Passing

by Nella Larsen

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. When you understand this as one of the organizing principles of state control, you begin to see how an act like “passing” becomes so provocative, so tantalizing, so dangerous and fraught as it is for Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry in this novel.

Anita Reynolds’s recently rediscovered memoir American Cocktail,

Charles Chesnutt’s heartbreaking The House Behind the Cedars.

“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.”

The trouble with Clare was, not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, but that she wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folk 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.

Pain, fear, and grief were things that left their mark on people. Even love, that exquisite torturing emotion, left its subtle traces on the countenance.