No Definite Destination: Transnational Liminality in Harlem

NO DEFINITE DESTINATION: TRANSNATIONAL LIMINALITY IN HARLEM

RENAISSANCE LIVES AND WRITINGS

A dissertation submitted

to Kent State University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the

degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Joshua M. Murray

May 2016

Except for previously published materials

Dissertation written by

Joshua M. Murray

B.A., University of Georgia, 2008

M.A., University of Georgia, 2011

Ph.D., Kent State University, 2016

Approved by

Babacar M’Baye , Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Claire A. Culleton , Members, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Robert W. Trogdon ,

Kenneth J. Bindas ,

Landon E. Hancock ,

Accepted by

Robert W. Trogdon , Chair, Department of English

James L. Blank , Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... iii

DEDICATION ...... v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... vi

AUTHOR’S NOTE ...... viii

INTRODUCTION Toward a New Black Transnationalism ...... 1

CHAPTERS I. Claude McKay’s Transnational/Transitional Identity ...... 22

The Wandering Vagabond in Home to Harlem and Banjo ...... 25

Gendered Liminality in Gingertown and Banana Bottom ...... 40

II. Racial Escapism in Nella Larsen’s Fiction ...... 59

Elusive Freedom in Quicksand ...... 63

Liminal Captivity in Passing ...... 73

III. Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Black American’s French Dream...... 87

The Class Ceiling in There Is Confusion ...... 92

The Transnational Savior in Plum Bun ...... 103

The Intraracial In-Between in The Chinaberry Tree ...... 111

Transnational Failure in Comedy: American Style ...... 119

IV. Authorial Emplacement in Langston Hughes’s Life Writings ...... 138

Setting the Global Stage in The Big Sea ...... 145

Around the World Home: I Wonder as I Wander and Beyond ...... 162

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CONCLUSION Continuing a New Black Transnationalism ...... 180

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 192

For Kendra, Silas, and Zelda

Acknowledgments

This project was years in the making, and I owe a great deal of it to my dissertation director, Babacar M’Baye. Prior to our first discussion, I had only an inkling of what exactly transnationalism entailed. In the many conversations since, he has offered innumerable suggestions that made my ideas become a tangible reality. On a personal level, he has been the most encouraging and supportive mentor I have encountered. After every meeting, I left with a renewed sense that I was doing exactly what I needed to be doing. I thank him for going above and beyond to help me succeed. Robert W. Trogdon was instrumental not only in my approach to this dissertation but throughout my time as a doctoral student. From my very first semester, he showed an interest in my work, and he pushed me to seek the highest quality in each of my projects. Claire A. Culleton offered some much needed editorial insight throughout the entire process. I appreciate her willingness to provide a different perspective that clearly improved the final product. I would also like to thank my cohort at Kent State for their friendship and input over the years; Kevin Floyd for his invaluable support; Kenneth J. Bindas for his historical expertise; the departmental staff who kept me on the right track each semester; and

Christopher Allen Varlack for agreeing to publish excerpts of this project in Critical

Insights: Harlem Renaissance.

I want to thank the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale

University for granting me access to the Langston Hughes Papers, which proved instrumental in my fourth chapter. I also want to thank the Kent State University

Graduate Student Senate for awarding me the research grant that enabled me to travel to

New Haven in the first place.

Finally, I never would have made it this far without the unconditional support from my family. My parents, Mike and Crystal Murray, and my sister, Jordan Cook, contributed to the loving environment of my youth and were among the first to back me when I chose to follow the academic path. I thank them for always believing in me along the way. My beautiful wife, Kendra, experienced this journey with me day in and day out. She has been more than supportive, offering me the calm words and reassurances I needed when I thought the end was nowhere in sight. In addition to showing me love at every turn, she has given me the two best gifts: our children, Silas and Zelda. The three of them have sacrificed countless hours as I spent time away researching, conferencing, and writing. I hope to return those hours in the years to come. More than for anyone else, this is for them.

vii

Author’s Note

For the title of this dissertation, I chose the phrase “no definite destination,” which appears in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928). This line occurs near the end of the novel when Helga Crane has reached the climax of her liminality. She despondently leaves her apartment in the rain and wanders aimlessly through the Harlem streets, needing transition more than anything. I feel that this scene succinctly epitomizes the pairing of transnationalism and liminality that the lives and writings of the included authors evince.

As the motivating force behind my study, racial liminality—especially when exhibited through the works of twentieth-century African Americans—necessarily lends itself toward physical transition. As Helga’s situation exemplifies, the choice for travel and movement is the tangible manifestation of the desire to escape the intangible effects of a marginalized (liminal) social position. This places the emphasis on the act of leaving, with the destination itself receiving less weight. For a group of writings and writers that emphasizes the act of moving/transitioning above the endpoint itself, this phrase offers an appropriate title.

viii

Introduction

Toward a New Black Transnationalism

Literature is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I’m still pulling. (335) Langston Hughes, The Big Sea

The concept of transnationalism occupies a unique academic space, in that the term itself is relatively new even though scholars and theorists have been considering its significance and effects under the purview of other related fields for years. As a term that refers to both an interdisciplinary field and a theory, transnationalism explores a variety of areas and subjects including economics, politics, history, literature, religion, art, and culture. Yet, despite its broad scope, the concept of transnationalism particularly focuses on past and current theories of postcolonialism, internationalism, and globalization from which it stems. Certain scholars, specifically Paul Jay and John Cullen Gruesser, have emphasized the interplay of these concepts in relation to literary studies. At the same time, other disciplines have begun to incorporate a transnational framework, even if scholars in those fields do not explicitly use the title of “transnationalism.” Essentially, the academy as a whole is trending toward a transnational worldview.

Yet the appeal of transnationalism particularly comes from the popularity that the concept has achieved in recent years with the advent of groundbreaking works since the publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness in

1993. Through this text, Gilroy presents a compelling argument for the connections across national and continental boundaries. More than two decades following its

1 publication, The Black Atlantic remains a key text in understanding and examining a black transnational identity, as scholars including Laurent Dubois, Julius S. Scott, and

Lucy Evans continue to consider and reconsider the contemporary applications of

Gilroy’s theory. Whereas Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt’s monumental collection

The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations (2008) thrives in its ability to broaden and relate Transnational Studies to encompass a vast number of fields and concepts, Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic utilizes the key tenets of transnationalism to flesh out his narrower theory of a Black Atlantic. Gilroy’s book has proven influential to

Transnational Studies, Pan-African Studies, and African-American Studies alike.

Tellingly, Khagram and Levitt include an excerpt of Gilroy’s work in their volume.

While Gilroy focuses heavily on the interplay and connections between Great Britain and the United States, the value of his work lies in its ability to reconfigure the idea of national borders/boundaries and the Atlantic Ocean itself as important theoretical constructs in the study of black transnational cultures and literatures. In essence, Gilroy’s theory of the Black Atlantic arises from the forced diasporic removals, dislocations, or displacements of peoples, cultures, and identities that occurred as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. This immense diaspora had long-lasting effects on the global black identity, which exists beyond and between constructed borders of all types: national, linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and racial. The Atlantic, then, becomes a spatially significant location, as an understanding of the local and global become even more conflated when modern black intellectuals and writers begin to travel and live in multiple locations housed around the

Atlantic Ocean, including Europe, Africa, North America, and the Caribbean.

Resulting from Gilroy’s work, both directly and indirectly, many scholars have taken up the mantle of examining black culture and literature through a transnational lens over the last twenty years. Two specific texts, Brent Hayes Edwards’s The Practice of

Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003) and

Wendy W. Walters’s At Home in Diaspora: Black International Writing (2005), utilize the underlying concepts of Gilroy’s theory as they, in turn, map out the transnational travels and writings of certain black writers, specifically of the twentieth century.

Individually, these two scholars have different theses. Through his work, Edwards notices in African American writings transnational settings, tropes, and a common theme which all serve as an impetus for his scholarly research: “[O]ne might note—just in terms of interwar black U.S. novelistic production alone—that to ask about the function of Paris is to ask a broader set of interrelated questions about the role of outer-national sites even in texts that are putatively the canonical literature of ‘Harlem.’ It is as though certain moves, certain arguments and epiphanies, can only be staged beyond the confines of the United

States, and even sometimes in languages other than English” (4-5). Nonetheless, Edwards views as his central goal the examination of the relationships among certain New Negro writers with Negritude intellectuals. In this way, he uses Gilroy’s theory as a starting point, since the Black Atlantic figures as the hub of transit(ion) that becomes simultaneously a place of movement and a place of stasis, a fact that figures significantly in my argument. Important to Edwards’s study is the juxtaposition and amalgamation of language and translation, specifically in reference to English and French. Edwards examines key examples of these transnational, translational interactions―including authors using multiple languages and certain writers translating the work of others―as he

3 demonstrates the prominent and frequent relations occurring between borders and across the Atlantic during the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on Edwards’s theory of transnationalism, my dissertation addresses the frequent appearance of international sites in the works of certain Harlem Renaissance writers. As Edwards posits, these locations outside of the United States enable the writers to create situations, statements, and epiphanies that would be impossible otherwise.

In contrast, Walters specifically looks at the work of five black writers who traveled, lived, and wrote across and between national borders. Though she does not focus primarily on the Harlem Renaissance, she does offer some insight as to the degree her analysis significantly relates to the movement, which informs my own work here:

“The Harlem Renaissance was an international cultural movement whose guiding spirit was never confined to the neighborhood for which it was named. . . . African American writers physically displaced themselves from the racial discrimination they experienced in the United States, relocating their cultural work in Europe and yet consistently ‘writing back’ about U.S. political life, African American urban life, and African independence movements” (viii). For her analysis, the physical location of the authors also plays an important role, but just as significant is their choice of setting for their creative work.

Frequently in the works she examines, the writers incorporate settings that directly or inversely mirror their own travels and location, yet the fictional counterparts usually have some link to the writers’ personal experiences. Gilroy’s work again proves influential as the Atlantic sits as a subconscious medium through which Walters’s chosen authors live, travel, and write. By utilizing Walters’s theory, my dissertation calls upon her concept of a non-spatial, diasporic home created through the transnational moves of the specific

4 writers and characters I examine. This idea of a non-geographical site perfectly mirrors the concept of liminality, which I deem a necessary juxtaposition. Additionally, similar to the individual chapters in Walters’s book, I will use a biographical approach by considering the influence of personal travels and experiences upon the writings of the individual subjects I examine. Their personal travels, coupled with their diasporic, created space between borders, provide the foundational tenet for my dissertation and its goals. Edwards and Walters focus their efforts on writers and on the production of literature, but they also have a more specific theoretical connection. Both authors examine the importance of spatial locations (or “homes,” as Walters terms it) in a non- spatial state. For Edwards, this arises in the realm of cross-language interactions; for

Walters, the state of displacement in diaspora creates a sort of home. This rhetorical choice by both authors informs my own work, as I hope to create a similar statement about liminality and the writers and works of the Harlem Renaissance.

Significant to my work here, then, is the idea that transnationalism and liminality are unavoidably connected, especially in the realm of African American literature in general and the Harlem Renaissance specifically. The writings of certain key authors display characters and themes that exhibit elements of liminality existing between

“acceptable” modes of living. The concurrent transnational moves, then, create a sort of physical metaphor for liminality, as these authors and their writings move between national boundaries to create a new racial, transnational identity housed in a state of flux.

Harkening back to Gilroy, this intangible home occurs primarily in the Atlantic and the

Caribbean. Paul Jay additionally explains the relationship between these concepts in

Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (2010), when he posits that

5 transnationalism “has productively complicated the nationalist paradigm long dominant in these fields, transformed the nature of the locations we study, and focused our attention on forms of cultural production that take place in the liminal spaces between real and imagined borders” (1). These liminal spaces become spatialized sites in the travels and writings of many Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, namely Claude McKay, Nella

Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Langston Hughes. Methodologically, this project utilizes the lens of liminality by which to examine the prevalent transnational associations that present themselves conspicuously in the fictional and nonfictional works of these writers.

While the work of Gilroy, Edwards, and Walters will prove instrumental in setting the foundation for my use of transnational theory, the writings of Victor Turner appear equally significant in outlining the concept of liminality. Though initially coined and examined by Arnold van Gennep in his 1909 work Les rites de passage, liminality received much more attention from Turner through a series of publications in the 1960s and 1970s. The dialectical theorization of liminality causes a resistance to a clear, simple definition; nonetheless, an explication of this concept helps to illuminate its relevance to the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. From the outset of his writings on the topic,

Turner presents it in the societal framework of structure, wherein the middle, liminal state separates from the accepted structure: “If our basic model of society is that of a ‘structure of positions,’ we must regard the period of margin or ‘liminality’ as an interstructural situation. . . . Such rites indicate and constitute transitions between states” (Forest of

Symbols 93). In regards to subjects who fall into this state, “one would expect to find that transitional beings are particularly polluting, since they are neither one thing nor another;

6 or may be both; or neither here nor there; or may even be nowhere (in terms of any recognized topography), and are at the very least ‘betwixt and between’ all the recognized fixed points in space-time of structural classification” (97). Using these parameters, Turner demonstrates the way in which liminal beings, by definition, occupy a transitional space that fails to conform to the greater, hegemonic society. The dialectical properties of liminality are important, as even in his own writings, Turner admits the difficulty of creating a concise definition: “The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (‘threshold people’) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (Ritual Process 95). Though admitting the elusive quality of pure liminality,

Turner again calls upon an important characteristic central to my examination here:

“betwixt and between.” This phrase indicates a transitional state, one that should exist temporarily. In transitioning from one state to another, the subject becomes liminal and therefore outside the boundaries, or between the cracks, of society. By applying this theory to African American literature, and specifically the works of the Harlem

Renaissance, one can see the way it provides a fruitful entry to the critical discourse.

Especially in the early twentieth century, most blacks in America found themselves consigned to a second-tier citizenship, which fits in line perfectly with the way Turner continues his characterization of a liminal being: “They are persons or principles that (1) fall in the interstices of social structure, (2) are on its margins, or (3) occupy its lowest

7 rungs” (125). In line with this definition, racial minorities frequently enter the space of liminality, resulting from structural racism and inequality.

Each of the writers in my dissertation personally experiences and subsequently explores these qualities of liminality in his or her writings. For instance, McKay spent extended periods of time in his native Jamaica as well as in the United States and Europe.

These geographical experiences influence his writings, as his novels take place in the

United States, France, and the Caribbean. In these works of fiction, certain key characters struggle with locating a community or society they can call home, often resulting in a transient lifestyle. Larsen’s protagonists follow a similar pattern, as passing and racial acceptance play prominent themes in her fiction. Unlike some of Fauset’s characters, the various moves and decisions of Larsen’s characters do not provide them with acceptable resolutions, and they find themselves trapped in a negative, perpetual liminality. For

Fauset, the character conflicts usually begin with racial dissatisfaction, which at times leads to passing. Interesting to her writings, however, is the protagonists’ frequent decision to travel to abroad, frequently to France, in an attempt to escape the racial identity problems associated with American society. Finally, Hughes spent much of the

1920s and 1930s traveling abroad, visiting locales such as Central America, the

Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He details much of these travels in his autobiographies, which provide insight into his choice to remain in constant transition.

If we take the key concepts from the aforementioned critical works and apply them to the Harlem Renaissance, a new critical perspective—which I term a new Black

Transnationalism—arises and sheds light on some understudied aspects of this important era. Many of the writers and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance (not to mention

8 other visual artists and musicians) spent time traveling abroad, frequently to Europe,

Africa, and the Caribbean. This physical transition leads to significant relationships and experiences with others of differing races and backgrounds. For many of these writers and poets, the transnational experiences became part of their individual and racial identities, which in turn appear as central themes in their autobiographical and fictional writings. Some of the writers find themselves “at home” in these transitions, similar to

Walters’s analysis. Others feel perpetually foreign or seeking a home—the title of Claude

McKay’s autobiography A Long Way from Home (1937) provides a good example. Yet despite their individual thoughts, each writer (and the themes and settings in his or her writings) relies heavily on the idea of existing between states or locations. This is where

Turner’s theory of liminality ultimately proves useful to my examination. Therefore, in creating a study based on certain Harlem Renaissance writers and their works, it is important to analyze the transnational, transatlantic themes that arise. Each writer has personal and differing experiences with these concepts, yet examining each can continue the work begun by Gilroy, Edwards, and Walters in expanding the field of African-

American literary studies.

I emphasize here that liminality appears in various iterations, not limited to a single, universal experience. The key factors of race, gender, sexuality, and class, as well as the possible combinations thereof, lead to a multitude of possible entrances into this unstable, fluctuating state. Interestingly, despite the variance of potential iterations, liminal subjects overwhelmingly choose the same solution: physical transition, often of a transnational nature. My purposes within this study, then, are to analyze and address the relationships that arise through these subjects’ subversive interactions with the dominant

9 society, thus creating the liminal space at the fringe of acceptable performance roles. My use of terms such as acceptable, normal, and expected refers to the ideologies created and enforced by the dominant society and ruling class. Though clearly prejudiced and used as an apparatus to oppress/suppress different minority groups, this sort of unbalanced binary is necessary to understand the presence and creation of liminality. By definition, liminality arises as a result of a subject’s movement from a culture or society’s dominant performative position to an external, marginalized, or unaccepted state. Traditionally, in accordance with Turner’s theory, liminality is a temporary state acting as a transitional conduit from one stable state to another. While I similarly identify liminality as an unstable state of flux, the cases appearing within the works of these Harlem Renaissance writers paradoxically occur primarily as permanent, or at least indefinite, modes. This perpetual liminality, as I term it, appears notably within African American literature, which provides the impetus for my theoretical approach.

To take it a step further, I propose that the study of race and black literature of the twentieth century is inherently transnational, just as the milieus of these periods are inherently and structurally racist. Ruth Mayer has defined Diaspora Studies as “studies of transnational interrelations, cultural contact zones, and cosmopolitan conditions,” demonstrating the necessary consideration of a holistic and global black identity (91). In the same way that indigenous and postcolonial populations warrant the application of liminality and transnationalism vis-à-vis their marginalized status as outsiders resulting from hegemonic oppression despite their presence in their geographical places of origin, so too are black diasporic communities innately homeless at home. National identity therefore must be questioned, leading to the necessary extranational application of the

10 diasporic identity. The majority of texts I examine here provide clear and obvious manifestations of transnational travel and international settings; however, this Black

Transnationalism applies to the greater field of Africana Studies, regardless of international movement. For instance, the action in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) occurs completely within the United States, yet the plot is transnational inasmuch as

Sethe’s conflict stems from her filicidal act that she feels compelled to commit as a result of slavery and racial violence. My proposition is therefore twofold: First, the liminal status innate within the African American identity (and any localized black community) necessarily forces a connection with the greater African Diaspora. Second, this nuanced and multilocal diasporic community creates a symbolic, metaphysical, extranational/transnational home for the black subjects, granting them autonomy and belonging not accessible to them solely through the confines of whitewashed national identity.

Though my dissertation takes as its primary focus the examination of writers and their produced works, my goals remain in essence interdisciplinary. By juxtaposing the theories of transnationalism and liminality, I hope to begin the study of a new Black

Transnationalism, one that uses as its foundation the ideas of Gilroy, Edwards, Walters, and Turner to demonstrate the innate extranational qualities of the African Diaspora. The emphasis on the ambiguous nature of a combined racial/national identity provides a legitimate lens by which we can, in the words of Khagram and Levitt, “uncover, analyze and conceptualize similarities, differences, and interactions among trans-societal and trans-organizational realities, including the ways in which they shape bordered and bounded phenomena and dynamics across time and space” (10-11).

As a conclusion to this introduction, I briefly draw attention to Alain Locke’s use of these key concepts in the composition of his monumental manifesto of the Harlem

Renaissance, The New Negro. In 1925, Locke edited a special issue of Survey Graphic on

Harlem; he also reworked that concept into the influential anthology The New Negro: An

Interpretation later that year. Both of these works contain personal contributions from

Locke—three in Survey Graphic and five in The New Negro—as well as other essays, poems, short stories, dramas, and songs from artists sympathetic to what Locke saw as the New Negro Movement. Interesting to my analysis here, however, is the specific rhetorical choices Locke makes in the composition of these documents. While Locke does not create the movement himself, he does characterize it in a way that attempts to internationalize, and more specifically Africanize, the Harlem Renaissance. The reasoning behind this is twofold. First, by comparing the plight of African Americans to the contemporary resurgence of other subjugated peoples elsewhere, Locke provides a necessary model for the rise of a “New Negro.” Second, he uses overarching metaphorical binaries, contradictions, and juxtapositions to demonstrate the way black

Americans can utilize their ancient African heritage to reconfigure themselves in a modernist America, creating a series of rhetorically complex arguments. As Eric King

Watts explains, “Harlem Renaissance writing concerned the cultivation of blackness as an authentic and empowering element of Black Nationalism and U.S. democracy” (19).

The result of Locke’s contributions, then, is a strong transnational ethos that prefigures much of the work by McKay, Larsen, Fauset, and Hughes.

Prior to guest-editing the Harlem issue of Survey Graphic and compiling The New

Negro, Locke became interested in Africa in a less-than-conventional manner. This

12 fascination with the ancient African culture seemingly began for Locke in 1922 when archaeologists discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb. At the time, Locke was working as a psychology professor at Howard University. As the preface to his article “Impressions of

Luxor” explains, Locke “traveled extensively both in the United States and Europe, having spent several months in Europe, the Near East, Egypt, and the Sudan, 1923-24”

(74). During this time, then, he visits the excavation site and then details his findings in the article. The short essay provides a cursory overview of the archaeological work at the site, yet Locke’s philosophical musings bleed through toward the end when he illuminates the controversies regarding the discoveries: “Already the conjectures of the archeologists are turning toward various known sources for clues. But wherever the impetus came from, it was, we must remember, focalized here in an African setting and in a polyglot civilization that must have included more African, and possibly even Negro components than will ordinarily be admitted, so wide-spread is the impression that nothing profoundly cultural can come out of Africa even though it may be found in

Africa” (78). Two key devices are at play in this precursor to Locke’s definitive volume of the following year. Immediately, he hones in on the sense of racism behind these

“conjectures.” It does not seem plausible, in the eyes of many, that such cultural greatness could arise out of Africa, the land of a subjugated and supposedly “inferior” people. Simultaneously, Locke equates the modern Negro to the ancient Egyptian, thereby establishing a link to a vast cultural heritage; this move becomes important to the goals of The New Negro. In this instance, then, Locke conveys the thought process by which he feels an application of Egyptian/African history and culture can contribute to the advancement of a New Negro cultural presence.

When The New Negro hit bookshelves, it received the same success that the

Harlem issue of Survey Graphic had attained earlier in the year. Following a similar layout to the SG issue, The New Negro contains essays, stories, poems, songs, and illustrations interspersed with one another. The overall tone and motivation behind these two volumes, on the other hand, was quite different. While the former attempts to give outsiders a glimpse into a particular culture, the latter presents philosophical ideas about how African Americans can utilize the arts to distinguish their burgeoning movement from the sentimental ideals of the past. Locke also specifically addresses the difference in the breadth of the two works, noting that while “the whole movement was presented as it is epitomized in the progressive Negro community of the American metropolis” in the special issue, the new volume presents “the New Negro in a national and even international scope” (Foreword x). Therefore, Harlem is not the focus of this monumental volume; rather, the much greater concept of a national/international/transnational race is at the forefront of Locke’s mind.

Particularly, Locke emphasizes the values of the ancient African civilization in regards to his race’s cultural and political objectives. On the topic of young black artists and writers, Locke posits, “They have instinctive love and pride of race, and, spiritually compensating for the present lacks of America, ardent respect and love for Africa, the motherland” (“Negro Youth Speaks” 52-53). Taking this observation a step further, then,

Locke conjectures that additional appropriations of African heritage and culture can assist in the plight of blacks within American society. In fact, he includes a well-developed essay titled “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” in The New Negro, which delves into what lessons the American Negro can learn from continental Africa. Though the essay

14 does not reuse any of the content from Locke’s earlier “Impressions of Luxor,” there are certain echoes from the prior work in the way he praises the ancient civilization. As with the topic of the Egyptian arts and history, Locke professes kinship to the experiences and legacy of ancient African peoples. In this way, he claims the legendary ethos of Africa for his own purposes. Analyzing this use of Africa within The New Negro, John C.

Charles realizes that “Locke’s project was, in effect, an effort to construct a ‘racial nation’ within and for the larger national project of American cultural nationalism” (43).

This rhetorical move, then, is utterly important to Locke’s work, as it provides a sort of authority to the movement as a whole.

