Nella Larsen

by Passing

  Horribly clear, she could now see the reason for her instinct to withhold—omit, rather—her news of the encounter with Bellew. If Clare was freed, anything might happen.

  She paused in her dressing, seeing with perfect clearness that dark truth which she had from that first October afternoon felt about Clare Kendry and of which Clare herself had once warned her—that she got the things she wanted because she met the great condition of conquest, sacrifice. If she wanted Brian, Clare wouldn’t revolt from the lack of money or place. It was as she had said, only Margery kept her from throwing all that away. And if things were taken out of her hands—Even if she was only alarmed, only suspected that such a thing was about to occur, anything might happen. Anything.

  No! At all costs, Clare was not to know of that meeting with Bellew. Nor was Brian. It would only weaken her own power to keep him.

  They would never know from her that he was on his way to suspecting the truth about his wife. And she would do anything, risk anything, to prevent him from finding out that truth. How fortunate that she had obeyed her instinct and omitted to recognize Bellew!

  “Ever go up to the sixth floor, Clare?” Brian asked as he stopped the car and got out to open the door for them.

  “Why, of course! We’re on the seventeenth.”

  “I mean, did you ever go up by nigger-power?”2

  “That’s good!” Clare laughed. “Ask ’Rene. My father was a janitor, you know, in the good old days before every ramshackle flat had its elevator. But you can’t mean we’ve got to walk up? Not here!”

  “Yes, here. And Felise lives at the very top,” Irene told her.

  “What on earth for?”

  “I believe she claims it discourages the casual visitor.”

  “And she’s probably right. Hard on herself, though.”

  Brian said: “Yes, a bit. But she says she’d rather be dead than bored.”

  “Oh, a garden! And how lovely with that undisturbed snow!”

  “Yes, isn’t it? But keep to the walk with those foolish thin shoes. You too, Irene.”

  Irene walked beside them on the cleared cement path that split the whiteness of the courtyard garden. She felt a something in the air, something that had been between those two and would be again. It was like a live thing pressing against her. In a quick furtive glance she saw Clare clinging to Brian’s other arm. She was looking at him with that provocative upward glance of hers, and his eyes were fastened on her face with what seemed to Irene an expression of wistful eagerness.

  “It’s this entrance, I believe,” she informed them in quite her ordinary voice.

  “Mind,” Brian told Clare, “you don’t fall by the wayside before the fourth floor. They absolutely refuse to carry anyone up more than the last two flights.”

  “Don’t be silly!” Irene snapped.

  The party began gaily.

  Dave Freeland was at his best, brilliant, crystal clear, and sparkling. Felise, too, was amusing, and not so sarcastic as usual, because she liked the dozen or so guests that dotted the long, untidy living-room. Brian was witty, though, Irene noted, his remarks were somewhat more barbed than was customary even with him. And there was Ralph Hazelton, throwing nonsensical shining things into the pool of talk, which the others, even Clare, picked up and flung back with fresh adornment.

  Only Irene wasn’t merry. She sat almost silent, smiling now and then, that she might appear amused.

  “What’s the matter, Irene?” someone asked. “Taken a vow never to laugh, or something? You’re as sober as a judge.”

  “No. It’s simply that the rest of you are so clever that I’m speechless, absolutely stunned.”

  “No wonder,” Dave Freeland remarked, “that you’re on the verge of tears. You haven’t a drink. What’ll you take?”

  “Thanks. If I must take something, make it a glass of ginger ale and three drops of Scotch. The Scotch first, please. Then the ice, then the ginger ale.”

  “Heavens! Don’t attempt to mix that yourself, Dave darling. Have the butler in,” Felise mocked.

  “Yes, do. And the footman.” Irene laughed a little, then said: “It seems dreadfully warm in here. Mind if I open this window?” With that she pushed open one of the long casement-windows of which the Freelands were so proud.

  It had stopped snowing some two or three hours back. The moon was just rising, and far behind the tall buildings a few stars were creeping out. Irene finished her cigarette and threw it out, watching the tiny spark drop slowly down to the white ground below.

