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4. Passing as Principle
- Baylor University Press
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79 CHAPTER FOUR Passing as Principle Iola and Harry Leroy grew up thinking they were white. Their father was white. Their mother was white. Their grandparents and aunts and uncles were white. Their family even owned slaves. But as the Civil War approached, Iola and Harry found out that they were not white after all. Frances E. W. Harper brings this scenario to life in her novel Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted, demonstrating how passing eloquently connects the realities of fiction to the fictions of reality. Through Iola’s and Harry’s experiences Harper shows that access to reality is sometimes based on fiction rather than fact and that identities are understood best in terms of the stories we tell about who we are. Harper reveals how fiction can sometimes ring more “true” than fact and that what we call facts are sometimes simply eloquent and persuasive fictions— fictions we deem most reasonable and expedient.1 Harper’s protagonists, Iola and Harry Leroy, discover the relation between fact, fiction, and passing when their sister and father die suddenly of yellow fever and their “true” racial identities are revealed. After spending their lives growing up in an upper-class white slave-owning family in the South, the siblings find out they and their mother are multiracial and, because of hypodescent, considered black. The discovery changes everything. It changes where 80 • Clearly Invisible and how they live, what they own, who they love, and what they can expect for themselves and from society. Most important, it sets them on a journey to uncover and discover themselves, their roots, their family, and the difficult and complex story of racial identities in the slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras. The road is rocky and the conflicts are profound. Like the nation itself, Iola and Harry experience unions, break-ups, compromises, battles , and displacement. As Harper narrates it, many years pass before Iola and Harry reunite. When Harry boards a train en route to meet with Iola, he sits in the “colored” car. But after several hours, and because he is no longer in his hometown, things change. “A colored man entered the car, and, mistaking [Harry] for a white man, asked the conductor to have [him] removed.”2 Harry insists that he is “colored” in order to remain in the “colored” car with his black traveling companion and girlfriend, Miss Delaney. When things calm down, he turns to Miss Delaney and groans, “It would be FIGURE 4.1 Frances E. W. Harper, author of Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted [18.116.13.113] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:16 GMT) Passing as Principle • 81 ludicrous, if it were not vexatious, . . . to be too white to be black, and too black to be white.”3 Harry’s sharp and critical commentary is a direct response to the notion that people are not who they say they are. Interestingly, Harper herself was accused publicly of passing as both black and female. For example, after speaking engagements it was noted that “she was so articulate and engaging as a public speaker, audiences concluded that she couldn’t possibly be a black woman. Some even speculated that she must be a man, while others reasoned that she was painted to look black.”4 Critical disbelief and alienation followed Harper in her life and in her writing as a function of racial episteme, which created collective identities and evidentiary standards that required extrinsic authentication. These standards are the determining factors of public knowledge, creating identities, identifications, and divisions. Because of such standards, it is no surprise that Harper’s major rhetorical constraint and inspiration was found in passing—in relations between fiction and reality and in conversations among passers, dupes, and in-group clairvoyants, navigating between multiple audiences and their attendant perspectives . Harper made her characters as eloquent as possible and attributed their eloquence to blackness in order to prove she too was black.5 Further, Harper’s eloquent characters created a space in which blackness could be so eloquent that it expressed possibilities for interracial relationships and multiracial identities. Harper uses her characters, “too white to be black, and too black to be white,” to expand the social imaginary. Not only does she make room for herself as an eloquent black author, but she also exposes the few options made available to multiracial people in an unimaginative, tradition-bound society. Thanks to hypodescent, multiracial people lived in a world where a drop of black blood made them...