In exploring the African connections, Locke essentially elucidates the ways in which the African diaspora holds cultural and artistic significance for black Americans:

“[E]ven with the rude transplanting of slavery, that uprooted the technical elements of his former culture, the American Negro brought over as an emotional inheritance a deep- seated aesthetic endowment. And with a versatility of a very high order, this offshoot of the African spirit blended itself in with entirely different culture elements and blossomed in strange new forms” (“Legacy” 254). Locke demonstrates here how the appropriation and application of certain African qualities can aid in the movement toward modern progress. In fact, in keeping with his great emphasis on modern ideas and identities as being central to his philosophy, Locke asserts, “A more highly stylized art does not exist than the African” (256). Thus, his suggestion is not merely to copy the art styles of generations past but to comprehend and learn from the experiences embodied within them. Locke realizes the great transcendent ethos of the Egyptian culture in 1924, and he understands that same ethos in relation to all of African experience in 1925. This concept

15 is the essential driving force behind Locke’s philosophical understanding of the movement; the political and cultural situation within American society is more a battle of intellect than one of physical force, and he suggests a new black identity that is at once modern and transnational.

Moving away from the theoretical praise of African ideals, Locke places his sights on concrete examples of this transnational identity. For instance, he highlights several times, especially near the beginning of his anthology, the vast diversity of Harlem itself: “Here in Manhattan is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. It has attracted the African, West Indian, the Negro American” (“New Negro” 6). This rhetorical move serves to extend the boundaries of the rising movement and encompass other racial and ethnic groups. Along these same lines, Locke frequently compares the plight of the African American to other historically oppressed peoples. This device interestingly appears in multiple of Locke’s essays within The New Negro. He begins his volume with the hypothesis, “A race experience penetrated in this way invariably flowers. As in India, in China, in Egypt, Ireland, Russia, Bohemia, Palestine and Mexico, we are witnessing the resurgence of a people” (Foreword xi). Similarly, not only do the members of the movement maintain a connection to previous peoples, but so too does the geographical center: “Without pretense to their political significance, Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia” (“New Negro” 7). As a final example, Locke pulls in the significance of the arts and relates it to earlier social progress as well: “Just as with the

Irish Renaissance . . . we are having and will have turbulent discussion and dissatisfaction

16 with the stories, plays and poems of the younger Negro group” (“Negro Youth Speaks”

50). In making these connections, Locke again borrows from the ethos of another culture to strengthen the rhetorical position of the African American.

In the end, then, Alain Locke’s rhetorical choices within The New Negro: An

Interpretation establish an obvious connection between the Harlem Renaissance and transnationalism. This move embodies a theory Locke posited a year prior to compiling the influential volume: “Once we recognize this principle of the cross-fertilization of cultures, we shall be over our greatest difficulty in the broad comparative study of civilization and our science of man will have been clarified of its greatest pollution, ethnic bias in terms of cultural prejudice” (“Impressions of Luxor” 78). He realizes the liminal state of his race, and The New Negro is his response. Therefore, Locke puts this hypothesis into action as he draws upon the art of Africa, as well as the social mobility of previously suppressed peoples. While the apparent goal of Locke’s writing is to further the plea for black equality in America, he does so by incorporating the rhetoric of a transnational society. The heavy reliance upon borrowings from and amalgamations of various cultures illustrates the way this prototypical New Negro based in Harlem has the obligation to define and expand the relevance of the race’s life and experiences. In theorizing the transnational liminality of the African Diaspora, Locke begins the blueprint for the writings of several of his contemporaries.

In line with this methodology, I apply the concept of transnational liminality to the Harlem Renaissance and its writings. Despite this focus, however, I do not intend to imply that the interwoven concepts first appeared during this period, nor do I contend that the four writers I highlight provide the only worthy examples in the movement. On the

17 contrary, prior to the early twentieth century, transnational liminality presents itself implicitly and explicitly both in the Black Atlantic slave trade and thematically in slave narratives. A prime example, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of

William and Ellen Craft from Slavery describes the journey of the Crafts as they migrate from Macon, Georgia to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to procure freedom. The trip, just like other tales of escape from slavery, embodies liminality as the husband and wife duo experience the interstitial space between captivity and freedom. Compounding the significant of this recollection is the means by which the Crafts enacted their plan. In order to make their way to the North, the Crafts traveled in daylight, with Ellen passing as both white and male and William playing the role of her servant. In this way, the act of passing creates the necessary vehicle for the Crafts to achieve their goal of freedom.

Similar appearances of liminal travel occur frequently in antebellum writings, making this critical apparatus especially useful in the study of early African American history and literature. Clearly, then, such texts offer a precursor to the subsequent relevance of travel and identity in the twentieth century.

Coinciding with the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, Marcus Garvey’s message as he entered into American society provided transnational relocation as a potential solution to the problem of racial liminality. Seemingly arising in popularity overnight, Garvey put forth the idea of a connected, diasporic identity for African individuals on a global scale. While his approach to this goal was considered as extreme by some—his Black Star Line ostensibly represented the future of Garvey’s platform by offering a return to the African continent—he nonetheless contributed greatly to the intellectual milieu for African Americans and the African Diaspora as a whole. If the

18 nascent Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement as Locke presented it, sought a reconciliation of black identity, modernity, and the global society, Garvey was a precursor who offered his own pathway to those results. His influence, both directly and indirectly, can be seen throughout much of the literary productions of the Harlem

Renaissance.

Prefiguring Garvey’s contributions to the African Diaspora identity that factored heavily into many of the Harlem Renaissance texts, W.E.B. Du Bois was a key African

American intellectual whose ideas and writings spanned much of the early and mid- twentieth century. In his landmark The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois coins and explicates the concept of double-consciousness wherein a black individual remains constantly aware of the conflicting dichotomy between race and society. By means of example, Du Bois explains, “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (8). This double- consciousness, then, becomes a key trope of African American writings. Especially during the Harlem Renaissance, the understanding of having a dual identity factors heavily into literary and artistic production. In a move related to Du Bois’s idea, liminality takes the basic tenet of double-consciousness—the feeling of a divided or incomplete self—by emphasizing not just a multifold identity but one that exists between accepted societal norms. Such a significant principle therefore acts as the guiding premise for this project.

Specifically, then, Chapter 1 examines Claude McKay’s published works of fiction—which exude an unavoidable transnationalism—as he lived a transitory life,

19 penning his most famous works while abroad. My analysis here demonstrates the ways in which a transnational and liminal identity progresses from a subtle, underlying theme in his early novels to a more explicit and problematic component of his later writings. As conclusion to this chapter, I highlight the importance of McKay’s underappreciated third novel Banana Bottom (1933), as its female protagonist Bita inverts the traditional narrative of liminality as presented in the works of Larsen and Fauset. Chapter 2 explores

Nella Larsen’s two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), in light of the central and detrimental presence of liminality. The protagonists of her novels experience a complicated and unsatisfactory existence, primarily resulting from the intersection of gender and biracial identity. In each instance, the story ends tragically. Coincidentally or not, Larsen’s life parallels her fiction, as she personally falls into obscurity and irresolvable liminality in the decades prior to her death. As an important counterpoint to

Larsen, Chapter 3 places Jessie Redmon Fauset and her writings under the microscope.

Similar to Larsen, Fauset primarily employs women protagonists in her four novels, causing the resultant difficulties to be linked inextricably to both gender and race. While transnational travel presents itself in Larsen’s works, it becomes a pivotal choice for

Fauset’s protagonists, especially in Plum Bun (1928) and Comedy: American Style

(1933). As she demonstrates throughout her writings, however, a transnational setting nonetheless fails to resolve the disastrous liminality. Finally, Chapter 4 considers liminality in a different sense, as I place the spotlight upon Langston Hughes through the lens of his autobiographies. Fitting with the earlier texts of the Harlem Renaissance,

Hughes (as protagonist of his life writings) occupies a liminal space of transition, often situated on the Atlantic Ocean and in its surrounding nations. In a twist to the formula,

20 however, Hughes embraces his liminality and transnational movement, creating a space of home and belonging within a marginalized existence. This examination acts as a culmination of the earlier studies. I then conclude this dissertation with a brief examination of the ways in which transnational liminality, essential to a new Black

Transnationalism, can be beneficial and relevant in examining other works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Chapter One

Claude McKay’s Transnational/Transitional Identity

For many modern readers, the historical Harlem Renaissance evokes a vague image of an artistic and cultural awakening of African Americans in 1920s America.

While this is true, the New Negro Movement that fueled the increased focus on black literary and artistic ventures also contributed to a global reconsideration of all things

Africana. Michelle Ann Stephens provides a thought-provoking insight into the effects of the “New Negro” consciousness in her article “The Harlem Renaissance: The New Negro at Home and Abroad,” when she describes it as “a black American social identity that traveled well beyond the confines of the United States, to serve as a metaphor for a rising, black, cultural and intellectual consciousness informed by international political events, which swept through the Americas and spilled over into metropolitan Europe” (214).

This movement, then, helped “create an increasingly self-aware black world” (214). A defining work in this movement was Alain Locke’s The New Negro. This 1925 collection includes various short stories, poems, drama, music, and essays by many key contributors to the Harlem Renaissance.

Of utmost importance is Locke’s introductory essay which delineates what he sees as the way forward for black individuals in a rapidly changing society and explains the cultural significance of Harlem specifically: “The movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance—in the Negro’s case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval

America to modern. . . . Harlem [is] an instance of this” (“The New Negro” 6). Thus,

Locke suggests the importance of Harlem, seat of the New Negro Movement and the

Harlem Renaissance to which it lends its name, as a place where change can occur. His emphasis on Harlem’s significance, however, is not solely limited to African Americans, as he realizes the neighborhood’s international implications as well: “It [Harlem] has attracted the African, the West-Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the

Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast” (6). Therefore, why should the Harlem Renaissance be thought of as a strictly

African American phenomenon? It should not, as Locke’s essay indicates. Considered by many to be the manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance, it informs other works of the period, including works by one writer in particular: Claude McKay.

A prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay differs from other black contributors of the movement in one interesting and significant way: he was not

American-born. For this black poet and writer, the term African American does not accurately apply. Instead, the Jamaican-born McKay personified the idea put forth by

Locke that the New Negro Movement applied to black peoples globally rather than solely to those in Harlem and the rest of the United States. In McKay’s fiction, the inclusion of transnational characters and ideals contributes to the definition of the Harlem

Renaissance. Each of McKay’s works of fiction presents the themes of transition, international travel, and liminality in increasingly prominent ways. Home to Harlem

(1928) occurs primarily in the United States; Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929) takes

23 place in France; Gingertown (1932) is a collection of short stories that juxtaposes settings in the United States, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean; and Banana Bottom (1933) uses Jamaica as its primary setting, with some allusions to England. In this way, McKay purposefully constructs a progressively transnational canon of works. By following this sustained evolution, he successfully highlights transcendent questions of identity and race in a multitude of locales.

In addition to its inherent transnationalism, McKay’s fiction also exhibits frequent instances of liminality. Biographer Tyrone Tillery calls McKay “the proverbial ‘marginal man,’” which rang true as he continued to travel for much of his life (20). By examining the progression of his central writings, I hope to call attention to this underlying thread of liminality in McKay’s disparate works and demonstrate the way in which the use of this trope in conjunction with transnational settings contributes to a necessary reexamination of key Harlem Renaissance texts. Joel Nickels succinctly establishes the significance of this theme, as he argues “that McKay’s representations of transnational patterns of interaction . . . are partial examples of an as yet unrealized political project, in which specifically African-descended subjects establish self-organized, racial structures of proletarian democracy within a larger multiethnic international” (5). The partiality

Nickels stresses here can be seen as central to a liminal identity. The innate marginalization and consequential search of liminal subjects arises from a sense of incompleteness. As in the novels of Larsen and Fauset, McKay’s protagonists partake in a perpetual quest for home and belonging. The resultant liminality leads to geographical mobility and international settings. In each of his diverse settings, there remains a persistent tension and unrest; while race plays a primary role in the creation of this

24 liminality, gender becomes increasingly significant through the progression of McKay’s texts. I therefore propose that an in-depth analysis of McKay’s use of liminal characters can expand our understanding of the transitory nature of black diasporic writings.

The Wandering Vagabond in Home to Harlem and Banjo

Over the last few decades, scholars have begun to look at the transnational implications latent within McKay’s canon. Carl Pedersen, George Hutchinson, and others have contributed to this trend. John Lowney in particular examines the international aspects of Home to Harlem. In his article, he is concerned with the political and historical connection between America and Haiti, as is embodied within the characters Jake and

Ray. On the other hand, in an article by Robert P. Smith Jr., Banjo receives the main focus as Smith delineates the heavy French components of the novel in relation to

McKay’s personal life. My project here deviates from Lowney’s and Smith’s treatments of the two works in that I do not focus as heavily on the contemporaneous political workings of the time or the apparent biographical details. While I do concur with these elements of emphasis, they ignore a central metaphor I find important: transition.

Throughout Home to Harlem and Banjo, the characters and scenes are constantly in motion. Michael A. Chaney identifies the concept of “vagabondage” as he explores

“narratives of African American and other diasporic subjects in Europe, emphasizing tropes of movement, national identity, narrative fracture, and collaborative or embedded orality” (“Traveling” 54). The protagonists of the two novels—Jake, Ray, and Banjo— are essentially wandering vagabonds who live for pleasure; yet these characteristics that

Chaney delineates create the state of liminality they all experience to some degree. They avoid constraints such as long-term relationships and permanent housing in exchange for

25 the ability to uproot themselves at a moment’s notice. I will highlight the existence and importance of this transition metaphor in the way that it relates to an overall understanding of McKay’s emphasis on the transnational components of the Harlem

Renaissance, as elucidated in Locke’s The New Negro. Moreover, I will explore how, at the same time, the juxtaposition of Jake and Banjo with Ray in both novels further exemplifies the far-reaching impact of the New Negro Movement outside of Harlem and the United States. Because of the overlap in characters and setup of Banjo as a sequel to

Home to Harlem, the two novels encourage a joint consideration.

Over the course of Home to Harlem, slightly more than a year passes, and in that time Jake stays in three or four different apartments, while also working for the railroad during the bulk of it. In fact, almost half of the novel actually occurs outside of Harlem.

Richard K. Barksdale specifically outlines the ironic and problematic use of the term home throughout McKay’s novel, both in terms of Jake’s development and in relation to

McKay’s own absence from Harlem for much of its Renaissance (“Symbolism” 343-44).

When confronted with the problems at the end of the novel, it does not take much convincing for Jake to agree to leave his “home” in Harlem for Chicago that very night.1

Jake’s transitory nature, then, mirrors McKay’s own propensity for travel—as he spent most of the 1920s and 1930s abroad—and leads into a perfect illustration of how the

Harlem Renaissance was much more global than merely an American movement.

1 The emphasis on an ironic home appears as a frequent motif in literature of racial liminality, such as Langston Hughes’s short story “Home” (1934) and Toni Morrison’s novel Home (2012).

In comparison, the eponymous protagonist of Banjo essentially defines himself in the same light. Though the novel is set outside of Harlem, in Marseilles specifically,

Banjo has lived a full life: “Banjo was a great vagabond of lowly life. He was a child of the Cotton Belt, but he had wandered all over America. His life was a dream of vagabondage that he was perpetually pursuing and realizing in odd ways, always incomplete but never unsatisfactory. He had worked at all the easily-picked-up jobs— longshoreman, porter, factory worker, farm hand, seaman” (11). Once he decided to leave

America in the first place, his “tramp was a casual one. So much so that it was four months and nineteen days after sailing down through the Panama Canal to New Zealand and Australia, cruising cargo around the island continent and up along the coast of Africa, before his dirty overworked ‘broad’ reached the port of Marseilles” (12). Though the bulk of the travel occurs outside the frame of the novel, and much of the action appears stationary, Marseilles plays a key role. In every instance of characterization, Banjo is a transnational figure. As Adam Lively demonstrates, “The theme of alienation is reinforced by the setting . . . which brings out the rootless nature of black life” (231). The group of men who surround Banjo all embody a displaced identity, creating an impromptu community on the Marseilles waterfront. Hailing from a variety of nations, their greatest commonality is this rootlessness, with Banjo at the center. Marseilles ultimately functions as the signifier for this diasporic microcosm.

Banjo clearly takes the place of Jake in McKay’s follow-up to Home to Harlem, as he is the pleasure-seeker in perpetual transition. Yet Banjo takes this concept to a much grander scale. Instead of traveling around the Northeastern United States like Jake, he sails the world, stopping at ports that might provide entertainment. Nickels

27 characterizes Banjo concisely, describing him as “unattached, without a country, and determined to live in the moment. His unsteady stride belongs to this transitory existence” (14). Nonetheless, Laura Doyle provides a necessary distinction between the novels, situating her critique through the lens of the workforce. In Home to Harlem, she claims that Jake’s movements are motivated by his ability to obtain jobs, whereas in

Banjo “the migrant life is a choice to avoid the white world of regimented work”

(“Atlantic Modernism” 125). In this way, Doyle successfully delineates the liminality of the two novels by revealing the structural racism of the employment system. Despite

Jake’s and Banjo’s disparate career goals, each finds himself forced into a state of marginalization, without the luxury of stability. Similarly, Bairbre Walsh finds the importance of the two novels when “McKay extends and transgresses the geopolitical, racial, and sexual boundary and reimagines the cultural value of intercultural encounters that occur along the divergent axes of the Black Atlantic” (139). In each case, the men begin their journeys in direct relation to their racial status, locating work or avoiding it as a result of the racist and segregated society around them. The foregrounding of transition and movement therefore becomes pivotal in understanding the place of liminality within race theory.

The first of McKay’s novels, Home to Harlem, introduces Jake Brown as he rides a freighter back to the United States from London. Immediately, the reader receives an initial glimpse at the theme of transition; as we will see, the novel both begins and ends outside of Harlem. As soon as Jake arrives in Harlem, he makes it his goal to catch up on what he has missed over the previous two years. In a fitting parallel, McKay’s sequel concludes as Banjo and Goosey receive help from the American consulate in procuring a

28 trip back to America—back to Harlem—though Banjo ultimately declines and remains in

France. But when Jake arrives on the freighter at the beginning of his story, he has not journeyed back to the U.S. to settle down into a daily routine of repetition, and he has no intention of becoming stationary. Instead, as soon as he arrives in New York, Jake quickly drops his suitcase off at a saloon and makes his way to a cabaret. From this moment on, Jake resists settling. As Doyle explains, “In this world, what might look like freedom of movement is often necessity of movement” (“Atlantic Modernism” 124). In fact, for the entirety of the first section, Jake never once stays in his own apartment as he mostly participates in the Harlem nightlife and stays with Rose, a singer he met at the

Congo nightclub. In this way, Jake is essentially homeless; in McKay’s sequel, Banjo is literally homeless. The characters’ nonstop motion, then, sets the tone for both novels, as the protagonists have no true home and resort to motion and pleasure-seeking as a natural way of life.

This theme of transition, though present in both novels, provides a distinct metaphor within Home to Harlem as the main characters are all African American, except for Ray. Walsh highlights the perpetual motion in Home to Harlem when she states,

“Being located, albeit temporarily, in Harlem, begins to suffocate Jake and Ray. The tension between Harlem’s ‘happy familiarity,’ and the stultification it causes of individual ambition due to limited resources, leads Ray to identify flight as the most appropriate means of survival” (144). This roadmap acts as guiding compass for the majority of the novel. In Banjo, on the other hand, the setting of Marseilles provides a much richer, more international dramatis personae. Stephens, in her “‘Nationality

Doubtful’ and Banjo’s Crew in Marseilles,” posits that McKay’s second novel “does

29 succeed in telling an alternative, lost story of global modernity, one that places modern black male subjects in the new world order in a different way”; she also finds it to be a

“successful attempt to write a transnational story of the race, one informed by [McKay’s] own travels and experience” (169). The “beach boys” implied in Stephens’s titular

“crew” and the late-night bar regulars all hail from different countries: “Senegalese,

Sudanese, Somalese, Nigerians, West Indians, Americans, blacks from everywhere, crowded together, talking strange dialects, but, brought together, understanding one another by the language of wine” (McKay, Banjo 36). In this instance, McKay underscores the transnational and diasporic environment of Marseilles. Bridget T. Chalk, connecting the content to the author, emphasizes McKay’s personal ties to the specifics of international travel, which applies directly to Banjo. She explains, “For Claude

McKay, who was born in Jamaica but left for the United States in 1912, never to return, a transnational life involved serious bureaucratic complications” (358). The transnational and liminal implications present themselves more explicitly here, as the theme of transition, central to Home to Harlem, moves to the background in Banjo. Jake (and to a smaller degree, Ray) employs seemingly aimless wandering as he searches for an unnamed home; in the sequel, Banjo and Ray embody the black diasporic identity in a cosmopolitan setting, yet liminality persists.2 Despite the black internationality of the

French setting, where color did not create as restrictive a social barrier as it did in the

2 The sustained French setting in Banjo and its apparent failure to resolve Ray’s liminality parallels the plight of the Carys in Jessie Fauset’s Comedy: American Style

(1933).

United States in the early twentieth century, the members of Banjo’s group in “the Ditch” never successfully ditch their outsider status.

Both novels, however, share a key character who acts as a representation for what

Locke called the New Negro and what I term “the liminal subject.” Ray is a Haitian intellectual who provides a clear contrast to the main protagonist in each story. For the most part, in fact, Jake and Banjo are interchangeable. They both act spontaneously and refuse to live for anyone but themselves. This mindset allows them to avoid boredom, but it also causes them to lack a greater philosophical understanding of racial progress in the

1920s. Ray, on the other hand, provides a completely new perspective. His intellectual ponderings allow a deeper insight into the actual race theories of the time, while also conveying the strongest demonstration of liminality. Therefore, it is Ray who enters the story in the second part of both novels and brings about a more profound understanding of the actual New Negro mentality of the time.

Part two of Home to Harlem can easily be summarized by its opening chapter’s title: “The Railroad.” In this section, Jake takes a job as a railroad cook, which offers him the opportunity to travel constantly and stay out of Harlem except during layovers between trips. Again, Jake has no home; he spends most of his nights in either the provided quarters of the various stops or in local speakeasies and buffet flats with which he has quickly become acquainted. As the narrator indicates, Jake would spend only

“One or two nights a week in Harlem. And all the days on the road. He would go on like that until he grew tired of that rhythm” (126). In addition to placing Jake in motion, this section also contains the frankest presentation of the transnational identity that McKay himself understood as important to the Harlem Renaissance. The beginning of the second

31 part brings about a change in the content McKay includes in his novel. While Jake encounters no dramatic shift in personality or demeanor, he does meet Ray at this point, who most clearly personifies the globalized discussion of the international black community. Lively provides a succinct character analysis of Ray, stating that he

“personifies the dilemma of the black intellectual; he is a man caught between two worlds” (231). Immediately, the liminal dichotomy between the two men becomes quite clear. Jake is the pleasure-seeker, while Ray is the intellectual; Jake’s needs are physical, whereas Ray’s are mental.

Ray continues to pique the curiosity of Jake, since his friend is not familiar with well-read black men through his various travels. During this initial conversation, Ray stresses that although he is a “Negro” like Jake, his Haitian nationality means French is his native language. This moment is eye opening for Jake, who realizes for the first time that there are black individuals with experiences outside of America. Ray goes on to inform Jake about the French Revolution’s impact on Haiti, the uprising led by Toussaint

L’Ouverture, and other general accounts of Africa and oppressed peoples throughout history. The turn for Jake lies in his own naïve comprehension of what exactly he experiences during this conversation: “It was revelation beautiful in his mind. . . . Jake was very American in spirit and shared a little of that comfortable Yankee contempt for poor foreigners. . . . But now he felt like a boy who stands with the map of the world in colors before him, and feels the wonder of the world” (134). In essence, Jake appears like a small child in the face of Ray’s knowledge. The idea that another Negro, nonetheless one working as a railroad waiter, could be so knowledgeable about history and the black race in general proves incomprehensible to Jake. He finds it to be significant in some

32 way, but he has difficulty grasping it. He thinks that Ray must be fundamentally different from himself. In this way, Jake conveys McKay’s main success in his novels. Just as

Ray’s intellect and knowledge appear foreign to Jake, so too does Jake’s promiscuity and hyper-sexuality seem unfamiliar to Ray. The dichotomy between these two men, then, characterizes the complex tension present within McKay’s fiction. They are not binary opposites, but they do counterbalance each other in a way that emphasizes the transnational importance of the New Negro Movement. Additionally, each character exhibits certain qualities that relate biographically to McKay. Neither character displays a one-to-one ratio with the experiences McKay endured on his travels from the Caribbean to America and then to Europe, but the similarities apparent through the relations between the two characters especially demonstrate how McKay’s personal liminality bleeds into his novels.

