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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. How much money per week is the room that the narrator rents at the boarding house in the beginning of Chapter 5?

2. Who wrote the Christian allegory The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come?

3. The narrator is earning how much money per week after working at the cigar factory for three months in Chapter 5?

4. What does the narrator describe under the shed in the backyard of his childhood home in Chapter 1?

5. What is the Pullman car porter wearing when the narrator encounters him at a ball in Chapter 5?

Short Essay Questions

1. How is the early childhood of the narrator described in Chapter 1? Where does he live?

2. In what ways does the narrator show blindness and naiveté regarding his race?

3. How is the first Pullman car porter described by the narrator? Where does the narrator meet him?

4. How does the motif of music apply in the novel? What is the narrator’s relationship to music?

5. Where does the narrator hide his money at the rooming house in Chapter 4? Where does he go after this?

6. When and where was the author of the book born and raised? How are his parents described?

7. What are “slave narratives”? How are they related to the narrative of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man?

8. Where did James Weldon Johnson attend university? How is this institution described?

9. What is early education like for the narrator? When does he enter public school and how is this setting described?

10. How is the second Pullman car porter described by the narrator in Chapter 4?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Describe and discuss the cigar industry in the late 1800s, early 1900s in Florida and Cuba. What were relations like at this time between Cuba and the United States? How many of the narrator’s coworkers hail from Cuba? What influences do they have on him?

Essay Topic 2

Discuss the narrator’s perception of personal identity when he arrives in Florida. How is his perception of the African Americans here different than in Georgia and in Connecticut? In what ways does the narrator incorporate himself into Spanish-speaking society in the South? How is he perceived by this ethnic minority?

Essay Topic 3

Discuss the setting of Atlanta, Georgia, and the narrator’s impressions of the city upon arrival. How does the city compare with the narrator’s childhood home in Connecticut? How does he perceive the African Americans of the South to be different than those of the North? Where does the narrator stay upon his arrival?

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