From Necessity to Possibility

Abstract

This article applies theories of fragmented postmodern identity and Heidegger’s modes of existence and concept of historicality to the issue of passing and traces the treatment of that motif across six African American novels that move from the largely realistic perspective of the 19th century to the subjectivist perspective of the early 20th century. These novels thus foreshadow the postmodernist questioning of the basis of discrete personal identity. The article claims that, across these novels, the act of passing and its relationship to human identity through time and historical circumstance becomes problematized from a necessary tool for escaping slavery, and so sustaining identity in its most basic form as life itself, to a potential existential dilemma of identity as a matter of authenticity and possibility. The article further discusses whether the individual is constrained by his or her background, especially, by race itself, or is a totally free, ungrounded agent.

The act of passing in early African American novels, whether for White or for Black, or not passing when passing would be possible, is necessarily about identity formation and maintenance, and so can be susceptible to analysis that focuses on questions about the dynamics of identity in each work. Furthermore, identity in these novels exists in a historical and cultural context that has substantial weight that encumbers the forms that identity can take. As M. Guilia Fabi (2001) states,

Early African American novelists used [the awareness that personal identities are constructed] most obviously to explode white delusions of the naturalness and legibility of race, but they also moved on to a deeper and more complex discussion of “the ‘praxis’ of identities” in the making of black culture . . . (pp. 5-6)

At the same time, the issue of identity formation and cultural context has long been seen as fundamental to discussions of postmodernist literature and ethos. In Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture, Phillip Brian Harper (1994) brings concepts about postmodernism, in particular, that “postmodern fiction foregrounds subjective fragmentation” (p. 3), to bear on literary works that “occupy the cusp between the modernist and postmodernist enterprises, and thus . . . constitute prime material for an inquiry into the social problematics that subtend contemporary postmodern practice” (p. 24). His purpose is to interrogate and expand our understanding of and, notably, our theories about the postmodern and, especially, about postmodern identity. P. B. Harper (1994) examines works that are about characters who differ from the social “center” of power, or what P. B. Harper (1994) quotes Audre Lorde as calling the “mythical norm” of being “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian and financially secure” (p. 13), in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, and social class. P. B. Harper (1994) highlights these characters as members of marginalized groups and “suggest[s] that postmodern decenteredness may actually be a function of the increasing implication in the ‘general’ culture of what are usually thought of as socially marginal or ‘minority’ experiences” (p. 12).

In this article, I apply Harper’s thinking about fragmented postmodern identity to the issue of racial passing ¹ and trace the treatment of that motif across six African American novels: The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, written by William Wells Brown (1853/2004); The Bondwoman’s Narrative, A Novel, by Hannah Crafts (circa 1850s, published 2002); The Garies and Their Friends, by Frank J. Webb (1857/1969); Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, by Frances E. W. Harper (1892/1988); The House Behind the Cedars, by Charles Chesnutt (1900/2003); and The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, by James Weldon Johnson, (1912 anonymously and 1927 under the author’s name). These novels, I contend, move from the largely realistic perspective of the 19th century to the subjectivist perspective of the early 20th century and that foreshadow the postmodernist questioning of the basis of discrete personal identity. I claim that, over the course of these novels, the act of racial passing and its relationship to human identity through time and historical circumstance becomes problematized from a necessary tool for escaping slavery, and so sustaining identity in its most basic form as life itself to a potential existential dilemma of identity as a matter of authenticity and possibility. That is, as these novels move toward what might be termed a more postmodern sensibility, the issue of identity can be seen to become more postmodern, or potentially open, as well. For, as bell hooks (1990) has observed, “postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within new culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of self and the assertion of agency” (p. 28). In this movement, the cultural conditions that pertain to the individual and his or her identity are always seemingly in question, that is, whether the individual is constrained by any aspect of his or her background, especially, by race itself, or is a totally free, ungrounded agent. Of course, the very concept of “racial identity” has come to be recognized as an artificial construct of the colonial European powers of the 19th century and their rationale for enslavement and colonialization of subject peoples of color. As Naomi Zack (1997) in her well-known essay, “Race, Life, Death, Identity, Tragedy, and Good Faith,” summarizes,

The concept of race as ordinarily used in racialized and racist cultures is based on pseudoscience and ill will. Even though race is commonly taken to be biological, not all people of a racialized group have the same heritable biological traits. No genes or chromosomal markers for any of the designated groups have been identified. There are also no verified correlations between so-called biological traits and any cultural traits. Empirically, the assumed biological foundation of race turns out to be nothing more than a changing range of biological traits—no different from other biological traits by anything biologically “racial” about them—that have been selected as racial. (p. 99)

The liberatory power of racial passing is, therefore, subject to the critical point of acceptance or rejection of the concept of race itself. For her part, Zack (1997) goes on to make the existential case for the rejection of the concept and of its potential for affecting one’s actual life:

I submit that to experience oneself as a member of an oppressed race in the existential return-to-life after awareness of death constitutes an intolerable constraint on freedom after the return . . . The perpetual moment of freedom is therefore raceless. Race has nothing to do with my life in the existential sense of identity. (p. 103)

Taking the opposite view is no less a philosophical voice than that of George Yancy (2008), who maintains that, as facticity, race does indeed matter:

From the perspective of whiteness, I am, contrary to the existentialist credo, an essence (Blackness) that precedes my existence . . . My darkness is a signifier of negative values grounded within a racist social and historical matrix that predates my existential emergence. (p. 1)

While conceding that race “is not real qua constituting a physical property of the universe” (p. 34) nonetheless, Yancy insists that “race is ‘out there’ in a socially ontologically substantive way” (p. 34, emphasis in original).

In this article, I find it helpful to the discussion to apply central phenomenological tenets from the work of Martin Heidegger. ² For example, I would contend that it is precisely because of Heidegger’s work in healing the schizophrenia brought about by Descartes and, arguably, the whole of European metaphysical thought since the Greeks that Heidegger’s work can be especially helpful in offering a view of human being that rejects the mind–body duality prevalent in the racialized context of African American literature and American culture. More than any other philosopher since Descartes, I would argue, Heidegger succeeded in offering an alternative to the Cartesian dilemma, the fateful division of Being into the subjective and objective, that forced humans from their natural home on the earth and among others and into their own subjectivity as the only epistemological perspective possible. Descartes’s goal was to locate a foundation for science and ultimately for an understanding about the essence of human being itself. By locating this ground in the intellect—“Cogito, ergo Sum”—Descartes believed that he avoided the vagaries of the senses and of ordinary experience. However, the price of his locating this ground in the human intellect was to create a new dualism between the mind and the body, between the subjective and the objective, between “the world of intellectual intuition” and “the world of phenomenal experience” (Fell, 1979, pp. 4-5). Crispin Sartwell (1998) makes the case in Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity that the racial distinction of Black or White is based on “the dualisms that dominate the Western tradition” (p. 14) and that this duality precedes Descartes and is, in fact, characteristic of Western philosophy since its beginnings:

The particular forms of economic and political hegemony which we practice are articulated through what is essentially a metaphysical construction. The primary dualisms of the Western tradition are between mind and body, culture and nature, general and particular. These dualisms are coded into European languages or, it has been suggested (by Derrida among others), are constitutive of European languages. So, if black is coded as physical, natural, and particular . . . and white is coded as intellectual, cultural, and general, this calls into service the vast machinery of Western conceptuality that has been developing since the Greeks. (p. 14)

The thought of Heidegger offers a way out of this dualism and therefore a potential means of striking at the very heart of the racism that results from that dualism. In Being and Time, Heidegger (1962) defines “the entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being . . . by the term ‘Dasein,’” (p. 27) or “Being-there” (p. 27, fn. 1), “there” referring to Being-in-the-world. One of the “existentials,” or ways that Dasein is aware of itself as existing, is state-of-mind, which Heidegger (1962) defines as “our mood, our Being-attuned” to the world and to our past in it (p. 172). One of the major characteristics of state-of-mind is “thrownness,” our “facticity,” the “that it is and has to be” of Dasein (p. 174, emphasis in original), the things that we are physically, socially, and historically over which we have no control. In its thrownness, Dasein is already in the world. In terms of the question of a first cause or a ground to human being, then, Heidegger (1962) asserts the

impossibility of the metaphysical quest for a transcendental, nonrelative ground; the quest contradicts itself by being always already grounded in the experience of the absence of a final ground . . . the true and always-prior ground is the clearing, Dasein’s own Being-in-its-world. (As cited in Fell, 1979, p. 58)

In other words, the

primordially given “I” or self is always and already part of the world; and indeed, a world in which other persons are likewise given . . . the highly abstract and purely rational “ego” of the Cartesian metaphysics is a fiction . . . (Gelven, 1989, pp. 70-71)

Sartwell (1998) cautions,

It is characteristic of European and European-American male theoretical production that it fails to acknowledge its sources in personal experience and in social situations. In particular it fails to acknowledge its location in the social situation of privilege and oppression . . . Left to my own devices, I disappear as an author. That is the “whiteness” of my authorship. This whiteness is, for us, a form of authority; to speak (apparently) from nowhere, for everyone, is empowering, though one wields power here only by becoming lost to oneself. (p. 6, emphasis in original)

However, in contrast to this European tradition and the reason that Heidegger himself saw his work as representing a turn away from—or, famously, the “end” or “completion” of Western metaphysics (Heidegger, 1977, p. 432)—is that in his approach, one’s being is always already “in the world.” It is not possible by definition to deny one’s “social situation,” or to transcend—that is, meta—the physical world. In the process of my investigation, I use a number of Heideggerian concepts that are particularly apt in elucidating fundamental aspects of identity expressed in these novels. Specifically, I use the Heideggerian existentials, or modes of existence, of state of mind, fallenness, and understanding, and the Heideggerian concept of historicality as delineated through heritage, fate, and destiny. History, in Heidegger’s view, “is about the worlds of those Daseins whose stretch-along between their respective births and deaths constitutes a significance of the past” (Gelven, 1989, p. 205). Historicality, for Heidegger, is the existential awareness through which one understands being in history. There are three grounds to historicality: heritage—or tradition, a part of thrownness; fate—the awareness of finitude; and destiny—part of being with others as applied to a whole people or nation.

Moreover, I discuss an important aspect of the postmodern attitude that Phillip Brian Harper (1994) does not examine, specifically, that fragmentation of existing systems of order, even of an individual’s sense of his or her own subjectivity, can be not only marginalizing and debilitating but also potentially liberating, or at least enabling of possibilities. And, just as Harper sees the condition of decenteredness of marginalized characters as being so within the structure, the centeredness, of society, these horizons of possibilities are themselves contained within cultural and historical contexts. In that sense, the postmodern aspects of a character are not apolitical or ahistorical, but are rather always already engaged in the social as well as the phenomenological world. As Africana philosopher Robert Birt (1997) claims,

To become human and develop a human identity is a process of invention (self-invention), of personal and collective action conditioned by social relations. If Sartre is right that in claiming that “freedom is impossible to distinguish from the ‘being’ of human reality,” then we humans can invent ourselves and create autonomous identities. But we do so through actions and choices conditioned by our social existence. (p. 206)

And, this social process is different from traditional European approaches. Relating this self-invention to the existentialist thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, Lewis R. Gordon (1997), in his introduction to Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, cautions that, although “Sartre stands as an unusual catalyst in the history of black existentialist philosophy” (p. 2), “it will be an error to construct Africana academic existential philosophy as a fundamentally Sartrean or European-based phenomenon” (p. 3) because,

although there are Africana philosophers who have been influenced by both Sartre and European thought, for the obvious reason that there has been no place “outside” of Western/European civilization from which to raise questions about existence in the twentieth century, it will nevertheless be fallacious to assume that the influence functions as the “cause” instead of a consequence. (p. 3)

For, Gordon (1997) notes,

Africana philosophers already have a reason to raise existential questions of liberation and questions of identity . . . by virtue of the historical fact of racial oppression manifested most vividly in the European and Arabic slave trade and the European colonization of the African continent and the entire world of color. (p. 3)

And, Frantz Fanon (1963/2004), whom Gordon (1997) refers to, with Richard Wright, as “undoubtedly the twentieth century’s two most influential Africana existentialist ‘men of letters’” (p. 9), throughout The Wretched of the Earth emphasizes the need for the issues of identity and possibility to be tied to the social and political sphere. In a passage that is consistent with Heidegger’s view of the historicality of Dasein, Fanon declares that “When the colonized intellectual writing for his people uses the past, he must do so with the intention of opening up the future, of spurring them into action and fostering hope” (p. 167).

To continue my point about the correlation between postmodern art and the social world, Linda Hutcheon (1988) has argued for just such a connection through, specifically, postmodernism’s use of parody, which

paradoxically brings about a direct confrontation with the problem of the relation of the aesthetic to a world of significance external to itself, to a discursive world of socially defined meaning systems (past and present)—in other words, to the political and the historical. (p. 22)

Similarly, connecting African American literature to the past and so to history, Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1983), in his foundational article, “‘The Blackness of Blackness’: The Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey,” defines the central trope of African American literature as “signifying,” the repeating, revising, parodying, and extending of previous works: “ . . . black writers read and critique other black texts as an act of rhetorical self-definition. Our literary tradition exists because of these precisely chartable formal literary relationships, relationships of signifying” (p. 693). And, finally, Teresa C. Zackodnik (2010), in The Mulatta and the Politics of Race, builds on the work of Hazel Carby on the racialization of the 19th-century “cult of true womanhood,” on theories of parody, and on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s (1983) theory of signifying as including performance as well as “verbal and musical texts” to posit a type of signifying that she terms “parodic performance” (p. xxi). Through parodic performance of “racialized womanhood and whiteness,” the mulatta figure in the texts she examines “signify on power structures African American women sought to redress” (p. xxvii). By orienting her discussion around the “redressing” of social ills, Zackodnik (2010) emphasizes the complexity of the issue of passing and the mulatta figure, its resistance to a simple duality of interpretation, and, from a different theoretical direction, the significance of the past. For, although a character has the freedom to choose to pass, to perform an identity, the experiences of the past have weight and, to the extent that those experiences have been imbued with the political and psychological effects of racism, cast their shadows across the future actions of the passing self. ³ So, too, the viability—in Heideggerian terms, the authenticity—of the identities of the protagonists in the novels that I discuss can be seen in relation to their ability to acknowledge and use their past experience to condition their range of action, of possibilities, for the future.

