The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Johnson uses these middle chapters to explore the impact of geographic movement on racial identity and to show that the groundwork for the Harlem Renaissance was already in process by the turn of the century.

After having explored the roots of his personal and racial identity in the rural South, the narrator moves from the South to the North, allowing him to replicate the geographic movement of many Black people at the turn of the century. For rural Southerners, the city held both peril and promise. On the one hand, the city is a place that promised freedom from restrictive Jim Crow laws and limits on Black excellence. Like the young men whom he accompanies, the narrator thinks that the city will offer more work opportunities and the chance to explore the pinnacle of what Black culture has to offer—ragtime, from the narrator’s perspective.

In the club, the narrator initially finds just what he expected to find in the city. The club typifies Black excellence with its autographed pictures of famous Black men, and the talented people the narrator encounters there show that Black people as a whole are capable of success in sports, politics, and art. In his own life, the narrator has no problem finding work, likely a reflection of the greater economic opportunities available in the city, and he is fascinated by how money flows so freely through the hands of gamblers and Black celebrities alike. In short, the city is a place that offers freedom that is unavailable elsewhere in America.

Johnson uses foreshadowing at the start of this chapter to show that the city cannot live up to all that it promises to Black people and the narrator. At the start of the chapter, the narrator moves from how he then saw the city as a beautiful panorama to using retrospection to describe it as a witch who tricks the viewer into seeing her as a beautiful woman; this witch hides an old face and capriciously raises some to success and others to failure. The city as witch shows that self-determination and hard work are nothing in the face of luck and happenstance when it comes to Black success. The fate of the gamblers—men who are made and broken by luck and forced to stay inside of the gambling parlor based on these random outcomes—is just what the narrator encounters later in the city.

The young Black man trapped in the sinful city is a racial archetype that Johnson develops to show that wherever Black people go, racism is there to meet them. In 1912, this second part of the novel would have been a cautionary tale about Black migrants. In 1927, there were already rumblings of how economically, politically, and socially precarious the lives of Black migrants to the city were. The New York episode in the chapter thus counters the idealized notions of the city with a realistic take on the persistence of inequality everywhere in the United States.

When the narrator does manage to achieve some degree of movement and freedom, it is through music, specifically through ragtime. Ragtime is a musical style built on syncopated rhythms. The narrator describes it during the Southern part of his travels, but starting in this section and continuing on through the end of the novel, we see what happens when ragtime travels beyond these roots. For the narrator, ragtime in the city is the perfect expression of what happens when Black excellence and creativity are recognized by others, especially white people. There is, however, always the danger of “white imitators and adulterators” (97) who appropriate the music and do so poorly.

Deep study of the music helps the narrator claim a Black identity in the city: He becomes “the professor” (112) because of his mastery of the music. He achieves both economic and geographic mobility through the music when he begins his long-term gig with his white patron. However, that mobility is double-edged. For the narrator, mastering the music helps him to escape physical restriction because it takes him into the affluent neighborhood where the millionaire lives and even to Europe, where the millionaire spends his leisure time.

Despite the broader geography that music opens to him, the narrator discovers early on that his freedom is limited by the whims of his patron. The narrator plays well beyond exhaustion on many nights because the millionaire wishes it so, and the millionaire cuts him off when the narrator wants to return to the United States to study music. In exploring the patron-artist relationship between the narrator and millionaire, Johnson highlights the racist dynamics that emerged even when white patrons were well-intentioned in their appreciation and support of Black artists during the Harlem Renaissance.