Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Other Writings (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

1 (p. 2) The Publishers: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was first published anonymously in 1912 by the small publishing house of Sherman, French and Company. In 1927, during the Harlem Renaissance, Alfred A. Knopf reissued the book—this time as The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (using the English spelling “coloured”) and with Johnson noted as the author—to a wider reading public. Johnson is the author of the Preface.

2 (p.14) this dualism in the presence ofwhite men: W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1868-1963) idea of “double consciousness” forms a foundation for the idea Johnson’s narrator expresses here. As Du Bois explained it: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Returning to his alma mater, Atlanta University, in 1904, Johnson met Du Bois, then a professor there, for the first time. The two men would go on to work together, each in his own way, for the advancement of African-American life and culture in the United States.

3 (p. 16) I found there “Pilgrim’s Progress,”... with the result ofgaining a permanent dislike for all kinds of theology: The reading matter the narrator refers to comprises : John Bunyan’s (1628-1688) religious allegory Pilgrim’s Progress; a history by Peter Parley, pseudonym of Samuel Griswold Goodrich (1793-1860), who published a variety of fiction and nonfiction books for young people; Children’s and Household Stories, a collection of fairy tales, published by the Brothers Grimm: Jacob Ludwig Carl (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Carl (1786-1859); Sir Walter Scott’s (1771-1832) Tales of a Grandfather, a history of Scotland for children; and Natural Theology, by English theologian William Paley (1743-1805).

4 (p. 18) I constantly forced my accelerandos and rubatos upon the soloist, often throwing the duet entirely out of gear. The narrator refers to the increase (accelerando) and the slackening and quickening (rubato) of tempo.

5 (p. 23) “where the brook and river meet”: This is a quotation from the poem “Maidenhood, ” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882):

Standing, with reluctant feet,
Where the brook and river meet,
Womanhood and childhood fleet!

6 (p. 45) Gomezes, both the white one and the black one, of Maceo and Bandera: José Miguel Gómez (1858-1921) and Maximo Gómez y Báez (1836-1905) were both war generals who proved instrumental in Cuba’s liberation from Spain, a struggle that began in 1895 and ended in 1898. Because he was born in the Dominican Republic, Maximo was labeled “black,” whereas José Miguel, born in Cuba, was labeled “white.” Maximo joined forces with Antonio Maceo y Grajales (1848-1896), a commander in the army of independence. Maceo was of mixed ancestry; his father was a Venezuelan mulatto and his mother was Afro-Cuban. Quintín Bandera (1834-1906), a free-born native black Cuban, also fought heroically in the war for independence; his name means “fifteen flags,” in recognition of the fifteen Spanish ensigns he captured while fighting to free Cuba.

7 (p. 53) cake-walk: The cakewalk originated on U.S. plantations when blacks in bondage parodied the dancing and manners of their white enslavers. These parodies evolved into competitions in which the best dancer was awarded a cake. The cakewalk, like ragtime music, required the artist to blend technical excellence and imagination. Although its origins were on the plantations, the cakewalk endured in American culture, making appearances in a range of settings, from the minstrel stage to vaudeville to the New York City Ballet in the 1950s, confirming Johnson’s prophetic artistic vision: “These are lower forms of art, but they give evidence of a power that will some day be applied to the higher forms” (p. 54).

8 (p. 54) The first two of these are the Uncle Remus stories ... ragtime music and the cake-walk: The “four things” Johnson references here grew out of the American vernacular tradition. American writer Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) popularized stories of the plantation through his fictional Uncle Remus, a former slave who becomes a family servant and weaver of folktales. These tales of black folklore Harris published in 1880 as Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. The Fisk Jubilee Singers began in 1871 with the goal of helping Fisk University, a black college started in Nashville six months after the Civil War, to raise money. Through their performances, the Fisk Jubilee Singers helped Fisk University remain solvent, while ensuring the place of African-American spirituals in American culture. During the 1890s, the heavily syncopated ragtime music was being pioneered and, like the cakewalk (see the note above), offered the artist space for improvisation.

