The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Prose - 56. Siobhan Somerville “Double Lives on the Color Line”

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Siobhan Somerville “Double Lives on the Color Line”

African American studies will often use a technique of abstraction to educate about “past times.” For purposes of bringing history to life, more often than not, lecturers of this discipline will reduce every person in the past to a “body.” Then the ways in which these racially defined “bodies” were oppressed, exploited, abused, tortured and derogated can be explored through several lenses, literature being the subject of the following essay. Here Professor Somerville does not break character as he assumes the early 20th century “judge” of Black mores to examine a popular novel of that day. He also uses this tool of abstraction of talk of Gay “bodies” receiving the same treatment of de-humanization; so in this regard, he has us view queer people through the now-disgraced but-once popular psychiatric notion that those who “suffered from” same-sex love were man-women and woman-men – the “invert.” Somerville explores how these “invert” “bodies” were shamed, oppressed, exploited, abused, tortured and utterly derogated as sub-human.

The primal flaw in this nearly ubiquitous way to approach Black History, and by extension of Gay History in the following, is (or should be) obvious: no one is allowed to be more than just a “body.” There are no individual circumstances; no mitigating factors; no personal tales of redemption; no self-awareness; no such thing as free will. As readers of the Mirror should have observed by this point, every entry is personal. Every installment refutes the straight will to abstract individuals to a “kind,” for that technique is the sledge hammer of Gay erasure. We didn’t exist in the past, the erasure-wielders will assert, because “your kind” are a modern “problem.”

I’ve made these preliminary comments to adjust the reader’s mind to the editorial POV you are about to encounter in this fascinating chapter. But, do keep in mind, this work shows every one of its 22 years of age. Many facets of thoughts have greatly liberalized since it was written, thanks the stars, especially in regards to gender / gender expression and mid-20th century notions of how maleness is asserted and judged. Things have changed, for the better.

Double Lives on the Color Line: “Perverse” Desire in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

In his autobiography, Along This Way, published in 1933, James Weldon Johnson discusses the two literary lives of his fictional autobiography, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, which was first published anonymously in 1912 and subsequently reissued in 1927 “affixed” (in Johnson’s words) with his identity as the author. Addressing the reception of the book’s initial publication, Johnson explains:

I did get a certain pleasure out of anonymity that no acknowledged book could have given me. The authorship of the book excited the curiosity of literate colored people, and there was speculation among them as to who the writer might be – to every such group some colored man who had married white, and so coincided with the main point on which the story turned, is known. (page 238)

Johnson emphasizes his pleasure at witnessing his text “passing” as a “human document”: like the (unnamed) ex-colored man himself, the text circulates anonymously without being clearly marked as “truth” or “fiction.” Yet this passage also asserts a key – and, as I will argue, strategic – characterization of the narrative of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man: that the “main point” of the text concerns “some colored man who had married white.” For, as I will explore in this chapter, the pursuit of deviant [opposite-sex] interracial marriage is hardly the main trajectory of desire in this text. In fact, it is both integral to, and subordinated by, another form of desire figured as “perverse” that shapes the ex-colored man’s narrative, that of male [same-sex love]. In this way, Johnson’s text participates in the uneven transitions occurring in early-twentieth-century American cultural understandings of bodies and desires that I have discussed in previous chapters. Specifically, in The Autobiography of Ex-Coloured Man, the representation of the mulatto body is mediated by the iconography of gender “inversion,” and interracial [opposite-sex] lust functions in the text as […] a screen through which it can be articulated. As he shuttles between racialized subject positions, the ex-colored man is constructed simultaneously as the subject and object of multiple trajectories of desire. The very proximity of these oscillating racialized and sexualized “perversions” is integral to Johnson’s fascination with, and critique of, his unnamed protagonist.

