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

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

The reasons for the political, financial, and critical success of the slave narratives have been discussed by many critics(8); suffice it to say here that they appealed to the desire in liberal Northern whites to "know" the Negro race and its "problems" by presenting the life of one individual (ex-)slave as representative of the lives of the mass of black Americans. Thus autobiography, a highly literary genre that produces personal fictions for the purposes of self-fashioning - and, in this case, for liberation - became ethnography, a genre designed to educate white America about its "exotic" and unknown "other."(9) That Johnson was playing on this public demand for cultural knowledge and representativeness in African American texts becomes clear from the Preface to his novel, ostensibly written by "THE PUBLISHERS" (xxxiv) but in fact dictated to them almost verbatim in a letter by Johnson himself dated 2 February 1912. The opening paragraph of the Preface reads as follows:

This vivid and startlingly new picture of conditions brought about by the race question in the United States makes no special plea for the Negro, but shows in a dispassionate, though sympathetic, manner conditions as they actually exist between the whites and blacks to-day. Special pleas have already been made for and against the Negro in hundreds of books, but in these books either his virtues or his vices have been exaggerated. This is because writers, in nearly every instance, have treated the colored American as a whole; each has taken some one group of the race to prove his case. Not before has a composite and proportionate presentation of the entire race, embracing all of its various groups and elements, showing their relations with each other and to the whites, been made. (xxxiii)

Certainly, Johnson's text was revolutionary in its attempt to treat differences and divisions within the black race, as well as those between blacks and whites in America. He thus presented the issue of race in America as much more than a simple binary opposition, introducing into the discussion complicating factors such as class, geography, ethnicity, education, and gradations of color. He demonstrates that the subject positions of black Americans are not fixed by race alone, but are multiple and shifting. Jessie Fauset, herself an astute observer of race issues, in reviewing the book for The Crisis, praised Ex-Coloured Man for dealing with "practically every phase and complexity of the race question" (12), a sentiment that has been echoed by a number of critical commentators since.(10)

But the preface to Ex-Coloured Man is not without its own potential problems. It goes on to promise that "in these pages it is as though a veil had been drawn aside: the reader is given a view of the inner life of the Negro in America, is initiated into the 'freemasonry,' as it were, of the race" (xxxiv). On the surface, this is a simple pledge of cross-cultural education conducted by an "insider." But here the preface has slipped into quasi-anthropological or ethnographic discourse, complete with an assumed view from the position of the white reader, always the viewing subject in such discourse. The promise is that the exotic "other" - "the Negro" -will at last be entirely revealed to the scrutinizing gaze of the dominant culture, which is invited to join what has previously been a closed or secret society. That white America has literally enclosed "the Negro" is not mentioned, nor is the question of whether black America wishes its "inner life" to be exposed considered. The right of white America to "know," and to gain power from knowledge, goes unquestioned. Instead, ethnography verges on pornography in this titillating promise of total revelation, itself verging on parody of Du Bois's promise in his "Forethought" to Souls of Black Folk to lift the veil created by bigotry.(11)