In these early African American novels, that past experience is fraught with the horrors of slavery, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction in the United States. The impact of these horrors on character is discussed by Stephen Knadler (2003) in “Traumatized Racial Performativity: Passing in Nineteenth-Century-African American Testimonies” in terms of trauma theory and performance studies to arrive at what he terms “traumatic performativity” (p. 66) in African American texts. Specifically, his purpose is “to look at the complex and often fragmented process by which certain extensively rehearsed memories come to, and sometimes fail to, mediate a core narrative of the self . . . ” (p. 66). In the process, Knadler critiques both poststructuralist and African American studies’ views of passing and its meaning for personal identity. The former, he says, focuses on race as a cultural construction based on behavior. The latter does not deny the constitutive nature of race but promotes the value of maintaining race pride, solidarity, and self-determination for the achievement of social justice. Both views, according to Knadler, underplay or ignore the role of trauma on identity formation and maintenance. Knadler quotes trauma theorist Cathy Caruth’s definition of trauma as “the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, or other repetitive phenomena” (p. 65, emphasis in original). In such circumstances, the self is unable to express the traumatic experience in traditional discourse, that is, the discourse of the dominant culture, and so is left with gaps in its ability to perform racial identity. Both the poststructuralist and African American studies views, Knadler argues, stress the passer’s choice of racial identity, which he ties to “neoliberal capitalist democracy and late twentieth-century versions of multiculturalism” (p. 68), and thus repress the passer’s trauma.

To return to the Heideggerian concepts of state-of-mind and “thrownness,” or our “facticity,” this existential/phenomenological aspect of the facticity of human being is most pronounced negatively in a racist context. For the laws governing the institution of slavery define the slave as chattel, a piece of property, an object. And so, as Robert Birt (1997) has observed, quoting Simone de Beauvoir, “the black person is ‘reduced to pure facticity, concealed in his immanence, cut off from his future, deprived of his transcendence’” (p. 207). Without the ability to make choices, being relegated to oppression and objectification, having no real position as a subject, racist oppression, Birt (1997) claims, “robs people of their identity . . . [and] imposes rigid, stultifying identities on its victims” (p. 206). Furthermore, “all oppression begets alienation [and] . . . according to Angela Davis, alienation ‘is the absence of authentic identity’” (p. 207).

Going even further in the direction of victimhood and its effects, Knadler’s (2003) approach supports the role that I claim phenomenological facticity plays in not only the formation and the performance of identity but also on the self’s future horizon of possibilities. For no aspect of experience of the character, including the traumatic events and the responses that they produce in the character, can be excluded from, or elided across, the impact that they have on a character’s identity and on the horizon of possibilities for that character. As Heidegger (1962) puts it,

Possibility . . . does not signify a free-floating potentiality-for-being . . . In every case Dasein . . . has already got itself into definite possibilities . . . Dasein is being possible which has been delivered over to itself—thrown possibility through and through. (p. 183, emphasis in original)

For the characters in these African American novels who are born with certain racial attributes and in a condition of slavery, those facts are part of their “thrownness” into the world.

Such thrownness is the major focus in what is generally acknowledged as the first novel by an African American, Clotel: or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, written by William Wells Brown and published in London in 1853. For the main characters, Currer, Thomas Jefferson’s former hired slave and mistress, and her two daughters with Jefferson, Clotel and Althesa, the choice to pass for White involves their survival because racial passing offers a means of escape from slavery. Brown’s literary style of mixing fictional and non-fictional elements has been widely discussed, often to his detriment as a novelist. However, Eve Allegra Raimon (2004) sees this style as purposeful. She also links it to a style that we have come to think of as postmodern:

The title character’s story is constantly interrupted by a complex assortment of seemingly disparate textual elements—a pastiche of short stories, anecdotes, biographical notes, histories, transcriptions of newspaper clippings, billboard announcements, and other such artifacts woven loosely together in a collection one might fairly term protopostmodern. (p. 68)

Raimon (2004) goes on to claim that “the blurring of the boundaries of fictivity that is so insistent in Clotel joins with the project of blurring the boundaries of race and nation, revealed as their own brand of fiction” (p. 70). This “blurring” coincides with Brown’s “double-edged narrative strategy” (p. 71) toward the largely White readership, dramatized in the novel’s first scene of the auctioning of female slaves, of appealing both to the reader’s sympathy for the victims of slavery’s “sexual exploitation” (p. 70) and to the reader’s “anxieties about ‘amalgamation’” (p. 71). The results are also that this approach “introduce[s] the reader to the notion of the instability of racial identities” and “place[s] the origin of such racial instability where it belongs, not with the advent of widespread antislavery agitation in the 1830’s but with the very founding of the Republic, and before” (p. 71). This racial instability can be tied, in Phillip Brian Harper’s (1994) term, to the social marginality of African Americans in antebellum America, certainly, but the even more interesting aspect of Raimon’s point—and of Brown’s approach—is that this racial instability is applicable, at least theoretically through miscegenation and the uncertainty of “pure” racial bloodlines that necessarily proceeds from it, to the entire society, thus sowing the seeds of both greater fragmentation of racial identity and greater possibility of choice of such identity for future generations of Americans.

Althesa and Clotel pass for the wives of White men, though Clotel’s marital arrangement is sub rosa from the start. In fact, the novel has come under some criticism for what is seen as an overemphasis on the roles of passing and of Whiteness. Ann duCille (2000) discusses this criticism in general and the point of view of critic Addison Gayle in particular:

Gayle asserts that Brown was incapable of portraying anything other than stereotypical images and secondhand ideas. He simply rebutted popular depictions of blacks as brainless, childlike Uncle Toms or lawless “brute Negroes” with counterimages of beautiful quadroons—romantic images that appealed to whites and to the black middle class . . . (p. 453)

However, duCille (2000) argues that Brown and other 19th-century African American writers chose

a strategy of the times, [an] attempt to argue for equality by establishing resemblance, by collapsing difference into sameness, by pointing out the mutability of race and the absurdity of white society’s color codes through the trope of the mulatto, tragic and heroic [and that contemporary readers may be guilty of applying a kind of] prescriptive, anachronistic criticism [to these writers]. (p. 454)

