Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man E-Book

James Weldon Johnson

• Herausgeber: Jacaranda Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 277

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Masked in the tradition of the literary confession as practiced by such writers as St. Augustine and Rousseau, this "autobiography" purports to be the candid account of its narrator's private views and feelings as well as an acknowledgement of the central secret of his life: that though he lives as a white man, he is, by heritage and experience, an African American. Tracing his journey from the South to the North and from America to Europe and back again, the narrator's first hand experiences on both sides of the colourline intimately demonstrates the qualities of race that are both established yet mutable. An important exploration into identity and how to establish it, Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is a timeless and vital novel.

Leseprobe

This edition first published in Great Britain 2019 byJacaranda Books Art Music Ltd27 Old Gloucester StreetLondon WC1N 3AXwww.jacarandabooksartmusic.co.uk

Copyright © James Weldon Johnson 1912Courtesy of Jill Rosenberg Jones, Literary Executor ofthe James Weldon Johnson Estate

The right of James Weldon Johnson to be identified as the authorof this work has been asserted by her in accordance with theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarityto real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended bythe author.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, distributed, or transmitted in anyform or by any means, including photocopying, recording, orother electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior writtenpermission of the copyright owner and the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the BritishLibrary

ISBN: 9781909762756eISBN: 9781909762763

INTRODUCTION

JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN

The year 1908 is often thought of as a watershed moment in African American history given Jack Johnson’s unprecedented ascendency to the world heavyweight boxing championship. Less noted is another event that also signalled a shift in racial consciousness indicative of an emerging New Negro, the publication of “I Got the Blues,” the first blues composition to make its way into print. As a secular musical form, the blues brought forth a gritty idiomatic expression that in time would reshape the spirituals into gospel music. On a broader scale the blues provided African Americans an aesthetic and philosophical frame for understanding how to make a way out of no-way. In his 1962 lecture “The Myth of a ‘Negro Literature,’” LeRoi Jones goes so far as to say that the “appearance of blues as a native American music signified in many ways the appearance of American Negroes where once there were African Negroes.” Why? For Jones, “Blues and jazz have been the only consistent exhibitors of ‘Negritude’ in formal American culture simply because the bearers of its tradition maintained their essential identities as Negroes” without the “striving for respectability” that characterized middle class artists in the other art forms, leading to an “impressive mediocrity.”

Even if Jones overstates his case, he offers us a way to think about the failures and limitations of African American fiction during the first half of the twentieth century. To this point, Jones makes the persuasive argument that the “literature of the blues is a much more profound contribution to Western culture than any other literary contribution made by American Negroes.” Interestingly enough, the year 1912 saw both the publication of The Autobiography of An Ex-Coloured Man, the first African American novel with a musician as a protagonist, and two additional blues compositions, Hart Ward’s “Dallas Blues” and W.C. Handy’s “The Memphis Blues.” In the way that many listeners at the time found these songs new and different, many readers of Johnson’s text found it like nothing they’d ever encountered before. And for one reason: Johnson’s unnamed narrator promises to give a secret glimpse into Negro life: “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 ‘freemasonry’…of the race.” His promises are all the greater when we remember that readers took the narrative as fact, a deliberate misreading resulting from Johnson’s decision to have the book published anonymously. My guess, first and foremost Johnson wanted to force the white reader to come to terms with Negro excellence and exceptionalism in the form of his mixed-race narrator, an intelligent, talented, and highly motivated pianist, a figure unlike any other in American literature heretofore, a coloured Everyman who can easily adapt to any environment or situation, a skill that makes him fully capable of guiding the white reader through every realm of Negro life.

His need to serve as guide has the decidedly political aim of eradicating the ignorance that underpins racist stereotypes. For, as he sees it, the “main difficulty of the race question does not lie so much in the actual condition of the blacks as it does in the mental attitude of the whites.” To this end, the narrator engages in his own method of classification throughout the novel, drawing on his observations and experiences to categorize and measure the social and intellectual value of black people by skin colour, education and learning, manners, profession, and social status. We see this process fully at work when the narrator arrives at Atlanta University with hopes of enrolling. “I was… occupied in looking at those around me. They were of all types and colours, the more intelligent types predominating. The colours ranged from jet black to pure white, with light hair and eyes.” Hard to know what physical characteristics the narrator uses here to identify the “more intelligent types.” His greater purpose here is to establish, contrary to popular belief, that Negroes of intelligence do in fact exist. The narrator himself is one, although fate comes in the way of his attending college. Instead, he becomes a peripatetic, going this way, encountering new places and people and acquiring the know-how of hands-on experience.

