Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

En route to Boston, the narrator quickly noted “a tall, broad-shouldered, almost gigantic, colored man” (the physician) whose majestic air attracted everyone’s attention; a few days later, the narrator found him smoking a cigar and saw an opportunity. The narrator offered the man a new one and mentioned that, a few days before, someone sitting near the man requested to be moved away from him—“the big man” said he did not “object to anyone having prejudices so long as those prejudices don’t interfere with my personal liberty” and they struck up a friendship. The man turned out to be “the broadest minded colored man I have ever talked with on the Negro question,” even occasionally defending white Southerners and firmly placing his faith in blacks’ progress and having the “moral law” on their side. The man, it turned out, was a Howard University-trained physician living in Washington.

In Boston, the narrator met “several of my new friend’s acquaintances,” who were educated, cultured, and wealthy, “genuine Yankees” in contrast with the black upper classes of the South. The narrator ended up spending a few weeks in Washington, also mostly with the physician and his friends; Washington seemed to have the most “developed” black society, with its many hundreds of educated professionals.

The narrator notes that “among Negroes themselves there is the peculiar inconsistency of a color question,” which is never explicitly raised but clearly exerts itself unconsciously, especially given their “tendency toward lighter complexions”—this is not internalized racism, the narrator insists, but rather a way of seeking better opportunities for their children. And the physician was harsh toward lower-class blacks—or, in his words, “those lazy, loafing, good-for-nothing darkies […] who create impressions of the race for the casual observer.” They visited various black institutions, including Howard University, and the doctor sent for various people to greet him on every stop of his trip all the way down to Macon, Georgia.

In the smoking car during his train ride, the narrator quickly grew friendly with the other men there—and soon they brought up “the Negro question.” Eventually, an “old Union soldier” was defending the North against a man from Texas, who considered the Civil War “a criminal mistake” and Reconstruction humiliating for the South—he insisted that “no country at all is better than having niggers over you.” He asked whether the soldier was so audacious as to believe in racial equality and proclaimed that “the Anglo-Saxon race has always been and always will be the masters of the world”; the soldier pointed out that other “races and nations” actually developed all of civilization’s greatest achievements—they argued about intermarriage and whether blacks deserved fair treatment, but the Texan insisted that he would never accept equality and resolved the argument by pulling out his flask.

Returning to his seat, the narrator was discouraged, “sick at heart.” He noted that white and black Southerners alike insistently stuck to their principles, and that blacks are often “their own most merciless critics”—but none of this would ever happen in the polite, tolerant North. In retrospect, the narrator has realized that the Texan’s prejudice could be a source of optimism: it reveals that the greatest barrier to racial progress not black achievement but white attitudes, which are easier to change. Just like people can understand the solar system when they learn that the sun, not the Earth, is its center, white people can learn to live in harmony with others by recognizing their “common humanity” and living in accordance with “the simple rules of justice.”

Upon reaching Macon, the narrator resolved to “strike out into the interior” and met the “rural colored people” who are so overrepresented in American literature that people can have difficulty grasping their reality outside books. This archetype of the “happy-go-lucky, laughing, shuffling, banjo-picking being” is always treated as absurd and used to discount serious black art and literature. There is so much “new and unknown” in black life to be revealed by writers like W.E.B. Du Bois.

The narrator continually wished to return to Europe—his lodging was uncomfortable and cramped, and the food was horrible. Occasionally, someone had built a livable house, but most of the people were uneducated, unthinking, and submissive toward whites; the narrator almost admired Southern whites who were honest enough to publicly proclaim their opposition to education for blacks. Whereas “Northern white people love the Negro in a sort of abstract way, as a race” on whose behalf to fight for justice, Southerners hate the race as a whole but love and help certain individuals. Many families were even racially mixed, and the narrator found it amusing that he would so often be respectfully treated as white in a new town, until people saw him visiting with “the colored preacher or school teacher.” He was eager to finish his data collection and return “to some city like Nashville” to start writing music.

At the last town he visited, the narrator stumbled upon a “big meeting,” in which all the churches in an area congregated together for a week to celebrate and worship. This meeting centered on the preacher John Brown and the chorus leader “Singing Johnson,” whose presence reminded the narrator of religion’s foundational role in black community, despite the increasing derision it receives from “the progressive element among the colored people.” John Brown delivered enthralling sermons by modulating his voice to create pauses and climaxes, even leading the whole congregation on an imaginary “heavenly march” up through the stars and the pearly gates to Zion. His descriptions of hell were just as rich.

 Singing Johnson was even more fascinating—he was small and dark, with only one eye and a high-pitched but powerful voice. He led the congregation’s call-and-response hymns, singing the leading lines he had memorized before the congregation responded with their same refrain. He traveled all around the country, writing new songs and leading congregations in old ones—he had an uncanny ability to know what hymn to sing when, even at important moments during John Brown’s sermons. Listening to the songs, the narrator contemplated where they came from, who managed to transform biblical sentiments into such enchanting and emotionally rich music. Even the black upper classes “do not fully appreciate these old slave songs,” although hopefully they will one day get recognition for their foundational role as American cultural heritage.

The narrator left the “big meeting” inspired to begin writing music, but decided to catch a ride with a new friend, a schoolteacher who took him to his own village and revealed that he studied at the Negro college where Shiny was now teaching—the narrator determined to write him. The man, like “the majority of intelligent colored people,” was overeager about the prospect of racial progress.

They pulled into the nondescript town and passed the night in the boarding house where the teacher was staying. Sometime after eleven, the narrator heard men outside—a crowd of them, yelling about “some terrible crime.” Knowing that the townspeople still thought he was white, the narrator went outside and came across an enormous crowd of armed white men, growing by the minute, at the railroad station. At sunrise, smaller groups set off in different directions, but the crowd continued to grow—even some local black residents came to the train station.

Then “they brought him in”—a bound black man was dragged behind two horses as the white men shrieked and slipped a rope around his neck, then tied him to a railroad tie, his eyes “dull and vacant, indicating not a single ray of thought,” clearly “too stunned and stupefied even to tremble.” They doused him in fuel and set him on fire—he let out “cries and groans that I shall always hear.” Some observers cheered, others looked away, and the narrator was unable to look away until he saw the man’s body reduced to “charred fragments” and “the smell of burnt flesh.”

The narrator walked away and felt “a great wave of humiliation and shame” at realizing the United States, “the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive.” Afterward, whenever anyone said that the South should solve “the Negro question” on its own, he remembered “that scene of brutality and savagery” and wondered how Southerners able to justify and tolerate burning another person alive could “be entrusted with the salvation of a race.” Despite what Southern apologists insist, there is no “great and impassible gulf” between whites and blacks—the existence of multiracial people is enough to prove this, and indeed Southern whites, while romantic when considered at a distance, are in fact living with the morality of the Dark Ages.

After about an hour, the narrator barely managed to drag himself back to the boarding house—he did not see the school teacher—and get on the train back to Macon, where he immediately bought a ticket to New York and decided “that to forsake one’s race to better one’s condition was no less worthy an action than to forsake one’s country for the same purpose.” He would claim neither blackness nor whiteness but merely “change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would.” He was leaving “the Negro race” out of “shame, unbearable shame.”