ABSTRACT
The tension between individual and communal expression that African American artists faced in the early part of the twentieth century is poignantly articulated in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. A pivotal work in the representation of music in the African American literary tradition, Johnson’s novel is the story of a ragtime piano player whose light skin allows him to “pass” as a white man. Ironically, it is in Europe that the Ex-Coloured Man crystallizes his plan to become an African American leader through his musical abilities. The narrator continues to perform ragtime for his patron’s entertainment and is perfectly content with what is basically a life of leisure until he meets a German pianist at one of his patron’s soirees. The Ex-Coloured Man ultimately cannot stand being “identified with a people;” he cannot handle being an individual tied to a community.
