Gayle Wald is Assistant Professor of English at George Washington University.

CROSSING the Line

Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and CultureBy GAYLE WALD

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2000 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2479-9

Contents

Preface……………………………………………………………………………………………….viiAcknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………..xiIntroduction: Race, Passing, and Cultural Representation……………………………………………………1Chapter 1 Home Again: Racial Negotiations in Modernist African American Passing Narratives…………………….25Chapter 2 Mezz Mezzrow and the Voluntary Negro Blues………………………………………………………53Chapter 3 Boundaries Lost and Found: Racial Passing and Cinematic Representation, circa 1949…………………..82Chapter 4 “I’m Through with Passing”: Postpassing Narratives in Black Popular Literary Culture…………………116Chapter 5 “A Most Disagreeable Mirror”: Reflections on White Identity in Black Like Me………………………..152Epilogue: Passing, “Color Blindness,” and Contemporary Discourses of Race and Identity…………………………182Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………………191Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………..227Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………241

Chapter One

Home Again: Racial Negotiations in Modernist African American Passing Narratives

To Market, to Market To buy a Plum Bun Home again, Home again, Market is done. -Children’s rhyme and epigraph to Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral, JESSIE REDMON FAUSET

In 1926 Jessie Redmon Fauset decided to resign from her post at The Crisis, the influential NAACP house publication where she had served as literary editor since 1919. After seven years of energetically promoting the work of writers such as Langston Hughes, Counte Cullen, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay, Fauset may have turned in her letter of resignation with the hope of securing more time to devote to her own fiction (her first novel, There Is Confusion, had been published in 1924). Yet if she harbored any such intentions, Fauset chose not to reveal them to Joel Spingarn, a friend and patron of the burgeoning New Negro Renaissance, whom Fauset solicited for help in finding new employment. In a letter to Spingarn, Fauset listed what she saw as her job prospects, in descending order of preference: to work as a publisher’s reader, if the pay were sufficient; to be a social secretary in a private family; to work at one of the New York foundations; or to return to teaching French. Knowing that her opportunities would be limited, she tactfully advised Spingarn what to do if the “question of color” were to arise. “In the case of the publisher’s reader,” she wrote, almost as an afterthought, “I could of course work at home.”

Citing Fauset’s letter to Spingarn in her introduction to the 1990 reissue of Fauset’s novel Plum Bun, a work that centers an artistically ambitious female protagonist, Deborah McDowell writes that it “shows Fauset combining an enterprising spirit with a sober, no-nonsense recognition of the realities of occupational segregation.” To this we might add that the letter-and particularly Fauset’s anticipatory offer to “work at home” as a way of negotiating the protocols of a segregated public sphere-also resonates with multiple and subtle ironies. For one, it anticipates the literary-critical legacy that has extolled Fauset for her behind-the-scenes role as editor while casting a more equivocal eye over her own literary production, which included four novels, children’s literature, and numerous short stories and essays. Echoing Langston Hughes’s famous description of Fauset (in his autobiography The Big Sea) as one of the three people who “midwifed the so-called New Negro literature into being,” scholars have typically assessed Fauset’s “contributions” to African American literary tradition in terms of her helpful encouragement of others. While protgs such as Hughes prospered, Fauset would eventually be assigned to the ranks of African American literature’s “Rear Guard”-a term that paradoxically registers her importance in terms of her distance from the creative centers of modernist culture. The self-seclusion suggested by Fauset’s offer to “work at home” thus resonates with her willingness to promote the work of younger writers at the expense of her own literary reputation, which suffered, by comparison, for being rooted in the genteel traditions of nineteenth-century bourgeois domestic fiction, which it also critiqued.

We might also consider Fauset’s proposition in terms of the capitalist scripting of “home” as that symbolic as well as literal location where middle-class women are seen most to embody the private role that gender prescribes. Working “at home” as a publisher’s reader is, of course, not the equivalent of performing housework; nevertheless, the phrase conjures the gendered construction of labor performed in the domestic sphere as nonproductive and therefore invisible. Her offer to work at home thus links Fauset, a middle-class intellectual of old Philadelphia stock, with the majority of black women in the 1920s, who found their most ready source of employment in domestic labor, and whose “public sphere” of work was the private sphere of middle-class white women. While it denotes the specific physical location where Fauset will do her editorial work, the word “home” is thus also suggestive of the place of black women within social hierarchies that delimit their agency within, and access to, the spheres in which socially visible and valued “work” is performed. Indeed, in Fauset’s anticipation of staying at home as a condition of her work for a white publishing house, we can see these two spaces-home as a literal place and home as a symbolic social location-coincide and overlap.