To be sure, Clotel and her daughter Mary are tragic figures. Their facticity while passing carries the weight of the secret of their mixed ancestry, and so because of their society’s racial essentialism they suffer a kind of fragmentation of the self. However, as duCille (2000) contends, they are also heroic figures. In Heideggerian terms, this heroism can be linked to the concept of authenticity. The Self, Heidegger (1962) says, “is . . . for the most part inauthentic, the they-self” (p. 225). The “they-self” is an aspect of the existential of fallenness, which Heidegger (1962) defines as “an absorption of Being-with-one-another,” or “Being-lost in the publicness of the ‘they’” (p. 220). In and of itself, fallenness into the world is not a negative quality; it is simply one mode of being. But to the degree that it becomes, in Heidegger’s (1962) term, “a constant temptation” (p. 221) to Dasein to turn away from its own selfhood, fallenness is a potential problem for personal identity. Clotel and Mary face the temptation of fallenness in two senses: First, they could simply go along with the “they-self” of their social circumstance of slavery; second, while passing, they could go along with the “they-self” of White society and forget about their past, as Clotel could forget about Mary after escaping to the north. Fallenness is in its basic aspect what Heidegger (1962) terms “inauthentic.” Inauthenticity also is not a categorically negative quality, but rather simply a part of Being in the world. Heidegger (1962) contrasts the inauthentic Self to “the authentic Self—that is, . . . the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way” (p. 167, emphasis in original). One comes to authenticity through the existential of understanding, which Heidegger (1962) defines as “the phenomenological basis for seeing [possibility] as a disclosive potentiality-for-Being” (p. 183). Through their experiences, Clotel and Mary come to the existential of understanding and choose to live authentically by “taking hold” of their own heritage and the horizon of possibilities stemming from it even when, as in Clotel’s case, doing so may result in death.

In February 2001, Henry Louis Gates Jr. purchased a holograph manuscript from the Swann Galleries in New York City during its yearly auction of “Printed and Manuscript African Americana” (Gates, 2002, p. xxi). The title of the manuscript was “The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, a Fugitive Slave, Recently Escaped from North Carolina,” and the date of origin was put at “circa 1850’s” (Gates, 2002, p. xxiv). Based on his evaluation and research into its authorship and date, Henry Louis Gates published the manuscript in 2002 as The Bondwoman’s Narrative, A Novel, by Hannah Crafts. In his introduction to this first edition of the novel, Gates (2002) states his view that “this fictionalized slave narrative . . . [is] possibly the first novel written by a black woman and definitely the first novel written by a woman who had been a slave” (p. xxv). As the auction catalog description says, “the narrative is not only that of the mulatto Hannah, but also of her mistress who turns out to be a light-skinned woman passing for white” (Gates, 2002, p. xxiii). In fact, Hannah’s mistress, Mrs. Vincent, has not actually made a deliberate choice to pass. She has led a life of southern White privilege unaware that she has been “passing” since birth, for she was exchanged for the stillborn child of the mistress and raised as the Master’s daughter. The later discovery of her origin shocks Mrs. Vincent to the point of fragmenting her sense of self—she “was” one person and then she “is” a totally different person in the eyes of the law and society. Along with shock, Mrs. Vincent feels shame and regards the fact of the infant exchange as “the secret of my birth” (Crafts, 2002, p. 46), “the horrible truth” (Crafts, 2002, p. 48), “the worst” (Crafts, 2002, p. 48), and “a curse” (Crafts, 2002, p. 49). Although pejorative, her reaction to her true background has the objective rationale that the legal status of a child in the slave states followed that of the mother, and so, if her background is revealed, Mrs. Vincent could be sold at any moment. With this threat hanging over her, she quickly agrees to Hannah’s advice to run away. In making this decision, Mrs. Vincent changes identity again, for she goes back to passing as White as a means of escape. Thus, for Mrs. Vincent, “passing” carries the burden of her struggle to hide a literal secret.

In these terms, Mrs. Vincent experiences what would seem to be impossible—a change in her thrownness, the material facts of her being—by her color and race changing instantaneously. Of course, what this change actually dramatizes is not a change in her thrownness but rather the arbitrariness of the social perception of her thrownness, that is, the absurdity of the “one drop rule” that defines a person who has any African heritage whatsoever as a Negro and thus as a slave.

As with Clotel, Hannah faces the temptation of falling into the they-self of the stereotype of the obedient slave. In particular, in dealing with Whites, Hannah must suppress her own mental acuity. As Adebayo Williams (2003) points out, Hannah’s “sharp wit, intellectual elevation, and sense of danger . . . are contrasted unfavorably with the dim-witted clumsiness and obtuse procrastinations of her mistresses and other socially superior ladies” (p. 144). Hannah’s knowledge of a mistress’s embarrassing encounter with social fashion in the form of face powder that turns her face, ironically, black leads to Hannah being falsely accused by a jealous fellow slave of revealing the episode and to Hannah being sent to be the wife of a field hand whom she hardly knows. ⁴ Hannah decides to escape a second time, not, as with Mrs. Vincent, to help her desperate mistress, but for her own sake.

Hannah’s successful escape from this forced marriage is accomplished by her ability to pass first as a White boy and then as a White girl. Like Mrs. Vincent, Hannah has fragmented her identity between races, but going farther than Mrs. Vincent, Hannah crosses the gender line as well as the color line. The ability to pass, then, although indicative of the degree to which identity may be seen as socially constructed, can in the context of the struggle to survive the horrors of slavery be seen as a valuable tool that can fool anyone, Black or White, male or female. However, when Hannah reaches freedom in New Jersey, she chooses a life that is not racially ambiguous in any way, that is, she makes a clear choice of one side of the color line. She marries a Black minister who “has always been a free man” (Crafts, 2002, p. 246), settles into a community of African Americans, and “keep[s] a school for colored children” (Crafts, 2002, p. 244). In this choice, this Heideggerian projection of her own possibilities, Hannah heals the postmodern-like fragmentation that has characterized her sense of self to this time by firmly acknowledging and accepting her African American heritage. Hannah, as Phillip Brian Harper (1994) says of the protagonist of Invisible Man, comes to understand “the importance of [her] identification with the black community if [s]he is to achieve individual identity” (p. 135).

Published in London in 1857, Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends has been traditionally acknowledged to be, after Brown’s Clotel, the second novel published by an African American. Although written in the same decade as Clotel and The Bondwoman’s Narrative, The Garies and Their Friends offers a strikingly different view of African American society, yet raises similar issues about identity. The setting is not the cotton plantation south but the mercantile north, specifically, Philadelphia, which by the 1830s had a significant and thriving free African American population. The main conflict of the novel is based on the tensions between White, particularly Irish, immigrants and African Americans over jobs and social status that resulted finally in the Abolition Riots of 1842 (DuBois, 1899/1967). ⁵ The Garies are an interracial couple; he, a wealthy Georgian planter, and she, a beautiful, lighter skinned African American slave whom he bought for US$2,000 some 10 years before on “the auction-block at Savanah” (Webb, 1857/1969, p. 2) and fell in love with. Although legally unable to marry in Georgia, the couple live as a family with their two children, Clarence and Emily, both of whom “showed no trace whatever of African origin” (Webb, 1857/1969, p. 2). Mrs. Garie fears that “if anything should happen” (Webb, 1857/1969, p. 53) to her husband, she and the children “might be sold and separated for ever” (Webb, 1857/1969, p. 54), and so she convinces her husband to move the family to Philadelphia.

