That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing

That Middle World

JULIA S. CHARLES

That Middle World

Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing

The University of North Carolina Press   Chapel Hill

© 2020 The University of North Carolina Press

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Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Charles, Julia S., author.

Title: That middle world : race, performance, and the politics of passing / Julia S. Charles.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019053157 | ISBN 9781469659565 (cloth) | ISBN 9781469659572 (paperback) | ISBN 9781469659589 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Passing (Identity) in literature. | Racially mixed people in literature. | Race in literature. | American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. | Racially mixed people— Race identity—United States. | Race awareness—United States.

Classification: LCC PS169.P35 C48 2020 | DDC 810.9/352996073—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053157

Cover illustration: Detail of Thomas E. Askew (1850–1914), Nine African American Women (Atlanta, Georgia, 1899). Courtesy of the W. E. B. Du Bois Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

For Ayanna, Julia, and Isaiah

Yet these stories, after all, are Mr. Chesnutt’s most important work, whether we consider them merely as realistic fiction, apart from the author, or as studies of that middle world of which he is naturally and voluntarily a citizen. We had known the nethermost world of the grotesque and comical negro and the terrible and tragic negro through the white observer on the outside, and the black character in its lyrical moods we had known from such an inside witness as Mr. Paul Dunbar; but it had remained for Mr. Chesnutt to acquaint us with those regions where the paler shades dwell as hopelessly, with relation to ourselves, as the blackest negro. He has not shown the dwellers there as very different from ourselves. They have within their own circles the same social ambitions and prejudices; they intrigue and truckle and crawl, and are snobs, like ourselves, both of the snobs that snub and the snobs that are snubbed. We may choose to think them droll in their parody of pure white society, but perhaps it would be wiser to recognize that they are like us because they are of our blood by more than half, or three quarters, or nine tenths. It is not, in such eases, their negro blood that characterizes them; but it is their negro blood that excludes them, and that will imaginably fortify them and exalt them. Bound in that sad solidarity from which there is no hope of entrance into polite white society for them, they may create a civilization of their own, which need not lack the highest quality. They need not be ashamed of the race from which they have sprung, and whose exile they share; for it may in many of the arts it has already shown, during a single generation of freedom, gifts which slavery apparently only obscured.

—William Dean Howells

Contents

Acknowledgments

PROLOGUE

That Mandy Oxendine

CHAPTER ONE

That Middle World

CHAPTER TWO

That Respectability

CHAPTER THREE

That Performance

CHAPTER FOUR

That Indefinable Something

CHAPTER FIVE

That Invisibility

EPILOGUE

That Rachel Dolezal

Glossary of Terms

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1 The Carolina Theatre, October 1927 3

2 Charles W. Chesnutt, c. 1883, age 25 19

3 A preliminary sketch of the metaphysical racialized space That Middle World, illustrating how it connects to the Black and white worlds 28

4 Jean Toomer’s passport, c. 1926 38

5 Hon. P. B. S. Pinchback, c. 1900 39

6 This is the woman and I am the man, from The Wife of His Youth by Charles W. Chesnutt 57

7 The Al G. Field Minstrels, c. 1907 95

8 Henry Box Brown, The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia 96

9 Ellen Craft 97

10 Sojourner Truth, I sell the shadow to support the substance 98

11 Rachel Dolezal 160

Acknowledgments

Often, it is not until the culmination of a thing—in this case, a book—that I stand still long enough to reflect on how it came to be. This process—of theorizing, writing, questioning, doubting, revising, nearly quitting, reaffirming, and finally finishing That Middle World—has been quite a journey, sometimes delightful because of the ways in which thoughts begin to come together, sometimes disorienting because of the ways in which they don’t. Throughout the many changes that have occurred in my life since the start of this book—graduating, relocating, starting a new job, and all that comes with those transitions—That Middle World has remained. It has been so present at times that it revealed itself in the most unexpected ways as part of everyday living; it has been so hidden at times that I wondered if it would ever show itself again through the fogginess. Yet whether visible or veiled, it has been a reassuring constant, revealing to me its merits. It has reminded me that the subjects I write about within these pages matter a great deal to the history of America and the shaping of American identity. Thus, nearly every day I came to this work with anticipation, anxiety, and, later, unwavering confidence that there was a thread here of the national fabric that had yet to be revealed in the way I believed it should be. And so I continued to write. The commitment to this work is rooted, as I hope all my work is, in humanity. It is the promise to bear allegiance, scholarly as it is, to the people and characters who have shown us who we are and helped redefine nationhood, especially those whose bodies bear the weight of a racially fraught nation. These stories have given me the freedom to ask tough questions, to search for answers, and, indeed, to dream about one day being in conversation with the many able passing literature scholars whose work prefigures my own, for whom I have deep respect, and in whose academic lineage I now fall.

