conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for a Penguin book with the title 'The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man'.. Start with the sentence 'The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
  In all of my experience there has been no period so brief that has meant so much in my education for life as the three months I spent in the backwoods of Georgia'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
  In all of my experience there has been no period so brief that has meant so much in my education for life as the three months I spent in the backwoods of Georgia. I was thrown for the first time on my own resources and abilities. I had my first lesson in dealing with men and conditions in the outside world.... It was this period that marked the beginning of my psychological change from boyhood to manhood. It was this period which marked also the beginning of my knowledge of my own people as a "race."
  Since his boyhood in Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson had known black Americans "as individuals or as groups," but during his summer in the backwoods, the city youth received from his associations with the countryfolk a peculiar sort of self- and social consciousness that was quite new to him. For the first time he realized that he was part of a people who were themselves, for good and for ill, "a classified division, a defined section of American society."
  It is significant that the twenty-year-old Johnson had not learned earlier this lesson about his separate identity in the American social scheme. As the product of relative privilege, growing up in a middle-class black family in a city that he termed in 1895 "the most liberal town in the South," Johnson had little reason or opportunity to consider his relationship to the masses of black Americans, most of whom lived in the rural South, until he actually worked among them. When the time came for him to confront his identity in a broad social context, however, Johnson's summer in rural Georgia taught him that he could not think of the black countryfolk as "something apart" from himself. "They were me, and I was they"—"a force stronger than blood made us one."
  This new sense of identity made the young Johnson "anxious to learn to know the masses of my people, to know what they thought, what they felt, and the things of which they dreamed." In the process of educating himself in these areas, Johnson realized that "I laid the first stones in the foundation of faith in them [the black folk] on which I have stood ever since. I gained a realization of their best qualities that has made any temptation for me to stand on a little, individual peak of snobbish pride seem absurd.... I discerned that the forces behind the slow but persistent movement forward of the race lie, ultimately, in them; that when the vanguard of that movement must fall back, it must fall back on them." Had he not recognized, early on, the import of an identification with and reliance on the folk of black America, it is unlikely that James Weldon Johnson could have become the black renaissance man of his era, the exemplar of the African-American vanguard in letters and in social activism during the first third of the twentieth century.
  During his boyhood, Johnson observes in his autobiography, "neither my father nor my mother had taught me directly anything about race." James and Helen Louise (Dillet) Johnson were more concerned with educating their first-born son for success in his dealings with the white world. Helen Louise Johnson, born free in Nassau in the Bahamas, taught school for twenty years in Jacksonville. She imparted to her very receptive son her considerable love and knowledge of English literature and the European tradition in music. Johnson's father had been born free in Richmond, Virginia. In New York City and in Nassau he learned the skills that would eventually take him to the position of headwaiter at the St. James hotel, a luxury establishment built when Jacksonville was one of Florida's first winter havens. The Johnson family prospered on the income of both parents, and young Jimmie grew up resourceful, confident, and independent. When a visiting preacher asked him what he planned to be when he grew up, the nine-year-old boy replied, "I am going to be governor of Florida." Although he would come to learn the restrictions that the white South placed on persons of his color, his familial training and support, buttressed by what he called "an unconscious race-superiority complex" in his boyhood, enabled him to keep alive a deep-seated belief in his own self-worth and a desire to express that belief through writing.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I shall take advantage of this pause in my narrative to describe more closely the "Club" spoken of in the latter part of the preceding chapter—to describe it as I afterwards came to know it, as an habitué. I shall do this not only because of the direct influence it had on my life, but also because it was at that time the most famous place of its kind in New York, and was well known to both white and colored people of certain classes.
