Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man

The controlling issue of shame is raised early when he tells the story of his boyhood best friend's shame during a spelling lesson (13). He himself has no awareness of his own race when he is a child, and he hears words and does not understand their meaning, as is evident when he sees a black boy throw a slate and hit a white boy in the mouth:

We ran after them pelting then with stones until they separated in several directions. I was very much wrought up over the affair, and went home and told my mother how one of the "niggers" had struck a boy with a slate. I shall never forget how she turned on me. "Don't ever use that word again," she said, "and don't you ever bother the colored children at school. You ought to be ashamed of yourself." I did hang my head in shame, not because she had convinced me that I had done wrong, but because I was hurt by the first sharp word she had given me" (15).

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er meal in the greasy restaurant of the day before" (58). However, the young man feels little more predisposed toward higher-class blacks when he meets them because he resents the fact that they do not feel the shame he feels: This class of colored people get a good deal of pleasure out of life; their existence is far from being one long groan about their condition. Out of a chaos of ignorance and poverty they have evolved a social life of which they need not be ashamed (81). The narrator turns his shame into something different--he begins to see the real shame in the people around him, people who are forced to be hypocrites, like the Southern leaders who must talk against educating the blacks for political reasons and "find themselves in the embarrassing position of preaching one thing and praying for another" (170). The narrator finds this sort of behavior in many white people who react to him in a dual way, depending on what they know of his background: In thus travelling about through the country I was sometimes amused on arriving at some little railroad-station town to be taken for and treated as a white man, and six hours later, when it was learned I was stopping at the house of the colored preacher or schoolteacher, to n
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Approximate Word count = 1559
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)