  Someone in the room had turned on the phonograph. Or was it the radio? She didn’t know which she disliked more. And nobody was listening to its blare. The talking, the laughter never for a minute ceased. Why must they have more noise?

  Dave came with her drink. “You ought not,” he told her, “to stand there like that. You’ll take cold. Come along and talk to me, or listen to me gabble.” Taking her arm, he led her across the room. They had just found seats when the door-bell rang and Felise called over to him to go and answer it.

  In the next moment Irene heard his voice in the hall, carelessly polite: “Your wife? Sorry. I’m afraid you’re wrong. Perhaps next—”

  Then the roar of John Bellew’s voice above all the other noises of the room: “I’m not wrong! I’ve been to the Redfields and I know she’s with them. You’d better stand out of my way and save yourself trouble in the end.”

  “What is it, Dave?” Felise ran out to the door.

  And so did Brian. Irene heard him saying: “I’m Redfield. What the devil’s the matter with you?”

  But Bellew didn’t heed him. He pushed past them all into the room and strode towards Clare. They all looked at her as she got up from her chair, backing a little from his approach.

  “So you’re a nigger, a damned dirty nigger!” His voice was a snarl and a moan, an expression of rage and of pain.

  Everything was in confusion. The men had sprung forward. Felise had leapt between them and Bellew. She said quickly: “Careful. You’re the only white man here.” And the silver chill of her voice, as well as her words, was a warning.

  Clare stood at the window, as composed as if everyone were not staring at her in curiosity and wonder, as if the whole structure of her life were not lying in fragments before her. She seemed unaware of any danger or uncaring. There was even a faint smile on her full, red lips, and in her shining eyes.

  It was that smile that maddened Irene. She ran across the room, her terror tinged with ferocity, and laid a hand on Clare’s bare arm. One thought possessed her. She couldn’t have Clare Kendry cast aside by Bellew. She couldn’t have her free.

  Before them stood John Bellew, speechless now in his hurt and anger. Beyond them the little huddle of other people, and Brian stepping out from among them.

  What happened next, Irene Redfield never afterwards allowed herself to remember. Never clearly.

  One moment Clare had been there, a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold. The next she was gone.

  There was a gasp of horror, and above it a sound not quite human, like a beast in agony. “Nig! My God! Nig!”

  A frenzied rush of feet down long flights of stairs. The slamming of distant doors. Voices.

  Irene stayed behind. She sat down and remained quite still, staring at a ridiculous Japanese print on the wall across the room.

  Gone! The soft white face, the bright hair, the disturbing scarlet mouth, the dreaming eyes, the caressing smile, the whole torturing loveliness that had been Clare Kendry. That beauty that had torn at Irene’s placid life. Gone! The mocking daring, the gallantry of her pose, the ringing bells of her laughter.

  Irene wasn’t sorry. She was amazed, incredulous almost.

  What would the others think? That Clare had fallen? That she had deliberately leaned backward? Certainly one or the other. Not—

  But she mustn’t, she warned herself, think of that. She was too tired, and too shocked. And, indeed, both were true. She was utterly weary,
and she was violently staggered. But her thoughts reeled on. If only she could be as free of mental as she was of bodily vigour; could only put from her memory the vision of her hand on Clare’s arm!

  “It was an accident, a terrible accident,” she muttered fiercely. “It was.”

  People were coming up the stairs. Through the still open door their steps and talk sounded nearer, nearer.

  Quickly she stood up and went noiselessly into the bedroom and closed the door softly behind her.

  Her thoughts raced. Ought she to have stayed? Should she go back out there to them? But there would be questions. She hadn’t thought of them, of afterwards, of this. She had thought of nothing in that sudden moment of action.

  It was cold. Icy chills ran up her spine and over her bare neck and shoulders.

  In the room outside there were voices. Dave Freeland’s and others that she did not recognize.

