Instead, it suggests the awful isolation that can
persist for artists of color in the midst of seeming
success.
Bibliography
Cooper, Wayne. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the
Harlem Renaissance.New York: Schocken Books,
1987.
Wilson, Sondra Kathryn, ed. TheOpportunity Reader.
New York: The Modern Library, 1999.
“High Yaller” Rudolph Fisher(1925)
A prizewinning short story by the talented physi-
cian and New York–based writer RUDOLPHFISHER.
It appeared in two parts in the October and
November 1925 issues of THECRISIS.In 1926,
“High Yaller” earned first place in The Crisisliter-
ary competition.
The protagonists are Evelyn Brown and Jay
MacLeod, an African-American couple whose dif-
ferent skin tones prompt passersby to think of
them as an interracial couple. The story begins
with a dance staged immediately after a basketball
game. Evelyn finds the mad throng unbearable,
and it becomes even more so to her when she
overhears unflattering comments about her
friends. She is accused of choosing to spend her
time only with light-skinned women. She flatly de-
nies this charge at first but comes to realize that it
is indeed true. Her solution is to integrate herself
into the community of darker-skinned people. She
urges Jay to escort her to the illegal cabarets and
night spots frequented by African Americans.
These efforts are thoroughly unsuccessful. The
couple consistently are ostracized or ogled because
of their seeming mixed race.
One of the more novel twists in the story
comes as both Evelyn and Jay face their own per-
sonal devils. These figures, which appear to each
at night, bait them and encourage each one to
abandon the other. Jay’s devil is a “young man
who looked exactly like Jay, feature for feature,
with one important exception: his skin was
white.” He torments Jay with the idea that there
are absolute limits within and beyond the race
that dictate his choice of partners. “Beside her
you become absolute black,” insists the white
devil who characterizes Evelyn as a girl who’s
“too fair for comfort.” The devil that visits Evelyn
is “a sophisticated young woman who sat famil-
iarly on the edge of the counterpane and hugged
her knees as she talked, and who might have
been Evelyn over again, save for a certain bearing
of self-assurance which the latter entirely lacked.”
This forthright devil torments Evelyn with the
notion that her short courtship with Jay is
doomed. She proposes that it is a desperate need
for “self-protection” that motivates “the lily-
whites,” light-skinned African Americans and
mixed-race people, to keep company with each
other. “Whether you do it consciously or not,
you’re really trying to prevent painful embarrass-
ment,” observes the she-devil. The unsolicited
visitor then insists that Evelyn extricate herself
from the unrewarding social scene. “Get out.
Pass,” she insists before Evelyn hastens away to
tend to her asthmatic mother.
Ultimately, Evelyn becomes brown in name
only. She has survived several uncomfortable and
threatening encounters with people who believe
that she is white and that she should not be so-
cializing with a man of color. After the death of
her mother, she has no more ties to the African-
American community and seems to pass away as
well. Jay, seated in the segregated balcony of a
movie theater, spots her in the white section
below. He watches as she, seated next to a man
who is “unmistakably white,” responds to his effort
to hold her hand. Jay is transfixed momentarily as
“one white hand close[d] firmly over the other.”
As he hurries out of the theater, “Yaller Gal’s
Gone Out of Style,” the song that has dogged
them both recently, begins to play.
CHARLES CHESNUTT, Sinclair Lewis, and
H. G. Wells were the judges in the 1926 Crisislit-
erary competition. The three accomplished writers
voted unanimously to award Fisher first place.
Chesnutt, however, noted that he was not entirely
convinced of the story’s theme. Since then, how-
ever, scholars like John McCluskey have recog-
nized Fisher’s deft handling of explosive issues of
intraracial tension, caste prejudice, and PASSING.Bibliography
McCluskey, John, Jr. The City of Refuge: The Collected
Stories of Rudolph Fisher.Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1987.238 “High Yaller”