by Passing
5. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis (1929); also cited in Hoyt Fuller’s Introduction, Nella Larsen, Passing (New York: Collier Books, 1971), 13.
6. According to Gayle Wald, the “postpassing” narratives “[articulate] collective values of pride in the ‘Negro’ identity and [challenge] the social and economic pressures that promote passing as an ‘alternative’ to racial segregation.” Gayle Wald, Crossing the Color Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 119.
7. See Claudia Tate, “Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Problem of Interpretation,” Black American Literary Forum (Winter 1980), 146.
8. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis (1928); also cited in Hiroko Sato, “Under the Harlem Shadow: A Study of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen,” in Harlem Renaissance Remembered: Essays, Arna Bontemps, ed. (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1972).
9. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis ( July 1929), 234; also cited in Fuller.
10. Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958; revised 1965), 102.
11. Fuller, 18.
12. Sato, 88, 89.
13. Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 157, 159.
14. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Knopf, 1981; Oxford University Press, 1989), 231.
15. George Hutchinson, “Subject to Disappearance: Interracial Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand,” in Genevieve Fabre and Michel Feith, Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
16. Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 132.
17. See Charles R. Larson, Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer & Nella Larsen (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 86, and Thadious M. Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance:A Woman’s Life Unveiled (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994). Arthur Davis describes Larsen’s first novel as “a moving story,” although “not as good a novel as Quicksand,” 97. Critic Bernard Bell regards Quicksand as “structurally … the better of [Larsen’s] two novels” (The Afro-AmericanNovel and Its Tradition [Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987], 110). And although questioning the grounds of earlier evaluations of Passing, Mary Mabel Youman does not “quarrel with the overall [critical] judgment” that ranks Larsen’s second novel “inferior” to her first.
18. Gayle Wald aptly deploys this term.
19. This is the second version of William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or, the President’s Daughter (1853), which is currently regarded as the first novel published by an African American.
20. See David Kirkpatrick’s account, “On Long-Lost Pages, a Female Slave’s Voice” (The New York Times, Nov. 11, 2001), which provides the account of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s remarkable “discovery” of this volume.
21. Werner Sollors speculates that “[t]he first American instances in which the word ‘passing’ was used to signify ‘crossing the color line’ would seem to have appeared in notices concerning runaway slaves, and the term ‘passing’—first for ‘free,’ and then for (its larger part-synonym) ‘white’—may have entered American fiction through the citing of such bills,” 255.
22. Caleb Johnson, “Crossing the Color Line,” Outlook and Independent158 (Aug. 26, 1931): 526; also cited in Sollors, 245.
23. Walter White, “Why I Remain a Negro,” The Saturday Reviewof Literature, Oct. 22, 1947; quoted in Amritjit Singh, The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance: Twelve Black Writers, 1923– 1933 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press), 92.
24. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1944), 683, 688.
25. Sterling Brown, The Negro in American Fiction (1937; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1969), 142.
26. See José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentification: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
27. Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 44, 45.
28. Bone, 98.
29. Singh, 93.
30. Donald Goellnicht, “Passing as Autobiography: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” African-AmericanReview 30.1 (1996), 19.
31. Examples of works by such southern writers include Thomas Dixon’s The Clansmen (1905) and The Leopard’s Spots (1902), and Thomas Nelson Page’s Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction (1898).
32. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); also cited in Ruth Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 10.
33. Sollors, 260.
34. Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds. (New York: The New Press, 1996), 278.
35. Ibid.
36. Eva Saks, “Representing Miscegenation Law,” Raritan 8.2 (1988), 57.
37. Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980), 98.
38. Sir Francis Galton, the inventor of fingerprinting techniques, began his project in an attempt to discover an indicator of “Race and Temperament” in the character and patterns of fingerprints. Josiah C. Nott, in his Two Lectures on the Natural Historyof the Caucasian and Negro Races (1844), moved from the scriptural evocation of the curse of Ham to a biological argument for racial difference that was based on a theory of polygenesis. Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, who developed his racial ideas in 1863, is widely acknowledged as one of the major formulators of “scientistic racism.” See Sollors, 157, 109, 131.
39. Drawing out the implications of British philosopher J. L. Austin’s work on performative utterances, contemporary theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler postulate the performativity of identities constructed through practices of citationality and iterability. “Performativity,” Judith Butler argues, “consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice.’ ” For Butler, then, “The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake.” ( Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter [New York: Routledge, 1993], 234).