What a journey this has been! The topsy-turvy ride that culminated in That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing would never have started were it not for two women, tiny in stature yet looming large in personality, demand, and expectation: Drs. Esther M. A. Terry and Linda B. Brown. As the cofounder of the PhD program in Afro-American Studies at UMass and, perhaps more serendipitously, as a graduate of the English Department at Bennett College—the same department from which I graduated—Dr. Terry has certainly left an indelible mark on my life and scholarship. I am overjoyed to have been supported, loved, and, when necessary, chided by her. And thank you to Dr. Brown, who is also a graduate of Bennett College and was my English professor there. Dr. Brown was my first sustained look at what this academic life could be. She was the first to offer me Black writers as something much more than an appendage to white American writers, and that has since sustained me. What began as a mandatory class at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, has become a passion for excavating the lives of Black folks like us and a staunch refusal to let our histories be narrated in anything other than unabashed truth and love. And that is certainly because of these two Black women. It is my sincerest hope that I have made them proud or, at least in some small measure, glad to have helped and encouraged me. Indeed, it takes a Belle.

A special thanks to the folks in the English Department at North Carolina A&T State University, especially to my cohorts, who have become good friends within and outside the academy. Aggie Pride! I am forever indebted to Bennett College herself, for without her, I would not have learned the responsibility of voice or the legacy of civic action. I remain true to thee, indeed.

In my five years as assistant professor of African American Literature in the English Department at Auburn University, I have had the support of many colleagues, some of whom have become great friends. I am deeply thankful for their support and kindness, especially for Paula Backscheider, Sunny Stalter-Pace, and Emily Friedman, who have made themselves available to answer my many questions. Mostly, though, I am eternally thankful to my colleague-turned-friend Susana Morris, who has held my hand as I learned what the professoriate is all about for a Black woman feminist. She has lent me her ear and, when necessary, her voice, and I owe her a great debt, which she would never ask me to repay.

I owe an even greater debt to Ernest L. Gibson III, who, since 2010, has been my friend in the academy and at the spades table. He has believed unwaveringly in my work from its infancy through its maturation. He has watched—and, dare I say, guarded—my turn from novice to professional, from student to professor, and, certainly best of all, from friend to family. He has never stopped trusting in my work and expecting great things from it. I am not certain this project would be what it is without our conversations in the car on the way to Boston, in the library at Rhodes College, on the top floor of the parking deck at Auburn University, or, better still, through frustrated tears outside an eatery in Memphis. For the past decade, this man has been my true friend and, indeed, the blueprint for creating and curating a life of the mind. I am always more thankful to call him friend than I am to call him colleague; the latter just doesn’t cover it.

In the place where Ernest and I met and where I cut my teeth, as they say, in this academic game, there are a great many people who either taught me or shared a classroom table with me and commiserated about the rigor of the work (as graduate students often do). I am delighted to acknowledge them here: I am humbly grateful to James Smethurst, who still reads some of my work, takes my calls, and answers all my questions. He was my advocate and a fierce believer in the merit of my work back in my UMass days. It was in A. Yemisi Jimoh’s graduate course that That Middle World began to emerge. There, my thoughts about racial performance and the politics of passing were shaped, challenged, and confirmed. Because she would not allow me to tell only one part of this beautifully complex way of being, That Middle World is, simply put, a better book. Were it not for her urging me to concern myself with language precision as a matter of ritual and her example of self-confidence—sometimes quiet and other times vocalized—I doubt that That Middle World would be.

Finishing That Middle World has caused me to recall the first chapter I completed—rushed and imprecise, in much the way a novice writer can be. I first received feedback from Britt Rusert, and I never knew a pen could be so devastating. Yet within the comments, which felt overwhelming at the time, was a string of questions and suggestions that demonstrated sureness and excitement in where this line of inquiry was headed and that pushed me forward—from wobbly student to specialist—and I am thankful to her for that. I am thankful, too, to Steve Tracy, John Bracey, and Manisha Sinha, who have each played a significant role in my growth as a scholar; I appreciate all of them and, particularly, Tricia Loveland, without whom the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies would likely cease to be. Indeed, the entire faculty of the department proved incredibly valuable to my growth as a scholar, thinker, and, I hope, sound writer.

