Coming of Age in "Ex-Colored Man"

After reading the first four chapters of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, I have found the unnamed protagonist to be a likeable character with tremendous potential to find real, lasting success in turn-of-the-century America. However, poor decision making has riddled the characters attempts at this so far. Specifically, the moments when the character reaches a crossroads, he seems to invariably make the wrong turns. Having both a stable job and a sudden streak of good luck in gambling, he declares, “I at last realized that making cigars for a living and gambling for a living could not both be carried on at the same time, and I resolved to give up the cigar-making” (Johnson 52). Here is a character who is so well-spoken and grounded in a seemingly rational mindset, yet he comes to some of the least rational conclusions.

Having not read ahead to establish a better understanding of the overall direction that he is headed as a character, I can only speculate. So far, I am seeing the narrator make so many poor decisions amidst the potential for such opportunity, and I come back to this thought: he is a young man. While I believe that the racially volatile dynamic of post- civil war America is a prevailing lens through which to examine the story as a whole (or half, as that is all that I have read up to this point), I still think it is key to acknowledge that this work is revolving around the young life of a boy becoming a man, and I’ll be the first one to admit that young adults make some pretty ridiculously irrational decisions from time to time. Based on these observations, I expect this narrative to adhere to the inverted slave narrative structure that we have discussed in class, but I also see this work in some ways taking the form of a coming-of-age story. In the traditional "Bildungsroman," the character's personal growth transitions the character into being more dependable, and I see this as probable for the narrator.