STEPS ACROSS THE COLOR LINE

Abstract

While Sollors does acknowledge the initial - rather general and neutral - meaning of the term ([it] "may refer to the crossing of any line that divides social groups"), he refers the reader to an entire line of seminal works on the AfricanAmerican experience, which employ the term in a narrower, more specialized sense. [...]he provides the working definition we shall use in the present paper and the necessary background to our analysis: "Passing" is used most frequently as if it were short for "passing for white", in the sense of "crossing over" the color line in the United States from the black to the white side [...] Race is a matter of mind rather than body, of background rather than foreground (Bowser, qtd. in Kaplan (ed.), 2007: 94). [...]the reviewer called into question several essential elements of a long-lasting ideological confrontation, among which the fact that white dominant discourse had long resorted to presumably 'scientific', quantitative argumentation in order to secure and preserve its hegemonic position in an increasingly fragmented and questionable social hierarchy. [...]reference is clearly made to the overwhelming pressure that Jim Crow laws exerted upon American citizens, by imposing the 'separate but equal' status to AfricanAmericans for almost a century after the Civil War (approximately 1870s-1960s). [...]I think, 'Rene, that it's even worth the price" (44).

Headnote

Abstract: In terms of blurring boundaries and defying social and cultural norms, (racial, class, even gender), "passing" stands out as a most interesting phenomenon. While acknowledging the fact that Charles Waddell Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, or Jessie Redmon Fauset rank among the most prominent names to have captured it in their novels, the present paper will explore this problematic issue by focusing upon one of the most famous 20th century cases of fictional (de/re) construction of racial identities - Nella Larsen's Passing.

Keywords: color(-line); identity; mulatto; passing; race.

1. Introduction

In his 1997 Neither Black, Nor White, Yet Both. Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature, among other equally fascinating topics - like the Curse of Ham, the calculus of color, the "tragic mulatto" -, Wemer Sollors dedicates an entire chapter to the study of passing as a social phenomenon, which greatly influenced the literary production of a particular American epoch and milieu. In order to emphasize its importance, he starts by clarifying the term and its special use in the context of official and unofficial discourses as to the ongoing plight of the "near-white" population of the United States (but not necessarily restricted to this territory).

While Sollors does acknowledge the initial - rather general and neutral - meaning of the term ([it] "may refer to the crossing of any line that divides social groups"), he refers the reader to an entire line of seminal works on the AfricanAmerican experience, which employ the term in a narrower, more specialized sense. Thus, he provides the working definition we shall use in the present paper and the necessary background to our analysis:

"Passing" is used most frequently as if it were short for "passing for white", in the sense of "crossing over" the color line in the United States from the black to the white side [...] Though the camouflaging of aspects of one's identity is probably a human universal, racial passing is particularly a phenomenon of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. It thrived in modem systems in which, as a primary condition, social and geographic mobility prevailed, especially in environments such as cities or crowds that provided anonymity to individuals, permitting them to resort to imaginative role-playing in their selfrepresentation (Sollors 1999: 247-248).

In accordance with Sollors' argument, passing will be regarded in what follows as an integral part of the larger discourse on racial difference, involving both the ideas of veiling and pretense, and those of impersonation, performativity, purposeful construction of the self to a profitable end. Ambivalence, ambiguity, doubling appear to be quasi-inevitable side effects of the African-American burden of "double consciousness". The dilemmas of transgression, the inherent anxieties of racial constrictions and the difficulties which arise in the subjects' efforts to comply with or defy social expectation, the gains and dangers of assuming a (not altogether) different persona all require careful examination, as they form the axis around which the plot of Nella Larsen's unambiguously-entitled novel, Passing, revolves.

2. The (In)Visibility of Race

In order to better understand the topics addressed by Larsen's second novel, one must bear in mind a whole range of issues connected to the history of African-Americans in the United States and to the fact that race, ethnicity and color have long been reasons why the members of this community have been treated as second-class citizens (if legally granted citizenship at all). The ineffectiveness and blatant injustice of such distinctions have made the object of innumerable essays and studies pointing at the ineffability and subjectivity of such criteria. Emotional or rationalizing, impulsive or thoroughly documented, reactions to the abasement, exploitation, denigration and discrimination of an entire community on account of its racial givens have grown throughout the centuries, culminating in the clearly articulated theses of 20th and 21st century thinkers, writers, social activists and politicians.

