The ex-coloured man is the novel's narrator, who never reveals his name. At the novel's beginning, he says that the story he is about to tell will reveal his deepest secret, and it is in the interest of protecting those who would be affected by the secret that he gives no names—neither his own nor the names of those who pass through his life. The secret, as the novel's title hints, is that he is by the end of his story an African American man "passing" as a white man. In other words, his skin is light enough that no one who meets him suspects what he himself did not discover until he was nine years old: his mother is "colored" and his father is white. By the end of.....
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