Read Online Nella Larsen by Passing - Free Book Online Page B

lives of certain of her old school friends, people who know she is a Negro but who are as capable of passing as she is. It is as if Larsen wanted to invite us into a closed circle of the well-off light-skinned Negroes who distance themselves from their darker brethren by class, color, and fashion.
    It is impossible to escape the beauty of Clare Kendry, her sense of fashion and drawing room manners. As Larsen writes:
    Clare, exquisite, golden, fragrant, flaunting, 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.
    At one point Irene Redfield thinks that Clare was born out of her correct era, that she belongs in the time of French salons and the antebellum South— which is telling, because both of these epochs were sustained by the exploitation of the masses of people. Irene, too, is seduced by Clare’s beauty, her mystery, and brazen risk taking. For Clare is married to a man who literally hates Negroes and doesn’t know he is married to one—he calls her “Nig” as a private joke for how dark she got in the sun.
    And Clare wants Irene to provide her entrée into the Negro society of the 1920s, though she could lose everything: someone might see her and put two and two together. (If you socialize with Negroes, you must be one—who else but “colored” would want to be around us?)
    Clare wants Irene to lay her life open to her on a whim—on the occasion of her husband’s absence, whenever it pleases her to visit the “Negro,” as if Irene were there for her amusement, to see Negroes, not unlike the hordes of whites who invaded Harlem at the time to look at us, to dance our dances, to guess who among us was more white than the others. Irene realizes that “Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it.”
    This sort of betrayal tortured Irene, as does her husband’s friendliness toward Clare. Brian Redfield is a handsome and accomplished doctor. He longed for some of the freedoms his color denied him, and his true private obsession is Brazil, where, he imagines, color is of no import. Irene insists he give up the fantasy of Brazil for her sake, their children’s, and their comfortable life. She refuses to take his dream seriously.
    Irene is tormented by both these forces—Clare Kendry’s passing back and forth and Brian Redfield’s resentment that she is the cause of his lack of freedom. Irene cherishes her boys of different colors and her secure life during Harlem’s Renaissance as a member of the elite light-skinned Talented Tenth. She takes pride in the advancement of the race, as evidenced by her participation in the Negro Welfare League—though her husband sees it as an unwelcome obligation to help the poorer brothers. Let there be no mistake, Larsen bluntly exposes the classism and racism of this small clique of our population by offering no personalities for the household help of the Redfield house: black and poor and ignored except for their efficiency. So, Irene Redfield’s suffering brought about by Clare Kendry is limited to the fate of her class and caste. Irene even upbraids her husband for speaking honestly about lynchings because she wants her sons to be “happy,” meaning ignorant of the true perils of Negro life at that time.
    Nevertheless, Irene Redfield openly participates in Clare Kendry’s very dangerous tiptoeing back and forth over the color line and guards Clare Kendry’s charade like an obsessed lover, constantly submitting herself to the allure of Clare’s beauty and the “furtive mystery” of her person. There is no way to ignore the homoerotic undertones of their relationship, as evidenced in one of Clare Kendry’s letters to Irene:
    . . . For I am so lonely . . . cannot help