  Should she put on her coat? Felise had rushed down without any wrap. So had all the others. So had Brian. Brian! He mustn’t take cold. She took up his coat and left her own. At the door she paused for a moment, listening fearfully. She heard nothing. No voices. No footsteps. Very slowly she opened the door. The room was empty. She went out.

  In the hall below she heard dimly the sound of feet going down the steps, of a door being opened and closed, and of voices far away.

  Down, down, down, she went, Brian’s great coat clutched in her shivering arms and trailing a little on each step behind her.

  What was she to say to them when at last she had finished going down those endless stairs? She should have rushed out when they did. What reason could she give for her dallying behind? Even she didn’t know why she had done that. And what else would she be asked? There had been her hand reaching out towards Clare. What about that?

  In the midst of her wonderings and questionings came a thought so terrifying, so horrible, that she had had to grasp hold of the banister to save herself from pitching downwards. A cold perspiration drenched her shaking body. Her breath came short in sharp and painful gasps.

  What if Clare was not dead?

  She felt nauseated, as much at the idea of the glorious body mutilated as from fear.

  How she managed to make the rest of the journey without fainting she never knew. But at last she was down. Just at the bottom she came on the others, surrounded by a little circle of strangers. They were all speaking in whispers, or in the awed, discreetly lowered tones adapted to the presence of disaster. In the first instant she wanted to turn and rush back up the way she had come. Then a calm desperation came over her. She braced herself, physically and mentally.

  “Here’s Irene now,” Dave Freeland announced, and told her that, having only just missed her, they had concluded that she had fainted or something like that, and were on the way to find out about her. Felise, she saw, was holding on to his arm, all the insolent nonchalance gone out of her, and the golden brown of her handsome face changed to a queer mauve colour.

  Irene made no indication that she had heard Freeland, but went straight to Brian. His face looked aged and altered, and his lips were purple and trembling. She had a great longing to comfort him, to charm away his suffering and horror. But she was helpless, having so completely lost control of his mind and heart.

  She stammered: “Is she—is she—?”

  It was Felise who answered. “Instantly, we think.”

  Irene struggled against the sob of thankfulness that rose in her throat. Choked down, it turned to a whimper, like a hurt child’s. Someone laid a hand on her shoulder in a soothing gesture. Brian wrapped his coat about her. She began to cry rackingly, her entire body heaving with convulsive sobs. He made a slight perfunctory attempt to comfort her.

  “There, there, Irene. You mustn’t. You’ll make yourself sick. She’s—” His voice broke suddenly.

  As from a long distance she heard Ralph Hazelton’s voice saying: “I was looking right at her. She just tumbled over and was gone before you could say ‘Jack Robinson.’ Fainted, I guess. Lord! It was quick. Quickest thing I ever saw in all my life.”

  “It’s impossible, I tell you! Absolutely impossible!”

  It was Brian who spoke in that frenzied hoarse voice, which Irene had never heard before. Her knees quaked under her.

  Dave Freeland said: “Just a minute, Brian. Irene was there beside her. Let’s hear what she has to say.”

  She had a moment of stark craven fear. “Oh God,” she thought, prayed, “help me.”

  A strange man, official and authoritative, addressed her. “You’re sure she fell? Her husband didn’t give her a shove or anything like that, as Dr. Redfield seems to think?”

  For the first time she was aware that Bellew was not in the little group shivering in the small hallway. What did that mean? As she began to work it out in her numbed mind, she was shaken with another hideous trembling. Not that! Oh, not that!

  “No, no!” she protested. “I’m quite certain that he didn’t. I was there, too. As close as he was. She just fell, before anybody could stop her. I—”

  Her quaking knees gave way under her. She moaned and sank down, moaned again. Through the great heaviness that submerged and drowned her she was dimly conscious of strong arms lifting her up. Then everything was dark.

