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    Passing
    Passing
    Passing
    Ebook183 pages2 hours

    Passing

    By Nella Larsen, Maggie Lily and Darryl Pinckney

    4/5

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    Restless Classics presents the ninetieth anniversary edition of an undersung gem of the Harlem Renaissance: Nella Larsen's Passing, a captivating and prescient exploration of identity, sexuality, self-invention, class, and race set amidst the pealing boisterousness of the Jazz Age.

    When childhood friends Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry cross paths at a whites-only restaurant, it’s been decades since they last met. Married to a bigoted white man who has no idea that she is African American, Clare has fully embraced her ability to “pass” as a white woman. Irene, also light-skinned and living in Harlem, is shocked by Clare’s rejection of her heritage, though she too passes when it suits her needs. This encounter sparks an intense relationship between the two women who, as acclaimed critic and novelist Darryl Pinckney writes in his insightful introduction, reflect Larsen’s own experience of being “between black and white, and culturally at home nowhere.”

    In a culture intent on setting boundaries, Clare and Irene refuse to adhere to expectations of gender, race, or class, culminating in a tragic clash of identities, as their relationship swings between emotional hostility and intense attraction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRestless Books
    Release dateOct 16, 2018
    ISBN9781632062031
    Author

    Nella Larsen

    Nella Larsen was born in Chicago in 1891 to a white Danish mother and a black West Indian father. She studied in America and Denmark and throughout her writing career she worked as a children’s librarian and primarily as a nurse. In 1928 her first novel Quicksand was published to great critical acclaim. Passing was published a year later. Her marriage to Dr Elmer Imes brought her into contact with the upper echelons of New York’s black society and she became an important female voice of the Harlem Renaissance. She was the first black woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing. Divorced in 1933, she spent the rest of her life working as nurse. Nella Larsen died in 1964.

