![]() What makes Clare so fascinating is that she revels in the nearness of getting caught. Passing is a performance that, like any other, requires an audience. That Clare airs her biggest secret on the rooftop of a hotel feels right. Clare is white on the rooftop until she calls Irene by her childhood nickname, ’Rene the intimacy of her language, not her physical appearance, transforms her back to the Black woman Irene once knew. Yet, because her husband is too dark to pass, when she is alone, she is occasionally white. Irene is the model Black wife and mother: She lives in Harlem with her husband and sons, and she serves on a committee for the Negro Welfare League. “Never, when she was alone, had they even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro.”įrom the novel’s opening, race is slippery, uneasy and unstable. “White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell,” she thinks. Even then, she is so confident in her ability to fool white people that she feels indignation, not fear. As she enjoys a glass of iced tea on a breezy roof, which feels as relaxing and luxurious as her temporary vacation into whiteness, she suddenly notices a white woman staring at her. Irene has slipped up to a whites-only rooftop to escape the stifling heat passing, to her, is a tool of convenience, not a way of life. What’s most surprising about this reunion is that both women are actually passing at the same time. The novel centers on the tension between these two old friends - one who chooses to pass and the other who chooses not to. But her disappearance into white society is interrupted when she recognizes, by chance, Irene Redfield, a childhood friend, on the rooftop of a Chicago hotel one summer day. She seizes her chance to escape at 18 by marrying Jack Bellew, a wealthy white man who knows nothing of her Black heritage. She grows up poor in Chicago, raised by a raging alcoholic father, and after he dies, she is sent to live with her racist white aunts, who force her to work to earn her keep. Given that my first introduction to a passing character was the whining Sarah Jane, Clare struck me as beguiling and sympathetic. I FIRST READ the 1929 novel “ Passing” by Nella Larsen in college, and no wonder I was so taken by Clare Kendry. Is what true? But of course, we already know the punchline. He only has one question: Is it true? Sarah Jane laughs, unsuspecting. Sarah Jane asks her boyfriend to run away together, the boyfriend pretends to consider it. Part of the pleasure of a passing narrative is watching the passer fool her audience in this scene, however, the audience is aware while the passer is not. In a strange way, the beating scene itself is almost structured like a joke. We’d watched her mope through the whole movie about not wanting to be Black. We knew we were wrong to laugh, but we were too young to take much seriously, let alone a character like Sarah Jane, whom we found more pitiful than pitiable. The frenetic music in the background, the melodramatic slaps, Sarah Jane’s slow crumple to the asphalt. I’m not proud to admit that in elementary school, my best friend and I used to watch this scene over and over again, not because we thought it was tragic, but because we found it funny. “Is your mother a nigger?” he sneers, before beating her in an alley. ![]() Instead, the scene that sticks with me is halfway into the movie, when Sarah Jane meets up with her white boyfriend, who has secretly discovered that she is Black. There’s a scene in the 1959 melodramatic film “ Imitation of Life” that I have seen dozens of times, but it’s not the one you’re probably imagining: the climatic funeral scene where Sarah Jane Johnson, a young Black woman passing for white, flings herself onto the casket of the dark-skinned mother she has spent the entire film disowning. to a virtual conversation, led by Brit Bennett, about “Passing,” to be held on March 9. This essay is part of T’s Book Club, a series of articles and events dedicated to classic works of American literature.
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