Joanna refuses to marry a Negro whom she found “charming and sympathetic ... [but] too white. She did not want a marriage which would keep the difficulties of color more than ever before her eyes.” Plum Bun (1929) is greatly concerned with “passing.” Believing that “the great rewards of life—riches, glamour, pleasure—are for white-skinned people only,” Angela goes “over the line.” After a disillusioning liaison with a rich white man, “which left no trace on her moral nature,” she falls in love with Anthony Cross, and fears to reveal her secret. But love will find a way: he reveals that he too is of Negro parentage, “passing” because his father was lynched by a mob. So now they can marry, as in Veiled Aristocrats. The beautiful brown sister, for whom life has been evenly pleasant, likewise marries happily at the book’s end.
The Chinaberry Tree (1931) is again concerned less with the unspectacular drama of the Negro middle class, than with the melodrama of the octoroon. The two heroines are illegitimate. Laurentine is the daughter of Aunt Sal and Colonel Halloway, who loved Sal devotedly but could not marry her. In contrast to Laurentine’s love affair, there is a great deal of confusion in the life of Melissa, who is saved only in the nick of time from marrying her half-brother. There are valuable glimpses of Negro community life in Red Brook, the characters ranging from Mrs. Ismay, a Bostonian of “innate gentility,” to young pool-room sports. But the complications springing from the “mystery of birth” make what could have been realism into old-fashioned romance. Olivia Cary, who dominates Comedy, American Style (1933) is obsessed by the need to be white, not out of shame for her blood, but because of the things which the white world possesses. She persecutes her husband and drives her daughter into a loveless marriage and her son to suicide. The bitter comedy of race-prejudice is ultimately blamed. With random flashes of power, Comedy, American Style is without satiric drive, and manages to be sentimental instead of tragic.
Jessie Fauset has been called by one critic the American woman most worthy “to wear the mantle of Jane Austen’s genius.” This comparison is not apt: Jane Austen’s satiric approach to her people and setting and her neatly logical plots are not evident in Miss Fauset’s four novels. Miss Fauset is sentimental, and regardless of her disclaimers, is an apologist. She records a class in order to praise a race. Favorite characters are chauvinists, condemning “the dastardly American whites,” believing that Negro blood is “the leaven that will purify this Nordic people of their cruelty and their savage lust of power.” Having courageously set herself to chart the class of Negroes she knows, Jessie Fauset, at her best, succeeds in a realism of the sort sponsored by William Dean Howells. Too often, however, instead of typical Negro middle class experience we get the more spectacular “passing,” and exceptional Negro artists and cosmopolitans. Miss Fauset has written:
To be a Negro in America posits a dramatic situation. The elements of the play fall together involuntarily; they are just waiting for Fate the producer to quicken them into movement,—for Chance the Prompter to interpret them with fidelity.
But her novels rely too much upon Fate and Chance.
The Tragic Mulatto Passes For White. Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) covers a great deal of ground, from Georgia to Chicago, Harlem, Copenhagen, and finally a small southern town. Upper class Negroes are her main characters, and their snobbishness is revealed (both consciously and unconsciously). Helga Crane is buffeted about, but does not attain tragic stature. The attempt to reveal a self-centred, harassed personality is commendable, but is not helped by scenes like the one in which the sophisticated heroine attends a church meeting, and there, overwhelmed by the frenzy, begins to yell like one insane, and to weep torrents of tears. She felt “a supreme aspiration toward the regaining of simple happiness ... unburdened by the complexities of the lives she had known.” In Passing (1930) Mrs. Larsen is anxious to set before us the refinement and good taste of wealthier Negroes. Clare, who “passes,” is unhappy, and frequently visits Harlem. “You don’t realize, you can’t realize how I want to see Negroes, to be with them again, to talk with them, to hear them laugh.” Says the author’s spokesman, “they always come back.” Discovered in Harlem by her Negro-hating husband, Clare falls from a sixth story window—death solves her problems. Her friend, Irene, who would not “pass,” lives in contrast a happy, respectable life.
White novelists rushed into print with a different version. Vara Caspary’s The White Girl (1929) and Geoffrey Barnes’ Dark Lustre (1932) are so alike in essentials that they should be considered together. Both of the heroines are repelled by Negro life and Negro suitors. Both because of their exotic beauty become artistic models, and both have tragic love affairs with white men. In The White Girl, Solaria’s secret is revealed by the coincidental appearance of her brown-skinned brother. Desperate, and believing that she is growing darker, she drinks poison. In Dark Lustre Aline’s dilemma is solved by having her die in childbirth, but her whiter baby lives to continue “a cycle of pain.” Both books advance the old superstitions. Solaria at a wild party is thus explained: “It was the colored blood in her, the heritage from some forgotten ancestor, that released these warm wild winds of passion.” Aline is thus explained: “There was too much nigger in her to follow a line of reasoning when the black cloud of her emotions settled over it.” It is all so sad.
Hallie Dickerman’s Stephen Kent (1935), on the other hand, takes up the cudgel for her mulatto hero’s superiority, but he is made too superior, winning prizes and acting nobly at every turn. There is much mystery about “tainted blood,” about the reappearance of colored blood “unto the third and fourth generations.” A sympathetic plea for justice, Stephen Kent is still hard to credit. Imitation of Life (1933) by Fannie Hurst was well meaning, perhaps, but it, too, perpetuated old stereotypes. Peola longs to be white: “I won’t be a nigger! I won’t be a nigger!” Her black mother is philosophical about it: “It may be mixed up wid plenty of white blood ... but thin out chicken gravy wid water an’ it remains chicken gravy, only not so good.” When Peola meets with problems:
Lord git de white horses drove out of her blood. Kill de curse—shame de curse her light-colored pap lef’ for his baby. Chase it, rabbit’s foot. Chase de wild white horses trampin’ on my chile’s happiness.... It’s de white horses dat’s wild, a-swimmin’ in de blood of mah chile....
It is no wonder that, longing to be stable, Peola “passes” and marries on the other side. Delilah, with a “rambunctious capacity for devotion,” is the old contented slave, brought up to date, worshipful of her white Miss Honey Bea, to whom her drudgery has brought wealth. The statement is clear: black Negroes, contented with serving and worshipping whites; mixed Negroes, discontented, aspiring, and therefore tragic. Alas, the poor mulatto!