Copy Wright: What is an (Invisible) Author?

I am a negro and was born some time during the war in Elbert County, Ga., and I reckon by this time I must be a little over forty years old. My mother was not married when I was born, and I never knew who my father was or anything about him.

—Anonymous, "The New Slavery in the South—An Autobiography by a
Georgia Negro Peon" ¹

I am near white. [. . .] I might be white if I wanted to be. And therein lies the anomaly which to the uninitiated seems strange beyond belief.

—Anonymous, "The Adventures of a
Near-White" ²

My eyes are light blue, my hair is light brown, my features are undeniably Nordic, my skin is white; yet in my veins run a few drops of negro blood. Therefore, in America, I am a negro.

—Anonymous, "White, but Black: A Document on the Race Problem" ³

I am an invisible man. [. . .] I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man ⁴

Autobiographical Acts

I AM A NEGRO." "I am near white." "Therefore, in America, I am a negro." "I am invisible." With such self-descriptions these four nameless voices introduced their personal histories by racially categorizing the faces they did not show. They spoke from within a continuous practice of testimony that in the first half of the twentieth century moved from genuine anonymity to authored invisibility. Though the anonymous texts remain uncollected and unstudied, there are enough similar testimonies to raise the possibility that "I am [name withheld]" was the twentieth-century successor to the ex-slave narrators' "I was born," but one that interrupted the master narrative of emancipation and racial progress. Titles such as "The New Slavery in the South" (NS 409) and "More Slavery at the South" made no bones about the matter. ⁵ Antebellum narrators, such as Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, became household names and formed the first well-known generation of African American authors. In these later self-narratives, the substitution of "I am" for a signature marked the spot where the parables of liberation and uplift went underground to lament the dream deferred. For the peon, the nurse, and other southerners, the only vestige of the underground railroad was journalistic; they sent their accounts rather than themselves northward. The two "white Negroes" above are in the North, but dare not say where. Outspoken as they all are, they continue to elude literary historians as they once did the Klan.

From 1940 onwards there came an emergence of sorts in that breakthrough moment of black authorship when Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and others managed both to sell books and to speak for the voiceless or, as Wright put it in American Hunger, "to voice the words in them that they could not say, to be a witness for their living" ⁶ (and to make a living in the process, it might be added). But the loss was not repaired. A distinction easily missed is that the voiceless were not the anonymous, who in fact did find words to witness for their living, though at the cost of their names. To be considered below is the role that the nameless "I am"s play in this curious history of authorship's disappearance and reappearance within the strong continuities of African American autobiographical practice. ⁷ This is an unstudied question, though not a hidden one. Ellison beckons to it: "'I am what I am!'" proclaims his anonymous narrator, wolfing down two yams. "'They're my birthmark,' I said, 'I yam what I am!'" (IM 266).

The movement from the anonymity of "Negro Peon 1904" to the authored invisibility of Ellison's novel obviously crosses the line between fact and fiction, though this is not an easy line to find. Invisible Man is fact-based fiction at a teasingly ambiguous distance from Ellison's own autobiographical self-presentation. About the facticity of the other...