Mortgaged Status: Literary Representations of Black Home Ownership and Social Mobility

In The Housing Status of Black Americans, Wilhelmina A. Leigh observes that the percentage of black home ownership in the 1980s equaled that of whites in the 1940s (20). With a forty-year lag, federal policy did not catch up with needs until 1988, when the Fair Housing Amendments Act enabled the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to bring complaints before federal courts. Leigh’s study allows us to understand this historical period in terms of a time lag between the government and the people it served. In this essay, I analyze novels concerned with this contradictory time in the postwar period—a time when more African Americans were entering the middle class than ever before, but when home ownership was still circumscribed due to the ideological climate. It was a time, as Bart Landry notes in his 1988 study of the black middle class, when a house could be seen as “the symbol of success in a society that allowed [African Americans] precious few opportunities for conspicuous achievement”; yet African American authors were also questioning that very symbol of success (79). It was out of these contradictions, in the wavering between the enticement of class ascension and a disillusionment with its fruition, that novels such as Dorothy West’s The Living Is Easy (1948), Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), and Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills (1985) emerged. By symbolizing upward mobility through the acquisition of houses in neighborhoods associated with social and economic success, these novels historicize communal consumption patterns and reflect how status symbols function as part of an ideological inheritance. Characters who pass down and characters who are bequeathed this inheritance enact a conceptual framework, what I am calling a mortgaged status, that lays bare the process and interpretation of social mobility over generations.

By developing characters seeking to counter social marginality through status symbols along with characters trying to make sense of alternatives to material accumulation, these novels helped to articulate the stressed position of a minority middle-class subjectivity before there was a sociological language to describe it. Amy Schrager Lang has argued that in the mid-nineteenth century, American writers endeavored to construct a “syntax of class” in order to describe and order class differences. Similarly, these novels produced from the 1940s to the 1980s were developing figures and symbols to narrate the struggle for social incorporation during a period of simultaneous growth and limitation for the black middle class; for even though economic advancements and civil rights gains did much to alter the field of possibilities, there still existed a disparity in the actual attainment of equal housing opportunity, as well as a lag in the realm of possibilities imagined for a minority middle class.

I argue that one prominent figure in these novels is the status seeker, who strives for social elevation on material grounds. As a financial asset, a house offers a sense of intergenerational stability. More than just a place to raise one’s family, a house can stand for investments in self and communal worth in that it necessitates continuous psychic, social, and monetary payments over time. While the status seeker acts as the original investor, this status is mortgaged, borrowed in the hopes of uninterrupted upward mobility and dependent on subsequent generations to keep up payments. But later generations can have different interpretations of upward mobility’s end goal, and in portraying this disconnect, these novels nuance the trajectory of upward mobility and depict status as an accruement of a kind of debt, one that cannot or will not be paid off by subsequent generations.

In this generational disconnect of aspirational values at odds with the changing environment, there is a critique of ideologies associated with previous historical moments that are no longer viable in the present. The portrayal of temporal incongruity in The Living Is Easy, Brown Girl, Brownstones, and Linden Hills illustrates how artistic production can intervene and make sense of historically situated social contradictions. I thus end with readings of artist figures trying to interpret the contradictions around...