22 The New York Review
Escaping Blackness
Darryl Pinckney
Self-Portrait in Black and White:
Unlearning Race
by Thomas Chatterton Williams.
Norton, 174 pp., $25.95
The black individual passing for white
in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
American fiction by white writers is
usually a woman, and usually when the
truth emerges, the purity of the white
race is saved. However, in An Imperative
Duty (1891) by William Dean Howells,
a Boston girl is ashamed to find out
that legally she is colored, but her white
suitor marries her anyway and takes her
off to a life in Italy. In the beginning of
Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind
the Cedars (1900), a “high-bred” black
man in North Carolina returns to his
hometown to ask his sister to take his
dead white wife’s place and bring up
his son. A young aristocrat she meets in
her new white life proposes marriage,
but soon learns the truth of her origins.
Literary convention, in the form of a
fever, kills her. The white suitor real-
izes too late that love conquers all. He
promises to keep the brother’s secret.
The secret was as radical as Ches-
nutt could get. From a North Carolina
family of “free issue” blacks—meaning
emancipated since colonial times—
Chesnutt had blond hair and blue eyes.
He wouldn’t pass for white, because
if he became famous then he chanced
someone appearing from his past. He
preferred to pursue reputation as a
black man. Chesnutt had cousins who
crossed the color line and he never told
on them, viewing passing as an act of
“self-preservation,” a private solution to
the race problem. The big escape from
being black was an American tradition.
Three of Sally Hemings’s six children
ended up living as white people.
The nameless narrator of James
Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiog-
raphy of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), a
widower and a father, says little about
his life as a white man. He is interested
instead in his past as a black person,
his life with different classes of black
people, his wanderings around Europe
as a young musician. When he returned
to the United States and went on a folk
song–collecting tour of the South, he
witnessed a lynching—a black man
being burned alive. Terrified, he got
himself across the color line. He didn’t
want to belong to a racial group so ut-
terly without power.
An awkward work, Johnson’s novel
nevertheless challenges the genre of
passing literature because there is no
trauma of exposure, however ambiva-
lent the narrator is about his choice at
the novel’s end. The Ex-Colored Man
regrets that his security has come at the
expense of the composer he believes he
could have been had he stayed black. He
is keenly aware that he removed himself
from an environment that would have
nourished him as an artist. Johnson’s
premise mocks the notion of racial pu-
rity, while the injustices that come with
being black make for his larger subject.
At the same ti me he’s saying that maybe
being white isn’t what it’s cracked up to
be, that for all the material rewards of
his business ventures, maybe his life
as a white person is less rich in im-
portant ways than it could have been,
though he loves his family, and his wife
had been in on his secret.
Johnson put his name to the 1927
edition of his novel, but when it was
first published, The Autobiography of
an Ex-Colored Man was said to have
been written “by Anonymous,” en-
hancing the sense that the narrator was
still out there, an infiltrator who had
succeeded in insinuating his legally-
defined-as-black self into the Nordic
gene pool. Laws defining who was
black varied from state to state, but the
drop of black blood—one grandparent
or even one great-great- grandparent—was the “taint” that white society was
psychotically on guard against. In
Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), a black
woman whose racist white husband
doesn’t know she is black talks about
the ruin of giving birth to a baby too
dark. In fiction about passing, inter-
racial union has already happened,
whether consensual or forced. The
protagonist begins life as a carrier of
the taint. What makes Larsen’s novel
so striking is its cold, utilitarian atmo-
sphere of let the joke on the lawgiver be.In the considerable American litera-
ture about stepping across the color
line, nothing matches Anatole Bro-
yard’s Kafka Was the Rage: A Green-
wich Village Memoir (1993) for lack of
conscience. Broyard, a distinguished
New York Times literary columnist for
many years, presented himself as white,
though enough people knew otherwise.
Yet he insisted on the mask. In his
memoir, published posthumously, Bro-
yard brilliantly evokes the intellectual
excitement and amorous joy of the Vil-
lage in the immediate postwar years.
The whole time his black family was
living just over the bridge in Brooklyn.
He simply never mentions them. “Ra-
cial recusal is a forlorn hope,” Henry
Louis Gates Jr. said in his portrait of
Broyard in Thirteen Ways of Looking
at a Black Man (1997). “In a system
where whiteness is the default, race-
lessness is never a possibility. You can-
not opt out; you can only opt in.” For
a black person to pass for white means
that the rational self and the real self
can never be reconciled—we assume.It’s remarkable that the subject of
passing and the predicament of the
tragic mulatto persisted in American
popular culture for as long as it did.
