Legba's Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic

1. Race, Citizenship, and Form: James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

{ 29 } Race, Citizenship, and Form James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) is a tricky African Atlantic text. Literary scholars have frequently queried The Autobiography’s historiography, didactic style, external literary influences, use of irony, and particularly Johnson’s representation of his first-person narrator. The narrative has been called “disruptive,” a “textual changeling,” “taxonomically slippery.”1 Such appellatives that gesture toward The Autobiography’s generic unpredictability are, to a great extent, attributable to its standing arguably as one of the earliest and most notable fictional texts written by an African American that deliberately masks itself . Initially published anonymously, Johnson’s book was not the first fictional autobiography in the African American tradition; his, nevertheless, was the first notable work to gain widespread readership and generate the The words don’t count. The tune is the unity of the thing. —Zora Neale Hurston 1 { 30 } chapter one kind of readerly anxiety regarding its authorship that his textual strategies anticipated.2 The narrative’s confessional frame is a guise, self-consciously employed by Johnson, to authenticate the main character’s story, strategically giving the text the appearance of an autobiography. In keeping with narratological operations of the Legba Principle, the narrative structure simultaneously veils and conceals while unveiling and revealing. Hence readers are tasked with standing at the gateway, as it were, of The Autobiography ’s hybrid structure, open to apprehending Johnson’s acts of genre crossing, so that they might decipher narrative truth. In the case of Johnson’s classic text, such attribution of African Atlantic modes of epistemological contestation may seem surprising. In fact, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is richly adorned with the discursive fabric of Legba’s principal feature—navigating the difficult and delicate crossing of discourse, purpose, and understanding. Through its formal play, the narrative escapes easy definitions and categorizations. It is neither autobiography nor fiction; it is neither history nor myth, nor does its narrator speak with or for one voice. The polyvocal rhythms that texture the narratological trajectory of The Autobiography indeed affirm the presence of the African Atlantic orisha Legba, whose principles governing form guide us toward a richer understanding of Johnson’s intricate narrative design and the writerly process his formal interruptions inaugurate . First, however, it is necessary to identify and historically ground the conventional interruptions, formal departures, and literary upheavals that texture The Autobiography, all of which clearly reveal the confluence of social forces, generic expectations, and the author’s own racial and national consciousness. African Atlantic subjects in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century were necessarily innovators—involved in imagining new paradigms for citizenship in a newly emergent America that remained unwilling to grant them tenure. The form that black national identity would take had not been resolved with the Civil War or Reconstruction, nor did the turn of the century portend substantial social change. Hence, when James Weldon Johnson began writing The Autobiography in 1905, the atmosphere was one of anxious uncertainty. It is not surprising then that the form of textually representing the complexities of black citizenship within a social space marked by such uncertainty would be consequently unpredictable. It is precisely The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man’s tricky resistance to Race, Citizenship, and Form { 31 } formal categorization that accounts for its continuing ironic appeal as well as its relevance to the national discourse surrounding the constitution of African American enfranchisement. Any discussion of Johnson’s formal innovations must begin by foregrounding the fact that Johnson is engaged in representing a fictional antihero , a black man who chooses to pass for white rather than negotiate the hardships of race relations in America.3 As a consequence, The Autobiography thematically departs, quite dramatically, from its autobiographical predecessors, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901) and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Johnson’s work also deviates from traditional narrative representations of passing such as those found in the late nineteenth-century novels of Frances Harper and Charles Chesnutt. Yet we must not forget that Johnson was a publicly acclaimed race man. The intrigue of his formal variations is that he knowingly wrote such hybrid “anathema” in the highly charged racial climate of a rabidly Jim Crow era. The narratological trajectory of The Autobiography of an Ex...