At a gambling hall in Greenwich Village he chances into a transformative occasion; he hears ragtime music for the first time: “It was music of a kind I had never heard before… The barbaric harmonies, the audacious resolutions…, the intricate rhythms… produced a most curious effect.” Taken, he quickly develops into a “professor” of rag piano, bringing something novel to the idiom via his training in classical music, a process that pushes him to develop rag interpretations of classical standards. Still, it takes several months of living in Europe for him to awaken to the possibility of a true hybrid form, an awareness that leaves him “stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form.” His ambition is such that he re-crosses the Atlantic to embark on a pilgrimage through the Deep South, determined to learn all he can about Negro music, a choice that is as perplexing as it is naïve given that he has already come to understand that coloured Americans never receive recognition for their artistic achievements at home like they do in Europe. As he notes, the “Negro is much in the position of a great comedian who gives up the lighter roles to play tragedy. No matter how well he may portray the deeper passions, the public is loth to give him up in his old character; they even conspire to make him a failure in serious work, in order to force him back into comedy.”

Be that as it may, this is only half the story. The narrator’s plans to break new musical ground come to nothing, for at the very moment when he is “ready and anxious to get to some place where I might settle down to work and give expression to the ideas… teeming in my head,” he witnesses a lynching in the novel’s most alarming scene, one that lays bare the violent brutality that all black Americans potentially face. Now the narrator knows what it means to be black in America, a realization that brings a feeling of “unbearable shame… at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals.” He decides to pass for white.

Buying into Booker T. Washington’s idea that “passive resistance is more effective…than active resistance could possibly be,” the narrator had spent his entire life trusting that his knowledge, refinement, good manners and taste would distinguish him from the black masses who bear the “label of inferiority.” Johnson was of his time in putting forward these elitist and often racist assumptions. He would have us believe that the “advanced element of the coloured race… are the ones among the blacks who carry the entire weight of the race question.” No surprise then that in one of the book’s most telling moments, the narrator spends time with a doctor who says to him: “You see those lazy, loafing, good-for-nothing darkies, they’re not worth digging graves for; yet they are the ones who create impressions of the race for the casual observer… But they do not represent the race. We are the race, and the race out to be judged by us, not by them.” The narrator offers no response either in dialogue or narration, his silence implying support.

Fair it to say that the narrator sees himself as one of W. E. B. DuBois’s Talented Tenth despite his leanings toward Washington. (Touring the campus of Atlanta University, he tells us that “I was especially interested in the industrial building,” an odd statement until we consider it in light of Washington’s emphasis on industrial education as the means to racial uplift.) At the time that Johnson penned the novel he sided with Washington in the divide with DuBois. Indeed, he was serving as consul in Nicaragua after a post as consul in Venezuela, a post Washington helped him get through the Roosevelt administration.

For all that, DuBois is the defining influence on The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Johnson’s pseudo-confessional serving as a thinly veiled attempt to couch the sociological methodology DuBois uses in The Souls of Black Folk into a long-form narrative. In one of the book’s most striking passages, the narrator calls Souls a “remarkable book” and exemplary prototype that reveals opportunities for the “future Negro novelist and poet to give the country something new and unknown in depicting the life, the ambitions, the struggles and the passions of those of the race who are striving to break the narrow lines of traditions.”

Be that as it may, when it comes to the “new and unknown,” Johnson maintains a narrow political focus, showing little in the way of DuBois’s formal and aesthetic ambitions in Souls. This is the nearest he can get to breaking literary tradition in this book, although for decades now many have overstated the novel’s achievements. Even Johnson included the book in a course on the modern novel he taught at New York University as the first African American to be appointed a professor there in 1934.

The claims for the novel kicked into high gear after critic Robert E. Fleming published his 1971 essay “Irony as a Key to Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man where he introduced the notion that Johnson constructs an unreliable narrator, an idea that has been taken up by other critics. According to Fleming, the book is “not so much a panoramic novel presenting race relations throughout America as it is a deeply ironic character study of a marginal man.” On the contrary, few readers see the irony that Fleming sees.

In fact, the reading public took little interest in the book until a new 1927 edition that revealed for the first time that Johnson was the author and that the narrative was not autobiography but fiction. As fiction, much about the narrative seems old fashioned, clumsy, and underdeveloped, especially by comparison to the modernist experiments that had been coming into print since the turn of the century. (Two notable examples, Death in Venice was also published in 1912 and Swann’s Way the following year.) While many modernists were pointillists demonstrating that words could capture day to day minutiae, Johnson’s nature shirks that responsibility. The novel is sketchy, heavy on summary, the narrator trying to justify his vagueness by telling us that so much “evades the powers of expression.” The book has other limitations. Few characters come off as individualized but serve instead as generic polemical mouthpieces or representatives of a group. The plot is loose, relying on heavy-handed coincidence to move the narrator from one setting or situation to another. Johnson brings many episodes to a crescendo of melodramatic overstatement.

