Nella Larsen (7 page)

66. See Mark J. Madigan, “Miscegenation and ‘The Dicta of Race and Class': The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen's
Pass
ing,” Modern Fiction Studies 36.4 (Winter 1990), and James L. Wacks, “Reading Race, Rhetoric and the Female Body: The Rhinelander Case and 1920s American Culture,” senior thesis, Harvard University, 1995.

67. David Theo Goldberg,
Racist Culture, Philosophy and the Politics
of Meaning
(Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1955), 185; also cited in Kawash, 8–9.

68. James Weldon Johnson,
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), 190.

69. Tate, 145.

 

 

MAE G. HENDERSON is professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Author of numerous articles on African American and feminist criticism and theory, pedagogy, and cultural studies, she is also editor of
Borders, Boundaries, and Frames;
co-editor (with John Blassingame) of the five-volume
Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals: An Annotated Index of Letters, 1817–1871
.

 

 

INTRODUCTION

Ntozake Shange

As a person of color—light brown by most standards, but not light enough to pass—I've often wondered about the lives of childhood friends and family members who took that precipitous step and crossed over the color line to become white. Remembering that I am of a generation that straddled the era of strict segregation of the races and the toppling of that abominable separation of black and white, I've experienced the denigration that Clare Kendry, Nella Larsen's protagonist in
Passing,
sought to escape. So I understand the impulse not to announce to everyone that which they can't ascertain on their own. Or as Larsen writes:

Absurd! Impossible! White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot. They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy. Never, when she was alone, had they even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro.

Clare Kendry, unlike her friend Irene Redfield, takes it upon herself to pass. But the aloneness brings her back time and again to the lives of certain of her old school friends, people who know she is a Negro but who are as capable of passing as she is. It is as if Larsen wanted to invite us into a closed circle of the well-off light-skinned Negroes who distance themselves from their darker brethren by class, color, and fashion.

It is impossible to escape the beauty of Clare Kendry, her sense of fashion and drawing room manners. As Larsen writes:

Clare, exquisite, golden, fragrant, flaunting, in a stately gown of shining black taffeta, whose long, full skirt lay in graceful folds about her slim golden feet; her glistening hair drawn smoothly back into a small twist at the nape of her neck; her eyes sparkling like dark jewels.

At one point Irene Redfield thinks that Clare was born out of her correct era, that she belongs in the time of French salons and the antebellum South— which is telling, because both of these epochs were sustained by the exploitation of the masses of people. Irene, too, is seduced by Clare's beauty, her mystery, and brazen risk taking. For Clare is married to a man who literally hates Negroes and doesn't know he is married to one—he calls her “Nig” as a private joke for how dark she got in the sun.

And Clare wants Irene to provide her entrée into the Negro society of the 1920s, though she could lose everything: someone might see her and put two and two together. (If you socialize with Negroes, you must be one—who else but “colored” would want to be around us?)

Clare wants Irene to lay her life open to her on a whim—on the occasion of her husband's absence, whenever it pleases her to visit the “Negro,” as if Irene were there for her amusement, to see Negroes, not unlike the hordes of whites who invaded Harlem at the time to look at us, to dance our dances, to guess who among us was more white than the others. Irene realizes that “Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it.”

This sort of betrayal tortured Irene, as does her husband's friendliness toward Clare. Brian Redfield is a handsome and accomplished doctor. He longed for some of the freedoms his color denied him, and his true private obsession is Brazil, where, he imagines, color is of no import. Irene insists he give up the fantasy of Brazil for her sake, their children's, and their comfortable life. She refuses to take his dream seriously.

Irene is tormented by both these forces—Clare Kendry's passing back and forth and Brian Redfield's resentment that she is the cause of his lack of freedom. Irene cherishes her boys of different colors and her secure life during Harlem's Renaissance as a member of the elite light-skinned Talented Tenth. She takes pride in the advancement of the race, as evidenced by her participation in the Negro Welfare League—though her husband sees it as an unwelcome obligation to help the poorer brothers. Let there be no mistake, Larsen bluntly exposes the classism and racism of this small clique of our population by offering no personalities for the household help of the Redfield house: black and poor and ignored except for their efficiency. So, Irene Redfield's suffering brought about by Clare Kendry is limited to the fate of her class and caste. Irene even upbraids her husband for speaking honestly about lynchings because she wants her sons to be “happy,” meaning ignorant of the true perils of Negro life at that time.

Nevertheless, Irene Redfield openly participates in Clare Kendry's very dangerous tiptoeing back and forth over the color line and guards Clare Kendry's charade like an obsessed lover, constantly submitting herself to the allure of Clare's beauty and the “furtive mystery” of her person. There is no way to ignore the homoerotic undertones of their relationship, as evidenced in one of Clare Kendry's letters to Irene:

. . . For I am so lonely . . . cannot help longing to be with you again, as I have never longed for anything before; and I have wanted many things in my life. . . . You can't know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of. . . . It's like an ache, a pain that never ceases. . . .

In kind Irene Redfield suffers fits of depression and teary bouts of guilt about her relationship with Clare to the point that she becomes jealous of her husband's very innocent relationship with her friend.

In this exquisitely written volume, Nella Larsen has peeled away the historical questions we might have about society during the Harlem Renaissance, while remaining relevant in an America whose biracial population is growing. She offers characters so honest and desperate to be whole that we cannot help but champion their humanity.

NTOZAKE SHANGE is a renowned playwright (for
colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbowis enuf
), poet (
Nappy Edges
and
The Love Space Demands
), and novelist (
Betsey Brown; Liliane;
and
Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo
). She lives in Texas with her daughter.

PART ONE

ENCOUNTER

ONE

It was the last letter in Irene Redfield's little pile of morning mail. After her other ordinary and clearly directed letters the long envelope of thin Italian paper with its almost illegible scrawl seemed out of place and alien. And there was, too, something mysterious and slightly furtive about it. A thin sly thing which bore no return address to betray the sender. Not that she hadn't immediately known who its sender was. Some two years ago she had one very like it in outward appearance. Furtive, but yet in some peculiar, determined way a little flaunting. Purple ink. Foreign paper of extraordinary size.

It had been, Irene noted, postmarked in New York the day before. Her brows came together in a tiny frown. The frown, however, was more from perplexity than from annoyance; though there was in her thoughts an element of both. She was wholly unable to comprehend such an attitude towards danger as she was sure the letter's contents would reveal; and she disliked the idea of opening and reading it.

This, she reflected, was of a piece with all that she knew of Clare Kendry. Stepping always on the edge of danger. Always aware, but not drawing back or turning aside. Certainly not because of any alarms or feeling of outrage on the part of others.

And for a swift moment Irene Redfield seemed to see a pale small girl sitting on a ragged blue sofa, sewing pieces of bright red cloth together, while her drunken father, a tall, powerfully built man, raged threateningly up and down the shabby room, bellowing curses and making spasmodic lunges at her which were not the less frightening because they were, for the most part, ineffectual. Sometimes he did manage to reach her. But only the fact that the child had edged herself and her poor sewing over to the farthermost corner of the sofa suggested that she was in any way perturbed by this menace to herself and her work.

Clare had known well enough that it was unsafe to take a portion of the dollar that was her weekly wage for the doing of many errands for the dressmaker who lived on the top floor of the building of which Bob Kendry was janitor. But that knowledge had not deterred her. She wanted to go to her Sunday school's picnic, and she had made up her mind to wear a new dress. So, in spite of certain unpleasantness and possible danger, she had taken the money to buy the material for that pathetic little red frock.

There had been, even in those days, nothing sacrificial in Clare Kendry's idea of life, no allegiance beyond her own immediate desire. She was selfish, and cold, and hard. And yet she had, too, a strange capacity of transforming warmth and passion, verging sometimes almost on theatrical heroics.

Irene, who was a year or more older than Clare, remembered the day that Bob Kendry had been brought home dead, killed in a silly saloon-fight. Clare, who was at that time a scant fifteen years old, had just stood there with her lips pressed together, her thin arms folded across her narrow chest, staring down at the familiar pasty-white face of her parent with a sort of disdain in her slanting black eyes. For a very long time she had stood like that, silent and staring. Then, quite suddenly, she had given way to a torrent of weeping, swaying her thin body, tearing at her bright hair, and stamping her small feet. The outburst had ceased as suddenly as it had begun. She glanced quickly about the bare room, taking everyone in, even the two policemen, in a sharp look of flashing scorn. And, in the next instant, she had turned and vanished through the door.

Seen across the long stretch of years, the thing had more the appearance of an outpouring of pent-up fury than of an overflow of grief for her dead father; though she had been, Irene admitted, fond enough of him in her own rather catlike way.

Catlike. Certainly that was the word which best described Clare Kendry, if any single word could describe her. Sometimes she was hard and apparently without feeling at all; sometimes she was affectionate and rashly impulsive. And there was about her an amazing soft malice, hidden well away until provoked. Then she was capable of scratching, and very effectively too. Or, driven to anger, she would fight with a ferocity and impetuousness that disregarded or forgot any danger; superior strength, numbers, or other unfavorable circumstances. How savagely she had clawed those boys the day they had hooted her parent and sung a derisive rhyme, of their own composing, which pointed out certain eccentricities in his careening gait! And how deliberately she had—

Irene brought her thoughts back to the present, to the letter from Clare Kendry that she still held unopened in her hand. With a little feeling of apprehension, she very slowly cut the envelope, drew out the folded sheets, spread them, and began to read.

It was, she saw at once, what she had expected since learning from the postmark that Clare was in the city. An extravagantly phrased wish to see her again. Well, she needn't and wouldn't, Irene told herself, accede to that. Nor would she assist Clare to realize her foolish desire to return for a moment to that life which long ago, and of her own choice, she had left behind her.

She ran through the letter, puzzling out, as best she could, the carelessly formed words or making instinctive guesses at them.

“. . . For I am lonely, so lonely . . . cannot help longing to be with you again, as I have never longed for anything before; and I have wanted many things in my life. . . . You can't know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of. . . . It's like an ache, a pain that never ceases. . . .” Sheets upon thin sheets of it. And ending finally with, “and it's your fault, 'Rene dear. At least partly. For I wouldn't now, perhaps, have this terrible, this wild desire if I hadn't seen you that time in Chicago. . . .”

Brilliant red patches flamed in Irene Redfield's warm olive cheeks.

“That time in Chicago.” The words stood out from among the many paragraphs of other words, bringing with them a clear, sharp remembrance, in which even now, after two years, humiliation, resentment, and rage were mingled.