_____________p a s s i n g

Blacks who go incognito in white society learn terrible truths and tell dangerous lies.
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BY KAREN GRIGSBY BATES

Let me declare my bias right up front: With few exceptions, I have scant patience for literature -- fiction and not -- that agonizes over the dilemma of the black soul trapped in a body that appears to be white. Most days, people who are visibly members of the African Diaspora suffer such horrors that the angst that their paler compatriots endure over whether or not to claim the race seems a luxury that doesn't merit much complaint. And while dark-on-light color prejudice does, indeed, exist among blacks (from the "She think she cute cause she look white" variety -- an experience I can attest to personally -- to the more pernicious "What's this white MF doing over here on our side of town, let's kick his ass" variety), it's more common the other way around, and often with more dire consequences.

That said, two books about the black soul/white body dilemma have been published recently that made me put aside my self-imposed injunction on the issue. Toi Derricotte and Danzy Senna both have written stories in which passing -- going racially incognito -- plays a pivotal part.

Derricotte, a nationally recognized poet and university professor, has written "The Black Notebooks," an excruciatingly candid memoir of her attempt to come to grips with the oxymoron of looking white while being reared in black American culture. She started the book 20 years ago, deeply depressed about racism, this country's inability to stop sipping from that poisoned cup and her own shame and fear for taking what some would call the easy way out. In a very calculated sin of omission, she chose not to identify herself as black, knowing that others would simply assume she was white if she didn't correct them. She finally decided to 'fess up because, as she told the Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year, "to show myself in this unfavorable light is to say, 'Let's talk about the things that racism makes us do.'" She hopes that in sharing her own personal and painful evolution in as undecorated a manner as possible, she'll contribute to making us all a bit more willing to examine our own racial fears, prejudices and hopes.

Even as Derricotte begins her confessions -- and they do read as if said in the hushed sanctity of a trusted friendship or, more accurately, the purposefully nonjudgmental safety of the analyst's office -- she worries: "What benefit can this be? It's already been done by somebody better. It's too late ... racism doesn't happen to people of my color ... Light skin gives me such privileges that my complaints are not worthy. I'm not 'positive' enough, not 'black' enough ... Whose side am I on?" And, as my own initial misgivings of the genre show, there is cause for her anxiety. An attractive woman with light skin and features that can, depending on the eye of the beholder, be interpreted as racially ambiguous, Derricotte clearly has had the benefits of a middle-class life: She's been well-educated, she works as a writer in the fine arts and she was for decades married to one of the first black executives in the banking industry. Much of the early part of her memoir is spent recounting her disappointment with life in Upper Montclair, N.J., a bedroom suburb of New York that was, in the early '70s, still white by design until she and her husband integrated it. (And that only happened because she house-shopped without her discernibly black spouse, and chose not to disclose her race to the realtor until all the t's had been crossed, the i's dotted on their deed.)

The joy of attaining the home of her dreams, however, was darkened by a miasma of fury and longing: Derricotte spends far too much time worrying that she and her husband aren't included in the neighborhood's social life, the linchpin of which is a country club with predictably exclusionary membership policies. Her neighbors (some of them) profess to abhor those policies -- but demur to change, even as they sheepishly apologize for their moral laxity: "We met for four hours. Several of us said we would turn in our resignations unless you could come [to a club dinner]. But the majority felt it wouldn't be a good idea because you'd see all the good things and want to join, and since you couldn't join, it would just hurt you and be frustrating. John and I wanted to quit. I feel very ashamed of myself, but the next summer when I was stuck in the house with the kids and nothing to do, we started going again." (Which means, of course, these non-prejudiced people must not have resigned to begin with, just placed themselves on the "inactive" roster until they deigned to go back to the fold. These are the same progressive beings who gasped, "I didn't know black people had houses like this!" when they saw a photograph of Derricotte's mother's home.)

I read passages like that one and I want to shake Derricotte and ask, "Why on earth would you want to be with those people anyway?" It's unfathomable to me, as is much of the similar anguish in this book. Derricotte's early musings possess a level of racial naiveté I find shocking -- but that may be explicable, given our ages. Although she and I are exactly 10 years apart (56 and 46, respectively), it was a critical decade, one in which we moved from being Negro to being black, and became, in many ways, less hopeful of what integration could and would do for us. When I was 15, my family integrated our tree-canopied block in New Haven, Conn.; unlike Derricotte, none of us expected that our neighbors, primarily middle-aged, middle-class and Jewish, would be friends, although some of them, indeed, evolved into friends over time.

Like us, most integrating blacks were people setting off into white neighborhoods like westward pioneers on prairie schooners. We were going with firm purpose and a definite list of wants: better houses, better schools, less crime. If getting those things meant living next to white people, so be it, but living next to white people, per se, was not why we went. Potlucks with the neighbors was not on that list of goals; if it occurred, it was considered a windfall, a little social lagniappe. The integrating black families I knew went with the intention of forming our own islands, socially self-sufficient. We went assuming white anxiety and social rejection were part of the price of upward mobility, the price of the ticket. (And in most cases, they were.)

Which makes me wonder: Where were Derricotte's black anchors? The elite women's social groups, the men's fraternal organizations made up of doctors, lawyers, MBAs? If you could scan photos of these groups taken at the same time that Derricotte lived in Upper Montclair, you would see immediately that there was no lack of white-looking black socialites; major cities of the Eastern Seaboard and the South were (and, to some degree, are) still full of them. Why was Derricotte not among their numbers? Especially since she has no guilt (unlike some privileged blacks a few years later) surrounding the issue of remaining in the upper middle class. Even if she wasn't religious and eschewed the church route, there were other ways (such as the ones just mentioned) to be included among W.E.B. DuBois' "Talented Tenth." That she did not avail herself of them remains one of the many unspoken mysteries in this book.

N E X T+P A G E+| Innocent bystanders in the race wars