Nella Larsen (19 page)

4.
“sheba”:
slang term for an attractive black woman; probably signifying on the African Queen of Sheba, who, according to the Old Testament, is associated with wealth and great beauty. Possibly related to—although not necessarily the counterpart of—
sheik,
a popular epithet for a black lover or gigolo (or one who dresses like one), most likely popularized by its association with romantic screen idol Rudolph Valentino (1895–1926) for his signature roles,
The Sheik
(1921) and
Son of the Sheik
(1926).

5.
“Instinct of the race to survive and expand”:
notion associated with Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and the theory of organic evolution advanced in
Origin of Species
(1859) and
The Descent of Man
(1871). In his “principle of natural selection,” Darwin promoted the idea that organisms are competitive and result in the survival of the fittest variant.

CHAPTER TWO

1. “Mr. Wentworth”: Hugh and Bianca Wentworth are modeled on Carl Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff (see note for Dedication, page 183).

2.
“the Negro Welfare League”:
Larsen's parodic equivalent of the Negro uplift organizations that worked on behalf of racial progress and advancement. Best known among such organizations were the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League.

3.
“shekels”:
slang term for cash, money; originally the chief silver coin of the ancient Hebrews (and currently a monetary unit in Israel).

CHAPTER THREE

1.
“Rich man, poor man”:
popular children's nursery rhyme.

2.
“Nordic”:
slang for white, a term in currency among blacks and whites during the period; originally of or pertaining to Germanic people of northern European origin, exemplified by the Scandinavians, or having physical characteristics (e.g., blond hair, blue eyes) associated with northern Europeans. Given her Scandinavian background, such a term would have had an especially fraught meaning for Larsen.

3.
“ ‘butter and egg' men”:
Here used derisively, this refers to farmers or small-town businessmen who spend money extravagantly when they come to the big city. A popular 1927 song, “The Big Butter and Egg Man,” made the “big butter and egg man from the West” synonymous with the sucker or free-spender. Texas Guinan, a New York City nightclub entertainer, popularized the description of her best customers as “big butter and egg men” with that song (see Lax and Smith,
The Great Song
Thesaurus
). I'm indebted to Connie Eble, editor of
AmericanSpeech,
for help in tracking down this elusive term.

4.
“Terpsichorean art”:
pertaining to dance, especially social dance. In classical mythology, Terpsichore was the Muse of dance.

5.
“dicty”:
Harlemese for a “swell” or “high-toned” person, meaning snobbish, pretentious, haughty, or “hinckty,” often referring to the black bourgeoisie or “upper-class”; opposite of
rat,
meaning lower-class; I would guess that the more recent term
siddity
(or
s'ditty
) represents a contraction of
so-dicty—
a term that used to be applied to black women who were considered to be “putting on airs,” especially with speech, or trying to act more sophisticated than seemed warranted by their class background.

6.
“ ‘fay' ”:
Harlemese slang for a white person, seemingly derived from pig Latin for
foe;
cryptic racial code intended to confuse white people. Rudolph Fisher, Harlem Renaissance novelist, defines
ofay
as a contraction of
old
and
fay,
which is the original term. The term is the literary predecessor of
honkey
and
whitey.

7.
“Slippin' me, Irene?”:
to dodge or evade, as in “to give one the slip” or to equivocate; also to trick or “put one over” on someone; possibly related to the later term
slipping
and sliding,
which means “two-timing.”

PART THREE: FINALE

CHAPTER ONE

1. “Josephine Baker”: Baker (1906–1975) was the toast of Paris in the 1920s. She made her Parisian debut in 1925 in
La Revue Nègre
at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and later became the star of the Folies-Bergère. She embodied for the French the essence of exotic primitivism. Notably, Baker did not appear in
Shuffle Along
(see note below) when she auditioned for its Philadelphia opening, because (as Baker claimed) she was considered “too dark” to be a chorine. In New York, where it became a great hit, Baker again auditioned for
Shuffle
Along
and was placed as the “end girl” in the chorus line. Because of her talent, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake also created a special part for her as a comedienne in the chorus line of
The Chocolate Dandies
(1924).

