First published in 1929
Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Passing explores the juxtaposition of two women who look similar, but lead very different lives. We begin with Irene Redfield receiving a letter from Clare Kendry, in the 1920s. Irene is avoiding Clare because, as it turns out, Clare is 'passing'; both women are African-American, both light-skinned. Both are wealthy and comfortable; they meet in Chicago, which is where they both grew up, but later reconnect when Irene is home in Harlem. Irene has a husband whose skin color announces him to the world as definitively African-American; his name is Brian. Clare is married to a white man, Jack Bellew.
In a strange twist, we realize quite early on that Jack has no idea that Clare is not white. In fact, he calls her a very derogative nickname, joking that she could 'pass' as black if she wanted, but that he wants nothing to do with n*****rs. Clare and Jack have a daughter, Margery, who also passes for white (and doesn't, in fact, know that she isn't). Irene and Brian have two sons, Junior and Ted. What follows from their first re-encounter of each other is a series of increasingly high-stakes socializations between the two women. Irene keeps telling herself it's unsafe to re-connect with Clare, but Clare is persistent, and stubborn, and, tbqh, selfish. Clare ingrains herself into the Redfields' household, and after a few months, it becomes clear to Irene that Clare and her husband, Brian, are not simply friends.
Irene bumps into Jack on the street, and since they met before (and because Clare made it seem so, he thought she was white) he greets her, only to realize that she is arm-in-arm with another black woman, which makes him realize she is not so white after all. Irene thinks about telling Clare (and Brian) that Clare may have been outed, but she decides not to, hoping that Clare will simply dematerialize from their lives and give her back her sense of security (and her hubby). A few days later, Jack interrupts a dinner party that Clare, Brian, and Irene are attending at another friend's house. He calls out Clare in front of everyone, and in the blur of a moment, she tips over the ledge of a balcony and falls to her death. As Irene was running her way and had her hand on Clare's arm, it's ever so uncertain if Clare fell or if, perhaps, she was gently pushed.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here
Dear blobbists,
How are you? Are you surviving all the Coronavirus mayhem? I hope this blob finds you well, and resting comfortably if you are finding yourself not so well.
I loved this book. Looking back, I'm pretty sure I read it in high school for a class, but I didn't remember the particulars, so it still held a great deal of suspense for me. If you haven't read it, I HIGHLY recommend. It's quite short (120 pages or so) and definitely readable in a day or a weekend.
Without further ado, my thoughts!
Purple ink
The book opens with Irene reading a letter from Clare and among the many things that stand out (and that annoy her) about it is that it's written in purple ink. I'm sure this was pretty scandalous for the 20's, but it made me smile because all my letters from my best friend Mar are in purple ink. I immediately read purple ink and thought, OOH! Irene got a letter from Mar!
Clare
Clare is such a fascinatingly drawn character. One of the things I remember about reading the book before is that I thought Clare was the main character. Which, in a way, she is, but also, in another way, she very much isn't. Irene is our narrator, we return to her in between encounters with Clare, and we sympathize with her at various points in the work. I felt a little bad that I kind of forgot Irene entirely. But perhaps that's part of the beauty of the contrast between her and Clare. Here are some lines about Clare that paint a picture.
- What strange, languorous eyes she had!
- Arresting eyes, slow and mesmeric, and with, for all their warmth, something withdrawn and secret about them.
- The basket for all letters, silence for their answers.
Clare reminded me in many ways of Rebecca deWinter from Rebecca. She had this allure and mystery and fatal energy floating around her, and it was both fascinating to watch and a little terrifying to behold.
Probably what I loved most about this book was how many layers it had packed into its 120 pages. It gets at all kinds of things conceptual, racial, and personal, and deals with everything from womanhood to personhood. Here are some examples of the layers:
Irene is 'passing' when she encounters Clare at the restaurant.
