The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a novel by James Weldon Johnson. It first appeared anonymously in 1912, published in Boston by the small firm Sherman, French & Company. Johnson, who was then working in the diplomatic service, chose anonymity because he feared that a book so controversial on questions of race might harm his career. It addressed discrimination and racial identity openly, at a time when American literature rarely did so, and it was poorly received when it came out. In 1927 it was reissued, with some minor changes of wording, by Alfred A. Knopf, an influential house that published many writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and this time Johnson was credited as its author. Despite its title, it is a novel, though it draws on people and events from Johnson's own life, which is why it is often described as a roman à clef.

The story opens with a frame in which an unnamed narrator, now an adult, presents his account as "the great secret of my life." He admits that telling it carries a risk, so he withholds the name of the small Georgia town where his childhood unfolds, since people who still live there might recognize him. Born shortly after the Civil War, he is the son of an African American mother who shields him through childhood and adolescence, and of a wealthy white father from the Southern aristocracy who is largely absent but supports both of them financially. That support lets the boy grow up in a more comfortable, middle-class setting than many Black people of the time could enjoy. He comes to love music and attends an integrated school, where he learns that his heritage exposes him to contempt. After being publicly corrected in class, he asks his mother whether he is a "nigger," and she answers that his father is one of the greatest men in the country. The episode ends his innocence and launches a racial awareness that makes him scrutinize himself and his family harshly.

After his mother's death he is left an orphan and poor. He moves easily among working-class Black communities and, through church and social gatherings, observes three groups: the desperate, the domestic servants, and the independent artisans and professionals. He later enjoys a period of prosperity as a ragtime pianist for a rich white gentleman, who introduces him to the world of the wealthy and with whom he forms an ambiguous bond mixing dependence, friendship, and echoes of the master and slave relationship. In Paris, during a performance of Faust, he realizes that the young woman seated beside him is his half-sister, the daughter of the man who is his father. The revelation pushes him to leave his patron and return to the United States, determined to create an African American musical form that will bring honor to his people. There he witnesses the lynching of a Black man, a scene that leaves a lasting mark and strengthens his resolve to study the spirituals and ragtime.

The novel has been read as an examination of identity, class, and race in America after Reconstruction, and as a meditation on the cost of concealing one's origins. Its critical standing grew over the years, and its importance to the Harlem Renaissance and to later African American literature is now widely recognized.