Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gayle Wald is Assistant Professor of English at George Washington University.

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"Deeply engaging, well-researched, and effective, "Crossing the Line" is a fine multidisciplinary study not only of passing narratives but of the social, political, and economic struggles that they negotiate in racial terms."-- Priscilla Wald, author of "Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form"

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CROSSING the Line

Duke University Press

Contents

Preface.............................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments.....................................................................................................xiIntroduction: Race, Passing, and Cultural Representation............................................................1Chapter 1 Home Again: Racial Negotiations in Modernist African American Passing Narratives.........................25Chapter 2 Mezz Mezzrow and the Voluntary Negro Blues...............................................................53Chapter 3 Boundaries Lost and Found: Racial Passing and Cinematic Representation, circa 1949.......................82Chapter 4 "I'm Through with Passing": Postpassing Narratives in Black Popular Literary Culture.....................116Chapter 5 "A Most Disagreeable Mirror": Reflections on White Identity in Black Like Me.............................152Epilogue: Passing, "Color Blindness," and Contemporary Discourses of Race and Identity..............................182Notes...............................................................................................................191Bibliography........................................................................................................227Index...............................................................................................................241

Chapter One

To Market, to Market To buy a Plum Bun Home again, Home again, Market is done. -Children's rhyme and epigraph to Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral, JESSIE REDMON FAUSET

In 1926 Jessie Redmon Fauset decided to resign from her post at The Crisis, the influential NAACP house publication where she had served as literary editor since 1919. After seven years of energetically promoting the work of writers such as Langston Hughes, Counte Cullen, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay, Fauset may have turned in her letter of resignation with the hope of securing more time to devote to her own fiction (her first novel, There Is Confusion, had been published in 1924). Yet if she harbored any such intentions, Fauset chose not to reveal them to Joel Spingarn, a friend and patron of the burgeoning New Negro Renaissance, whom Fauset solicited for help in finding new employment. In a letter to Spingarn, Fauset listed what she saw as her job prospects, in descending order of preference: to work as a publisher's reader, if the pay were sufficient; to be a social secretary in a private family; to work at one of the New York foundations; or to return to teaching French. Knowing that her opportunities would be limited, she tactfully advised Spingarn what to do if the "question of color" were to arise. "In the case of the publisher's reader," she wrote, almost as an afterthought, "I could of course work at home."

Citing Fauset's letter to Spingarn in her introduction to the 1990 reissue of Fauset's novel Plum Bun, a work that centers an artistically ambitious female protagonist, Deborah McDowell writes that it "shows Fauset combining an enterprising spirit with a sober, no-nonsense recognition of the realities of occupational segregation." To this we might add that the letter-and particularly Fauset's anticipatory offer to "work at home" as a way of negotiating the protocols of a segregated public sphere-also resonates with multiple and subtle ironies. For one, it anticipates the literary-critical legacy that has extolled Fauset for her behind-the-scenes role as editor while casting a more equivocal eye over her own literary production, which included four novels, children's literature, and numerous short stories and essays. Echoing Langston Hughes's famous description of Fauset (in his autobiography The Big Sea) as one of the three people who "midwifed the so-called New Negro literature into being," scholars have typically assessed Fauset's "contributions" to African American literary tradition in terms of her helpful encouragement of others. While protgs such as Hughes prospered, Fauset would eventually be assigned to the ranks of African American literature's "Rear Guard"-a term that paradoxically registers her importance in terms of her distance from the creative centers of modernist culture. The self-seclusion suggested by Fauset's offer to "work at home" thus resonates with her willingness to promote the work of younger writers at the expense of her own literary reputation, which suffered, by comparison, for being rooted in the genteel traditions of nineteenth-century bourgeois domestic fiction, which it also critiqued.

We might also consider Fauset's proposition in terms of the capitalist scripting of "home" as that symbolic as well as literal location where middle-class women are seen most to embody the private role that gender prescribes. Working "at home" as a publisher's reader is, of course, not the equivalent of performing housework; nevertheless, the phrase conjures the gendered construction of labor performed in the domestic sphere as nonproductive and therefore invisible. Her offer to work at home thus links Fauset, a middle-class intellectual of old Philadelphia stock, with the majority of black women in the 1920s, who found their most ready source of employment in domestic labor, and whose "public sphere" of work was the private sphere of middle-class white women. While it denotes the specific physical location where Fauset will do her editorial work, the word "home" is thus also suggestive of the place of black women within social hierarchies that delimit their agency within, and access to, the spheres in which socially visible and valued "work" is performed. Indeed, in Fauset's anticipation of staying at home as a condition of her work for a white publishing house, we can see these two spaces-home as a literal place and home as a symbolic social location-coincide and overlap.

Taking into account these convergences between the critical neglect of Fauset's published works, the construction of middle-class women's identities through domestic ideology, and the racialization of domestic labor through the restriction of African American women's opportunities for waged labor, we can begin to discern the multiple negotiations of power-the complex combination of resignation, self-discipline, and strategic resolve-involved in Fauset's offer to work at home. In particular, we can observe Fauset's resourceful response to her racial exclusion from the public sphere of literary production and "work" through the modes of gendered agency available to her via cultural ideals of middleclass domesticity. As McDowell's use of the term "enterprising" suggests, she would indeed be reframing the privatization of her identity as a black woman in terms of professional and economic need and desire. In working at home, Fauset would be withdrawing from the racially segregated public sphere, even while deploying such withdrawal as a means of securing her role as a publisher's reader. Interpreted in this way, Fauset's offer to work at home is significant not merely as her pragmatic recognition of racism and gender discrimination, but as her resourceful appropriation of gendered norms and expectations of domestic virtue to assert herself as a black female intellectual, or "race woman." Relegated to a...