Taking into account these convergences between the critical neglect of Fauset’s published works, the construction of middle-class women’s identities through domestic ideology, and the racialization of domestic labor through the restriction of African American women’s opportunities for waged labor, we can begin to discern the multiple negotiations of power-the complex combination of resignation, self-discipline, and strategic resolve-involved in Fauset’s offer to work at home. In particular, we can observe Fauset’s resourceful response to her racial exclusion from the public sphere of literary production and “work” through the modes of gendered agency available to her via cultural ideals of middleclass domesticity. As McDowell’s use of the term “enterprising” suggests, she would indeed be reframing the privatization of her identity as a black woman in terms of professional and economic need and desire. In working at home, Fauset would be withdrawing from the racially segregated public sphere, even while deploying such withdrawal as a means of securing her role as a publisher’s reader. Interpreted in this way, Fauset’s offer to work at home is significant not merely as her pragmatic recognition of racism and gender discrimination, but as her resourceful appropriation of gendered norms and expectations of domestic virtue to assert herself as a black female intellectual, or “race woman.” Relegated to a position of, alternatively, social invisibility or social marginality on account of both gender and race, Fauset contrives in her letter to fashion “home” as a space of intellectual productivity and cultural agency. Thus imagined, home, a space associated with the privacy and nonproductive labor of individual women, becomes a place where Fauset can continue to contribute to the collective project of “black” racial uplift, even while helping to secure the “room of her own” necessary to her own creativity.

The issues so powerfully evoked in Fauset’s letter to Spingarn resound in the fictions of racial passing that she and her contemporaries James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen produced in the first decades of the twentieth century. In the three works I discuss in this chapter-James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Fauset’s short story “The Sleeper Wakes” (1920), and Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (1929)-the issue of how racially defined subjects deploy race to their own ends and desires becomes a subject of narrative representation. In these texts the depiction of racial passing becomes a way of imagining the social and economic “wages” of whiteness (to use a phrase of Du Bois), and of envisioning, too, the rewards, stakes, and pleasures of a certain “chosen” identification with “blackness.” In particular, all three texts offer readers sophisticated representations of the inevitable conditioning of such “choice” on factors outside of the subject’s own, individualized choosing. In so doing, I argue, they also develop critiques of racial passing as a contradictory enterprise, one especially associated with the racially defined subject’s cultural estrangement and forfeiture of opportunities associated with “home” communities and identities.

Although published over a period of almost twenty years, the texts that this chapter examines share a common concern with exploring racial passing as a source of political and ideological tension embodied in characters who quixotically seek “freedom” through the circumvention of racial definition. Each centers the development of an individual protagonist (or in the case of Larsen’s novella, protagonists), juridically defined as black, as he or she confronts the implications-the rewards as well as the costs-of a strategic identification with whiteness. In all three texts, passing is shown to be a highly unstable means of transcendence, as each of the protagonists pursues a project of social and economic protection or “betterment,” yet concedes an ability to mobilize this success as a “black” subject. Such contradiction, in turn, introduces a narrative instability that can seemingly be resolved only with the passer’s rejection of passing. In Johnson’s text this instability is allowed to prevail, as the male protagonist seeks an elusive solace in his success as a businessman and in the memory of his beloved wife, as she is figuratively reembodied in his two children. In Fauset’s and Larsen’s texts, on the other hand, the female protagonists are denied such “haven” in the fantasy of their economic and domestic success. Dissatisfied with the conditions of their domesticity despite the economic benefits of their marriages, both protagonists contrive to reestablish ties to the black communities from which they have, of necessity, distanced themselves. They do so in very different ways, however, and ultimately to quite different ends.

As this brief overview suggests, the interests and desires of the protagonists of these texts are quite complex. So, too, we might add, are the texts themselves. For one, they eschew idealizing representations of character, prompting readers to consider the limits and boundaries of their own identifications. Whereas each of their protagonists confronts exploitation and oppression (in the case of female protagonists, on account of race as well as gender), none is wholly a victim; indeed, all are the beneficiaries of a certain class privilege and power. Moreover, none of the narrative “resolutions” of these texts completely dissolves the instabilities, ambiguities, and tensions that the narratives raise. Even Fauset’s story, ostensibly the tidiest in its conclusion, cannot neatly answer questions posed by the female protagonist’s decision to sacrifice wealth and social status for a seemingly more humble dedication to her “people.” Finally and most important, the figure of “passing” in these texts is produced and mediated not only through race, but through a variety of social discourses, especially class and sexuality. This is most explicit in Larsen’s novel, the title of which is left radically ambiguous as a means of inviting multiple and even contradictory readings.