The issue of passing as presented in Nella Larsen's novel has made the object of numerous critical debates, a considerable number of scholars having focused on its racial, class, and gender connotations. On June 5, 1929, an early review of Nella Larsen's Passing put things into relevant perspective by placing the novel from the very beginning within a context that was evidently not new or unknown, but less frequently discussed than should have been the case. Aubrey Bowser pointed out that:

Mankind is divided into races by differences of color, features and hair. This is about the best that science can do, for science is concerned only with material things. Society is not satisfied with scientific distinctions, for it classes as Negroes many people who are whiter than those classed as Caucasians [...] Thus society makes a fool of itself. The ethnological distinction of race, though accurate enough in a physical sense and serviceable as a generalization, is a poor guide in dealing with questions of race as they are. Race is a matter of mind rather than body, of background rather than foreground (Bowser, qtd. in Kaplan (ed.), 2007: 94).

Thus, the reviewer called into question several essential elements of a long-lasting ideological confrontation, among which the fact that white dominant discourse had long resorted to presumably 'scientific', quantitative argumentation in order to secure and preserve its hegemonic position in an increasingly fragmented and questionable social hierarchy. Such approaches had been supported by laws and regulations that facilitated the enforcement of a system based on otherness and difference, presented in terms of 'menacing alterities'. Springing from white attempts at countering any equal status claims on the part of the (former) subject population, many such rules illustrated the sheer absurdity of a mentality that equated individuals and numbers, and officialized the substitution of quantity for quality.

Many instances of the aforementioned kind have entered a large body of fiction and non-fiction works, and testify to the American nation's lingering resistance to a most necessary change of mentality. Nevertheless, we shall only refer to the most notorious cases. References to the "one-drop rule" go back to the post-Civil War era and the heyday of the Jim Crow laws, when the principle of "invisible blackness" was used to assign a lower social status to the offspring of mixed families. Gayle Wald's Crossing the Line talks about

the set of social and legislative practices that condition racial passing as both a social enterprise and a subject of cultural representation. Codified in the late nineteenth century, particularly in the years following Reconstruction, this rule designated as "black" any person seen as possessing even a single "drop" of "black blood," as determined by ancestry extending back (in theory, at least) an indeterminate number of generations [...] The binary logic of the one-drop rule mandated that if he were not "white", then he had to be "black" [...] By representing "whiteness" as the absence of the racial sign, it has perpetuated the myth of white purity (a chimera that colors contemporary liberal language of the "mixed-race offspring" or "interracial" marriages) (Wald 2000: 10-14, passim).

It is against this particular background that the story in Larsen's Passing is projected and meant to be understood and interpreted. Published in 1929, the novel plays heavily upon its contemporary readers' knowledge of recent history. As it presents the story of two African-American women whose lightness of skin allows each of them to embrace the racial affiliation of her choice, it retraces a whole vocabulary of bloodlines, which supposedly define and describe strict racial appurtenance. At a time when William Faulkner was working on some of his most dramatic characters - the famous octoroons that populate his best known and most accomplished stories of the Deep South -, Larsen equally meditates upon the "visibility" of race.