“A Pretty Boy”: Gender Inversion and the Mulatto Body

A key turning point in most fictional narratives of the tragic mulatto is the protagonist’s confrontation with an epistemological crisis about her or his racial identity. In American fiction about mulatto characters – including, for example, Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby,” Zara Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and William Faulkner’s Light in August – the protagonist is unaware of his or her racial standing, or assumes herself or himself to be white, until some external source of knowledge steps forward to present evidence of her or his African American ancestry. Typically these […] crises are rendered as moments when the subject is interpellated into a racialized position by institutions, […] such as the school, the law, the hospital, the orphanage, or, in the case of Hurston’s Janie, an itinerant photographer. In The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, the scene of recognition occurs in a classroom, when the teacher separates the white students from “the others.” When the protagonist, who has never before consciously considered the question of his racial labeling, stands with the white children, the teacher excludes him from the group. Given this new “knowledge,” the narrator later confronts his own image in a mirror:

I had often heard people say to my mother: "What a pretty boy you have!" I was accustomed to hear remarks about my beauty; but now, for the first time, became conscious of it and recognized it. I noticed the ivory whiteness of my skin, the beauty of my mouth. the size and liquid darkness of my eyes, and how the long, black lashes that fringed and shaded them produced an effect that was strangely fascinating even to me. I noticed the softness and glossiness of my dark hair that fell in waves over my temples, making my forehead appear whiter than it really was. How long I stood there gazing at my Image I do not know. (page 17)

As this passage so richly demonstrates, although the narrator initially frames his crisis as one of racial identification, this moment in the narrative coincides with a (somewhat pleasurable) renegotiation of his gender [sic]. Where one might expect the narrator to respond to his new knowledge about his African American position by suddenly recognizing features associated with racial stereotypes, the narrator presents a scene in which he enters instead a new consciousness of his own beauty. His description presents a series of contrasts between light and dark: the “ivory whiteness” of his skin and forehead brings out the “liquid darkness” of his eyes, “long, black lashes” and “dark hair.” This play between light and dark is itself erotic and the source of the “strangely fascinating” effect on the narrator. Through descriptions such as “fringed and shaded” and his focus on the “softness and glossiness” and “waves” of his hair, the narrator is also distinctly feminized, recalling descriptions of the highly eroticized mulatta of nineteenth-century fiction.

As discussed in the previous chapter, the narrative-trajectories of male and female mulatto characters in nineteenth-century fiction differed considerably, with tragedy as the more likely end for a female character. In Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars, for instance, the very light-complexioned character John Warwick successfully passes into the white world (and out of the text). His beautiful sister Rena, however, is exposed in her attempt to pass as white and subsequently dies young, fleeing the attentions of rival suitors into a wilderness that ultimately punishes and destroys her. […] It may be argued […] that rather than simply “feminizing” the narrator, Johnson characterizes him through a model of gender inversion. That is, as a “hybrid” racialized subject, symbolically both black and white, the narrator is also gendered between male and female, like the bodies of the so-called inverts who were subjected to the taxonomizing gaze of sexologists. In the case of the ex-colored man, his own gaze importantly constructs and internalizes an eroticized version of the mulatto as “invert.”

Racialized Homoerotics

The gaze through which the narrator so powerfully eroticizes his own biracial body in this early recognition scene also turns on and eroticizes other male bodies throughout the book. Although he does not direct this gaze exclusivity at men, as I will show, the narrator’s homoerotic attachments hold a much more powerful place in the narrative than do his erotic attachments with women. Johnson’s repeated use of these scenes to destabilize the narrator’s “masculinity” is an integral part of the novel’s overall project of critiquing racial passing and the narrator’s racial naiveté. These homoerotic attachments begin early in the narrative, when the narrator is a child in school, with descriptions of his crushes on two boys, symbolically one white and the other African American. These attachments oscillate between identification and desire. On the one hand, his identifications with the white and Black boyhood friends literalize the ex-colored man’s seemingly split identification with white and Black culture. On the other hand, these figures are also rendered as objects of the protagonist’s nascent homoerotic desire, which will shape his most important adult relationship later in the narrative. The narrator describes his meeting with his first “staunch friend,” a white boy nicknamed “Red Head”:

