Making It New: 1900–1945 325Johnson’s “ex-colored” hero crosses the racial barrier no less than four times because,
being to all appearances white, he can effectively act out his own ambivalence. Unlike
his protagonist, Johnson had no doubts about his identity or aims. For all of his
career as a writer, he sought what he described as “a form that will express the racial
spirit.” And he sought in more than one form. While practicing law in Florida, for
instance, he collaborated with his brother in writing popular songs and spirituals.
One of these, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (1900), became known as the black national
anthem. Later, while teaching creative literature at Fisk University, he published a
black history of New York City, Black Manhattan (1930). And later still, he published
an account of his political activities as US consul in Nicaragua and Venezuela from
1906 to 1912, Along this Way (1933), and a summary of his role as a major figure in
the NAACP, Negro Americans, What Now? (1934).
It is for his poetry and fiction, however, that Johnson deserves a place as a pivotal
figure in African-American writing at the dawn of the twentieth century. Pursuing
his quest to express the racial spirit in verse, he wrote poems addressed to the
anonymous authors of blues and spirituals (“O Black and Unknown Bards” (1908))
or written in imitation of black musical forms (“Sence You Went Away” (1900)).
The most powerful poetic realization of this quest was God’s Trombones: Seven
Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), a series of poems in which Johnson attempted to
recreate the passion and power of black sermons using polyrhythmic cadences, vivid
diction, and a technique of intensification by repetition. The most powerful prose
realization, in turn, and his most influential work, was The Autobiography of an
Ex-Colored Man. Published anonymously at first, it was reissued under Johnson’s
own name in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, to become a model for
later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph
Ellison. Born to a black mother and a white father, a “tall man” whom he sees only
twice during his life, the narrator begins by telling the reader that he is about to
divulge the “great secret” of his life, the one he has guarded more carefully than any
of his “earthly possessions.” The secret is that he is “colored.” So much of a secret was
this, apparently, that his early years were spent without him knowing it either. It was
only at school he learned that he was himself what he had become accustomed to
call “a nigger.” At first, rushing back from school, he had been reluctant to believe it.
Gazing at himself in the mirror in his “little room” what he saw, he confides, hardly
warranted the belief. “I noticed the ivory whiteness of my skin,” he recalls,
“the beauty of my mouth, the size and liquid darkness of my eyes, and the long,
black lashes that fringed and shaded them produced an effect that was strangely
fascinating even to me.” It is only when his mother confirms the truth – while
adding, “your father was one of the greatest men in the country, the best blood in
the South is in you” – that he is forced to accept it.
As the description of his youthful, beautiful image in the bedroom mirror
suggests, the ex-colored man is something of a narcissist. Gradually, the reader
learns that he is an egoist, too, inclined to celebrate his talents and his success.
Working in a cigar factory in Jacksonville, he claims that “his talent for language”
enables him to speak “better Spanish than many of the Cuban workmen” there. As aGGray_c04.indd 325ray_c 04 .indd 325 8 8/1/2011 7:53:46 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 46 AM