Such fictional interrogations of American realities at the beginning of the 20th century capture and debate upon the unreliability of the very governmental procedures that should have clarified matters. Emilie Hahn's 1929 analysis of the epoch's growing appetite for passing strategies ('Social and Economic Ambitions Lead Negroes to "Pass" at a Rate of 5,000 a Year to White Fold') outlines some of the policies that deepened the nation's confusion as to 'the color line':

In 1910 the Department of Commerce report stated: "The census's classification is necessarily based upon perceptibility, qualified by the ability of the enumerator to perceive." In other words, it is up to the census-taker to decide offhand just how much blood runs in the veins of a suspiciously high-yellow citizen. The problem seems to have developed in complexity in the last few years, for, in 1890, the Government had much more definite ideas. "Be particularly careful," read the directions, "to distinguish between blacks, mulattoes, quadroons and octoroons. The word 'black' should be used to describe those persons who have three-fourths or more black blood; 'mulatto,', those persons who have threeeights to five-eights black blood; 'quadroons,' those persons who have one-fourth black blood, and 'octoroon,' those persons who have one-eighth or any trace of black blood [...] It all looks very pretty and scientific, but as a matter of fact the proposition is not so simple (Hahn, qtd. in Kaplan 2007: 118).

It is, in fact, the complexity of issues stemming from such intricate and completely superfluous categorizations that triggers the kind of fictionalization which Faulkner and Larsen made famous. By playing upon a set of stereotypical ideas and behaviors which had solidly inscribed themselves into the mental structures of the American nation, both authors choose protagonists whose fate is decided by the devious interplay of 'race' and 'color'. If Faulkner is more concerned with the evolution of male characters, whose racial ambiguity triggers individual, familial and communal misfortune (Charles Bon in Absalom, Absalom!, Joe Christmas in Light in August), Larsen chooses to bring to the fore female protagonists, whose interaction is all the more complex, as gender comes to complicate the social equation.

3. Protagonists, Antagonists

Before investigating the text proper, one must acknowledge its belonging to a whole series of writings which, in time, brought to the fore the reality and illusion of passing as a social phenomenon. As Catherina Rottenberg emphasizes in her 2007 study on Passing: 'Race, Identification and Desire',

In the second half of the nineteenth century, African-American writers such as William Wells Brown and Frances Harper began invoking the phenomenon of passing in their texts as a way of investigating the complexities and contradictions of the category of race in the United States. The light-enoughto-pass Negro (but usually Negress) would play a central role in the imagination of African-American writers for the next fifty years. Charles Chesnutt's The House behind the Cedars, Jessie Faucet's Plum Bun, and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man are perhaps the best-known examples. Nella Larsen's 1929 novella [...] can thus be seen as inheritor and perpetuator of a long tradition of such narratives (2007: 490).

Descending from such solid and distinguished ancestry, the novel takes all the possible opportunities to expose and debate upon the dilemmas of passing, from various angles and perspectives. Larsen's protagonists are two AfricanAmerican women of similar origins, yet different evolutions. Childhood friends, they are reunited after years of separation; as both their skins are light enough for them to pass for white, they have had the opportunity to build their identities, their paths in life and society, their families and circles of friends and acquaintances accordingly. In terms of defmit(iv)e choices, they have gone their separate ways. Clare Kendry has opted out of her race, married white, enjoyed all the benefits, yet craved for her roots and found herself discontent on 'the other side'. Irene Redfield identifies with the black community she is still immersed in, whose interests she seems quite concerned with.

Larsen labels her entire novel as a meditation upon community issues by opening with the Countée Cullen motto, "One three centuries removed/ From the scenes his fathers loved/ Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, What is Africa to me?' This is, indeed, "the double edged question both Clare Kendry, who is passing for white, and Irene Redfield, who is living a model life as a 'race woman' in Harlem, must face" (Rabin 2004: 125). Although each of them seems to have settled for a particular answer, ambiguity lingers and the book comes to gradually deconstruct the idea of binary opposites and clear-cut appurtenances.

Although many reviewers have seen Irene and Clare as antagonists, they are protagonists of the same story, whose power lines are dictated by cultural, legal and mental constraints. As Claire is the one whose passing is permanent and foregrounded as such, other minor instances or moments of temptation tend to go unnoticed. However, surprisingly enough given her rhetoric, the first one to be caught 'passing', no matter how briefly, is Irene herself. On the day she meets Clare again, she is having tea at a fancy downtown Chicago hotel, feeling uneasy under the supposed stranger's insistent gaze. Not only does she ask herself nervously whether anyone might suspect her being a Negro, she also meditates upon the paradoxical nature of her own condition:

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. No, the woman sitting there staring at her couldn't possibly know. Nevertheless, Irene felt, in turn, anger, scorn, and fear slide over her. It wasn't that she was ashamed of being a Negro, or even of having it declared. It was the idea of being ejected from any place, even in the polite and tactful way in which Drayton would probably do it, that disturbed her (18/19)

By plunging into Irene's consciousness and allowing the reader to partake in her inner thoughts, Larsen offers insight into an ongoing history of cliché and abuse. She derisively outlines the physical arguments which supporters of 'visible blackness' were likely to use at the time and points out that such clues could easily be misleading, deeming judgment incorrect, if not altogether ridiculous. Moreover, reference is clearly made to the overwhelming pressure that Jim Crow laws exerted upon American citizens, by imposing the 'separate but equal' status to AfricanAmericans for almost a century after the Civil War (approximately 1870s-1960s). Placed in such a context, passing stands out as a kind of resistance, a predictable outcome of unfair social treatment.

One of the things that are clear from the very beginning in the two women's conversation is the fact that passing, no matter how obvious or wellknown, is and must be treated as a taboo subject. Irene very clearly remembers Clare's departure from the black community after her father's death, just as she recalls the rumors after her disappearance from her West Side relatives' home. They all spoke of the young woman being seen in fashionable urban locations, in the company of well-off and, more importantly, white men. Her former peers' reactions to such allegations are quite telling, as they cannot help but judge such behavior quite harshly. Although the society of the time does not allow any straightforward remarks, allusions to the immorality of Clare's sudden upward mobility are transparent: "Working indeed! People didn't take their servants to the Shelby for dinner. Certainly not all dressed up like that"(26).

While Irene shares with Clare every notable thing about her adult life - her marriage, her two sons, her relocation to New York -, she initially gets no information from her former friend and thinks it best not to require any: "If things with Clare were as she - as they all - had suspected, wouldn't it be more tactful to seem to forget to inquire how she had spent those twelve years?" (32). The implicit silence and the complicit forgetfulness indicate the potential dangers of being found out and exposed as a social 'fraud'. Clare's reaction to Irene's impulsive invitation to visit her and her family falls into the same pattem of desire and repression imposed by the illicitness of her situation: "I couldn't. I mustn't, you see. It wouldn't do at all. I'm sure you understand. I'm simply crazy to go but I can't" (35).

4. Fabricated Lives

The length to which the character goes to protect her fabricated identity is illustrative of the extent of racial passing during the first decades of the 20th century. Sociologist Juanita Ellsworth analyzed the profile and motivation of 'White Negroes ' in a 1928 article, considering that the individuals' informal claims to membership in a different race had clear-cut explanations: "The economic advantage that comes from 'passing' is great; it is sometimes the chief reason for deliberately seeking the transition from one race to another" (2007: 109). Similarly, Elaine K. Ginsberg emphasizes the essential part discrimination played in the whole mental and physical process of transition:

In American history, race, sex, and gender have been inextricably linked, first through a system of slavery that placed white men in control of the productive labor of black men and the productive and reproductive labor of both black and white women, and then nationally through an economic and political system and a cultural ideology that established a fundamentally racist and sexist hierarchy of privilege and oppression (1996: 5).

Privilege and the lack of it lie at the basis of inequity and the various kinds of attempts to supplant it. Larsen does not content herself with presenting the mere existence of such social experiments; the two friends' exchanges, increasingly casual as the conversation unfolds, offer her the perfect opportunity to voice the dilemmas of both passing and non-passing Negroes. On the one hand, Irene is curious as to the practical aspects of "this hazardous business" (36) which involves severing all ties to a past that, once discovered, will inevitably equal disgrace and loss of the fraudulently acquired status. "What, for example, one did about background, how one accounted for oneself. And how one felt when one came into contact with other Negroes" (37).