Fannie Hurst’s best seller about pass-
ing, Imitation of Life (1933), was made
into a film in 1934 and again in 1959,
the second version directed by Douglas
Sirk. The fiction about passing is ro-
mantic, expressing compassion for the
black person perpetrating the fraud.
But the color line was a policed bor-
der well into the civil rights era. “The
‘Negro race’ is defined in America by
the white people,” Gunnar Myrdal ob-served in that graveyard of liberal phi-
losophy, An American Dilemma: The
Negro Problem and Modern Democ-
racy (1944). He added that any analysis
of passing would always be conjecture,
but it seemed that migration and the
increasing anonymity of urban life had
made it easier and that, surprisingly,
black men were more likely to pass
than black women. Renee C. Roma-
no’s bleak study, Race Mixing: Black-
White Marriage in Postwar America
(2003), relates how in the 1940s and
1950s the courts routinely sided with
white grandparents or the white par-
ent in custody battles between divorc-
ing interracial couples. To be brought
up white or among white people was in
a child’s best interest, the white parties
contended. The Supreme Court didn’t
overturn all laws against intermarriage
until 1967.
A black person who wanted to es-
cape being black was also getting away
from generalized ideas of blackness.
Birthright (1922) by T.S. Stribling, a
white writer, charts the disillusionment
of a Harvard-educated black man who
has returned to his Tennessee home-
town as a teacher. He finds black life
too squalid for him to have any effect.
It isn’t clear if he and his fiancée are
intending to pass for white when they
leave, but they feel that by going North
to the culture they want to belong to,
they are escaping perdition. Stribling
was seen as a social realist: he was mak-
ing the point that black people were the
way they were because of the degrad-
ing conditions in which they lived, not
because of traits they were born with.
But Claude McKay charged that Strib-ling’s black characters conformed to
the same racist stereotypes as those
of any white writer who portrayed the
social inferiority of black people as an
expression of supposedly innate racial
characteristics.Harlem Renaissance writers viewed
the black masses as the keepers of
blackness; no longer were they prison-
ers of it. A black person’s estrangement
from the black masses was therefore
sometimes depicted as a false or Euro-
pean culture suppressing the true one.
The class question got lost in ideas hav-
ing to do with a racial essence. In Carl
Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926), a
prim black girl is in despair that she is
too cultivated to get in touch with her
inner black self should it really be there,
and maybe she doesn’t want to anyway.
The desire to pass, to escape being
black, and the urge to get away from
blackness, to live separate from black
communities, may have had the same
motives as the dream of transcending
race, but philosophies that called for
doing without racial categories sought
to address the social definitions of
what it meant to be black—by being
open about the heritage of race-mixing
that excited whites to violence. Race
transcendence tended to mysticism in
the Harlem Renaissance writer Jean
Toomer, who made a sensation in lit-
erary circles with Cane (1923), his
expressionist meditation on his expe-
riences of the black South. He said he
was a mixture of French, Dutch, Welsh,
Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian,
and had lived on both sides of the color
line, but his desires as an artist pulled
him “deeper into the Negro group.” He
didn’t stay in that group for long.
Toomer was handsome and light-
skinned. He said that “I have the ap-
pearance of a sort of universal man”
and that people had taken him for
“American, English, Spanish, French,
Italian, Russian, Hindu, Japanese, Ro-
manian, Indian, and Dutch.” His abil-
ity to belong to different groups served
to “nonidentify” him. Toomer became
a student of George Gurdjieff’s in 1923,
and the next year he returned from the
Institute for the Harmonious Devel-
opment of Man at Fontainebleau an
“earth being.” He died a Quaker forty
years later, never having had another
commercial publication.
George Schuyler, the Mencken-
like Harlem Renaissance satirist who
late in life became notorious in black
America as a conservative opponent
of Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1964
Civil Rights Act, proposed in 1929 in
a pamphlet, Racial Inter-marriage in
the United States, that the race problem
could be solved by intermarriage. His
daughter, Philippa Schuyler, born in
1931, a musical prodigy, he regarded as
an example of “hybrid vigor.” Yet the
Schuylers were also behaviorists, de-
termined to apply the ideas of the child
psychologist John Broadus Watson,
who had been a student of Pavlov’s and
discounted the influence of heredity.
Schuyler’s white wife kept her child’s
existence a secret from her Texas fam-
ily for years. She reared Philippa on
raw meat, corporal punishment, musicThomas Chatterton Williams, New York City, 2019 ; photograph by Dominique NabokovDominique Nabokov