Contrariness in Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

By the end of the hold in, when he makes that choice, he has come to intellectu on the wholey appreciate his barren heritage, and his subsequent abandonment of that heritage strikes the sympathetic reader as a true tragedy. The protagonist is a man who is exhausting to work out his place in the institution, exclusively finally he finds no place of his own and must resolve for a compromise position which clearly does not satisfy or give him any real peace:

My hunch forward for my children makes me glad that I am what I am and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet . . . I preemptnot repress the thought that, by and by all, I fork over chosen the lesser part, that I lead sold my birthright for a mess of pottage (154).

In other words, the protagonist claims he does not desire to be otherwise, but it is clear that he does in fact overhear such a desire, repressed only by his complete for his children. This passage is rife with the ambivalence which marks the entire book, the result of the protagonist's mixed racial make-up and the fact that his responses to that racial universe are found not in emotion but in mental evasion.

The ironies which serve as the turning points of the book are rooted in the protagonist's unorthodox responses to his situation. He is elevated as a white and believes that he is white. His white style adds to this belief. He believes he belongs to a world which he discovers is not his a

fter all, and the shock is traumatic. One daylight in school he is suddenly informed indirectly that he is part black. To be "part black" in the South in the post-Civil war era was to be "all black." The boy rushes home to his mother and asks her, "Tell me, mother, am I a nigger" (12). From that moment forward, the protagonist lives ion shaky basis psychologically. The reality he knew is no longer real, and the reality of the black world is at that point utterly alien, if not despised by the boy. His life from that point on will be a struggle to forge his own reality. As we have seen in his concluding remarks above, he is never able to attain that goal to any measure of lasting stability or satisfaction.

Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

New York: Penguin, 1990.

. . . The main difficulty of the backwash question does not lie so much in the actual condition of the blacks as it does in the mental side of the whites; and a mental attitude, especially one not based on truth, cam be changed more easily than actual conditions. . . . The pr howevertative of the question is . . . that [whites] are unwilling to open certain doors of hazard and to accord certain treatment to ten million aspiring, education-and-property-acquiring slew (121).

The protagonist actually recognizes this situation, but he fails to understand it even as he is naming it: "There were two fast results of my forced loneliness: I began to find company in books, and greater pleasure in music" (16). Books and music can certainly be consolation, but they are not substitutes for human being company.

In the life of everyone there is a limited issue of unhappy experiences. . . . These are the tragedies of life. We may grow to include about of them among the trivial incidents of childhood . . . but these, too, as well as the bitter experiences and disappointments of mature years, are the tragedies of life (13-14).

The protagonist interprets the world and his own experi
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