The move to the north, however, as slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass’s (1845/2001) attest, ⁶ does not bring relief from bigotry and discriminatory civil practices. These practices, though, are mild precursors to the horror of the race riot that results in the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Garie. How the two children grow up from this point, how their identities form, makes the central point about passing in the novel. For the two—both capable of passing for White—take distinctly different paths. Emily, as a female, is allowed to remain in the African American community and grows to be a happy and well-adjusted adult. Clarence, however, is sent to an all-White boys’ school far away and so put on a track for life as passing for White. The children’s guardian, the African American entrepreneur Mr. Walters, agrees to the plan proposed by Balch, the Garies’ White lawyer, but suspects trouble may result from his decision in the long run; for Clarence, Walters worries, “must live in constant fear of exposure; this dread will embitter every enjoyment, and make him the most miserable of men” (Webb, 1857/1969, p. 275). The term that Walters uses, “dread,” is particularly appropriate to my discussion of the issue of identity, for dread is the term that Heidegger uses to describe that state of mind that makes us “aware of what is . . . We are thrown in a world. Dread brings us face to face with this thrownness” (Gelven, 1989, 118, emphasis in original). In Clarence’s case, this dread is the awareness of his mixed racial background and how that is perceived in the world of antebellum America, even in the north. For Heidegger (1962), dread can be a catalyst for an individual to confront his ability to make choices, that is, to be authentic. For Clarence, though, the matter of whether he makes an authentic choice to pass for White is muddled, for, as Guilia Fabi (2001) observes, “Clarence’s passing is an externally imposed lifelong necessity that emerges as one more form of racial oppression . . . young Clarence falls victim to the white family lawyer’s conviction that as a white person he ‘will be better off’” (p. 39).

Given this problematic nature of Clarence’s choice to pass, his further development as White can also be seen as questionably authentic. More probably, as the evidence indicates, his is another example of pre-postmodern fragmented identity. At the beginning of the novel, Clarence is simply himself, a child with a beautiful mother with a “light-brown complexion” (Webb, 1857/1969, p. 2) and little, if any, sense of racial identity. After the riot, though, Clarence becomes racially divided, as Balch tells him, “we are going to send you where it is not known that you are coloured; and you must never, never tell it . . . ” (Webb, 1857/1969, p. 279, emphasis in original). As a result of this socially enforced racial essentialism, that is, the expectation that a person must be either Black or White, Clarence must necessarily disassociate from his former life and so from a central part of himself. For example, he begins to think of African Americans, including his sister, as the Other: “ . . . I can’t go [to see her] with any comfort or pleasure . . . each year as I visit the place, their ways seem more strange and irksome to me” (Webb, 1857/1969, p. 322). In fact, he betrays a racial schizophrenia, even as he denies its possibility: “ . . . I can’t be white and colored at the same time; the two don’t mingle, and I must consequently be one or the other” (Webb, 1857/1969, p. 323). Genetically, of course, Clarence is both Anglo and African, but society demands that he can be only one, and if it knew of the African part, would classify, essentialize, him as Black. Clarence expresses his sense of fragmentation in Heideggerian terms: “My education, habits, and ideas, all unfit me for associating with [African Americans]; and I live in constant dread that something may occur to bring me out with [whites]” (Webb, 1857/1969, p. 323, emphasis added). This “bringing out” does indeed finally transpire and ruin Clarence’s plans to marry the (White) woman he loves, and he lives out the brief remainder of his life “very wretched and lonely . . . apart from both [white and Black] society” (Webb, 1857/1969, pp. 380-381).

Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, published in 1892 by Frances E. W. Harper, begins during the Civil War and ends during Reconstruction and so can be seen as a “transition from the antebellum period to the Harlem Renaissance” (Foster, 1988, p. xxxvii). Iola Leroy shares the circumstance with Mrs. Vincent of The Bondwoman’s Narrative of having her sense of self reversed overnight. Born to a wealthy Louisiana planter, Eugene Leroy, and Marie, his light-skinned former slave, whom he sent north to be educated and then married, Iola has never been told of her mixed heritage and so is “perfectly ignorant of [her] racial connection” (Harper, 1892/1988, p. 113). One minute, she is defending slavery to her abolitionist schoolmates at an exclusive girls’ school in the north:

Slavery can’t be wrong . . . for my father is a slave-holder, and my mother is as good to our servants as she can be . . . I don’t think these Abolitionists have any right to meddle in our affairs. (Harper, 1892/1988, pp. 97-98)

The next minute, she is tricked into leaving the school by a lawyer sent by her father’s cousin and heir after Leroy’s death by yellow fever, returned to Louisiana, and sold as a slave. The shock of this change causes Iola “intense horror and agony” (Harper, 1892/1988, p. 114). As a beautiful young woman, she is purchased “to keep house,” a euphemism for sexual services, but because, in the words of her slave friend, Tom Anderson, “she’s a reg’lar spitfire” in resisting such service, she has been sold “all ober de kentry” (Harper, 1892/1988, p. 38).

Iola, then, is marginalized by race—from White to Black; by social status—from privileged aristocrat to slave; and by sexual status—from respected lady to purchased concubine. By any standard of expectation, she should suffer a breakdown of her sense of self. The world as she knew it has collapsed; everything she believed to be true is false. Her world, that is, has become strikingly chaotic and absurd, or postmodern. Yet Iola’s identity, finally, does not remain fragmented. Teresa Zackodnik (2010) states that Iola is “forced to become self-reliant and independent as a result of [her] experiences” (p. 110). Certainly, Iola does become self-reliant and independent. She even maintains her sense of pride in the most humiliating circumstances and is able to ascribe shame to the perpetrators rather than the victims of abuse:

I have heard men talk glibly of the degradation of the negro [sic], but there is a vast difference between abasement of condition and degradation of character. I was abased, but the men who trampled on me were the degraded ones. (Harper, 1892/1988, p. 115)

