African American Experience
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man — James Weldon Johnson
Sherman, French & Co, 1912
It was Johnson’s argument in this novel (which is not strictly an autobiography, although it certainly draws on experiences that Johnson must have had growing up in both the post-Civil War South and North) that the Black man in America was less understood by white America than vice versa, and that white America looked at Black Americans as one solid, undifferentiated social bloc more than as individuals. It would be hard to argue that it’s much different today.
In addition, Black Americans have always had to see themselves in relation to white Americans. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is sort of the flip side of John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, in which a white man passed as Black in order to experience life from that side of the color divide.
The unnamed narrator (this was the first work of fiction by an African-American written in the first person, by the way) is a Black person who can apparently pass for white – in the North, at least, and except for one incident in school. Questions of racial identity barely enter his consciousness; he is aware of other Black children, but he neither experiences nor observes any overt racial animosities. Reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe impresses upon him something different about Black culture: that there are different kinds of colored people in the world, not one monolithic “blackness.”
The world Johnson’s narrator describes circa 1890 is a world in which there are three basic types of Black Americans: the shiftless or criminal element who live up (or down, depending on your point of view) to white people’s attitude about Black people in general, and who want nothing to do with white people; a middle level of tradespeople and serving people who interact with the whites and maintain decent but somewhat distant and cautious relations with them; and a class of well-educated, financially successful Blacks who emulate white culture but do not seek admission to it.
There were no organizations giving performances of such order as are now given by several colored companies; that was because no manager could imagine that audiences would pay to see Negro performers in any other role than that of Mississippi River roustabouts; but there was lots of talent and ambition. I often heard the younger and brighter men discussing the time when they would compel the public to recognize that they could do something more than grin and cut pigeon-wings.
His naivete is shattered when he travels South to attend college (his first actual encounter with a mass Black culture) and gets robbed of all his money – by a fellow Black man. Back in New York, he discovers a new kind of music being made, ragtime.
Johnson’s narrator is musically talented (Johnson himself was a successful songwriter), but seemingly overnight he becomes one of the city’s greatest ragtime players. As he does so, he gains entry into exclusive worlds dominated by whites: millionaires’ penthouses, expat cafes in Paris and Berlin. He is equally welcome, of course, in Black gambling dens in New York and sharecroppers’ cabins in the South.
This is where The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man seems to go off the rails. Not only does the protagonist instantly master ragtime music, but he travels to Europe where he effortlessly learns foreign languages. Is there nothing that this Black man can’t do? If Johnson is trying to explain that Black people can be equally creative, industrious, and intelligent as white people, he should remember that not even most white people can be as accomplished as this Black man. When he decides once and for all that he can pass — that is, “be” white in a white man’s world and renounces his Black heritage — it begs the question what the point of all this has been.
The reason, it seems, is that he has made the point that the Black man can be the intellectual, creative, and social equal of the white, but that the struggle for that equality is arduous — too arduous to further subject himself and his own children to. He does this, though, with regret that he will not be part of “that small but gallant band of coloured them who are publicly fighting the cause of their race.” Men like Booker T. Johnson and W. E. B. DuBois, among others.
All this may feel like a cop-out, but the novelist and social critic Nathaniel Rich wrote in a 2012 essay that the existence of this “autobiography” is Johnson’s “consolation, in the same sense that Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave him his perspective and purpose.
The Autobiography is Johnson’s argument that no such thing as the “ideal and exclusive literary concept of the American Negro” exists. There can be no single picture of African Americans, just as there can be no single picture of America. This is a liberating idea, and one reason why Johnson’s novel inspired a new generation—Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, among them—to write autobiographical fiction that broadly expanded the variety of black experience depicted in literature.
Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison
Random House, 1952
This novel is a milestone in American literature, not just a subsection of it. But Ellison illustrates something deep in the African American experience up to his time: the sensation that Black people feel invisible in white society. To the extent that they are even seen, they are seen through. And this creates a schizophrenic view: to endure it and to fight against it simultaneously.
His narrator starts by recounting how his grandfather, born a slave, always mild-mannered and uncomplaining, on his deathbed confessed he felt a traitor for not standing up for his race, and telling his son that their life was a war. As a teen, he is invited to give a speech before some white city fathers because he is considered a fine example of a colored boy who will be a credit to “his race”; but before the speech, he is subjected to a weird, blindfolded fistfight in a boxing ring with other Black boys and forced to scrum for coins at the end of it. What does this possibly signify?
Next we find him at a Black Southern college (Tuskegee Institute?), assigned to drive one of the school’s financial backers around on a visit. The man is a true Boston Brahmin, a kindly, rich gentleman, and unaware of how condescending and paternal he sounds when he talks about how his “pleasant fate” has been bound tightly with “your people.” He asks to stop at a Black sharecropper’s cabin, and sets in motion a chain of events with consequences that reverberate at the college. The college president dresses down the narrator (still unnamed – he’s invisible, remember, even to other Black people, apparently). The boy’s excuse that he only did what the white man asked him to is exactly the wrong answer.
