubters, accepted it as a human document [i.e., as an authentic autobiography]. This was a tribute to the writing, for I had done the book with the intention of its being so taken. (Along This Way 238; emphasis added)

The deception was, then, clearly deliberate; less clear are Johnson's motivations in perpetrating this literary "hoax."

William L. Andrews speculates, correctly I believe, that one of the reasons was economic: "When the Autobiography appeared in 1912, the publication of African-American novels by Northern commercial publishers was still a new and risky venture" (Introduction xv). Houghton Mifflin of Boston was the first to take such a risk when it published Charles W. Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars in 1900, followed quickly by three other Chesnutt novels; Dodd Mead of New York published Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods in 1902(5); also in 1902, J. S. Ogilvie of New York issued George Langhorne Pryor's Neither Bond nor Free; and A. C. McClurg of Chicago brought out W. E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece in 1911. These novels deal with the socioeconomic conditions of African American life in a realistic or naturalistic style and thus provided a brief tradition with which Johnson could have aligned his text; all, however, are written in the third person, unlike Johnson's first-person narrative. More to the point, though, is the fact that none of these books was financially successful (Andrews, Introduction xv-xvi), a situation that must have left publishers wary of this relatively new commercial genre, the African American novel.

Not nearly so new, and far more popular with white audiences, was another African American genre: the narratives of slaves and ex-slaves that dominated black autobiography into the twentieth century. Johnson seems to have attempted to gain credibility and a market for his text by trading on the importance of autobiography in early African American writing. The slave narrative was a politically charged genre that was widely recognized and read in the nineteenth century, during the antebellum and Reconstruction eras, and which was still considered more important than the African American novel at the start of the twentieth century. From the publication in 1845 of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself to the appearance in 1901 of Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, black autobiography had been immensely successful, gaining support for the abolition cause in particular and sympathy for the plight of African Americans in general, making many of the authors famous, and turning a profit for the publishers.(6) Also more popular than the African American novel was the black sociological essay, with its autobiographical overtones, best exemplified by W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903 to great critical acclaim. It is not surprising, then, that Sherman, French, and Company was willing to risk the publication of this text, provided it passed as autobiography.(7)