On the other hand, Clare seems surprised that many of her peers, who could have easily passed for white, have never chosen to do so, although it is "such a frightfully easy thing to do [...], all that's needed is a little nerve" (37). Larsen proves a true connoisseur of the mechanisms and rhetoric of passing, having her protagonists articulate a whole range of issues connected to plausibility, authenticity, respectability, imagination, poise as necessary elements in what ends up being a masterful game of illusions. Identity as performance is central to the (de)construction of race which Clare embodies.

Her personal story is as fascinating as it is appalling, given the fact that it is based on a string of lies told to the closest people around: the aunts that took her in and the boy next door, whom she hastily ran off with and married. When Irene bluntly states that she has never thought of passing, as she has everything she wants, save for, perhaps, "a little more money", Clare points out that it is precisely financial advantages that make the process appealing to a considerable number of people: "That's what everybody wants, just a little more money, even the people who have it. And I must say I don't blame them. Money's awfully nice to have. In fact, all things considered, I think, 'Rene, that it's even worth the price" (44).

While talking about expectation and compromise, Larsen distinguishes herself from other African-American writers by the playful undertones of her text, by the characters' awareness of the fact that, although determined by concrete social factors and easily blamable on them, passing remains an instance of impersonation. This quiet crossing of the racial border, this shortcut to social acceptance and its subsequent benefits, is most certainly double-edged: simultaneously a gesture of courage and a betrayal, a defiant step across the line and an acknowledgement of the line's very existence.

The true dimension of social prejudice and discrimination is brought to the reader's attention when Clare's husband steps into the picture. Not only is the New York businessman strikingly white ("unhealthy looking dough-coloured face" - 66), but also outspokenly and bluntly biased when it comes to skin color and the "flaws' it, supposedly, entails.

This assumption of whiteness is dramatically exposed when Irene first encounters Jack Bellew, Clare's racist husband. The tea party to which Clare invites Irene after their reencounter includes three women: Clare, Irene, and Gertrude. All three women are light enough to pass. Although Clare is the only one who has completely 'passed over', Bellew, who claims to know a 'nigger' when he sees one, does not for a moment entertain the idea that one of the women sitting with his wife might be 'black'. He therefore feels perfectly comfortable acknowledging that he doesn't dislike niggers but rather hates them. 'They give me the creeps', he admits, adding, 'the black scrimy devils'. It appears that American racial classification assumes 'that racial identity marks the subject in the form of absence or presence of color.' In other words, racial identity and classification seem to be constituted through skin color (Rottenberg 2007: 494).

Larsen successfully combines the suspense that Clare's nickname ("Nig") creates (her friends begin to wonder whether her husband actually knows about her black ancestry and does not mind it), with the inherent humor of the situation. Apart from the fact that John is completely unsuspicious of the undesirable company he finds himself in and exhibits his prejudices at ease, the absurdity of his behavior echoes the frequently encountered and already mentioned discourses of race:

When we were first married, she was as white as - as - well as white as a lily. But I declare she's getting' darker and darker. I tell her if she don't look out, she'll wake up one of these days and find she's turned into a nigger" [...] Clare handed her husband his tea and laid her hand on his arm with an affectionate little gesture. Speaking with confidence as well as with amusement, she said: "My goodness, Jack! What difference would it make if, after all these years, you were to find out that I was one or two percent coloured?"

Bellew put his hand in a repudiating fling, definite and final. "Oh, no, nig," he declared: nothing like that with me. I know you're no nigger, so it's all right. You can get as black as you please as far as I'm concerned, since I know you're no nigger. I draw the line at that. No niggers in my family. Never have been and never will be." (67/68)

Larsen obviously mocks the widespread rhetoric of race and the color line, and she goes even further than that when she has Irene ask the determined detractor of African-Americans whether he has met any representatives of the community he discretionarily abhors. His answer is all the more remarkable as it expresses a sad reality: "Thank the Lord, no! And never expect to! But I know people who've known them, better than they know their black selves. And I read in the papers about them. Always robbing and killing people" (70). One can easily recognize the patterns of stereotypical thinking that have - disturbingly often - shaped the modem world; particular attention is drawn to the importance of the media and public discourse in the steering - or, more often than not, manipulation - of public opinion.

