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

Abstract

Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man - narrative of a fair-skinned mulatto man who, after many difficulties on both sides of color-line and much agonizing over the Negro problem in America, chooses to pass for white - was published anonymously in 1912, leading to speculation about identity of its author. Accepted by most readers and reviewers as authentic autobiography, this text was, in fact, a fiction written by James Weldon Johnson, himself a black man who had already gained a reputation as a musician and song writer in New York and was at time U.S. Consul, government's representative, in Corinto, Nicaragua.(1) Although a number of readers in New York intellectual circles guessed book's author shortly after its initial release by small Boston firm of Sherman, French, and Company, Johnson's authorship was only publicly revealed when novel was reissued by Alfred A. Knopf, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, in 1927 at height of Harlem Renaissance. By this time black creative literature was very much in vogue, and Johnson himself had gained considerable fame as first black leader of NAACP. By 1927 he was also a prominent editor of African American poetry - Book of American Negro Poetry, a landmark work, had appeared in 1922 - and a significant poet in his own right - God's Trombones, a set of sermons in free verse, was also published in 1927. Criticism of Ex-Coloured Man since 1927 has traditionally focused on issue of whether text is autobiographical fiction, a question raised in all its complexity, but left hanging in ambiguity, by Van Vechten in his introduction to Knopf edition: The Autobiography, of course, in 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 subjects discussed, so that to a person who has no previous knowledge of author's own history, it reads like real autobiography (v-vi). It was not until appearance of Joseph Skerrett's 1980 article on ironic detachment between Johnson as author and his unnamed narrator, Ex-Coloured Man, that question of text as autobiographical fiction was definitively answered in negative.(2) Skerrett interprets 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 Ex-Coloured Man at level of biography. But further complications remain to be explored: We underestimate complexity of text when we pose question of narrator's position as an either/or proposition - either anonymous narrator is to be taken as autobiographical mouthpiece of Johnson's conservative views on race and class, or he is to be read as 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: 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 narrowness and bigotry of his own perspective and thus becomes object of Johnson's, and our, ironic gaze. An important part of establishing text as complexly ironic is an examination of 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. decision to engage in this generic passing - parallel to Ex-Coloured Man's genetic passing - was one that Johnson took after a good deal of deliberation, at least according to account he gives in his own autobiography, Along This Way, published in 1933, in part to prove that he was not protagonist of his novel. …

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