It’s one of our oldest American pastimes. Before reality television. Before the local color school. Think Mary Rowlandson, 1682. The birth of the captivity narrative.
Who are they? Simply: not us. The boundary can lie along a fault of ethnicity or wealth. Geography, perhaps. Profession. Sexual orientation.
But who, then, amongst this panoply of subcultures, are we? Everyone else. Our fascination with them is the only meaningful way to define us. We are all, at times, we, and we are all, at times, them.
Of course, when our group comes under the voyeur’s lens, we bridle a bit. That’s not really what we’re like, we say. Reading about ourselves as “them” plugs us into one of our two deepest readerly impulses: the evaluation of art’s fidelity to that which it represents, and, of course, the need to escape. Reading about something we haven’t experienced before. Reading about “them.”
All of this brings us to the delicious dramatic irony of James Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man. Published anonymously in 1912, only outed as fiction in 1927. The publishers claim that the author will draw aside a veil so that “we” can see how “they” (in this case, Black America) live. But the joke’s on us. Johnson has his narrator overstimulate us, titillating our voyeuristic urges not just with descriptions of Black America, but the North, the South, urban and rural. Cuban immigrants in Jacksonville’s cigar factories. Millionaires in Manhattan. Europe: French, English, and Germans. And in the end, the narrator, obsessed with categorization, defies any category himself. He, like his genre-bending text, becomes invisible, transparent, another lens beyond the lens. Johnson reminds us that for the voyeur, “they” is always the stuff of fantasy, and that believing we’re finally glimpsing the truth about them is perhaps the biggest delusion of all.