by Carla Kaplan
“Strange Longing”: Interracial Love, Passing, and Voluntary Blackness
I am possessed by a strange longing.
—James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex–Colored Man
Published anonymously in 1912 and reissued under his own name in 1927, James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex–Colored Man was one of the most widely read books of the Harlem Renaissance. A novel of passing in the guise of a confession, this short work tells the story of an unnamed narrator who is pushed across the color line by the horrific sight of a lynching, described in gruesome detail. The narrator determines that he is “not going to be a Negro” henceforth and resolves to go to New York, where, because he looks white, it will not be “necessary for me to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead.” He goes to school, becomes a successful real estate developer, moves up in society, and finds that in almost all particulars, except the economic, the white and black worlds are nearly identical; it is class and culture, not race, that account for real differences between people. After some time in the white world he falls in love with a white woman, who agrees, after much torment, to marry him and keep his racial secret. They are a “supremely happy” couple. But she dies in childbirth with their second child. He continues to pass for his children’s sake: “there is nothing I would not suffer to keep the brand from being placed upon them.” At the end of the novel, the narrator ruminates on his life, remembering his mother (from whom he received his “coloured” blood). He wonders if he has been “a coward, a deserter” and if he has committed an unforgivable moral breach.
Before he can answer that question, however, he finds himself “possessed by a strange longing for my mother’s people.” His longing is strange because in learning that there is no real difference between the races, there should be nothing, in particular, for him to miss. His longing is also “strange” because the sudden desire to be among “his people” is so forceful, threatening to upend his carefully considered choices.
The power of this “strange” longing for blackness turns up everywhere in the black literature of the Harlem Renaissance. It is a disruptive force in both of Nella Larsen’s novels. Helga Crane, in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, visits a “subterranean” Harlem cabaret, and finds it
gay, grotesque, and a little weird. . . . A blare of jazz split her ears. . . . They danced, ambling lazily to a crooning melody . . . or shaking themselves ecstatically to a thumping of unseen tomtoms. . . . She was drugged, lifted, sustained by the joyous, wild, murky orchestra. The essence of life seemed bodily motion. And when suddenly the music died, she dragged herself back to the present with a conscious effort; and a shameful certainty that not only had she been in the jungle, but that she had enjoyed it, began to taunt her.
She finds herself overcome, after this, with longing to be amid the “brown laughing” faces of “her” people and experience those “joyous,” essential feelings. She is “homesick . . . [for] her” people. And in Passing, Clare Kendry has crossed over into white society and finds that she cannot stay there because she too is overcome by her “longing” for blackness. That longing grows in her as a “wild desire . . . an ache a pain that never ceases.” Warned that this “wild desire” may destroy her marriage to a white man who does not know her secret, Clare responds, “You don’t know, you can’t realize how I want to see Negroes, to be with them again, to talk with them, to hear them laugh.”
This sudden longing is an important turning point in black authors’ novels of passing. Racial longing reinforces a racial ethic—the idea that “a refusal to pass is commendably courageous”—and vice versa. The longing to “come back” is an affirmation of race pride, a testament to the fact that there is nothing enviable in white culture. “A good many colored folks that try to be white find that it isn’t as pleasant as they imagined it would be,” Booker T. Washington is reported to have remarked. “White folks don’t really have a good time, from the Negro point of view. They lack the laughing, boisterous sociability which the Negro enjoys.” Turning one’s back on blackness is portrayed not only as betrayal but also as undesirable. This makes a coercive stricture into attractive preference. “Voluntary Negroes” are not only better people, in other words, but happier. What might otherwise have been a guilty pleasure, since an emotional preference for one race over another always smacks of essentialism, is reaffirmed as a proper ethical stance.
But a “strange longing” for blackness meant something quite different when expressed by white women. White women who believed in essential, or fixed and immutable, notions of racial identity often aligned themselves with primitivism’s conviction that blacks embodied a set of qualities and characteristics not found elsewhere. To them, attacks on biological difference seemed to fly in the face of their efforts to appreciate blackness as something very different from—and in some ways even better than—whiteness. Nor did they take to what was then a pragmatic position that eluded the question of what race was by insisting that whatever race was, it was an ethics, a mandate that blacks be loyal to their “own” people in the face of discrimination and oppression. White women animated by an erotics of race did not want to be loyal to “their” own race—that was the whole point. They wanted to qualify as “voluntary Negroes” instead (in spite of the fact the honorific was meant only for blacks who might have passed but chose not to). Simply put, some of the white women who were most taken with black Harlem also had a powerful personal—if unacknowledged—stake in some of the very ideas of racial difference that so vexed and frustrated the political/cultural movement. Their “strange longing,” as many would have called it, put pressure on the very thing most Harlemites wanted least to admit—that ideas of essential and immutable racial difference persisted, even among blacks and even though they were widely challenged.