Later, Irene makes it clear that she occasionally 'passes' when she's at a restaurant or the movies, for matters of convenience, but that she never willfully misleads people about her race, and she's honest if asked. Still, it makes their first encounter so fraught because Irene is analyzing every bit of herself to see if Clare has realized she isn't white, when in actually, Clare is staring at her because she recognizes her from when they grew up together.
There's also something sort of mystical about 'passing' that Irene is attracted to, and wants to learn more about:
She wished to find out about this hazardous business of 'passing', this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one's chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.'passing over' - at one point, Clare refers to it as 'passing over', which I thought was fascinating because it made me think of dying. And I suppose in a way, Clare transitioning to a world where her blackness wasn't permitted was a kind of death. The terminology felt so final.
Conversation about children: When Clare has Irene over to her house, another woman, Gertrude is over, who grew up with them. All three women have the skin tone to 'pass', but all live along the spectrum of blackness. Irene, as we've said, 'passes' only on occasion for convenience. Gertrude is married to a white man, but they have known each other since they were young, and he knows that she is black. Clare's husband and daughter know nothing of her blackness.
I loved this exchange, as they were discussing children, and the layers of complexity of pigmentocracy and self-hatred:
Clare - I nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born for fear that she might be dark. Thank goodness, she turned out all right. But I'll never risk it again. Never! The strain is simply too - too hellish!
Gertrude - But of course, nobody wants a dark child.
Irene - In a voice of whose even tones she was proud: "One of my boys is dark."Clare later asserts that the average black woman needn't worry about such things - It's only deserters like me who have to be afraid of freaks of the nature. Like I said. Layers on layers on layers, people.
On being bound to Clare while also wanting to get as far away from her as possible:
She had to Clare Kendry a duty. She was bound to her by those very ties of race, which, for all her repudiation of them, Clare had been unable to completely sever.
She was caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race. Race! The thing that bound and suffocated her. Whatever steps she took, or if she took none at all, something would be crushed. A person or the race. Clare, herself, or the race.This was so exquisitely articulated. Irene is pushed and pulled by the very thing which Clare has tried to wish out of existence, and it is what simultaneously makes Irene hate and resent Clare and what binds them together in solidarity.
Irene, talking to Brian:
Irene: 'It's funny about 'passing'. We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.
Brian: Instinct of the race to survive and expand.
Irene: Rot! Everything can't be explained by some general biological phrase.
Their conversations about race and passing were also beautifully complex, which is, I think a real triumph not only because she captures it so well but also because she does it so concisely. Every scene, every moment has its purpose and packs its proverbial punch.
Irene talking to Hugh, a wealthy white man at the Negro Welfare League dance:
Irene: 'It's easy for a Negro to 'pass' for white. But I don't think it would be so simple for a white person to 'pass' for coloured.'
Hugh: 'Never thought of that.'
Irene: 'No, you wouldn't. Why should you?'
I suppose it's obvious that the average white person wouldn't try to 'pass' as a person of color (although there are a not insignificant number of recent examples) because the power to be had is on the side of whiteness. I love that Irene points it out to Hugh, though, and makes him do this mental work.
So you want to [not] talk about race
During their tea at Clare's house, Irene watches Clare talk about everything BUT the blunt facts of the matter - that they live in separate worlds. Here's how she describes Clare not talking about race:
It was the most brilliant exhibition of conversational weightlifting that Irene had ever seen.I love this mental image, and it made me think about how so many white people I know do this. They bend over backwards, twist themselves in all kinds of contortions, to talk about anything but race, and while I recognize that race is a construct, racism is real, and not acknowledging it is basically gaslighting every person of color on a daily basis. It's also just mean, on a really basic level, to pretend that differences in lived experience across race don't exist, because it refuses to allow someone full personhood. So maybe drop those conversational weights, people, and just tell it like it is.
