Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

As soon as he crosses over into the white world, it seems, the narrator suddenly has access to the entirety of New York City—but he also loses the entire community he had previously enjoyed. There is no possibility of a middle ground, living as black in some places and white in others; he does not merely use his ambiguous appearance to his advantage, as the terms of his decision in the previous chapter might have suggested. Rather, the very fabric of his social being has transformed.

While money was always tight in his past and he was usually forced to live in boarding-houses, now he suddenly purchases his own home and can afford to continue living the lavish lifestyle he learned in Europe—but his newfound wealth, and the selfish obsession with accumulation that drives it, inhibits his lifestyle rather than facilitating it. While he was previously a black imitator of ragtime, here he becomes precisely one of the white imitators he criticized when he first mentioned ragtime in Jacksonville. The “capital joke” suggests that his “grade of society” only accepted ragtime when white musicians adopted it.

Yet again, music forms the backdrop and medium of the narrator’s emotional life. Here, it leads him to love, and the classical music that he returns to becomes the medium through which he expresses and, at least in the narrative structure, consummates that love. The Faustian character of his decision to “pass” becomes clear, and his relationship with the singer becomes shrouded in racial secrecy much like his own parents’ relationship.

Recall that Shiny, now a successful professor, is too dark-skinned to ever “pass” for white. Not only does Shiny’s prominence point the narrator to the kind of achievement, at once personal and collective, that may have been open to him had he continued to live as black; Shiny’s entry into the same space as the “white” couple also suggests that he can circumvent New York’s informal segregation in at least an informal way, even if only because of his prominence or “refine[ment].” Despite his role as a character foil for the narrator, Shiny’s decision not to say anything reflects a tacit agreement between them: he seems to understand not only what the narrator is doing but also the obvious advantages to doing so. What is perhaps more surprising is that the narrator feels no shame or guilt at apparently abandoning his people when he sees Shiny.

Although the singer clearly loves the narrator and her interest in Shiny suggests that she is not a racist, unspoken racial divisions run so deep even in the North that the intangible, invisible fact of the narrator’s blackness—something she surely knows they would continue to hide from the world—devastates her. This event is, of course, a straightforward mirror image of his encounter with his father: in both cases, his blackness prevents him from receiving love from white people who do, in fact, love him.

The narrator and the singer recapitulate their pattern of expressing and achieving emotional intimacy through music, but notably she also reaches out to him precisely by citing the moment of racial disclosure that led her to abandon him. Rather than resume their relationship while simply avoiding the question of his blackness—which she has been doing so far—she addresses it directly. Of course, the narrator’s accidental change to the Nocturne’s final chord clearly symbolizes the “happy ever after” of their coming marriage, but it also recalls his years as a full-time performer, when he reworked classical themes to create ragtime.

The narrator’s son is just like him, but looks white—as “dazzlingly white” as his mother—which may be a more covert and insidious reason for the narrator’s love, even though he still passes on the biology he fears could be blamed for his faults. After revealing his secret to his wife, he feels not relief at getting to acknowledge his complete self but rather fear that his white wife will never truly see him as equal. He finally manages to take the active role his own father never could; he hides his children from their own blackness, it seems, out of love and fear for the way they may be treated.

This is the sense of regret that, at the beginning of the book, the narrator said he was trying to address; by re-encountering the power of black music and political leadership through his character foils, who are given perhaps the world’s most prominent stage, he sees what he could have become. The last sentence of the novel is an explicit reference to the biblical story of Esau, who sold his birthright (his right to authority as his family’s elder brother) for a bowl of lentil stew (the “mess of pottage”). This story, like Faust, represents trading one’s identity for immediate comforts; the narrator realizes that his slightly greater comfort as a Northern white man does not resolve his shame at being black, or at seeing the way the United States treats its black population, but it does prevent him from openly fighting for civil rights. That leaves this book, an anonymous tale ending in regret, as the narrator’s only way to make amends and insist on the imperative of fighting for justice.