In highlighting the complicated set of factors that motivates each character to pursue and/or reject passing as an “alternative” to racial definition, I position my readings of these texts in relation to analyses that have argued for their overdetermination by racial ideology. As I show, however, although these texts are inscribed by race, inasmuch as it is the condition of their representations of passing, the narratives they construct are not therefore defined in the last instance by racial discourse. Written when conditions of racial segregation were encouraging many middle-class African Americans to embrace the political project of racial “uplift” as a means of encouraging collective prosperity and self-sufficiency, they represent the individual as well as collective value of the embrace of an imposed racial categorization. By centering the experiences of protagonists afforded a certain prerogative to choose what the one-drop rule has presumably already decided for them, they dramatize the process by which individual agency is negotiated in the context of prevailing social imperatives and restraints, including the ever-present threat of gendered racial violence (rape and lynching). In so doing, they also explore-through negative as well as positive example-the possibility that these imperatives might be reclaimed or refashioned as sources of collective mobility and “racial” affirmation.

LITERARY REPRESENTATION, RACIAL IDEOLOGY, AND THE “PASSING PLOT”

It is precisely because they grapple with such issues as the strategic embrace of subjects’ gendered and classed racial identities that modernist passing narratives have acquired a certain significance within contemporary literary-critical debates about the power of racial ideology. In particular, feminist scholars of the last several decades have focused on such fictions of passing to critique racial essentialism, explore the representation of black female sexuality, and (especially in the cases of works by Larsen and Fauset) to reevaluate the previously overlooked or critically disparaged literary production of early-twentieth-century African American women. In this section, I identify and briefly examine two strands of such recent feminist scholarship, one of which has been concerned with African American women writers’ strategic deployment of the “passing plot,” the other of which explores the narrative limitations of this plot as, ultimately, a reflection of race and gender ideology. My concern here is to argue that so long as we valorize passing narratives according to their success in imagining the transcendence of social definition, we are bound to be disappointed by them. On the other hand, by approaching these narratives with the idea that they are concerned with questioning and redefining “transcendence” itself, then we begin to see how they elucidate the mobilization of social definition to articulate needs and interests that do not merely respond to or replicate the wishes of the dominant culture.

One of the first critical texts to explicitly broaden the terms by which scholars could understand the literary representation of racial passing was Reconstructing Womanhood (1987), Hazel Carby’s pathbreaking study of African American women novelists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There Carby offers a compelling analysis of the preponderance of so-called mulatto protagonists in black women’s turn-of-the-Racial century literature in direct response to previous scholars’ indictment of these characters/texts as “politically unacceptable.” Arguing that earlier criticism neglected the specific social and artistic restraints imposed on black women, Carby foregrounds the narrative function of such “mulatto” characters to the cultural and political work of black women’s fictional texts. Reading the “mulatto” as “a narrative figure” who serves as both “a vehicle for an exploration of the relationship between the races and, at the same time, an expression of the relationship between the races,” Carby argues that this figure “should be understood and analyzed as a narrative device of mediation” (89). Accordingly, she posits racial passing as a useful “narrative mechanism”: a means of literary representation that enabled black women writers to transgress the boundaries that delimited the “proper sphere” of their storytelling (158). “The device that allowed a white character to darken his skin and move about the black community in popular fiction had no equivalent that would allow black characters equal access to white society, which could be accomplished only by the creation of a narrative of ‘passing'” (147-48), she writes in a discussion of Pauline Hopkins’s serialized novel Hagar’s Daughter (1901-2). “Consideration of the formal aspects of ‘whiteness’ as disguise problematizes interpretations which consider the representation of white-looking black characters as an indication of acquiescence in dominant racist definitions of womanhood and beauty” (148).

Carby’s arguments concerning the narrative deployment of racial passing echo the claims put forth by Deborah McDowell, in a widely influential 1986 essay on Larsen’s Passing that spurred scholarly interest in Larsen’s work. Focusing on the explicitly eroticized relationship between Larsen’s two female protagonists-as it is filtered through the narrative consciousness of one of these characters, Irene-McDowell similarly works to recuperate Passing from decades of critical neglect through an emphasis on the text’s modernist articulations of ambiguity and irony. McDowell’s argument is essentially that Passing passes, cloaking an artistically and politically risky exploration of black women’s sexuality and sexual desire under the more conventional guise of the passing plot. As McDowell explains it, Larsen “uses a technique found commonly in narratives by Afro-American and women novelists with a ‘dangerous’ story to tell: ‘safe’ themes, plots, and conventions are used as the protective cover underneath which lie more dangerous subplots. Larsen envelops the subplot of Irene’s developing if unnamed and unacknowledged desire for Clare in the safe and familiar plot of racial passing. Put another way, the novel’s clever strategy derives from its surface theme and central metaphor-passing.” McDowell raises a similar point in a subsequent analysis of Fauset’s novel Plum Bun, claiming that it “displays a progressiveness and daring that few critics have noted.” “As in so many novels written by women, blacks, and other members of ‘literary subcultures,'” she writes, “indirect strategies and narrative disguise become necessary covers for rebellious and subversive concerns. Such writers often employ literary and social conventions that function as a mask behind which lie decidedly unconventional critiques.”

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Excerpted from CROSSING the Lineby GAYLE WALD Copyright © 2000 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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