On Jack calling Clare 'Nig'
Yeah, so remember how I said Jack had a very derogatory nickname for Clare? That's it. I didn't even want to type it, but I figured it would be kind of obfuscating if I just wrote asterisks. Again, layers on layers here. There's this brilliant brimming tension when we're in the room with Jack and Gertrude and Irene and Clare, but there's also this vehement hatred just spewing out of his mouth, and Irene's loyalty to Clare (again, ironically largely due to their shared race, though Clare doesn't own it) as well as a sense of personal safety, that keeps her from spitting in his face or calling him out. When Irene calmly asks him what he thinks of n****rs, he says he doesn't hate them, but they're:
'Always robbing and killing people. And...worse.'Ah yes. So NOT hate then. Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.
The loneliness of 'passing'
There are so many beautiful themes in this book, but I think the loneliness of 'passing' was my favorite. Clare claims in writing to Irene that she would have been fine and never looked back had she not run into her at that restaurant. But when she came back in contact with her past, and with blackness, she felt an ache so all-consuming she was compelled to rekindle their friendship. She says:
I want to see Negroes, to be with them again, to talk with them, to hear them laugh.Interestingly, Irene experiences loneliness when she's in the room with Gertrude and Clare:
Later, when she examined her feeling of annoyance, Irene admitted, a shade reluctantly, that it arose from a feeling of being outnumbered, a sense of aloneness, in her adherence to her own class and kind; not merely in the great thing of marriage, but in the whole pattern of her life as well.As I read Passing, I tried to imagine a time in my life where I had felt something close to what Clare was feeling, or even what Irene was feeling in that moment. Obviously as a white person I can't inhabit the experience of a person of color passing as white; that said, I think the closest comparison I came up with was when I was living in France. I could 'pass' as a French person, and my accent was good enough that the average person assumed I was French, but even when I was around Americans, I felt deeply alone. I'm still not sure why that was, but I think a big part of it was that I wasn't proficient enough or comfortable enough in French to really be myself. I couldn't make jokes in French, which sounds silly, but humor is a big part of my identity. And French humor is very localized and super important to their culture, so I felt sort of doubly on the outside in that regard. I also had never spent that much time away from my family, my friends, or my sisters. Anyway, while I kind of wanted to resent Clare, because I wanted to side with Irene, I understood how traumatizing that loneliness could be, and ended up empathizing with her deeply as well.
LIKE I SAID, folks. LAYERS.
On wealth
I thought it was super interesting that Clare and Irene's lives were not demarcated along lines of wealth. Part of the crux of their conversation in the beginning centers around the fact that they both have money, children, husbands, nice houses. In some ways, I loved the way this challenged 1920's notions of blackness; I don't think the average white person thought of blacks as being educated, capable of being high-income earners, etc. and Irene's husband Brian is a doctor and they have servants. That being said, there was an interesting disconnect in a way, in that I wondered if Clare's passing would have been somehow more 'permissible' if Irene were not living a life that was equally comfortable. But again, perhaps this is precisely Larsen's point! #layersonlayers
On not being safe
I loved these lines. Here's Clare describing herself to Irene, when Irene tells her it wouldn't be 'safe' to spend time together:
Why, to get the things I want badly enough, I'd do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away. Really, 'Rene, I'm not safe. God, I love this line.And then later, Irene reflecting on Clare's behavior:
If, at the time of choosing, Clare hadn't precisely reckoned the cost, she had, nevertheless, no right to expect others to help make up the reckoning. Again. LOVE.On realizing Clare and Brian are...
The scene where Irene puts two and two together around Clare and Brian and Brian's increasing emotional distance is so lyrically depicted:
In the room beyond, a clock chimed. A single sound. Fifteen minutes past five o'clock. That was all! And yet in the short space of half an hour all of life had changed, lost its colour, its vividness, its whole meaning. No, she reflected, it wasn't that that had happened. Life about her, apparently, went on exactly as before.
