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C h a p t e r t w o Double Consciousness Johnson  Chesnutt  Du Bois  Washington Aboy discovers, by being told not to stand up with the “white scholars” in his class, that he is “colored.” “Mother, mother,” he cries when he gets home, “tell me, am I a nigger?” “I am not white,” she answers, “but you . . . the best blood of the South is in you.” The boy goes on to take up piano. On the way to enroll in college in Atlanta, he is diverted by a craps game and ends up becoming a cigar maker in Jacksonville. Moving north, he becomes a professional gambler as well as “the best ragtime player in New York.” A millionaire who likes his playing takes him to Europe as a servant-companion. After a pleasant sojourn, the narrator decides to return to the United States to pursue music, especially study of “the old slave songs.” At Macon, Georgia, he strikes out “into the interior.” One night he hears the galloping of horses and mutterings about “some terrible crime.” “A crowd of men, all white,” gathers at the railroad station. A “poor wretch” is chained to a railroad tie and burned alive. On the return journey north, the narrator feels “unbearable shame” and realizes the emotion “that was driving me out of the Negro race.” He resolves to make money, in real estate. “Then I met her.” She is “dazzlingly white.” A courtship begins; he finally tells her “I love you,” and that “there is something more.” She flees. Meeting him again months later, she confesses her love. “We were married the following spring . . . First there came to us a little girl, with hair and eyes dark like mine . . . Two years later there came a boy, who has my temperament , but is fair like his mother.” The wife dies giving birth to the son. “I shall never marry again.” The narrator concludes that “I am an ordinary successful white man who has made a little money.” But he ends, in his last sentence, with the thought that “I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.” What an American story! Wandering, vagrancy, upward mobility, courtship, denial, marriage, parenthood, success—and all that crossed by race, a factor that determines everything and nothing. What allows the unnamed narrator to escape its strictures is his appearance, one by which even he—the big recognition scene occurs when racial identity is publicly disclosed and imposed—is taken in. And, of course, if race can be this easily dissembled, then what, exactly, is it? Never used here is the word “black”—the term simply does not apply. At moments of extreme racial awareness, the narrative retreats from specificity behind Double Consciousness 13 questions (“Am I a nigger?”), euphemism (“best blood”), or abstract nouns (“something more”). While being black is an overwhelming cultural fact for most Negroes , trapping them in a cycle of abuse sanctioned by lynching, the narrator lives out his race as a performance, an identity function that exists insofar as he is willing to acknowledge it. The great fantasy of James Weldon Johnson’s (1871–1938) Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is that race is an experience to which one can consent. The “ivory whiteness” of his skin allows the narrator to move at will across the color line, and yet the crises of his story involve an experience of unchosen or anguished identification with his blackness. These are moments of shame: the “sword thrust” in the classroom; the lynching in Georgia; the rejected proposal, when his wife-to-be begins to weep. To step out of blackness, on the other hand, proves relatively painless, its greatest price being the guilt expressed in Johnson’s last sentence. And of course the book itself, like its narrator, engages in an act of passing: it is a novel masquerading as an autobiography. In its step-by-step documentary tone (a life, unlike a story, cannot have happened otherwise), the Autobiography purchases a kind of necessity for a character who enjoys a fantastic freedom. The Autobiography was first published anonymously, in 1912. An editor’s note in the Dover Thrift Edition tells us that “it fooled many readers with its authentic tone.” But it did not become “widely successful” until reissued in 1927 under its author’s name. Then it became clear that this “autobiography” had nothing to say about vast stretches of its author’s life, such as his founding of the first...

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