Banjo’s introduction to Ray follows a similar pattern, though Banjo is not as naïve as Jake when it comes to a knowledge of the global black community. Again, there is a clear contrast in these two characters, even within their personal dialects. Banjo exhibits an obvious “Dixie” form of speech full of euphemisms and truncations. As in Home to

Harlem, Ray once again primarily speaks standard English, though there are a few more colloquialisms apparent in his speech patterns of the second novel. Other than the vocal interactions, however, there is not a direct correlation between the two male-male relationships of McKay’s novels.3 Unlike Jake, Banjo does not seem to experience an

3 Gary Edward Holcomb and Eric H. Newman have thoroughly established the queer implications of these relationships in McKay’s first two novels.

33 awakening as a result of his exchanges with Ray. However, addressing Ray’s presence in the second novel, Jarrett H. Brown labels him “McKay’s intellectual voice speaking as the new colonial writer whose presence and self-expression in Marseilles eventually exposes a volatile cosmopolitan climate and cultural conflict” (13). I contend, then, that

Ray himself grants McKay’s first two novels their most significant quality, as he experiences liminality in relation to his attempts at self-discovery and identity. While

Jake and Banjo seek pleasure, Ray seeks intellectual satisfaction, which proves elusive in light of the company he keeps. Opportunities for sex and drugs readily present themselves, but throughout his travels Ray does not meet another individual who matches his mental prowess.

Ray’s most significant contribution to the novels can be seen in the inner turmoil he conveys to the reader. More so than the other characters, Ray finds himself in an irreconcilable liminal state. In this way, he operates in one of the key roles of the novels, as his questions and struggles can be applied to the racial issues explored by African

American intellectuals of the early twentieth century. W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double-consciousness lies at the heart of Ray’s dilemma, creating a liminal tension. When

Ray arrives back at the workers’ quarters with Jake after their trip to a Pittsburgh speakeasy in Home to Harlem, he begins his first exploration of the meaning and importance of the intellectual prowess he pursues. This initial introspection stems from seeing his fellow railroad workers sleeping comfortably in the cold room filled with bedbugs: “Thought was not a beautiful and reassuring angel, a thing of soothing music and light laughter and winged images glowing with the rare colors of life. No. It was suffering, horribly real. It seized and worried him from every angle. Pushed him toward

34 the sheer precipice of imagination. It was awful. He was afraid. For thought was a terrible tiger clawing at his small portion of gray substance, throttling, tearing, and tormenting him with pitiless ferocity” (156). Here, Ray devolves into a strange, rambling version of himself. His inability to comprehend or justify race and curiosity leads him to question the validity of his own. McKay personally struggled with the same issues, which he explains in his autobiography A Long Way from Home: “It was the problem of color.

Color-consciousness was the fundamental of my restlessness” (245). Some of Ray’s comments, then, even verge on internalized racism, as he agrees with certain racist comments through his initial loathing of the black railroad workers. Though this is clearly a dark moment for Ray, his comments importantly demonstrate the tension that contributed to an international, postcolonial, black liminality in the early twentieth century.

In the last chapter of the second section of Home to Harlem, when Ray is preparing to leave the railroad and the United States behind for a freighter job (thus ending his personal story in the way Jake’s began), he again questions his position in society. The driving force behind his musings this time is the internal dichotomy between his intellectual nature and his black identity, which he expresses to Jake: “I don’t know what I’ll do with my little education. I wonder sometimes if I could get rid of it and go and lose myself in some savage culture in the jungles of Africa. I am a misfit . . . with my little education and constant dreaming, when I should be getting the nightmare habit to hog in a whole lot of dough like everybody else in this country. . . . The more I learn the less I understand and love life. All the learning in this world can’t answer this little question, Why are we living?” (274). Though I do not seek to make the claim that he acts

35 as a mouthpiece for McKay’s personal feelings here, Ray does share certain qualities with McKay’s biographical experiences, such as an educational background and a trip abroad in the early 1920s. His mention of Africa here echoes Locke’s personal ideas about how the reappropriation of African culture and history could help those of African ancestry claim a heritage of their own. Additionally, Locke asserts that the goal is not for black intellectuals of the 1920s simply to mimic the ancestral African styles; rather,

“what the Negro artist of to-day has most to gain from the arts of the forefathers is perhaps not cultural inspiration or technical innovations, but the lesson of a classical background, the lesson of discipline, of style, of technical control pushed to the limits of technical mastery” (“Legacy” 256). In this instance, Ray is the definitive New Negro. He formulates and performs the questions Locke sets forth as fundamental to black modernity, yet liminality arises as he cannot reconcile blackness with modernity. Ray and other transnational figures operate in this capacity both in Home to Harlem and in Banjo.

Not only does Ray continue his emphasis on the arts in Banjo, but he also brings his propensity for introspection along with him. These sections that appear in both novels deviate from the otherwise mostly lighthearted and episodic plots. Ray’s meditations, usually focused on race, indicate the deeper abstract struggles of the time period. Chalk similarly highlights Ray’s deviation from the other characters, providing a sense of origin for his outlook: “Ray’s personal and political disillusionment stems from witnessing the violence of the US occupation of his home country of Haiti and his experience as a black man in the States, and though his Haitian background does not factor prominently in

Banjo, his interest in racial politics and the uses of art intensifies in this second novel”

(363). This depth of character allows Ray to become the key figure in each novel,

36 insomuch as McKay attempts to demonstrate the innate homelessness of a transnational black identity. In the interim between the two novels, he experiences a sort of shift in the way he operates, though he still maintains his pensive nature: “Ray had undergone a decided change since he had left America. He enjoyed his role of a wandering black without patriotic or family ties. He loved to pose as this or that without really being any definite thing at all. It was amusing. Sometimes the experience of being patronized provided food for thoughtful digestion” (136). So while Ray might personify more of the vagabond spirit, he still follows a life of the mind, so to speak. At multiple points in this second novel, he again struggles with his liminal place in society as a seemingly dichotomous individual: “Only within the confines of his own world of color could he be his true self. But so soon as he entered the great white world, where of necessity he must work and roam and breathe the larger air to live, that entire world, high, low, middle, unclassed, all conspired to make him painfully conscious of color and race. . . . But of one thing he was resolved: civilization would not take the love of color, joy, beauty, vitality, and nobility out of his life and make him like one of the poor mass of its pale creatures” (164). Importantly here, Ray indicates that the new and the old, the intellectual and the instinctual, can mesh together in harmony, even if only in his hybridized liminality. This dichotomy is paralleled in the tension between locations inherent in a diasporic identity. Ray’s mindset is therefore not superior to his male counterparts’, as he realizes himself: “Close association with the Jakes and Banjoes had been like participating in a common primitive birthright” (321). Thus, a transnational understanding of race, one that exists outside of any particular nation’s borders, is central to both McKay’s fiction and the Harlem Renaissance itself.

Both Home to Harlem and Banjo, then, ultimately conclude with the repetition of the transition trope. In the third part of Home to Harlem, Jake reunites with Felice, the escort he had met on his first night in Harlem at the beginning of the novel. In a fit of despair from not seeing Jake again after their initial encounter, she had become annoyed with Harlem and chose to leave town as her solution. Thus, both characters find that they have an affinity for transition. In fact, their actions fit in perfectly with most other characters of the novel: Ray comes to America from Haiti, works as a waiter on an ever- moving train, and finally takes a job on a freighter; Zeddy lives in Harlem until he meets

Suzy, whereupon he moves in with her on Myrtle Avenue; even the Baltimore cabaret undergoes a transition when it begins as a prominent nightspot, gets shut down as the result of a raid, and finally reopens in the last section of the novel. It is no surprise, then, when as the result of a violent confrontation with Felice’s former lover, Jake and Felice decide to leave town for Chicago that very night. Again, Jake’s recurring relocations function as real-world reflections of his liminal status that inevitably creates motion.

Similarly, in the concluding chapters of Banjo, the main characters prepare for an evacuation from Marseilles. Jake (who has returned as a gratuitous reference to Home to

Harlem) takes Goosey back to America on his ship, while Ray and Banjo plan to leave

Marseilles for no particular destination. In this conclusion to Ray’s story (who essentially takes the spotlight in both novels), he enters into his final moment of intense contemplation before leaving with Banjo. Here, he provides the most candid analysis of his ideas of blackness in a modern society: “The more Ray mixed in the rude anarchy of the lives of the black boys . . . the more he felt that they represented more than he or the cultured minority the irrepressible exuberance and legendary vitality of the black race.

And the thought kept him wondering how that race would fare under the ever tightening mechanical organization of modern life” (324). Thus, in departing Marseilles and

McKay’s narrative, Ray leaves the reader with a final glimpse into his inner thoughts and struggles. Ray’s last thought settles on the liminal site created at the intersection of race and modernity. Regardless of chosen location, the persistent double-consciousness remains at the forefront of his mind. As Chaney aptly explains, “neither Harlem nor the

French district can be determinatively known as an a priori home. What we are left with is an inscription of a deconstructive antinationalism in the guise of flippant cosmopolitanism” (“Traveling” 66). Through this moment of contemplation, then, Ray conveys a perpetual liminality definitively tied to black transnationalism. The seemingly positive conclusion and its juxtaposition with the restlessness of liminality demonstrate the innate fluidity and contradiction of black modernity.

With his first two novels, McKay composes a strong argument for the migratory response to the liminal problem. His three main protagonists encounter their liminality through differing avenues, yet each attempts to outrun his in-betweenness, so to speak, by means of relocation. As the irresolution of Banjo demonstrates, McKay calls attention to liminality but offers no solution. None of the protagonists receives a satisfactory finale promising a home free of transition and marginalization. In the realm of these works, then, this state of in-between and instability is the norm for the black individuals given the spotlight. Nevertheless, the novels manage to resist the tragic conclusions of other

Harlem Renaissance texts, namely Larsen’s Passing (1928) and Fauset’s Comedy:

American Style (1933), as the three men maintain agency throughout their stories. This

39 fact therefore prefigures McKay’s continued consideration of liminality and transnationalism in his later writings.

Gendered Liminality in Gingertown and Banana Bottom

Following his first two connected novels, McKay chose to deviate from his original approach to writing, focusing less on the vagrant lifestyle exhibited by Jake, Ray, and Banjo and instead creating a nuanced look at racial liminality that emphasizes the internal elements of his characters. Gingertown embraces this altered style tentatively in only some of its stories, while Banana Bottom arguably illustrates the most insightful and cohesive example of liminality in McKay’s work. The Jamaican setting and McKay’s use of female protagonists surely contribute to the success of these texts. While women enjoy only minor roles in his debut novels, they take center stage for his final two published texts of fiction.4 When dissecting his first two novels, Doyle illuminates “McKay’s uncomfortable awareness that women are ‘caught’ in this war in an especially cloaked and painful way” (“Atlantic Modernism” 129). Though McKay relegates them to the

4 Following the publication of Banana Bottom in 1933, McKay worked on a number of other manuscripts, such as Harlem Glory and Romance in Marseilles, which he never completed or published during his lifetime. Most recently, a manuscript titled Amiable with Big Teeth was discovered and verified as a previously unknown McKay novel.

While these unpublished manuscripts house valuable insight into McKay’s writing process and preoccupations during the 1930s and early 1940s, they remain irrelevant in the discussion of McKay’s presentations of transnational liminality, at least within the defined parameters of this study.

40 background initially, he reconsiders his position in his later writings. In this way, McKay enters the discussion of gendered liminality that Larsen and Fauset aptly begin during the

Harlem Renaissance. As Gingertown and Banana Bottom stand in contrast to Home to

Harlem and Banjo, the dual liminality that occurs at the intersection of race and gender becomes more apparent.

For his third published work of fiction, McKay composed a collection of twelve short stories. Perhaps because of its genre or its publication in the shadow of his debut novels, Gingertown has received little critical attention over the years. Taken on their own, a few of the stories appear insubstantial, yet many of them merit attention. Through the inclusion of episodic tales, McKay enabled himself to juxtapose the settings of his individual novels, at once addressing multiple locations. In their biographical study of

McKay, Kotti Sree Ramesh and Kandula Nirupa Rani emphasize the importance of these stories, even if they find the text as a whole lacking: “Like his three novels, they are set in three different locations, serving more as supplement to them, and hence do not demand an exhaustive study” (142). They continue this review, stating the stories “do not focus, except for one or two, on the main theme of his major fictional works—the quest for self- definition. . . . [T]hey are often melodramatic and lack the strength of his other writings”

(142). While I agree that the stories do not house the same complexity as the novels, I contend that the narratives incorporating this “quest” deserve a degree of inspection. By nature, Gingertown embodies the related theories of liminality and hybridity, invoking the innate multicultural transnationalism of the Black Diaspora. Kathleen Drowne, comparing Gingertown to McKay’s Home to Harlem, evinces the way the “stories . . . manage to break through this façade of seemingly endless amusement and pleasure to

41 acknowledge the pain caused by racism and by the difficulties in forging satisfying emotional relationships” (941). She continues to explore the failings of the collection, however, as she shows that “McKay glosses over the grinding poverty experienced by many Harlemites, the lack of economic security even for those who held steady jobs, and the use of alcohol and drugs primarily to provide temporary relief from the pressures of life” as a result of being out of touch with Harlem during his time abroad (942).

Following this line of reasoning, and keeping with the examination of transnational liminality, I will focus my efforts on the two standouts from the internationally set latter half of the collection instead of the Harlem stories Drowne condemns.

Of the twelve stories in Gingertown, the first six occur in Harlem. As short stories, they fail to develop their characters to the same extent as McKay’s novels, thereby frequently appearing weak and flat. The final six stories, however, take place outside the United States; in this way, they create an important space in which McKay continues his transnational examinations, leading toward the important conclusion of his third novel Banana Bottom, which utilizes Jamaica as its primary setting. In an attempt to prelude the paradigm-shifting presentation of liminality in Bita Plant’s tale, I will focus heavily on two stories from Gingertown and his experimentation specifically with a

Caribbean setting. In this instance, the collection warrants critical attention primarily due to its status as a stepping stone to Banana Bottom.

Of the four Jamaican stories, two specifically demonstrate a liminality that places the stories at a level of complexity above the others. As Ramesh and Rani rightly claim,

McKay’s “Jamaican stories dealing with less hackneyed subjects are quite authentic in the portrayal of characters and their environment” (145). The first of these, “Crazy

Mary,” conveys the story of Mary Dean, the sewing-mistress for a small village schoolhouse. At first, Mary occupies a respected and socially accepted space, dating the bachelor schoolmaster and teaching young girls to sew. Her liminality arises, however, when the schoolmaster is accused of sexually molesting Freshy, one of the students.

Though evidence of this encounter is specious, the village responds with anger. When

Mary attempts to clear the schoolmaster’s name, the villagers direct accusations of fornication toward her. Regardless of the truth of the matter,5 Mary loses her status in the village and finds herself forced to the margins. Here, her liminality magnifies and she never again reclaims her footing: “Miss Mary went to the city and stayed there a long time. Her people said that she had had a breakdown from nervous trouble and they had had to take her to a doctor in the city”; later, “the village became aware that she was . . . a little crazy” (199). As the years pass, the schoolmaster (who remains nameless) continues his absence from the village, yet Mary “went about with her hair down like a girl,”

“barefooted like a common peasant girl,” and holding a bouquet of red flowers “in her arm as if she were nursing it” (199-200). At each step of her mental degradation, the village stands by and permits her continued marginalization.

The disastrous conclusion begins when the schoolmaster returns to town and receives no repercussions; for all the years that Mary has lived under scrutiny, his arrival

5 In an apparent confirmation of the falsity of the schoolmaster’s misdeed, the text labels

Freshy a “petulant little actress” (197) and emphasizes her promiscuity years later:

“Freshy had had three children for three different black bucks before she was nineteen”

(200).

43 grants him the status of celebrity. The questioning of Mary’s character results directly from her connection to the schoolmaster, yet she is the only one who enters a distinct liminal status due to gender inequality. At this point, Mary runs through town flashing the villagers and laughing. James R. Giles highlights Mary’s sexuality as a key component of her liminality, labeling her tragedy “a result of her enforced repression of a strong sexuality. . . . Her final gesture is perhaps not so insane—it expresses her contempt not only for those villagers whose hysteria over the patently false charges of an adolescent girl ruined her life but also for the man who deserted her during that hysteria” (119). In the same way that Fauset and Larsen employ liminality in their novels, then, gender plays a key role in creating a liminal space; the dichotomy between Mary and the schoolmaster indicates the way in which sexism heavily weighs upon Mary. At once, Mary parallels the two protagonists of Larsen’s Passing. Like Irene Redfield, Mary experiences her liminality as a psychological captivity of sorts. As time compounds her feelings of inadequacy and ostracism, the inevitability of a tragic conclusion becomes more apparent. But instead of Irene’s descent into darkness, Mary’s predicament mirrors that of

Clare Kendry Bellew, trading Clare’s defenestration for a leap from a waterfall. As is the case for most instances of racial and/or gender liminality, death provides the only pure escape.

In stark contrast to Mary’s cautionary tale, “The Strange Burial of Sue” presents a protagonist who engages in open sexuality. Despite her happiness and the apparent acceptance of her lifestyle, she nevertheless enters into a state of liminality. The two stories therefore appear in clear conversation with one another. Sue Turner’s open sexuality leads Giles to label her “a personification of McKay’s ideal of ‘black passion’”

(120). In Mary’s case, her suspected dalliance with the schoolmaster initiates her downward spiral; Sue, on the other hand, is open about her “free-loving” nature, receives no “local resentment,” and is “friendly with all the confirmed concubines and the few married women, and she was a picturesque church member” (221-22). Even though she would become intimate with married men, her kindness and nursing ability granted her a continual popularity. As a follow-up to McKay’s other Jamaican story with a female protagonist, then, this presentation of Sue emphasizes the dichotomy between the internal and external elements of their situations. Mary’s liminality begins when the villagers accuse her of an affair, and it continues as she internalizes her isolation; Sue, on the other hand, appears to have sidestepped liminality through her successful sexual choices, yet she too falls victim to the gossip and hatred of the village citizens.

Sue’s marriage to Nat Turner does not squelch her sexuality, and Turner himself never forbids her from engaging in extramarital affairs, often befriending Sue’s boyfriends himself. One such relationship occurs when Sue becomes attracted to the young Burskin, who returns to the village after a failed apprenticeship with a cooper in

Gingertown. Sue instigates a sexual relationship which lasts several months. The conflict of the story therefore arises not as a result of Sue’s promiscuity but when she decides to swap Burskin for a newcomer from Panama. Burskin does not appreciate Sue’s decision, leading him to the local grogshop where he becomes drunk and shares the most intimate of details regarding his experiences with Sue. Following Sue’s violent reaction to

Burskin’s public declarations, the local church involves itself, with the parson making it his personal mission to excommunicate Sue from the congregation. In response to

Burskin’s actions, Sue’s husband decides to take him to court for seducing Sue, whereas

Burskin plans a countersuit regarding her assault at the grogshop. In a brief period, then,

Sue goes from a satisfactory state to one in which much of her life crumbles around her.

The subsequent stress has such a mental toll on her that she begins to overexert herself in her work, “[a]s if she wanted to burn up all her splendid strength” (240). She succeeds in this quest, and amidst the gossip of the villagers, Sue falls ill and quickly dies. Giles emphasizes Sue’s laughter at the time of her death as indicative of “her triumph over the forces of bigotry that have destroyed her,” yet he undersells the cause of her death in the first place (120). Following the same trajectory of Mary, Sue’s fall from grace leads her into a societally marginalized existence that must conclude with death. Though Sue’s liminality leads immediately to death, Mary’s builds over time.

In another deviation from “Crazy Mary,” McKay continues the story for several more pages instead of abandoning Sue’s tale following her death. In this instance, liminality continues posthumously. Despite Sue’s physical removal, the village continues their revocation of her agency through continued gossip and insinuation regarding the official cause of her sickness and death. For instance, the church parson’s choice of songs for the funeral service conveys his displeasure with Sue’s lifestyle, including “such hell- fire ones as ‘Too late, Too late,’ ‘Backsliders, Repent,’ and ‘That Lost Soul’” (243).

Turner attempts to redeem his wife’s name by running the preacher off and assuming control of the service, but in this instance he perpetuates the removal of Sue’s agency for self-identity. Nonetheless, in a final attempt to return some dignity to the deceased woman, several villagers step up and discuss Sue’s generosity and helpfulness; however, the deadly consequences have already occurred. Giles claims that Sue “dies amidst love and laughter”; the retelling of memories at her graveside may warrant this reading, but

46 we must realize that she also dies amidst liminal subjugation (121). Were she not forced into this status wherein she maintains no agency over her own identity, she would not have died.

In both short stories, then, the liminality has an unavoidable gendered aspect.

Mary and Sue each enter their liminal states as a result of their connection to men, the accompanying disapproval of society, and their personal internalization of the ostracism.

Whereas feminized liminality does not necessitate tragedy, death often appears as the prevailing conclusion, as is the case here. These two stories from McKay’s Gingertown thereby begin the significant contribution he fully fleshes out in his following novel.

“Crazy Mary” and “The Strange Burial of Sue” allow McKay to return to his homeland of Jamaica, as does Banana Bottom. The return to this setting, at once diasporic, postcolonial, and familiar to McKay, provides the perfect location to underscore the innate liminality of black transnational identity. The two stories of Gingertown contribute to this discussion, but McKay’s last published novel truly shines in its distinction from his earlier writings.

As McKay’s fourth work of fiction, and his third published novel, Banana Bottom firmly places the action in “the Jamaican period of the early nineteen hundreds,” which

McKay indicates in his Author’s Note. Continuing the efforts of his previous writings, then, this work extends the transnational focus away from the United States, completely eliminating the setting except in passing reference. Florian Niedlich notes that Banana

Bottom is “[o]ne of the first and arguably most important postcolonial novels of the

Caribbean” (338). As the final published work of fiction during McKay’s lifetime,

Banana Bottom completes the trajectory that began in Home to Harlem, as Jake felt the

47 unnamable urge to move forward and outward constantly. Even more significant, however, is this underappreciated novel’s treatment of racial liminality, the societally marginalized existence resulting from racism and racial oppression. Attempting to establish the key distinctions in McKay’s novels, Lively posits, “While the two earlier novels had been concerned with characters on the fringes of society, with outsiders, the characters in Banana Bottom are firmly rooted in a landscape and a social milieu” (232).

Though this may be the case, Lively neglects to consider the colonial status of Jamaica in the novel and the presence of the white Craigs who attempt to suppress black identity as inferior to what they can offer Bita and the surrounding villages. As we shall see, race plays a significant role in the liminality of Banana Bottom, despite the Jamaican setting; colonialism entrenches the black majority in restlessness and dissatisfaction.

Banana Bottom also creates a distinct deviation from McKay’s two earlier novels through the use of a female protagonist. Amritjit Singh, in his exhaustive study The

Novels of the Harlem Renaissance (1976), underscores this gender choice, claiming that

“when McKay wrote Banana Bottom, with Bita as his heroine, he had realized that woman is central to his racial vision and therefore is the means to resolve the conflicts between folk and educated black cultures” (57). This is key, but the novel more importantly trades the transitory vagabondage for a clearly defined cultural in- betweenness. Kay R. Van Mol delineates this presence of liminality, as Bita “is pulled between two worlds, that of her Black heritage and that of her white education,” while the novel’s “tension is created largely through the juxtaposition of the two cultures which influence twentieth-century Western Blacks—the African pull of their past and the

Western necessity of their present” (48). In this way, the liminality and ultimate

48 resolution of McKay’s third novel address the relevance of black modernism, which is central to Locke’s philosophy of the New Negro. Belinda Edmondson similarly contends that through the novel McKay conveys a message of “how the black Caribbean middle class can integrate its European heritage into a modern, globally conscious Caribbean identity while standing firm on the foundation of its African one” (161). The positive conclusion thereby emphasizes the reconcilability of black identity.

Of McKay’s published novels, Banana Bottom has received the least critical attention. Nonetheless, the novel has received praise over the years. For example, in a

1970 article, Kenneth Ramchand labels it McKay’s “supreme artistic achievement” (54).