Yes, life went on precisely as before. It was only she that had changed. Knowing, stumbling on this thing, had changed her. It was as if in a house long dim, a match had been struck, showing ghastly shapes where had been only blurred shadows.The danger of not counting yourself
Irene is the opposite of Clare, and while Clare thinks of herself and herself only, Irene thinks of everyone else. Here's one of her first thoughts after she realizes her husband has been cheating with Clare:
How would it affect her and the boys? The boys! She had a surge of relief. It ebbed, vanished. A feeling of absolute unimportance followed. Actually, she didn't count.Again, so beautifully articulated, and, I think, so often true of mothers. And yet also so unspeakably sad, and perhaps, in the end, dangerous.
On intersectionality
Along the lines of incredible layers, Irene suffers from her blackness not in relation to the white world, per se, but because it ties her to Clare, whom she desperately wants to hate and cast out of her life for good:
For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one's own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved. I think Irene would have liked seeing Lemonade in this moment.On when you talk to your kids about race when they're POC
Another beautifully nuanced exchange between Brian and Irene as they discuss when it's appropriate to talk about race with their sons:
Brian: 'You're absolutely wrong! If, as you're so determined, they've got to live in this damned country, they'd better find out what sort of thing they're up against as soon as possible. The earlier they learn it, the better prepared they'll be.
Irene: 'I don't agree. I want their childhood to be happy and as free from the knowledge of such things as it possibly can be.'
Brian: 'Very laudable. Very laudable indeed, all things considered. But can it?'
I think about this a lot not so much in relation to children in my own family (though I have started to have conversations with my nephew, G, about race, and his school has done a fabulous job of guiding exploration of it and diversity) but more so in relation to the students I've worked with. All of my jobs in education have been non-profit positions, designed ostensibly to support underresourced communities and work to dismantle racism, prejudice, inequity, etc. But at one point do we (or do the families of our students) loop them in to the why of our program? Do we put it front and center and speak transparently about it, so we don't gaslight anyone (as mentioned above)? Or do we honor each family's independent decision and timeline around how and when (and if) to address matters like that with their young adult children? I'm sure on many levels, students of all ages are aware of and conscious of race, and it's not for me to "open their eyes" to anything, but it can feel complex when you're working with a young person and trying to honor their personhood to figure out how and when and where to discuss heavy things.
Referents and Reverberations
Two specific ones came to mind.
This moment: On the floor and the walls the sinking sun threw long, fantastic shadows.
Reminded me of this line from Jane Eyre: Daylight began to forsake the red-room.
And this moment, when Irene is at a party with Brian (and Clare, and a bunch of other people) and she knows about the affair:
Someone in the room had turned on the phonograph. Or was it the radio? She didn't know which she disliked more. And nobody was listening to its blare. The talking, the laughter never for a minute ceased. Why must they have more noise?Reminded me of Macon, and his two-sided cassette tape of silence. Maybe he could lend it to Irene. ;)
Well friends, it's been a strange few weeks, and I'm sure they'll get stranger before they feel normal again. All of this 'social distancing' has made me think of how easy it is to subjugate a population by not allowing them to meet in groups. It made me think of Prague Spring and Arab Spring, of secret police, of World War II, of slaves not being allowed to congregate in groups for fear it would foment rebellion. I know the isolation is for our own health in this case, but it's made me realize how easy it would be to keep people from banding together, from revolting, from communicating, from breaking down barriers, from challenging unjust governments.
And it's certainly reminded me how deeply privileged a life I lead, in that while my grocery store may be short on some goods these days, I've never once gone without a meal from a case of need. And while 'social distancing' reminds me of my loneliness in France, I've never been (and still am not, except perhaps physically) kept from communicating with others, from organizing, from publicly dissenting. And while Coronavirus sounds scary to our most vulnerable communities, and certainly has taken its toll fatality-wise, I live in a country virtually untouched by Ebola, Dengue fever, Malaria, or SARS.
In the mean time, I will also continue to be grateful for another of my life's privileges - reading books. Keep each other safe. Keep faith. Good night.
No comments:
Post a Comment