I have endless love for my homegirls, both old and new: Erica-Brittany Horhn and India Smith, who have given me much-needed laughter. They have listened to me ramble on about this project for years, and they never once complained. While Erica specifically instructed me not to acknowledge her here because she just be chillin’, I chose to do so anyway, for this friendship is over a decade old and yet is still quite new as we both achieve. So thank you, Erica; fight me. Adrienne Duke, Bridgett King, and Dawn Morgan, who have given me the joy of sisterhood in these academic streets. Black Friday has been the absolute best part of this ride, hands down. Adrienne in particular has been my dear friend since I arrived at Auburn, always willing to share her advice and provide direction; I am incredibly glad to know and love her. Thank you to Jessica Fripp, whose prayers have kept me faithful to this work and whose laughs have kept us both real. Thank you, too, to Crystal Donkor, who has been my friend, writing partner, and accountability partner since our dissertation days. I appreciate all the calls, the coffee, and especially the tea.

To the entire Bonafide 40, what can I even say? What a privilege! Especially to Chanelle Jones and Danielle Bender … from 3:00 A.M. emergency phone calls that we still reference to this day to Y-shapes, this is one sisterhood that I hope never sees its end. But if it must, please know that my life is so much better because of you.

This project would not have come to fruition without generous financial support from Auburn University’s English Department and the College of Liberal Arts, which have provided various fellowships toward the completion of this project. Additionally, I am grateful for the W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholars Fellowship at UMass. A very special thanks to University of North Carolina Press, especially to Lucas Church and Andrew Winters for shepherding my manuscript through the publication process. I owe endless thanks to my reviewers, whose belief in my arguments and whose comments have resulted in a vastly better book. They, whomever they are, have made me believe in the review process as something that welcomes newness and fosters growth. Their feedback pushed me forward in critical ways; what has emerged here is the result of their thoughtful responses, for which I am overwhelmingly appreciative.

To my love, my friend, and my music, Nicole Linen: thank you from that part of me that I didn’t know existed, that is just for you. May this project be a time capsule of sorts, marking the beginning of us. May we crack the spine of this book in ten years and know that it holds a special place in our hearts. And may the projects that follow this one continue to hold our memories and bring even more meaning to our moments, for this is rare. I am eager to experience every single moment and all the things with you. Just do me this one favor: Let me wear the day well so when it reaches you, you will enjoy it. I love you deep.

Finally, I reserved this ending space for my family:

My life has not been what one might call traditional; growing up in foster care set that direction early on. And yet I now write to my carefully curated and assiduously attended forever family. The weight of this moment is not lost on me. Therefore, please allow me a minute to pause and humbly reflect on the fact that I, too, have a family, and I have stood on their shoulders to reach this place. Selah.

It is an honor and a sobering privilege to say their names here: Legolia Lee, Willie Lee, Antonio Charles, Lemar Charles, and, my best friend in this entire world despite the ruptures foster care created, Takeya Charles. Without you, I am not. Because of you, I am. Keta, I love you more. There is no doubt. (I win! Forever!) It has been an immense pleasure to know you as my sister but also to call you my friend—my very best friend. To Princess, J-Bird, and the Kid, you make me love harder than I ever knew was possible. To Mommy—Lorraine Tutt—I am afraid there aren’t enough pages to say thank you for choosing me. I am constantly blown away by your capacity to love someone like me. I owe you for your patience, and I am endlessly grateful for your presence.

I hope this book makes all of you mentioned here proud in some small way.

That Middle World

PROLOGUE

That Mandy Oxendine

The crucial question has always been a question of identity: Who is this Negro whose identifying characteristic is his color and what is his status in the world?

