The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

On the trip home, the narrator strikes up a friendship with a Black doctor. This man believes Black progress is inevitable because justice demands it. With letters of introduction from the doctor, the narrator gains access to respectable and affluent Black communities in the federal capitol, Maryland, and Nashville. He is shocked by the stiff, proper diction and strict behavioral codes of the Black elites he encounters. Like all upwardly mobile people of African descent he encountered in places like England, they adhere to the strictest national archetypes of their respective countries.

The narrator begins traveling by rail to the South after Nashville. One night, the narrator overhears various white people—a Civil War veteran who fought for the union, a professor, a Jewish man, and a Texan with overtly racist ideas—argue over the fate of Black people in the South. The debate dwindles down to one between the veteran and the Texan. While the veteran is all for equality and sees nothing so special about Anglo-Saxon culture, he is uninterested in social contact between Black and white people. The Texan enthusiastically endorses white supremacy. The narrator is impressed by the Texan’s partisan defense of the South, despite the medieval nature of its racial violence. However, the narrator is sure that justice, facts, and the impossibility of maintaining all the energy it takes to oppress Black people will defeat white supremacy.

Once in Macon, the narrator has the chance to see Black folk culture in its fullness. He attends tent revivals where the preacher and song leader use call and response and all the eloquent conventions of Black oral culture to engage their simple Black listeners. The narrator is moved to tears as he listens to a Black spiritual. He believes that this music needs interpreting and popularization for people—white people—to see its true worth and beauty. Black artists and thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois (civil rights activist and author of The Souls of Black Folk, a sociological study of Black people) have only just begun this work. So close to slavery, most Black people cannot appreciate the beauty of their culture.

The narrator goes to a boarding house to stay with a young Black teacher, yet another promising young man who is so obsessed with countering racism that he cannot be himself. The narrator wakes up later after he hears the ominous sound of people walking in the night. Despite the warning from his companion, he leaves the house to see what the matter is. He watches as ruthlessly disciplined white men hunt and then burn to death a Black man they have accused of rape. The barbarity of the lynching terrifies and angers the narrator, but he is also ashamed that he belongs to a people on whom such violence can be visited with no consequences. He abandons his plan to be an interpreter of Black folk music and decides to make no claims about his race from there on out. He will pass as white if no one questions him, in other words. He heads to New York.

Once in New York, the narrator takes the $400 he has and achieves what he sees as white success—making money as a businessman. He eventually secures a clerk position in a wholesale business and from there lands at an import-export house. He hoards his money until he has enough to invest and real estate, allowing him to quadruple his investment in almost no time.

The narrator sees passing as a very big joke on casual and rabid white supremacists until he falls in love with the blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughter of a business acquaintance. Like him, she plays classical piano. They bond as he impresses audiences with his playing. For the first time, he comes to fear exposure and wonders if his olive complexion or some other tic he is unaware of will out him to her. He confesses his love to her one night while playing Chopin with her, but he still withholds his racial background from her.

While on a date, the two encounter Shiny, and the young woman’s curiosity about Shiny, whose discretion conceals the narrator’s identity, emboldens the narrator to tell his girlfriend that he is passing. She breaks off all contact with him. For the first time, the narrator hates that he has Black heritage. The young woman ignores his heartfelt letter asking her to overlook who he is for the sake of love. When he runs into her family, they treat him the same, so he assumes she has said nothing.

They reunite one night as she plays the Chopin piece. They marry and have two young children. Their happiness is short-lived because she dies giving birth to their second child during the third year of their marriage. Afraid of damaging his children’s futures by exposing his racial heritage, the narrator continues to pass. He has some regrets once as he witnesses the artistry of the Hampton University Singers perform Black spirituals and hears the eloquence of race leader Booker T. Washington afterward. He wonders if surrendering his cultural heritage and racial identity was too high a price to pay for the sake of material success.