John Bellew is the proud representative of white supremacists who base their attitudes on hear-say and the alleged superiority of one race as compared to another. To complicate things even further, Larsen draws a love triangle, making Irene and Clare compete for the affection of the former's husband. While the suspicious wife would want nothing more than to have her childhood friend out of her life, she cannot reveal the terrible secret. It is at this point that race comes forth as the true topic, around which everything in the story revolves. It is what defines and constrains the protagonists, what critically unites and separates them:

She was caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race. Race! The thing that bound and suffocated her. Whatever steps she took, or if she took none at all, something would be crushed. A person or the race. Clare, herself, or the race. Or, it might be, all three [...] She was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one's own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved. Surely, no other people so cursed as Ham's dark children (181).

5. Conclusion

By exposing Irene's hesitations and moral dilemmas in such a manner, the author makes allusion to the burden of "double consciousness" that W.E.B. du Bois had earlier described as typical of African-American consciousness.1 While Du Bois deplored the plight of the "American Negro", forced to reconcile an African heritage with an American upbringing, Nella Larsen chooses to take things one step further than the mere color-line, also introducing gender and romance into her intricate story of passing. The outcome is, quite predictably, tragic, as it is predicated on the complex challenges of what the society never fully ceases to label as "otherness".

Nella Larsen exposes the traps of institutional discourses: those of marriage, race, gender, sexuality, class, and the nation. Each is only a temporary solution for the radical alterity of her characters (Keresztesi 2005: 49).

By resorting to a variety of characters and situations, the author crosses lines, challenges clichés, forces the reader to think outside the box of binary oppositions and expands the existing paradigms of racial determinations. Taking into account the moment at which the novel was published, one cannot help but emphasize its boldness and insightfulness, as well as its value insofar as it attracts attention to a phenomenon that had transformed the age into a risky, fascinating and questionable game of masks and identities.

Footnote

1 W.E.B. du Bois: American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, author of a series of essential works in African-American literature. The essays in his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk revolve around the twofold nature of African-American identity, seen both as a historical burden and as a potential cultural advantage.

References

References

Bowser, A. 2007. 'The Cat Came Back' in Nella Larsen. Passing. C. Kaplan (ed.). New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 94-96.

Cutter, M. J. 1996. 'Sliding Significations: Passing as a Narrative and Textual Strategy in Nella Larsen's Fiction' in Passing and the Fictions of Identity. E. K. Ginsberg (ed.). Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 75-100.

References

Ellsworth, J. 2007. ''From White Negroes' in Nella Larsen. Passing. C. Kaplan (ed.). New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 109-111.

Ginsberg. E. K. (ed.). 1996. Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Ginsberg, E. 1996. 'Introduction: The Politics of Passing' in Passing and the Fictions of Identity. E. K. Ginsberg (ed.). Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 118.

Hahn, E. 2007. 'Crossing the Color Line. Social and Economic Ambitions Lead Negroes to "Pass" at Rate of 5,000 a Year to White Fold' in Nella Larsen. Passing. C. Kaplan (ed.). New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 117-120.

Hutchinson, G. 2006. In Search of Nella Larsen. A Biography of the Color Line. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Kaplan, Carla (ed.). 2007. Nella Larsen. Passing. A Norton Critical Edition, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.

Keresztesi, R. 2005. Strangers at Home. American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars. Lincoln and Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Larsen, N. 1990. Passing. Salem, New Hampshire: Aver Company Publishers.

Rabin, J. G. 2004. Surviving the Crossing. (Im)migration, Ethnicity, and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen. New York and London: Routledge.

Rottenberg, C. 2007. 'Passing: Race, Identification, and Desire'. Nella Larsen. Passing. C. Kaplan (ed.). New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 489-507.

Sollors, W. 1999. Neither Black, Nor White, Yet Both. Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Stringer, D. 2010. "Not Even Past". Race, Historical Trauma and Subjectivity in Faulkner, Larsen, and VanVechten. Fordham University Press.

Wald, G. 2000. Crossing the Line. Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press.