Our professor for the class is one of my very favorites (he was one of the faculty on our Ireland trip, and he took me to a pharmacy when I thought my head was going to explode in Galway), and his approach to analyzing the novel focuses on how the novel is the antithesis of a novel about a spiritual awakening. The real meat of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man lies in the deep irony of the work-the protagonist, who identifies himself as “an ex-colored man” in the title of his autobiography, is, in fact, deeply racist and self-loathing. On the surface, it’s a very straight forward story about a black man who can pass for white making his way through life and concluding with the death of his wife and birth of his children. Okay, I try my best to make those summaries punchy, but it’s hard in the case of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. After witnessing a murder, the protagonist escapes to Europe with his benefactor, and it’s there that he decides to return to the American South and study traditional black music. But when that shuts down, he heads to New York, where he finds himself as a highly sought after piano player.

After the death of his benevolent mother, the protagonist heads South for college, but, when misfortune hits him, he sets out for Jacksonville, Florida, where he makes a life for himself working at a cigar plant. After having spent his life passing as white, our protagonist pens his memoirs, starting with his upbringing in the North, where he had no idea of his racial status until an incident at school. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man’s protagonist is never named. (There’s also Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which we talked about but did not read.) Classes like these are hugely important, especially when it comes to uncovering and analyzing texts that might fade away or otherwise not occur to some people. (It’s so interesting to revisit books, especially given such a shift in consciousness.) But Passing is a very well-known novel I was much more fascinated by the texts I’d never heard of on our syllabus, like Clotel, or the President’s Daughter and Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted and, of course, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, whose title, for no particular reason, puts me in mind of The Invisible Man. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon JohnsonĬurrently, for my History of the African-American Novel class, I’m reading Nella Larsen’s Passing, which I read in high school and quite liked.

The autobiography of an ex colored man