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

Notes

1. The Amsterdam News, New York's black newspaper, treated the novel as an autobiography and gave it a favorable review, as did the Boston Guardian; the reviewer for the New York Times could not decide whether the story was fact or fiction, a situation that pleased Johnson, who wrote to his wife Grace Nail, on 26 June 1912: "It is proven that I am sufficiently a master of the technical art of writing to make it impossible for even so keen a critic as the one on the Times to say that the story is not true." Jessie Fauset, who would herself go on to become a significant novelist, sensed the truth about this situation when she reviewed the book for The Crisis in the November 1912 issue: "It is indeed an epitome of the race situation in the United States told in the form of an autobiography. The varied incidents, the numerous localities brought in, the setting forth in all its ramifications of our great and perplexing race problem, suggests a work of fiction founded on hard fact" (38).

2. I use the term autobiographical fiction here in a rather too simplistic fashion to mean fiction that is based on the lived experiences and the beliefs of the author projected onto the protagonist of the fiction. As this paper will clearly demonstrate, however, I view both autobiography and fiction as more complicated than this definition implies. For the sake of propelling the argument forward, I adopt this naive definition for the time being.

3. Skerrett was by no means the first to read the text as ironic; as he himself acknowledges, he stands at the end of a line of critics, including Robert Bone (46-49), Edward Margolies (25-27), Euginia Collier, Robert Fleming ("Irony"), and Marvin Garrett, who interpret Johnson's treatment of his narrator as ironic. The counter-tradition, which reads the narrator's views as those of the author, without any suggestion of irony, includes Sterling Brown (104-05), Hugh Gloster (79-83), Stephen Bronz, David Littlejohn (26-27), and Nathan Huggins (144-45, 152-53).

4. To pursue a line of inquiry that compares the political and social ideas expressed in the novel with those put forward by Johnson in his non- fiction writing would no doubt be revealing, but would take my argument into territory far beyond the range of this analysis, and would amount to a reopening of the debate as to whether the novel is autobiographical fiction or not. As I have stated above, I see the question as more complicated than this. Suffice it to say here that Johnson's political and social views were not conservative for his time, as Richard Carroll has demonstrated. See also Johnson's critique of Booker T. Washington's famous Atlanta Exposition speech (Along This Way 311-12).

5. Dodd Mead had published three earlier Dunbar novels, The Uncalled (1898), The Love of Landry (1900), and The Fanatics (1901), but none of them have main characters who are black.

6. William L. Andrews points out that during the 1840s "the publication of American slave autobiographies created a growing international literary sensation" (Free Story 97) that continued at least to the end of the nineteenth century, even though the elements of the slave narratives changed over this period. He traces these changes in "The Representation of Slavery and the Rise of Afro-American Literary Realism, 1865-1920." According to Andrews, "Approximately sixty-five American slave narratives were published in book or pamphlet form before 1865," and "between the Civil War and the onset of the depression, at least fifty more ex-slaves saw their autobiographies in print" ("Representation" 78).