The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

“In these pages it is as though a veil had been drawn aside: the reader is given a view of the inner life of the Negro in America, is initiated into the ‘free-masonry,’ as it were, of the race [….] These pages also reveal the unsuspected fact that prejudice against the Negro is exerting a pressure, which, in New York and other large cities where the opportunity is open, is actually and constantly forcing an unascertainable number of fair-complexioned colored people over into the white race.”

This fictionalized publisher’s note frames the text as one written for white audiences for the purpose of exposing the authentic thoughts and identities of Black people and culture. The diction is objective and previews the frequent sociological commentaries that interrupt the novel later.

“I remember how I sat upon his knee, and watched him laboriously drill a hole through a ten-dollar gold piece, and then tie the coin around my neck with a string. I have worn that gold piece around my neck the greater part of my life, and still possess it, but more than once I have wished that some other way had been found of attaching it to me besides putting a hole through it.”

The gold piece is an important symbol of what the narrator’s father gives him—money. It is also a symbol for whiteness in general, because what the father also gives the narrator is his skin color. The narrator’s sense that the coin has a hole in it might also reference the father’s absence or the fact that his whiteness is not quite whole because of his biracial heritage.

“Sometimes on other evenings when she was not sewing she would play simple accompaniments to some old southern songs which she sang. In these songs she was freer, because she played them by ear [….] Always on such evenings, when the music was over, my mother would sit with me in her arms often for a very long time. She would hold me close, softly crooning some old melody without words, all the while gently stroking her face against my head; many and many a night I thus fell asleep. I can see her now, her great dark eyes looking into the fire, to where? No one knew but she. The memory of that picture has more than once kept me from straying too far from the place of purity and safety in which her arms held me.”

The narrator also has a birthright from his mother. That heritage includes Black folk music and music in general. For the narrator, this vision of his mother singing is also a source of the part of him that is motivated by ethics and morality, in contrast to the material values he derives from his father. The contrast between the two reflects and previews the narrator’s conception of Black culture as a counterweight to the materialism that dominates white American culture.