This friend I bound to me with hooks of steel in a very simple way. He was a big awkward boy with a face full of freckles and a head full of very red hair . . . . I had not been at school many hours before I felt that “Red Head” – as I involuntarily called him – and I were to be friends. I do not doubt that this feeling was strengthened by the fact that I had been quick enough to see that a big, strong boy was a friend to be desired at a public school; and, perhaps, in spite of his dullness, “Red Head” had been able to discern that I could be of service to him. At any rate there was a simultaneous mutual attraction. (page 11)

This description foregrounds a number of issues that recur in the narrator’s relationships with white men later in the novel. Importantly, the “simultaneous mutual attraction” depends explicitly on the relationships […] between the narrator and this boy within the world of the schoolroom. Clearly, as the narrator admits, he was partly attracted to the power that “Red Head” represented: the narrator sees this older boy as a reliable ally and protector against the other boys at school, some of whom, the narrator remembers, “seemed to me like savages” (page 10), an unself-consciously racialized construction of his own superiority in return for this protection, the narrator is quite willing to “be of service to him” by coaching Red Head in his academic work, often simply giving his friend the correct answers on exams. As the narrator writes, “through all our school-days, ‘Red Head’ shared my wit and quickness, and I benefited by his strength and dogged faithfulness.” (page 13) A similar system of patronage and service characterizes the narrator’s subsequent relationship to white men, as the narrator foreshadows: “And when I grew to manhood, I found myself freer with elderly white people than with those near my own age.” (page 23)

If the narrator eroticizes the position of power granted to Red Head by means of his white identity, gender, age, and sheer physical bulk, he also eroticizes Black male bodies, but in very different ways. At the same time that the narrator bonds with Red Head, he also meets “Shiny,” who, he writes, “strongly attracted my attention from the first day I saw him.” (page 14) The narrator gives great attention to Shiny’s physical characteristics:

His face was as black as night, but shone as though it were polished; he had sparkling eyes, and when he opened his mouth, he displayed glistening white teeth. It struck me at once as appropriate to call him “Shiny Face,” or “Shiny Eyes,” or “Shiny Teeth,” and I spoke of him often by one of these names to the other boys. These terms were finally merged into "Shiny," and that name he answered good-naturedly during the balance of his public school days. (page 4)

The narrator’s description of Shiny unself-consciously draws on popular cultural stereotypes of the black male body, particularly those that had circulated through the conventions of blackface minstrelsy. The narrator constructs Shiny’s body as a collection of fetishized parts, fixating on his “polished” face, “sparkling eyes,” and “glistening” teeth. Indeed, the narrator expands the imaginative hold of these fetishizations by using them metonymically to name his friend: in the narrator’s eyes, his friend’s identity becomes synonymous with the “shiny” characteristics on which he fixates. When Shiny makes a speech at grammar school graduation, the narrator again expresses his fascination with his friend’s physical presence:

He made a striking picture, that thin little black boy standing on the platform, dressed in clothes that did not fit him any too well, his eyes burning with excitement, his shrill, musical voice vibrating in tones of appealing defiance, and his black face alight with such great intelligence and earnestness as to be positively handsome. (page 44)

In this portrait of Shiny, who later in the novel becomes a professor at a “Negro college,” Johnson borrows the tropes of the African American hero, dignified spiritually and physically In contrast to the narrator, who repeatedly demonstrates his lack of spiritual or physical defiance, Shiny represents a race leader, one whose racial and gender identifications are, not coincidentally, never in question. In this scene, however, the narrator’s attraction for Shiny takes on the form of a powerful identification with this heroic figure: “I felt leap within me pride that I was coloured; and I began to form wild dreams of bringing glory and honour to the Negro race.” (page 46)

The figure of Shiny resurfaces at a crucial moment in the closing pages of the novel, when the narrator is passing for white, and again his presence has the effect of eliciting the narrator’s desire for racial identification. Standing in line at a theater with his white fiancée, who at that point does not know about the narrator’s African American ancestry, the narrator spots Shiny in the crowd. Although the ex-colored man perceives Shiny as a threat to his secret and thus to his potential status as husband to this white woman, Shiny protects him from exposure: “[Shiny] seemed, at a glance, to divine my situation, and let drop no word that would have aroused suspicion as to the truth.” (page 202) Although Shiny participates in the narrator’s passing, this incident has the ironic effect of making the narrator want to reveal his African ancestry to his fiancée. As in the earlier scene, however, the narrator’s identification with Shiny is fleeting and ultimately replaced by his desire, however ashamed, to be an “ordinarily successful white man.” (page 211)