Some of the most subtle literature of the Harlem Renaissance dramatizes this paradoxical persistence. For example, black novelist and Crisis literary editor Jessie Fauset, the stepdaughter of an early interracial marriage, demonstrates who can and cannot volunteer for blackness in her 1920 short story “The Sleeper Wakes.” Here, a blond, blue-eyed child named Amy is left with a middle-class black family when she is five years old, a family that is unable to tell her with certainty whether she is white or “colored.” Amy joins the white world but finds it sterile, cold, insolent, and acquisitive. “She wanted to be colored, she hoped she was colored.” Finally, she gives in to the “stifled hidden longing” for blackness. Because Amy might have black blood, might therefore be black, those longings are validated. Indeed, Amy’s longings are validations, in and of themselves, of black pride.
Miss Anne sometimes saw her exclusion from “voluntary blackness” as Harlem’s version of America’s “one-drop rule.” She protested against it by claiming also to have, as Charlotte Osgood Mason put it, the “creative impulse throbbing in the African race.” Seeing black poets proclaim “I am Africa,” she sometimes concluded, as Nancy Cunard did, that that she too could “speak as if I were a Negro myself.” On the one hand, Miss Anne had a point. What prevented such a claim, if not blood and biology? On the other hand, of course, such a claim was audacious, even outrageous. By suggesting that she could volunteer for blackness and that only an essential ideology could logically exclude her, Miss Anne managed at one and the same time to both validate black culture and challenge its racial edicts in almost equal measure. Hence, her mere presence seemed to undermine “rooted identity . . . that most precious commodity.”
Sexualizing Edna Margaret Johnson’s prayer for color made all the complexities of Miss Anne’s “strange longing” easier to dismiss. The white press, especially, went to extraordinary lengths to sexualize any longing white women expressed for blackness over whiteness. Civil rights activist and NAACP founder Mary White Ovington was a remarkable example of this phenomenon.
Like Nancy Cunard, Ovington was a socialist from a well-heeled family. And, like Cunard, she was a stubborn woman who straine
d her family’s tolerance as she doggedly transformed herself from dilettante to fighter. She rejected the mannered, 1880s Brooklyn Heights society in which she was raised: its balls, card games, fox hunts in the country, and long, chaperoned Sunday walks with suitors. Like Nancy Cunard, she resolved never to marry. “To live on in an eternal round of home duties without any outside fun or outside work even would just about kill me.” She moved from settlement work to NAACP leadership. Her parents were at a loss to understand her. “Do stand by me if you can,” she begged her increasingly distant mother.
Mary White Ovington.
Ovington was a very serious, even severe person. She was not at all a “New Woman,” demonstrating her feminism and independence through rebellious style. Born in 1865, she was in her late fifties during the Harlem Renaissance and the product of the very Victorian society that New Women like Cunard set out to affront. She disapproved strongly of their flamboyance and especially their provocative behavior with black men, which she felt drew the wrong kind of attention to integration. Hyperconscious of the “need for caution about appearances,” she saw “the nasty propaganda potential of any event with white women and black men.” Although Ovington used femininity to escape the constraints of womanhood that faced her, she did not believe in openly flouting sexual conventions. Adopting a personal style marked by decorous behavior and old-fashioned pastel suits helped her draw attention away from herself. She also deflected notice by working without a salary for forty years and being very careful about contradicting the NAACP’s black male leadership in public. So successful were her self-effacing strategies that to this day people are often unaware that she founded the organization.
Yet the press attacked this mild-mannered, middle-aged woman just as viciously as it attacked Cunard. Ovington was called a sexual hydra. She was accused of working for black rights only to insinuate herself sexually into the company of black men. Seizing on an interracial dinner she sponsored in 1908, long before such occasions were in “vogue,” front-page stories from The New York Times to the Chattanooga Times to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch exploded with “public disgust and indignation” over such a “disgraceful” social gathering. The press worked itself into a froth over the “forces of evil” represented by social interracialism and especially excoriated the “unbalanced” white women it insisted went to Peck’s Restaurant to seduce black men. Ovington was singled out for particularly ugly charges that she had ulterior motives for organizing the “Miscegenation Banquet,” as the press dubbed the dinner. If she wasn’t seeking black men for herself, then she was attempting to lure young white women into sex with black men, they insisted. “High priestess, Miss Ovington, whose father is rich and who affiliates five days in every week with Negro men and dines with them at her home in Brooklyn,” declared one southern newspaper, was determined to “take young white girls into that den.” A flood of threatening and “nauseatingly obscene” letters arrived at Ovington’s home, remarkably like the letters Cunard would receive nearly thirty years later during her own stay in Harlem. Ovington tried—as always—to put a brave face on things, declaring that “one is complimented to feel that one may have endangered one’s life for a cause.” But she was concerned enough to retreat to her sister’s home.
The papers did not always have to stretch to sexualize white women in Harlem. Certain white women, such as Cunard and Schuyler, were open about their sexual desire for black men. In those cases, the press had only to render such desire as monstrous, insane, unnatural, and unhealthy. Given the taxonomic fever of the twenties, that was not hard to do.
In the winter and spring of 1927, there was a string of mysterious and brutal attacks on Hollywood starlets. One of them occurred on April 12, 1927, when Helen Lee Worthing—a Ziegfeld Follies girl (named “one of the five most beautiful women in the world”) and screen star who had played opposite John Barrymore in Don Juan—was badly beaten by an intruder who broke her nose, knocked out a tooth, and left without attempting to take anything from her bungalow. Soon after her recovery, she vanished.