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    Reviews for Passing

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    • 4/5
      Nella Larsen’s use of color in “Passing” is apropos since it’s a story about different women who can racially pass as white and the attendant problems of identity within different social circles. It’s also the first time the two main characters have met in years. The idea of passing could also refer to marital infidelity or transitory relationships or, simply, the brief glimpse a person may get of themselves —that moment of stark lucidity before the mirror. There’s a lot going on here. But the author’s use of color is as beautiful, original and evocative as it is pervasive. “Brilliant red patches flamed in Irene Redfield’s warm olive cheeks.” “A waiter passed her, followed by a sweetly scented woman in a fluttering dress of green chiffon whose mingled pattern of narcissuses, jonquils, and hyacinths was a reminder of pleasantly chill spring days.”“Irene watched her spread out her napkin, saw the silver spoon in the white hand slit the dull gold of the melon.”“Entering, Irene found herself in a sitting room, large and high, at whose windows hung startling blue draperies which triumphantly dragged attention from the gloomy chocolate-colored furniture. And Clare was wearing a thin floating dress of the same shade of blue, which suited her and the rather difficult room to perfection.”“A pale rose color came into Clare’s ivory cheeks.”“Clare, exquisite, golden, fragrant, in a stately gown of shining black taffeta, whose long, full skirt lay in graceful folds about her slim golden feet; her glistening hair drawn smoothly back into a small twist at the nape of her neck; her eyes sparkling like dark jewels. Irene, with her new rose-colored chiffon frock ending at the knees, and her cropped curls, felt dowdy and commonplace.”“Clare fair and golden, like a sunlit day. Hazelton dark, with gleaming eyes, like a moonlit night.”“Irene couldn’t remember ever having seen her look better. She was wearing a superlatively simple cinnamon-brown frock which brought out all her vivid beauty, and a little golden bowl of a hat. Around her neck hung a string of amber beads that would easily have made six or eight like one Irene owned. Yes, she was stunning.”“The day was an exceptionally cold one, with a strong wind that had whipped a dusky red into Felise’s smooth golden cheeks and driven moisture into Irene’s soft brown eyes.”OK, so I know that’s a lot to drop in an FB post, but that’s the power color has in this book. It’s a cumulative power. And all that paint builds up like impasto and makes you aware of each individual line in the brush strokes. The pain, the jealousy, the struggles, the frustration, the awe, the heartbreak—it’s all in there. Layers upon layers of gorgeously tormented meetings in the passing between humans. From race to race, sex to sex, social class to class, we all leave our thick lines in the paint. Will it compliment or contrast our idea of our own existence when we see it—when we happen upon that glimpse in the passing?“Her whole body went taut. In that second she saw that she could bear anything, but only if no one knew that she had anything to bear. It hurt. It frightened her, but she could bear it.”Goddamnit, Nella Larsen. You wrote a book that will have a far greater effect on me than the title would otherwise suggest.
    • 5/5
      Page turner! The end leaves you wondering why?
    • 5/5
      A great look into the world of passing as it existed in the 1920's.
    • 4/5
      Nella Larson's Passing is one of the key novels of the Harlem Renaissance, written in a restless and apprehensive prose that is more than a little gothic. A solid example of the psychological novel, the book is of great interests to scholars of Black Criticism for its articulations of race, and also to feminist theory for its questions about gender roles and motherhood. I read this book for an LGBT Literature class, and the application of queer theory here poses the question, "Is Passing passing as a novel about passing?" Is there a subtext of same sex attraction here that is taken out of focus by the novel's strong emphasis on race?I think all of the possible theoretical queries that the novel invites us to pursue our worth considering, but the plot's penchant for mystery and the necessity of reader inference into details make all but the most obvious questions challenging.
    • 3/5
      I keep waffling between 3 and 4 stars. There were moments of brilliance when I just wanted to run up to someone and shove the pages of this book in their face. "Read this! Read this!" I wanted to blurt out at the person closest to me. But, then the story got predictable real fast. I sometimes have little patience for characters who do painfully stupid things.
    • 4/5
      The second novella from Nella Larsen, lost writer of the Harlem Renaissance. In this book, Irene reconnects with her childhood friend Clare, who is passing for white in a marriage with a typical white racist of the Jazz Era. Irene's physician husband Brian wants to leave the US for Brazil, where he is convinced that their sons will be able to avoid a childhood of suffering from extreme racism. Irene, however, is a "race woman" who is very comfortable in her middle class Harlem life and is a control freak to boot, keeping her husband and boys in line. Clare, a "sheba", is a symbol of all that is free and wild and there is an underlying sexual tension between the women that Irene greatly fears. In fact, under her staid life, Irene is the sum of many fears, and Clare ends up suffering for them. I loved this book and thought that Larsen did an amazing job voicing Irene's inner thoughts. Wow, would this make a movie, comparable to "Their Eyes Were Watching God".
    • 4/5