In this text where song and performance figure so prominently, music is the missed opportunity, much to be had in those “strange harmonies” of Negro tradition that the narrator heard as a boy when his mother played the piano. The narrator’s break from blackness requires a rejection of this tradition for a full embrace of European classical music, a concession that culminates in his marriage to a fellow pianist who shares his love for Chopin. So it is that the Romantic sentiments of preludes and nocturnes set the tone for the final pages of the novel.

We are left wondering what might have issued from the narrator’s mind and hands had the lynching not turned him about face. Could he have struck a brilliant chord and penned a new kind of the novel? A question we should ask since the passages of the book that still resonate are those dealing with Negro music. “Very early I acquired the knack of using the pedals which makes the piano a sympathetic, singing instrument… I think this was due not entirely to natural artistic temperament, but largely to the fact that I... [began] to learn the piano by… trying to reproduce the quaint songs which my mother used to sing, with all their pathetic turns and cadences.” The strange harmonies. This is the book we are begging Johnson to write.

About the Author

Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of five books including the novels Song Of The Shank and Rails Under My Back, which won the Chicago Tribune‘s Heartland Prize for Fiction; the short story collection Holding Pattern, which received The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence; and two collections of poetry. Allen is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a grant in Innovative Literature from the Creative Capital Foundation, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Autobiographyof anEx-ColouredMan

James Weldon Johnson

PREFACE

This vivid and startlingly new picture of conditions brought about by the race question in the United States makes no special plea for the Negro, but shows in a dispassionate, though sympathetic, manner conditions as they actually exist between the whites and blacks to-day. Special pleas have already been made for and against the Negro in hundreds of books, but in these books either his virtues or his vices have been exaggerated. This is because writers, in nearly every instance, have treated the coloured American as a whole; each has taken some one group of the race to prove his case. Not before has a composite and proportionate presentation of the entire race, embracing all of its various groups and elements, showing their relations with each other and to the whites, been made.

It is very likely that the Negroes of the United States have a fairly correct idea of what the white people of the country think of them, for that opinion has for a long time been and is still being constantly stated; but they are themselves more or less a sphinx to the whites. It is curiously interesting and even vitally important to know what are the thoughts of ten millions of them concerning the people among whom they live. 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 coloured people over into the white race.

In this book the reader is given a glimpse be hind the scenes of this race-drama which is being here enacted, he is taken upon an elevation where he can catch a bird’s-eye view of the conflict which is being waged.

CHAPTER ONE

I know that in writing the following pages I am divulging the great secret of my life, the secret which for some years I have guarded far more carefully than any of my earthly possessions; and it is a curious study to me to analyse the motives which prompt me to do it. I feel that I am led by the same impulse which forces the un-found-out criminal to take somebody into his confidence, although he knows that the act is liable, even almost certain, to lead to his undoing. I know that I am playing with fire, and I feel the thrill which accompanies that most fascinating pastime; and, back of it all, I think I find a sort of savage and diabolical desire to gather up all the little tragedies of my life, and turn them into a practical joke on society.

And, too, I suffer a vague feeling of unsatisfaction, of regret, of almost remorse from which I am seeking relief, and of which I shall speak in the last paragraph of this account.

I was born in a little town of Georgia a few years after the close of the Civil War. I shall not mention the name of the town, because there are people still living there who could be connected with this narrative. I have only a faint recollection of the place of my birth. At times I can close my eyes, and call up in a dream-like way things that seem to have happened ages ago in some other world. I can see in this half vision a little house, I am quite sure it was not a large one; I can remember that flowers grew in the front yard, and that around each bed of flowers was a hedge of varicoloured glass bottles stuck in the ground neck down. I remember that once, while playing around in the sand, I became curious to know whether or not the bottles grew as the flowers did, and I proceeded to dig them up to find out; the investigation brought me a terrific spanking which indelibly fixed the incident in my mind. I can remember, too, that behind the house was a shed under which stood two or three wooden wash-tubs. These tubs were the earliest aversion of my life, for regularly on certain evenings I was plunged into one of them, and scrubbed until my skin ached. I can remember to this day the pain caused by the strong, rank soap getting into my eyes.

Back from the house a vegetable garden ran, perhaps, seventy-five or one hundred feet; but to my childish fancy it was an endless territory. I can still recall the thrill of joy, excitement and wonder it gave me to go on an exploring expedition through it, to find the blackberries, both ripe and green, that grew along the edge of the fence.