9 (p. 55) She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country: In 1915 Johnson published his poem “The White Witch” (it was also included in his 1922 anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry). The poem warns black men against a “great white witch” who appears “in all the glowing charms of youth.” What we see here are the seeds of that idea. The comparison drawn between New York City and a witch corresponds to the double consciousness that shapes The Autobiography as a whole. As W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) wrote in his own autobiography, remembering the words of a French girl as he sailed through New York Harbor, returning to the United States in 1894: “Oh yes the Statue of Liberty! With its back toward America, and its face toward France!” Johnson’s Autobiography also makes use of this paradox. New York City presents the young nameless narrator with opportunities, but they are restricted by his race.

10 (p. 86) I doubt that even a white musician of recognized ability could succeed there by working on the theory that American music should be based on Negro themes: The irony of this statement is that Czech composer Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904) proclaimed in 1893 “that the future music of this country [the United States] must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.... In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.” To support his belief, Dvořák incorporated two measures of African-American composer’s Harry Thacker Burleigh’s (1866-1949) “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” into his Ninth Symphony, From the New World. In his posthumously published An American Primer (1904), Walt Whitman (1819-1892) voiced ideas similar to Dvořák’s. According to Whitman, the African-American “dialect has hints of the future theory of the modification of all the words of the English language, for musical purposes, for a native grand opera in America, leaving the words just as they are for writing and speaking, but the same words so modified as to answer perfectly for musical purposes, on grand and simple principles.”

11 (p. 100) His character has been established as a happy-go-lucky, laughing, shuffling, banjo-picking being, and the reading public has not yet been prevailed upon to take him seriously: This argument Johnson develops further in the preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry: “The Negro in the United States has achieved or been placed in a certain artistic niche. When he is thought of artistically, it is as a happy-go-lucky, singing, shuffling, banjo-picking being or as a more or less pathetic figure” (Johnson, Writings, p. 713; see “For Further Reading”). Looking to counter the caricature of black life as seen in literature, The Book of American Negro Poetry boasted 117 poems by thirty-one poets, offering readers a sense of the range and diversity of black expression. Johnson believed that through artistic and literary expression African Americans could counter racist prejudice.

12 (p. 100) that remarkable book by Dr. Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folks”: In 1903 African-American writer, scholar, and activist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) published his study The Souls of Black Folk, a work that is foundational to The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” and Johnson’s novel dramatizes this problem. Johnson’s ex-colored man is compelled to choose between remaining “black” or passing for “white.”

13 (p. 104) “heavenly march”:This sermon is based on an actual one Johnson heard as a boy. In his preface to God’s Trombones (1927), Johnson describes the “Heavenly March” as a detailed “journey of the faithful from earth, on up through the pearly gates to the great white throne” (Writings, p. 834).

14 (p. 105) “Young man yo arm’s too short to box wid God!”: This line would form the foundation for “The Prodigal Son,” one of the seven sermons Johnson wrote for God’s Trombones (1927). “The Prodigal Son” opens with

Young man—
Young man—
Your arm’s too short to box with God.

15 (p. 105) Committing to memory the leading lines of all the Negro spiritual songs is no easy task, for they run up into the hundreds: Johnson compiled two anthologies of spirituals, The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925) and The Second Book of Negro Spirituals (1926).

16 (p. 106) The solitary and plaintive voice of the leader is answered by a sound like the roll of the sea, producing a most curious effect. The narrator describes here the call and response dynamic prevalent in the black church and the wider African-American vernacular tradition, encompassing blues, jazz, and sermons. Originating in West Africa, call and response is marked by words or phrases from the leader, the call, which elicits a response from the audience.