—John Hope Franklin, Color and Race

I was raised with the belief that there is no better education than the one received from having conversations with the elders. The elders, as I was taught and have since come to know full well, are the ones who have lived long enough to experience the ebbs and flows of life, the traumas and the triumphs, the births and the deaths. Therefore, to sit with the elders, I’ve learned, is not an obligatory practice but a true gift. So it was for that reason that I sat with my grandmother Frances (her the generous teacher and me her willing and fortunate student) and listened as she told me the history of the freedom struggle in our hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. The city had certainly survived its share of racial violence.¹ It had weathered the Greensboro massacre of 1979,² which occurred on my grandmother’s birthday, making that day ever since a clash of two worlds: the mournful and the celebratory—a fierce amalgam of wanting to forget and needing to remember. Likewise, the city had endured the historic Greensboro sit-in movement, which desegregated Woolworth’s lunch counter and marked the genesis of widespread, often coordinated political demonstrations across the South.³ My grandmother shared them all with me. She is a vault of memories, carrying the histories of Black folks with her for her entire life and eager to unlock the vault if ever asked. She did not, that I can recollect, call it the freedom struggle; that was an expression that formal education provided me. She would simply call it the way of things, turning the phrase back in those days into a wave of anticipation for me. Essentially, back in those days was a calling card, a signal for me to sit up and listen, for I was about to learn something about my past—which is to say, I was about to learn something critical about myself.

One day, as I was sitting with my grandmother, she began to tell me about when she was young and living in the place we call the Gate City. During this conversation, she remembered segregation at public places there. In particular, she remembered the Carolina Theatre in downtown Greensboro, where, as teenagers, she, her siblings, and her friends would go to take in a movie. Much of her memory was dedicated to the fact that segregation was deeply entrenched in Southern life—which is to say, Jim Crow was the way of things.

That Carolina Theatre

Once billed as the Showplace of the Carolinas, the Carolina Theatre (see figure 1) opened on Halloween 1927. Its opulence was a sign of the times, as were its segregated seating policies. As part of the Keith vaudeville chain, its early programs included live performing acts, an in-house orchestra, and silent films.⁴ The introduction of sound films resulted in vaudeville’s undoing there. Known in part for its innovation, the Carolina was the first theater in the state to introduce Vitaphone speakers; beginning in 1928, audiences attended in droves to see films there five times a day. Consequently, for the next 30 years, this Downtown movie palace was a hub of Greensboro nightlife.⁵ Indeed, the mission statement on the original program from opening night of the luxury theater building read, ‘The Carolina Theatre represents, to you and to us, far more than a structure of brick and stone, far more than a prideful addition to the city’s importance. It represents our faith in the future of our own fair city. It represents a magnificent edifice which we hereby entrust to your care and which we have sincerely dedicated to the pleasant task of rendering life more cheerful.’ ⁶

My grandmother partly echoed that sentiment as she recalled how the Carolina Theatre was usually the first choice of places to go to have a good time. She recalled that she and her friends just knew where they were supposed—or permitted—to sit, so much so that when I recoiled at the injustice of the Carolina Theatre’s segregated seating policies—Black folks being relegated to the balcony—my grandmother said with a simple sigh, That’s just how things were then. In other words, this was not a foreign experience for Grandma. In fact, she noted, Back in those days, I don’t think we thought very much about this [having to sit in the balcony] as being wrong. We were young kids; we just wanted to go out and have a good time. When I asked if there was an attendant there to enforce the seating policies, she said, "We just knew Black folks had to sit in the balcony, just like we knew we had to sit in the back of the bus in those days. But they could look at you and tell where you belonged. If you were darker than the white folks, you had better go to the balcony." With Black folks sequestered in the balcony and white folks free to take in the show from floor seats, Jim Crow was indeed a way of life, and the Carolina Theatre had both succeeded and failed in its mission of rendering life more cheerful.

FIGURE 1 The Carolina Theatre, October 1927. Courtesy of the Carolina Theatre, Greensboro, North Carolina.

Having thrived from its opening night in 1927, to (barely) surviving the retail boom of the late 1960s that sent folks away from downtown, to its late 1970s restoration and reinvention as Greensboro’s hub for community performing arts, to the July 1, 1981, catastrophe in which the Carolina was beset by a raging fire in an old stairwell that had once led to the segregated balcony,⁷ the Carolina Theatre is, in many ways, as timeless as it is a reflection of the city’s moral fiber. As a kid during the mid-1990s, I recall attending church services in that same building, my childhood church having rented out the Carolina Theatre while the church was expanding its own edifice. Now operating as a fully functioning performing arts center, the Carolina Theatre is, as the originators had hoped, far more than a prideful addition to the city’s importance. It is encompassing of the city’s racial history and emblematic of its growth, having survived the city’s changing political landscape time and again, all the while with its own story to tell of cataloging and being an integral part of the Gate City’s past. Indeed, It represents our faith in the future of our own fair city.

