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A range of critics have convincingly identified how James Weldon Johnson's 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is reminiscent of its literary predecessors, particularly the slave narrative. For example, the young narrator's journey from Georgia to Connecticut, the white father's giftof a coin as the boy and his mother are sent north, and the fact that the narrator never gives his name all invite readers to see close parallels to fugitive slaves' escape to the North, to their experiences of being bought and sold, and to the practice of remaining secretive about names and locations.1 Although the novel indeed "operates along several discursive lines, including . . . signifying riffs on conventions from the book's literary ancestors" (Andrade 2006, 257), very few readers have considered the scope and significance of Johnson's reference to a major best-selling liter¬ary predecessor that is named in Johnson's novel: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Johnson's explicit reference to Stowe's 1852 text early in the narrative solicits a reading of the intertextuality at work within his novel. In particular, I argue that the references to Stowe's novel in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man expose the historical challenges faced by biracial men of the early twentieth century, whose lives continued to be shadowed by the legacy of slavery. Johnson's allusions to specific characters and narrative choices found in Stowe's novel shed significant light on the racial and sexual ideologies that persisted in his own era.
Readers cannot miss the explicit reference to Uncle Tom's Cabin as Johnson's novel begins, for it furnishes the protagonist with lessons about his newly-discovered identity. At the start of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the unnamed narrator explains that he never knew he was anything other than a white boy until a teacher revealed his biracial identity in grammar school. By the time he is twelve, the narrator has begun to read books to fill in the blanks about his African American history. He explains that he first looked to the history books, but "the story was told in such a condensed and skipping style" that he could not gain any real understanding. In a library, however, he discovered Uncle Tom's Cabin and it "cleared the whole mystery" (Johnson 1990, 28). He...