The narrator’s early fascinations with Shiny and Red Head prefigure perhaps the central and most powerful erotic relationship in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, that of the narrator and his patron, a wealthy white man whom the narrator meets while performing as a ragtime pianist in New York. The narrator describes his fascination with this figure on his first encounter with him:

Among the other white “slummers” there came into the “Club” one night a clean-cut, slender, but athletic-looking man, who would have been taken for a youth had it not been for the tinge of grey about his temples. He was clean-shaven and had regular features, and all of his movements bore indefinable but unmistakable stamp of culture. He spoke to no one, but sat languidly puffing cigarettes and sipping a glass of beer. He was the centre of a great deal of attention; all of the old-timers were wondering who he was. (page 116)

This eroticized and lone figure gradually focuses his attentions on the narrator and begins a slow seduction of him, leaving a five-dollar tip each time he visits the club. The man, later referred to by the narrator as “my millionaire friend,” symbolizes a somewhat sinister version of fin de siècle decadence, a figure of wealth and forbidden [sex-appeal]. At a party in the millionaire’s home, at which the narrator is a hired entertainer, the narrator observes: “The men ranged in appearance from a girlish-looking youth to a big grizzled man whom everybody addressed as ‘Judge.’ None of the women appeared to be under thirty, but each of them struck me as being handsome. I was not long in finding out that they were all decidedly blasé. Several of the women smoked cigarettes, and with a careless grace which showed they were used to the habit.” (page 118) This scene shows the existence of a spectrum of gender and [orientations] that exceed the boundaries of bourgeois norms, a certain outlaw sexuality possible within wealthy social circles at the time. The male figures are thus described in language that exaggerates conventions of grace (“a girlish-looking youth”) and brutishness (“a big grizzled man”). Likewise, the female figures do not conform to standards of middle-class femininity: described as “handsome,” they are associated with gender transgression through their accomplished cigarette smoking, a taboo for respectable women at the time and a symbol of sexual freedom.

The relationship of the narrator to his “millionaire” recalls that of both son and lover. The millionaire’s position as an admirer of the musical abilities of the ex-colored man echoes the earlier position of the narrator’s white father, described as “a tall, handsome, well-dressed gentleman of perhaps thirty-five,” evoking a figure much like the suave patron (page 32). During one of his father’s rare visits, the piano similarly mediates the emotional relationship between father and son:

My father was so enthusiastic in his praise that he touched my vanity – which was great – and more than that; he displayed that sincere appreciation which always arouses an artist to his best effort, and too, in an unexplainable manner, makes him feel like shedding tears, I showed my gratitude by playing for him a Chopin waltz with all the feeling that was in me. When I had finished, my mother’s eyes were glistening with tears; my father stepped across the room, seized me in his arms and squeezed me to his breast. I am certain that for that moment he was proud to be my father. (pages 34-35)

Both the narrator’s father and the millionaire are older male figures who support both emotionally and materially the narrator’s efforts to have a musical career. Just as his father rewards his performance with the gift of a new piano, so the millionaire provides him with cash, travel, and a new wardrobe.

At the same time that the relationship between the narrator and his patron is one of son to father, however, it also has associations with a more directly sexual relationship. Robert Stepto has noted that in his portrayal of the narrator’s mother as a “kept woman” to a wealthy white man, Johnson borrows and recasts anti-slavery literature’s “haunting image of the snug cottage in the clearing,” provided for the slaves who became concubines for their white masters. I suggest that there is also at work here an implicit analogy between the narrator’s relationship with the patron and his mother’s relationship with his father; both echo the figure of the slave mistress, who is given a minimal amount of financial and material security in exchange for her sexual service to the white master. Through an identification between the narrator and his mother, Johnson foregrounds the ways in which processes of racialization shape and resituate codes of masculinity.

