Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (review)

Gayle Wald's Crossing the Line examines racial passing as a complex negotiation of identity and social mobility in the twentieth century. Beginning with the passing narratives of Jessie Faucet and Nella Larsen, Wald quickly distinguishes the process that will shape her discussions of the blues musician Mezz Mezzrow, post–World War II cinematic representation, "postpassing" narratives in 1950s African American magazines, and John Howard Griffin's autobiography, Black like Me. Passing, in Wald's analysis, calls forth a most profound psychological and cultural challenge to manage stable identities over and against the inherent indeterminacy of meaningful selves.

Wald's case studies are creatively conceived and researched. Her focus on individual writers consistently branches out into broader cultural and theoretical contexts that mediate the shifts and attempts to fix dominant readings of racial bodies. The analysis of Mezz Mezzrow's Really the Blues is one of the most innovative components of the study, for the analysis broadens the definition of passing to include narratives of explicit and dramatic performances. As a 1946 Ebony article claimed, there was "nothing secret about Mezzrow's passing" (57); Mezzrow looked white, was Jewish and middle-class, and consistently proclaimed himself a "voluntary Negro." Throughout his autobiography, which sold 25,000 copies, he wove together stories of his experience with slums and tight squeezes in prison cells (a Rikers stretch of time for drug possession and trafficking). The complexity of Wald's portrait ultimately dovetails with the hard fact of Mezzrow's cultural dislocation and racial repression. As a musician and a man, he was weak because he tried, in Sidney Bechet's words, "so hard to be something he isn't."

There are moments in the study when Wald's focus too neatly defines the stability and instability, as well as privileges and exclusions, of what it means to pass—a concept firmly rooted in racial classification and what it means to be "black" and "white" in the United States. Part of the problem is the book's conceptual framing. Crossing the Line's most illuminating moments occur when Wald spends more time on historical analysis and less on classic psychoanalytic theory, which does little to illuminate the long and complex struggles of African American subjects in the United States. In my view, there is little to gain from an approach that finds the uncanny in the moments when Griffin, who chemically darkened his skin to know what it was like to be black in the mid-twentieth-century South, reveals how his authentic "Negro" identity turns strange by virtue of his uncanny likeness (and hidden whiteness) to the "Negro" phenotype. All familiar and assumed identities grow strange in relation to a backdrop of changing perception fields. More enlightening is Wald's analysis of cinematic representation in which she studies the elitist, liberal, institutional policy of Hollywood production studios and contrasts this policy with the status-quo framing of race in films like Pinky and Lost Boundaries.

Wald's chapter on postpassing narratives in African American magazines displays some of the more problematic absences of class analysis. Here Wald draws on E. Franklin Frazier's classic study Black Bourgeoisie to define the "bourgeois" ideal readers of Ebony and Essence. Yet there is no analysis of those women who had to pass to survive, to feed their children, for example, as was the case with Louise Little, the mother of Malcolm X. Neither is there an extended analysis of how passing connects to the profound implications of "colorism" or the battle of shades in African American communities, particularly among women. After all, colorism shaped, and continues to shape, concepts of beauty as class mobility in the culture of consumption, a culture disseminated for African American readers of mass culture precisely through magazines such as Ebony and Essence (where makeup...