I remember with what pleasure I used to arrive at, and stand before, a little enclosure in which stood a patient cow chewing her cud, how I would occasionally offer her through the bars a piece of my bread and molasses, and how I would jerk back my hand in half fright if she made any motion to accept my offer.

I have a dim recollection of several people who moved in and about this little house, but I have a distinct mental image of only two; one, my mother, and the other, a tall man with a small, dark moustache. I remember that his shoes or boots were always shiny, and that he wore a gold chain and a great gold watch with which he was always willing to let me play. My admiration was almost equally divided between the watch and chain and the shoes. He used to come to the house evenings, perhaps two or three times a week; and it became my appointed duty when ever he came to bring him a pair of slippers, and to put the shiny shoes in a particular corner; he often gave me in return for this service a bright coin which my mother taught me to promptly drop in a little tin bank. I remember distinctly the last time this tall man came to the little house in Georgia; that evening before I went to bed he took me up in his arms, and squeezed me very tightly; my mother stood behind his chair wiping tears from her eyes. 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.

On the day after the coin was put around my neck my mother and I started on what seemed to me an endless journey. I knelt on the seat and watched through the train window the corn and cotton fields pass swiftly by until I fell asleep. When I fully awoke we were being driven through the streets of a large city Savannah. I sat up and blinked at the bright lights. At Savannah we boarded a steamer which finally landed us in New York. From New York we went to a town in Connecticut, which became the home of my boy hood.

My mother and I lived together in a little cottage which seemed to me to be fitted up almost luxuriously; there were horse-hair covered chairs in the parlour, and a little square piano; there was a stairway with red carpet on it leading to a half second story; there were pictures on the walls, and a few books in a glass-doored case. My mother dressed me very neatly, and I developed that pride which well-dressed boys generally have. She was careful about my associates, and I myself was quite particular. As I look back now I can see that I was a perfect little aristocrat. My mother rarely went to anyone’s house, but she did sewing, and there were a great many ladies coming to our cottage. If I were around they would generally call me, and ask me my name and age and tell my mother what a pretty boy I was. Some of them would pat me on the head and kiss me.

My mother was kept very busy with her sewing; sometimes she would have another woman helping her. I think she must have derived a fair income from her work. I know, too, that at least once each month she received a letter; I used to watch for the postman, get the letter, and run to her with it; whether she was busy or not she would take it and instantly thrust it into her bosom. I never saw her read one of them. I knew later that these letters contained money and, what was to her, more than money. As busy as she generally was she, however, found time to teach me my letters and figures and how to spell a number of easy words. Always on Sunday evenings she opened the little square piano, and picked out hymns. I can recall now that when ever she played hymns from the book her tempos were always decidedly largo. 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. Those evenings on which she opened the little piano were the happiest hours of my childhood. Whenever she started toward the instrument I used to follow her with all the interest and irrepressible joy that a pampered pet dog shows when a package is opened in which he knows there is a sweet bit for him. I used to stand by her side, and often interrupt and annoy her by chiming in with strange harmonies which I found either on the high keys of the treble or low keys of the bass.

I remember that I had a particular fondness for the black keys. 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.

At a very early age I began to thump on the piano alone, and it was not long before I was able to pick out a few tunes. When I was seven years old I could play by ear all of the hymns and songs that my mother knew. I had also learned the names of the notes in both clefs, but I preferred not to be hampered by notes. About this time several ladies for whom my mother sewed heard me play, and they persuaded her that I should at once be put under a teacher; so arrangements were made for me to study the piano with a lady who was a fairly good musician; at the same time arrangements were made for me to study my books with this lady’s daughter. My music teacher had no small difficulty at first in pinning me down to the notes. If she played my lesson over for me I invariably at tempted to reproduce the required sounds without the slightest recourse to the written characters. Her daughter, my other teacher, also had her worries. She found that, in reading, when ever I came to words that were difficult or unfamiliar I was prone to bring my imagination to the rescue and read from the picture. She has laughingly told me, since then, that I would sometimes substitute whole sentences and even paragraphs from what meaning I thought the illustrations conveyed. She said she sometimes was not only amused at the fresh treatment I would give an author’s subject, but that when I gave some new and sudden turn to the plot of the story she often grew interested and even excited in listening to hear what kind of a denouement I would bring about. But I am sure this was not due to dullness, for I made rapid progress in both my music and my books.