40. See Mary Helen Washington, “Lost Women: Nella Larsen: Mystery Woman of the Harlem Renaissance,” Ms. (Dec. 1980). Arguably, of course, the same indictment could be brought against what might be regarded as “compulsory blackness,” in which, by virtue of the one-drop rule, one’s “roots and genealogy” are also denied.
41. For Wall, these roles are defined as “the perfect lady” and “the exotic Other.” Wall argues, correctly, that Irene is “the perfect lady” and Clare “the exotic Other”—both roles rejected by Larsen’s earlier protagonist, Helga Crane, in Quicksand. See Wall, 121.
42. Deborah McDowell, Introduction, Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), xxx.
43. See Washington.
44. Tate, 143.
45. Wall, 138.
46. Mary V. Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicityin American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 59.
47. McDowell, xxvi, xxx. In Bodies That Matter, theorist Judith Butler both extends and revises McDowell’s reading of Passing by arguing that race and sexuality are “inextricably linked, such that the text offers a way to read the racialization of [sex and] sexual conflict, 272.
48. Larson, 82.
49. See Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Traditionin Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Jennifer DeVere Brody, “Clare Kendry’s ‘True’ Colors: Race and Class Conflict
in Nella Larsen’s Passing,” Callaloo 15.4 (1992).
50. Critic Hazel Carby suggests that the mulatta “is a narrative device of mediation; it allows for a fictional exploration of the relationship between the races while being at the same time an imaginary expression of the relation between the races.” See Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 171. Similarly, Ann duCille describes the mulatta as “both a rhetorical device and a political strategy,” 7.
51. McDowell, xxvi; Tate, 144.
52. Saks, 44.
53. See Deborah McDowell’s argument, cited above, that Irene’s attraction to Clare is based on latent or repressed lesbian desire.
54. Saks argues that because “the deviance of social form from legal form makes social form an unreliable sign of legal form (and vice versa), this deviance causes a crisis of representation,” 63.
55. Referencing the black postmodernist subject, W. Lawrence Hogue compares the decentered subject of postmodernism to the modernist subject: “Unlike the alienated, modern subject who seeks temporal unification of the past and the future with the present, the postmodern subject is free from all metaphysical narratives, free to simply desire and want. He or she no longer seeks social change; he or she exists only to satisfy his or her own desires.” See W. Lawrence Hogue, Race, Modernity, Postmodernity: A Look at the Literatures of People of Color Since the 1960s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 152.
56. In his S/Z, Roland Barthes distinguishes between le scriptible (the writerly) and le lisible (the readerly) text, the latter allowing the reader to collaborate in the production of meaning. See Roland Barthes, S/Z, Richard Miller, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974). Also see Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response model of reading in which the “act of reading” generates new meanings, and even new identities, on the part of the reader: Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communicationin Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Reception (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Both models of reading would seem especially useful for understanding the consequences of Irene’s “act of reading” Clare.
57. My reading here signifies on Deborah McDowell’s reading of Larsen’s Passing.
58. Wall, 130. Curiously, Wall focuses on Irene’s function as Clare’s double, rather than vice versa. While acknowledging the mutuality of this relation of doubles, my own analysis emphasizes Clare’s role as Irene’s double.
59. Davis, Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, 315.
60. duCille, 105. DuCille both challenges and expands Wall’s and McDowell’s readings of Irene.
61. Samira Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African American Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 18.
62. Significantly, both William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends refer to the “mezzotinto” of the iris as a physical marker betraying African ancestry in the passing subject.
63. Frankenberg, 6.
64. In response to Chesnutt’s article (“What Is a White Man?,” New York Independent, May 30, 1889), Cable wrote the following: “You know that all my earlier stories about quadroons really ask this question, ‘What is a white man, What is a white woman?’ ” George Washington Cable, letter to Charles Chesnutt, June 12, 1889. Charles Waddell Chesnutt Collection, Fisk University, Nashville; also cited in Stephen P. Knadler, “Un-tragic Mulatto: Charles Chesnutt and the Discourse of Whiteness,” American Literary History, 8.3 (Fall 1966), 426–48.
65. In its draft stage, Larsen’s Passing was entitled “Nig”— perhaps, as Thadious Davis speculates, as a “play” upon Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926). What is equally intriguing for me is that its initial title ironically echoed the then “undiscovered” novel by Harriet Wilson, entitled Our Nig (1859).
66. See Mark J. Madigan, “Miscegenation and ‘The Dicta of Race and Class’: The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen’s Passing,” Modern Fiction Studies 36.4 (Winter 1990), and James L. Wacks, “Reading Race, Rhetoric and the Female Body: The Rhinelander Case and 1920s American Culture,” senior thesis, Harvard University, 1995.
67. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture, Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1955), 185; also cited in Kawash, 8–9.
68. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), 190.
69. Tate, 145.
MAE G. HENDERSON is professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Author of numerous articles on African American and feminist criticism and theory, pedagogy, and cultural studies, she is also editor of Borders, Boundaries, and Frames; co-editor (with John Blassingame) of the five-volume Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals: An Annotated Index of Letters, 1817–1871.
INTRODUCTION
Ntozake Shange
As a person of color—light brown by most standards, but not light enough to pass—I’ve often wondered about the lives of childhood friends and family members who took that precipitous step and crossed over the color line to become white. Remembering that I am of a generation that straddled the era of strict segregation of the races and the toppling of that abominable separation of black and white, I’ve experienced the denigration that Clare Kendry, Nella Larsen’s protagonist in Passing, sought to escape. So I understand the impulse not to announce to everyone that which they can’t ascertain on their own. Or as Larsen writes:
Absurd! Impossible! White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot. They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy. Never, when she was alone, had they even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro.
Clare Kendry, unlike her friend Irene Redfield, takes it upon herself to pass. But the aloneness brings her back time and again to the lives of certain of her old school friends, people who know she is a Negro but who are as capable of passing as she is. It is as if Larsen wanted to invite us into a closed circle of the well-off light-skinned Negroes who distance themselves from their darker brethren by class, color, and fashion.
It is impossible to escape the beauty of Clare Kendry, her sense of fashion and drawing room manners. As Larsen writes:
Clare, exquisite, golden, fragrant, flaunting, in a stately gown of shining black taffeta, whose long, full skirt lay in graceful folds about her slim golden feet; her glistening hair drawn smoothly back into a small twist at the nape of her neck; her eyes sparkling like dark jewels.
At one point Irene Redfield thinks that Clare was born out of her correct era, that she belongs in the time of French salons and the antebellum South— which is telling, because both of these epochs were sustained by the exploitation of the masses of people. Irene, too, is seduced by Clare’s beauty, her mystery, and brazen risk taking. For Clare is married to a man who literally hates Negroes and doesn’t know he is married to one—he calls her “Nig” as a private joke for how dark she got in the sun.
And Clare wants Irene to provide her entrée into the Negro society of the 1920s, though she could lose everything: someone might see her and put two and two together. (If you socialize with Negroes, you must be one—who else but “colored” would want to be around us?)
Clare wants Irene to lay her life open to her on a whim—on the occasion of her husband’s absence, whenever it pleases her to visit the “Negro,” as if Irene were there for her amusement, to see Negroes, not unlike the hordes of whites who invaded Harlem at the time to look at us, to dance our dances, to guess who among us was more white than the others. Irene realizes that “Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it.”
This sort of betrayal tortured Irene, as does h
er husband’s friendliness toward Clare. Brian Redfield is a handsome and accomplished doctor. He longed for some of the freedoms his color denied him, and his true private obsession is Brazil, where, he imagines, color is of no import. Irene insists he give up the fantasy of Brazil for her sake, their children’s, and their comfortable life. She refuses to take his dream seriously.
Irene is tormented by both these forces—Clare Kendry’s passing back and forth and Brian Redfield’s resentment that she is the cause of his lack of freedom. Irene cherishes her boys of different colors and her secure life during Harlem’s Renaissance as a member of the elite light-skinned Talented Tenth. She takes pride in the advancement of the race, as evidenced by her participation in the Negro Welfare League—though her husband sees it as an unwelcome obligation to help the poorer brothers. Let there be no mistake, Larsen bluntly exposes the classism and racism of this small clique of our population by offering no personalities for the household help of the Redfield house: black and poor and ignored except for their efficiency. So, Irene Redfield’s suffering brought about by Clare Kendry is limited to the fate of her class and caste. Irene even upbraids her husband for speaking honestly about lynchings because she wants her sons to be “happy,” meaning ignorant of the true perils of Negro life at that time.
Nevertheless, Irene Redfield openly participates in Clare Kendry’s very dangerous tiptoeing back and forth over the color line and guards Clare Kendry’s charade like an obsessed lover, constantly submitting herself to the allure of Clare’s beauty and the “furtive mystery” of her person. There is no way to ignore the homoerotic undertones of their relationship, as evidenced in one of Clare Kendry’s letters to Irene:
… For I am so lonely … cannot help longing to be with you again, as I have never longed for anything before; and I have wanted many things in my life… . You can’t know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of… . It’s like an ache, a pain that never ceases… .
