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71 3 Black Like She Grace Halsell and the Sexuality of Passing During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, miscegenation was broadly conceived in terms of its transformative power: it could potentially turn white babies black. In the popular imagination, however, more than the baby could be blackened by sexual proximity between black and white. In 1732 the South Carolina Gazette published a poem, “The Chameleon Lover,” which envisioned miscegenationists as “imbib[ing] the blackness of their charmer’s skin.”1 At least as far back as the eighteenth century, interracial relationships were credited with such “magical” powers: through repeated sex with a black partner, it was believed, whites could find themselves turning black. This popular myth was shored up by a measure of historical truth. For example , in one twentieth-century study of black-white couples, a sociologist discovered a number of cases in which white partners in a mixed marriage had attempted to conceal their racial heritage and instead claimed membership in the black community.2 Significantly, in most narratives about this sort of passing, it is the white woman, not the white man, who passes for black. From the Civil War on, most interracial mating was between black women and white men, but most interracial marriages were between black men and white women. According to a writer in 1924, such a marriage “condemned [white women] to bitter hatred and social ostracism among their race. They generally had no recourse but to associate with the colored people and become Negroes in all but color.” In 1886 a North Carolina resident described the “low white women who cohabitated with Negroes. Well I can remember, the many times 72 BLACK LIKE SHE when, with the inconsiderable curiosity of a child, I hurriedly climbed the front gate to get a good look at a shriveled old woman trudging down the lane, who, when young, I was told, had had her free Negro lover bled and drank some of his blood, so that she might swear she had Negro blood in her, and thus marry him without penalty.” During the same era, two white girls were jailed for dressing in men’s clothing and accompanying their black boyfriends to New Orleans, where they planned to marry them; perhaps the cross-dressing emphasized in the legal report of this case reflects displaced anxiety about another sort of transformation—a racial one—that could occur with such a marriage. As late as 1946 an article in Negro Digest declared: Most Negro-white marriages are between Negro men and white women, and usually the wife follows the husband into the colored community. In many instances she claims to be a light-skinned Negro, hoping thereby to overcome the aversion with which the majority of Negroes appear to regard interracial marriage. This is by far the easiest of all forms of passing, even if the woman happens to be a golden blonde. Few whites, or Negroes, either, for that matter, can imagine her saying she is a Negro if she isn’t.3 It is intriguing that such accounts of white passing in the context of sex and marriage are primarily about women. In this chapter I consider the position of the female white passer in the context of interracial sex—not only because sex represents the most literal form of proximity but also because the transformative power attributed to such relationships seems to apply principally to white women. In The Garies, for instance, the white Mr. Garie is married to a lightskinned black woman; although he is stoned to death by a racist lynch mob— thus losing his life on account of his proximity to black people—he never, in a novel replete with sundry passing scenarios, actually passes as black. Proximity , as I have been arguing, is capable of turning white black, but the meaning of “proximity” has everything to do with gender. Inherent to this chapter is the concept of sexual tourism, which involves an extension of one’s sexual boundaries, exploration of new and “primitive” bodies in a sexual context. It is what bell hooks has called “eating the Other”: “The direct objective was not simply to sexually possess the Other, it was to be changed in some way by the encounter.”4 Sexual tourism occurs when sex becomes not merely about pleasure but about appropriation—appropriation, in this context, of blackness itself. Yet while men and women engage in this sort of appropriative sexual tourism, the process, as we shall see, is...

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