Passing

by Nella Larsen

It hurt. It hurt like hell. But it didn’t matter, if no one knew. If everything could go on as before. If the boys were safe. It did hurt. But it didn’t matter.

For, she reasoned, what was there, what had there been, to show that she was even half correct in her tormenting notion? Nothing. She had seen nothing, heard nothing. She had no facts or proofs. She was only making herself unutterably wretched by an unfounded suspicion. It had been a case of looking for trouble and finding it in good measure. Merely that.

How could she without anything done or said, or left undone or unsaid, so easily believe him guilty? How be so ready to renounce all confidence in the worth of their life together?

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. Nothing, she imagined, was ever more completely sardonic.

Sitting alone in the quiet living-room in the pleasant firelight, Irene Redfield wished, for the first time in her life, that she had not been born a Negro. For the first time she suffered and rebelled because 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.

Then came a thought which she tried to drive away. If Clare should die! Then— Oh, it was vile! To think, yes, to wish that! She felt faint and sick. But the thought stayed with her. She could not get rid of it.

It was really inexcusable for you to bring up a thing like that at dinner. There’ll be time enough for them to learn about such horrible things when they’re older.”

“You’re absolutely wrong! If, as you’re so determined, they’ve got to live in this damned country, they’d better find out what sort of thing they’re up against as soon as possible. The earlier they learn it, the better prepared they’ll be.” “I don’t agree. I want their childhood to be happy and as free from the knowledge of such things as it possibly can be.” “Very laudable,” was Brian’s sarcastic answer.

“I tell you, Irene, they’ve got to know these things, and it might as well be now as later.” “They do not!” she insisted, forcing back the tears of anger that were threatening to fall. Brian growled: “I can’t understand how anybody as intelligent as you like to think you are can show evidences of such stupidity.” He looked at her in a puzzled harassed way.

Was it, perhaps, that she had endured all that a woman could endure of tormenting humiliation and fear? Or was it that she lacked the capacity for the acme of suffering? “No, no!” she denied fiercely. “I’m human like everybody else. It’s just that I’m so tired, so worn out, I can’t feel any more.” But she did not really believe that.

She felt a something in the air, something that had been between those two and would be again.