Prejudice In Autobiography Of An Ex-Colored Man And Cane River

In The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the narrator, James Weldon Johnson, makes the decision to live life disguised as a white man after seeing and experiencing the troubles that hound the African-Americans after the abolition of slavery. In Lalita Tademy’s Cane River, a slave family struggles to survive through their enslavement and the aftermaths of the Emancipation Proclamation. Throughout both of these stories, white people are disrespectful to the black people despite them deserving respect. Occasionally, this disrespect festers and turns into unjustified hatred. Through the gloom of death in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Cane River, one can see how prejudice is devastating to everything that stands in its path. James Weldon Johnson, being a fair-skinned negro, is unsure whether he should identify himself as a black man or as a white man. However, one event in his life

Joseph is a white man who seems to believe Emily’s black family to be just as good, if not better, than the other white people he knows. Due to this revelation, Joseph is able to love Emily as if there were no prejudicial barriers. However, the people living around Joseph catch wind of this relationship; those people are not as accepting as Joseph. They threaten him, and in the end, Joseph dies. Before Joseph’s death, Narcisse advises Joseph and says, “You cannot hold back every hothead in Grant Parish… If you care about Emily and the children, you have to protect them. Provide, yes. Love them, yes. Joseph, you need to move them somewhere safer” (312). Narcisse wants what is best for Emily; although he has assisted the two immensely before, even he accedes to the demands of the majority. While there is controversy on the happenings of his death, it is trivial. In the end, whether or not he was murdered is inconsequential; the fact is that he died because he broke the status