Passing

By Nella Larsen, Maggie Lily and Darryl Pinckney

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Restless Books
• Release date: Oct 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781632062031

Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen (1891–1964) was an author, nurse, and librarian best known for her contributions to the Harlem Renaissance. Born to a Danish mother and Afro-Caribbean father in South Chicago, Larsen's life would be seemingly marked by her mixed-race heritage. Too Black for white spaces and not quite Black enough for Black spaces, Larsen would find herself constantly at odds in terms of her identity and belonging. First after the death of her biological father, where she would see her mother be remarried to a white man, have a white half-sibling and move to a mostly white neighborhood; next when she would seek a higher education at Fisk University, a historically Black college where she was unable to relate to the experience of her Black peers, and finally in her adult life in New York where she faced difficulties both professionally and socially. In 1914, Larsen would enroll at a nursing school that was heavily segregated and while working as a nurse two years later was employed in mostly white neighborhoods. She would marry Elmer Imes, the second African American to earn a PhD in psychics, in 1919 which–in addition to the couple's move to Harlem–introduced her to the Black professional class; however still, Larsen's near-European ancestry and lack of a formal degree alienated her from Black contemporaries of the times such as Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson. Larsen would begin to pursue a career as a librarian in 1921, becoming the first Black woman to graduate from the New York Public Library's library school and would help with integration efforts within the branches. Her work in libraries would lead her to the literary circles of Harlem and in 1925 she would begin work on Quicksand, her semi-autobiographical debut novel. Published in 1928 to critical and financial success, Larsen would continue to make waves when just one year later, she published her sophomore novel, Passing. The success of her novels as well as her 1930 short story, "Sanctuary," led her to become the first African American woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, which she used to travel through Europe in the wake of her divorce in 1933. Little is known about Larsen's life after she returned to the U.S. in 1937, other than she had returned to nursing, disappeared from the literary world and may have suffered from intense depression. There was some speculation that like the characters in her books, Larsen had elected to pass into the white community given how difficult it was for single women of color to achieve financial independence, but to this day there is no evidence supporting or disproving the claim. While she died alone at the age of seventy-two, Larsen's work cemented her legacy as an important voice in the Harlem Renaissance–one that represented the struggles of identity and culture that befell mixed-raced people of the time.

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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

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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

Reviews for Passing

[carolfoisset · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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

[scottjpearson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[mlyons1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A great look into the world of passing as it existed in the 1920's.

[lynsey2-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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."

[june_clark-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Page turner! The end leaves you wondering why?

[diovival · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[citizenjoyce · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[encephalical · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.