Sunday, August 4, 2002
“Hiding in Plain Sight”
PASSING: A Novel, By Nella Larsen
The Modern Library: 208 pp. $9.95 paper
By BROOKE KROEGER
"Passing," as Nella Larsen explains, is "this breaking
away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one's chance in another
environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely
friendly."
It is also the title of her novel about the struggle of Irene Redfield,
a privileged black woman, with the attempts of a childhood acquaintance
to insinuate herself into Irene's adult life. Clare Kendry was steely,
the daughter of a well-liked but drunken mulatto janitor and a black mother
who died when she was small. In womanhood, Clare has become glamorous,
wealthy--and white.
With her "ivory skin" and "pale gold hair," Clare
passes for the same reasons people still decide to pass: for opportunity,
for adventure, for safety or for some combination of the three. At the
time of her father's death, her two (white) great-aunts insist upon it
as they take her in as ward and housemaid. But she does not pass "all
the way," as the expression goes, until she elopes with John "Jack"
Bellew, a white, wealthy and virulent racist, whom she never tells that
she is three-quarters black.
Larsen supplies fresh ironies and subtle twists to what might at first
seem to be another dated "Alas! The poor mulatto!" tale. And
The Modern Library's decision to reissue this 1929 work, now in paperback,
provides a perfect opportunity to rethink the implications of a practice
deployed as often today as it ever was, full-time, part-time, inadvertently
or only-now-and-then. Passing happens in a range of situations beyond
the classic black-for-white in which Larsen sets her story.
Itinerant passing, for convenience, access or entry, is one of Larsen's
themes. Take an innocuous present-day example: the nobody with nerve who
makes restaurant reservations in the name of someone with sure-fire cachet.
In Larsen's story, the "olive-skinned" Irene slips into the
dining room of a segregated hotel because a cabbie tells her it is the
best place in Chicago for a cool drink on a hot day. Despite the "race
loyalty" Irene both professes and lives, she also has no compunction
about supporting a racist system in this way.
Looking beyond Larsen's definition, we might ask if Irene is also passing
when she postures as the "New Negro" paragon--doctor's wife,
mother, social do-gooder--even though she long ago spent her passion for
these roles and cares only about maintaining her comfort level and position.
Is it passing when Irene's husband, Brian, presents himself as a dedicated
Harlem physician and community stalwart while he burns to leave New York
and bring up his sons in more tolerant Brazil? And what of this still
familiar story: Brian, passing as attentive, faithful husband, even as
he strays.
Clare shifts from full-time to part-time passer well into her life as
a white person: The chance meeting with Irene triggers a yearning to re-associate
with her root community. The year is 1927, after all, and Harlem is all
the rage.
Jack, Clare's husband, is gruff and common, clearly the class inferior
of the sophisticated, well-spoken Harlem crowd to which the author introduces
us. For Clare, enduring this vulgarian's racial hostility is the price
of economic security and social standing. "No niggers in my family.
Never have been and never will be," he bellows in front of Irene
and another white-looking black friend who mask their indignation with
pleasantries and laughter. For Clare's sake, they feel compelled to pass
in his presence.
Clare makes brazen if passive strikes back at Jack's verbal assaults.
There are her almost taunting, repeated forays into Harlem, and, before
them, the more "hellish" act of risking childbirth, knowing
the baby's appearance could well have meant her downfall.
Larsen herself was such a child and became estranged from her own mixed
family (her mother was of Danish origin; her father, West Indian) when
it opted for whiteness. There is a telling entry under her name in the
Harry Ransom Center's repository of copyright information: "Larsen
had no children, left no identification of her extended family, and her
only sibling, now deceased, denied knowledge of her existence."
Born in 1891, Larsen worked as a nurse and then a librarian in Harlem,
where she became a member of its Renaissance literati. But she abruptly
stopped writing in 1930 and resumed her nursing career. She died in 1964.
Her work, which had fallen into obscurity, was first reclaimed in the
1970s.
For Clare, as for many passers, the act eliminates deterrents to economic
and social advancement, but passing can also be a means of avoiding harassment.
In all cases, the passer knows or at least suspects that the group to
which he or she seeks admittance or acceptance is either overtly or covertly
intent on keeping the passer out.