17 (p. 125) R. C. Ogden, Ex-Ambassador Choate, and Mark Twain; but the greatest interest of the audience was centered in Booker T. Washington: Robert Curtis Ogden (1836-1913) led the Board of Trustees at Hampton Institute; Joseph Hodges Choate (1832-1917) was U.S. ambassador to England; Mark Twain (1835-1910), American novelist and satirist, in 1894 published The Tragedy of Pudd‘nhead Wilson, a novel that explores the idea of race from a legal perspective; Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), former slave and educational reformer, was the first principal of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, founded in 1881.

Other Writings

1 (p. 130) the Board of Censors was induced to demand a second exhibition: Several members of the Board of Censors were adamant in their condemnation of the film, and the Board’s founder and chairman, Dr. Frederick C. Howe, resigned his post because of the controversy that ensued.

2 (p. 130) “McFadden’s Flats”: “McFadden’s Flats” was based on an 1897 comic book by E. W. Townsend called The Yellow Kid in McFadden’s Flats. For Johnson the core idea connecting the Irish and the African-American experience is the struggle to find a voice in a language initially not one’s own. As a result of slavery’s trauma and loss, Africans in America were compelled to express their identities and unique sensibilities in the new tongue they encountered, English. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce brings this idea to light: “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words.” Johnson’s strategy here of drawing parallels between the Irish and the African-American experience is further developed in his preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry, where he alludes to the great Irish playwright J. M. Synge.

3 (pp. 133-134) “Steal away to Jesus” ... “Jordan roll”... “Nobody knows de trouble I see”... “Go down, Moses”: The speaker’s catalog of Negro spirituals celebrates the artistic achievement of these works. Johnson himself appreciated the value of the spirituals; he collaborated with his brother, J. Rosamond, to produce The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925) and The Second Book of Negro Spirituals (1926). See also Autobiography, pp. 106-108, for the narrator’s impressions on hearing the spirituals at the revival meeting.

4 (p. 141) Representative Rayburn of Texas and Sanders of Louisiana: Born in eastern Tennessee, Samuel Taliaferro Rayburn (1882-1961), son of William Marion, a farmer and Confederate cavalryman, and Martha Waller of Virginia, served as a Democrat in Congress for forty-eight years (1913-1961); he was Speaker of the House for seventeen years. J. Y. Sanders Jr. (1892-1960) was a member of the Democratic Party who served in the Louisiana House of Representatives and the U.S. Congress.

5 (p. 141) Sooner or later the Government must face this question of discrimination on the railroads which it is operating: The “Jim Crow” car was ultimately just one element of the codes that divided Americans along racial lines. It would not be until the mid-1960s, nearly three decades after Johnson’s death, that legalized racial segregation, upheld by state governments, was abolished in the United States. For a sense of the heated racial discussions that occurred in railcars, see Autobiography, pp. 93-98.

6 (p. 142) the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation.... Negro dialect is at present a medium ... : As he did in his argument for spelling “Negro” with a “big ‘N’” (pp. 137-140), Johnson displays strong engagement with elements of linguistics here. The “eye dialect,” the misspellings that writers used to try to capture the sound of the African-American vernacular had its roots in the plantation and minstrel stage tradition, where African Americans were caricatured and ridiculed for the way they spoke. Johnson’s call for a new artistic form in literature challenged black writers to capture the complexity of their own experiences by going beyond the “mutilation” of the English language to the creation of an authentic African-American voice. The African-American writers who would follow Johnson—notably Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling A. Brown, and Ralph Ellison—would achieve great eloquence in their highly skilled use of the African-American vernacular.

7 (p. 142) the richest contribution the Negro poet can make to the American literature of the future will be the fusion into it of his own individual artistic gifts: This statement has antecedents in, among other places, the ideas of Antonín Dvořák and Walt Whitman (see endnote 10 to The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man). This statement also anticipates the aesthetic concerns Langston Hughes explores in his famous essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926). Johnson’s keen eye toward the relationship between race and art helped make him a visionary, one of the leading thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance and a true Renaissance man. Johnson’s writings and anthologies served and continue to serve as the foundation for the artists and intellectuals who have followed and who continue to follow in his wide wake.