Johnson clearly delineates the racialized hierarchies of ownership and property that define the relationship between the protagonist and the patron, implicitly connecting this instance of patronage with the historical legacy of slavery. The complex interplay of economic power and eroticism between the narrator and his patron becomes increasingly apparent as their “friendship” progresses. Eventually, the millionaire develops an exclusive arrangement with the narrator, and the full dimensions of the patron’s economic control are revealed in the narrator’s comment that “occasionally he ‘loaned’ me to some of his friends. And, too, often played for him alone at his apartments.” (page 120) Although the narrator defends his patron—“Between him and me, no suggestion of racial differences had ever come up”(page 145)—clearly “racial differences” are central to the structure of their relationship.

Johnson implicitly criticizes the protagonist’s inability to see the class and racial hierarchies that structure his relationship to his patron, a blindness that implicates the narrator in his own exploitation. After detailing the odd habits of the millionaire, who demands that the narrator play for him alone late at night in his home for hours at a time, the narrator begins to sense that something is askew:

During such moments this man sitting there so mysteriously silent, almost hid in a cloud of heavy-scented smoke, filled me with a sort of unearthly terror. He seemed to be some grim, mute, but relentless tyrant, possessing over me a supernatural power which he used to drive me on mercilessly to exhaustion. (page 121)

In this passage, the narrator seems close to articulating and acknowledging the millionaire’s underlying sadistic and exploitative powers. Yet he immediately disavows this possibility: “But these feelings came very rarely; besides, he paid me so liberally I could forget much.” (page 121) And indeed the narrator does forget much, dismissing his earlier portrait of the millionaire as a “grim, mute, but relentless tyrant,” and instead insisting that the two men had “a familiar and warm relationship” and that “the patron had a decided personal liking for me.” (page 121) In fact, the narrator seems to idolize this man and his position of power; “On my part, I looked upon him at that time as about all a man could wish to be.” (page 121) Here the narrator’s attempts to convince himself that their relationship is about mutual regard rather than power and money echoes his mother’s romantic attachment to his father: “She loved him; more, she worshiped him, and she died firmly believing that he loved her more than any other woman in the world.” (page 43) Although the narrator casts a skeptical eye on his parents’ relationship ("Perhaps she was right. Who knows?"), he is unable to doubt his millionaire’s motives.

Although Johnson portrays the narrator as a naive participant in his own economic exploitation, he also characterizes the patron as skillful at securing his own power through its very erasure. Nowhere is this process more apparent than in the scenes in Paris, where the millionaire has brought along the narrator as his “valet.” Because they have left New York for Europe quite suddenly, the narrator has few clothes when he arrives in Paris, a situation quickly remedied by the patron: “He bought me the same kind of clothes which he himself wore, and that was the best; and he treated me in every way as he dressed me, as an equal, not as a servant. In fact, I don’t think anyone could have guessed that such a relation existed.” (page 130) The narrator mistakes the superficial appearance of similarity between the two men as evidence of their equal status. Although the narrator never explicitly suggests that their relationship might have a physical component, his descriptions have all the characteristics of a romantic liaison: “He kept me supplied with money far beyond what ordinary wages would have amounted to. For the first two weeks, we were together almost constantly, seeing the sights; sights old to him, but from which he seemed to get new pleasure in showing them to me.” (page 130) At one point, the narrator seems to go out of his way to deny that their relationship is erotic. During a discussion between the narrator and the millionaire about the ex-colored man returning to the United States, Johnson writes. “When I had finished (telling him my plans), he put his hand my shoulder – this was the first physical expression of tender regard he had ever shown me – and look(ed) at me in a big-brotherly way.” (page 144) The narrator’s characterization of their relationship as that of siblings is ironic, after his previous descriptions of inequality and exploitation. His description of the patron’s look as “big- brotherly” masks the condescension (and perhaps mutual desire) of the white patron; the narrator wants to remember this gesture as one of benevolence rather than subjugation. Further, it is significant that the narrator interrupts this sentence with the explanation that “this was the first physical expression of tender regard he had ever shown me.” This assertion marks a self-conscious disavowal of the powerful eroticism, whether physical or not, that has structured their relationship.