However, it cannot be, tautologically, that Iola responds resiliently because there are forces that militate against her. Rather, Iola is able, though marginalized in several social categories, though having had her sense of self shattered, to reconstitute her fragmented identity. The means by which she does so can be understood through Heidegger’s concept of history and historicality. History, in Heidegger’s view, “is about the worlds of those Daseins whose stretching-along between their respective births and deaths constitutes a significance of the past” (Gelven, 1989, p. 211, emphasis in original). Historicality, for Heidegger, is the existential awareness through which one understands being in history. There are three grounds to historicality: heritage—or “one’s tradition as significantly determining . . . the makeup of the ‘world’ that one is ‘in’ as Being-in-a world” (p. 212), a part of thrownness; fate—“one’s awareness of one’s finitude . . . [and] one’s limited possibilities and the ensuing significance of one’s choices and decisions” (p. 212, emphasis in original); and destiny—“a kind of fate on the level of a whole people . . . grounded in Dasein’s Being-with of others” (p. 213). Iola responds to her changed circumstances by seeing herself anew as a historical being. Whereas she was a typical southern belle who believed in the southern ideal of the south as an Anglo Saxon Camelot, a world out of space and time, her sudden change in material circumstance jolts her back into history by making her aware of her own finitude. Moreover, she becomes aware of destiny and heritage through identification of herself—imposed at first but then accepted and avowed by her by choice—as African American. Specifically, when the Civil War ends and the hospital at which Iola serves as a nurse closes, Dr. Gresham suggests that she, like many other White women, open a school for African American children. Up to this point, Iola has been a slave and in that sense has identified with African Americans. However, after the war, she can choose to be White or African American. Her greatest temptation to choose to be White comes in the form of a marriage proposal from Dr. Gresham, who as “a member of a wealthy and aristocratic family, proud of its lineage, which it could trace through generations of good blood to its ancestral isle” (Harper, 1892/1988, p. 58), represents that same Anglo Saxon ideal that grew beyond the south throughout the 19th century along with American militarism. As Raimon (2004) explains, “The growing confidence in white racial superiority blended with a parallel sense of providentially sanctioned nationalist destiny” (p. 28). ⁷

Although Gresham is attracted to Iola, and proposes to her even after learning of her origin, he nonetheless sees that origin as shameful: “he resolved to win her for his bride, bury her secret in his Northern home, and hide from his aristocratic relations all knowledge of her mournful past” (Harper, 1892/1988, pp. 59-60). More generally, he displays a view of African Americans as less than equal to Anglo Saxons. For example, in attempting to persuade Iola of his genuine affection for her, the two become entwined in a discussion of the aftermath of slavery, and Dr. Gresham expresses the same view that African Americans must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, must, that is, earn the equality that is granted them, like every other citizen, by law, that, a few years after the publication of Iola Leroy, Booker T. Washington expressed in his Atlanta Exposition Address: Specifically, Gresham says that African Americans “must learn to struggle, labor, and achieve” (Harper, 1892/1988, p. 116). Gresham then holds up the model for African Americans to emulate:

The Anglo-Saxon race is proud, domineering, aggressive, and impatient of a rival . . . They have been a conquering and achieving people, marvelous in their triumphs of mind over matter. They have manifested the traits of character which are developed by success and victory. (Harper, 1892/1988, p. 116)

Thus, Gresham wants (a) to separate Iola artificially from her own, again, in Heidegger’s term, thrownness—he tells her, “I love you for your own sake. And with this the disadvantages of birth have nothing to do” (Harper, 1892/1988, p. 114); (b) to deny, and to have her deny, her heritage and the destiny that she could share with African Americans; and (c) to bestow upon her, noblese oblige, his own thrownness, his Anglo Saxon heritage and destiny. For example, in response to her continuing the discussion of the lot of African Americans, Gresham, “a little impatiently,” protests, “But, Iola . . . what has all this to do with our marriage? Your complexion is as fair as mine. What is to hinder you from sharing my Northern home, from having my mother to be your mother?” (Harper, 1892/1988, p. 116). To this idyllic question, Iola brings the hard genetic facts that might disrupt his Anglo Saxon paradise and that a medical man might have been expected to anticipate, a point she ironically emphasizes by addressing him by just his title: “Doctor . . . suppose we should marry, and little children in after years should nestle in our arms, and one of them show unmistakable signs of color, would you be satisfied?” His reaction—“His face flushed as if the question suddenly perplexed him” (Harper, 1892/1988, p. 117)—reveals his most fundamental feelings toward African Americans and provides Iola with the motivation to resist the very significant temptation to renounce her heritage by accepting his proposal of marriage.

In rejecting Gresham, Iola takes a major step to her own authentic choice of identity. In choosing to follow that path of destiny that accords to the African American people, Iola acknowledges in the most substantive manner possible that, in the United States, race matters. As Barbara Christian (1980) discusses, Iola represents a different kind of mulatta, one “no longer tragic or melancholy but a source of light for those below and around her” (p. 29). It is because Iola chooses to identify with her African heritage that she does not see herself as having to hide a secret of identity or to feel a shame of origin. And, it is because she chooses to project her destiny with that of African Americans that she sees her future as having meaning and possibility.

The characters’ motivation for passing changes with the historical circumstances in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars, published in 1900. In North and South Carolina “a few years after the Civil War” (Chesnutt, 1900/2003, p. 3), passing is no longer necessary as an escape from slavery. For John Warwick/John Walden, passing is instead a means to prosperity and higher social status. He thinks of his origin and heritage as an African American as “the blight of his inheritance” (Chesnutt, 1900/2003, p. 21) and rails momentarily “against the fate which made it necessary that he should visit the home of his childhood, if at all, like a thief in the night,” but he is able to assign such responses to “pure sentiment” (Chesnutt, 1900/2003, p. 22), for he has chosen to be one of those “men who have elected to govern their lives by principles of abstract right and reason” and to “be careful about descending from the lofty heights of logic to the common level of impulse and affection” (Chesnutt, 1900/2003, p. 21). Moreover, as a lawyer, Warwick’s view of race is legalistic. As John Sheehy (1999) asserts, Warwick’s “is the mind of a lawyer . . . Warwick/Walden is white, by appearance, by blood, and, more importantly, by law” (p. 409, emphasis in original). As Judge Straight advises John Walden when he comes to him as a boy announcing that he wants to be a lawyer, John might one day go to South Carolina, where the law allows that a person of mixed blood might be considered White not only if “the admixture of African blood did not exceed one-eighth” but also “by reputation, by reception, and by their exercises of the privileges of the white man . . . ” (Chesnutt, 1900/2003, p. 118). John Warwick, then, solves his own sense of marginalization, heals the fragmentation of his identity, by simply ignoring a part of his facticity in a socially acceptable way, that is, by legal definition, and creates a wholly new identity. There is some residue of his prior self left over in the emotion he feels in missing his mother, but he seems willing to accept the weight of that residue in exchange for his new identity.

In Heideggerian terms, an initial inclination might be to conclude that Warwick lives authentically because he chooses, from among all of the genuine elements of his personal background, his facticity, that is, from among the White and the Black aspects, to live his life as a White man. However, there are several reasons why this view is problematic. First, in his approach to living his life, Warwick is still living with a lie and a secret, and so is not authentically facing his facticity. Second, Warwick’s need to pass for White requires him to accept uncritically the values of that White, particularly idealized Anglo Saxon society—for example, the Tournament scene contrasts Warwick playing the knight and honest Frank Fowler watching the pretentious event from the sidelines—and so requires him to act inauthentically. Third, Heidegger’s conception of freedom, like his conception of possibility, is not absolutely free. As Joseph Fell (1979) explains,

Heidegger does not describe freedom as a present power of autonomous or arbitrary choice . . . [Freedom] means the impossibility of any essential amelioration or progressive transformation of the human condition and situation, for it is a being-free for a future that is in all essentials the recurrence of what has already been, and one of these essentials is the thrown and factical necessity of having to take over a particular past that one can never make over from the ground up ex nihilo because it is itself part of the ground. (pp. 62-63)

What this means in terms of Warwick’s authenticity in fine and the authenticity of mixed-race characters in general is that one is always already what one is factically and that facticity has meaning in the projection of possibilities into the future. A character who denies or ignores the whole of what he or she is limits or perverts the range of possible choices for the future, and so is living inauthentically.

