This is by James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance. As well as working as a lawyer, educator, and diplomat, he was active as a civil rights leader.

And he was a writer. He wrote poetry, some of which was set to music (one beautiful piece is Lift Every Voice and Sing, a spine-tingling a capella version of which can be heard here). And he wrote this novel, which was published in 1912. It's a fictional autobiography, and the central idea is that the narrator, who is bi-racial, but can pass as white, and has chosen to do just that for many years, is now coming out, as it were, and "divulging the great secret of my life". The book's initial anonymity was supposed to underline its authenticity.

My audio-version was beautifully read by Bill Andrew Quinn.

I came to it via The Fraud, which highlights the way the horrors of slavery continued to resonate down through the decades, but it's also very reminiscent of The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois (which is referenced in Johnson's text, although the strategies of the two men differed).

And, as a final bit of introduction, it's worth recalling how the terminology employed in the title has shifted over the years.

So, the story...

Our narrator, who is never named, has had a chequered career. Born in Georgia, he spends his childhood in Connecticut with his mother. The man who visits from time to time is later revealed to be his (white) father. The moment that changes his life comes during his second term at school, when he is about nine. The principal asks all the "white scholars" to stand. The boy stands. But then he is told to sit down... When he goes home, he asks his mother for an explanation, and she explains that she is not white. For our narrator, this is a devastating discovery:

"And so I have often lived through that hour, that day, that week, in which was wrought the miracle of my transition from one world into another; for I did indeed pass into another world... And this is the dwarfing, warping, distorting influence which operates upon each and every colored man in the United States. He is forced to take his outlook on all things, not from the viewpoint of a citizen, or a man, or even a human being, but from the viewpoint of a colored man... This gives to every colored man, in proportion to his intellectuality, a sort of dual personality."


San Francisco, 2001. Even this city, which we tend to associate with liberalism, is not immune from racial problems

When his mother dies, he heads south for college, but those plans are thwarted when his money is stolen. He ends up in Jacksonville, Florida, where he earns his living in a cigar factory. When that business closes its doors, he goes to New York, and as he is a talented musician, he is sought after as a ragtime piano player. This whole "club" environment is not that salubrious. He becomes a gambler, and is present when a brutal murder takes place. A benefactor then takes him to Europe as his personal secretary/entertainer. But eventually he decides he cannot continue this gilded existence, and returns to the southern US, where he plans to study traditional black music, and compose in that style. This resolution doesn't last long either, and after witnessing a terrible killing, when a black man is burnt alive by a crowd of whites, he decides life in the south is not for him. He heads to New York -- as a white man. He cannot bear the shame of "being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals". When he falls in love, he confesses his racial status to his would-be wife, who thinks about it for a bit, and then decides she loves him too much to let this separate them. She dies at an early age, and we assume he never tells his two children about their heritage.

The ending is terribly sad. At one point he attends a meeting at Carnegie Hall, and admires "that small but gallant band of colored men who are publicly fighting the cause of their race". He reflects: "Beside them I feel small and selfish. I am an ordinarily successful white man who has made a little money. They are men who are making history and a race. I, too, might have taken part in a work so glorious." For his children's sake, he cannot regret what he has done. Nevertheless: "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."

To have felt forced to make that choice is a horrible indictment on the circumstances of his day.



The gamut of experience that the protagonist is able to taste perhaps stretches credulity a little, but these widely varying situations allow Johnson to create a rich composite snapshot of the lives of differently-situated black Americans of the day.

Culturally, there are a lot of interesting snippets. Our narrator lists four things that he feels demonstrate the originality and artistry of black Americans: The Uncle Remus stories (controversial but interesting); the Jubilee songs (featured in The Souls of Black Folk); ragtime music; and the cakewalk. He also defends Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin ("it opened my eyes as to who and what I was and what my country considered me"). And he gives a wonderful description of the call-and-response music of the tent revival meeting he attends: "The solitary and plaintive voice of the leader is answered by a sound like the roll of the sea, producing a most curious effect... As I listened to the singing of these songs, the wonder of their production grew upon me more and more. How did the men who originated them manage to do it? The sentiments are easily accounted for; they are mostly taken from the Bible; but the melodies, where did they come from? Some of them so weirdly sweet, and others so wonderfully strong... And so many of these songs contain more than mere melody; there is sounded in them that elusive undertone, the note in music which is not heard with the ears."