While Johnson depicts the relationship between the narrator and his patron as fraught with inequities, he also implicates the narrator’s own acquisitive motivations; in addition to the literal money and possessions he receives, the ex-colored man gains enormous cultural capital through exposure to Europe. The narrator ends his relationship with the patron by temporarily reidentifying with African American culture when he decides to try to pursue a career as a black composer in the United States (one of Johnson’s own successful careers). In this way, he also seems to avert the inevitably tragic end the patron meets by “leaping into eternity.” (page 143) Yet Johnson implicitly criticizes the narrator, who, despite his physical departure, remains nostalgically attached to “this peculiar man” and refuses to recognize the racialized discrepancies in power that shaped their relationship. In fact, the narrator elevates the formative effects of the patron on his life: “And so I separated from the man who was, all in all, the best friend I ever had, except my mother, the man who exerted the greatest influence ever brought into my life, except that exerted by my mother. My affection for him was so strong, my recollections of him are so distinct, he was such a peculiar and striking character, that I could easily fill several chapters with reminiscences of him.” (page 148) Through this effusive and arbitrary resolution to their relationship, Johnson suspects that the narrator’s feelings toward the patron exceed the limits of what is representable. With what seems a disingenuous concern for “tiring the reader,” the narrator ends his discussion of this “peculiar and striking character.” […]

Yet, as I will show in the next section, the narrator’s [orientation] is not rendered “normative” through the various heterosexual relationships that he enters. Two forms of taboo desire – incest and interracial lust – function as evidence of his [queerness] by contrast and are linked symbolically to the supposedly tragic narrative of [same-sex love].

Deviant Heterosexuality

Although his relationship with the white patron is arguably the most fully rendered erotic bond in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, the narrator’s attachments are not exclusively with men. The narrator presents brief portraits of girls and women to whom he is attracted: a young musician for whom he is an accompanist, a schoolteacher he meets in Florida, a young girl he believes to be his stepsister, a rich widow he meets in the Club, and lastly, his wife. All of his attachments to these women, however eroticized, are aborted in some way beyond the narrator’s control, as if they must be expelled from the narrative. For example, despite the narrator’s secret rhapsodic infatuation with an older teenage girl, a violinist, the attraction is entirely one-sided, with no possibility that his affection will be returned. Likewise, the narrator’s attachment to his first fiancée, “a young school-teacher,” with whom he entertains “dreams of matrimonial bliss,” is described fleetingly. He introduces her and dismisses her all in a single sentence, alluding to “another turn in the course of my life (that) brought these dreams to an end.” (page 83) When the factory in which he works closes, the narrator’s visions of middle-class heterosexuality (“marrying the young school-teacher” and “raising a family”) are replaced by “a desire like a fever” to return to New York (page 88). Importantly, there are racial as well as sexual implications to the narrator’s flight; marrying the schoolteacher would have committed the narrator to a permanent identity within a black middle-class community.

The narrator’s adult attractions to women are represented as transgressive, fleeting, inevitably tragic, and culturally taboo. In his representation of these relationships, Johnson depicts as dangerous the narrator’s attraction to women who (like the white patron), by law and custom, are prohibited objects of sexual desire for black men. But unlike the rendering of the protagonist’s attachment to the patron, these relationships are represented as explicitly sexual, thus providing, according to the cultural logic of segregation, a recognizable pattern of deviant sexual object-choice. For example, while attending the opera during his trip to Europe, the narrator becomes enchanted by “a beautiful, tender girl.” (page 134) Recalling this encounter, the narrator describes her as a disembodied presence: “I cannot describe her either as to feature, or colour of her hair, or of her eyes; she was so young, so fair, so ethereal, that I felt to stare at her would be a violation; yet was distinctly conscious of her beauty.” [i] (pages 133—34) When he realizes that the man accompanying this girl is his own father, the narrator is overwhelmed by the tragic implications of his incestuous desire. Staring at her is indeed a “violation”: within the historical context of the early twentieth century, his desire for his white stepsister transgresses cultural prohibitions against both incest and interracial heterosexuality.