Yet, when the novel has garnered consideration, it has frequently done so through the lens of postcolonial Caribbean studies. For instance, in Edmondson’s eyes, “Banana

Bottom is perhaps the only novel that is canonized in both the Caribbean and African

American literary tradition” (160). Coming from a different perspective, Ramesh and

Rani make a necessary point regarding the novel’s Jamaican setting, a colonial site. The critics write, “The text suffered a fate similar to that of other McKay works as it was read within either the Western literary tradition or an Afro-American aesthetic framework.

Neither of the schools has read it as a postcolonial text, comprehending the distinct dynamics operating in such a context. Colonial encounters, even if recognized, are placed in a rigid dichotomy by these readings, elaborating monolithic constructions of self and other, disregarding the dialogic subtleties and the discursive, although disjunctive, cultural economy of the dynamics of cultural intimacy” (149). While my focus here is not inherently postcolonial, the colonial past of Jamaica does make it a logical location for

49 scrutinizing racial liminality. As others such as Homi K. Bhabha have noted previously, liminality relevantly applies to the study of postcolonialism and hybridity.

Some have examined McKay’s third novel more for its commentary on Jamaica than its discussion of individuals. In this vein, Raphael Dalleo explains that “Banana

Bottom invests its hopes in a literary intellectual class, married to the physical power of the peasantry, as the future for Jamaica” (107). A nationalist approach makes sense, especially in light of the Jamaican author performing a textual homecoming; nonetheless, my explication involves the liminality of protagonist Bita Plant. Niedlich has come the closest to this form of critique, positing that “travel, space, and identity in Banana Bottom interact in such a way as to endorse the essentialist notion of a fixed and stable self. As

Bita returns to Banana Bottom, she reconnects with her heritage and her true self, transgressing the framework of the white identity imposed on her and recovers her natural black identity” (341). This statement lays the groundwork for my discussion here, yet I propose taking it a step further. Rather than reading Banana Bottom in a vacuum, I consider the gendered implications of McKay’s choice of a female protagonist and her unique position as sole liminal saboteur in Harlem Renaissance fiction.

The setup for Banana Bottom immediately presents the reader with a liminal protagonist, Bita Plant, who receives an education in England and then returns to Jamaica seven years later. With her time away from Jamaica, Bita realizes that she returns to a state of in-betweenness, as she initially finds herself unable to locate a sense of belonging. Edmondson characterizes Bita as “sophisticated” and “middle class,” yet she is also “instinctively drawn to the ‘primitive’ traditions of black peasant culture” (158).

Extending this realization of liminality, Edmondson synopsizes the novel when she writes

50 that “a gentrified Bita then returns to her rural home, where to the indignation of her guardians and the respectable classes she rejects genteel brown suitors and middle class status in favor of Jubban, a poor black laborer with whom she has a baby out of wedlock”

(161). In a significant deviation from his first two novels, McKay chooses a female protagonist; Bita therefore stands in immediate and stark opposition to Jake, Ray, and

Banjo. Contrasting this third novel with the earlier two, Ramchand concisely explains the inversed inclusion of transition when he argues, “Home to Harlem and Banjo had ended with the departures of exiles. Banana Bottom begins with the return of a native” (54). In this way, Bita’s tale distances itself from the aimlessness of earlier protagonists.

At the same time, Banana Bottom begs to be considered in conjunction with other women protagonists of the era. McKay’s choice of gender places the novel within this tradition, wherein gender and race often intersect in a way that compounds the perceived liminality. Nonetheless, despite McKay’s employment of a female protagonist for the first time, his use of liminality remains consistent with its appearance in his earlier novels. Unlike Larsen’s and Fauset’s texts, in which the protagonists frequently find their liminality constraining to the point of immobility—as is especially the case in Larsen’s

Passing—McKay’s novels present liminality as the impetus for movement and dissatisfaction, yet the individual conclusions resist tragic overtones. This fact cannot be overstated; of the Harlem Renaissance novels that follow female protagonists, Banana

Bottom illustrates a situation wherein Bita resists personal tragedy to a great degree— excepting the deaths of both her biological father and her adoptive father—and receives exactly the conclusion and resolution she desires. No other woman in a Harlem

Renaissance novel can claim the same.6 Van Mol also recognizes that the novel “has an obviously positive ending” (48). In a seemingly purposeful rewriting of the formula for racial liminality, McKay reverses the sense of loss and indirection by creating a resolved hybridity, one which requires no code-switching or doubling. Perhaps the earliest appearance of such resolution, Bita Plant successfully combines her two identities into one, with no residual friction. A case study of Banana Bottom therefore grants a powerful counterpoint to other examples in the Harlem Renaissance.

Bita’s immediate liminality following her return to Jamaica exists on two codependent levels, namely those of race and class. Whereas liminality can manifest as a subtle, underlying tension, Bita’s experience is more of a literal and physical in- betweenness. The people of Banana Bottom and Jubilee exhibit their excitement for her return, yet the expectations of those closest to her place her in the nebulous state of identity confusion. Her adoptive family becomes one end of the spectrum. Reverend

Malcolm Craig and his wife Priscilla provide Bita with the opportunity to travel to

6 Female protagonists are present within Larsen’s Passing (1928) and Quicksand (1929);

Fauset’s There Is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1928), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), and

Comedy: American Style (1933); Walter White’s Flight (1926); Wallace Thurman’s The

Blacker the Berry (1929); and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

(1937). Each protagonist experiences a state of liminality at the intersection of race and color, leading to physical transition and travel. In the end, they all conclude on tragedy or compromise, diminishing self-identity in the process. Bita exhibits the sole exception to this rule.

England for her education in the first place. A white English couple, the Craigs represent an upper class that frequently conflates with the whiteness throughout the novel. When

Bita returns to Jamaica, they view her education as their success: “This day celebrated the sum joy in the clerical career of the Reverends Malcolm and Priscilla Craig. They were happy in a praise-Godly humble way over their handiwork. The transplanted African peasant girl that they had transformed from a brown wildling into a decorous cultivated young lady” (11). Later, Priscilla demonstrates the underlying racism of her gift, as she

“had conceived the idea of redeeming her from her past by a long period of education without any contact with Banana Bottom, and at the finish she would be English trained and appearing in everything but the color of her skin” (31). The Craigs’ attempt to control

Bita’s future therefore hinges upon the idea that they are saving her from an inferior existence and bringing her into the more valued colonial English identity.

On the other end of this spectrum, Bita’s friends and biological family occupy a supposed lower class, speaking the vernacular and partaking in local traditions that the

Craigs frown upon. Bita slowly participates in the various events around Banana Bottom, leading her to relinquish “the English identity that was conferred upon her” and to feel

“proud of the black identity she is regaining” (Niedlich 339). The transition is not quick or easy—the plot unfolds slowly over the course of the novel—yet few events take Bita off her course, unlike Mary and Sue in Gingertown. As a deviation to the common narrative of liminality, Bita’s progression operates in an opposite manner, conveying her toward an ultimate epiphany of identity rather than toward calamity and dissolution.

Initially, then, Jamaica and England signify the opposite pole positions of Bita’s liminality. When she returns to Jamaica, Banana Bottom and Jubilee create the same

53 dichotomy. In each case, the whiteness of the Craigs (represented through England and later Jubilee) contradicts the blackness of her former life (signified through Jamaica and later through the specific image of Banana Bottom). In this way, whereas McKay's earlier protagonists find themselves essentially directionless and wandering from one place to the next, Bita traverses a single line between whiteness and blackness, upper class and lower class. The Craigs and the Plants most distinctively designate this liminal binary; but a series of binaries comprise the novel, more greatly emphasizing the two lives Bita must navigate. Throughout Banana Bottom, due to the foregrounding of interracial relations, tragedy remains a constant possibility, especially given the conclusion of other such novels of the Harlem Renaissance. This makes Bita’s positive outcome, deus ex machina though it may be, even more significant.

Through the continued trips between Banana Bottom and Jubilee, Bita realizes to a greater degree her dissatisfaction and consequential liminality. During this time, she finds out exactly who she is and who she wants to be, which she vocalizes to Herald

Newton Day, the man the Craigs encourage Bita to marry: “I thank God that although I was brought up and educated among white people, I have never wanted to be anything but myself. I take pride in being colored and different, just as an intelligent white person does in being white. I can’t imagine anything more tragic than people torturing themselves to be different from their natural unchangeable selves” (169). At that juncture, barely halfway through the novel, Bita exhibits the stability of self-identification that most liminal subjects do not. In the pages that follow, as she finds herself presented with binary choices in race, class, location, love, and intellect, Bita refrains from allowing her liminality to define her in a negative light. Instead, she enjoys the alternating sides of her

54 identity (reminiscent of Passing’s Clare who morphs between black and white), not allowing the dichotomy to become contradictory.

As the novel comes to a close, Bita continues to make her own decisions, choosing to bypass the expectations placed upon her by her education or status. She marries Jubban, her father’s uneducated drayman, and inherits “the lot of land and the house with everything in it and five hundred pounds in the local bank” when Squire

Gensir dies (309). Edmondson expounds on the rule-breaking conclusion, as she too realizes the uniqueness of the situation: “Bita manages to have the best of both worlds, however; she inherits a home and some money from her aristocratic English mentor

Squire Gensir, and thus can live a comfortable middle class life even while eschewing the trappings of respectability” (161). In attaining “the best of both worlds,” the liminality transitions into a combination of the two halves of Bita’s identity, allowing her act of identity construction to complete itself. Paul Jay questions the novel’s end, pointing out its inevitability due to the fact that “the idea that Bita has any real choice between the one or the other is probably specious” (“Hybridity” 189). While he intends this comment as a critique, the truth is that Bita cannot choose between the two parts of her identity, which is why she chooses a static location between and within the two. In a note during his examination of Bita’s path, Niedlich settles on a similar idea: “Bita does not reject her white identity in its entirety after all. Rather, she manages to integrate part of her white education with her recovered black identity” (339n5). He eschews the concept of hybridity here because Bita’s liminality, which he terms “the in-between of the ‘third space,’” is her true self, rather than a mere amalgamation of two externally-constructed ideas (339n5). In this way, Niedlich helps to prove my theory of perpetual liminality. If

McKay’s fiction creates a question of perpetual seeking, always searching for a home,

Bita’s journey in Banana Bottom is the closest it comes to discovering and establishing one.

Barbara Griffin takes issue with this reading, as she finds Bita’s marriage to

Jubban and her reliance upon Squire Gensir problematic. For instance, she contends that

“Bita does not so much mediate her two worlds as she succumbs to the author’s concept of what a woman could do or should do. . . . And her place is under one patriarchy or another or marriage to a silent man whose routine rustic life and sociopolitical apathy in no way threaten the colonial subtext of the narrative: With him Bita will be subdued and isolated” (506). While Griffin raises valid concerns, she also downplays Bita’s agency in the outcome, her happiness and control through it all. Griffin might have been better to end on her earlier claim that Bita’s “circumstance certainly strengthens the notion that she is a McKay protagonist who has at last achieved a synthesis” (506). Indeed, the resolved fusion that occurs in the end is unique in the perpetual quest of McKay’s fiction.

In no other plot does the protagonist discover such a perfect conclusion without losing some aspect of his or her identity in the process. Similarly, biographer Wayne Cooper states, “With the creation of Banana Bottom, McKay’s picaresque search for psychic unity and stability, begun with Home to Harlem, came full circle to rest in the lost paradise of his pastoral childhood” (282). It is therefore fitting that the chosen location be the Jamaica of his youth, though the gender alteration for his protagonist keeps the successful resolution a fiction and nothing more. With this in mind, Edmondson calls it

“a nostalgic novel suggesting that McKay, the ‘vagabond’ Marxist who traveled from

Jamaica to Harlem to Moscow, was torn on how to reconcile his own cosmopolitan life

56 with his origins in the well-to-do peasantry” (161). As his autobiography demonstrates, the author could not embrace a frictionless hybridity to the same degree as Bita Plant.

While Banana Bottom has not received the same level of attention in the canon of

African American literature as it has in the Caribbean realm, its presentation of racial liminality deserves consideration in the same way as Larsen’s and Fauset’s novels do. As

I demonstrate here, racial liminality arises as a form of unrest and dissatisfaction in a subject’s self-identity. Frequently tied to external factors, racial liminality often manifests itself through a physical mobility in the quest for identity resolution. In almost every case, pure resolution remains elusive with compromise or tragedy as the only possible outcomes. The concept of a successful liminal transition or home comes off as idealistic and unrealistic. However, Banana Bottom achieves the impossible by granting Bita this product. In the same way that Langston Hughes employs liminality as a mode of uplift in his autobiographies, the idealized presentation of liminality is one in which the interspatial in-between becomes a stable home.

In using the tropes of transition and instability, McKay brings more attention to the idea of transnational liminality. While the latter is the figurative, theoretical concept of moving or occurring between cultures and nations, the former is the physical representation of it. Though all of his fiction illustrates this concept to some degree, his inclusion of Ray in Home to Harlem and Banjo as well as his use of female protagonists in Gingertown and Banana Bottom enable his works to transcend primitivism and instead address the issues latent within black modernism. Clearly the idea of transnationalism was familiar to McKay, as it was only natural due to his personal transitions between cities and nations his entire life. The inclusion of the transnational and the transitional

(and the blurring of their distinctions at times) contributes to a fuller understanding of the far-reaching effects of the Harlem Renaissance itself. The fading in and out of all characters illustrates the way that geographical location holds less significance than the greater race goals of the time period. Just as the term renaissance connotes, this movement was a reawakening and refiguring of transnational African identity in general.

As Locke implies in The New Negro, the effort to reclaim a cultural past and present for those of African descent should apply to peoples outside the term African American. And

McKay’s fiction does just that.

Chapter Two

Racial Escapism in Nella Larsen’s Fiction

A significant counterpart to Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen has gained a position as a key writer of the Harlem Renaissance although she only published two novels and a handful of short stories. Larsen’s protagonists embody the tension at play for women of color during the 1920s, and she pulls material from her own life to contribute to these characters’ lives. Perhaps more than any other writer I address, she personally experiences a permanent liminal state. A key figure of the movement during the 1920s, she slowly fell into obscurity following the success of her two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). As such, details from her life can provide insight into the psychological backstory and the creation of such liminal characters as Helga Crane, Irene

Redfield, and Clare Kendry Bellew.

The three main protagonists of Larsen’s works come from multiethnic backgrounds, with Irene and Clare possessing the ability to pass as white. This status provides the foundation for Larsen’s writings, as each woman experiences conflicting emotions and feelings of insecurity based on the doubling of her identity. In other words, the protagonists’ inability to determine a suitable home community, as they oscillate unsatisfactorily between racial groups, creates the central conflict of liminality. In the words of George Hutchinson, “Larsen’s most important revelations about the nature of the modern, transnational racial labyrinth, not least her consciousness of her own entrapment within it, have been sublimated, even unwittingly repressed” (“Subject to

Disappearance” 177-78). This entrapment that Larsen’s protagonists encounter arises in direct correlation to their biracial identities. In this case, I stress the friction that results from each character’s conflicting sense of self-identity with her societally mandated identity. When these two views—chosen and given identities—contradict one another, the result is an inescapable liminality, as opposed to hybridity, in which the three female protagonists of Larsen’s two novels find themselves. This form of liminality, especially in the fiction of the Harlem Renaissance, seems to present itself most frequently in tandem with women characters.

If any writer can be labeled the quintessential liminal figure of the Harlem

Renaissance, it must unequivocally be Nella Larsen. As several scholars have thoroughly explicated—most successfully Hutchinson, Cheryl A. Wall, Charles Larson, and

Thadious Davis—multiple plot points and storylines from Quicksand and Passing have direct correlations to Larsen’s life. More than this, however, Larsen experienced a growing sense of marginalization and liminality throughout her life, ultimately leading to her descent into obscurity for her last thirty years. In the introduction to his biography,

Hutchinson succinctly establishes Larsen’s liminality, proposing that she “no doubt felt like a shadow through much of her life. She did not long inhabit the sort of place in which she could feel at home” (In Search 1). While he details her life to a great extent throughout his thorough study, this initial description of Larsen grants the insight necessary to realize that the characters of her novels live an in-betweenness she knew firsthand. He concludes his biography with a recollection of his trip to New York to seek

Larsen’s grave. After a confusing visit at the cemetery in which he could only find a blank plot with no headstone where she was supposed to be buried, he receives

60 confirmation from a staff member. On a small card, the only information available was her name but “no date of birth or death, no record of a headstone” (482). Fitting with the liminality Larsen wrote into her novels, “[s]he was there all right, in that gap at the center of the Garden of Memory, but the grave had never been marked” (482). Though Larsen may have lost her fame during her lifetime and reached an end as tragic as her heroines, her novels live on and grant insight into the quest for identity.

In each of Larsen’s novels, the female protagonists begin their journeys by seeking a new realized identity. These quests include elements of race, gender, and sexuality, as these characters find themselves marginalized in multiple categories. Over the years, Larsen has been praised for her contributions to both African American literature and women’s literature. According to Ann duCille, Larsen’s writings “echo the racial and gender politics and the passionlessness of their nineteenth-century predecessors” as well as “anticipate the frank explorations of passion, power, desire, and danger that would characterize black women’s novels of the 1970s and 1980s” (87).

Larsen’s role, then, is one of intermediary, raising the questions necessary for the literary advancements to come. Wall similarly praises Larsen’s revision of past tropes, stating that “the tragic mulatto was the most accessible convention for the portrayal of middle- class black women in fiction. But her protagonists subvert the convention consistently”

(Women 89). Significantly here, Larsen provides a nuanced complexity to the protagonists, successfully critiquing the racist society that could engender such characters. Ultimately, I propose a re-theorization of the tragic mulatto trope that appears in variations in Larsen’s writing. In the case of these two novels, the protagonists’ liminal status provides the impetus for a disastrous conclusion more so than their biracial

61 identity. Wall addresses this element by explaining, “The tragedy for these mulattoes is the impossibility of self-definition. Larsen’s protagonists assume false identities that ensure social survival but result in psychological suicide” (Women 89). To be more specific, their biracial identity contributes to their experience with liminality, but it is this state of being between two identities rather than simultaneously within two identities that leads to their tragic ends. The liminality of biraciality therefore harkens back to Du

Bois’s concept of double-consciousness, demonstrating the way the protagonists appear stuck in the oscillation from one race to the other.

Both Quicksand and Passing ultimately resist resolution. In each instance, the protagonists land far from their attempted destination. For Quicksand’s Helga, her impetus for transition arises out of the slowly compounding dissatisfaction she experiences while working as a teacher at Naxos. Seeing the lifelessness of her coworkers and realizing her indifference toward her fiancé, she sets herself on a course for freedom, which ultimately ends in imprisonment. Her quest embodies both local and global settings, yet she fails to escape her liminality. Irene and Clare of Passing do not partake in the same geographical journey as Helga, but they both navigate competing identities in their own right. Employing the titular passing at various times throughout the novel,

Clare realizes that her self-identity is divided in two each time she must hide the other half of her self. Irene, on the other hand, rarely passes, but she similarly feels a sense of brokenness, of being a stranger among friends and family. In this way, Larsen’s novels prove valuable in delineating the multifaceted nature of racial liminality.

Elusive Freedom in Quicksand

In 2009, Stefan L. Brandt wisely saw the value of juxtaposing Michel de

Certeau’s theories of city space with the theory of liminality. When introducing his argument, Brandt explains, “At first glance, the postmodern city seems to figure as a closed space—a labyrinth that leaves protagonists and readers in a state of disorientation, fragmentation, and constant decentering. At second glance, however, the maze-like organization of the ‘postmetropolis’ also offers numerous opportunities, making aesthetic experience, and movement in particular, a central motor of the production of meaning”

(553). Brandt focuses his examination on postmodern literature, but these same statements also apply to the modernist moves Larsen employs within her novels. In conjunction with Helga’s unsettled and insecure emotions, her uneasiness manifests itself in physical unrest. As Brandt aptly conveys, the idea of closure—essentially synonymous with stasis, finality, and immobility—becomes dichotomously conflated with transition— a perfect expression of change, inconclusiveness, and mobility.

To contribute to my analysis of Larsen’s first novel, then, I turn to de Certeau’s theories of city and space. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), de Certeau grapples with the theorization of quotidian culture and society as he attempts a new critical viewpoint by which “everyday practices, ‘ways of operating’ or doing things, no longer appear as merely the obscure background of social activity”; this can be attained, he believes, “if a body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it possible to articulate them” (xi). His study includes topics ranging from the art of practice to the uses of language. Central to his monograph, both figuratively and compositionally, the concept of spatial practices arises. Here he

63 deconstructs the city and its myriad physical and conceptual implications. Using the

World Trade Center as an example, de Certeau addresses the ways in which the conceptual can overpower any physical attributes, specifically emphasizing “the transformation of the urban fact into the concept of a city” (94). Furthering this initial juxtaposition of concept and city, de Certeau coins the obvious term “Concept-city” and continues to delineate its abilities, calling it “a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, . . . the machine and the hero of modernity” (95).

Through these descriptions, then, one can see how the urban city gains an ethos much larger than its buildings and boundaries. The concept of the city effectively promotes ideals and emotions fully separate from an actual physical experience. In terms of transnational liminality, this instance occurs when the liminal subject looks toward the next location for the promise of salvation from a marginalized existence. While deviating from de Certeau’s personal theories, I assert that a city’s occupation of Concept-city status creates an ethos too large, too overshadowing, that the physical city-space itself, once intersected by a person, cannot satiate the liminal subject’s desires. In Larsen’s case,

Helga Crane continues to search for a cityscape that can quench her liminal thirst for fulfillment and community, migrating to multiple cities along the way, even including a transnational venture to Copenhagen. As Concept-cities, these locations fail to resolve

Helga’s liminality in accordance with de Certeau’s writings. Laura Doyle validates this reading of Quicksand as a tale of the transnational failure of liminal removal (which I explore to a greater degree in Fauset’s Comedy: American Style). She posits, “Helga can find no freedom exactly because she lacks an embracing race community within which to

64 pursue it. With no ‘people,’ Helga has no ready point of entrée into the freedom story. . . .

[H]er story signals the flaw in any assumption that transnational travel will in itself offer liberation from anything, including race. Instead, Helga displays for us how transnational travel has structured the terms of race identity” (“Transnational History” 551). Thus,

Helga’s quest is doomed from the start, before she even leaves Naxos7 in search of herself. Harlem becomes the closest thing Helga finds to closure, as she returns here after her trip to Europe. Yet this idea of a Concept-city, one in which the location itself can never fully attain the hype of its projected powers, accurately mirrors Helga’s frustrations and struggles with liminality, which she calls her “indefinite discontent,” wherein she runs unceasingly toward a mirage-like goal that remains forever out of reach (83).

By utilizing the term metropolitan in the strict sense meaning “of or relating to the city,” Larsen’s freshman venture can therefore be labeled as a metropolitan novel.

Though scholars may not have analyzed Quicksand through the lens of the cityscape previously, it follows a transitory trajectory as the female protagonist Helga Crane finds herself in a subjugated, liminal state and chooses to mobilize in an attempt to locate an accepting community. Each move occurs in direct relation with the metropolitan environment, as Helga consciously chooses each time to migrate toward or away from a metropolitan setting. Jessica Labbé posits the greater significance of Helga’s transitory nature: “Larsen’s participation in the construction of New Negro Womanhood and in the

7 Hutchinson creates a compelling argument for the mythological connections of Larsen’s

Naxos in his “Subject to Disappearance: Interracial Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand”

(2001).

65 creation of one of the earliest and finest examples of the black flȃneuse draw distinctly feminist concerns into a larger discussion of race, politics, and creativity in 1920s

American literature and culture” (“Too High” 83). Just as other novels of the Harlem

Renaissance present skin color as a plot device (namely, the works of Fauset, White, and

Thurman), so too does Larsen’s premier novel, at least on the surface. In this case, Helga presumes her feelings of oppression/suppression arise because of her biracial background. This state of being between races leads to a lengthy journey from one city to another, before ultimately ending where and how it began. Especially relevant in this case, Helga constantly finds herself in motion in an attempt to find a Concept-city whose physical iteration measures up to the perceptual façade. For instance, over the course of the novel, Helga starts in Alabama as a teacher at Naxos; she then moves to Chicago in an attempt to reconnect with her white maternal uncle, who must ultimately turn her away due to his demanding, racist wife; from there, she moves to Harlem, but becomes disillusioned with constant concern over the “race problem”; next, Helga visits her white maternal aunt in Copenhagen, but she grows desirous of her now-absent black friends; to alleviate this problem, she returns to Harlem, where she ultimately stumbles into a church revival during a dejected walk through the city; and then she develops a relationship with the minister, Rev. Pleasant Green, with whom she moves back to Alabama after a quick wedding. Helga’s story thus concludes with her filling the role of wife and mother in a small southern town. This quick summary of Helga’s story may seem reductionist, but it adequately emphasizes the many shifts and transitions that take place for Helga in a brief amount of time. As de Certeau proposes, “Every story is a travel story—a spatial

66 practice” (115). Clearly, Helga’s story functions as a travel story, in which she finds herself constantly in transition, both physically and figuratively.

