484 Making It New: 1900–1945African - American women who could pass for white. One of them, Clare Kendry,
does so and is married to someone who is not only white but a racist. The other,
Irene Redfield, only does so occasionally as a matter of social convenience – when
visiting a white restaurant, say. She is married to a prominent African-American
physician, devotes herself to various good causes, and has established her identity as
a respectable wife and doting mother. Through the story of the separate but inextri-
cably linked lives of these two women, former childhood friends, Larsen explores the
multiple forms that social repression and self-deception can assume. “She was caught
between two allegiances,” Irene observes of herself at one point in the novel. That
links her, not only with her old friend, but with the heroine of Quicksand. Like Clare
and Helga Crane, she suffers from what is called here “the burden of race,” which
tells her different stories about herself. Like them, too, she is compelled to make her
way in a social world that seems to depend upon masks and masquerade, the disso-
lution of character into category. At the end of this subtle, circuitous novel, Clare is
killed when she falls from a window; and there is a hint that Irene, who is there
beside her when she dies, may have pushed her. Linked in life, the two women are
also linked at this moment of death: Irene, it may be, is attempting the futile gesture
of resolving her divisions by ridding herself of her doppelgänger, the secret sharer of
her plight. Just as Quicksand maneuvers the traditional theme of the tragic mulatto
into a poignant, pioneering portrayal of a modern woman – and, in the process,
offers one of the first serious studies of those aspiring to the African-American mid-
dle class – so Passing rewrites the story of crossing the color line in psychological
terms. Both are major novels of racial and sexual identity, in the modernist vein.
The work of Jean Toomer (1894–1976) can also be seen as a bridge between the
New Negro movement and modernism. A contributor during the 1920s to such
black journals as Opportunity and Crisis, as well as The New Negro, Toomer published
as well in such experimental magazines as Broom and The Little Review. One of the
few writers to receive positive comment in Infants of the Spring, Wallace Thurman’s
satirical portrait of the Harlem Renaissance, he also received encouragement and
support from such luminaries of the Greenwich Village avant-garde as Waldo Frank
(1888–1967), whose own work included social criticism (Our America (1919)),
expressionist drama (New Year’s Eve (1929)), and a variety of novels in different
modes (among them, City Block (1922), Holiday (1923), and The Bridegroom Cometh
(1939)). Toomer saw himself as a confluence of different races and influences. “In
my body were many bloods, some dark blood, all blended in the fire of six or more
generations,” he recollected. “I was then, either a new type of man or the very oldest.
In any case, I was inescapably myself.” What that self was, he believed, apart from
unique, was American. “From my own point of view I am naturally and inevitably
an American,” Toomer wrote in a letter to The Liberator magazine. “I have strived for
a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling. Without denying
a single element in me, with no desire to subdue one to the other, I have sought to
let them all function as complements.” Born Nathan Pinchback Toomer, he was, in
fact, the grandson of a part-black acting governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction.
A mixture of several races and nationalities, an individual who could be identified asGGray_c04.indd 484ray_c 04 .indd 484 8 8/1/2011 7:54:03 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 03 AM