“Boy, haven’t you learned anything?” Dr. Bledsoe asks in thespian, but genuine, bewilderment. We don’t say yes to the white man, he says, we lie to the white man. That’s what the whole racial relationship down here is about. Then he takes the theme further. The Blacks don’t control this college and neither do the whites: “I control this college.” He’s played this lying game better than anyone, that’s why he’s gotten where he is.
It’s a shock to the boy. Dr. Bledsoe has no choice but to expel him, but because he senses a bit of combativeness and dignity in the boy, he gives him a chance to redeem himself and work his way back to the college . . . maybe. The boy has no choice but to take it.
Once in New York, he tries to make contact with all the introductions Dr. Bledsoe had promised him; he is rebuffed by them all, and is shocked to find out that Dr. Bledsoe had basically sold him out – he had no intention of letting the boy come back to the college. But one man is kindly enough to recommend him for a job anyway. It’s in a paint factory, what could go wrong? There, he’s harassed by an impatient boss, stumbles into a union meeting, is harassed by another boss (a condescending Black man), and — because that boss didn’t have the patience to train him properly — accidentally blows the factory up.
Gradually, he comes to terms with his new surroundings, his new situation, and his new life, whatever it is. Walking down a Harlem street, he stops at a stand selling hot yams, and it reminds him of home and his identity; he decides he doesn’t have to stand up to what is “expected” of him (e.g., Dr. Bledsoe’s hypocritical façade), he can accept his identity as a Black man from the South. Minutes later, he observes an old Black woman being evicted from her apartment. “They can do that here?” he asks, incredulous. It reveals him as a Southern naïf, and he’s thrust back again into his self-doubt. Among the possessions being put out on the street is a wedding photo of the old couple: “Seeing them look back at me as though even then in that nineteenth-century day they had expected little, and this with a grim, unillusioned pride that suddenly seemed to be both a reproach and a warning.”
The crowd wants to storm the marshal and trusties, but before he even knows what he’s doing, the boy jumps in and tries to calm them: “We are a law-abiding and slow-to-anger people.” Somehow his speech starts a riot, police arrive, and the boy escapes to the roof of the building (with the help of a mysterious white girl). Evading the police, he is approached by a man who invites him to become involved in a social-justice group and make speeches. The group turns out to be a brotherhood of activists (Communists?). At the first meeting, he encounters a drunken man who wants him to sing spirituals. He’s more confused than ever – are these well-heeled “revolutionaries” for real? They give him a new name, a new place to live, and a salary. He’s taught their scientific theories and methodology. When he finally gives a major speech, it ignites the crowd. But he is criticized afterward for being emotional, not rational.
As he moves up through the organization, he encounters factions and subterfuges – not exactly the Brotherhood he believed in. He’s seduced by a white woman, then ostracized from the Brotherhood (for what reason he never learns). More and more, the Brotherhood comes to seem stifling, self-serving, and unwilling to actually confront the world it claims it wants to reform.
I was to be a justifier, my task would be to deny the unpredictable human element in all of Harlem so that they could ignore it whenever it interfered with their plans. I was to keep ever before them the picture of a bright, passive, good-humored receptive mass ever willing to accept their every scheme.
On the street he is repeatedly mistaken for Rinehart, a Harlem character about town, who is known variously as a numbers runner, a gambler, a briber, and a reverend. The revelation that one man could be so many things to different people, and that he can be mistaken for him, is stunning. Our “invisible” man realizes morethan ever that he can be what he wants to be.
What is real anyway? But how could I doubt it? He was a broad man, a man of parts who got around. Rinehart the rounder. It was as true as I was true. His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must have been crazy and blind. The world we lived in was without boundaries. A vast, seething, hot world of fluidity, and Rine the rascal was at home. Perhaps only Rine the rascal was at home in it.
Another seduction – is this a consequence of his addressing the “woman question”? All hell breaks loose in Harlem and he is summoned back up there. The resulting riot is a hallucinatory scene, a descent into Dante’s hell.
The episodic nature of Invisible Man makes it seem somewhat formless and plotless. I think that is Ellison’s point: there is no natural shape to this Black experience, or maybe anyone else’s; anything can happen at any time, for no clear reason, even a racist one. Black people can’t be trusted any more than white ones.
Invisible Man is not a “protest” novel, or even a novel of the “black experience” as such. The main character, always unnamed, is too exceptional in many ways. It does protest against the de-individualizing forces that make us all, in some way, invisible men.
lifeisascreendoor 