      Written in 1929 Larsen conveys the thoughts and feelings as well as the turmoil and animosity toward African Americans that were prevalent to the times.Irene is a light skinned negro who at many times can pass for a white person, provided she is not with people of her own race. It is on one of these such days that she takes tea by herself and finds a woman staring at her. Who she comes to find out is a friend from her past, also very light skinned. This woman, Clare, invites Irene to come to her home for a small party one night and after much hesitation she accepts. Here Irene, Clare, and Gertrude (another light skinned negro whom they both grew up with) enjoy each others’ company until Clare’s husband comes home. He is white and extremely racist and has no idea his wife is part negro.This novella is about how Clare and Irene find their own identity apart from what has been branded on them. As much as it is about them finding their own identity it also deals with how the rest of the world sees them.
    • 4/5
      A short novel about a woman who crossed the color line in 1920s New York/Chicago. After her parents' deaths, teen Clare was sent to love with her elderly white aunts in New York. And with that, she successfully crossed the color line, marrying a wealthy white businessman.But that meant she could not go back to Chicago, and had to let those friends go. And her husband teases her for how dark she gets in the sun. They have a daughter, Clare is beautiful, but when she runs into her childhood friend Irene some 20 years later, she admits she misses the culture she grew up in and the people she grew up with, despite wondering why more don't cross just for the convenience.But she is playing with fire. Visiting Irene and another friend or two, making new friends, attending events in Harlem. She must know this won't end well--Irene is worried.
    • 4/5
      This brilliant novella was written in 1929 by a belle of the Harlem Renaissance who is all but forgotten today. It tells the story of race in America by way of two successful African American women: one who chooses to “pass” as white and the other who doesn’t. The story comes to us by way of the arrogant, then conflicted and finally terrified primary character Irene as she works through her relationship with the beautiful, flamboyant and “having” Clara. Both women are driven by their personal powers, their desires and their insecurities, but their struggles take different routes and are tangled together in unexpected ways. The novella offers psychological depth in the tradition of Virginia Woolf, although its story line is more directed and more accessible. I found it fascinating, both from a historical point of view and a personal one. The insights about race are still relevant today, but even without race as a pivot, the tale of choices made and paid for will resonate with many readers. It certainly did with me.
    • 4/5
      This was a very interesting, enjoyable read. Even though it was written in 1929, the book is very relevant to present day also. The characters are well developed and the author's writing is such that you are drawn to loathe some of their behavior. I did not expect the ending and was very surprised. I would recommend this book to everyone and I look forward to reading more of Larsen's work.
    • 3/5
      Melodramatic and overwrought prose by today's standards, but still revealing of race relations of its time (1920s). A rather shocking ending...was not expecting that at all!
    • 4/5
      A very quick and easy read that must have been quite controversial when it was written. Passing is the story of two black women who are so light skinned they can pass for white. One is married to a black man, the other who is married to a white man who does not know that she has"negro blood."
    • 4/5
      Once again Nella Larsen manages to combine a great deal in a few pages. The title of this novella is Passing, and there's more than one person doing it. Clara, the beautiful blond mixed race daughter of a janitor, is the main person passing; but Irene the security hungry wife and Brian her supercilious husband do their share. Larsen was such an astute observer of humanity, I want to credit some of that to her background as a nurse. Literature would have benefited if she had written more.
    • 4/5
      Great book, quick read. Passing is the story of two women who are black and grew up as childhood friends in Chicago. It was published in 1929 and is set in Harlem Renaissance period, a period covering from 1918 to 1930 and is a time period of black culture/art. It did not just occur in Harlem New York but that might be the largest setting. This is a story of race and choices. One girl chose to escape her culture and married a white man and did not tell him. The other girl, Irene, married within her race and it is her story as well. There is a third choice but that girl only has a small part in the book. She married white but he knew she was black. That is just one layer of this great book. Passing is not the first book to be written about Passing; not the first book to examine Passing, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, The Father of Désirée's Baby, The Garies and Their Friends but this book does offer a inventive approach and fresh ideas to the topic, showing how even though one married black and lived as black she was still creating her own fiction. The story is great with an interesting conclusion. I guess I didn't see that coming but when it was done, I also was not surprised. And the ending remains ambiguous, IMO. The characters are great. It is highly readable. Achievement: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006/2008/2010/2012 Edition), Guardian 1000 (State of the nation), 500 Great Books by Women (Choices), David Bowie's Top 100 (1929). The book is told from Irene's POV and some is her stream of conscious and some her interactions.
    • 4/5
      Got totally caught up in the central conflict, was not expecting the resolution. The intro in the Penguin Classics edition was so bad, full of spoilers and academese, that I put it down for six years before restarting it.
    • 4/5
      I've gotten to the point in my reading life where I can frequently predict what's going to happen in a book. Whether it's a result of reading so voraciously for so many years or from my knowledge of story structure, themes or being able to interpret subtext and recognize foreshadowing, I'm not sure. Of course, I'm not always right, but my batting average is pretty darn good. That's why books that surprise me in some what always end up as favorites. The ending of Passing surprised me, though it probably shouldn't have.