Similarly, the narrator presents his brief relationship with the “widow,” a wealthy white woman, as transgressive and dangerous. He describes her as “an exceedingly beautiful woman of perhaps thirty-five . . . (who) had glistening copper-coloured hair, very white skin, and eyes very much like Du Maurier’s conception of Trilby’s ‘twin grey stars.’” (page 108) The widow is one of a group of white women, “regular habituées” of the Club who have a specifically racialized erotic orientation: they seek out “coloured men” as their sexual companions (page 108). The narrator portrays this woman and her exclusive desire for African American men in terms of a femme fatale: when he is warned about her jealous lover, the narrator writes, “the woman was so beautiful that my native gallantry and delicacy would not allow me co repulse her; my finer feelings entirely overcame my judgment.” (page 122) Their relationship and the woman’s life come a tragic and violent end when her lover murders her. The narrator is haunted by the scene of “that beautiful white throat with the ugly wound. The jet of blood pulsing from it had placed an indelible stain on my memory.” (page 125) This murder serves as a brutal punishment for the widow’s sexual and racial transgression. Significantly, it is also the catalyst responsible for the narrator’s decision to travel to Europe with his patron. According to the logic of the narrative, male interracial homoeroticism becomes an antidote to the potentially horrific consequences of interracial heterosexuality, one not entirely unwelcome for the protagonist.

Likewise, the narrator’s heterosexual courtship and marriage receive relatively little attention in contrast to the narrative space and intensity devoted to his relationship with the white patron. The first description of the narrator’s future wife docs not occur until the final chapter of the book: “She was almost tall and quite slender, with lustrous yellow hair and eyes so blue as to appear almost black. She was as white as a lily, and she was dressed in white. Indeed, she seemed to me the most dazzlingly white thing I had seen. But it was not her delicate beauty which attracted me most; it was her voice, a voice which made one wonder how tones of such passionate colour could come from so fragile a body [in lovemaking].” (page 198). This description eroticizes a contrast between, on the one hand, the overwhelming whiteness of her image and its distinct lack of physical presence (she is “almost tall and quite slender,” with a “delicate beauty,” and a “fragile . . . body”) and, on the other hand, the “passionate colour” of her overpresent voice. Again, as if the narrative cannot sustain interracial heterosexuality, the narrator’s wife dies a tragically young death; a death significantly linked to childbirth, seemingly punishing her for the miscegenous results of her sexual behavior. Although the narrator does not describe her death directly, he states that “it was for their child, a son, that she gave all; and that is the second sacred sorrow of my life.” (page 209) Echoing the death of the widow earlier in the novel, the death of the narrator’s wife works narratively as retribution for interracial heterosexuality. Although he laments that “her loss to me is irreparable,” he also admits that she represented a threat that her death coincidentally removes: “I no longer have the same fear for myself of my secret’s being found out.” (page 210) The death of the narrator’s wife removes a threat to his performance in both whiteness and heterosexuality. Despite their “supremely happy” marriage, her very presence had made the narrator wonder “if she was scrutinizing me, to see if she was looking for anything in me which made me differ from the other men she knew . . . . I began even to wonder if I really was like the [white and straight] men I associated with; if there was not, after all, an indefinable something which marked a difference.” (pages 199—200) The “indefinable something”—the hidden identity that could be rendered as either his mulatto or "invert" status—is at once racial and sexual. […]

Part of the enduring fascination of readers with the Autobiography lies in the ways in which the text mapped culturally taboo sexual desires onto the color line, a relationship that was integral to the literary and artistic landscape of the 1920s. In the next chapter, I explore the ways that this landscape and subsequent critical response to it shaped the career of Johnson’s contemporary Jean Toomer.

—Siobhan Somerville, [ii]

2000