  I have already stated that in the basement of the house there was a Chinese restaurant. The Chinaman who kept it did an exceptionally good business; for chop-suey was a favorite dish among the frequenters of the place. It is a food that, somehow, has the power of absorbing alcoholic liquors that have been taken into the stomach. I have heard men claim that they could sober up on chop-suey. Perhaps that accounted, in some degree, for its popularity. On the main floor there were two large rooms: a parlor about thirty feet in length, and a large, square back room into which the parlor opened. The floor of the parlor was carpeted; small tables and chairs were arranged about the room; the windows were draped with lace curtains, and the walls were literally covered with photographs or lithographs of every colored man in America who had ever "done anything." There were pictures of Frederick Douglass and of Peter Jackson, of all the lesser lights of the prize-fighting ring, of all the famous jockeys and the stage celebrities, down to the newest song and dance team. The most of these photographs were autographed and, in a sense, made a really valuable collection. In the back room there was a piano, and tables were placed around the wall. The floor was bare and the center was left vacant for singers, dancers, and others who entertained the patrons. In a closet in this room which jutted out into the hall the proprietor kept his buffet. There was no open bar, because the place had no liquor license. In this back room the tables were sometimes pushed aside, and the floor given over to general dancing. The front room on the next floor was a sort of private party room; a back room on the same floor contained no furniture and was devoted to the use of new and ambitious performers. In this room song and dance teams practiced their steps, acrobatic teams practiced their tumbles, and many other kinds of "acts" rehearsed their "turns." The other rooms of the house were used as sleeping-apartments.
  No gambling was allowed, and the conduct of the place was surprisingly orderly. It was, in short, a center of colored Bohemians and sports. Here the great prize fighters were wont to come, the famous jockeys, the noted minstrels, whose names and faces were familiar on every bill-board in the country; and these drew a multitude of those who love to dwell in the shadow of greatness. There were then no organizations giving performances of such order as are now given by several colored companies; that was because no manager could imagine that audiences would pay to see Negro performers in any other rôle than that of Mississippi River roustabouts; but there was lots of talent and ambition. I often heard the younger and brighter men discussing the time when they would compel the public to recognize that they could do something more than grin and cut pigeon-wings.
  Sometimes one or two of the visiting stage professionals, after being sufficiently urged, would go into the back room and take the places of the regular amateur entertainers, but they were very sparing with these favors, and the patrons regarded them as special treats. There was one man, a minstrel, who, whenever he responded to a request to "do something," never essayed anything below a reading from Shakespeare. How well he read I do not know, but he greatly impressed me; and I can say that at least he had a voice which strangely stirred those who heard it. Here was a man who made people laugh at the size of his mouth, while he carried in his heart a burning ambition to be a tragedian; and so after all he did play a part in a tragedy.
  These notables of the ring, the turf, and the stage, drew to the place crowds of admirers, both white and colored. Whenever one of them came in, there were awe-inspired whispers from those who knew him by sight, in which they enlightened those around them as to his identity, and hinted darkly at their great intimacy with the noted one. Those who were on terms of approach immediately showed their privilege over others less fortunate by gathering around their divinity. I was, at first, among those who dwelt in darkness. Most of these celebrities I had never heard of. This made me an object of pity among many of my new associates. I soon learned, however, to fake a knowledge for the benefit of those who were greener than I; and, finally, I became personally acquainted with the majority of the famous personages who came to the "Club."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Several years ago I attended a great meeting in the interest of Hampton Institute at Carnegie Hall. The Hampton students sang the old songs and awoke memories that left me sad. Among the speakers were R. C. Ogden, ex-Ambassador Choate, and Mark Twain; but the greatest interest of the audience was centered in Booker T. Washington, and not because he so much surpassed the others in eloquence, but because of what he represented with so much earnestness and faith. And it is this that all of that small but gallant band of colored men who are publicly fighting the cause of their race have behind them. Even those who oppose them know that these men have the eternal principles of right on their side, and they will be victors even though they should go down in defeat. Beside them I feel small and selfish. I am an ordinarily successful white man who has made a little money. They are men who are making history and a race. I, too, might have taken part in a work so glorious.
  My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet, when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.
  Robert the Bruce] Robert I (1274-1329), king of Scotland, who freed his country from English rule by winning the battle of Bannockburn in 1314.
  Macéo and Bandera] Antonio Macéo (1845-1896) and his assistant Quintín Bandera, both men of color, were officers in the Cuban revolutionary armies of 1868-78 and 1893-98.
  R. C. Ogden] Robert Curtis Ogden (1836-1913), head of the board of trustees of Hampton Institute, was a leading advocate of educational reform in the post-Reconstruction South.