      Larsen pulls off a neat trick by making the reader believe this book is about blacks passing as whites and the pull black culture retains over those who "pass." It is a thematic red herring. What this book is really about is one woman's determination to preserve her way of life, social standing and family. Irene is a wonderfully complex character who was alternately sympathetic and a little scary in her single-minded pursuit of her own will.

      Great book. Recommended.
    • 4/5
      The number of commas renders some of the sentences stilted, so the writing is a bit off-putting. The characters of Irene and Clare, two mixed-race women who pass for different reasons and once childhood acquaintances, meet as adults. One selfish and self-centered, heedless of the harm she causes, the other self-sacrificing and jealous and only too aware of "doing the right thing." An unreliable narrator and the question of passing drives the story, but the personalities of the two women, so different but the same creates the tension and the ambiguous end.
    • 4/5
      Written in 1929 during the Harlem Renaissance, Passing by Nella Larsen tells the story of two biracial and light-skinned black women who can pass as white. One, Clare, has married a racist white man who is completely unaware of her past and her identity. Irene, the other, has married a black physician and has no real wish to pass. However when she is tired after a shopping trip, she stops for tea at a whites only tea room where the two women encounter each other. They had grown up in the same neighbourhood but haven’t seen each other since childhood until this meeting. The encounter will lead to unexpected and eventually tragic consequences for both women.Passing is a very short book that packs a huge wallop. It is an intriguing, surprisingly suspenseful, and very insightful book about racial identity and attitudes that still resonates today. There is also an exploration of the tensions that develop between women, between the sexes, and between classes. Irene acts as narrator albeit an untrustworthy one adding a layer of ambiguity to the story and this ambiguity is nowhere more evident than at the end, one that was completely unexpected at least by me. This is not an easy or even a comfortable read but it is an important one and I recommend it highly.Thanks to Edelweiss+ and Restless Books for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review
    • 4/5
      ‘Passing’ is a novella on race relations, written and set during the period of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ of the 1920’s, with some historical significance. 60 years after emancipation, 40 years before the Civil Rights Act, and 50 more beyond that to the present day, where race is still a major problem in America, this represents a time slice in a particular place and cultural segment that Nella Larsen was familiar with first-hand.For the most part in this story, there is peaceful coexistence between races. It’s not a horror story with overt violence. There are some people who are deemed ‘black’ because of some fractional African-American heritage who ‘pass’ as white either permanently, or selectively in some situations. There are society events in Harlem attended by whites either out of interest in the culture (in vogue at the time), or their attraction to African-Americans, and these are harmonious. And there are African-Americans who can’t ‘pass’ who likely run into racism in their lives routinely – but this is not their story, and those events are untold. However, there is one glaring exception – one of the white men who has married a woman who has ‘passed’ (and never told him of her ancestry) is a blatant racist, and at one point he spews his venom in front of her and two others who ‘pass’, without realizing the company he’s in. His tone is not only insulting but murderous. There is therefore an undercurrent of danger in ‘passing’, which ranges from small but humiliating things like being escorted out of a restaurant in front of everyone if detected, to larger things like the annulment of a marriage, or violence. Detection could come from memories of the past, the company one kept, or, if having a child, ‘surprise’ racial characteristics in the baby. There is also an undercurrent of guilt. To what lengths would one go to escape ‘blackness’ in a world filled with racism, where social progress was measured by economic and cultural advancement? What price would be paid by rejecting a portion of one’s ancestry? How could one rationalize and come to terms with wanting children who were “less dark”?Without explicitly asking it, the novella also begs the question, what does it mean to be ‘black’? For it’s odd that those who were 1/4 black and who appeared white would even be considered ‘black’. It was as if any percentage of ‘black blood’ tainted someone, and indeed, the Plessy vs. Ferguson case resulting in the ‘separate but equal’ ruling was pursued by Homer Plessy, who was 1/8 black and denied rights and legal privileges as a result. Aside from the obvious wrongs of racism and segregation, the need to categorize ‘mixed-race’ people to begin with, and then to deem them all black regardless of appearance or the majority of their racial make-up, are additional wrongs – though no one (white or black) in the novella questions this, and in fact, they prefer to know and to ‘bin’ people as one or the other. Larsen herself was acutely aware of this, being herself the daughter of a mixed-race father from the Danish West Indies, and a white mother from Denmark. When her father died when she was young and her mother remarried a white man (and had a white daughter by him), Larsen was the lone ‘colored’ member of the family, and in an ambiguous situation with both white and African-American communities. Anyway, that’s the backdrop and part of what makes it interesting, on top of the questions it raises and the period it represents. However, the writing is only so-so, and the plot line involving infidelity is weak; hence, my somewhat average review score.Just these quotes, the first, on religion:“’Have you ever stopped to think, Clare,’ Irene demanded, ‘how much unhappiness and downright cruelty are laid to the loving-kindness of the Lord? And always by His most ardent followers, it seems.’”And:“’Well, Hugh does think he’s God, you know.’