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

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

The horrifying import of a slave auction, which de-humanizes those being sold and establishes property rights as the supreme value above all others in an inversion of the norms of human worth, is vividly captured in Frederick Douglass's description of the sale of the property of his deceased master, Captain Aaron Anthony of Talbot County, Maryland, in October 1827:

Then, too, there was the intensified degradation of the spectacle. What an assemblage! Men and women, young and old, married and single; moral and intellectual beings, in open contempt of their humanity, leveled at a blow with horses, sheep, horned cattle and swine! Horses and men - cattle and women - pigs and children - all holding the same rank in the scale of social existence; and all subjected to the same narrow inspection, to ascertain their value in gold and silver - the only standard of worth applied by slaveholders to slaves! How vividly, at that moment, did the brutalizing power of slavery flash before me! Personality swallowed up in the sordid idea of property! Manhood lost in chattelhood! (My Bondage and My Freedom 175)

Read against the "intensified degradation" of this auction "spectacle," the Ex-Coloured Man's decision to adopt his father's value system of "chattel-hood" takes on heightened significance as a tragic betrayal of his black ancestors.

Another common trope in slave narratives is the escape to freedom, usually involving a dangerous journey from South to North. Here, however, the trope is parodied in that, far from gaining hard-won freedom by means of a daring escape, the child is sent from Georgia to Connecticut to save his father from embarrassment. Moreover, he is not free at all, for the coin around his neck symbolically sets his worth and yokes him to the father with whom he continues to identify. The coin represents both the physical shackles that were used to control human bodies and the narrator's enslavement to the system of private property ownership that was the basis of chattel slavery and is still a cornerstone of capitalism. He remains yoked to that system at the close of the novel when he chooses to pass and becomes a land speculator and slumlord (143). Throughout, the Ex-Coloured Man continues unaware of the implications of these revisions of tropes from slave narratives, as Johnson separates himself from his narrator.

A further, albeit less common, trope Johnson may be drawing upon is the ex-slave's journey to Europe, echoed in the Ex-Coloured Man's European travels that occupy chapter nine. The most famous travel writings by fugitive slaves were Frederick Douglass's letters from Britain, written in the mid-1840s and published mainly in William Lloyd Garrison's ardently anti-slavery Boston newspaper The Liberator, and William Wells Brown's Three Years in Europe: or Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met, originally published in London in 1852 and later reissued in an American edition under the title The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad (Boston, 1855). The final third of Samuel Ringgold Ward's Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro also recounts his experiences in Britain during the mid-1850s. Like the Ex-Coloured Man, all of these observers of European life comment at some length on the customs, characteristics, and mores of different national groups, often succumbing to the kind of stereotyping they were battling against. Unlike Johnson's narrator, however, they were all in Europe as living examples of educated and cultured black humanity - representatives of the race - while they worked vigorously in the cause of abolition, as well as for other social causes, such as the temperance movement. In contrast, the Ex-Coloured Man tours Europe as the hired servant/artist of his white millionaire patron - he has replaced the millionaire's valet, a situation whose irony is completely lost on the narrator (91) - whose sole concern is with personal pleasure and who eschews all moral and social causes. Ironically, in view of Douglass's work with the British temperance movement, the narrator actually takes a positive view of French drinking habits (101). Moreover, it is clear from the final exchange between the narrator and his millionaire that the former has been traveling as a white man (105-07). His act of passing obviates the need to deal with the issue of color in Europe and in America, and gives him a false sense of security and freedom. Although he reports conscientiously on what he calls "racial difference" in Europe, by which he means national characteristics - his shift in terminology is itself a significant indicator of a strategy of evasion - on only two occasions during his almost two years abroad does the Ex-Coloured Man have to face the issue of racial difference based on color: once when he sees his father and half-sister at the Opera in Paris, and again when a French friend questions him about lynchings in America (98-100). On the former occasion the narrator flees from the situation, while on the second he evades the issue, feeling embarrassed at being American rather than expressing outrage at being part of the group victimized by American racism. Finally, in their comparisons of national characteristics, the fugitive slaves always focus on Europe, especially Britain, versus America, boldly proclaiming their sense of genuine liberation, their freedom from racial hatred, while abroad. Brown's statement perhaps best exemplifies this opinion: