African American writers

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Sister Josepha (#Review)

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It’s a year since I’ve posted on a Library of America (LOA) story, but I was driven to post on this one for two reasons. I have just posted a review of “The scapegoat” by Dunbar-Nelson’s first husband, Paul Dunbar, and, earlier this year, I reviewed “A carnival jangle”, written by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, before marriage when she was Alice Ruth Moore.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

In my post on “A carnival jangle”, I provided a brief biography of Dunbar-Nelson, so I won’t repeat that here, except to remind us that she was a poet, journalist and political activist, born to a black mother and white father. She was prominent in the Harlem Renaissance, and lived in New Orleans for 21 years, as well as Boston, New York, and elsewhere.

In that bio, I also wrote that racism was an important issue for her, but that she also took a wider view of human rights. It is this point that I would like to explore further in this post, due to some ideas raised in LOA’s introduction to her story. They focus quite a bit on her relationship with Paul Laurence Dunbar, noting that the two communicated with each other by letter for a couple of years before meeting. Dunbar asked for her opinion on using “Negro dialect in Literature”, which he sometimes did. LOA shares her response, which was that she saw no problem with using dialect if you knew it and had “a special aptitude for dialect work” but that she saw no necessity to do so just because “one is a Negro or a Southerner”, and if, like her, you were “absolutely devoid of the ability to manage dialect“. This makes good sense, but the main thing I want to share is what she says next:

Now as to getting away from one’s race—well I haven’t much liking for these writers that wedge the Negro problem and social equality and long dissertations on the Negro in general into their stories. It’s too much like a quinine pill in jelly—I hope I’m not treading on your corns. Somehow, when I start a story, I always think of my folks (characters) as simple human beings, not as types of a race or an idea—and I seem to be on more friendly terms with them.

After detailing more of Dunbar-Nelson’s biography, LOA returns to the issue of subject matter, saying that “the ambiguity of racial identity for the Creole characters” in her stories resulted in several critics in recent decades arguing that

she “camouflaged the issue of race,” that she “spurned that racialized element of her identity,” or that she “shaped her tales of Creole life for white audiences.” In “Sister Josepha,” which we reprint below as our Story of the Week selection, the reader realizes that the lead character is not white only through descriptive hints (“brown hands,” “tropical beauty”) and by what the other nuns do not say about her.

However, continues LOA, another commentator, Caroline Gebhard had noted in a recent article that Dunbar-Nelson

“presumes that readers already read her work as ‘black.’” In the 1890s and early 1900s, most of Dunbar-Nelson’s stories, essays, and poems appeared in Black newspapers and magazines; The Monthly Review, for example, advertised itself as “the only illustrated periodical published by Negroes in this country.” … “Dunbar-Nelson knew she would be read as a Black author and never tried to pass in print,” Gebhard concludes. “To read Dunbar-Nelson’s fictions as addressing only white readers, which the accusation of passing implies, is to dismiss the fact that Dunbar-Nelson’s first and most loyal readers were African Americans.”

This point reminded me of the discussion my American friend Carolyn and I had about “The scapegoat” concerning the fact that it is almost completely set in the black community. White people are not identified, except for the Judge, so we have to work out, between the lines, who else might be white in that story. I think Paul Dunbar assumed we’d know – just as Alice Dunbar-Nelson did, according to Gebhard. It’s a lesson in how difficult it is to read out of one’s own time and culture.

It also reminded me of something more contemporary, a post I wrote in 2021. The focus was memoir, but the point was that ‘diverse writers’ are expected to write narrowly about their diversity, and their frustration that they are not encouraged to write, as Dunbar-Nelson explained, about “simple human beings, not as types of a race or an idea”.

“Sister Josepha”

“Sister Josepha” appeared in Dunbar’s 1899 short story collection, The goodness of St Rocque and other stories, and can be read at the link below. It tells the story of a young three-year-old orphan named, Camille, who was left at a convent orphan asylum. The story opens 15 years later when this orphan has just finished her novitiate and is a fully-fledged sister, but she’s unsettled.

Dunbar tells us that when she was 15, and still Camille, she had “almost fully ripened into a glorious tropical beauty of the type that matures early” and had attracted the attention of a couple who offered to take her in. Her Mother Superior calls her in and makes the offer:

Camille stole a glance at her would-be guardians, and de­cided instantly, impulsively, fi­nally. The ­ woman suited her; but the man! It was doubtless intuition of the quick, vivacious sort which belonged to her blood that served her. Untutored in worldly knowledge, she could not divine the meaning of the pronounced leers and admiration of her physical charms which gleamed in the man’s face, but she knew it made her feel creepy, and stoutly refused to go.

To justify her decision to Mother Superior, who did not force her to go, she announces that she loves the convent and sisters, and would like to be one too. However, three years later, the life is palling for this lively young woman. She’s tired, and bored, and plans her escape, but this is a story about the few opportunities available to a young woman in her situation. Should she live the confining but secure life of a nun, or could she make it out in the world where she has no identity, no name other than Camille, and “a beauty that not even an ungainly bonnet and shaven head could hide”.

What lifts this story out of the large body of often cliched stories about young nuns like Camille/Sister Josepha is the situation and Dunbar’s expressive writing that subtly conveys the reality of our sister’s position. Race is never mentioned but there are hints regarding Camille’s background. This is a different story to “A carnival jangle” but no less powerful.

Alice Dunbar Nelson
“Sister Josepha” (1899)
First published: in The goodness of St Rocque and other stories
Available online: Library of America

Paul Laurence Dunbar, The scapegoat (#Review)

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Paul Laurence Dunbar’s short story “The scapegoat” is the fourth in the anthology Great short stories by African-American writers, which my American friend Carolyn sent me. Compared with the previous author, Gertrude H. Dorsey Browne, Dunbar is much better known.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Dunbar c. 1890, from The African-American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The biographical note at the end of the anthology provides good background, and Wikipedia has a detailed article on him. Dunbar (1872-1906) was, says Wikipedia, “an American poet, novelist, and short story writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries”, and “became the first African-American poet to earn national distinction and acceptance”. In fact, it is through his poetry, which is frequently anthologised, that I recognised him when he popped up in the book. He was born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been slaves. Indeed, his father had escaped slavery before the Civil War ended, and fought with the Union Army.

Dunbar, says Wikipedia, wrote his first poem when he was six, and gave his first public recital at nine. Both sources say he was the only African-American in his high school. He was apparently well-accepted, being elected president of the school’s literary society, as well as being the editor of the school newspaper and a debate club member.

Wikipedia provides much detail about his work and publishing history, his health issues (particularly with tuberculosis which killed him), and his failed marriage to Alice Ruth Moore, whose story, “A carnival jangle” (my review), opened this anthology. He was a prolific writer, and was famous for his use of dialect, although he also wrote in standard English. Recognised in his own time, his influence and legacy continues. Maya Angelou titled her book I know why the caged bird sings, from a line in his poem “Sympathy“. But I will conclude with an assessment from his friend, the writer James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), who wrote in his 1922 anthology, The book of American Negro poetry:

He was the first to rise to a height from which he could take a perspective view of his own race. He was the first to see objectively its humor, its superstitions, its short-comings; the first to feel sympathetically its heart-wounds, its yearnings, its aspirations, and to voice them all in a purely literary form.

We see some of this in the short story chosen for this anthology.

“The scapegoat”

“The scapegoat” is the opening story in Dunbar’s 1904-published collection The heart of Happy Hollow. My anthology describes it as “Dunbar’s story of an ambitious and intelligent young man who sees no reason to sell himself short or accept defeat”. This is accurate, but only half the story.

It is told in two parts, the first before the protagonist Mr Robinson Asbury goes to prison, and the second after his release. The opening paragraph, after referencing the saying that the law is “a stern mistress”, chronicles young Asbury’s fast rise from a bootblack, through porter and messenger in a barber shop, to owning his own shop. The second and third paragraphs describe the story’s setting, the “Negro quarter” of “the growing town of Cadgers”. Here Asbury sets up his barber shop, and attracts customers with his ‘significant sign, “Equal Rights Barber Shop”‘, which our third person narrator says

was quite unnecessary because there was only one race about to patronise the place but it was a delicate sop to the peoples vanity and it served its purpose.

Whatever the reason, he was successful, and his shop became “a sort of club”, where the men of the community gathered to socialise and discuss the news. As a result Asbury soon comes to the notice of “party managers” who, seeing his potential to win them black votes, give him money, power and patronage. This Asbury accepts, and his power and status in the community grows. He then decides he’d like to join the bar, which, with the help of the white Judge Davis, he does.

And so the story continues. With success, he does not “leave the quarter” to “move uptown” as expected, though Judge Davis is prescient:

“Asbury,” he said, “you are–you are–well, you ought to be white, that’s all. When we find a black man like you we send him to State’ prison. If you were white, you’d go to the Senate.”

By now, Asbury’s success is arousing jealousy among his peers, particularly at a local coloured law firm. Two, Bingo and Latchett (great names eh?), are alarmed by Asbury’s fast rise to the top, but his putting out his shingle is “the last straw”. They plan to pull him down, and engage the services of another to lead an opposing faction in the community. However, with the continued help of the “party managers”, Asbury holds the day.

Now politics is messy, and allegiances switch. Along the way Bingo comes over to Asbury’s side. There’s an election, and Asbury’s side wins, but our narrator says:

the first cry of the defeated party was, as usual, “Fraud! Fraud!”

Was there fraud? Certainly there’s intimation of skulduggery, but without evidence it’s decided a “scapegoat” must be found – a big man – and so Asbury is deserted by the party “Machine”, and by his peers including Bingo, and charged. After the jury finds him guilty, Asbury seeks leave to make his statement, which Judge Davis allows:

He gave the ins and outs of some of the misdemeanours of which he stood accused showed who were the men behind the throne. And still, pale and transfixed Judge Davis waited for his own sentence.

It doesn’t come, because Asbury recognises Davis as “my friend”, but he exposes “every other man who had been concerned in his downfall”. He is sent to prison, for the shortest sentence the Judge can give, and is away for ten months, just long enough for him not to have been forgotten and, in fact, to be recognised as “the greatest and smartest man in Cadgers”. (This rehabilitation of Asbury in the eyes of the community while he is absent is just one of the many astute insights Dunbar makes about the way humans think and behave.) Part Two details Asbury’s revenge, but you can read it for yourself at the link below.

“The scapegoat” is a well-written, well-structured story set primarily within the black community, though the “party managers” who want the “black vote” are clearly white. Its main theme concerns political ambition and corruption, and racial oppression. It shows Asbury’s peers working to bring him down, putting their own ambition ahead of the good of the community, and overlays this with oppression by the string-pulling “Machine” uptown. I particularly liked the measured, neutral tone Dunbar employs which, together with his frequent insights into political behaviour and human nature, enables this story to read almost like a fable, a morality tale that says something in particular about this community, about the unfortunate behaviour of people who should support each other, but also something universal about politics and oppression.

It’s unemotional, clever, true – and, unfortunately, still relevant.

Paul Laurence Dunbar
“The scapegoat” (first published in The heart of Happy Hollow, 1904)
in Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by African-American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2015
pp. 45-56
ISBN: 9780486471396
Available online (you can find the whole collection at this site)

Gertrude H. Dorsey (Browne), An equation (#Review)

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Gertrude H. Dorsey’s short story is the third in the anthology Great short stories by African-American writers, which my American friend Carolyn sent me. It presented an unexpected challenge.

Gertrude H. Dorsey (Browne)

The biographical note at the end of the anthology is one of the shortest provided by the editors. It goes:

Who was Gertrude H. Dorsey Browne? By the evidence of her published work between 1902 and 1907 in Colored American Magazine she was a clever writer of literary short fiction at the turn of the twentieth century; the little romance “An equation” is possibly her first published short story.

She does not appear in Wikipedia, and an internet search found very little, but it did find something, an article published in 2021 by two journalism students, Sarah Barney and Smelanda Jean-Baptiste. They write how an interest in Dorsey was sparked in a Newark reading group in 2017, when they met to discuss ‘a story, a witty romance titled “An Equation”’. Intrigued by the author’s apparent Newark connection, they decided to research her life. They discovered that she was born on 1 August, 1876/77, in Coshocton, Ohio, to Clement Dorsey and Martha Johnson Lucas, and that she died in April 1963 and was buried in an unmarked plot in Cedar Hill Cemetery.

Dorsey graduated from Coshocton High School in 1896, the only African-American student in a class of 11. She maintained honor roll throughout her years and was a member of the school’s Literary Society. While in high school, she had been a sales representative for the Black-owned Cleveland Gazette newspaper, and did this same work when she moved to Newark as a representative for the Colored American Magazine.

Further, the book club found that while Brown (as they spell her name) worked as a sales representative, she also wrote some stories for the magazine. Some was nonfiction but most was fiction, and her writing “often engaged with pertinent issues such as racism and Jim Crow through wry story plots”. They say her stories

transcend, but do not dismiss, class, race, and gender. They often speak to the hidden truths of what makes us human and the pride involved in shielding those commonalities. 

Not much else is known about her life, but the book club women recognised that “Brown had literary talent in a time when graduating from high school was a feat for women, especially Black women, and writing for a leading national magazine was an even greater accomplishment”.

“An equation”

“An equation” was, it seems, her first story. According to Barney and Jean-Baptiste, another story, titled “A case of Measure for Measure,” is about a group of white women who blacken their faces to attend a “blackface ball.” Afterwards, they discover that the paint won’t come off, forcing them to ride in the segregated car on the train, and thus “learn firsthand some hard lessons about racism and class”. 

“An equation” is not so overtly political – perhaps because it was her first – but, whatever the reason, it is a witty romance that slots into that idea of “the hidden truths of what makes us human”. The anthology’s editors say in their Introduction:

All of the stories in part or in whole are necessarily about the human condition, such as Gertrude H. Dorsey Browne’s “An equation”, in which the narrator declares that “the power of loving is not variable”.

It tells of a young 19-year-old woman, Grace, who obtains a job as an assistant to the Principal of her college and as a result meets 26-year-old school inspector, Raymond Turner, to whom she finds herself attracted. The story is told from her point-of-view and progresses through a series of mathematical jokes which start with her describing Turner as an “Unknown Quantity”. Unlike typical romance stories, this romance doesn’t really get off the ground before it seems to be over. In fact, it nearly doesn’t happen at all due to missed communications, hurt feelings and too much attention paid to mathematical theories and concepts like certainties and uncertainties. But, our lovers are brought together at the end and the story concludes with yet another mathematical joke.

Race is not an issue here, and class differences, while evident, are a background factor rather than a major player in the story. It does have interest, however, beyond being an enjoyable story. This relates to the fact that it was published in the Colored American Magazine, which was, according to an article I found, “a Black-owned, -published, and -operated magazine catering to a Black audience”. Tanya Clark, the article’s author, talks about CAM editor Hopkins’ pedagogical intentions for the magazine, which encompassed “challenging the status quo and elevating the race”. However, she also wanted “to provide African Americans with narratives that simply bring them gratification”. This is, I think, where Dorsey’s story comes in. It’s an entertaining and intelligently written story that could be about a romance between any young educated couple. That, of course, is a political point, but it’s subtly made by just being the story it is.

Clark also makes the point that under Hopkins, “CAM was a publishing forum for women writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction articles”. These women included “seasoned and budding writers, … race leaders who wanted to try their hand at creative writing, … and friends and subscription agents of the magazine” who included Gertrude Dorsey Browne. Clark says “their woman-centered stories honored sisterhood among Black women, showcased Black women’s intellectual capacities, and praised Black women’s desires to work, organize, and fulfill hopes for domesticity”.

“An equation” is one of these “women-centred stories”. The love interest (the “Unknown Quantity”), the romance’s trajectory calling into play questions of probability, and the resolution, draw on mathematical concepts which assume an intelligent, educated readership. It did feel a little clumsy in its exposition, due perhaps to the inexperience of the author, but it has much to offer as an example of African-American writing of the time, besides its being a clever story. I mean, talking of love in such mathematical terms. Who would have thought!

Sources

Tanya N. Clark, “Hagar Revisited: Afrofuturism, Pauline Hopkins, and Reclamation in the Colored American Magazine and Beyond” in CLA Journal, 65 (1): 141-162 (March 2022)

Sarah Barney and Smelanda Jean-Baptiste, “Uncovering a Literary Treasure: Local Book Club Re-discovers Newark’s Gertrude Dorsey Brown”, in The Reporting Project, 20 February 2021

Gertrude H. Dorsey (Browne)
“An equation” (first published in Colored American Magazine, August 1902)
in Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by African-American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2015
pp. 36-44
ISBN: 9780486471396
Available online in the digital version: scroll to page 278

Charles W. Chestnutt, Uncle Wellington’s wives (#Review)

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Charles W. Chestnutt’s long short story is the second in the anthology Great short stories by African-American writers sent to me by my American friend Carolyn. I have come across Chestnutt before, in the Library of America’s Story of the Week program, but they haven’t published this one and I haven’t written about him before.

Charles W. Chestnutt

The biographical notes at the end of the anthology provide a brief introduction to Charles Waddell Chestnutt (1858–1932), whom they describe as the “first commercially successful African-American writer of fiction”. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, and growing up in North Carolina, he “became a teacher, married, and moved to New York City, before returning to Cleveland, where he studied law”.

Wikipedia, of course, provides more. They describe him as “an American author, essayist, political activist, and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South”. His racial background is interesting, and I will quote Wikipedia here (without the references/links which cite sources for descriptors we no longer use):

His paternal grandfather was known to be a white slaveholder. He identified as African-American but noted that he was seven-eighths white. Given his majority-European ancestry, Chesnutt could “pass” as a white man, but he never chose to do so. In many southern states at the time of his birth, Chesnutt would have been considered legally white if he had chosen to identify so. By contrast, under the one drop rule later adopted into law by the 1920s in most of the South, he would have been classified as legally black because of some known African ancestry, even in spite of only being one-eighths black.

The anthology says that some of his best-known – and popular-at-the-time – stories, reproduced the dialect of uneducated storytellers, and Uncle Wellington is one such. Like this anthology’s first author Alice Ruth Moore, Chestnutt wrote about the color line, oppression, and themes of racism.

“Uncle Wellington’s wives”

I was rather tickled when I started reading “Uncle Wellington’s wives” because it delightfully pairs with the novel I had just read, Percival Everett’s James (my review). It is set post Civil War and satirically deals with the lure of the freedom of the North. The anthology describes it as ‘one of his fine and wry stories about “the Color Line”, a line that had consequential legal and social repercussions’. It tells of Uncle Wellington who, “living in a small town in North Carolina … yearns for something beyond his comfortable home with his impatient, hard-working wife”.

According to Wikipedia, the collection from which this story has been taken, includes many themes explored by 20th-century black writers. One of these, “the pitfalls of urban life and intermarriage in the North”, underpins “Uncle Wellington’s wives”. The story is built around the trope of a disgruntled, and somewhat lazy, husband – the titular uncle Wellington – of a hardworking, practical woman who keeps the show on the road. It opens with uncle Wellington Braboy returning home from a lecture at a meeting of the Union League (see Wikipedia) on the topic of “The Mental, Moral, Physical, Political, Social and Financial Improvement of the Negro Race in America”. It’s a topic, says the narrator, that is common in “colored orators” because “to this struggling people, then as now, the problem of their uncertain present and their doubtful future was the chief concern of life”. But, there was hope, and this speaker had “pictured in eloquent language the state of ideal equality and happiness enjoyed by coloured people at the North”. Indeed, the “mulatto” speaker had “espoused a white woman”.

Chestnutt tells of how the now inspired uncle Wellington goes about getting to the North to experience this land of milk and honey, this seemingly “ideal state of social equality”. He goes to a local lawyer to find out whether his wife’s money is his to control. It is, and it isn’t, he learns in a wonderful discussion of the finer points of law. Later, this issue of law’s finer points comes into play again when, now up North, he wants to get out of a marriage. The satire on the law is delicious.

Indeed, the satire throughout this story is delicious as uncle Wellington comes to appreciate the truth of that adage that “life is not always greener”. There might be more legal equality in the North, but that doesn’t mean people are equal. People don’t change overnight. White people don’t suddenly all treat coloured people as “equal”, regardless of what the law says. Coloured people can’t immediately achieve “equal” jobs, because they don’t have the skills and/or the education and/or the contacts. This is not all spelt out in the story, but it’s apparent nonetheless through what happens to uncle Wellington.

I mentioned at the start that an underlying trope for this story is the disgruntled, lazy, husband of a hardworking, practical woman. However, there are other tropes, including the prodigal son story. There are also other themes, besides racial equality, including that of the problems of illiteracy and poor education. Uncle Wellington’s not being able to read, for example, lays him open to not understanding his rights, or the law, and so on. It doesn’t play out badly here but we see the pitfalls and the risks he faces.

In the end, this story – without spoiling it too much – is not a tragedy. Chestnutt is generous to his protagonist, and so uncle Wellington learns a lesson without suffering too much. We see the truth in his wife aunt Milly’s response to him early on

“I dunno nuffin’ ’bout de Norf,” replied aunt Milly. “It’s hard ’nuff ter git erlong heah, whar we knows all erbout it.”

For aunt Milly, life with the people you know in the place you know is hard enough. This truth is repeated, in a different way, by the coloured Northern lawyer:

“Well, Mr. Braboy, it’s what you might have expected when you turned your back on your own people and married a white woman. You weren’t content with being a slave to the white folks once, but you must try it again. Some people never know when they’ve got enough. I don’t see there’s any help for you; unless,” he added suggestively, “you had a good deal of money.”

For Chestnutt, I understand, there’s the issue of loyalty to your race or people, or, to look at it the opposite way, of racial treason. The point is that there are no simple answers. Life and living are complex. Equality is the goal, but it doesn’t come easily, and it doesn’t come by denying your own. It comes with mutual respect and equal opportunity. These don’t change overnight. The Chestnutt Archive writes that:

As a young educator in Fayetteville, Chesnutt had remarked on the “subtle feeling of repulsion toward the Negro common to most Americans”; and yet he concluded that “the Negro’s part is to prepare himself for recognition and equality.” 

These ideas quietly, without didacticism, underpin “Uncle Wellington’s lives”.

Charles W. Chestnutt
“Uncle Wellington’s wives” (first published in The Atlantic Monthly, 1898)
in Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by African-American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2015
pp. 5-35
ISBN: 9780486471396
Available online at ClevelandStateUniversityPressbooks

Percival Everett, James (#BookReview)

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Well, let’s see how I go with this post on Percival Everett’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel James. I read all but 30 pages of this novel before my reading group’s meeting on 27 May. I was not at the meeting as I was in Far North Queensland, but I wanted to send in some notes, which I did. The next day, our tour proper started and I did not read one page of any novel from then until the tour ended. So, it was some 15 days later before I was able to pick it up to finish it. I found it surprisingly easy to pick up and continue on but, whether it will be easy to remember all my thoughts to write about it, is another thing. However, I’ll give it a go.

I greatly enjoyed the read. The facts of slavery depicted here are not new, but Everett offers a clever, engaging and witty perspective through which to think about it, while also being serious and moving. In terms of form, it’s a genre-bender that combines historical and adventure fiction, but I would say these are overlaid with the road novel, a picaresque or journey narrative, those ones about freedom, escape and survival rather than adventure.

Now, I’m always nervous about reading books that rewrite or riff on other books, particularly if I’ve not read the book or not read it recently. I’m not even sure which is true for Huckleberry Finn, given I came across that book SO long ago. Did I read it all in my youth? I’m not sure I did, but I don’t think it mattered here, because the perspective is Jim’s, not Huck’s. More interesting to me is the fact that at times James reminded me of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, such as when James says “we are slaves. What really can be worse in this world” (pt 2, ch 1) and his comment on the death of an escaping slave, “she’s just now died again, but this time she died free” (pt 2 ch 6).

Before I say more, however, I should give a brief synopsis. It is set in 1861 around the Mississippi River. When the titular slave, James, hears he is about to be sold to a new owner some distance away and be separated from his wife and daughter, he goes into hiding to give himself time to work out what to do. At the same time, the young Huck Finn fakes his own death to escape his violent father, and finds himself in the same hiding place as James. They set off down the river on a raft, without a firm plan in mind. The journey changes as events confront them, and as they hear news of a war coming that might change things for slaves. Along the way they meet various people, ranging from the cruel and brutal through the kind and helpful to the downright brave. They face challenges, of course, and revelations are shared. The ending is satisfying without being simplistic.

“It always pays to give white folks what they want” (James)

All this makes for a good story, but what lifts it into something more is the character and first-person voice of James. Most of you will know by now that Everett portrays James as speaking in educated English amongst his own people but in “slave diction” to white people and strangers. On occasion, he slips up which can result in white people not understanding him (seriously!) or being confused, if not shocked, that a black man can not only speak educated English but can read and write. Given the role language plays as a signifier of class and culture, it’s an inspired trope that exemplifies the way slavery demeans, humiliates and brutalises human beings.

James – the book and the character – has much to say about human beings. There’s a wisdom here about human nature. Not all slaves, for example, see things the same way. Some are comfortable in their situation (or, at least, fear change), while some will betray others to ingratiate (or save) themselves. But others recognise that there is no life without freedom and will put themselves on the line to save another. We meet all of these in the novel. And, of course, we meet white people of various ilks too. Some of the most telling parts of the novel are James’ insights into the assumptions, values and attitudes of white people and into how slaves, and presumably coloured people still today, work around these. It would be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious:

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them … The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior’ …” (pt 1 ch 2)

AND

It always made life easier when white folks could laugh at a poor slave now and again. (pt 1 ch 12)

Everett piles irony upon irony, daring us to go with him, such as when James is “hired” (or is he “bought”, he’s not quite sure) to perform with some black-and-white minstrels, and has to be “painted black in such a way as to appear like a white man trying to pass for black”:

Never had a situation felt so absurd, surreal and ridiculous. And I had spent my life as a slave. (pt 1 ch 30)

There are other “adventures” along the way of course – including one involving a religious revival meeting. James is not too fond of religion, differentiating him, perhaps, from many of his peers.

Is James typical of slaves of the time? I’m not sure he is, but I don’t think that’s the point. This is not a realist novel but a novel intending to convey the reality of slavery and what it did to people. James jolts us into seeing a slave’s story with different eyes. We are forced to see his humanity – and perhaps the joke is on “us” white people. Making him sound like “us” forces us to see him as “us”. We cannot pretend he is other or different. This is seriously, subversively witty, I think.

And this brings me to my concluding point which is that the novel interrogates the idea of what is a “good” white person. No matter how “good” or “decent” we are, we cannot escape the fact that we are white and privileged. No matter what we say or do, how empathetic we try to be, it doesn’t change the fundamental issue. James makes this point several times, such as “there were those slaves who claimed a distinction between good masters and cruel masters. Most of us considered such to be a distinction without difference” (pt 1 ch 15). I suppose this is “white guilt”, but I don’t really know how to resolve it. Talking about it feels like virtue signalling, but not talking about it feels like a denial of the truth. There were times when the book felt a little anachronistic, but that’s not a deal-breaker for me because historical fiction is, fundamentally, the past viewed through modern eyes. And how are we really to know how people felt back then?

I’d love to know what you think if you’ve read the novel (as for example Brona has!) 

Percival Everett
James
London: Mantle, 2024
303pp.
ISBN: 9781035031245

    Alice Ruth Moore, A carnival jangle (#Review)

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    Over the last two years I worked my way through the anthology Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers that was sent to me by my American friend Carolyn. It introduced me to many writers I hadn’t read before, and, valuably, to the issues and concerns facing some of America’s first peoples. Many of these issues – such as identity, and the long-lasting, all-encompassing fallout from dispossession – overlap with the issues First Nations Australians are confronting. It was an excellent reading project, so I was thrilled when, a year ago, Carolyn sent me another Dover anthology, Great short stories by African-American writers. I’ve read a few more of these authors than I had of the Native American collection, but not many, so I’m looking forward to another worthwhile reading project. Thanks again, Carolyn!

    Alice Ruth Moore

    The first thing to say about Alice Ruth Moore is that she is better known as Alice Dunbar Nelson, which is the name Wikipedia uses. Born Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans in 1895, she married three times – Paul Laurence Dunbar (1898–1906), Henry Arthur Callis (1910–1916), and Robert J. Nelson (1916–1935). Poet Dunbar died in 1906, but it had been an abusive relationship and she’d left him before his death. Her marriage to physician and professor, Callis, ended in divorce, and she did not it seems take – or keep – his name. Her final marriage was to poet and civil rights activist, Nelson, and this marriage lasted for the rest of their lives. His name she used, but she also retained Dunbar. Fascinating.

    A poet, journalist and political activist, Dunbar Nelson, who had a black mother and white father, was among the first generation born free in the South after the Civil War. She was also one of the prominent African Americans involved in the Harlem Renaissance (about which I wrote in my post on Nella Larsen’s Passing.) She lived in New Orleans for 21 years, and briefly taught primary school there, before moving to Boston and then New York, where she co-founded and taught at White Rose Mission, a school for coloured working girls (in the non-euphemistic meaning of the term!) She also lived in Washington D.C., Delaware and Pennsylvania.

    Racism was an important issue for her, but she also took a wider view of human rights. She was an activist, for example, for African American’s rights and women’s rights. By the 1920s, she was concerned about social justice and the struggles of minorities in general. Wikipedia’s article concludes with this:

    Much of Dunbar-Nelson’s writing was rejected because she wrote about the color line, oppression, and themes of racism. Few mainstream publications would publish her writing because they did not believe it was marketable. She was able to publish her writing, however, when the themes of racism and oppression were more subtle.

    “A carnival jangle”

    “A carnival jangle” appeared in her first collection of stories and poems, Violets and other tales, which was published by The Monthly Review in 1895, while she was still in New Orleans. She wrote a brief, self-deprecating introduction to the collection, commenting on the number of books being foisted on the market, and then offering her “maiden effort, — a little thing with absolutely nothing to commend it, that seeks to do nothing more than amuse”. Many of “the sketches and verses” had appeared in before, but many others were new.

    There is also a preface by Sylvanie F. Williams (d. 1921) whom Wikipedia describes as New Orleans-based “educator and clubwoman“. (Click on the link to find out more about the women’s club movement in the USA.) She says the author ‘belongs to that type of “brave new woman who scorns to sigh”, but feels that she has something to say, and says it to the best of her ability”. However, she is also young, “just on the threshold of life, and with the daring audacity of youth makes assertions and gives decisions which she may reverse as time mellows her opinions, and the realities of life force aside the theories of youth”. Love this.

    Williams also writes that “there is much in this book that is good; much that is crude; some that is poor”. I haven’t read any Moore/Dunbar Nelson, so I have no way of knowing where “A carnival jangle” sits in terms of her oeuvre, but it certainly feels like a standout in this collection.

    Set during New Orleans’ Mardi Gras festival, “A carnival jangle” is fundamentally a mistaken identity story. It is just 4 pages, but delving into it – as the podcasters at CodeX Cantina did – reveals an impressively complex story offering multiple readings. I don’t usually go looking for analyses before I write my posts, but I came across CodeX Cantina when I was researching who Moore/Dunbar Nelson was. I’m glad I did because they teased out some culturally specific aspects that I didn’t know. For example, I completely misread the use of “Indians” in the story. These are the New Orleans or Mardi Gras Indians – an African-American carnival subculture, not Native Americans.

    The story opens:

    There is a merry jangle of bells in the air, an all-pervading sense of jester’s noise, and the flaunting vividness of royal colors; the streets swarm with humanity, — humanity in all shapes, manners, forms, — laughing, pushing, jostling, crowding, a mass of men and women and children, as varied and as assorted in their several individual peculiarities as ever a crowd that gathered in one locality since the days of Babel.

    It’s tight and short, and tells of a young girl named Flo, who, hovering “between childhood and maturity”, is drawn away from her “unmasked crowd” by a “tall Prince of Darkness”, “a shapely Mephisto”, who promises to “show [her] what life is”. She is swept away to a costume shop and disguised as a “boy troubadour”, before joining the masked dancers – but things don’t turn out the way she is promised.

    The two podcasters discussed “the tower of Babel”, which is alluded to in the opening paragraph and which suggests the idea of people coming together, until all falls apart, and the Faustian bargain, which is implied through the narrative and which presages a promise not fulfilled. The masked society can be understood as one in which all are equal, regardless of race or gender. However, masked people can also be invisible, unknown, and this tension between freedom and danger underpins this story.

    The language is vibrant and lush capturing the excitement of the carnival, but is also constantly subverted by references and allusions to darker things. Carnivals, after all, tend to encompass opposing ideas – fun versus pandemonium, humour versus derision. The revellers here include “jesters and maskers, Jim Crows and clowns, ballet girls and Mephistos, Indians and monkeys…”, an odd and unsettling assortment which reflects not only traditional carnival characters but the diversity of New Orleans, and the racial tensions developing as Jim Crow laws were being enacted. Moore’s New Orleans is a place in flux, and the carnival motif is a perfect vehicle for conveying that.

    The CodeX Cantina podcasters don’t talk much about Flo, and the fact that we don’t know what she wants or thinks. Described as “the quietest and most bashful of the lot” when she is drawn away, she seems to have no choice or agency in what happens to her. Is this because she’s simply a tool in the wider story, or is there a comment on gender, or both? What does it mean that she’s white?

    “A carnival jangle” is a sophisticated story about a complex place and time, written by someone who was just starting her writing journey. It warrants more teasing out than I’ve done here, because it has so many angles to think about. Do read it, and, if you have time, listen to the CodeX guys. They don’t have all the answers but they do some good thinking.

    Alice Ruth Moore
    “A carnival jangle” (1893)
    in Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by African-American writers
    Garden City: Dover Publications, 2015
    pp. 1-4
    ISBN: 9780486471396
    Available online at louisiana-anthology.org

    Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (#BookReview)

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    I came across Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1953-published novella, Maud Martha, on JacquiWine’s blog last year, and was confident it was a book for me – so I bought the e-Book version and read it slowly on my phone and iPad whenever I was out and about. This sort of reading doesn’t work for all books, but it did for Maud Martha because it is told in short vignettes (or “tiny stories” as Brooks’ called them) which cover the protagonist’s life from her childhood to motherhood. Her voice is so fresh, so honest, so real that I was completely captivated.

    Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) is a new author for me, perhaps because she was primarily a poet. In fact, Maud Martha is her only novel. She was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize (1950) and the first African American woman to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1976), but these are just two from an honours-filled career.

    My edition of Maud Martha has an excellent introduction by the American critic and academic, Margo Jefferson. She ponders the novel’s disappearance from view, and posits that “it sank beneath the weighty canonical force of first novels by two of Brooks’s Black male peers”. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible man appeared in 1952, and James Baldwin’s Go tell it on the mountain in 1953, the same year as Maud Martha. By comparison, Maud Martha “looks” slim but, in real weight, it is anything but. Jefferson quotes from Brooks’ memoir in which she discusses the autobiographical element of the novel: ‘It is true that much in the “story” was taken out of my own life, and twisted, highlighted, or dulled, dressed up or down.’ I read this as meaning that what she describes is “true” though not necessarily factual. It’s “a novel”, says Jefferson, “by a Black woman about working-class Black life in the twenties, thirties and forties”.

    “But dandelions were what she chiefly saw”

    The book opens with an exquisite description of seven-year-old Maud Martha. It introduces us to a young girl who has dreams but also has her feet on the ground:

    She would have liked a lotus, or China asters or the Japanese Iris, or meadow lilies—yes, she would have liked meadow lilies, because the very word meadow made her breathe more deeply, and either fling her arms or want to fling her arms, depending on who was by, rapturously up to whatever was watching in the sky. But dandelions were what she chiefly saw.

    And, she was happy with them, those “yellow jewels for everyday”:

    She liked their demure prettiness second to their everydayness; for in that latter quality she thought she saw a picture of herself, and it was comforting to find that what was common could also be a flower. And could be cherished! 

    These opening paragraphs are telling: we learn a lot about Maud Martha – as you can see – and we are introduced to Brooks spare, poetic style. It is because of language like this that Brooks can tell Maud’s story from the early 1920s to the 1940s in barely 100 pages. Jefferson describes Brooks’ style as “like a sonnet sequence, each story delights in sensory and emotional details and each reveals another aspect of Maud Martha. Poets take liberties with prose notions of a story arc”.

    So, through the stories Maud Martha grows up, questioning the real world while dreaming of New York, which is “a symbol” for her of “what she felt life ought to be. Jeweled. Polished. Smiling. Poised. Calmly rushing! Straight up and down, yet graceful enough”. She knows it’s a dream, but she stands by her right to dream. And, anyhow, “who could safely swear that she would never be able to make her dream come true for herself? Not altogether, then!—but slightly?—in some part?” This is a young woman, in other words, still with her feet on the ground but with imagination as well. 

    Meanwhile, life goes on. She marries Paul who is fairer than she, enabling him to “pass” among whites or, at least, be more easily accepted by them. She knows her darkness pulls him back, “makes him mad”, but she’s not cowed. She knows who she is and what she can offer.

    What she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that.

    And so she soldiers on through the bright moments and the disappointments, like settling for a kitchenette with a shared toilet when she marries Paul. Moments like these are universal. Other moments, though, are less so, because, of course, she faces racism – again and again – at the movies, while shopping for a hat, at a beauty parlour. A particularly painful occasion occurs when Santa Claus treats her little daughter Paulette differently from the white girls – and Paulette notices.

    Another occasion concerns Maud Martha’s taking work as household help, because Paul is out of work. However, the way her employer and employer’s mother-in-law assume her inferiority causes her to understand “for the first time … what Paul endured daily … as his boss looked at Paul, so these people looked at her. As though she were a child, a ridiculous one, and one that ought to be given a little shaking …”. She decides to leave the job. Her employer won’t understand, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that she’s “a human being” too, and she will not be treated otherwise if she can help it.

    What makes Maud Martha special then is her – to use a cliche – resilience. No, it’s more than that, it’s her level-headed sense of self and a willingness to call what she sees. What’s remarkable in Brooks’ telling is the humanity and, often humour, with which she does it. Take, for example, Maud Martha’s description of her first beau:

    He was decorated inside and out. He did things, said things, with a flourish. That was what he was. He was a flourish.

    She was desperate to have a boyfriend, but not that desperate.

    Maud Martha is just delicious to read. It is deeply, distressingly insightful about Black American experience in all the horrific ordinariness of ingrained, oblivious, white superiority, but the combination of intelligence, dignity and humour with which Brooks tells her story takes your breath away.

    Gwendolyn Brooks
    Maud Martha
    London: Faber & Faber, 2022 (orig. pub. 1953)
    126pp.
    ISBN: 9780571373260 (e-Book)

    W.E.B. Du Bois, “Strivings of the Negro People” (#Review)

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    W.E.B. Du Bois by James E. Purdy, 1907, gelatin silver print, National Portrait Gallery, which has released this digital image under the CC0 license

    While I knew of W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), it wasn’t until I read Nella Larsen’s Passing earlier this year that I was inspired to read something by him. Americans will probably know him well, but Wikipedia (linked on his name) describes him as a “sociologist, socialist, historian and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist”.

    He grew up, continues Wikipedia, in “a relatively tolerant and integrated community” in Massachusetts, and from quite early on was involved in the equal rights movement for African Americans. In 1909, he was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Wikipedia writes that:

    Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. He referred to this group as the Talented Tenth, a concept under the umbrella of racial uplift, and believed that African Americans needed the chances for advanced education to develop its leadership.

    Du Bois and Larsen were both involved in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Du Bois, says Wikipedia, wrote that “a black artist is first of all a black artist.” While I love art with meaning, I don’t necessarily like prescription in the arts. However, when a group is so powerless, I completely understand the desire to expect all who can to put their shoulder to the wheel. We are certainly seeing a lot of it here in First Nations writing, and I’m loving (and learning from) the truths being told.

    I am still in Melbourne so don’t have my copy of Passing, with its excellent introduction, but the idea of “racial uplift” underpins much of the novel. It is supported by its main female protagonist Irene who belongs to the new Black bourgeoisie and is committed to the “uplifting the brother” project. But Larsen also explores through this novel, Du Bois’ theory concerning “double consciousness”, which, originally, says Wikipedia, referred to the

    psychological challenge African Americans experienced of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes” of a racist white society and “measuring oneself by the means of a nation that looked back in contempt”. The term also referred to Du Bois’s experiences of reconciling his African heritage with an upbringing in a European-dominated society.

    In other words, he’s saying that African-Americans have this two-ness or split whereby they are always conscious of how they view themselves and of how others view them. I don’t think things have changed much for people of colour. It must be exhausting, this being conscious, whether you like it or not, of how others view you (and then worrying about what behaviour that might bring).

    Strivings of the Negro People

    So, now Du Bois’ piece. The Atlantic published “Strivings of the Negro People” in August 1897. It is still available via their site. They introduce the article with a quote from within it:

    “It dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”

    This refers to the moment when, still a young boy, Du Bois realises that although he is just like everyone else (“like … in heart and life and longing”), he is excluded from the white world by “a vast veil”. The piece explores what this means. It’s a plea and a treatise on the treatment of African-Americans, a reasoned argument on the value to both “races” of recognising and appreciating each other. It’s also an analysis of the failure of the hope and promise of emancipation over the three decades between 1865 and the writing of the article in 1897.

    I found the analysis telling. He explores the trajectory of hope and action decade by decade, pinpointing the failures. But, he starts with the observation that no matter how hard a black person might study and work, might even do better than their white peers, “he” always faced a wall that was “relentlessly narrow, tall and unscalable to sons of night”.

    Then, comes the plea:

    He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he does not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he believes—foolishly, perhaps, but fervently—that Negro blood has yet a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of self-development.

    Then he turns to emancipation which had taken place thirty years before, and observes that “the freedman has not yet found freedom in his promised land”. In the first decade there was “merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom”, but as the second decade dawned there was an awareness of another possibility, the ballot. With enthusiasm, black men “started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom” but “the decade fled away” bringing nothing but “suppressed votes, stuffed ballot-boxes, and election outrages that nullified his vaunted right of suffrage”. (You get the gist, I’m sure, given recent history.)

    However, another idea also raised its head in this second decade, ‘the ideal of “book-learning”’ (education). Again, he resorts to biblical language (though apparently he was agnostic, if not atheist):

    Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.

    It might take longer, but … and so, he writes,

    Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly; only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was weary work.

    It didn’t achieve the desired goal, but it did something, “it changed the child of emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect”. People started to understand and analyse their burden. And what did they find? Poverty, yes – “to be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships”. And ignorance. But also “the red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race”. This meant, he writes, “not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of filth from white whoremongers and adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home”. A social and moral degradation.

    At this point, Du Bois turns to discuss the “shadow of a vast despair”, the shadow being “prejudice”. It’s interesting, because he suggests that prejudice is ‘the natural defense of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the “higher” against the “lower” races’. “The Negro” would support, he continues, “this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress”. BUT, the black man is

    helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy … the all-pervading desire to inculcated disdain for everything black.

    Still, they press on with hope – not for “nauseating patronage” but for ‘a higher synthesis of civilization and humanity, a true progress, with … the chorus “Peace, good will to men.”’

    So, he gets to the third decade suggesting the attempts and strivings of the first two were of “a credulous race childhood”. The ballot, education and freedom (“of life and limb”… “to work and think”) are still needed, but through “work, culture and liberty” must be fostered the “traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to, but in conformity with, the greater ideals of the American republic, in order that some day, on American soil, two world races may give each to each those characteristics which both so sadly lack”. His arguments become somewhat idealised but his point is valid – that African Americans had much to offer the nation.

    Interestingly, his Wikipedia article tells how his 1935 history of Reconstruction which argued for the active and constructive role played by black people in this period ran counter to the “orthodox interpretation” of white historians (surprised?). It was virtually ignored until the late 1960s when it ‘ignited a “revisionist” trend’ in Reconstruction historiography. By the 21st century, his book had become a foundational text in these studies!

    A very interesting man, whose legacy continues for his forward, clear thinking about the social and psychological mechanisms of race.

    Nella Larsen, Passing (#BookReview)

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    For last year’s Novellas in November, Arti (of Ripple Effects) posted on a book and author I’d never heard of, Nella Larsen’s Passing. She also discussed its 2021 film adaptation. Quite coincidentally, that same month, my Californian friend Carolyn wrote positively about the film in a letter to me. It sounded right up my alley, so how grateful was I when, this month, Carolyn sent me the book. I decided to squeeze it in …

    According to Wikipedia, Nella Larsen (nee Walker) was born in a poor part of Chicago to a Danish immigrant mother, and a father “believed to be a mixed-race Afro-Caribbean immigrant from the Danish West Indies”. He disappeared early in Nella’s life, and her mother married another Danish immigrant. Because of Nella they were seen as a “mixed” family and were not welcome in the mostly white neighbourhood where they’d moved. Nella grew up in that difficult limbo of being neither white nor black.

    Eventually, she married a Black-American* physicist and they moved to Harlem where they became involved with “important figures in the Negro Awakening”, later known as the Harlem Renaissance. I share all this because it is relevant to Passing, which was her second novel.

    Passing, set mostly in 1927, tells the story of two Black women, Irene and Clare. Both can pass as white, but Irene lives in Harlem with her darker doctor husband, while Clare lives in white society, as a White, with her Black-hating banker husband. At the start of the novel, Irene receives a letter from Clare, referring to an accidental meeting they’d had in a swish hotel in Chicago where both had been “passing” as white. This meeting had been 12 years after they’d last seen each other as teens in Chicago, at which time Clare had been whisked away by her White aunts after the death of her drunken janitor father.

    Two years had passed since that uncomfortable Chicago meeting, two years during which Irene had done her best to forget an occasion “in which even now, after two years, humiliation, resentment, and rage were mingled”. But now, Clare was wanting to see Irene again …

    “they always come back” (Brian)

    Much has been written about this book, which speaks directly to the challenges and conflicts faced by African Americans at the time. There was a new Black bourgeoisie – a professional middle class – to which Irene belongs, and in which she feels comfortable. She’s committed to the whole “uplifting the brother” project and does good works to that end. Clare, on the other hand, has turned her back on her race. The scene is set, we think, for conflict.

    And there is, but if you think it’s going to encompass a simple dichotomy, you would be wrong. From the start, Larson keeps us on our toes, forcing us to see two very different ways of living as a black woman in that place and time. The story is told third person, but through the perspective of Irene. She is the conservative rule-follower who is sure of her path, while Clare, who is probably closer to Larsen herself, is more adventurous, a risk-taker. She’s lively, sensual, a breath of fresh air, but how are we to read her – and, for that matter, Irene?

    As the novel progresses, we (and our allegiances) are tossed between the two, just as tensions between the two ebb and flow. Are we to approve Irene’s conscientious approach to life, or should we empathise with the “lonely” Clare who wants to reconnect with the black community? Both are flawed characters. Irene’s choice involves buying into the whole aspirational, consumerist, success-focused values of the bourgeoisie, so much so that she rides rough-shod over the wishes and needs of her husband and sons. Clare, on the other hand, might be lively but she can also be “selfish” and “wilful”, with her risk-taking being potentially dangerous or damaging to others, including her neglected young daughter. It’s clear that if her husband discovered she’d been touched by “the tar brush”, she’d be in deep trouble. It’s to Larsen’s credit that we do not see these characters as black and white (hmm!).

    Irene and Clare are not the only characters in this tight novella, but the most interesting of the others is Irene’s husband, Brian, who finds himself caught between the two women after Clare inveigles herself into their lives. At the end of Part 1, just after the meeting in Chicago, Irene is preparing to return home to New York and Brian whose “old, queer, unhappy restlessness had begun again within him, that craving for some place strange and different, which at the beginning of her marriage she had had to make such strenuous efforts to repress.”

    “caught between two allegiances” (Irene)

    Passing is told in three parts – Encounter, Re-encounter, and Finale. In Re-encounter we learn more about these characters through their interactions, and we discover the source of Brian’s restlessness. He is, potentially, another adventurer, though different to Clare.

    Early in this final part, Irene and Brian discuss Clare, “passing” and race. Brian has a more nuanced understanding of “race”, it seems. Answering Irene’s question about why those who pass “always come back”, he says, “if I knew that, I’d know what race is”. Much later, we learn that race is at the core of Brian’s restlessness. When Irene upbraids him for honestly answering their son’s question about lynching, he lashes out:

    …I’d feel I hadn’t done my duty by them if I didn’t give them some inkling of what’s before them. It’s the least I can do. I wanted to get them out of this hellish place years ago. You wouldn’t let me. I gave up the idea because you objected. Don’t expect me to give up everything.

    Passing is about many things, only some of which I’ve discussed. It’s about convention and security versus risk and adventure, about gender and marriage, about class and money, and about self-definition. There is much here that is universal about human nature, but, of course, race is a driving factor. As the novel draws to its conclusion, Irene finds herself

    caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race. Race? The thing that bound and suffocated her.

    But, there is another layer to this novel, a foreshadowing of something darker. Half-way through the novel, Irene says to Clare that “as we’ve said before, everything must be paid for”, while a little further on, Clare says to Irene

    “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.”

    It’s chilling, but I’ll leave it there. I was engrossed by this novel from its opening sentence to its clever, unsettling ending.

    * I’m uncertain about nomenclature, given the language used in this 1920s novel is not what we use now. I hope I’ve made a fair call.

    Nella Larsen
    Passing
    New York: Penguin Books, 2018 (orig. pub. 1929)
    128pp.
    ISBN: 9780142437278

    James Weldon Johnson, Stranger than fiction (#Review)

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    Several months ago, I bookmarked a Library of America (LOA) Story of the Week offering – as I often do for later use – but, despite its being a very brief offering, I’ve only got to it now. It’s on James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), and was timed, 17 June 2021, to synchronise with the 150th anniversary of his birth.

    American readers here may know Johnson, but many of the rest of us probably don’t. Wikipedia describes him as an American writer and civil rights activist, but that hides a wealth of accomplishments. LOA, lists his achievements in a news item. He

    • wrote one novel, The autobiography of an ex-colored man, “which is considered by many critics to be the first modern African American novel and a major inspiration for Harlem Renaissance writers”.
    • was a lawyer, the first African American from his county, or perhaps state, to pass the Florida bar exam.
    • was an educator, and president of the Florida State Teachers Association (for Black teachers).
    • was a songwriter who, with brother Rosamond and friend Bob Cole, wrote dozens of popular songs. Many ended up in Broadway musicals of the early 1900s. They also wrote two songs used for Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 campaign. One of these, “Under the bamboo tree,” was a big national hit in 1902 and was later performed by Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis). He and his brother wrote and composed the hymn “Lift every voice and sing,” also known as the “Black national anthem”.
    • was a diplomat, U. S. Consul in Venezuela (1906–1909) and in war-torn Nicaragua (1909–1912).
    • was a journalist at The New York Age, supervising its editorial page and writing a daily column for over ten years.
    • was an activist with the NAACP, who, in his role as field secretary, significantly increased the number of branches and the size of the membership.

    LOA’s Story of the Week includes some biographical information that inspired his novel, and the text of his 1915 New York Age editorial which discussed the critical reaction to the novel.

    “Stranger than fiction”

    When I saw the title of this offering, I expected an essay, perhaps an entertaining one, on that old adage that “truth is stranger than fiction”, but I didn’t know the author then. What I got was something far more interesting.

    LOA prefaces the essay, as usual, with some explanatory material. In this case, they start with two “dramatic experiences that would inform his writing and activism for the remainder of his life”. One occurred in 1895, when, as an enterprising new teacher (a black man, remember) he asked to visit a white school to see and compare practices. He did so, but apparently a few days later he learnt that his visit “had raised a hullabaloo”. Parents had objected to the presence of a “Black man” in their children’s classrooms. Johnson wrote that “The affair was fomented to such an extent that the board of education felt it necessary to hold a meeting to inquire into the matter and fix the responsibility for my action.” To their credit, the superintendent and the school’s principal stood their ground, and it all blew over.

    The second involved his meeting a journalist in a park in 1901, at her request. She wanted to fact-check an article she was writing on the disproportionate damage done to Jacksonville’s Black neighbourhoods by the Great Fire. She and Johnson were confronted by “eight or ten militiamen in khaki with rifles and bayonets” who had “rushed to the city with a maddening tale of a Negro and a white woman meeting in the woods”. Again, it was resolved, but the ordeal left its mark.

    Johnson’s novel, The autobiography of an ex-colored man (1912), which was inspired by experiences like these, has been described as the first fictional memoir by a black person. Set in late nineteenth to early twentieth century America, its protagonist is a young biracial man, known only as the “Ex-Colored Man”. Because of such experiences as witnessing a lynching, he decides to “pass” as white for safety and advancement reasons. The book chronicles his experiences and ambivalent feelings about his decision.

    The book did not sell well initially, but sold very well three years later, after, says LOA, Johnson revealed himself as the author and “distributed several thousand copies of a glowing review that had appeared in Munsey’s Magazine“. This brings us, finally, to the essay, “Stranger than fiction”, which was published in 1915 in his daily column in The New York Age, where he was editor.

    His aim was to give “a brief overview of the novel’s critical reception” but it was partly inspired, says LOA, by rumours that the estate of a wealthy woman publisher, Miriam (Frank) Leslie, was being contested by her late husband’s relatives on the grounds that she was the daughter of an enslaved women and therefore ‘her relatives had “no heritable blood”‘.

    Johnson states at the beginning of his essay, that his book (novel)

    produced a wide difference of critical opinion between reviewers on Northern and Southern publications.

    Northern reviewers generally accepted the book as a human document, while Southern reviewers pronounced the theme of the story utterly impossible. A few of the Northern reviewers were in doubt as to whether the book was fact or fiction.

    For many Northern reviewers, in other words, the work was so “real” they could barely believe it was fiction. (It doesn’t sound that, like Helen Garner’s critics, this bothered them.) Southern critics, on the other hand, asserted that the work was unbelievable because, writes Johnson,

    the slightest tinge of African blood is discernible, if not in the complexion, then in some trait or characteristic betraying inferiority. This is, of course, laughable. Seven-tenths of those who read these lines know of one or more persons of colored blood who are “passing.”

    As it turned out the Miriam Leslie rumours were unfounded, but Johnson at the time, believed it could have been true, and, if so, was “stranger than any fiction”. Which, ironically, just goes to prove the adage, whether the story was true or not!

    Meanwhile, I was interested, though not surprised given how things are still playing out, in the disparity between Northern and Southern critical responses some 50 years or so after Abolition. Not strange at all, unfortunately.

    James Weldon Johnson
    “Stranger than fiction”
    First published: New York Age, 1915
    Available: Online at the Library of America