Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South

Coloring between the Lines: Historiographies of Southern Anomaly

| 23 1 Coloring between the Lines Historiographies of Southern Anomaly My old man died in a fine big house. My ma died in a shack, I wonder where I’m gonna die, Being white nor black? —Langston Hughes, “Cross” Images of segregation have become part of our historical conscience. They are reminders of past intolerance even as de facto segregation continues to permeate society. For better or worse, such images have also fixed our vision; we readily identify the “colored” signs over restroom doors or waiting rooms as literal signs of inequality. We also understand who they implicate; that is to say, we read the signs in black and white. But in what ways do these assumptions foreclose a complex understanding of the work of white supremacy, its scope, influence, or nuance? A case in point: how do we read the image of divided drinking fountains? Photojournalist Esther Bubley’s iconic 1946 photograph represents an apparently straightforward image of racial segregation. Taken when Bubley worked as a documentary photographer for Standard Oil,thephotographdepictsamanandaboyleaningoverside-by-sidedrinking fountains at a tobacco warehouse in Lumberton, North Carolina; one fountain ismarked“colored”andtheother,“white.”Bubley’sphotographdepictsascene readilyunderstoodinthecontemporarymoment,anunderstandingconveyed inhistorianGraceElizabethHale’sassessment,“theblackmanandthewhiteboy drinkingindicatetheirracialidentitiesevenastheyrefreshtheirthirsts”(2000, 174). Critic Elizabeth Abel’s interpretation of this image highlights additional axes of difference: age, gender, and class (1999). What one sees, writes Abel, is the photographer’s staging of racial fraternity in spite of the subjects’ formally separatestatus.Theybecomeunitednotonly through their mutual submission 24 | chapter 1 as laborers, she suggests, but through the image that floats above them: a postwar advertisement showing a half-naked pinup girl offering the viewer Camel cigarettes.Abelarguesthattheimageofthewhitewomansecuresthehomosocialbondbetweenblackandwhite (men);sexualdifferencepartiallyreconciles the scene of racial separation. The feminist critic triangulates the “colored”/ whitedichotomybyintroducinggenderasapointofmediation;inherreading, theintroductionofathirdspaceabovethephotograph’sfocalpointgeneratesan alternativeaccountoftheimagethatcomplicatesitsportrayalofracialdivision. Herreadingexemplifiesthecomplexityofintersectionalanalysisinitsaccount oftheinterplaybetweenrace,class,andgender,youthandmaturity. In order to gesture to another third space, I would pose this question: what if the figure drinking from the “colored” fountain was not black? IthappensthatthetownofLumbertonliesinRobesonCounty,NorthCarolina ,wherethepopulationwasdistinctlydivided,notinhalf,butinthreeparts: white,black,and,accordingtothecensusatthetime,“otherraces.”Thisanonymousfiguredrinkingfromthesegregatedfountainandmadetobeartheweight of Jim Crow’s symbolic abjection could, in fact, identify as American Indian. Howdoesthisuncertaintychangethemeaningwetakefromthephotographor thedehumanizinghistoryitevokes?Whatdifferencewoulditmake? The rise of segregation at the turn of the century forced the question of color and status in case of the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County. As I discuss in the next chapter, when faced with the pressures of white or black association, the Lumbee became, ironically, Indian. Following the rise of Jim Crow, school segregation forced the assertion of the community’s identity in ways that prefigured on-going arguments for tribal federal recognition . Crucial to this process was the discourse of blood: differentiating from blacks had to be visually inscribed, while claims to whiteness—the oral lore of being descended from Raleigh’s Lost Colony—contributed to the Lumbee claim to indigenous specificity. “Indian” became intelligible through approximation—as like black or white—in ways that gesture to a context that lies beyond the photograph’s contemporary framing. Yet Hale’s and Abel’s assumptions about this faceless man are also our own. As Charles Chesnutt writes in the 1920s, “The term ‘colored’ as applied to people partly or entirely of Negro descent is used the world over, and in the United States its meaning is not surrounded by doubt or uncertainty. No one refers to Chinamen or Japanese or Indians as ‘colored’” (1999, 566). The seemingly unequivocal association between “colored” and black indicates the power of a seamless account of history to structure the terms of our Coloring between the Lines | 25 comprehension, in this case, of segregation and the subject upon whose back white supremacy rested, as well as, I would argue, the proper subject of racial grievance. Thinking of American Indians as “colored” requires thinking outside segregation’s frame and the symbolic significance that frame assumes in the post–Civil Rights moment. The “colored” man’s identity as nonblack becomes inconceivable. If this ambiguity was repressed for the sake of the law in the context of Robeson County, North Carolina in 1946, half a century later, it could simply be forgotten. Yet the feminist critic’s generative methodology can apply to her own reading: what lies on the borders of the frame establishes meaning and serves to reveal culture’s investments. If “Indian” is rendered unintelligible in our national staging of racial injustice in the South, the stakes are high: the liberal frame of political representation in the United States is based on visibility to...