Not only does Warwick live inauthentically but also he succeeds in leading his younger sister into this condition of inauthenticity by prying her from her life with their mother in Patesville, North Carolina, to his estate in Clarence, South Carolina, and changing her name from Rena Walden to the romantic, Ivanhoe-inspired Rowena Warwick. However, although Warwick’s regret over repudiating his mother and his heritage is minimal, Rena/Rowena falls into the sentimental trope of the tragic mulatta because she suffers from a combination of the kind of shame that Mrs. Vincent in The Bondwoman’s Narrative felt about her secret past and a nostalgia for her family life with her mother and her heritage. For example, when considering a marriage proposal from the White, aristocratic George Tryon, Rena hesitates “due to a simple and yet complex cause . . . It was the consciousness of her secret . . . Rena’s secret was the worm in the bud, the skeleton in the closet” (Chesnutt, 1900/2003, pp. 52-53). And, because the people she has heretofore identified with and her heritage are socially marginalized by the dominant culture and defined as inferior, in passing Rena is acquiescing to the they-self of that dominant culture and their view rather than acknowledging the facts of her background and her heritage, and so, like her brother, living inauthentically. As Sheehy (1999) says, “Rena ultimately assents to assuming an ‘owned’ identity, historically predetermined and founded on European notions of race . . . this ‘received’ identity masquerades for Rena as an image of her ‘essential’ self” (p. 412).

When Tryon learns of Rena’s background and drops her, she returns to a life as an African American schoolteacher and seems to accept that identity. When George Tryon’s mother visits the school coincidentally without knowing of Rena’s former relationship with George and asks Rena whether she is “really colored,” the narrator tells us, “A year and a half earlier, Rena would have met the question by some display of self-consciousness. Now, she replied simply and directly. ‘Yes, ma’m, I am colored’” (Chesnutt, 1900/2003, p. 167). Yet, she still accepts an essentialist, socially defined version of her identity, one that categorizes, limits, and embarrasses her. For instance, when Tryon sends her a letter asking to meet after learning of her proximity, Rena, in her letter of response, writes,

You are white, and you have given me to understand that I am black. I accept the classification, however unfair, and the consequences, however unjust . . . As a white man, this might not mean a great deal to you; as a woman, shut out already by my color from much that is desirable, my good name remains my most valuable possession. (Chesnutt, 1900/2003, pp. 179-180)

Clearly, Rena is still pining for her former “passing” life with George, and the loss of it has caused her pain. She has become the sentimental tragic mulatta, coping with a sense of original shame, and in that role she dies a horrible and seemingly unnecessary death from “brain fever” induced by her getting lost in a swamp during a storm as she runs from both Tryon and would-be African American suitor, Jeff Wain. Although Wain is not the gentleman he pretends to be, he does represent a Black alternative to the White Tryon. Moreover, the male character in the novel who is unarguably the finest person and who has loved Rena since childhood, Frank Fowler, is someone who she does not even see as a possible mate. Thus, in a sense, Rena rejects both White and Black males, showing the confusion and sorrow over her own racial identity as the tragic mulatta figure of the 19th-century sentimental novel.

Published anonymously in 1912 and then in 1927 under the author’s name, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, by James Weldon Johnson, problematizes issues of authentic destiny and of identity more than any previous novel of racial passing. In fact, I would argue that with The Autobiography, the sentimental and realistic elements of the African American novel coalesce with the novel of the dominant culture into the psychologism of the Modernist period. Certainly, the mind of the narrator is as much the ground of the action of the novel as is its physical and cultural geography as we watch his struggle to acclimate to, and his alienation from, whichever society, for example, superficially integrated Connecticut, African American New York, White Europe, the African American South, or White New York, he lives in at the time. But, even more interestingly, we can see the roots of a postmodern division of identity in the narrator’s sense of himself. This fragmentation can be seen in all the African American texts I have discussed but is enunciated most memorably in The Souls of Black Folk with W. E. B. DuBois’s (1903/2007) term “double-consciousness,”

this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others . . . One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body . . . (p. 3)

In The Autobiography, the narrator alludes to “that remarkable book by Dr. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 169) in the context of writers who are depicting the full range of African American life beyond stereotype, but, more to the point, mentions also his own “transition from one world into another” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 20), from White to Black, and so to double-consciousness, or what he terms “a sort of dual personality,” of being “forced to take his outlook on all things, not from the view-point . . . of a man . . . but from the view-point of a coloured man” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 21, emphasis in original). Furthermore, what Phillip Brian Harper (1994) concludes about Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiographical narrative, The Woman Warrior, may be said of The Autobiography, namely, that it represents

a postmodernistic human subject whose existence is highly unstable and contingent upon the various narrative motifs that at any moment are deployed to ground [his] personality; that representation derives . . . specifically from the narrative treatment of social difference and marginality. (p. 28)

In The Autobiography, those narrative motifs take the form of test-case identities that the narrator tries on throughout the novel, unwilling to make, in Heidegger’s term, an authentic choice of identity. His indecisive attitude can be seen in the fact that, unlike other characters in the passing tradition, the ex-colored man sees his situation as more comic than serious. At the beginning, he refers to his passing as “a practical joke on society” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 3) and near the end of the novel as “the capital joke I was playing” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 197). This view of passing as comic seems to indicate that passing has changed from a matter of necessity—either for literal survival or for social or economic gain—to a matter of arbitrary preference. Specifically, the ex-colored man could choose at various times to be Black, White, or Italian by virtue of his olive complexion, or French, German, or Spanish by virtue of language and cultural fluency, and could slip into any of these identities for no greater reason that his own satisfaction, as when he takes “pride that [he] spoke better Spanish than many of the Cuban workmen at the [cigar] factory” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 73).

To be sure, throughout his life, the narrator identifies more with Whites than with Blacks. For instance, when at school a Black student throws a slate at a White student, the narrator joins the crowd of White students who retaliate: “We ran after them pelting them with stones . . . ” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 15, emphasis added). And, the narrator finds it easier to praise Whites than Blacks. For example, in a discussion of the reaction of White southerners to the possible advancement of the former slave class, the narrator says, “I could not but appreciate the logic of the position held by those Southern leaders who have been bold enough to proclaim against the education of the Negro” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 170). Moreover, when the narrator relates his experiences traveling through the south, he adopts an anthropological tone that smacks of smug White superiority. As Donald Goellnicht (1996) states,

The anonymous narrator . . . in aiming for a “detached” or “objective” stance on the race question—the position the social scientist conventionally pretends to—not only distances himself from the black America he depicts, but frequently chooses to adopt the gaze of white society. (p. 20)

For example, the narrator delineates elements of “Negro dialect”—such as “Lawd a mussy!” and “Look heah, chile!”—and condescendingly praises the “droll humour” and “ability to laugh heartily” that “does much to keep [the Negro] from going the way of the Indian” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 56). Furthermore, like an anthropologist, the ex-colored man categorizes those he observes. He outlines three classes of African Americans, all of them dominated by the “white gaze,” for, as the narrator acknowledges, they are “not so much in respect to themselves as in respect to their relations with the whites” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 76): first, the “desperate class—the men who work in lumber and turpentine camps, the ex-convicts, the bar-room loafers” who hate and avoid Whites; second, the “domestic service” class, comprised of “the servants, the washerwomen, the waiters, the cooks, the coachmen” who are closely connected to Whites; and third, the “well-to-do and educated class,” including “independent workmen and tradesmen” who “live in a little world of their own” away from Whites (Johnson, 1912/1970, pp. 76-79).

