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4. Race-changes as Exchanges: The Autobiography of an Ex-coloured Man
- University of Michigan Press
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4 Race-changes as Exchanges T H E A U T O B I O G R A P H Y O F A N E X -C O L O U R E D M A N Reflecting on his travels by Pullman coach at the end of The American Scene, Henry James imagines a race-change. He speculates that his perceptions would be altered dramatically were he “red” instead of “white,” a Native American rather than a “native” American. He scolds the railroad itself: “If I were one of the painted savages you have dispossessed , it wouldn’t be to you I should be looking in any degree for beauty or for charm. Beauty and charm would be for me in the solitude you have ravaged, and I should owe you my grudge for every dis‹gurement and every violence, for every wound with which you have caused the face of the land to bleed” (341). Out of sympathetic identi‹cation with another “type,” he elaborates this critique of the Pullman’s social signi‹cance, its de‹lement of “the great lonely land.” But he soon comes to a startling realization about his imagined race-change. He notes how the critique it allows him to generate is materially reliant on precisely his not being a Native American: “[I]f I had been a beautiful red man with a tomahawk I should of course have rejoiced in the occasional sandy track, or in the occasional mud-channel . . . Only in that case I shouldn’t have been seated by the great square of plate-glass through which the missionary Pullman appeared to invite me to admire the achievements it proclaimed” (342). Transparent yet impenetrable, the plate glass of the Pullman window serves here as both a medium for his vicarious experience and a reminder of the exclusive white privilege of holding that seat in the train car. It simultaneously marks the color line, makes possible an 129 imaginary traversal of the color line, and constitutes that traversal itself as unequally available. In an anonymous account of racial “passing” that appeared in The Independent in 1913, the black narrator’s light skin enables him to do exactly what James’s red man could not. I am a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I can ride in Pullman cars in the heart of the South, have my lunch in the best restaurant on my route, and stop for the night, as I have done, at the Piedmont hotel, or the Desoto, or the Heritage, and then when I am tired of being among strange folks I can go down on Auburn avenue in Atlanta, or Lawton avenue in St. Louis, and be a negro just as long as I choose. Sometime I shall possibly decide to be one or the other for all time, but just now the game is too interesting. (“Adventures of a Near-White” 376) Like James, this narrator identi‹es the Pullman with the trappings of the good life that consumer culture promoted. Also like James, he draws the color line between the quasi-public interior spaces of that consumer culture —its comfortable conveyances, restaurants, and hotels—and the life “on the avenue.” Through the exclusion of life “on the avenue,” these spaces of consumer culture acquire their racial speci‹city. In her 1928 novel, Plum Bun, Jessie Fauset offers a differently gendered account of this same color line through another fair-skinned black character. For Mrs. Murray, passing for white affords access to pleasures of consumption and spectacle that are not merely idle and ›eeting but nearly indispensable. It pleased her to stand in the foyer of the Great Hotel or of the Academy of Music and to be part of the whirling, humming, palpitating gaiety. She had no desire to be of those people, but she liked to look on; it amused and thrilled and kept alive some unquenchable instinct for life which thrived within her. To walk through Wanamaker’s on Saturday, to stroll from ‹fteenth to ninth street on Chestnut, to have her tea in the Bellevue Stratford, to stand in the lobby of the St. James ‹tting on immaculate gloves; all innocent, childish pleasures pursued without malice or envy contrived to cast a glamour over Monday’s washing and Tuesday’s ironing, the scrubbing of kitchen and bathroom and the fashioning of children’s clothes . . . Much of this plea130 C0mmerce in Color [44.200.182.101] Project MUSE (2024-03-29...