2. “Shuffle Along”: black musical comedy that became a smash Broadway hit in 1921, where it ran for over five hundred performances. It was composed by Eubie Blake (1883–1983) and Noble Sissle (1889–1975), and written by Aubrey Lyles (1882–1932) and Flournoy Miller (1889–1971). This show introduced the black musical review to Broadway, and paved the way for later popular shows, including
The Chocolate Dandies
and
Keep
Shufflin'.

3.
“Ethel Waters”:
Waters (1896–1977) was a talented blues, jazz, and, later, gospel singer, as well as a dramatic actress, who began her career on the vaudeville circuit, where she was known as “Sweet Mama Stringbean.” She later received critical acclaim as a nightclub performer, Broadway star, and recording artist during the 1920s. Recording on the Black Swan and Columbia labels, she was especially popular for her recordings of “Dinah” (1925) and “Stormy Weather” (1933). Unlike many entertainers, her career survived the Harlem Renaissance, and she became best known for performances in Du-Bose Heyward's
Mamba's Daughters
(1939) and
Cabin in
the Sky
(1940), and Carson McCullers's
The Member of
the Wedding
(1950). She was also nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for her role in
Pinky
(1949), a film about racial passing.

4.
“Worth . . . Lanvin . . . Babani”:
Charles Frederick Worth, Jeanne Lanvin, and Babani were all well-known designers associated with the great houses of haute couture in Paris during the early twentieth century. Worth opened the first fashion house in Paris and pioneered the look that became the prototype for women's tailored suits; Lanvin's most successful designs were her low-cut and low-waisted, ankle-length Basque dresses, or
robes de
style;
Babani's fashions were made from unusual fabrics and often featured unique details, such as corded tassels and metallic embroidery.

5.
Dave Freeland:
Larsen's biographer, Thadious Davis, correctly suggests that this character is modeled on novelist and short-story writer Rudolph “Bud” Fisher (1897–1934). His first novel,
The Walls of Jericho,
was published in 1928, the same year as Larsen's first novel,
Quicksand.

6.
“subway . . . underground”:
The direct reference here is to the Underground Railroad, the loose network of safe houses and routes north through which escaping slaves passed from the early days of the Colonies until the early days of the Civil War. Between the American Revolution and the mid-nineteenth century, in fact, perhaps as many as 100,000 slaves escaped to freedom. The connection of the Underground Railroad to the abolitionist movement after 1800 underscores its inherently revolutionary and transgressive effects. It is to these effects that Irene somewhat ironically—and also ambiguously—refers in her “history” of the once-Confederate cup's journey north (the implication is perhaps that the cup is “stolen property” since recovered) and in her tongue-in-cheek recounting of the cup's untimely demise just moments earlier. In light of Irene's tangled relationship to her own passing, her barbed synonyms for the Underground Railroad—the urban (and thus quintessentially New York)
subway
and the English (read pretentious)
underground—
play nicely on her own complicated and subterranean racial (and arguably, sexual) identity.

CHAPTER TWO

1. He slept in his room next to hers at night: It was not unusual for husbands and wives, especially upper- and upper-middle-class couples, to maintain separate bedrooms, or even separate apartments. Socially, this arrangement would have served as a marker of status: only wealth allowed space enough for separate accommodations.

2.
Ham's dark children:
According to the Bible, after the flood, Noah's sons—Shem, Ham, Japheth—populated the earth. Shem's descendants became the Semites, from whom the Hebrews and most of the Middle Eastern peoples were descended; Ham's descendants became the Hamites, and the peoples of North Africa; and Japheth's descendants became the Ethiopians and Egyptians, many of whom migrated northward into Europe and Asia. As Noah's second—and accursed—son, as well as the father of Canaan (see note for page 33 on page 187), Ham would have become the ancestor and progenitor of the usually dark-skinned peoples of North and East Africa, and Mesopotamia, including Ethiopians, Egyptians, Berbers, Babylonians, etc. Recent scholarship has both promoted and contested the “Hamitic hypothesis,” which challenges the assumption that the origins and predominant culture of ancient Egypt was Semitic. Other scholars challenge the attempt to distinguish between so-called Hamitic (Euro-African and Mediterranean) and more phenotypically black or Negroid racial classifications.

CHAPTER THREE

1.
the Avenue:
Fifth Avenue, in Manhattan. In midtown, from 34th to 59th streets, Fifth Avenue is known for its fashionable department stores and stylish boutiques.

2.
mashers:
A masher is a man who makes sexual advances, especially to women he does not know; a flirt.

3.
“queered”:
spoiled or ruined; put into a disadvantageous situation. Larsen's repeated use of
queer
as an adjectival synonym for “strange” or “unusual” is curious, given the term's widespread use at the time of Larsen's writing as slang for homosexual. The added connotations of its use as a verb in this instance to suggest “ruin” or “spoilage” perhaps echo the word's slang meaning, not only to the contemporary reader but perhaps even to the original readers of
Passing.
See Deborah McDowell's introduction to
Passing and Quicksand
(Rutgers University Press, 1986) for an extended reading of the lesbian subtext of Larsen's novel.

4.
“gone native”:
a reversal of the original meaning of this phrase, in which someone civilized, presumably white, “regresses” to a “native,” or savage, state. In Larsen's reversal,
gone native
is a synonym for passing, a play on the idea of blending into the “native” white surroundings. For more on this reversed sense of the phrase, see Marianna Torgovnick's
Gone Primitive: Savage Intellect, ModernLives
(University of Chicago Press, 1990).

5.
the Rhinelander case:
This was a highly publicized court case that involved the marriage of Leonard Kip Rhinelander, a member of a wealthy and aristocratic New York clan, and Alice B. Jones, a mulatto chamber-maid in his household. Married on October 14, 1924, Leonard filed for an annulment after the first month, on the grounds that Jones had fraudulently entered the marriage by falsifying her racial identity. After her lawyers first claimed that she was white, Alice Rhinelander filed a countersuit in which she charged that her husband knew her true racial status (she was a quadroon, a person of one-quarter black ancestry) before their marriage and that he had ardently pursued her nonetheless. As the trial proceeded, Leonard confessed with some embarrassment that indeed he did know that she was a mulatto before marriage but that his father had strongly objected to Alice's black ancestry. During the course of the trial, the white newspapers sensationalized the proceedings (the black newspapers less so), and Leonard's love letters were read in open court, while Alice was forced to partially disrobe so that the jury could examine her skin color. On December 5, 1925, the jury rendered its verdict (in spite of the racist closing argument of the prosecution), exonerating Alice from charges of fraud. Leonard's attempts to appeal the verdict would prove costly and futile. In 1927 (the temporal setting of
Passing
), Alice filed a suit for separation on the grounds of abandonment as well as “cruel and inhuman treatment” as a consequence of the trial publicity. When a divorce decree was granted, in 1930, Alice received a cash settlement of $31,500 (her husband had spent more than $50,000 in legal fees), along with a quarterly annuity of $3,600, payable for the rest of her life. Six years later, at age thirty-four, Leonard died of pneumonia. For further details of the case and its significance for Larsen, see Mark J. Madigan's “Miscegenation and ‘The Dicta of Race and Class': The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen's
Passing
” (
Modern Fiction Studies
36:4 [Winter 1990]).

CHAPTER FOUR

1. “C.P. time”: colored people's time; used jocularly in the African-American vernacular to mean late, lagging, or behind the appointed time; opposite of punctual or “on time.”

2.
“nigger-power”:
walking; the term suggests a forerunner of “black power” but without the ideological or political connotations. It refers to the achievement of a task by virtue of brute strength and endurance, rather than by ancillary (or machine) power. A legendary example might be John Henry, the “steel-drivin' man.”