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The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man | Introduction

The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, by James Weldon Johnson, was published anonymously by a small New York publisher, Sherman, French and Company, in 1912. The work is a novel, but the author hoped that by remaining anonymous he could persuade readers that it was an actual autobiography. The novel, told in the first person, is the story of a man whose parents were a wealthy white Southern gentleman and the “coloured” seamstress employed by the gentleman’s family. The narrator travels around the United States and through Europe, observing how white and black people behave within separate enclaves and with each other. In the end, he decides to “pass,” or to live as a white man, and abandon his African American heritage. The story includes many short scenes and didactic digressions, told in a rather flat style with little description or dialogue. When the book was published, only two or three books by African Americans had attracted large audiences, and The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man did not sell many copies. Its publisher went out of business, and the book all but disappeared.

With the blooming of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, Johnson became widely known as a writer and an intellectual. His book was re-issued by Knopf, an influential firm that published many of the Harlem Renaissance writers, and for the first time Johnson acknowledged that he was the author. This time, the book was widely sold and discussed, and it has remained in print ever since.

 

The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man Summary

Chapters 1–3

As The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man opens, a first-person narrator announces that he is about to reveal “the great secret of my life,” a revelation that he hopes will ease his mind over a concern he will describe at the end of his story. He then begins the story of his life, from his birth in a small Georgia town a few years after the end of the Civil War.

As a young child, the narrator (who is never named) lives with his mother in a pleasant house, and they are visited often by a tall man with a moustache. One day, the boy and his mother abruptly move to Connecticut, where his mother supports herself by sewing and with money she receives every month in a letter. She teaches her son to play the piano and to read. When he is nine, he begins school, where he has friends for the first time: Red Head, an older boy with red hair and freckles, and Shiny, a dark-skinned boy who is the smartest child in the class.

When the boy is about eleven years old, a comment from the school principal forces him to realize for the first time that he is “coloured.” This knowledge changes his outlook. He has vaguely considered his non-white classmates to be inferior; now he feels that inferiority in himself. A year or so later, the man from Georgia comes for a visit and is revealed as the boy’s father. His mother explains that she was a young seamstress working for a wealthy white woman when she fell in love with the woman’s son, home from college. Although they could never marry, she continues to believe that she is the man’s one true love, but by the time the narrator graduates from high school, the man has stopped sending letters, and his mother dies soon after. The narrator performs a piano concert to raise money and boards a train south, to Atlanta University.

Chapter 4

When he arrives in Atlanta, a Pullman-car porter from the train helps him find a place to stay and shows him around the city. For the first time, the narrator encounters large groups of African Americans. The people he sees on the streets are of the lower socioeconomic classes, and he is repulsed by them. He also encounters segregation for the first time. As the two men share an unappetizing meal at a dirty restaurant, among the best that will serve “a coloured man,” the porter points out that the narrator’s skin color and features would enable him to go anywhere in town because no one would realize he was not white.

The next morning, the narrator hides his money in his trunk and sets out to find Atlanta University. There, he meets the president and several other new students, who seem more intelligent and desirable than the African Americans... » Complete The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man Summary