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

Johnson's text avoids this accusation of succumbing to stereotypes, I believe, by the fact that it parodies - repeats with difference, revises but does not ridicule - the slave narratives it ostensibly imitates, and so, even before it was revealed as fiction in 1927, it was already challenging the generic boundaries imposed along racial lines by the dominant culture. Further, the later public unveiling of the text as a novel by Johnson makes obvious the act of generic passing that readers might have missed. In contrast, the Ex-Coloured Man begins his narrative with a gesture of self-revelation I quote at length:

I know that in writing the following pages I am divulging the great secret of my life, the secret which for some years I have guarded far more carefully than any of my earthly possessions; and it is a curious study to me to analyze the motives which prompt me to do it. I feel that I am led by the same impulse which forces the un-found-out criminal to take somebody into his confidence, although he knows that the act is likely, even almost certain, to lead to his undoing. I know that I am playing with fire, and I feel the thrill which accompanies that most fascinating pastime; and, back of it all, I think I find a sort of savage and diabolical desire to gather up all the little tragedies of my life, and turn them into a practical joke on society. (1)

For those in the know, the autorepresentational nature of this opening paragraph, which draws to our attention the similarities - and the differences - between the strategies that Johnson as author and the Ex-Coloured Man as narrator are engaged in, is fairly obvious. It is the differences I want to stress for the moment. Although the narrator discloses his racially mixed heritage, he never reveals to the reader his own personal identity, his name. In fact, he goes to great lengths to keep his identity a secret - another trope Johnson adapts from slave narratives - purportedly to protect his children, who have always been identified as white, but also to protect his own position in white, middle-class society. Thus the Ex-Coloured Man refuses to utter the punch-line in the "practical joke on society" (1) he claims to be engaged in; instead, by continuing to pretend to be white, the narrator recuperates the very racial boundaries that the act of passing potentially challenges: He lives in the closed world of white society, looking with both disdain and nostalgia at the life of black America that he has repudiated. The joke thus rebounds upon him, as he virtually acknowledges when he expresses regret in the final paragraph of the novel: "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" (154). The full subversive potential of passing fails to materialize for the Ex- Coloured Man. But by exploring the complexities of this very problem, Johnson's text proves itself revolutionary; it has helped to undermine the traditional generic division between white fiction and black autobiography, has helped to establish the African American novel as much more than simple ethnography, has exposed the hypocrisy of Northern bourgeois values, and has raised significant questions about the nature of parody and of passing.