The narrator's language-learning strategy (learn "three hundred necessary words, plus a set of "working sentences", after which point "the language taught itself") is also very interesting, and sounds similar to the "625 words" idea championed by Gabriel Wyner.

And on the subject of music, a transformative element in the narrator's life, a couple of asides: The first is this beautiful portrait of a pan-African gospel choir that I happened upon only this weekend; and the second is this throwaway from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: "Paul Robeson interested Gertrude Stein. He knew american values and american life as only one in it but not of it could know them. And yet as soon as any other person came into the room he became definitely a negro. Gertrude Stein did not like hearing him sing spirituals. They do not belong to you any more than anything else, so why claim them, she said. He did not answer. Once a southern woman, a very charming southern woman, was there, and she said to him, where were you born, and he answered, in New Jersey and she said, not in the south, what a pity and he said, not for me. Gertrude Stein concluded that negroes were not suffering from persecution, they were suffering from nothingness." These remarks seem a curious meld of the perceptive and the cloth-eared...



Politically, too, the biracial narrator's access to two constituencies allows him to present a fairly rounded picture of the wretched "race question". Ironically, it is his white benefactor, trying to persuade him not to leave, who produces the most tragic diagnosis: "I can imagine no more dissatisfied human being than an educated, cultured, and refined colored man in the United States... We light upon one evil and hit it with all the might of our civilization, but only succeed in scattering it into a dozen other forms. We hit slavery through a great civil war. Did we destroy it? No, we only changed it into hatred between sections of the country: in the South, into political corruption and chicanery, the degradation of the blacks through peonage, unjust laws, unfair and cruel treatment; and the degradation of the whites by their resorting to these practices, the paralyzation of the public conscience, and the ever overhanging dread of what the future may bring."

A black man he meets on the ship going home is more sanguine: "In spite of all that is written, said, and done, this great, big, incontrovertible fact stands out -- the Negro is progressing, and that disproves all the arguments in the world that he is incapable of progress. I was born in slavery, and at emancipation was set adrift a ragged, penniless bit of humanity. I have seen the Negro in every grade, and I know what I am talking about... But, above all, when I am discouraged and disheartened, I have this to fall back on: if there is a principle of right in the world, which finally prevails, and I believe that there is; if there is a merciful but justice-loving God in heaven, and I believe that there is, we shall win; for we have right on our side."

Another set of views is evidenced in the discussion the narrator witnesses during a train trip from Nashville to Atlanta. Four passengers debate "the Negro question". The Jewish cigar manufacturer is diplomatic and non-confrontational, and the northern professor who now works in the South is defeatist ("he had to confess that the problem could hardly be handled any better than was being handled by the Southern whites"), but not overly antagonistic. The other two, however -- the former Union soldier who had fought through the Civil War, and the cotton planter from Texas -- hold irreconcilable views. And a LOT of prejudice is expressed on all sides.

In face of these cruelly entrenched and systemic problems, it seems unfair to castigate "the protagonist’s failures to identify with, defend, or otherwise be an African-American". I wonder how many of us would have had the courage to do differently?



There was much in Ex-Colored Man that reminded me of The Porter, a 2022 Canadian television series that we watched, but I never quite got round to writing about. Directed by Charles Officer and R.T. Thorne, it follows the lives of the some of the black Canadian sleeping car porters in the early years of the 20th century. Here, too, we encounter gambling clubs and ragtime, deep-rooted prejudice, and a range of ideas on how to handle it all (including passing yourself off as white if you can). The series prided itself on getting the historical details right.

Described as "the biggest Black-led TV series in Canada’s history", it nevertheless brings together a team who still experience racism in their daily lives: "'Why I think The Porter is really important is because often we think that these things were years ago like, "Don’t worry about racism, it doesn’t exist." But truly, it’s just taken on new shapes,' says [actor Aml] Ameen. 'So it’s really like on our sleeves, it’s in the fabric of what we experienced and sometimes I think racism has become so complex that you disguise it with your smiles and cries or you disguise it with particular orders that "we don’t understand that here." It could be in trying to understand people’s food or little nuances that are abrasive… it’s the microaggressions.'"

That we're still stuck in this morass, over 100 years later, is very, very dispiriting.