  Centuries after, she heard the strange man saying: “Death by misadventure, I’m inclined to believe. Let’s go up and have another look at that window.”3

  NOTES

  DEDICATION

  1. For Carl Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff: Larsen’s dedication acknowledged her friends and supporters Carl Van Vechten (1886–1964) and his wife, Fania Marinoff (1887–1972). Novelist, photographer, and music and drama critic, Van Vechten was a patron of the arts and black artists during the Harlem Renaissance. Author of the controversial novel Nigger Heaven (1926), he was also a bohemian bon vivant and habitué of Harlem’s exotic nightlife. He and his wife were widely known for their lavish interracial parties downtown, and acted as a kind of bridge between the Harlem Renaissance artists and their white publishers and promoters. It was Van Vechten who recommended Larsen’s work—along with that of James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Rudolph Fisher—to Knopf, his own publisher.

  EPIGRAPH

  1. One three centuries removed … What is Africa to me?: The novel’s epigraph is from Countee Cullen’s famous poem “Heritage,” from his first published volume of poetry, Color (1925). Cullen (1903–1946) was the most celebrated poet among the New Negro writers and is known for his lyricism. He was widely acclaimed for his Keatsian sonnet “Yet Do I Marvel,” which concludes with the lines, “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing / To make a poet black, and bid him sing.” He was also chided by some of his contemporaries for making the statement, “If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be a POET and not [a] NEGRO POET.” One thus notes with some irony that his best-known poems address issues of race.

  PART ONE: ENCOUNTER

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. Samaritan: as in the “good Samaritan” (Luke 10:30–37); one who is compassionate and helpful to those in distress.

  2. finger-nails … silly rot: During the 1920s, the popular press teemed with warnings about those with “Negro blood” sliding quietly into the ranks of whiteness and offered several physical characteristics—among them the presence of a particularly distinct half moon or a dark blue tint on the fingernails, a clear difference in pigmentation between the palm and the back of the hand, and other “subtle” physical markers—as a litmus test of hidden African ancestry. Nearly every state in the union had some version of the one-drop rule, conceived during slavery, that held an individual legally black at the presence of a single drop of Negro blood. These physical markers—and by extension the one-drop rule—are the targets of Irene’s derision and derive from the widely accepted “principles” of the Victorian pseudosciences of the late nineteenth century. The Victorians in both England and the United States were awash in race theories and phrenology, pseudosciences that fo
und their clearest expression in eugenics, a theory—and later practice—founded by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911) in the mid-nineteenth century that applied horse-breeding principles to human reproduction.

  3. “Marshall Field’s”: Marshall Field and Company remains Chicago’s largest retail department store. Established in 1852, its renovation (after the great fire of 1871) installed a neoclassical design that suggested not only its dominance in the world of modern retail sales but also its cultural authority as an arbiter of fashion and taste for the affluent. Although the store also served a lessaffluent clientele in the 1920s, it catered primarily to a wealthy elite class. Shopping at Marshall Field’s thus reaffirmed the social standing and cultural taste of its white patrons. Clare’s shopping at such an establishment would have suggested her desire for race privilege and class status, and their material accouterments. Except for this reference and the one that follows, these explanatory notes do not highlight Larsen’s numerous references to the urban geography of Chicago, as they simply serve to locate the novel’s action. For more on these geographical references, see the notes in Thadious Davis’s edition of Passing (Penguin, 1997).

  4. “Idlewild”: an African-American vacation resort located in Manistee National Forest, Lake County, Michigan. It was popular for its lakeside beach, horseback riding, hunting, and other amusements during the 1920s and well into the twentieth century. Frequented by affluent blacks, Idlewild was for the black Midwest what Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard was for the black elite in the Northeast. See Robert Stepto’s “[F]rom Idlewild and Other Seasons” (Callaloo 14:1 [1991], pp. 20–36).

  5. “Negro blood”: refers to black ancestry and is part of a pseudoscientific discourse predicated on the notion that race was biologically defined. “Negro blood” was thus conceived of as different from “white blood,” and in the instance of miscegenation would “stain” the “purity” of the “white” bloodline. In the West Indies, some whites claimed that the Negro’s blood was indeed “black.” Notably, this discourse references the white perspective; black discourse might refer to “white blood.”