Passing

by Nella Larsen

Too many films and television shows with black women protagonists did not allow us the chance to make mistakes, to fail, to act selfishly or in our self-interest, and still survive.

Fiction can explicitly map the possibility of redemption for everyone, regardless of race or gender, while reminding us of the material limitations of access to that redemption. That access is often based on characters’ identity. History, in contrast, reminds us that entire state apparatuses are set up to ensure that some people have access to the possibility of redemption after transgression, and others, decidedly, do not.

For whites actively working to segregate public and private life throughout the United States, passing was an active threat. The moral basis of white support for segregation and racial terrorism was the “fact” that humans belonged to separate races, with inherent, immutable traits that directly aligned with moral aptitude and capabilities. So what was a segregated society to make of an individual who could slip between?

The discrepancy between passing in the artist’s imagination and passing in history belies one of America’s most cherished myths about art—that somehow, it will get closer to the truth than recorded facts ever will. The discussion of passing in literature points out that sometimes the limits of the artist’s imagination overlooks whole swaths of experience.

The notion of how much of this is actually a choice is complicated as the novel progresses. In her whiteness, Clare is not free; she has taken on an existence that assures her emotional and spiritual captivity, even as she flaunts her desire to socialize in both black and white worlds.

This fact makes Irene’s ultimate survival even more damning. Irene is a rare thing in fiction—a black woman who is allowed to feel jealousy, rage, anger, resentment, sexual desire, and still, she’s still alive at the end of the novel, allowed to fully feel her own ambivalence and torment. Irene is a realization of fiction’s promise—that through a novel, one can enter a consciousness completely different from one’s own, full of knots and complexity.

One three centuries removed From the scenes his fathers loved, Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, What is Africa to me?1 —COUNTEE CULLEN

“Have you ever stopped to think, Clare,” Irene demanded, “how much unhappiness and downright cruelty are laid to the loving-kindness of the Lord? And always by His most ardent followers, it seems.”

For all their Bibles and praying and ranting about honesty, they didn’t want anyone to know that their darling brother had seduced—ruined, they called it—a Negro girl. They could excuse the ruin, but they couldn’t forgive the tar-brush.

Later, when she examined her feeling of annoyance, Irene admitted, a shade reluctantly, that it arose from a feeling of being outnumbered, a sense of aloneness, in her adherence to her own class and kind; not merely in the great thing of marriage, but in the whole pattern of her life as well.

And mingled with her disbelief and resentment was another feeling, a question. Why hadn’t she spoken that day? Why, in the face of Bellew’s ignorant hate and aversion, had she concealed her own origin? Why had she allowed him to make his assertions and express his misconceptions undisputed? Why, simply because of Clare Kendry, who had exposed her to such torment, had she failed to take up the defence of the race to which she belonged?

Irene doubted the genuineness of it, seeing herself only as a means to an end where Clare was concerned. Nor could it be said that she had even the slight artistic or sociological interest in the race that some members of other races displayed. She hadn’t. No, Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it.

“Brian, darling, I’m really not such an idiot that I don’t realize that if a man calls me a nigger, it’s his fault the first time, but mine if he has the opportunity to do it again.”

She said: “It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”

It was only that she wanted him to be happy, resenting, however, his inability to be so with things as they were, and never acknowledging that though she did want him to be happy, it was only in her own way and by some plan of hers for him that she truly desired him to be so.

Since childhood their lives had never really touched. Actually they were strangers. Strangers in their ways and means of living. Strangers in their desires and ambitions. Strangers even in their racial consciousness. Between them the barrier was just as high, just as broad, and just as firm as if in Clare did not run that strain of black blood. In truth, it was higher, broader, and firmer; because for her there were perils, not known, or imagined, by those others who had no such secrets to alarm or endanger them.

“I think,” she said at last, “that being a mother is the cruellest thing in the world.”

But Clare—she had remained almost what she had always been, an attractive, somewhat lonely child—selfish, wilful, and disturbing.

It’s easy for a Negro to ‘pass’ for white. But I don’t think it would be so simple for a white person to ‘pass’ for coloured.”

“But it’s true, ’Rene. Can’t you realize that I’m not like you a bit? Why, to get the things I want badly enough, I’d do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away. Really, ’Rene, I’m not safe.”

Her voice, she realized, had gone queer. But she had an instinctive feeling that it hadn’t been the whole cause of his attitude. And that little straightening motion of the shoulders. Hadn’t it been like that of a man drawing himself up to receive a blow? Her fright was like a scarlet spear of terror leaping at her heart.

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.

She wanted to feel nothing, to think nothing; simply to believe that it was all silly invention on her part. Yet she could not. Not quite.

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. Surely, no other people so cursed as Ham’s dark children.

And this absence of acute, unbearable pain seemed to her unjust, as if she had been denied some exquisite solace of suffering which the full acknowledgment should have given her.

Security. Was it just a word? If not, then was it only by the sacrifice of other things, happiness, love, or some wild ecstasy that she had never known, that it could be obtained? And did too much striving, too much faith in safety and permanence, unfit one for these other things?

Yet all the while, in spite of her searchings and feeling of frustration, she was aware that, to her, security was the most important and desired thing in life.

She wanted only to be tranquil. Only, unmolested, to be allowed to direct for their own best good the lives of her sons and her husband.

Not even for Brian. He was her husband and the father of her sons. But was he anything more? Had she ever wanted or tried for more? In that hour she thought not.

One thought possessed her. She couldn’t have Clare Kendry cast aside by Bellew. She couldn’t have her free.