And so, for a couple of years my life was divided between my music and my school books. Music took up the greater part of my time. I had no playmates, but amused myself with games some of them my own invention which could be played alone. I knew a few boys whom I had met at the church which I attended with my mother, but I had formed no close friendships with any of them. Then, when I was nine years old, my mother decided to enter me in the public school, so all at once I found myself thrown among a crowd of boys of all sizes and kinds; some of them seemed to me like savages. I shall never forget the bewilderment, the pain, the heart-sickness of that first day at school. I seemed to be the only stranger in the place; every other boy seemed to know every other boy. I was fortunate enough, however, to be assigned to a teacher who knew me; my mother made her dresses. She was one of the ladies who used to pat me on the head and kiss me. She had the tact to address a few words directly to me; this gave me a certain sort of standing in the class, and put me somewhat at ease.

Within a few days I had made one staunch friend, and was on fairly good terms with most of the boys. I was shy of the girls, and remained so; even now, a word or look from a pretty woman sets me all a-tremble. 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. He was perhaps fourteen years of age; that is, four or five years older than any other boy in the class. This seniority was due to the fact that he had spent twice the required amount of time in several of the preceding classes. 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.

The teacher had strung the class promiscuously round the walls of the room for a sort of trial heat for places of rank; when the line was straightened out I found that by skilful manoeuvring I had placed myself third, and had piloted “Red Head” to the place next to me. The teacher began by giving us to spell the words corresponding to our order in the line. “Spell first.” “Spell second.” “Spell third.” I rattled off, “t-h-i-r-d, third,” in a way which said, “Why don’t you give us something hard?” As the words went down the line I could see how lucky I had been to get a good place together with an easy word. As young as I was I felt impressed with the unfairness of the whole proceeding when I saw the tail-enders going down before “twelfth” and “twentieth,” and I felt sorry for those who had to spell such words in order to hold a low position. “Spell fourth.” “Red Head,” with his hands clutched tightly behind his back, began bravely, “f-o-r-t-h.” Like a flash a score of hands went up, and the teacher began saying, “No snapping of fingers, no snapping of fingers.” This was the first word missed, and it seemed to me that some of the scholars were about to lose their senses; some were dancing up and down on one foot with a hand above their heads, the fingers working furiously, and joy beaming all over their faces; others stood still, their hands raised not so high, their fingers working less rapidly, and their faces expressing not quite so much happiness; there were still others who did not move nor raise their hands, but stood with great wrinkles on their foreheads, looking very thoughtful.

The whole thing was new to me, and I did not raise my hand, but slyly whispered the letter “u” to “Red Head” several times. “Second chance,” said the teacher. The hands went down and the class became quiet. “Red Head,” his face now red, after looking beseechingly at the ceiling, then pitiably at the floor, began very haltingly, “f-u-.” Immediately an impulse to raise hands went through the class, but the teacher checked it, and poor “Red Head,” though he knew that each letter he added only took him farther out of the way, went doggedly on and finished, “r-t-h.” The hand raising was now repeated with more hubbub and excitement than at first. Those who before had not moved a finger were now waving their hands above their heads. “Red Head” felt that he was lost. He looked very big and foolish, and some of the scholars began to snicker. His helpless condition went straight to my heart, and gripped my sympathies. I felt that if he failed it would in some way be my failure. I raised my hand, and under cover of the excitement and the teacher’s attempts to regain order, I hurriedly shot up into his ear twice, quite distinctly, “f-o-u-r-t-h,” “f-o-u-r-t-h.” The teacher tapped on her desk and said, “Third and last chance.” The hands came down, the silence became oppressive. “Red Head” began, “f” Since that day I have waited anxiously for many a turn of the wheel of fortune, but never under greater tension than I watched for the order in which those letters would fall from “Red’s” lips “o-u-r-t-h.” A sigh of relief and disappointment went up from the class. Afterwards, through all our school days, “Red Head” shared my wit and quickness and I benefited by his strength and dogged faithfulness.

There were some black and brown boys and girls in the school, and several of them were in my class. One of the boys strongly attracted my attention from the first day I saw him. His face was as black as night, but shone as though it was 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 to that name he answered good naturedly during the balance of his public school days.

“Shiny” was considered without question to be the best speller, the best reader, the best penman, in a word, the best scholar, in the class. He was very quick to catch anything; but, nevertheless, studied hard; thus he possessed two powers very rarely combined in one boy. I saw him year after year, on up into the high school, win the majority of the prizes for punctuality, deportment, essay writing and declamation. Yet it did not take me long to discover that, in spite of his standing as a scholar, he was in some way looked down upon.

The other black boys and girls were still more looked down upon. Some of the boys often spoke of them as “niggers.” Sometimes on the way home from school a crowd would walk behind them repeating:

“Nigger, nigger, never die,Black face and shiny eye.”