In these individual locations, Helga’s dissatisfaction becomes progressively exacerbated, leading to her withdrawal from each localized society and relocation to the next. Here, she depends upon the Concept-city of her next destination, until the bizarre twist in the end when she marries and returns to Alabama. The fact that she finds herself in six different locations throughout her story (in both Harlem and Alabama twice) confirms her inescapable liminal identity. Each new (or old) space creates the possibility for her desires to be quenched and her liminality to be resolved. Michael Keith and Steve

Pile understand the importance of these spaces in which Helga finds herself, as they contend, “spatiality should simultaneously express people’s experiences of, for example, displacement (a feeling of being out of place), dislocation (relating to alienation) and fragmentation (the jarring multiple identities). Spatialities represent both the spaces between multiple identities and the contradictions within identities” (225). These qualifications Keith and Pile provide exactly parallel Helga’s various geographical experiences. For instance, the feelings of displacement and dislocation occur throughout the novel, especially at Naxos due to her lack of “noble” ancestry and in Chicago as a result of the dismissal by her uncle’s wife. Her prime instance of fragmentation occurs during her time in Copenhagen: she arrives due to her relation with her white aunt, yet she feels that her conspicuously dark skin constantly receives unwanted attention. Labbé highlights the ways these situations reveal “the intricacies of oppression; all attempts to function within society are bound by this matrix that forces participants to be, at times, victims of others’ domination and, at other times, oppressors of other beings” (“Too

High” 89). At each metropolitan juncture, then, one of these qualities outlined by Keith,

Pile, and Labbé appears, thus reinforcing Helga’s liminality.

For Helga to achieve ultimate freedom, she must successfully eliminate her dissatisfaction. She comes close at times, such as when she becomes reacquainted with

Dr. Robert Anderson from Naxos. The feelings that rise within her, however, disturb her.

As she recalls on her way from Harlem to Copenhagen, “the figure of Dr. Anderson obtruded itself with surprising vividness to irk her because she could get no meaning from that keen sensation of covetous exasperation that had so surprisingly risen within her on the night of the cabaret party. . . . She wasn’t, she couldn’t be, in love with the man. It was a thought too humiliating, and so quickly dismissed” (66). Clearly she has feelings for Dr. Anderson, even if she keeps this veiled from herself. Earlier at Naxos she is engaged to marry James Vayle, and in Copenhagen Axel Olsen proposes to her. Yet no matter what her feelings, she finds herself so trapped and so attached to the despair and dissatisfaction of her liminality that her only response is to run. She never voices it, but entrenched in the opportunity for love is the fact that she would necessarily have to accept the societal binary that creates her liminality and that she resists at each turn. This fact leads Doyle to posit that Helga’s “transnational travel is provoked by (and fails to heal) her sexual as well as her racial alienation” (“Transnational History” 550). In the same way that she attempts to locate an environment welcoming of her racial in- betweenness, Helga also seeks sexual freedom. Larsen does not include lesbian

68 undertones in Quicksand to the same degree as in Passing,8 but the two novels clearly work together to emphasize the liminal legitimacy of biracialism and bisexuality.

Near the end of Quicksand, after she has endured rejection and disappointment at the hands of family, friends, and herself, Helga Crane feels the inescapable urge to walk the streets of New York, looking for nothing in particular. This scene produces a culmination and an amalgam of all of Helga’s conflicting desires and failures, everything which has pushed her toward ambivalent mobility over the span of the novel. After months of traveling and seeking a home for her identity, allegedly under the banner of locating the perfect community for herself, she realizes the hopelessness of her search.

On a rainy day, adequately mirroring her personal despair, Helga finds herself “so broken physically, mentally, that she had given up thinking. But back and forth in her staggered brain wavering, incoherent thoughts shot shutter-like. Her pride would have shut out these humiliating thoughts and painful visions of herself. The effort was too great” (110).

For the first time in her travels, Helga feels at a loss. She is quite familiar with feelings of depression, but she had always successfully followed these up with hopeful ideas of her next stop. In the end, however, the remaining strands of hope are gone and Helga “felt alone, isolated from all other human beings, separated even from her own anterior existence by the disaster of yesterday. Over and over, she repeated: ‘There’s nothing left but to go now.’ Her anguish seemed unbearable” (110). Helga again finds herself disconnected from the outside world, from any tangible connection to other humans. This

8 Doyle might disagree with this statement, given her queer reading of Quicksand and the ways it prefigures Passing.

69 sense of isolation completely engulfs Helga, removing any remaining optimism for the elusive home. For one final time, Helga turns to the solution which has become second nature to her: movement. The difference at this juncture is that instead of Chicago,

Harlem, or Copenhagen, Helga chooses “no definite destination” (111). In this moment, the act of travel/transition subverts the curative powers of the final destination itself.

Her problematic interactions with romance cause her ultimate conclusion to appear that much more confusing. After turning down three possible suitors, Helga surprisingly and abruptly marries Rev. Pleasant Green, whom she barely knows at all.

After unsuccessfully attempting to find satisfaction through her constant transitioning from one place to another, Helga feels that marriage becomes the only way she can conclusively terminate her mobility. Helga’s finale removes her mobility but not her liminality, as she falls into a more dissatisfied state than when she began her journey. Her defining identity leaves her, as she becomes the wife of a traditional, southern preacher.

No longer someone who looks forward to expressing herself through clothing and dances,

Helga resigns herself to a life of passivity, subjugation, and motherhood. This new existence leads duCille to claim that “Helga is unable to fashion an individual identity against the competing ideological and iconographic forces that ultimately render her invisible” (96). Following the birth of her fourth child, she enters a sickness that almost kills her. As she slowly nurses back to health, she looks back on her life and realizes she has once again failed to find freedom, that now “[i]t was over” (130). Following this reminiscence, she decides to leave her husband and escape her oppression. Yet the novel ends “when she began to have her fifth child” (136). Despite her long series of transitions, Helga finally finds herself trapped and stationary, ultimately succumbing to

70 the metaphorical quicksand of her liminality. Labbé believes that Larsen herself “makes it very clear that Helga wants to escape the oppressive nature of this last episode; moreover, she wants her children to escape the fate that she has created for them. Unlike the other times that Helga seeks such an escape, Larsen does not provide a quick resolution/escape route for her protagonist” (“Too High” 107). Indeed, the novel ends on an ambiguous note, one that leaves the reader with an overwhelming sense of irresolution. While Turner’s initial theories on liminality anticipate a positive outcome following the forward movement of a ritual or rite of passage, liminality existing in spaces of race and/or gender can create much more destructive products, as is the case when Helga fully disappears at the premature conclusion of her narrative.

More accurately an inward than an outward quest, Helga attempts to find satisfaction and selfhood through physical and geographical relocation, yet each new stop on her journey fails to achieve her desired outcome, a liminal resolution. As Wall demonstrates, Helga is aware of “her ‘difference,’ which she perceives as a personal flaw that makes her unable to take advantage of the opportunities she is offered. In truth, the flaw is Helga’s accurate perception that to succeed on the terms she is given, she must play herself false. While Helga, alone among Larsen’s major characters, never considers passing for white, she is keenly aware that the image she projects is fraudulent” (Women

96). Wall astutely notes the sense of “in-between” in which Helga feels trapped. In this way, examining writings about and by women of color relies much more heavily on the theory of liminality as opposed to hybridity, as there is more of an omission of identity rather than a duality of it. As in the case of McKay’s Bita in Banana Bottom, Helga’s liminality creates a new, third space separate from traditional binaries of race. Jessica

Wegmann-Sánchez recognizes this distinction, when she exposes the fact that “the possibilities allowed Helga Crane of being only Black or only White eventually ruin the life of this protagonist, who longs to celebrate her mixed heritage” (140-41). Helga fails at code-switching in her various environments, dismissing the idea that she must oscillate between forcibly separated aspects of herself. As a result, she encounters a feeling of perpetual marginalization, even eventually questioning “why [she] couldn’t . . . have two lives” (95). By breaking down the concept of liminality linguistically, we could say that

Helga feels continuously at the “threshold” of the various communities, and never a part.

Despite the friction she encounters, Helga resolutely resists compromising her search for truth and satisfaction, at least until the perplexing conclusion of the novel.

In light of this discussion, Helga Crane is perhaps the quintessential liminal character of the Harlem Renaissance, which she acknowledges through continuous migration from one location to another. The novel’s title functions as the perfect metaphor for Helga’s predicament, as her movement attempts to counteract the detrimental effects that inertia would create, just as a person would sink into the mire of quicksand. In this way, similar to Jake Brown in McKay’s Home to Harlem, the concept of transition becomes inseparably linked to liminality. Unlike Jake’s experiences, however, Helga finds herself unable to stay in one place as a result of her persistent dissatisfaction with her community and those around her; Jake chooses the life of a vagabond more in line with his pleasure-seeking mindset and desire to avoid conflict.

However, one important distinction in the case of Larsen’s protagonists is the entrapment, which Hutchinson so aptly explains, relating to biracial identity. Whereas McKay’s Jake

(and other male characters depicted through the Harlem Renaissance) appear to have

72 more agency and freedom of movement, the female protagonists of Larsen and Fauset— not to mention Mimi Daquin in White’s Flight and Emma Lou Morgan in Thurman’s The

Blacker the Berry—find themselves more immobilized by their race because of its combination with their gender. Nonetheless, Helga and Jake create an intriguing dichotomy based upon their gender and sexuality as well as their use of pedestrian motion, especially in the metropolitan environment, in a manner consistent with my emphasis on the connection between transition and liminality.

Liminal Captivity in Passing

Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing has received its fair share of scholarly examination. Recent analyses have focused heavily on the main theme of passing. While various writers approach this concept from distinct perspectives, the vast majority sees the two protagonists, Clare Kendry Bellew and Irene Redfield, as distinctly different. For the most part, these studies tend to focus chiefly either on just one of the two women— often Clare—or on the disparities between the two. For example, Josh Toth posits that

“Clare . . . ‘deauthenticates’ the communities through which she passes. In doing so, she provokes hysterical and violent reactions, reactions that speak to our pervasive (and potentially dangerous) need to maintain the illusion of authentic communities and stable identities” (56-57). Similarly, Catherine Rottenberg focuses primarily on Clare while avoiding a common thread between the two women: “The depiction and juxtaposition of these two characters reveal the complexities and intricacies of the category of race. While

Irene can be seen to represent the subject who appropriates and internalizes the hegemonic norms of race, Clare’s trajectory dramatizes how dominant norms can be misappropriated and how disidentification is always possible” (“Passing” 436). While the

73 racial tension of passing provides the basis for these types of interesting inspection, a less obvious and often overlooked component is both Clare and Irene’s liminality. Though the presence of “passing” does contribute to this liminality, the two protagonists experience marginalized states as a result of other internal and external stimuli as well.

In the decades since Larsen published Passing, the bulk of scholarship and criticism falls into one of two categories: race theory and feminist/gender theory.

Frequently in the past two decades, critics have zeroed in on apparent lesbian undertones, such as when H. Jordan Landry suggests that “Passing challenges earlier representations of the mulatto female character and offer[s] an alternative reading in which Irene’s and

Clare’s lesbian desire emerges from their idealization of the black female body” (28).

Rather than employing antiquated ideas of the tragic mulatto, then, Larsen empowers and uplifts the biracial woman, something that Reginald Watson similarly addresses. The other common theme among scholarly works is an approach to passing that mixes race and gender theories. For example, the aforementioned Toth and Rottenberg both use fresh perspectives to examine this titular element of the novel. Along these same lines, Miriam

Thaggert looks at Larsen’s work in comparison to the Rhinelander Case, which dealt with the concept of interracial marriage. In reading these alongside each other, Thaggert claims, “The concepts of readability and representation are central to both,” indicating the fluidity and subjectivity of race (2). This topic leads to other scholars who focus on the related themes of racial hybridity and miscegenation in the novel, such as when Mark J.

Madigan details the legal implications of interracial marriage in relation to the novel. Up to this point, however, no one has approached a scholarly treatment of liminality in

Passing. Though these other emphases on the novel and its characters are intriguing,

74 none capably supplies a satisfactory explanation of the tragic connections between Clare and Irene’s conflict. Most writings only explain either the tragedy of Clare or that of

Irene; the theory of liminality, however, provides a framework for understanding the parallels between the two characters and their disparate endings.

The most obvious example of liminality within the novel appears in the character of Clare Kendry Bellew. Of the main characters, she embraces (whether consciously or subconsciously) the identity of passing as she marries a white man. Her sense of liminality, however, begins earlier in the story than her controversial marriage. After her father dies, for instance, Clare must go live with her two white great aunts. As Clare explains, “The aunts were queer. For all their Bibles and praying and ranting about honesty, they didn’t want anyone to know that their darling brother [Clare’s grandfather] had seduced—ruined, they called it—a Negro girl. They could excuse the ruin, but they couldn’t forgive the tar-brush. They forbade me to mention Negroes to the neighbors”

(19). Her first experience with passing, then, occurs as something forced upon her by her aunts. She has no input in the matter, as the two women are essentially ashamed of their relation to a “Negro” girl by way of their brother’s indiscretion. Therefore, while Clare is still in her formative teen years (her father dies when she is sixteen years old), she becomes indoctrinated into the psychology of passing. Regardless of the lack of agency in this case, Sami Schalk believes, “By representing Clare as a character who can move between identity categories, Passing challenges the eugenic notion that race, class, gender, and sexuality are natural and knowable categories which can be controlled for eugenic purposes” (148). In this way, Clare’s passing defines a broader experience than many readings over the years have conveyed. Her liminal situation, therefore, shatters the

75 arbitrary binaries of self-identity, even if it must ultimately lead to her destruction because of societal unacceptance. Even though her aunts have not physically bound her or forced her into a life of slavery or captivity, their actions and clear disgust with her racial heritage lead to a liminality, or entrapment, in which Clare’s self-identity becomes ambiguous. And as this first occurs so early in Clare’s life, it brings about more psychological repercussions in the years to come.

During the two years that Clare lives with her aunts in her forced state of passing, she meets John Bellew, a “schoolboy acquaintance of some people in the neighborhood,

[who] turned up from South America with untold gold” (19). In an effort to get away from her aunts, Clare begins to see Bellew even though she must continue to live in her passing identity in order to do so. Thus, the very device used to imprison and brainwash

Clare is the avenue she chooses with which to escape, though this choice just entrenches her further. For while Clare had been living with her aunts, she would still sneak away at times to the south side of Chicago to see her former black friends. Once she elopes with

Bellew, however, she is forced to leave that part of her life behind altogether. She also slowly learns that not only is her new husband unaware of the hidden half of her racial identity, he also harbors racist feelings toward all African Americans. Early in their marriage Bellew takes to calling Clare by a racially offensive epithet: “Nig” (28). The irony here is that he does not realize his wife is actually an African American; rather, as he explains to Irene, “When we were first married, she was as white as—as—well as white as a lily. But I declare she’s gettin’ darker and darker. I tell her if she don’t look out, she’ll wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a nigger” (29). At this explanation, Clare laughs and finds it to be good-natured fun. One can see at this point,

76 then, that she has learned to accept her husband’s views, or, in following the psychological thread of reasoning, she has become ideologically inculcated over the decade or so of their marriage. Whatever the case, she clearly feels that her life is much more luxurious and enjoyable than it would have been had she lived it as a black woman, so in her eyes she makes the necessary concessions.

When Clare reunites with Irene, however, she feels the long-lost connection to her racial past. In a letter to Irene two years after their clandestine encounter in Chicago,

Clare writes, “For I am lonely, so lonely . . . cannot help longing to be with you again, as

I have never longed for anything before [ . . . . ] You can’t know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of” (7). When she visits Irene in Harlem for the first time, Clare puts this now-understood captivity into words when she expresses her envy of Irene’s life:

“You’re free. You’re happy. And . . . safe” (48). Thus, after years of passing, Clare finally realizes the imprisoning effect it has upon her. In an astute characterization of

Clare, Gabrielle McIntire foreshadows the novel’s conclusion when she proposes that the character is condemned “to a tragic death in part because she is too in-between, too liminal, seeking to stand perpetually on the in-betweens. Clare is always both black and white, straight and queer, cold and passionate, . . . and in and out of the closet of racial and sexual belonging” (783). This perpetual liminality is an innate component of Clare’s identity, something she embraces throughout the novel. For the first time, however, Clare sees the liminality as detrimental and detects the metaphorical shackles around her ankles and the figurative blindfold over her eyes. Once she comprehends the degree to which she is marginalized, she cannot resort to her former naïve captivity. Unfortunately for her,

77 the bonds of passing are difficult to break on her own. The only help Clare can find, then, is Irene.

Perhaps at this point in the story, Irene could have swept in and encouraged Clare to tell her husband—not to mention her daughter—the truth about her racial heritage;

Clare could have left Bellew once he most assuredly shunned her at the realization of this fact; and then Clare could have fully realized the joy she glimpses during her forays into

Harlem. Unfortunately, neither of the women performs her respective role in this hypothetical scenario. Irene rekindles their friendship with a less than welcoming attitude, and Clare refuses to leave her life of captive passing behind. Prior to this moment, Clare had remained in a state of stagnancy; without the realization of her position, she had maintained a sense of security and happiness. These false ideas shatter when she becomes “racially awakened,” and she chooses to sneak into Harlem to satisfy her new desires. Though Clare feels more energized through these secretive visits, her situation takes a turn for the treacherous when she must begin lying to her husband even more to cover her tracks. Her status of living between two states, her white life with her husband and her black life in Harlem, creates a liminal existence that mirrors Clare’s physical travels between the two locations. Here, the lives of the two female protagonists geographically intersect, and Irene’s personal psychological liminality becomes apparent.

While Clare’s liminal state hinges upon her racial passing, Irene’s situation is slightly more indirect and internal. In distinguishing the positions of the characters,

Gregory Askew views “Irene as a figure of reactionary conservatism, deeply troubled by the socio-symbolic effects brought on by the emerging consumer culture, and Clare as the very embodiment of consumer ideology, whose passing represents absolute indifference

78 to the traditional dividing lines of race, class, and gender” (309). Thus, Irene’s conflict remains more internal and calculated than Clare’s. Her sense of liminality may relate to race at times, but more prominently Irene finds herself essentially imprisoned by her own seclusion and insecurity. Often this leads to feeling trapped in her marriage to Brian. As

Irene prepares to leave Chicago at the end of Part One, the reader discovers that their marriage has not been without obstacles of its own. Irene conveys her insecurities with her marriage, as she ponders Brian’s “old, queer, unhappy restlessness” and his “craving for some place strange and different, which at the beginning of her marriage she had had to make such strenuous efforts to repress, and which yet faintly alarmed her, though it now sprang up at gradually lessening intervals” (35). Following this initial glimpse into their marriage, the subsequent chapters build upon the understanding of the tense relationship. The two frequently argue, and they clearly act out of passive aggression. It is this passivity that keeps Irene captive in her own home, as she refuses to present her concerns and fears to Brian and instead dwells on them. While Brian appears to harbor some resentment as a result of Irene opposing his desire to go to Brazil, Irene vacillates between despising Brian for the continuation of this desire and catering to him as an attempt to remove the desire altogether. In this way, the transnational desire of racial liminality enters the novel through Brian’s inability to pass and subsequent idealization of

South America as a place free of racist confines. Johanna M. Wagner contends that Irene does not comprehend the sincerity of Brian’s desire because, since she “is free of visible racial markings, racial issues are not her first concern” (149). Nonetheless, these understated problems continue to compound, at least in Irene’s mind, when Clare begins to visit Harlem and the Redfields more frequently.

When Part Three begins, three months have passed since Clare first came to

Harlem. In that time Irene has apparently shifted from merely thinking about Brian’s repressed issue to obsessing over it. The change seems to occur as a result of Irene’s inability to pinpoint his sense of ennui definitively to the restless desire to go to Brazil.

She conveys this idea when she finds herself in another prolonged state of introspection.

Ultimately she concludes that “he had stepped out beyond her reach into some section, strange and walled, where she could not get at him” (60). Her marriage captivity had already been of a psychological manner, in which she stressed about what ulterior motives might be behind Brian’s actions. But now that his personality has become even more peculiar and out of the ordinary, Irene’s thoughts have turned obsessive. This shift leads to the final stage of her captivity, in which she essentially feels helplessly distant from Brian and eventually Clare. Even the language she uses in the excerpt above, saying that he is in a “walled” section, indicates the seeming spatial captivity in which she finds herself. Matters only devolve from here when Irene begins to suspect that Brian and

Clare are having an affair. Though the true nature of their relationship is never revealed, this final obsession becomes the fuel that drives Irene to her breaking point. Her liminality is one of loneliness, hatred, and paranoia, in which she cannot reach out to others as she feels the whole world is against her.9

9 Brian Carr, in his 2004 PMLA article, offers an interesting counterargument by questioning the critical lens of “paranoid interpretation” as a means of understanding

Irene’s conflict.

Though the intensity of her liminal state first becomes extremely problematic at this point in the story, some earlier intriguing actions on Irene’s part provide telltale signs that foreshadow the turn for the worse later in the novel. For instance, Clare elicits an emotional response from Irene even in the first chapter when Irene reads the letter Clare sent her: “Brilliant red patches flamed in Irene Redfield’s warm olive cheeks. ‘That time in Chicago.’ The words stood out from among the many paragraphs of other words, bringing with them a clear, sharp remembrance, in which even now, after two years, humiliation, resentment, and rage were mingled” (7). Therefore, the first real glimpse of

Clare that the reader receives is filtered through Irene’s confusion of emotions. She immediately characterizes herself, then, as someone who is introspective and analytical.

At the discovery of this trait, one can see that Irene’s self-inflicted liminality dates back perhaps years before the events of the novel. Her predisposition to avoid confrontation and to hide her emotions contributes to the mounting tension of the novel.

A key example of Irene’s thought process occurs during her memory of the meeting with Clare in Chicago. After agreeing to a tentative meetup a few days later,

Irene leaves Clare and begins to think through the conversation. The time she takes to examine the interaction leads to her familiar over-analysis and an ultimate annoyance, discovering “a sense of irritation with herself” for succumbing to Clare’s desire to plan another meeting (22). In this excerpt from her inner narration, one can see the way her distrust of Clare quickly escalates. Presumably, this pessimistic attitude comes as a result of Clare’s decision to choose a life of passing, as Irene does not respond well to their conversation on the topic during their time together at the Drayton. Carlyle Van

Thompson claims that “Clare adamantly believes that the monetary and social advantages

81 of passing for white surpass the disadvantages” (79). Clearly, this belief could be argued for Irene, as she is passing herself in order to be on the roof of the prestigious Drayton in the first place. Though she does not live her entire life under this pretense as does Clare, she clearly does not consider her own opportunistic passing as detestable. Her thoughts, however, clearly convey that she acknowledges her use of ambiguous racial features to appear white.

When she sees Clare looking at her across the room, before she realizes the presumed white woman is actually Clare, Irene thinks to herself, “No, the woman sitting there staring at her couldn’t possibly know” (11). Irene appears to welcome the paranoia, which she creates through her propensity for internal contemplation. She may allege to disagree with the idea of passing, but she does not even think twice before going to the

Drayton and doing so herself. Her seemingly bipolar personality causes her to fabricate problems when they are not necessarily there. This exact feature leads to her strained relationship with Brian and her continued frustration with Clare. As I mentioned previously, she secludes herself from others and refuses to talk through any of these conflicts with Brian or Clare. Though the text does not answer the question of the potential extramarital issue, Irene essentially drives Brian to Clare through her continuous irrational actions. I do not mean to imply that he has no responsibility in their marital problems, but Irene’s contributions are by far more clearly portrayed through the text.

And once Irene considers the possibility of an affair, she again becomes obsessed and overthinks the situation. Clearly, this sort of thought process has become an unfortunate habit for Irene; she is relentlessly subjected to this routine of contemplation and action in all areas of her life.