‘That,’ Irene declared, getting out of bed, ‘is absolutely not true. He thinks ever so much better of himself than that, as you, who know and have read him, ought to be able to guess. If you remember what a low opinion he has of God, you won’t make such a silly mistake.’”Lastly, a note on the random connection discovered to the book I read previously, which was McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales – the characterization early on of Clare Kendry as “Catlike. Certainly that was the word which best described Clare Kendry, if any single word could describe her.” – reminding me of the cats and “Their movements were catlike, or perhaps clockwork”, in the story Catskin, by Kelly Link.
    • 4/5
      I found this to be a beautifully drawn character study. It is the story of two girls who were childhood friends but lose touch with each other as they grow up. Both of them biracial, they end up settled in New York. One married to a man of color with 2 children, 1 light skinned and 1 dark skinned and the other married to a very prejudicial white skinned man with 1 light skinned child. This is a very fortunate turn of events for her as she has not informed her husband she is part black. She has been "passing" all this time.The two ladies meet accidentally one day while having tea at a rooftop cafe. They reacquaint themselves with each other and begin to meet socially. As time goes on the one "passing" becomes more and more brave about her lifestyle and begins to yearn for the life of the Harlem Renaissance. She gets careless about where she goes and the company she keeps. What occurs next this is a shocking turn of events.I found this book to be very intelligently and subtly written. It is sad that [[Nella Larsen]] didn't write more than she did for she was a brilliant writer. I highly recommend this book and I think it is one that will stay with me long past my reading of it.
    • 4/5
      This is a great novel concerning 'passing', which refers to black people who have light enough skin to pass as white people, especially Clare, who uses passing to improve her social status. However, the conflict begins when she wants to be reunited with the black community and her reputation in the white community in tact. She employs Irene, who despises Clare for passing and also threatening her secure and safe middle class lifestyle. But if Irene doesn't help Clare, she will feel as if she is betraying her race because they are from the same race. There is only one solution to the problem, but I don't want to spoil the ending for you. Larsen is an excellent write for this, and makes drama real.
    • 3/5
      In 1929, she published Passing, her second novel, which was also critically successful. It is the story of two childhood friends, Clare and Irene. They lost touch when Clare's father died and she moved in with two white aunts. By hiding that Clare was part-black, she was able to 'pass' as a white woman and married a white bigot. Irene by contrast lives in Harlem, commits herself to racial uplift, and marries a black doctor. The novel centers on the meeting of the two childhood friends later in life, and the unfolding of events as each woman is fascinated and seduced by the other's daring lifestyle. The novel traces a tragic path as Irene believes, without concrete evidence, that her husband is having an affair with Clare. Her fears are never clearly justified as incidents seemingly innocent are not probative. Clare's race is revealed to her husband and the novel ends with a 'shocking' finale.The novel is complicated but elegantly plotted. The dual figures of Irene and Clare in many ways mirror each other and allow the author to explore the the complexities of their relationship. While there may be erotic undertones in the two women's relationship, it is their repressed lives that clearly predominates. With Clare in a terrible marriage to a bigot and Irene subject to increasing doubts about her own marriage and family, the novel quickly progresses towards its denouement. I found this a lucidly written depiction of a world that is not limited to blacks, but occurs wherever secrets are allowed to take control of people's lives.
    • 3/5
      Passing is an unusual novella about the lives of upper-crust African-American Harlemites in the 1920's.Light-skinned Irene Redfield and her darker husband Brian, a successful but unhappy doctor, have a very comfortable lifestyle at the top of their social set. But Irene's security and tranquility (two things that are very important to her) are badly shaken when her beautiful, reckless childhood friend Clare comes into the picture. For years, Clare has passed for white, and has even married and had a child with a virulent racist (Clare's husband calls her "Nig", not exactly as an endearment, but apparently he has no clue about her origins). Yet Clare misses her people, and her insistence on straddling the line between black and white ultimately leads to tragedy. My copy of Passing (from Dover Publications) is only 94 pages long, but it took me a week to finish it. The period slang and dense descriptions of emotional states make it slow going at times. Nonetheless, the novel provides interesting insights into female friendship and race relations in the age of the "one drop" rule.
    • 4/5
      This rather slim book packs a punch. Read The Vanishing Half awhile ago which made me think deeper about the act of "passing" and how that would play out through a persons life. Highly recommend both books
    • 5/5
