Perhaps best known for writing the Black National Anthem, Lift
Every Voice and Sing ,
James Weldon Johnson wrote one of the first novels to probe
the ambiguities of race, the
novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. As a boy,
the fictional title character is
sent North with his Mother to be raised in Connecticut.
He does extremely well in school and
is even something of a musical prodigy.
But, he is stunned when one day in school a teacher asks the
white students to stand, and scolds him
when he joins them. He confronts his fair skinned mother
and she reveals that she is indeed black
and his father is a white Southern gentleman. His father
later comes to visit, and even buys him a
piano, but the child is unable to approach and deal with him.
As a young man, the death of his mother & sale of their house
leaves him with a small stake & he
determines to attend college. Though qualified, he rules
out Harvard for financial reasons & heads
back down South to attend Atlanta University. However,
his stake is stolen from his boarding house
room before he can register & he ends up with a job in a
cigar factory.
When the factory closes, he heads North again, this time to New
York City and discovers Ragtime
music and shooting craps, excelling at the one & nearing
ruin in the other. A white gentleman who
has heard him play enters into an exclusive agreement to have
him play at parties & subsequently
takes him along on a tour of Europe.
Inevitably, he is drawn back to America and to music. He
tours the South collecting musical
knowledge so that he will be able to compose a uniquely American
and Black music. But his idyll is
shattered when he sees a white lynch mob burn a black man.
In the wake of this experience, he
decides to "pass" for white--not due to fear or discouragement,
but due to "Shame at being identified
with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than
animals."
Abandoning his musical ambitions, he takes a job as a clerk, does
well investing in real estate & meets
a white woman who he wishes to marry. After examining his
conscience he decides to tell her that
he is black. After taking some time to confront this fact,
she consents to marriage.
As the novel closes, the "ex-colored man" tells us: "My love
for my children makes me glad that I am
what I am, and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet,
when I sometimes open a little box
in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only
tangible remnants of a vanished dream,
a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought,
that, after all, I have chosen the
lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage."
And the reader can't help but feel profoundly ashamed of a system
of racial oppression that forced a
man to make these choices--a wonderful novel.