The conclusive component to this characterization of Irene’s state of captivity also happens to be the most candid portrayal of her own realization of the liminal imprisonment. As she struggles with the urge to confront Bellew regarding his wife’s true race, she finds herself pondering the hindrances of her situation, though she focuses on the racial aspects rather than her self-inflicted problems. She finds herself “caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race. Race! The thing that bound and suffocated her. Whatever steps she took, or if she took none at all, something would be crushed. A person or the race. Clare, herself, or the race. Or, it might be, all three” (69). Here, Irene recognizes the destructive power of liminality, seeing no possible way out. At the same time, she understands that her specific identity creates the perceived captivity on two distinct levels, leading her to decide that “[i]t was . . . enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one’s own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was brutality, and undeserved” (69). With the topic of race in mind, Wegmann-

Sánchez contends, “Even more than Quicksand, Passing focuses on exposing the logic behind the Black/White binary as unconvincing” (148). Indeed, Irene finds the arbitrariness of the racial binary unacceptable for her self-definition, acting as mouthpiece for Larsen in this instance. The language here clearly evokes the concept of a captive liminality as Irene feels “bound” and “burdened.” This section also foreshadows the end of the novel; just as the excerpt claims, “something would be crushed” eventually. As Irene’s thoughts have a way of bringing about calamity, this significant section essentially ensures the ultimate fate of the two women.

Finally, the combination of the protagonists’ similar yet distinct states of captivity brings Clare and Irene to a disastrous end. I hesitate to emphasize the surname of the

83 couple whose apartment provides the setting for the final scene—Freeland—but this location is indeed where the two protagonists end their imprisonment. As Clare falls out of the sixth-story window of the apartment to her death, it provides the impetus for freedom. As Nell Sullivan implies in her article “Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Fading

Subject,” Clare’s death represents a “colloquial” and final form of passing (373). Death is therefore the necessary deliverer. Clearly, Clare’s salvation is bittersweet: she finally comes out from under her liminality of passing when her husband realizes the truth, yet she meets her end only seconds later. For Irene, freedom is not as clear-cut, though she does achieve it in some fashion. When she discovers that Clare has indeed died, she

“struggled against the sob of thankfulness that rose in her throat” (81). Yet the happiness cannot withstand the fact that her only true friend has died: “Her quaking knees gave way under her. She moaned and sank down, moaned again. Through the great heaviness that submerged and drowned her she was dimly conscious of strong arms lifting her up. Then everything was dark” (82). Death becomes the freedom for Clare, which Wall underscores by labeling her “the victim caught forever betwixt and between until she finds in death the only freedom she can know” (“Passing for What?” 109). Clare lived life with reckless abandon; for Irene, life after Clare’s death presumably provides some sense of freedom, though the “dark” of the novel’s conclusion is unclear.10

10 As Carla Kaplan indicates in her Norton Critical Edition of the text, the first two printings of Larsen’s novel concluded with these two sentences following the “everything was dark” line: “Centuries after, she heard the strange men saying: ‘Death by misadventure, I’m inclined to believe. Let’s go up and have another look at that

Interestingly, as the two women both experience a psychological liminality, they are unable to escape unscathed. Instead, each “captive” seeks situations that fuel their respective burdens. Clare thrives on the excitement of visiting Harlem behind her husband’s back and leading a double life. Irene similarly thrives on her obsessive paranoia. In the end, the two women, though coming from quite different social and ideological situations, share a greater similarity than has previously been established. In light of this, their tragic experiences are not that disparate after all.

This recurring trope of liminality provides insight into early-twentieth century

African American literature, but specifically in examining and understanding Quicksand and Passing it proves necessary by illustrating outwardly the debilitating result of an inward struggle for identity and selfhood. The two novels provide endings that could be described as unsatisfactory, but ultimately they are necessary and justified conclusions to the liminal narratives. Quicksand’s Helga employs transition as her primary characteristic for much of the novel, enacting her liminality in an attempt to locate the ever-elusive freedom. Her nonresolution in rural Alabama cynically reiterates the detrimental effects of liminality by placing her in a location the exact opposite of the one she sought. In

Passing, both Clare and Irene become liminal subjects with limited movement. Yet their internal conflicts, with Irene’s at the forefront, debilitate them to the point of a double tragedy. In each novel, once the conflict has begun, there is no chance of achieving a

window’” (82). Subsequent printings removed these lines in favor of the more ambiguous ending, though it is unclear whether this omission was authorial, editorial, or accidental.

John K. Young also explores the various endings in depth.

85 different outcome. The more we delve into Larsen’s nuanced writings, then, the more clearly we can realize the degree to which women of color, especially during the period of the Harlem Renaissance, were perpetually marginalized as liminal subjects. Through this reevaluation of Larsen’s work, we can therefore more accurately solidify the place of her contributions within the Harlem Renaissance and (African) American Literature as a whole.

Chapter Three

Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Black American’s French Dream

In the August 1921 issue of The Crisis, Jessie Redmon Fauset published an essay titled “Nostalgia.” This ambulatory narrative reflects Fauset’s encounters, in

Philadelphia, with people of various backgrounds and nationalities who express longing for their homeland. These thematic repetitions encourage Fauset to muse on the titular concept of nostalgia and consider its implications of home and belonging. Fauset’s autobiographical writings are not necessary to examine her fiction, but the innate motion present in her essay provides insight into her novels’ emphasis on transatlantic travel.

Claire Oberon Garcia recognizes the significance of Fauset’s personal travels as they manifest through “a self-conscious engagement with issues of dislocation, translation and representation,” concepts that become defining characteristics for her protagonists

(“Black Women Writers” 31). In demonstrating a biographical correlation, Fauset underscores the inextricable connection of geographical location with self-identity. In

“Nostalgia,” each person she encounters symbolizes a displacement from his or her place of origin, yet the final encounter reverses the trend.

When Fauset meets a young African American who has recently returned from

Europe at the conclusion of the Great War, he questions his connections with the United

States and admits to be “homesick for France!” (249). Following the man’s conclusion,

Fauset continues the line of reasoning, exploring his inevitable fate in a way that easily equates to the broader African American experience: “That second lieutenant is doomed

87 to know homesickness of both body and spirit. In France he will want the comforts of

America; in America, he cries out for the rights of man which he knew in France. A nostalgia of body and soul—there is nothing harder to bear” (251). In this moment, three years before the publication of her first novel, Fauset frames the defining problem each eventual foray into fiction addresses: the inescapable and unquenchable “nostalgia” or search for belonging that occurs at the intersection of race and nation. Mark Whalan calls

Fauset’s essay “a story linking travel with emancipation in a way that had long been important as an inspiring principle in African American culture” (70). Fauset’s writings, therefore, carry great import as she considers the implications and possibility of a black home.

A multidimensional author of poems and short stories, Fauset is perhaps best known for her four novels published during the height of the Harlem Renaissance: There is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral (1928), The Chinaberry Tree: A

Novel of American Life (1931), and Comedy: American Style (1933). As biographer

Carolyn Wedin Sylvander notes, “Her influence on Black art in the period of the Harlem

Renaissance cannot be measured” (232). A common trope in her writings is the use of transnational locations, specifically Paris, as a sort of idyllic racial paradise. Garcia emphasizes the significance of this choice of location when she posits, “As a major nodal point in the African diaspora, Paris has long served as a laboratory for exploring the alchemies of national, racial, and cultural identities and testing the practical, modern applications of Enlightenment values and claims” (“No One” 90). Though the novels approach this trope in varying fashions, Fauset’s incorporation of France in her writing is important as it highlights an intriguing binary between racial and national identities.

Whereas the search for racial contentment foregrounds much of Fauset’s writing, she equally emphasizes the American identity as well. The result is a liminality that exists between racial and national borders, while simultaneously attempting to maintain a connection to at least one of the two, even if in name only. The complex relationship between racial and national identity provides a quintessential example of the Harlem

Renaissance connections between transnationalism and liminality. Indeed, liminality of early-twentieth century African American literature almost always arises from race, such as in Larsen’s Quicksand when biracial identity prevents Helga’s full acceptance into any racial community. Helga quickly concludes that this issue relates not only to her racial heritage but also to her nationality and presence in a racist American society. The logical next step, then, is a national relocation, though the ideal resolution remains elusive.

Fauset’s novels are no different, and they establish the definitive example of a racially- and nationally-fueled liminality.

Of Fauset’s four novels, the second and fourth—Plum Bun: A Novel without a

Moral and Comedy: American Style—emphasize most greatly the presence of a transnational liminality for African Americans in the early twentieth century. These two novels specifically demonstrate the ways in which the American society and identity can create a liminal existence for African Americans, while a transnational move and/or setting have a complicated possibility of removing or rectifying this liminality. When considering Plum Bun, Valerie Popp establishes a pivotal element of Fauset’s transnationalism: “With Angela’s move to Paris, the novel seems to enact the typical expatriate paradox: one can only find home by leaving its geographic borders” (141).

This underlying idea remains present yet unspoken throughout Plum Bun and Comedy:

American Style. The novels build toward a necessary transnational resolution.

Nevertheless, beginning with her first novel There Is Confusion, Fauset starts to experiment with the romanticized experience of Europe, in terms of an absence of and removal from race and its associated difficulties. Indeed, Amritjit Singh contends that

Fauset “developed and dramatized the thesis of the black’s shared Americanness in her four novels” (61). Singh begins the necessary emphasis on the innate contradictions present within African Americans’ attempts to grant equality between the American and black sides of their identity. The presence of transnational liminality in Fauset’s novels demonstrates this friction on a micro level.

At play within each novel, alongside the interwoven themes of liminality and transnationalism, is the intersection of race and nationality, something that frequently appears irreconcilable. Additionally, a thematic division appears between the first two novels and the last two. For instance, Fauset’s first two novels have conflicts that arise out of interracial issues. In There Is Confusion, Joanna hopes to achieve the life of a successful dancer, not merely for herself but to illustrate to the world her dual (and indivisible) status as black American. In Plum Bun, Angela feels that passing as white remains the best way to achieve the American dream. Ironically, she forsakes her nation and commits to a Parisian life with Anthony, a man of Brazilian and African American descent who also passes as white. The latter two novels, while still displaying degrees of interracial prejudice, emphasize issues that arise from within the black community. This distinction also provides some explanation and rationalization for the way the latter two works conclude on a more negative note. Fauset’s third novel employs a sarcastic outlook on blackness in America, clearly evidenced through its subtitle, A Novel of American

Life. If this novel portrays quintessential “American life,” then the disastrous and near- tragic plot makes no attempt at sugarcoating the difficulties of black life within this

America. Finally, Comedy: American Style conveys the most bitingly cynical take. This

American version of “comedy” involves intense intraracial prejudice, to the extent that almost no hope exists in the end. Indeed, Oliver commits suicide, Teresa finds herself trapped in a loveless marriage in a foreign land, and Olivia loses her valued connections and possessions and in Paris becomes estranged from her family.

The exploration of race and nationality is therefore crucial in the context of

Harlem Renaissance literature; just as imperative in Fauset’s novels is the incorporation of gender and class, which pivotally shape their individual outcomes. Similarly, Tania

Friedel emphasizes the “disparity between the neatly wrapped forms of literary convention and the impossibility of reaching a satisfying solution in the complex tangle of race, gender and class that is Fauset’s central concern” (50). Each novel focuses on middle- to upper-class African American women. To some degree, each protagonist seeks to obtain a higher social status, which in turn frequently brings with it the presumed necessity of transcending race, often emphasizing passing and classism, attempting to escape the imprisonment they feel within their racial liminality. Addressing this search,

Erica L. Griffin makes distinctions based on individual characters’ motivations in “The

‘Invisible Woman’ Abroad: Jessie Fauset’s New Horizon” (1997): “The quality of freedom depends on how one uses it, of course. Angela Murray uses it as a force for good, a taste of freedom that rewards her decision to stop passing; Olivia Cary uses it to become completely ‘white,’ and suffers as a consequence” (82). Through these characters’ quests for freedom, transition and travel become inevitable. Three of Fauset’s

91 novels showcase transnational settings in a way that forces a questioning of race relations in the American landscape. Though her third novel, The Chinaberry Tree, breaks this trend by eliminating transatlantic travel, it features a microcosmic glimpse into the unfortunate and tragic results of intraracial classism. Nonetheless, using Fauset’s novels of transnational liminality as the primary focus, this chapter presents her fiction as an exemplary and critical key for understanding the transcendent themes of Harlem

Renaissance literature.

To state that Fauset’s relationship to and opinions of liminality are complex would be an understatement. Singh has posited that “her novels concern the petty excitements and disappointments of mulatto heroines in their search for happiness in love and marriage” (61). Though there clearly is a marital emphasis in much of her fiction, the underlying statements on black liminality subvert the implied sexism and arbitrariness of

Singh’s statement. Rather, the greater emphasis on the reconcilability of race with nationality provide an insightful glimpse into the complex political milieu of the 1920s for black American women. In Black Women Intellectuals (1998), Carol Allen succinctly establishes that Fauset’s novels are “textual spaces where international, national, and local forces converge with the home space” (48). Indeed, each of her four novels features some iteration of this collision between frequently dichotomous forms. As a key contributor of the Harlem Renaissance, Fauset offers up a progressively candid and unashamed view of racism in all its manifestations.

The Class Ceiling in There is Confusion

As is the case in each of Fauset’s novels, the plot of There is Confusion focuses on multiple characters who find themselves inexplicably and inescapably on the threshold

92 of liminality. In conjunction with the common examples of liminality in African

American literature, race serves as the impetus for each character’s personal dilemmas; yet their family ties, personal relationships, and ultimate aspirations create additional roadblocks that further mire their attempts to escape a liminal existence. A common theme for Fauset’s fiction, then, arises in the status of her protagonists. The main characters of her four novels are middle class African Americans, and a shared goal of these characters is the attainment of higher class or a certain social status. In this way,

There Is Confusion specifically sets the stage for Fauset’s second novel Plum Bun. Both the boundaries of race and country act as catalysts for conflict, as we will see here. Later, in Plum Bun, these dilemmas are addressed when Angela first passes as white, escaping the confines of race, and then moves from New York to Paris, when the removal from race within America does not satisfy her desire for freedom.

In her first novel, Fauset sets up the impasse of liminality through the context of lineage. Indeed, the first five chapters delineate the family trees of the two protagonists,

Joanna Marshall and Peter Bye. In Joanna’s case, she discovers at a young age the “same impulse to greatness” for which her father Joel had always yearned (9). The desire for status and power in and of itself does not create the aforementioned liminality, yet this aspiration paired with the unfortunate state of race relations in the United States during the early twentieth century provides the impetus for a marginalized existence. Joanna realizes frequently throughout her journey that her racial status perpetually disrupts her desires for success. Even when she does receive opportunities and accolades later in life, they come at a cost. She discovers, therefore, that the liminality of race in America creates a “class ceiling,” a barrier that limits her possibilities for upward social

93 mobility.11 Though brief, the section detailing Joel’s adolescence and accompanying urge for prominence and to one day “write his name in glory” creates a foundation for

Joanna’s similar yet intensified experiences (10). In a 1994 article, Beth A. McCoy places great significance on this connection, claiming the novel’s opening “links [Joanna] inextricably to Joel” (103). McCoy continues to delve into the weight of the relationship, stating that “Joanna begins her textual life within her biological father’s influence and ends it within that of her husband, a surrogate father. More importantly, however, Fauset also uses the father-daughter relationship as a metaphor for patriarchy’s role in marshalling the shifting dynamics among race, gender, sexuality, and art in the 1920s”

(103). Following this line of reasoning, patriarchal influence ultimately undermines

Joanna’s agency as she attempts to fashion a self-identity. Nonetheless, Joanna employs her father’s concept of success as her own. A major theme in There is Confusion, and indeed most of Fauset’s fiction, this push toward greatness and social status creates a liminality in direct correlation with social class.

Despite several setbacks including his father’s death and the house burning down,

Joel remains steadfast in his potential achievements, whatever form they may eventually take. Even in his various circumstances, Joel continually considers and plans for his next step. Following the elder Marshall’s death, Joel and his mother begin work for “a wealthy

Virginian” (10). Through this experience, Joel saves his wages and plans for a successful business one day. To this extent, Joel’s thoughts and actions appear in the form of a positive determination and drive. Yet for Joanna, this drive takes over, as she chooses to

11 This concept recurs to some degree in each of Fauset’s novels.

94 forsake all other aspects of her life for the chance at greatness. Perhaps the greatest explanation behind Joanna’s magnified iteration of Joel’s “affliction” can be attributed to

Joel’s ultimate failure to meet his expectations. Though Joel does appear to be successful with his own catering business, his former ambitions reawaken when Joanna, at a young age, discovers her own innate yearning for renown when she would ask for a “[s]tory

‘bout somebody great, Daddy. Great like I’m going to be when I get to be a big girl” (9).

As such, she continues down the path toward a life of grandeur, choosing upward movement above personal relationships at each possible juncture.

Fauset’s other protagonist, Peter Bye, receives a much more detailed introduction, as she utilizes a three-chapter, four-generation history of the Byes to prepare the reader fully for his role in the novel. As the narrator states prior to this passage, “It is impossible to understand the boy’s character without some knowledge of the lives of those who had gone before him” (22). Peter’s history traces back to Joshua Bye, his great-grandfather and a slave of Aaron Bye. As Fauset works from Joshua down to Peter, a significant dichotomy appears, that between the black Byes and the white Byes. Seemingly linked by more than name and former slavery, each generation leading up to Peter employs the connection between the two families as a driving force, either one that encourages and supplies determination or one that creates a sense of entitlement and complacency. For instance, Peter’s father Meriwether states as his apparent mantra multiple times, “The world owes you a living, let it come to you, don’t bother going after it” (33). Éva

Federmayer labels Meriwether’s advice to Peter “the uselessness of any ambition in the face of white arrogance” (95). But instead of lazily expecting any success to come to him,

Peter uses his father’s words and his intricate lineage to motivate him forward, though, as

Mary Jane Schenck points out, he “shares his father’s cynicism about whites” (108).

Paralleling one another, Joanna and Peter each hope for some semblance of success and greatness, though their motivations are quite disparate. Joanna becomes interested in dance, hoping one day to perform upon the stage. Peter also has artistic inclinations, as he starts making money as a pianist for hire, though he has greater racial allegiance than does Joanna. While she performs for people of all races, he despises accompanying social events for rich white people.

In the middle of the novel, the protagonists explore their personal convictions, but they both exit on the other side with disappointment. When considering the ongoing

Great War, Peter feels the need to enlist. At this moment, the tension between race and nationality quickly presents itself, implementing the liminal connection to transnational travel. Despite Peter’s race pride and disgust with American racism, he nonetheless chooses to join the war effort. As part of the military, he travels to Europe and experiences the possibility of freedom from persistent, everyday racism. In a move that foreshadows her later novels, Fauset introduces Peter (and the reader) to the idea of a transnational savior from racism and liminality. Margaret D. Stetz labels this recurring theme as Fauset’s “urge to abandon America, the country that had already abandoned her in so many ways” (262). This phrase succinctly establishes the transnational appeal for

Fauset’s protagonists. Along with the other returning black veterans after the war, then,

Peter has a new perspective on life: “[T]hose boys who having fought a double battle in

France, one with Germany and one with white America, had yet marvelously, incredibly, returned safely home. There were all sorts and conditions of black men, Harvard graduates and Alabama farmhands. These last had seen Paris before they had seen New

York and they blessed the War which had given them a chance to see the great capital”

(269). With this transnational eye-opener, Peter feels the oppression of America even more conspicuously when he returns home. According to Jane Kuenz, the inclusion of nationalist critique is “an inherently perilous endeavor” due to the fact that “the attempt to revalue authentic blackness and link it with a new national identity risks exposing the very things threatening to undermine Harlem Renaissance cultural politics” (90). This may be the case, but the fact remains that liminality is an innate conflict, evidenced through its presence in the majority of Harlem Renaissance fiction. Therefore, Peter’s awareness of the incompatibility of his race with his nationality emphasizes the necessity of a global, diasporic identity in the early twentieth century.

For Joanna, though she never travels abroad despite having the opportunity (275), her disappointment arises when she realizes success and greatness cannot remove the inevitable American racism, even if no longer frequently directed at her. Despite the differing backgrounds from which Joanna and Peter originate, they both encounter a marginalized existence at the upper threshold or limit of color and race in the United

States. To be fair, Joanna does successfully break many of the supposed boundaries when she becomes a renowned dancer in an internationally-themed production, yet she still finds herself confronting the color barrier. Peter similarly discovers his class ceiling when his ability to play piano at various functions cannot surpass his white patrons’ desire that he be heard and not seen. In both cases, the characters understand that a realization of the dreams seems impossible; they cannot exit the liminal state of transition due to the metaphorical customs border barring their entry. Peter’s time in Europe during the war significantly provides him with insight into the possibility of life without racial obstacle

97 and Jim Crow laws, which Stetz calls a desire “to explore the beauty of Blackness in another setting” (262). Peter’s eyes have opened to the reality of America’s oppressive society. While his and Joanna’s story concludes in the United States, this section clearly provides inspiration for the greater emphasis on transnational travel and specifically Paris in Plum Bun.

Perhaps more important than the sheer existence of liminality in this novel, however, Fauset utilizes her first work of fiction to emphasize the disparity and unfortunate irreconcilability of race and nationality in the United States, directly through the character of Joanna. As important to Joanna as her urge for success is the desire to solidify herself as equally black and equally American. Fauset demonstrates this element frequently, beginning with Joanna’s statement on the topic early in her life. When her future brother-in-law Brian suggests she save her desire for dance to “build up colored art” instead of entertaining white people, she retorts, “Why, I am. . . . You don’t think I want to forsake—us. Not at all. But I want to show us to the world. I am colored, of course, but American first. Why shouldn’t I speak to all America?” (76). Later, Joanna conveys the same aspiration to Peter: “I’m going to do a dance representing all the nations, some day” (100). Perhaps surprisingly, these premonitions come to pass.

Following countless disappointments and rejections, when she receives her big break in

“The Dance of the Nations,” she gains the role of America. Upon her first performance,

“the tightly packed audience took up the applause again and Joanna was a star” (232).

Finally achieving her much sought-after greatness, and presumably resolving her liminality, Joanna yet discovers that “she was not happy” (235). Recognizing the importance of Joanna’s epiphany, Ann duCille posits that Fauset “questions the

98 possibility of the production of a ‘real’ black art in a white-controlled cultural market.

For not only do white culture keepers determine what authentic black art is, they control the who, how, where, and when of public cultural production and consumption as well”

(76). Following this line of reasoning, Joanna realizes that even the acceptance of

America-at-large does not fill the void: “What she did want, she decided, was to be needed, to be useful, to be devoting her time, her concentration and her remarkable singlemindedness to some worthy visible end. After all, she had worked hard and striven tremendously—to be what? A dancer” (236). The liminality Joanna feels, the titular confusion, is something she cannot necessarily pinpoint. Regardless, she realizes there must be more, a better way to gain the satisfaction she seeks. Though she cannot see it, the apparent success fails to satiate her desires because she remains marginalized even in her fame. The perpetuity of racial liminality in America prevents her from obtaining true freedom.

At the conclusion of the novel, Joanna and Peter finally consummate their marriage. In terms of their social status, Nina Miller calls the two “a rightful middle-class

African American couple” who “find their happiness, their peril, and finally their life’s work together and in public” (215). They may find happiness and satisfaction in their union, but it nonetheless reiterates the patriarchal limits of Joanna’s plight. In the end,

Joanna becomes completely disillusioned. Though she reunites with Peter and they choose marriage, she nonetheless maintains a sense of incompleteness. Federmayer reiterates this reading, claiming that “Fauset’s narrative voice tries her best to convince readers that Joanna’s marital obligations to be wife and mother and the agent of her husband’s authorization in patriarchy are also bound to lead to her liberation from the

99 bondage of enslaving ambition” (97). But as Federmayer’s sarcasm demonstrates, the removal from unobtainable success to patriarchal helpmate does not create a much brighter outcome. Joanna directly admits that she hopes the confusion (read: liminality) can be eliminated, though pessimism and hopelessness color her words: “Why, nothing in the world is so hard to face as this problem of being colored in America. . . . Oh, it takes courage to fight against it, Peter, to keep it from choking us, submerging us. But now that we have love, Peter, we have a pattern to guide us out of the confusion” (283). Peter knows firsthand that he and Joanna could move to Paris and experience a more satisfying life without the difficulties present in America (which several other characters imply and make clear—Vera Manning, Harley Alexander, and Tom Mason, for example). In line with this knowledge, Peter puts into words the plight of many of Fauset’s protagonists, exemplary of black liminal subjects as a whole: “We're intelligent, we can choose our own native land and prejudice, or freedom and a strange, untried country. We see clearly just what we're keeping and what we're letting go” (284). In this way, Peter echoes the young black soldier of Fauset’s “Nostalgia,” so much so that he very well may have been modeled on the man to some degree. Peter and Joanna understand their options, and, deviating from the soldier of Fauset’s personal encounter, they ultimately choose to remain in the United States, while others in later novels chance the dilemma’s alternate resolution.

