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7. The Tragedy and the Joke: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man Alessandro Portelli SIGNIFICATIONS I laughed heartily over what struck me as the capital joke I was playing. —J W J, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, p. 1971 In the beginning of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an ExColoured Man, we are told that this is going to be the story of a joke. In summing up the motives that led him to write the story, the first-person narrator says, “I find a sort of savage and diabolical desire to gather up all the little tragedies of my life, and turn them into a practical joke on society” (Autobiography 4). Let us start with a joke, then. The ex-colored man laughs because his success as a white man is enough to “disprove the theory that one drop of Negro blood renders a man unfit” (197); on the other hand, that drop still defines him to himself, an ex-ed colored man, a colored man under erasure whose identity is defined by the identity he thinks he has shaken off. So let us listen to another joke—a little folk tale about the unshakability of identity. Two men walk down the street. One of them is a humpback. As they walk, they talk. Turning a corner, they find themselves in front of a synagogue . One of them, the “straight” one, sighs deeply, turns to the humpback, and says, “You know, I once was a Jew.” The humpback sighs back, and says: “I know, I know. I, too, once was a humpback.”2 143 W. E. B. DuBois had prophetically announced in 1903 that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Less than ten years later, James Weldon Johnson both confirmed and complicated that statement. On the one hand, by writing a novel about the color line, he confirmed its tragic importance; on the other hand—and this is where the joke lies—he made that line greatly problematic. In a complex game of hide-and-seek, Johnson in one motion drew the line and blurred (ex-ed) it to the point that, the harder one looks for it, the harder it is to locate. Yet, invisible and powerful, it’s there, like the invisible, tragic hump in the old Jewish joke: you can call yourself an ex-Colored Man, or an ex-Jew, but you can no more discard the burden of cultural identity than the cripple can discard the hump on his back. In his recent revision of Sterling Brown’s image of the “Tragic Mulatto,” Werner Sollors points out that “in many cases literary Mulattos were able to cross racial boundaries that were considered fixed, real, or even natural. This ability is what made them such ideal questioners of the status quo.”3 This is precisely what Johnson’s formulation does: he downplays the tragedy (as in tragic Mulatto),and heforegrounds theironic transgression(literally, boundarycrossing ) in the form of the joke. Yet, he also reminds us that the mulatto’s ironic crossing would be meaningless without the shadow of the tragedy: just as the mulatto needs to evoke the line in order to cross it (to evoke his “colored” identity in order to erase it), likewise, to play his joke, Johnson needs to evoke and exorcise the tragedy. This takes place a number of times in the text. For instance, a potentially typical tragic-Mulatto situation arises when the narrator, at a performance of Gounod’s Faust in Paris, finds himself sitting next to his unknowing white half-sister.4 “I felt,” he writes, “an almost uncontrollable impulse to rise up and scream to the audience: ‘Here, here in your very midst, is a tragedy, a real tragedy !’” (Autobiography 135). And yet, although his “feelings [are] divided,” he does nothing. While the tragic show goes on on the stage, the potentially tragic hero stumbles out of the theater and never mentions the episode again in his narrative. The theatrical, and therefore implicitly contrived connotation of tragedy already visible in this scene is underlined by the author’s definition of himself as a “spectator.” This is in fact the role that he plays as he narrates, with an abundance of visual detail, the two most actually tragic episodes in the story: the killing of a widow by a jealous lover (in an interracial love story in which, however, race is ostensibly not...

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