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rather than vice versa. While acknowledging the mutuality of this relation of doubles, my own analysis emphasizes
Clare’s role as Irene’s double.
    59. Davis,
Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance,
315.
    60. duCille, 105. DuCille both challenges and expands Wall’s and McDowell’s readings of Irene.
    61. Samira Kawash,
Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and
Singularity in African American Narrative
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 18.
    62. Significantly, both William Wells Brown’s
Clotel
and Frank Webb’s
The Garies and Their Friends
refer to the “mezzotinto” of the iris as a physical marker betraying African ancestry in the passing subject.
    63. Frankenberg, 6.
    64. In response to Chesnutt’s article (“What Is a White Man?,” New York
Independent,
May 30, 1889), Cable wrote the following: “You know that all my earlier stories about quadroons really ask this question, ‘What is a white man, What is a white woman?’ ” George Washington Cable, letter to Charles Chesnutt, June 12, 1889. Charles Waddell Chesnutt Collection, Fisk University, Nashville; also cited in Stephen P. Knadler, “Un-tragic Mulatto: Charles Chesnutt and the Discourse of Whiteness,”
American Literary History,
8.3 (Fall 1966), 426–48.
    65. In its draft stage, Larsen’s
Passing
was entitled “Nig”— perhaps, as Thadious Davis speculates, as a “play” upon Carl Van Vechten’s
Nigger Heaven
(1926). What is equally intriguing for me is that its initial title ironically echoed the then “undiscovered” novel by Harriet Wilson, entitled
Our Nig
(1859).
    66. See Mark J. Madigan, “Miscegenation and ‘The Dicta of Race and Class’: The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen’s
Pass
ing,” Modern Fiction Studies 36.4 (Winter 1990), and James L. Wacks, “Reading Race, Rhetoric and the Female Body: The Rhinelander Case and 1920s American Culture,” senior thesis, Harvard University, 1995.
    67. David Theo Goldberg,
Racist Culture, Philosophy and the Politics
of Meaning
(Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1955), 185; also cited in Kawash, 8–9.
    68. James Weldon Johnson,
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), 190.
    69. Tate, 145.

 
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    MAE G. HENDERSON is professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Author of numerous articles on African American and feminist criticism and theory, pedagogy, and cultural studies, she is also editor of
Borders, Boundaries, and Frames;
co-editor (with John Blassingame) of the five-volume
Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals: An Annotated Index of Letters, 1817–1871
.

 
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INTRODUCTION
    Ntozake Shange
    As a person of color—light brown by most standards, but not light enough to pass—I’ve often wondered about the lives of childhood friends and family members who took that precipitous step and crossed over the color line to become white. Remembering that I am of a generation that straddled the era of strict segregation of the races and the toppling of that abominable separation of black and white, I’ve experienced the denigration that Clare Kendry, Nella Larsen’s protagonist in
Passing,
sought to escape. So I understand the impulse not to announce to everyone that which they can’t ascertain on their own. Or as Larsen writes:
    Absurd! Impossible! White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot. They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy. Never, when she was alone, had they even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro.
    Clare Kendry, unlike her friend Irene Redfield, takes it upon herself to pass. But the aloneness brings her back time and again to the