By the standards of an entertaining romance novel, There Is Confusion succeeds in the end, as the two protagonists ultimately choose love over all else; the reader’s natural inclinations for a tidy resolution comes to fruition with Joanna and Peter choosing life together rather than apart. Yet, as is the case in all of Fauset’s novels, the true plot

100 revolves around the female protagonist, who should gauge the success of the novel. As

Singh posits in his monumental study of Harlem Renaissance fiction, “There Is

Confusion might have made a better narrative if Joanna’s determination had proceeded to its logical, tragic, end—and Joanna had not sacrificed her genuine ambition for a career to the happiness of spouse and children” (74-75). As Singh implies, stories of liminality generally anticipate tragic conclusions, especially in the case of gendered liminality.12 It would make sense, then, for Fauset to illuminate the disastrous possibilities of racial in- betweenness. Fortunately, Fauset becomes more willing to convey these tragedies in her later writings. In this instance, however, Joanna’s goals and motivations, whether ultimately achievable or not, must bow and give way to the expected conventions of her sex.

In a manner similar to Larsen’s Helga, though not painted as tragically, Joanna essentially loses her sense of self, as it becomes consumed by her status as woman, wife, and mother. Many readers of the novel have questioned its conclusion, such as Cheryl A.

Wall when she emphasizes, “The ending seems all the more reactionary given the protagonist’s quest for personal and artistic autonomy earlier in the novel” (Women 67).

Additionally, duCille takes issue with this narrative turn, as her monograph The Coupling

Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (1993) critiques the device in several works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, providing specific comments on the work of Fauset. Comparing the situations of Helga and Joanna, duCille

12 Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom (1933) is a key exception to this rule, as I detail in my chapter on McKay’s novels.

101 claims the two women “ultimately discover that acceptance as a woman and as an artist means defining themselves by someone else’s terms and objectifying themselves for someone else’s gaze” (94). Later in her argument, duCille addresses There Is Confusion, in conjunction with a list of other novels by Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, and posits each of the novels is guilty of “squelching female subjectivity, ultimately either reducing otherwise resistant women to objects of male desire or killing them off” (122). Therefore, when Peter tells Joanna she must give up her career when they marry, the supposedly positive and uplifting conclusion betrays its true colors. Joanna’s transition may come to an end, but her liminal search for self-definition through her artistry remains unresolved as her personal desires for autonomy and success become hidden behind the prison bars of marriage. Indeed, one might question if Joanna maintains agency through this choice or whether she feels no other option due to expected gender conventions. As a greater racial allegory, the presence of liminality can be seen as inevitable and inescapable during the early twentieth century. Even without Joanna’s choice to leave dance and marry Peter, she had discovered the failure of success in bringing liminal relief. In the end, Joanna’s identity meets opposition at every turn.

As a debut novel, then, There Is Confusion establishes the necessarily tragic nature of the Harlem Renaissance novel, regardless of any apparent positive outcome. Its emphasis on art and the black middle class also demonstrates a new wave in African

American literature, heralding in the New Negro literature Locke would praise the following year. Though the novel has its faults and may not realize its full potential, the introduction to racial liminality proved transformative in creating the Harlem

Renaissance milieu of the 1920s. Joanna therefore stands as the archetype by which

102 subsequent protagonists must be measured and interpreted. In this way, Fauset paves the way for the rest of her literary canon, in addition to many other works during the era.

The Transnational Savior in Plum Bun

Fauset’s first foray into the “confusion” of liminality in her debut novel logically leads to her second and most critically acclaimed work: 1928’s Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral. This key Harlem Renaissance text addresses several controversial issues of the early twentieth century, such as passing, miscegenation, and racial identity. This last item provides the central conflict of the novel, as Angela Murray, the protagonist, struggles with her own racial identity and the choice of whether or not she should use her light-skinned complexion to pass as white. Licia Morrow Calloway, in Black Family

(Dys)Function in Novels by Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, & Fannie Hurst (2003), highlights the complications inherent in the act of passing, as she contends, “The visible contrast between Angela and [her sister] Virginia complicates the issue of racial identity and its connection to appearance. The Murray sisters share an identical genetic ancestry, even though they look as if they belong to different races” (53). In this way, passing sheds light on the subjectivity of self-identity, granting Angela a choice and subsequent liminality not available to her sister. This decision, therefore, does not come easily for

Angela, who attempts to work and live in her hometown Philadelphia before finally deciding to start afresh in New York following several instances of racial prejudice. She decides that her only chance at equality is through a physical and transracial move.

Therefore, Angela undergoes a series of geographic transitions, first to New York and then ultimately to Paris, a journey that Catherine Rottenberg calls “increasingly cosmopolitan city spaces” (“Jessie Fauset’s” 265). During this process, she effectively

103 changes both her name and her ethnic identity through the act of passing. My goal here, then, is to demonstrate the degree to which Angela and other characters in the novel use elements such as geographical community and skin color as part of a purposeful identity construction; I contend, however, that despite these conscious efforts to avoid racism and achieve happiness and success in New York, the realization of these objectives is only possible through the necessarily transnational act of moving to Paris.

Brent Hayes Edwards, in his monograph The Practice of Diaspora: Literature,

Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003), vocalizes this recurring trope specifically in relation to Paris in the fiction of the Harlem Renaissance: “[W]hy does

James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man . . . place in Berlin the narrator’s realization about using folk materials in classical composition? Why does

Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun need that Paris ending; why is the last third of her Comedy:

American Style set in the South of France?” (5). Edwards goes on to mention similar transnational scenes in works by Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Eric

Walrond. What he underscores through his questions is the persistent force of transnationalism, as the works of so many authors incorporate these global themes and settings. In a similar vein, Tyler Stovall examines the significance (and irony) of Paris to

African American intellectuals when he posits, “More so than in the United States, even

New York, African Americans found that in Paris the abstract ideal of worldwide black unity and culture became a tangible reality. . . . French colonialism and primitivism thus paradoxically combined to foster a vision of pan-African unity” (90). In branching off from these previous discussions, then, my objective here is to answer why Plum Bun, as an important text of the Harlem Renaissance, does in fact require the Paris ending. For

104 the character of Angela Murray, success and satisfaction cannot be achieved through her various attempts in Philadelphia and New York. Each move she makes prefigures her eventual transatlantic passage, with many subtle clues pointing to Europe throughout the novel. Her union with Anthony only succeeds in Paris, a space finally removed from the racial hindrances of American society.

In order to understand Angela’s need and desire for Paris fully, it is first necessary to comprehend the interconnectedness of her personal identity-construction with her initial decision to move from Philadelphia to New York. During her adolescence in

Philadelphia, several factors contribute to her personal conception of race within society.

Immediately in the first chapter of Plum Bun, the reader is confronted with Angela’s formative ideas on race. There are several key instances that give insight into her later decisions: “Color or rather the lack of it seemed to the child the one absolute prerequisite to the life of which she was always dreaming. One might break loose from a too hampering sense of duty; poverty could be overcome; physicians conquered weakness; but color, the mere possession of a black or white skin, that was clearly one of those fortuitous endowments of the gods” (13-14). Lending to this thought process, Angela’s mother unknowingly instilled in her daughter the emphasis on color, as they would regularly spend their Saturdays strolling from “Fifteenth to Ninth Street on Chestnut” passing as white (16). As Fauset delineates in the novel, these excursions with her mother place certain conclusions in Angela’s mind: the fact “that the great rewards of life . . . are for white-skinned people only” as well as the idea that others could be “denied these privileges because they were dark” (17-18). Based on this explanation, we can easily see the degree to which these excursions affected her later life decisions. Her mother’s model

105 of passing, coupled with personal experiences with prejudice when others discovered her racial identity, led to her decision that a life in Philadelphia surrounded by familiar people and situations held no future for her. Thus, her decision to choose a new location was simultaneously a decision to embody a new identity. As Sharon L. Jones indicates in

Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie

Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West (2002), “Angela considers whiteness as central to financial success and fulfillment” (40). Angela makes this fact clear when she confesses to Virginia that her only difficulties in life have occurred following a person’s realization of her race, however “as long as they didn’t know it didn’t matter. Which means it isn’t being colored that makes the difference, it’s letting it be known” (78). As the final conversation between the two sisters before Angela’s move to New York, this sets the tone for Angela’s new life: one characterized by distance from family, home, and race.

Several noteworthy inter-ethnic encounters occur during Angela’s time in New

York. Initially, she discovers that she can pass as white just as easily as she did in

Philadelphia without calling any unwanted attention to herself. For instance, soon after arriving in New York, she enrolls in an art class in Cooper Union, where she soon begins to make friends in high social circles. Through these connections, she also quickly catches the eye of several white suitors. The first man to gain a date with Angela is

Anthony, who changed his last name from Cruz to the Americanized Cross. She goes out with Anthony several times; though she enjoys his company, his morose disposition and poverty prevent her from considering any future promise. This growing emphasis on romance and marriage throughout the novel also complicates Fauset’s ultimate results. As

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Teresa C. Zackodnik explains in 2004’s The Mulatta and the Politics of Race, “Fauset’s narrative holds in tension both a black feminist subtext that critiques racial and gender hegemony and the sentimental and romantic pretext of a young woman seeking a fairy- tale life of a happy marriage and home” (165). This prominence of sexual-social relations therefore connects directly to the existence of liminality and search to escape it. In both instances, Angela desires a home, a place of belonging, whether it occur in a physical location or in a consummated relationship.

Another man, Roger Fielding, is a rich, powerful, and eligible bachelor. It thus makes sense from a materialistic standpoint to be with him. However, as Christina

Simmons notes, Angela soon “learns that the economic bargain of sex for marriage . . . is not a good one” (281). For in addition to these characteristics that Angela admires, Roger is also quite the racist. Her time with Roger proves to confound her attempt at identity construction and discovery as she unsuccessfully endeavors to understand her own attraction to such a prejudiced person. She begins to see him frequently and decides that she would be happy to have the protection and security that would come with marriage to him. During this time, Virginia sends a letter to Angela telling her that she will be coming to New York to take an examination that will allow her to be placed in a school there.

Angela plans to pick her up from the train station, but Roger happens to be there as well.

Therefore, when Virginia comes up to Angela, the older sister feels she must ignore her so as not to blow her cover, so to speak. This causes an understandable rift between the sisters, and duCille considers this act as it relates to Angela’s likeability, not faulting her decision so much as the situation that led to it: “The degree of understanding varies directly with the extent to which these characters are presented as products of ideology,

107 as victims of their socialization in a materialist, racist, sexist society” (99). When Angela is finally able to go speak with Virginia in an attempt to smooth things over, their relationship is not the same as it once was.

At this same time, Roger proposes a situation in which she would essentially become his mistress. Angela is somewhat disgusted by the proposition, as she was expecting marriage instead. While she tries to resist as much as possible, she ultimately falls to her own physical weaknesses and becomes his lover. During this time, he takes care of her financially, but she clearly has no power in the relationship. When it begins to deteriorate, she finally leaves Roger. She decides that she wants happiness most of all at this point in life, even if it means that she must “come out” as black. It might go without saying, then, that despite her vast new experiences in New York, Angela never truly obtains happiness, as she discovers that heartache is a universal quality, especially following her relationship with Roger. The closest she comes in achieving true happiness occurs when she begins to see Anthony Cross for who he is, a potential love interest. She also discovers that he too was merely passing as white; unfortunately, during Angela’s time with Roger, Anthony has become engaged to Virginia.

While in New York, she also forges something of a friendship with Rachel

Powell, an African American who earns a scholarship to Paris but then loses it due to her racial identity. This relationship ultimately encourages Angela to reveal that she herself is also African American, leading to her final attempt at self-discovery when she moves to

Paris, which Rottenberg labels “an idealized city space that, due to its different social context, presents the possibility of future transmutations and negotiations of modern black female identity” (“Jessie Fauset’s” 282). Entrenched within this search for identity,

108 even before Angela seriously considers moving to Paris, is an underlying transnationalism, which provides hints toward the international conclusion. While Popp’s argument prioritizes Brazil and the Global South over “the worn binary of Europe against

America,” it nonetheless exhibits the many references and allusions to the global world present throughout Fauset’s novel (131). For instance, while still in Philadelphia, Angela gains the attention of her Academy art instructor, Mr. Shields, and his wife. When visiting with them at their home one night, she confides in them that “she was restlessly conscious of a desire for broader horizons . . . . ‘Perfectly natural,’ they agreed. ‘There’s no telling where your tastes and talents will lead you,—to Europe perhaps and surely to the formation of new and interesting friendships. You’ll find artistic folk the broadest, most liberal people in the world’” (64-65). Despite the fact that the Shieldses soon contradict their statement when they realize that Angela is black, this idealized report of

Europe nevertheless stays with Angela as she progresses through life following

Philadelphia.

When she begins to flourish in her artistic circles in New York, under the new alias Angéle Mory, she becomes acquainted with fellow intellectuals who have spent extended periods of time in Europe and tout the cosmopolitan atmosphere. Again, unbeknownst to her friends, Angela latches onto the idea of moving to a more liberal locale not from the perspective of her artistic interests but because of her search for racial acceptance. While this yearning for a saving transnational experience remains implicit for much of the novel, it appears more overtly as her expectant trip approaches in the final section of the novel: “As for Angela she asked for nothing better than to put all the problems of color and their attendant difficulties behind her. She could not meet those

109 problems in their present form in Europe; literally in every sense she would begin life all over. In France or Italy she would speak of her strain of Negro blood and abide by whatever consequences such exposition would entail. But the consequences could not engender the pain and difficulties attendant upon them here” (340). When Angela finally arrives in Paris, things are not immediately better, as she feels a sense of loneliness and homesickness. Nevertheless, she attends school and finds work as an artist. At the very end of the novel, however, on Christmas Day, Anthony arrives in Paris for Angela, with the news that her sister Virginia has united with a former friend from Philadelphia, and their love can finally be consummated. According to Popp, “Cross’s Brazilian heritage renders their marriage doubly international: in other words, their union is a deceptively domestic model for a new type of global citizenship that transcends a number of national borders” (132). These multiple degrees of internationalism, then, emphasize Fauset’s preoccupation with the global African American identity. In answer to Edwards’s question regarding the necessity of this Paris ending, the non-American setting may not fully remove the characters’ liminality, but its appeal arises in the transitory journey and its distance from the environment that led them to a life of passing in the first place.

The presumed moral of the story (despite the novel’s subtitle A Novel without a

Moral) is that despite her decision to pass as white for the majority of the novel, Angela realizes the importance of her racial heritage and ultimately embraces it. Yet this all occurs while Angela is in New York, prior to her departure for France. In fact, though the entire book builds up to and anticipates the Paris resolution, only the final chapter of the novel’s twenty-seven chapters occurs in Paris. Thus, despite the positive ending of the novel with Anthony’s arrival, I argue here that the transnational elements and specifically

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Angela’s realized desire to venture to Paris, while downplayed throughout much of the novel, create the only possible reconciliation of Angela’s ethnic identity with a sense of success or happiness. Zackodnik also recognizes the importance of Angela’s transition when she notes in relation to the conventions of passing literature, “Fauset, in fact, violates the convention of returning the repentant passer to the black community and disappoints the expectations aroused by this section’s title, ‘Home Again,’ by making

Angela most at home when on the move between Harlem and Greenwich Village, between black and white, and between America and Europe” (178). Just as Angela’s identity lies outside and between the neat lines of race, so too must her final self- realization occur following a transnational move outside and between national borders.

This trope solidifies Angela’s liminal state and places Plum Bun firmly within an established category of Harlem Renaissance texts, as the transitory emphasis acts as a metaphor for the societal state African Americans experienced at the time. The final scene provides the most significant statement on social and inter-ethnic identities, then, as

Angela and Anthony, two African Americans who had passed as white while in the

United States, finally unite and reclaim their identities in Paris as a result of a transatlantic remove.

The Intraracial In-Between in The Chinaberry Tree

Fauset’s third novel, The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life,13 creates somewhat of a departure from the formula of the first two novels, inasmuch as travel,

13 This novel takes its foundation from a short story entitled “Double Trouble,” published in The Crisis in 1923 (Singh 62).

111 especially international travel, plays a lesser role. In fact, the majority of the novel’s events take place in Red Brook, New Jersey, with the exception of Laurentine’s excursion to New York City with Stephen Denleigh and Mrs. Ismay. This is not to say that transnationalism (and its underlying desire for transition) does not play a major role within Fauset’s novel. Instead, The Chinaberry Tree is more a case study of the internal components of liminality, which becomes magnified for Laurentine and Melissa as they remain in a small town and experience the detrimental effects of gossip and ostracism that accompany it. In characterizing the two central protagonists, Erica L. Griffin states that Laurentine and Melissa “are enshrouded within a patriarchal society as they journey toward womanhood—and ‘invisible’ wifehood” (86). Nonetheless, though the characters rarely travel and only speak of international locations in a lighthearted manner, they still view movement and transition as curative for their liminality. In many Harlem

Renaissance novels, the urge for physical movement and transition is the critical drive due to its necessary status as remedy for the stagnancy of liminality. The fact that the majority of these instances occurs in an international context merely adds to the fact that the racial milieu of the U.S. remains irrevocably at odds with the African American experience during the interwar period. It is also important to note that many of the liminal subjects ultimately choose to travel abroad once intranational travel fails to eliminate liminality.

Fauset’s 1931 novel also signals a distinct shift in her writing style. In this way,

Fauset’s canon can be viewed as two separate periods of work, with her first two novels creating the initial exploration into liminality and transition. Both There Is Confusion and

Plum Bun address the problematic nature of race and class in America, yet they form a

112 relatively positive conclusion in each case. The Chinaberry Tree and Comedy: American

Style, on the other hand, incorporate a burgeoning cynicism. This definitive tone of the latter two novels possibly contributes to the critical consensus that they are Fauset’s weaker works. As insights into liminality, however, these two novels prove significant due to their subversive approach and focus.

Of Fauset’s four novels, her third has received the least critical attention in recent years. The lack of consideration could relate to the inwardly focused narrative, as it presents a plot with less action than her other novels, so to speak. Nonetheless, The

Chinaberry Tree appears in scholarly conversation from time to time. As is the case with much of Fauset’s writings, critics such as Simmons and Mary Lupton have examined her treatment of black women. However, in terms of critique, Singh finds the novel lacking and of a lower quality than Fauset’s other texts. He directs his disapproval at Fauset as much as toward the novel itself, stating that “[h]er uncritical attitude toward the complexities of intraracial class problems and her repeated attempts to recreate a brown- skinned replica of the white American world seem, in retrospect, to limit her work’s aesthetic and cultural value” (63). He continues to disdain the quotidian nature of the middle-class characters, citing Saunders Redding’s contemporary criticism of the novel’s

“transcriptions from unimaginative life” (qtd. in Singh 63). However, the key element of the novel that Singh and Redding offer as flaw—mundanity—contributes directly to the value of the text, as the lack of adventure in light of the everyday routine creates perhaps the most believable instance of liminality, one that utilizes characters the readers may recognize as neighbors, friends, or themselves.

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Unique to The Chinaberry Tree is Fauset’s choice to include a foreword. Here, she mentions the “in-between spaces where colored men and women work and love and go their ways with no thought of the ‘problem’” (ix). Fauset therefore sets the plot upon the topic of liminality; whether conscious or not, this introduction establishes that the black race by nature inhabits a marginalized space, and the subjects therein are “displaced person[s]” (Griffin 77). She goes on to explain her attempt to portray “something of the homelife of the colored American who is not being pressed too hard by the Furies of

Prejudice, Ignorance, and Economic Injustice. And behold he is not so vastly different from any other American, just distinctive” (ix). This description provides a succinct introduction to Fauset’s third novel, which closely examines the lives of Laurentine

Strange and her cousin Melissa Paul, who experience everyday life in Red Brook, New

Jersey tinged only by the gossip and unforgiving memory of a small town.

If Fauset’s other novels explore liminality and its resultant movement outward, this novel inverts the formula and examines how a withdrawal and move inward creates a similar conclusion. In each of Fauset’s other novels, the protagonists seek some sort of geographical transition, moving from one city to another and frequently from the United

States to France. As I argue in this chapter and in the dissertation as a whole, this transnational result of liminality is essentially inevitable, though it rarely presents unproblematic results. Therefore, though I will not dwell unnecessarily on the deviation of The Chinaberry Tree here, a few key examples from the text illuminate and emphasize

Fauset’s approach to transnational liminality throughout her canon of works.

The central characteristic that distinguishes this novel from Fauset’s others is its characters’ relationships with and attempted resolution to liminality. There Is Confusion

114 emphasizes the difficulty of obtaining social status and achieving success from within the confines of race in America. Plum Bun demonstrates a similar conflict, though it proffers passing and a transnational ending as possible results. Finally, Comedy: American Style takes the concept of passing and the desire for whiteness to the extreme, resulting in an undeniably tragic conclusion, providing the quintessential culmination of Fauset’s fictional exploration of liminality. Yet in The Chinaberry Tree, the Strange family’s liminal existence, though just as limiting and detrimental as in Fauset’s other works, has become a sort of accepted status, indeed almost a comfort in its consistency. Rather than seeking escape like the Marshall-Byes, the Murrays, and the Carys, the Stranges accept their marginalized existence and withdraw further from society, creating a liminal space in their own house.

The central dilemma here is one of class and social standing, not unfamiliar in other Fauset plots. The two main protagonists, Fauset reveals over the course of the novel, belong to questionable and/or socially unfortunate lineages, as the births of both young women resulted from extramarital affairs. Laurentine Strange knows this information from the beginning, and she therefore accepts her ostracism and mostly keeps to herself, encouraging duCille to claim, “To a certain extent, however,

Laurentine’s ‘quarantine’ is self-imposed, for she has internalized the value system that blames the victim and holds the child responsible for the sins of the father—and the mother. She has bought the myth of her own bad mixed blood” (97). To make matters worse for Melissa, her situation remains unknown to her until quite far into the novel, when she almost unknowingly enters into a relationship with her half-brother. In the gossipy town of Red Brook, then, the Strange family find themselves shunned by the rest

115 of their African-American community, receiving a form of intensely focused intraracial prejudice. Here, perhaps more significantly than Fauset’s other novels, black bourgeois classism contributes almost solely to the “liminalization” of the two characters.

While Laurentine and Melissa both experience this ostracized liminality at the hands of their Red Brook peers, their shared experience appears in inverse relation to one another, as Laurentine slowly arises out of her metaphorical confinement over the course of the novel, and Melissa enters into her liminality only once the truth of her parentage is revealed, sending her into an emotional spiral. The forced separation and marginalization they encounter defines their existence and establishes their lack of belonging, their perpetual liminality. Zackodnik observes insightfully, “The Strange house literally marks the boundary between the town of Red Brook and the bordering countryside. . . .

Laurentine not only lives on the outskirts of town but also outside both black and white communities as a child” (131). The location of the house enacts a physical in-between space the protagonists must call home due to the inability to thrive elsewhere. In every aspect of their lives, the main characters find themselves marginalized, mirroring their liminal status in the local community by placing themselves at the threshold of the town.

Rather than enacting this ostracized living arrangement via forceful relocation, however, the women retract and choose the out-of-sight habitat for themselves. In this way, more than any of Fauset’s other characters, Laurentine and Melissa accept their liminality and choose not to seek individual escape outside of marriage.

Though transnational settings are only mentioned in passing throughout the novel,

Fauset nevertheless includes a brief scene of travel and transition when Laurentine and her suitor Stephen Denleigh take a trip to New York, the most cosmopolitan setting in the

116 story. In one of Fauset’s other works, this departure from the setting of origin into a new location would elicit feelings of freedom and possibility. Here, however, the opposite occurs, as the trip presents no such positive experience; the entire scene (which lasts less than a chapter) maintains a negative tone and mostly grants the travelers a glimpse of the only explicit racism in the novel.

