The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An insider’s look into the world of genetic goulash – hybrids, miscegenation, chimeras, cross-breeds, mongrels, alloys, amalgams, sexual salmagundi, mitochondrial mishmash – call them what you will.

These people have their dances and dinners and card parties, their musicals and their literary societies. The women attend social affairs dressed in good taste, and the men in evening dress suits which they own; and the reader will make a mistake to confound these entertainments with the “Bellman’s Balls” and “Whitewashers’ Picnics” and “Lime Kiln Clubs” with which the humorous press of the country illustrates “Cullud Sassiety.”

More specifically, the book gives an in-depth look at the schizophrenic world of mulattoes with their socio-cutural loyalties split between those of the whites and blacks.

I have since learned that this ability to laugh heartily is, in part, the salvation of the American Negro; it does much to keep him from going the way of the Indian…
Through my music teaching and my not absolutely irregular attendance at church, I became acquainted with the best class of coloured people in Jacksonville. This was really my entrance into the race. It was my initiation into what I have termed the freemasonry of the race. I had formulated a theory of what it was to be colored, now I was getting the practice…
It is a struggle; for though the black man fights passively he nevertheless fights; and his passive resistance is more effective at present than active resistance could possibly be. He bears the fury of the storm as does the willow tree.

An engrossing book.

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