Book Clubbing: The Human Stain

This spring my book club tackled Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, winner of the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award Winner. Set in 1998, during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the novel chronicles the rise and downfall of Coleman Silk, a classics professor at a small New England college, who has lived most of his adult life as a white man. None of his colleagues, students, not even his wife and children, know that he was born and raised as a black man in a family of mixed white-black heritage. The Human Stain explores the ambiguous borders between truth and deception, white and black, freedom and fate. Can you truly expunge your family and ethnic background and remake yourself in any image - without lasting consequences. Can you will your identity? What is gained and what is lost when you erase your past?

If the American history of racial passing fascinates you, black passing as white, and white passing black, the library holds some fascinating reading for you!

In The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, author Daniel Sharfstein examines the lives of three families who transitioned from black to white during the 18th and 19th centuries. One family is that of Gideon Gibson, a descendant of freed Virginia slaves, who marries a white woman and becomes a wealthy landowner in South Carolina. Gibson’s descendants jettison their African American roots, losing, for several generations, all memory of their roots. The Invisible Line is a line in the sand – shifting, fluid, sometimes arbitrary.

An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege by Heidi Ardizzone tells the story of a biracial woman, passing as white, who became the longtime director of the J.P. Morgan Library. Greene (1883-1950) broke through class, racial, class, and gender ceilings. In Passing Strange: a Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line by Martha A. Sandweiss, the passing is reversed. Clarence King, a uniquely accomplished and lauded 19th century American scientist and member of a socially prominent Newport family, lived for thirteen years a double life— as the white Clarence King and as the black Pullman porter and steelworker, James Todd. Only as James Todd was he able to marry Ada, the black woman whom he loved. King-Todd’s secret was only revealed to Ada in the last days of his life.

This phenomenon of white-to-black passing is the topic of Near Black: White-to-Black passing in American Culture by Baz Dreisinger. This may be less common then the reverse (passing as white), but it is equally fascinating. Dreisinger looks at both historical figures and culture (films, novels) from the 1930’s to today. The Jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow said he had lived with black Americans to such an extent and become so identified with jazz, that his skin had actually darkened. White journalists, such as Grace Halsell, attempted to pass as black in order to report on the issues of Black America. Halsell disguised her true skin color, traveled through America as a black woman, and eventually wrote Soul Sister based on her experiment.

The Bondwoman's Narrative, a novel by Hannah Crafts, was probably written in the mid 19th century by an African-American runaway slave. Discovered in the 20th century by scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., it became a 2002 bestseller. Included in this tale of a childhood in slavery and final escape to freedom in the North, is a slave mistress who passes as white. The title character, the slave, Hannah Crafts, whose skin is also "almost white” also uses her ability to pass to escape North.

James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man tells the tale of a biracial man raised as black, who as an adult decides to pass as white, marries a white woman, and raises his children as white. He never reveals the truth about his heritage to anyone but his wife. But the deception is costly, says the ex-coloured man: “my love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am, and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet, when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought, that after all I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.”

Finally, the classic fictional narrative of black-to-white passing is the 1929 novel Passing by Nella Larsen. Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, two light-skinned black women take different tracks in their attempts to counteract racism. Redfield only sometimes passes as white when circumstances require, but Kendry has abandoned her black identity and attempts live as a white woman. The consequences for both are tragic.

- Karen S.