In his description of these categories, the narrator betrays what may seem to be an authentic identity, that of a social and economic elitist. For instance, on his first trip to Atlanta, he reacts to what he sees as “the unkempt appearance, the shambling, slouching gait and loud talk” of the large African Americans population with “a feeling of almost repulsion” and is relieved when told that these people “were of the lower class” (Johnson, 1912/1970, pp. 55-56). Furthermore, the narrator privileges class distinction over race distinction. For example, he says that “refined coloured people get no more pleasure out of riding [in segregated train cars] with offensive Negroes than anybody else would get” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 81) and claims that his experience has taught him that class means more than race: “When one has seen something of the world and human nature, one must conclude, after all, that between people in like stations of life there is very little difference the world over” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 85).

However, ultimately, in neither his classist nor White experience traveling around Europe with his “patron” is the narrator making a wholly authentic choice of identity. It can be argued that although the narrator learns about different cultures and languages, he is, like the patron, essentially simply living in fallenness. Heidegger outlines three characteristics of the existential of fallenness: “idle talk, ambiguity, and curiosity” (quoted in Gelven, 1989, p. 106). The patron exhibits all three. Although the patron is somewhat distant and restrained, he is among the White “slummers” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 116) who frequent the Black ragtime club, and he throws extravagant dinner parties at his apartment so that he is constantly surrounded by “idle,” or inconsequential, “talk.” He lives in ambiguity in the Heideggerian sense that he refuses to make clear plans or decisions, as seen in his response when the narrator asks him how long he proposes to stay in Paris: “Oh, until I get tired of it” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 130). And last, the patron displays the curiosity that distracts one from one’s own life through voyeurism—“He seemed to take cynical delight in watching and studying others indulging in excess” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 118)—and in decadence—his crowd “were people . . . who were ever expecting to find happiness in novelty, each day restlessly exploring and exhausting every resource of [New York] that might possibly furnish a new sensation or awaken a fresh emotion . . . ” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 119). To the extent, then, that the narrator shares the patron’s way of life while he is with him and admires him—as he does: “I looked upon him . . . as about all a man could wish to be” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 121)—the ex-colored man also lives in the idle talk, ambiguity, and curiosity that constitute fallenness.

The narrator appears to break through this state of fallenness when he has what seems to be an epiphany, after a German musician at one of the patron’s parties transposes the narrator’s ragtime number into classical form, that he can do the same in a more comprehensive manner, thereby becoming the “great coloured man” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 46) he dreamed of as a boy. He decides to return to the south to “drink in . . . inspiration” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 142) from ragtime and “the old slave songs” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 143). However, he never succeeds in this breakthrough to authentic selfhood for several reasons. First, when he goes to the south, he still maintains the “white gaze” that he had during his first trip; if anything, it has become even narrower because of his time passing as a White American in Europe and his acculturation into White European society. For example, in conversing with a young male schoolteacher that he meets while studying African American spirituals at the religious “big meeting” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 182), the narrator notes that he and “the majority of intelligent coloured people are . . . too much in earnest over the race question . . . are unable to see things in their proper proportions . . . ” and should “exercise [a] sense of humour” about “their present and future” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 183). Second, although he explicitly censures White musicians who make money from popularizing as their own the music of Black ragtime musicians, his venture to re-work the old slave songs for his own glory and profit, represents, as Goellnicht (1996) notes, “the very thievery he had been critical of white musicians for” (p. 27). Third, he has a fundamental lack of respect for the very music and culture, and therefore for a part of his own heritage, that he plans to appropriate for his benefit. For instance, he transcribes “themes and melodies” as he attempts “to catch the spirit of the Negro in his relatively primitive state” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 173) and, at the big meeting, finds the “preacher’s words” to be “primitive poetry” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 177). Last, he decides calculatingly that he can be more successful as a Black man performing this music than as a White man: “ . . . I settled the question purely on selfish grounds . . . I should have greater chances of attracting attention as a coloured composer than as a white one” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 147).

Finally, of course, the narrator becomes the ex-colored man intentionally, and it could be argued that such an act is, by definition, authentic. He says, following his witnessing of the burning alive of an African American man in rural Georgia, that his motivation for making the decision is that he feels “shame, unbearable shame. Shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 191). But this motivation seems to mesh conveniently with another motivation that has been consistent throughout the narrator’s life, namely, his desire for social and economic success. He describes himself as a boy as “a perfect little aristocrat” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 7) who is told by his mother to expect that his father, “one of the greatest men in the country” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 18), will someday “make a great man” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 38) of him. So when he learns of his mixed-race background, he shifts to “wild dreams of bringing glory and honour to the Negro race” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 46). However, this shift is artificial; he maintains throughout his life the attitudes and perspective of White society. So it is consistent with that perspective that, when he witnesses the horror of the burning of Black men, he quickly reverts to the rationale “that to forsake one’s race to better one’s condition was no less worthy an action than to forsake one’s country for the same purpose” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 190), which he has already done. Of course, he himself has already shown through the numerous examples of “people of education and culture and . . . means” (Johnson, 1912/1970, p. 152) that he meets that success, at least to an extent, is possible for some African Americans like himself. What his decision to adopt a wholly White identity actually represents is his retreat into a kind of fallenness through his immersion into the “they-self” of White society, this immersion emphasized by his lack of a distinct name. In so doing, he also denies his heritage. Together, living in fallenness and denying that aspect of his own thrownness, a part of his heritage, that helps make him what he is results in his living inauthentically.

Attempting to live authentically can serve as a kind of healing of the divisions of identity that characterize the social marginalization that Phillip Brian Harper (1994) recognizes as similar to postmodern crises of identity. In truth, the acknowledgment, in Heideggerian terms, the understanding, of all elements of one’s facticity allows for the broadening of the horizon of possible action for one’s future. The color line and an individual’s place in relation to it, then, continue to be central aspects of American life as depicted in African American novels of racial passing. What it means to be Black or White is complex, and for those who are able by virtue of nuance to choose which side of the color line they want to be on, the choice is profound. ⁸ In Heideggerian terms, although one may be able to perform a social identity that ignores a part of one’s heritage, one does so at the real peril of losing part of the horizon of one’s authentic being.