      This short classic, set in New York City, was originally published in 1929 during the Harlem Renaissance. It examined the phenomenon of “passing” – a black person acting as a white person. Of course, the American context has changed significantly since 1929. The concept of race is now, thankfully, widely considered a social construct, without any biological merit. The concept of passing, though still present on occasion, is less of an issue.Nonetheless, Larsen gives us insight into how a culture obsessed with race, as early twentieth-century America was, can sometimes devolve into strange scenarios. In this particular scenario, Irene Redfield lives a comfortable life in Harlem with her physician-husband and children. Notably, she has light skin, but lives as an African American. She becomes reacquainted with a childhood friend Claire Bellew/Kendry. Claire, likewise, has light skin, but effectively “passes” as a white woman with a white husband. Even Claire’s husband does not know of her black lineage.By resuming a loose friendship with Irene, Claire realizes a spiritual longing for the black community in Harlem. Perhaps this is innate, due to her upbringing; perhaps this stems from living some kind of inauthentic existence. Nonetheless, Claire begins to spend time secretly with Irene whenever Claire’s husband is out of town on business. The husband, however, is openly racist and routinely uses the n-word. The obvious instability in this scenario ends up playing out in a shocking manner.In a post-George Floyd era, this book addresses timely issues such as how race affects how we interact in the world. Race in 1920s America is different than race in the 2020s, granted, but we aren’t so far as to be fully colorblind. To cite Cornel West, race still matters. Thus, contemporary readers should not treat this classic as a mere relic of the past.Should people be made to feel ashamed of their race? Is it all about how one presents one’s self? What role does authenticity have to play with the construct of race? This book’s style is easily accessible by many, even youth (though it does contain the n-word). At around 150 pages, it doesn’t take long to read either. In perusing it, perhaps we will find out that the world of the 1920s isn’t all that much different from today’s inequities.
    • 4/5
      Intriguing Portraits in PassingReview of the Penguin Vitae hardcover edition (2017) of the 1929 original.Nella Larsen (1891-1964) was a Harlem Renaissance author who published only two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) before she completely disassociated from writing and spent the rest of her life working as a nurse. This superb new edition from Penguin Vitae includes a thorough 30 page introduction by Emily Bernard and 8 pages of excellent Explanatory Notes by Thaddeus M. Davis.Passing is somewhat of a cat and mouse intrigue between two light-skinned African American women. Clare Kendry is passing for white, even though she is married to a virulently racist White American. Irene Redfield, although she could have passed, has stuck by her African American heritage and community. Kendry now regrets what she has left behind and begins to insinuate herself back into Redfield's life after a chance re-meeting (they had known each other as children) with eventual tragic consequences.I read Passing as part of my subscription to the inaugural 2020 Shakespeare and Company Lost Treasures curated selection. 4 books of the expected 12 have been delivered as of March 2020.
    • 5/5
      Irene Redfield is doing some shopping while on a trip to Chicago, when she stops for a brief rest and some tea at an elegant hotel’s restaurant. She notices a woman at a nearby table keeps staring at her and she’s immediately concerned. Could the woman have somehow discerned that Irene is not white, but a Negro? Larsen was part of the Harlem Renaissance and this book is a marvel of social commentary. In this slim volume Larsen explores issues of black/white identity, of the desire to get ahead and the societal obstacles to that path, of male/female relationships, and female-female rivalries. There is tension, fear, anger, joy, desire and hope. We get a wonderful glimpse of middle-class Black culture in 1920s Harlem. And that ending! My F2F book club had a stimulating discussion.A word of caution re the introduction: Definitely read the introduction, which will give you much insight into the book, the author’s background, and the critical thoughts of various experts. BUT … read the book FIRST, as the introduction will contain major spoilers for what happens in the novel.
    • 4/5
      One of the great things about reading from the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die List is that I have been introduced to many writers that I had not experienced before. Such is the case with Passing by Nella Larsen. This is the story of two American women in the 1920s with a similar background who chose very different ways to live.Both women are very light skinned black women and while Irene is a respected member of the Black community, married to a black doctor and allowing herself to “pass” for white only occasionally, Clare actually lives the life of a white woman, completely denying her black heritage and even hiding her race from her rich, white and bigoted husband. But Clare seemingly desires some contact with the black community and latches onto Irene in order to attend various black social functions. Irene has mixed feelings about Clare, she doesn’t approve of her life choices yet she does her best to protect her secret. Her feelings become even more challenged when she realizes that her husband and Clare are having an affair.I found Passing to be a very interesting story. Nella Larsen herself was of mixed heritage, her mother was Danish and her father a black American. Racial segregation laws were in force until the 1960s and some light-skinned blacks used “passing” in order to obtain equal opportunities and rights, social standing and acceptance. It is unfortunate that Nella Larsen only wrote one other book, but I will be reading that in the near future.

