worthy son, is set forth in a sequence of events that
recall the tragic realism of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s
Sport of the Gods(1902) and descriptive accounts of
a young man’s descent into the world of gambling,
liquor, and danger. Jim remains devoted to his
mother, in spite of her preferential treatment of his
brother and the victimization that he suffers at the
hands of William. Gilbert’s tragic portrait and searing
social realism are softened by the traces of African-
American resilience, determination, and love.
Bibliography
Gilbert, Mercedes. Selected Gems of Poetry, Comedy, and
Drama and Aunt Sara’s Wooden God.Introduction
by Susanne Dietzel. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997.
Roses, Lorraine Elena, and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph,
Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies
of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900–1945.Boston: G.
K. Hall, 1990.
Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
James Weldon Johnson(1912, 1927)
A gripping novel by JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
published anonymously in 1912. Through the
characters, the majority of whom are nameless, the
author portrayed the limitations placed on
African-American potential and self-expression
and the consequences of living in a highly strati-
fied and racially segregated world. The novel re-
ceived little critical attention when it was
published first by a small BOSTONpress. Fifteen
years later, in 1927, ALFREDA. KNOPF, the presti-
gious New York–based publishing house, reprinted
the work under Johnson’s name, and it garnered
immediate praise and attention. Many believed
that the work was Johnson’s thinly veiled autobiog-
raphy. The book did contain richly detailed scenes
drawn from Johnson’s own experiences, including a
character’s plans to attend ATLANTAUNIVERSITY,
the author’s alma mater, and the main character’s
work in a Florida tobacco factory. Despite these
striking similarities, however, Johnson asserted that
the novel was not an account of his own life story.
Six of the most important characters are the
unidentified protagonist, a light-skinned African-
American boy who is ultimately orphaned, his
mother, two schoolmates, and the hero’s white wife
and the mother of his two children who dies prema-
turely. The story, which moves back and forth be-
tween the South and North, underscores the chaos
and indecisiveness that the main character endures
as he tries to make a steady life for himself. The
novel begins as he and his mother leave the Georgia
town, in which his white father lives, for the North.
In Connecticut the protagonist discovers that de-
spite his light skin, he is indeed black. His ensuing
crisis of self is exacerbated by the death of his
mother. He returns to the South to begin music
studies at Atlanta University, but the theft of his tu-
ition money forces him to make new plans. After a
stint in a cigar factor, he returns to the North and
settles in New York, where he begins working for a
mysterious millionaire. He is embroiled in a murder-
ous love triangle and once again flees to the South.
There, he witnesses a lynching by a white mob and
is determined to protect himself from such vulnera-
bility in the white world. He returns to New York
once again, begins a lucrative business life as a white
man, falls in love with a white woman who ulti-
mately accepts his racial heritage, marries her, and
begins a family. The novel ends as the protagonist,
fully aware of his true identity and the pressing need
to maintain his personal fiction, contends with the
guilt and worry that continue to plague him.
As critic Nathan Huggins notes, the protagonist
“succeeds like a Horatio Alger hero” and weathers
the several tests of his honor and manhood. His de-
cision to pass comes after he witnesses a series of
racial injustices, the most dramatic of which is the
lynching of a man by a white mob. The protagonist
confesses his true racial identity to the woman he
loves but refuses to acknowledge the overtures from
childhood friends like Shiny, the promising African-
American student whom he meets years later and
who immediately realizes that his old friend has cho-
sen a new life and identity for himself. The guilt and
worry that plague the novel’s main character em-
body the twoness of the American Negro of which
W. E. B. DUBOISwrote just 12 years earlier in his il-
luminating work SOULS OFBLACK FOLK (1903).
Johnson’s novel about PASSINGis part of the signifi-
cant body of passing literature produced during the
Harlem Renaissance.Bibliography
Fleming, Robert. James Weldon Johnson.Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1987.Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man 17