As it turned out, Worthing had eloped with her doctor, a black man, marrying in Mexico to evade California’s antimiscegenation laws. Fearing scandal in the press, she withdrew from her film and stage career after her marriage. “We didn’t intend for the story to get out,” her husband told reporters. The story did get out, however, and Worthing rushed to defend her love for the light-skinned black doctor. (Her defense was not the most thoughtful, conflating Negrophilia and Negrophobia: “We all have the blood of the chimpanzee in our veins,” she averred. “Why should I object to a taint race of dark blood in my husband?”) Worthing and Nelson challenged Hollywood to accept and defend them, making it known that if they could not win support from those in film, they’d go to Harlem “and accept all that her status as his wife implies.” Their gambit failed. Trying to win over her friends was a “losing game.” She encountered “no recognition or friendliness” when she appeared in her former social circles. “I might have been an utter stranger.” Other whites treated her as if she were “not quite human.”
Helen Lee Worthing with her husband, Dr. Nelson.
Worthing began to receive the same kinds of hate mail Ovington had received—an antagonism that may have been the cause of the attacks on her. Those “venomous, coarse, and vindictive notes” called Worthing “a disgrace to the white race,” a “sex-crazed degenerate,” and worse. “They were cruel, dirty, anonymous letters.” She felt afraid to go out. Her studio work dried up overnight, and “every one of my old friends had deserted me.” She “gradually withdrew from society,” isolating herself both from her Hollywood friends and from her husband’s friends in their black Los Angeles neighborhood and beginning to abuse drugs and alcohol. Two years into the marriage and desperately lonely, she collapsed. By November 1932, she was confined, against her will, in Los Angeles Hospital, pending a formal charge of insanity. A few years later she reappeared as a bathroom matron in a defense plant and then as a sewing machine operator in an apparel shop, working her way up from piecework to shop forewoman, still considered newsworthy by the tabloids. In 1948, she killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. “Worthing’s decline and her banishment from Hollywood served as a warning for many other stars who followed. Interracial relationships were clearly taboo.” A death like Worthing’s gratified those who thought “it was a sign of insanity to have a black lover and advertise the fact.” It proved that “white women who voluntarily married black men were . . . depraved, insane, or prostitutes” and sure to come to a bad end.
It is probably impossible, nearly a hundred years later, to recapture the social force of the term “Nigger lover.” The term was used to indict those who had transgressed whiteness in ways that now made them ineligible for it: whites who refused to discriminate, were intimate with blacks, or socialized with blacks. Women who were “Nigger lovers” were traitors to whiteness; they were guilty of acts of symbolic treason, and they forfeited whatever class privileges they had acquired. Having given up the only superiority available to them, they could be understood, in the terms of their day, only as self-hating.
Not everyone believed that interracial relations were doomed. Joel A. Rogers, for example, a friend of George Schuyler and the author, among other works, of This Mongrel World: A Study of Negro-Caucasian Mixing Throughout the Ages, and in All Countries (1927), argued that interracial sex had a “‘cosmic’ significance” and that white women who feared rape were expressing “an ungratified desire for intimacy with Negroes.” Schuyler applauded Rogers’s position and agreed with him, as did his white wife, Josephine. But they were in a distinct minority. Citing “incompatible personalities, irreconcilable ideals, and different grades of culture,” even Du Bois and the NAACP discouraged interracial marriage. According to Claude McKay, “the white wives of Harlem have had such a rough time from the Negro matrons that recently there was organized an association of White Wives of Negro Men to promote friendly social intercourse among t
hemselves.”
Black activist and antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells called such women “white Delilahs” and resented having to defend them. But on balance, a woman such as Helen Lee Worthing may have been less troubling—at least she was predictable—than Edna Margaret Johnson with her “White Girl’s Prayer,” her “self-contempt,” and her glorification of all things black. When white women went to Harlem full of “strange longing” to escape from themselves into blackness, there was no telling what they might do.
Indeed, white women were often, for black communities, both unpredictable and dangerous. A second trial brackets the time period covered in this book, and it was every bit as influential in its day as the Rhinelander case was. It reinforced, for many, just how dangerous white women could be. And it reinforced, as well, how frightened white women might be of being perceived as choosing blacks over whites. The Scottsboro case began in the troubled Depression era, on March 25, 1931, when a fight erupted between black and white boys riding the rails in search of work in Alabama. Some of the white boys were thrown off the train and quickly ran to seek help from local farmers. In Paint Rock, Alabama, the train was stopped by a mob, which dragged the black boys off the train, along with two white women dressed in men’s overalls. The two women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, initially did not press charges or mention rape. But local officials quickly made it clear that “riding the rails, dressed in men’s overalls, consorting with rowdy white men, they could have been charged with vagrancy or worse.” Were they “nigger lovers”? the authorities demanded to know. Both women already had prostitution records. Neither had money or family to fall back on. “Bates and Price must have quickly recognized their stark choices. They could either go to jail or claim to be victims. They cried rape.”