    Book preview

    Passing - Nella Larsen

    Praise for

    Nella Larsen

    "Quicksand and Passing are novels I will never forget. They open up a whole world of experience and struggle that seemed to me, when I first read them years ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable."

    —Alice Walker

    Discovering Nella Larsen is like finding lost money with no name on it. One can enjoy it with delight and share it without guilt.

    —Maya Angelou

    A work so fine, sensitive, and distinguished that it rises above race categories and becomes that rare object, a good novel.

    —W. B. Seabrook,

    The Saturday Review of Literature

    "Passing broke literary ground."

    —The Guardian,

    1000 novels everyone must read

    "I have read and re-read Passing more than a dozen times. Each time I think I can hear Larsen’s own voice more clearly: asking, demanding really, that each of us abandon the labels we’ve been assigned and celebrate the story that we are."

    —Heidi W. Durrow, NPR

    Larsen did not barrel headlong into writing, instead she sidled up to it slowly like a guest unsure of her footing at the party…. An emblematic narrative of life on the ‘color line.’

    —Michelle Dean,

    Lapham’s Quarterly

    Nella Larsen didn’t just eschew tribes—she never had one to begin with…. Unsparing on the madness of racial classification but frank, and very beautiful, on the lure of racial belonging.

    —Parul Sehgal,

    The New York Times

    "[Passing] is a meditation on the uneasy dynamic between social obligation and personal freedom. It dramatizes the impossibility of self-invention in a society in which nuance and ambiguity are considered fatal threats to the social order."

    —Emily Bernard,

    Electric Literature

    Also by Nella Larsen

    Quicksand

    Contents

    Introduction by Darryl Pinckney

    Chronology

    Part One: Encounter

    Part Two: Re-Encounter

    Part Three: Finale

    A Note on the Text

    Suggestions for Further Reading

    A Guide for Restless Readers

    ‌

    Introduction

    Nella Larsen and the Story of Passing

    In Nella Larsen’s day, the theme of passing had been an obsession of American popular literature, of American culture and politics, since the mid-nineteenth century. In most of the fiction by white men about passing, a black girl of tragic birth is compelled by circumstances to pretend to be white. Her beauty always makes an aristocratic white youth fall in love with her. On the verge of marriage, she confesses or is exposed. The white youth—and the white race—are saved. Usually, the deceiving black girl dies of fever or the like. She pays. The difference in how black writers of the same time handled the subject has to do with depiction of motive, sympathy for the black girl’s predicament. When black women writers in late-nineteenth-century black women’s magazines dealt with passing in their fiction, the white suitor is given up not in the name of racial purity but for the sake of black pride. No more suicides over white men.

    The white husband at the end of William Dean Howells’s An Imperative Duty (1891) vows to keep his black wife’s secret, but they move to Italy. Charles Chesnutt in The House Behind the Cedars (1900) introduces a character who convinces his sister to join him in his life of passing for white. Once he has got her across the color line, he disappears from the story. The sister is left to her inevitable romantic doom and we aren’t told how her being exposed affects her brother. In James Weldon Johnson’s novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), the narrator, a successful businessman, looks back on his traumatic experiences as a black youth that led to his decision to pass for white. He is sometimes described as the first character in American fiction to get away with passing, though it is not the novel’s intention to tell us what effect his confession has and on whom. In Nella Larsen’s Passing, the black woman who has been living as a white woman does die, and yet Larsen’s novel feels very unlike previous fictions concerning light-skinned black girls attempting to escape what it means for them to be black. Her refinement has much to do with a deep fatalism at the core of her work.

    For a long time Nella Larsen was the mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance. She published two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), and then nothing more was heard from her. She died in obscurity in 1964. Reprints of her slender, but unsparing novels of class and color consciousness started coming out in the 1970s. Critical studies of the Harlem Renaissance as well as successive biographies of Larsen have filled in most of the story of this elusive and fiercely talented figure.

    Nellie Walker was born in Chicago in 1891. Her father, a black man from what was then the Danish West Indies, worked as a cook, and her mother, a white woman from Denmark, was a domestic and dressmaker. Her father vanished from the picture soon after her birth. Her mother quickly remarried, to a white Danish man, and gave birth to another daughter. Nella Larsen took her stepfather’s name. In an increasingly segregated, racially tense city, the only neighborhood where the Larsens as a mixed-race family could find a place to live was in the red light district. Black people constituted no more than two percent of Chicago’s population at the time. Larsen may have spent part of her childhood with relatives in provincial Denmark—she read and spoke Danish—but by 1907, when her family moved into an all white neighborhood, she was on her own.

    Larsen’s upbringing as the resented stepchild, the darker-skinned daughter whose existence perhaps burdened her otherwise loving mother would inform her fiction about women too dark to be white and too light to be black, women living between black and white, and culturally at home nowhere. Her biographers tell us that she tended to shroud her early life in mystery, ashamed of her lowly origins in the vice district and anxious that people would think her the daughter of a white prostitute. Yet Larsen’s working class mother provided for her black daughter an education that her white daughter would never have.

    However, Larsen’s studies in Nashville, Tennessee at Fisk University came to an abrupt end after only a year. Though it catered to the children of the black bourgeoisie, Fisk reflected ideas about the education of blacks that prevailed when black colleges founded in the South after the Civil War sought to control as well as mold black people. Many were denominational schools that imposed severe restrictions on student behavior. Fisk had rules about the clothes and jewelry its female students could wear. Apparently, Larsen dressed in a way she should not have and was expelled. She would adore good clothes all her life. She spent the next three or four years in Copenhagen, but Europe was not really the answer to her question of where she belonged.

    In 1912, Larsen returned to the US and began training to become a nurse at the Lincoln Hospital and Home in the Bronx, New York, an institution where the doctors were all white and the nursing school all black. After graduating in 1915, she took a position as head nurse at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which had an even stricter atmosphere than Fisk. Larsen resigned in 1916, exhausted by the poor working conditions. Back in New York, having witnessed the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, Larsen gave up nursing to become a librarian. In 1919, she married Elmer Imes, the second black person in US history to hold a doctorate in physics. They moved to Harlem and Larsen took a job at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. After gaining a certificate from the Library School of the NYPL, Larsen worked as a children’s librarian on the Lower East Side.

    By virtue of her marriage, she was a member of Harlem’s black professional class. She and her husband knew everyone who was anybody in Harlem. However, because of her low birth and mixed-race parentage, and because she did not have a college degree, Larsen was alienated from the life of the black middle class, with its emphasis on school and family ties, its fraternities and sororities. Yet she was well placed to catch the first stirrings of the Negro Awakening: the exhibitions, plays, concerts, and books. She drifted away from library work in order to write and in 1926 published her first adult fiction in women’s journals devoted to the romantic short story.

    Self-conscious among the Talented Tenth, some ten years older than Langston Hughes and his crowd—Zora Neale Hurston’s friends didn’t know that she’d lopped a decade off her age—Larsen was maybe more comfortable in Greenwich Village than she was in Harlem. She was drawn to the interracial bohemia frequented by Carl Van Vechten, the white writer and photographer whose controversial novel of 1926, Nigger Heaven, she defended to black people who felt he’d slandered the race by depicting Harlem life as a drunken orgy. But she herself was no celebrant of boldly proclaimed blackness and vernacular liberation. She also wasn’t on the side of black critics who valued art and literature by blacks as the cultural arm of the freedom struggle. She would always be on her own, her own secret.

    When Larsen wrote her first novel, Quicksand, what most influenced how she rendered her tale of a black woman struggling not to be imprisoned by insecure social circumstances was her reading of Henrik Ibsen and Jens Peter Jacobsen. The heroine of Quicksand is the child of a white mother and a black father who deserted them. Larsen kills off the mother pretty soon as well. Her heroine’s experiences are clearly drawn from her own life, so much so that biographers have looked to the autobiographical elements of her novel for clues about Larsen’s restlessness of soul—Negro education; teeming black Harlem; tolerant yet hurtful Copenhagen. It was daring to write about the sexuality of black women, and of single women in the city, but Larsen’s message is bleak. Her heroine is broken by religion, marriage, and drudgery in the South. Quicksand was a kind of purge, a shedding of psychological burdens, preparation for the leap Larsen would make as a writer in the novel that swiftly followed. In Passing, Larsen would give a very worn racial subject defiantly modern treatment.

    Passing is very interior: Larsen’s recessive characters need a lot of explanation, and she was writing a Harlem novel of sensibility. Her view of Harlem differs from that of other novelists of her era who shared her subject, because she deals largely with parties in private homes. Her characters don’t go to cabarets; her dances are club events. There is little of the street in her novel, and certainly none of the decadence behind the unassuming door, as in Van Vechten. It is a woman’s view of Harlem, determined by where she, a nice girl, can go, and when and with whom. Larsen’s control of her Harlem milieu of polite teas and tense cocktails is superb. She takes surfaces seriously: clothes, décor, the weather, faces.

    Things, lovely things for their own sake, play an important part in Larsen’s work. Her feminine sensibility found expression in women characters of terrible wariness and dread of social vulnerability. It shows in her dialogue, in the way the unspoken thought can undercut or contradict what is being said. The prose keeps a certain distance; the formality indicates Irene’s armored personality. Larsen can keep up the tension in the ordinary because she never forgets the conflict between what a character would like to do and what she brings herself to do. The withheld thought is perhaps a feminine strategy in conversation, part of the training in how to defer, to make oneself agreeable, to keep things moving along. What goes unsaid is certainly a useful weapon in Passing.

    By Larsen’s day, passing as a theme had become yet another example of blacks knowing more about whites than whites did about them. As such, Passing is an unusual novel of urban manners, because the focus is not on how the passer is doing among whites, but rather on how black people who know this secret about someone behave toward that person in social situations, uptown and downtown. Moreover, passing was always dramatized as a class question. Why should I be a slave when I’m

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