As my grandmother lent me her memories that day, I recall thinking, So, this was Jim Crow. This was the legal apparatus—far more than a structure of brick and stone—that controlled how races of people moved through space. The knowing that Jim Crow engendered struck me most; that knowing was telling. That as a kid, Grandma and Black kids like her simply knew where their bodies could go—and, by extension, not go—proves that that knowing was not hers alone; rather, it was the way of things. It was the law, of course, but there was also a social knowing that had to have taken place before she and those like her ever encountered the outside world that would enforce the law. And that anticipatory knowing was a result of the quotidian fear inherent in Black life in the Jim Crow South, fear of losing their Black bodies for lack of knowing, or for knowing and not doing, or, better still, for any reason at all that white folks felt the need to destroy Black bodies, especially if those Black bodies were out of their permitted place. My grandmother’s matter-of-fact statement of public policing and access prompted me to ask, But what if you were fair skinned like the white folks? Could you just sit downstairs then? She responded just as plainly, If you looked light-skinned enough, then, sure, you could get away with it. And, even if we [Black people] knew you had no business being down there, we wouldn’t have said anything. This was Jim Crow: a magnificent—that is, expansive and unyielding, if pernicious—edifice indeed.

My grandmother’s descriptions of the various memorable clashes between race and space—that is, how one’s Black race hinders freedom of movement—as she had known them often sent a quiet shock coursing through me. It was not that I wasn’t aware of all that had happened in our city; it was that I had not realized how near their touch had been—that I could be (and had been) conversant with the violent history of the South all these years, and that the vestiges of that South would somehow touch my current work. This work is concerned with the unnecessary, if expected, repetition and fear of losing the Black body, giving voice to the undisrupted silences—which are not to be confused with peace—that remain despite Black people’s encounters with people, systems, and spaces that mean them harm, neglect, or both. This is why That Middle World is a project in excavating the strategies of performance that make room for extended moments of movement, of freedom. This book is gesturing toward a freedom of movement that the Black body has not collectively known in literature but that the mixed-race figure and their liminal world attempt to create through identity performance.

My grandmother’s past feeds into my present work. Her encounters with the fierce legal system of segregation that purposed to establish greater distance between Black and white, especially after the collapse of Reconstruction, became the foundation for my understanding of the need for and the act of racial performance. The state and local segregation laws, collectively known as Jim Crow, strictly enforced racial separation or distance (in quality and often physical space) between Black folks and white folks, the latter experiencing the highest quality of everything—both tangible and intangible—from bathrooms, restaurants, and theaters to social treatment. Because it was so widely enforced, particularly across the South, Jim Crow—itself a trace of the national institution that was chattel slavery—controlled how Black folks moved through public spaces, especially with the risk of criminalization and racial violence always looming. This threat of being labeled and treated as a criminal, and the predictable violence that accompanies it, established a fearful distance between the races.

It was the distance between the races that most fascinated me; it is what provides the space for performance. Apropos of her material location, the thought that my grandmother could be sitting in the balcony of the theater and perhaps see a familiar face portraying a race outside their legal one in the crowd of whites below, yet she just knew not to say anything—that she would have tacitly consented to protecting someone’s legal identity because of a shared in-group—was telling of the understanding among Black people. For, as I understood my grandmother’s position, her silence, rather than simply being out of fear of contact with white people, would have come from an understanding of the obligation to protect Black life and an acknowledgment of the desire to move freely—to shrink the distance created by Jim Crow. Consequently, if my grandmother—or any other non-passing Black person—were to observe another legally-Black person crossing as white, she just knew—and this knowing is important—to maintain her silence, to preserve that crosser’s body, to extend that person’s moments of freedom. That knowing is special; it is a knowing that is inherent to and indicative of Black American life in the South. That knowing is often, as That Middle World demonstrates, an unspoken yet dependable knowing among Black folks, regardless of their feelings about the crosser. When I asked my grandmother if she could imagine herself saying anything to someone she knew was passing for white, she said, Probably not. Maybe I would have made eye contact and smirked a little, but I wouldn’t have acted familiar; that would’ve been dangerous. Inasmuch as that eye contact with the performer without verbal acknowledgment is crucial to grasping the role of the non-crosser in the success of the performance, that smirk to which Grandma signaled is a manifestation of the knowing; it is an acknowledgment of the successful performance, an inward ovation—the furtive gotcha, as it were. It is an