At its most extreme, passing makes it possible to elude treachery or danger
and can open the escape route to survival. Once out of harm's way, passers
often elect to stay with the new program, inevitably creating identity
crises when the coming generations happen on their history. "I think
that being a mother is the cruellest [sic] thing in the world," Clare
muses, as she and Irene contemplate what exposure of Clare's ruse might
mean, and we are left to speculate on what becomes of her daughter.
No matter what the purpose, passing always takes stealth and gumption,
cunning, agility and a certain social conceit. A passer stays in character
no matter what. Stared down in the segregated hotel dining room, Irene's
first reaction is to think her hat is on backwards or that her powder
is streaked until that "small inner disturbance, odious and hatefully
familiar" finally rises in her, though she does not give into it.
The option of passing is foreclosed to many of Larsen's characters. It
requires the face, skin color, body type, style and/or behavior that defy
or confound easy profiling. With the props of appearance and talent, passers
have the ability to step out of those identities dictated by genes, heritage,
training, circumstance or happenstance. Irene scoffs at the folly of would-be
phenotypers who think they can spot a black person by "the most ridiculous
means, fingernails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth and other equally
silly rot." And yet, passers know, it is the absence of such markers
that helps make their performances convincing.
Passers hide their origins. They need the complicity, the safe distance
or death of those who knew them when. For part-timers, the equivalent
would be keeping away people familiar with the passer's secret life. Clare,
having involved herself with the Harlem elite, knows the "race loyalty"
of her friends old and new will keep them from outing her. It is part
of their culture to protect her, for her daughter's sake at least. As
a rule, passers do not bring their past (or their present, in the case
of gays who pass for straight at work) to the table.
Passing, therefore, takes guile. Keeping secrets, or at least avoiding
certain disclosures, is a given in any passing story, and in traditional
passing narratives, the unmasking of the passer, the exposure of the deception,
is a moment of high drama. Shock, accusation, revulsion and/or violence
on the part of the deceived are the reactions we expect. (Think Julie
in "Showboat" or Sarah Jane in the Douglas Sirk film version
of "Imitation of Life." Remember the reaction of Fergus, who
is passing as Jimmy in "The Crying Game," when he learns the
secret of Dil, who is passing too?) Larsen concocts such a moment for
Clare.
The exposed passer is instantly subject to disgrace, loss of position,
expulsion from the desired situation--sometimes even jail or death. The
typical moral of the story is that passing, if not bad, is at least a
really bad idea, and that life will punish the passer for breaking the
rules.
And yet, the arc of the story in more contemporary passing tales, both
true and fictive, makes room for a more complicated response. Today we
tend to react against the institution, situation or environment that has
made the deception necessary instead of to the deception itself.
In recent real-life stories, the deathbed medical examination that exposed
as female the jazz musician Billy Tipton, a man-about-town in Spokane,
brought a response of compassion more than anger from those who thought
they knew the five-times-"married" saxophone player.
And in the case of Brandon Teena, who was raped and killed for living
as a man, the subterfuge pales against the brutality of the young Nebraskan's
executioners and their gruesome exhibition of ignorance and hate. The
compassion the Teena story evokes makes passing seem almost valiant, or
at least not a priori bad. It is as sad a story as ever, just as in all
the tragic mulatto tales of yore, especially when it results in so shockingly
tragic an end.
Larsen's Clare elicits no such compassion. She tells us without apology
that she lacks "proper morals or sense of duty," that she "would
hurt anybody, throw anything away" to get what she wants. Yet her
life and demise are no less tragic than Teena's in one important way:
an unjust system forced them to pass in order to live the lives they wanted
to live.
In a review of "Passing" in The Crisis in 1929, W.E.B. DuBois
prophesied that the whole business of black passing, though of great moral
import at the time, was really "all a petty, silly matter of no real
importance which another generation will comprehend with great difficulty."
Hasten the day.
- - -
Brooke Kroeger Is Writing a Book About Present-day Passing for Publicaffairs
and Is the Biographer of Nellie Bly and Fannie Hurst. She teaches Journalism
at New York University.
© 2002 Los Angeles Times
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