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

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

At the very least, the fact that the narrator and thousands like him feel the necessity to pass for white stands as testament to the fact that the North is not an ideal space where bondage has been exchanged for freedom, where African Americans have changed their status from property to personhood. The American promise of plenitude does not apply to them anywhere. Indeed, when the narrator visits Boston - the seat of much liberal and transcendental American thought, the home of famous fugitive slaves like Douglass and Brown, and the very place where Johnson's novel was published -

he praises the educated black population for its "adaptability": "In speech and thought they were genuine Yankees" (112). This intended commendation, which appears to signal the success of Yankee ideology in integrating African Americans in the North, itself turns out to be an unconsciously ironic utterance, as we see when the narrator expands his praise into a general statement on the African diaspora:

It is remarkable, after all, what an adaptable creature the Negro is. I have seen the black West Indian gentleman in London, and he is in speech and manners a perfect Englishman. I have seen natives of Haiti and Martinique in Paris, and they are more Frenchy than a Frenchman. I have no doubt that the Negro would make a good Chinaman, with exception of the pigtail. (112)

Adaptability may, of course, be a strategy for salvaging some material benefit from an intolerable situation of racial denigration, a way of profiting from impeccable performance, a method, within the limited choices available, of beating the dominant culture at its own game and of "proving" one's humanity in the process. But here Johnson also lets us glimpse the horror of the black colonized subject - who is clearly paralleled to the "liberated" African American - as the absolute mimic man who has become so adept at the art of imitation that his blackness has become blankness, an absence or void waiting to be filled by the identity of the colonizing culture.(20) So complete is the obliteration of an African heritage, so complete is the cultural assimilation to Euro-American values, that physical bondage is obviated; the compliant subject polices himself. What begins as performance becomes an identity. Indeed, successful passing for white by black Americans, to the extent that they lead their lives entirely within Euro-American culture as the narrator does, may constitute the ultimate act of cultural and racial mimicry, the annihilation of a residual African selfhood. While the role-playing may have subversive potential, it also has the ability to contain and transform the actor.

Even in such an apparently liberated, morally fluid, and ideologically liberal space as the bohemian world of New York night clubs, frequented by the narrator in the middle section of the novel (chapters six to eight), race remains a mark of hierarchized difference. And once more, in this world the narrator treads a subtle line between being a keen, critical observer of race relations and being an oblivious dupe who is himself used by whites. He is, for example, enthralled with those African Americans who patronize the clubs - "great prize fighters," "famous jockeys," "stage celebrities," and "noted minstrels" (76) - apparently unaware of what this list reveals: that "success" for African Americans is largely restricted to the worlds of sport and entertainment, where they perform for white society, a role he himself takes on in relation to his millionaire patron.(21) The reputed escape from class and race as dividers in this bohemian society - the narrator thinks that money alone is the indicator of position here (78) - is only an illusion. The narrator seems to see clearly this illusion of equality in his incisive analysis of the types of white patrons who come to the black clubs: There are men and women "out sight-seeing, or slumming"; there are stage performers who come "to get their imitations first hand from the Negro entertainers they s[ee] there," which they can then use to their advantage when performing "darky characters"; and there are sophisticated, educated white women looking for black lovers to keep (78-79). The narrator recognizes that these relations between blacks and whites are based on an asymmetrical distribution of power in favor of the whites(22); this is especially evident when he describes how white men steal the improvised rags of poor black musicians, alter the words slightly, and publish the songs under their own names, thus "earn[ing] small fortunes, of which the Negro originators got only a few dollars" (73). Yet ironically and perversely, the narrator himself reverts to the white gaze when registering his reaction to the relationships between white women and their kept black lovers: "I shall never forget how hard it was for me to get over my feelings of surprise, perhaps more than surprise, at seeing . . . [a wealthy white 'widow'] with her black companion; somehow I never exactly enjoyed the sight" (79). The narrator can recognize these relationships as exploitative, yet he cannot escape the antimiscegenetic attitudes toward sexuality upheld by white men. His dis-ease at the situation is especially ironic in view of his later marriage to a white woman. Clearly, he identifies himself as white here, a position he has already adopted when he speaks earlier of the "barbaric harmonies" (72) of ragtime and when he registers his pride over the acceptance of black music by "the civilized world" (73). How completely he becomes absorbed into the role of white musician exploiting black music can be seen by the fact that he later seeks to earn a handsome profit from recording black music in the South, the very thievery he had been critical of white musicians for.