Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

“With a stiff and aching body,” the narrator wandered around Jacksonville until he met an inquisitive minister, who walked him to a boarding house and asked him to visit his church. The “neat and not uncomfortable” house was run by “a rather fine looking, stout, brown-skinned woman of about forty” and the landlady’s Cuban husband. The other boarders, cigar factory workers, chatted rambunctiously in Spanish—the narrator worried that a fight would break out, but soon realized “they were discussing purely ordinary affairs and arguing about mere trifles” and began to enjoy their company.

The narrator wandered around Jacksonville, which he found much more pleasant and green than Atlanta, before asking his landlady about work—the hotels were not going to open for two more months, so he asked whether might be able to teach music lessons (he could, but “the colored people were poor” and could only pay 25 cents per lesson). The landlady’s husband offered the narrator work at the cigar factory, which he enthusiastically accepted. The cigar rollers could work at their convenience and were paid per thousand cigars, but the narrator would be a “stripper,” tasked with separating tobacco stems and leaves. The landlady’s husband also began talking about Cuban independence—he belonged to the Jacksonville junta (committee) that helped fund the Cuban rebels. The narrator was impressed with his eloquent English.

The next morning, a fellow “stripper” showed the narrator how to remove the stems—he was a natural, given his years of piano training, and soon became the fastest in the factory, making 4 dollars a week and teaching piano lessons at night. After three months, he was promoted and began to roll cigars. He also started “to smoke, to swear, and to speak Spanish,” which he picked up with remarkable speed—within a year, he was “like a native,” even better than the Cubans. In fact, he was even selected as the factory’s “reader,” the man who read newspapers and novels to the workers as well as resolving disputes. Making 25 dollars a week, he bought a piano and stopped teaching lessons.

But these lessons, along with church, had introduced the narrator to “the best class of colored people in Jacksonville,” or what he called “the freemasonry of the race.” Because of his position as an outsider, he learned things that were too quotidian for his new acquaintances to even realize: that black Americans passively but effectively resist racism; that white Southerners squander their energy oppressing blacks; that “the scene of the struggle has shifted” from black people’s humanity to their worthiness for education and now their “social recognition.” In fact, he finds it remarkable that both black and white Southerners have their lives “limited by the ever present ‘Negro question’” and even suggests that whites are more “deplored” insofar as they cannot help but fixate on race.

The narrator thinks that, in the South, “the colored people may be said to be roughly divided into three classes, not so much in respect to themselves as in respect to their relations with the whites.” There is the “desperate class” of laborers, convicts, and drunks, who hate “all white men” and do not value their lives; while this class is small, “it often dominates public opinion concerning the whole race.” He thinks that reducing this class—not by violence, but by changing the horrible conditions that leads to its formation—must be a priority. The second class consists of “simple, kindhearted and faithful” domestic servants who serve as “the connecting link between whites and blacks.”

The third class consists of independent workers and “the well-to-do and educated colored people,” who “live in a little world of their own” and are just as disconnected from whites as the first class. For instance, a friend once pointed out that a white man he grew up with would not talk to him since he became a professional; white people seem to think that educated and comfortable blacks are just “spiting the white folks” or “going through a sort of monkey-like imitation,” rather than realizing that everyone would similarly progress given the opportunity. People in this last class are “well disposed toward the whites” but deeply cognizant of the discrimination they face, like when they are forced to ride in segregated train cars. They “carry the entire weight of the race question” but can still enjoy their lives without shame.

This upper class has formed discriminating societies of their own, connected across the nation and difficult to join for even upwardly mobile outsiders. Jacksonville was in the early stages of developing such a community, and the narrator managed to enter it, visiting “comfortable and pleasant homes,” joining the literary society, and going to church and charity events. The next three years, “not at all the least enjoyable of my life,” even brought him a short-lived romance with a schoolteacher. But it was no fantasy life: the cigar makers, indifferent to social status, taught him to spend indiscriminately and brought him to endless weekend parties, although he “can’t remember that [he] ever did anything disgraceful.”

At one ball, the narrator saw the second porter who had loaned him the money to get to Jacksonville and eagerly paid him back—although he was wearing “what was, at least, an exact duplicate of my lamented black and gray tie.” At another of these raucous balls thrown by hotel waiters, he watched a cake-walk for the first time. Competing for a gold watch, the couples danced in a square and the judges narrowed them down to three before declaring a winner. The cake-walk, the narrator declares, should be a point of pride and not shame: it is one of the “four things which refute the oft advanced theory that [black people] are an absolutely inferior race.” The other three are the Uncle Remus Stories, Jubilee songs, and ragtime, which was so popular in Europe that Parisians simply called it “American music.”

Right when the narrator was thinking about settling down in Jacksonville, the cigar factory abruptly closed, and he decided to follow some of the workers north to seek work in New York.