The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man Book

OK, so maybe this isn't one of the great novels of the 20th century. The canon tells me that other books are, and because of that I'm starting to become less enamored of the canon and of those who insist on pushing it -- because such a focus on the limited offerings of elite taste makers and academics causes gems like this to fall by the wayside.

I do pay attention to the canon and use it as a guide and as a benchmark standard that fits within a larger context. The canon can't be ignored, and part of what makes it interesting is the socio-historical currents that created it. As long as we can keep that all in perspective, it's all good. Like anything that's part of this complete breakfast, it's best to take the canon with a proverbial grain of salt when confronting it -- not dismissively; that's a closed-minded approach -- and to move elsewhere as often as possible; to broaden one's reading horizons and create one's own canon.

And when I say this I don't mean just creating a list of favorite bubblegum reads. Danielle Steel and Stephenie Meyer or the latest author of vampire/werewolf/name-any-nocturnal-supernatural-Casanova books do not belong on any canon. I'm talking about a canon that seeks alternative books that equal in literary or informational merit the ones that get on all the elite lists of the famous or acclaimed. My version of this, which is a work in progress, is a shelf of unjustly neglected or underrated books that I call Evan's Alternative 100.

James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man is one of these bafflingly neglected books that deserves more attention. Although published in 1912, a lot of what it says about the "race question" in the United States is still pertinent and timely. In some ways it seems to me to be a precursor to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, except that Johnson's light-skinned bi-racial protagonist finds invisibility in a different way, by ultimately choosing to pass for white; to enjoy the freedoms denied him whenever his true lineage is revealed.

I have to admit, for a good while I had no idea that this was a novel. It is so convincing as an "autobiography" that I believed this to be Johnson's own story. Some of it is, from what I glean off the back cover blurb. Whatever the case, it is a book that is immediately engrossing; a remarkably evocative time capsule that whisks and immerses the reader into the world of early 20th-century America.

The first-person narrator of the book would have to be, admittedly, one of the more fortunate black/bi-racial men of his day. He is the spawn of a black mother and a well-to-do white father who, though distant and purposefully anonymous in his parentage due to the stigma of miscegenation, at least follows through on his responsibility of financial and occasional moral support. His musical talents and curiosity are nurtured, and thus he embarks on a life odyssey in which his options are more varied and flexible than would have been the case for his more unfortunate (and blacker and poorer) "colored" brethren.

In his observations, the narrator becomes almost like an anthropologist of his own people -- able to blend in and out of white and black society at will. What he reports in the book was probably news to a lot of white readers of the day, and a lot of it remains fascinating and enlightening even now from a historical and cultural perspective. The book gives the reader a taste of life as it was lived before 1912 in such diverse places as Atlanta and Macon, Georgia, and Jacksonville, Florida, and Connecticut and New York City and Paris and London. I found the man's various adventures as a ragtime pianist, cigar-roller, linguist, music anthropologist, urban gambler and erstwhile lover to be engaging -- putting me in places and situations I knew little or nothing about.

The book is a vibrant and fulsomely descriptive evocation of black American life in the early 20th century and is at the same time an exuberant celebration of black culture and of the often unremarked contributions to the world of black Americans and their ancestors.

The novel is honest, flavorful and lovingly rendered, and even with all that has come to pass it remains relevant.

I loved nearly every word of it.

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(KR@Ky, with some amendments made in 2016)