Prior to their trip, Denleigh experiences his first death since beginning to practice medicine in Red Brook. As one might expect, the event weighs heavily upon him, and the trip therefore begins with him feeling beaten and haggard. Each step of the itinerary follows this tone, providing no sense of happiness or escape along the way. For instance, on their way to New York, the car gets a flat tire that leads to a one-mile trek in the rain to the nearest service station; the group appears understandably “worn, weary and provoked” upon their arrival, leading them to be “only too glad, after dinner, to forego their carefully planned sortie into the gay streets and retire to their respective lodgings”

(306). During the rest of the week, they do take the time to enjoy Harlem, visiting theaters and night clubs and meeting interesting members of the community. However, on their last day before returning to New Jersey, they eat at a local restaurant, where they witness racism at work. They see several black patrons ejected from the establishment, and when Denleigh takes offense to the white waiter’s actions, they receive the same punishment. Harlem Renaissance writer Rudolph Fisher disagrees with Fauset’s inclusion of this single instance of discrimination, calling it “so much more dramatic than other episodes” and thereby detracting from the weight of the intraracial issues (qtd. in Singh

75). Upon their return to Red Brook, then, “it would not have taken very much imagination to have pictured a more pleasant trip” (313). Again, whereas travel and

117 transition appear as a desirous and restorative practice in Fauset’s other works, the single trip outside Red Brook in The Chinaberry Tree only refortifies the protagonists’ introversion and acceptance of liminality. Instead of feelings of freedom and excitement,

Laurentine and Denleigh “felt themselves scarcely benefitted by their outing, almost wished they had stayed at home” (313). This brief, external moment, the only time the action moves outside of Red Brook, once again elicits negative feelings that effectively confirm the protagonists’ continued withdrawal and marginalization. Any potential desire for removal and change, therefore, remains out of sight.

Following this brief trip, Melissa soon realizes the truth of her lineage and subsequent relation to Malory. This revelation places her in a dark and depressed state, feeling for the first time that she lacks identity and has no clear motivation in life.

Laurentine and Denleigh comfort and attend to Melissa, but she nevertheless has difficulty breaking out of her marginalized state. In this manner, breaking away from the more positive (if problematic) conclusions of Fauset’s first two novels, The Chinaberry

Tree concludes with the same inward focus and resistance to transition that sustained throughout the novel. When Asshur, an earlier romantic interest of Melissa’s, reappears as romantic savior, he provides a false positive, as the family remains just as unaccepted and ostracized as before. Both women have won marriage, but the veracity of this victory must be questioned. Fittingly, duCille does just that when she posits, “Fauset’s creation of an ‘ideal estate,’ in which Laurentine and Melissa retreat into thoughts of their respective rescues from the social abyss of illegitimacy and near-incest . . . seems to me a final swipe at the very form she has employed to critique both itself and the social values that elevate, idealize, and romanticize love and marriage” (100). For in these “rescues,”

118 the protagonists continue their inward withdrawal from society. If liminality is a pushing aside from society, then no success or resolution appears at the conclusion. In other words, the women must now “live out their lives in shadowy rooms, becoming invisible, obedient wives within the respectable social order” (Griffin 87). The pervasive ostracism of the novel remains just as resolute in distancing these characters from their community, though they may have added a couple sympathetic souls to their liminal midst. The apparent silver lining of the novel’s final pages has the possibility to deceive the reader, but the conflict has not disappeared, it has just been accepted and pardoned.

As a work of liminality, the novel demonstrates the detrimental marginalization that can occur from within a racially homogeneous community. As a work of transnationalism, it conspicuously eliminates and avoids the possibility of travel outside the United States, as well as essentially vilifying travel as a whole. A definite deviation from Fauset’s formula for fiction, it nonetheless provides a differing perspective on the aforementioned concepts that complicates Fauset’s approach to writing. As such, it signifies a maturing turning point in her canon of literature. The fourth and final installment, then, continues this direction, creating a nuanced ending if not a satisfying resolution.

Transnational Failure in Comedy: American Style

A number of Harlem Renaissance novels address concepts of dual identity, which is telling through the central motif of passing in the novels of Nella Larsen, Walter

White, and James Weldon Johnson, in addition to those of Fauset. Of course Fauset’s most famous novel, Plum Bun, details Angela Murray’s travails of passing to gain social status. However, Fauset's final novel, 1933's Comedy: American Style, illuminates the

119 concept of racial hybridity from an almost satirical perspective. Whereas her earlier novels consistently conclude on a positive note, even if introduced by tragic events, this final novel magnifies the catastrophic elements of race and racism without apology. The plot centers around Olivia Cary, whom Lupton accurately characterizes as “driven by her single-minded obsession with whiteness. She tries to impose her will on her family, causing unhappiness and disaster” (“Black Women” 38). Herein lies the conflict of the novel, as each and every tragedy can be traced back to Olivia’s choices and impositions.

In spite of its ending, however, there is more at play, such as the failure of a transnational savior that key characters seek as a resolution to their racial liminality. This unashamed discussion of the disastrous qualities of color obsession make Comedy: American Style a novel worthy of attention.

While not attaining the same level of acclaim as her earlier works, this novel takes a more cynical approach as Olivia Cary, the main protagonist, makes it her life goal to obtain a social status that she believes is only possible through passing. In Plum Bun,

Angela endures some hardships and pain in passing before ultimately achieving happiness and true love; quite differently here, Olivia essentially destroys her own family, leading her youngest son to commit suicide and abandoning the rest of her family in the end. This tragic novel sheds light on the detrimental effects of Olivia's self-hatred and desire to pass. Clearly, the “comedy” of the novel’s title is scathingly sarcastic. Singh notices this distinction, as he claims Fauset’s final work “goes a step further to expose the sickness and tragedy caused by America’s convoluted color complex” (72). As the contradiction between the ironic title and the plot implies, the ultimate result here emphasizes the inequity and difficulty of black life in America. As a child, Olivia

120 witnesses the immediate benefits of her teacher assuming she is Italian rather than

African American. This innocent observation acts as impetus for Olivia’s many selfish decisions later in life, as she attempts to maintain that advantageous illusion. Rather than condemning Olivia’s decision to pass, then, we should revisit Comedy: American Style for its condemnations of a racially intolerant society. Along these same lines, duCille describes the novel as “a complex picture of mixed blessings, burdens, temptations, and conflicting desires with which middle- and working-class black women and men must contend in a racist, patriarchal society” (93). As duCille indicates, this complex foundation allows the novel to exist without falling into the trap of a one-dimensional argument. Indeed, Olivia’s decisions rise out of a legitimate issue—that of racial inequality—yet she chooses to forsake her family and race to rectify the situation.

Additionally, when considering the joint concept of transnational liminality,

Fauset’s final novel presents an insightful commentary. International settings arise throughout the novel as a possible site of freedom, one in which the confines and restrictions of color prejudice are removed. In her introduction to the 2010 edition of

Comedy: American Style, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson specifically emphasizes the importance of travel and physical transition in Fauset’s final novel: “Beneath Comedy’s veneer of melodrama and romance runs a stringent analysis of the interplay between homelessness and freedom of movement, international exile and local familial responsibility” (xxxiii). Here, unlike Angela’s Paris of Plum Bun, however, the locations outside of the United States are unforgiving. The “exile” in this case proves to be a barren and isolated place. Olivia primarily views Europe as an ideal location, and the highest goal is not merely to pass for white but to become fully integrated into white society. In

121 fact, she explicitly proclaims regarding Teresa, “Her father and I have scraped and saved and sacrificed to give her the proper environment and clothes and ideals so that when she grew up she could take her place in the white world” (105). Though the Cary children receive more narrative attention, Olivia is truly the central character as her desire to live and achieve whiteness through her children acts as the sole conflictual impetus.

The action focuses on the Cary family, as they attempt to navigate an existence across the color line. The matriarch of the family, Olivia Blanchard Cary, discovers at a young age the “benefits” of a white identity; she therefore makes it her life goal to obtain this status, not solely for herself but for her entire future family. Throughout the complexities of the novel, then, this desire for social and class status through racial passing proves to be the sole motivation for all of Olivia’s actions. Wall finds Olivia’s

“anti-race” status unique among black women characters when she claims, “A self-hating woman, a conniver, a shameless traitor to the race, and, most shockingly, an unloving mother, Olivia is a new character in African-American literature” (Women 81). Olivia undeniably deviates from her precursors as she neglects her family to seek a racial removal. The liminal conflict naturally arises from this “terrible obsession,” as Olivia can never leave color behind and fully integrate as white (Comedy 107). If Fauset’s earlier novels illuminate the presence of liminality and its potential for conflict, Comedy:

American Style removes any possible doubt as to its detrimental effects. While characters of varying importance exhibit qualities of liminality throughout the novel, three key members of the central Cary family create the quintessential example: the matriarch

Olivia, the daughter Teresa, and the youngest son Oliver.

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While the beginning of the novel can feel cursory and perhaps unnecessary—even the titles of these sections, “The Plot” and “The Characters,” seem prefatory—the introduction to Olivia and her formative experiences during childhood grant insight into her beliefs later in life. Fauset foregrounds this notion when opening the novel, labeling

Olivia’s characteristic prejudice as “self-absorption and single-mindedness which were to stamp her later life,” as well as a “little fire [which] was really kindled by two events”

(7). These two incidents truly set her detrimental ideology in motion. Olivia first understands the hatred latent within racism when, at a young age, she throws a snowball at a white girl who then responds with a racial slur. She has never been exposed to color prejudice up to this point, and the encounter sends her into a spiral. As she begins to digest the scenario, she concludes that “her father’s original brownness was in some way responsible for her own” (8). In this moment, she develops a hatred toward her parents, angry at their neglect to explain the racist society around her. This early realization sets the stage by instilling in Olivia the belief that her color is a burden. She envisions herself as a victim, with no ability with which to escape. Soon thereafter, however, she discovers the answer. When her teacher assumes that she is Italian, Olivia becomes conscious of the possibility of passing as white. This epiphany excites Olivia and gives her an ultimate goal; when she finally voices this thought process to her mother, she demonstrates the degree to which whiteness becomes her life’s obsession: “I think, Mother, . . . that if you really are one way and people see you another way, then it’s just as easy for you to be their way as your way” (11). Olivia employs this mindset moving forward, in each life decision considering how she can obtain whiteness.

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To define Olivia’s liminality, then, we must understand that there are multiple contributing factors that create a nuanced result. The most obvious element is her ultimately unattainable desire not simply to pass as white but completely to infiltrate and become white in every capacity and aspect of life. Friedel labels Olivia’s beliefs of blackness and whiteness as essentially “white supremacist,” which in turn is Fauset’s satirical goal (73). In her quest, the primary obstacle becomes her family. Most obviously, her eldest son, Christopher, and her daughter, Teresa, attempt to thwart her plans to pull them into her personal quest for whiteness. Later in the novel, her husband also takes an active role condemning her choices. On a more passive level, her youngest son, Oliver, becomes the proverbial “thorn in her side” as his brown complexion removes any ability for passing. Olivia’s liminality, then, occurs to a degree based on her constructed status between races, which is a common form of liminality for biracial women characters of the period, and also on another level within her own family, as she moves herself to the margins by perpetually sacrificing any sense of love and familiality in her own home.

Once she has gained the social status she requires, joining committees of white women and hosting grand social functions, Olivia discovers that her desires remain unquenched. For her, as is the case for most other Fauset protagonists, a seemingly contradictory static mobility defines her. Despite her clearly defined goals for which she constantly strives, they always remain just out of reach. Rather than give up, Olivia employs other strategies as a means of overcoming her liminality. She eventually begins making choices, therefore, that place two of her children, Teresa and Oliver, in positions of liminality as well. Using Olivia’s actions as prime example, Allen contends that

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“Fauset exposes then condemns both intra-racial colorism and the bourgeois belief that each generation exists to boost the next into a higher class” (63). Indeed, her desire to improve her own life through the lives of her children acts as impetus for Olivia’s quest.

While Olivia’s choices as the matriarch of the family clearly stem from her conscious decisions, Teresa’s storyline paints her as a much more conflicted and sympathetic character.

From an early age, Teresa finds liminality—and passing—forced upon her. In terms of social connections, Olivia disallows any of her children from entertaining at their house other children who show color. Calloway highlights the fact that Olivia’s

“constant pressure on her children to sublimate their racial heritage and drift across the color line confuses them and poisons their home environment,” if it can be called a home

(8). These actions impress upon the Cary children, especially Teresa and Christopher, the arbitrariness and annoyance of their mother’s obsession. Though they have this wise understanding of the situation, however, they nonetheless become inculcated within

Olivia’s machinations. Teresa eventually finds herself internally conflicted and dreading her future, which she candidly conveys to her brother when Olivia sets out to send Teresa away to a white preparatory school: “I know what she’s hoping. She thinks either you or

I, or both of us, will marry white; and then she’ll come and live with us. . . . I can just feel that I’m going to be awfully unhappy. I can feel it closing in on me. . . . I feel like a fly in a spider’s web. I know I’m going to be caught and I know I’m going to hang there. I won’t have a lot of pain. I’ll just live on stupid and dull and unable to stir. Hating everything” (44). From quite early in the novel, then, the reader has a clear indication of how things will play out. Comedy: American Style does not thrive on twists and the

125 unexpected; rather, the novel foreshadows the tragic possibilities and dedicates the following pages to fleshing out the path toward that conclusion. In the same way, Teresa foresees her end, yet she remains powerless, through the limits of her own liminality, to alter her destiny.

Perhaps the quintessential example of Teresa’s liminality occurs during her time away from Philadelphia. While at Christie’s, the white school Olivia personally selected,

Teresa finds herself in the first situation in which she must remain forcibly and inexorably hidden behind her presumed white identity. The students and teachers never have any reason to suspect that Teresa could be anything other than white, yet Teresa feels conflicting emotions during her time there. When an African American girl starts attending the school, an unprecedented occurrence until that moment, Teresa feels drawn to the girl. As Jones points out, Alicia Barrett’s academic and social success at the school

“functions as a criticism of color consciousness and racial stereotypes of brown-skinned blacks” (60). Teresa’s friendship with Alicia is therefore significant, and when Teresa decides to travel home with her over the winter break, she discovers just how detrimental her liminal passing has been to her sense of self-identity: “Such after all had been the influence of the young girl’s earlier training that for a time she found herself no more at home with this large colored group than she had felt with the white group when she first went to Christie’s. Estranged, through lack of interest, from the latter group she was equally estranged, at least, from the first group, by lack of experience” (68). Despite the estrangement she feels, she nonetheless discovers the existence of “affluent, cultivated, and politically active blacks proud of their ethnicity,” which her mother had hitherto denied and defamed (Jones 60). In this instance, Teresa realizes completely that she has

126 fallen into an in-between space, a purgatory in which she fails to fit into any specific community. Soon after this epiphany, Teresa equates her status with her symbolic lack of a home. Physically, Teresa has a family and a place to live, but “[e]motionally, as far as race was concerned, she was a girl without a country. . . . Later on in life it occurred to her that she had been deprived of her racial birthright and that that was as great a cause for tears as any indignity that might befall man. With no conscious volition on her part a metamorphosis had been achieved. She had become, and she would always remain, individual and aloof, never a part of a component whole” (Comedy 69). Whereas Olivia views her personal liminality as a minor obstacle to be overcome via conscious social decisions, Teresa views hers in a more negative light as an inescapable, increasingly detrimental parasite that removes aspects of her essential identity that she cannot easily reclaim. Friedel’s description of Teresa as “a figure for the rootlessness and alienation of modern life” is quite fitting (72). Olivia never truly loses hope, as she pursues her goal of whiteness until the end, even when she has lost her family and earlier connections.

Though Teresa has fleeting ideas of escape, she also understands her situation each time she becomes further entrenched within her liminality.

When Teresa believes she has found escape both from her mother and her liminality through a planned elopement with the darker Henry Bates, it ultimately fails in a way that demonstrates the extent to which Olivia’s lifelong urging toward passing and whiteness has impacted Teresa mentally. When Olivia confronts the two, Teresa attempts a compromise by suggesting Henry could pass as Mexican. The suggestion does not sit well with Henry, who immediately breaks with Teresa, leaving her back at square one

(106). This event becomes a win for Olivia, who uses the opportunity of Teresa’s newly

127 acquired weakness to encourage her once again toward her own ends. This dissolution of the relationship with Henry, which Teresa had been counting on for two years (not to mention Oliver’s hope that he might too escape via this promised union), essentially proves to be Teresa’s last stand. Though she experiences some joy and happiness following the break, her only hopes for independence and freedom soon fall by the wayside.

As is the case with Comedy: American Style, Europe (and specifically France) maintains an integral connection with the occurrence of liminality. This transnational setting first appears as a hopeful savior, though it fails to live up to the billing. Michael

A. Chaney recognizes this occurrence in Fauset’s writing, which he labels a “liberatory promise of an imagined Europe to unravel America’s stultifying racial proscriptions of identity” (“International Contexts” 42). Teresa clings to this idea when she initially gains traction as a French tutor in Philadelphia and later decides that a summer institute in

France could further her burgeoning career. Though seemingly benign at first, the trip gains sinister undertones when Olivia decides she should join Teresa on the trip. Feeling the inevitable success of her mother’s plots, Teresa accepts a relationship with Aristide

Pailleron, a French professor of little means who believes her to be a white American.

Once again, Teresa initially thinks she can find some sort of happiness and independence through the union, yet she quickly learns her husband’s home in Toulouse, replete with an over-involved mother-in-law, holds no freedom for her.

Thus, Teresa’s narrative ends with a nonresolution. Her tragedy takes on the appearance of stagnation and complacency, as “her expectation of a change died away and she settled down into an existence that was colorless, bleak and futile” (134). Just as

128 her premonition indicated at a young age, Teresa’s life has reached a point where her mother’s emphasis on color prevails, leaving Teresa in a sad and loveless state. In fact, when Olivia attempts to move in with Teresa and her French husband at the end of the novel, “Teresa [is] silent, pale, subdued, the ghost of her former self” (233). Teresa’s narrative provides the slightest sense of optimism when her sister-in-law writes her with the hopeful news of Chris eventually saving her and bringing her back to the States, yet the text provides no indication that this ever comes to fruition. Lupton claims that the only “real survivors in this complicated social pattern are the ones who . . . can affirm their racial identities” (“Black Women” 38). Fauset’s text seems to warrant this reading, thereby demonstrating to the reader that Teresa’s ending is a slow descent into obscurity and irrelevance. In this case, as a foreshadowing of Olivia’s fate, Teresa discovers that passing has sapped the color from her life in more ways than one.

Unfortunately, Oliver’s life experience follows a trajectory even less positive and promising. While the two eldest children feel Olivia’s persistent compulsion to desire her own ideas of success, Oliver receives the opposite, a disdain and hatred of his obvious color, something she makes quite clear from the beginning: “To her Oliver meant shame.

He meant more than that; he meant the expression of her failure to be truly white. There was some taint in her, she told herself once, not long after Oliver’s birth. . . . For she belonged to that group of Americans which thinks that God or Nature created only one perfect race—the Caucasians” (150). This understanding taints Oliver’s entire existence, as Olivia perpetually works against him, making certain he remains invisible at all costs.

Oliver’s connection to his mother remains problematic for her, as his name acts as reminder of the familial relationship while his physical appearance is a “physical denial

129 of her own ‘whiteness’” (Lupton, “Black Women” 40). The significance of the (lack of) interplay between Olivia and Oliver can therefore not be overstated for either character, whose fates are codependent: Olivia sees her need for racial/social status perpetually magnified through Oliver’s presence, and Oliver’s slow degradation occurs from Olivia’s withheld love. Oliver’s avoidable death results from Olivia’s indifference, which creates the discord necessary for her to attain her Parisian conclusion. In this instance, then, the transnational setting is tainted with filicide.

Quite distinctly from the other liminal characters of the novel, Oliver’s darker skin prevents him from passing for white. In this way, his marginalized status and failure for identity construction arise not from his appearance of being stuck between racial categories, but from his inability to gain closure and recognition in his own family, directly resulting from his mother’s blatant disapproval of his skin color. Though Olivia ultimately finds herself alone and dejected, and Teresa becomes imprisoned in a loveless marriage, Oliver meets a more tragic end via suicide, feeling that he has no other option.

Oliver represents yet another degree of liminality, continuing to alter Fauset’s presentation of the subject. Even though Plum Bun demonstrates the complexities of liminality paired with racial passing and color obsession, Angela’s story concludes in a positive light, with the union of lovers in Paris. In the instance of Comedy: American

Style, as befits the biting irony of the novel’s title, no character finds true happiness in the end, though the Cary family appears to be on the upswing with Olivia out of the picture.

From the moment Oliver appears in the narrative at his birth, Olivia makes her opinion of him known: “Olivia sat up, arms outstretched to receive him. Her baby! Her eyes stretched wide to behold every fraction of his tiny person. But the expectant smile

130 faded as completely as though an unseen hand had wiped it off” (34). At the sight of his visibly brown skin, she even shouts aloud to her husband, “That’s not my baby!” (34). As

Calloway aptly underscores, “Oliver is the visible manifestation of what Olivia hates about herself: her black racial identity” (19). Significantly, Fauset makes clear throughout the novel that Oliver has a beautiful appearance, even to the extent of being “more attractive than the other children” (Comedy 34). Yet, as he discovers throughout his life, this objective beauty fails to capture the attention and love of his mother. In this way,

Fauset forces the intersection and constant justification of Olivia’s color-hatred. In order to create the life she wants, Olivia must find ways to keep Oliver out of the picture or obscure his familial connection to her. Oliver’s liminality is one in which his mother perpetually attempts to push him out of sight, to the margin, trying to keep him invisible.

At the outset of “Oliver’s Act,” Fauset offers a succinct description of Oliver’s marginalized status throughout his life: “Oliver lived in a double world. But it was a long time before he realized this. If he had understood it earlier, and if, more especially, he had learned the relative merits of each, he might have been spared many a moment of pain, many an hour of bewilderment. It was a long time before it became clear to his childish mind where he belonged, and which was his actual habitat” (137). As part of his mother’s persistent shame and dislike of him, Oliver spends much of his adolescence shuttling from one grandparent to another, always with the goal of remaining out of sight. This image of home conflicts with the more familial environment of Fauset’s earlier novels, which Friedel aptly illustrates when she posits, “Unlike the characters of her previous novels who ultimately discover the possibility of home as a place where individual growth can be nurtured, a space where one can be connected with others and still have

131 the freedom to be one’s ‘true self,’ in Comedy home is a place of constraint, cruelty and alienation from self and others” (72). Friedel’s realization applies most clearly to Oliver’s situation. This section therefore provides illuminating insight into the psychological issues at play within Olivia’s thought process. Simultaneously, we see the elements that come together and ultimately influence Oliver’s tragic conclusion.

Once he returns home to live with his parents, he unfailingly encounters the sense of disapproval from his mother that he cannot explain, yet it occupies his thoughts frequently, for “[i]t was only in the presence of his mother that he became suddenly discomfited, like an awkward boy who does not know what to do with ungainly hands or feet. . . . But there was nothing ungainly about Oliver. [. . .] Indeed he might never have thought of them with any degree of consciousness, if his mother’s behavior had not induced in him such a degree of introspection. His appearance, he thought, could not offend her. There must be some hidden, some inner defect, which age would reveal to him” (142-43). From a young age, then, Oliver’s discovery of this unspoken issue begins to create in him a sense of self-conscious doubt. One afternoon Oliver sees his mother walking with a group of women, and he runs to see her. When he arrives at the group and addresses his mother, however, he encounters a terrible situation that sticks with him:

“With the other ladies (he did not know whether they were white or colored since there were none fairer than she), she turned and faced him, let her eyes, like theirs, rest on his face with a strange and awful lack of recognition. Then she turned away again. He stood still” (146). Psychologically, Oliver feels inferior and inadequate, as Olivia sees him “as a curse on her and cannot accept him as a son despite his devotion to her” (Jones 62). He never receives any form of love from Olivia, which leads to his immediate happiness and

132 excitement when she offers him the opportunity “to play at being the butler” when she hosts parties (Comedy 77). Of course, Olivia’s reasoning behind this ploy is to hide

Oliver’s true relationship with her, thereby allowing him to be seen in the house without betraying her racial identity.

At the end of his section, Oliver finally loses his innocence when he discovers firsthand the cause of his mother’s disdain. When preparing some clothes for the laundry, he discovers a letter from his mother to his father. Within, the words on the page shock

Oliver with their hateful truth: “If you and Chris would come and settle down over here we could all be as white as we look . . . if it just weren’t for Oliver. I know you don’t like me to talk about this . . . but really, Chris, Oliver and his unfortunate color has certainly been a mill-stone around our necks all our lives” (160). Immediately, Oliver begins his downward spiral, finally having tangible evidence of the bias he always suspected but could never positively identify. Following this realization, Oliver places his hope for salvation in Teresa, seeing no other feasible solution. He harkens back to her earlier promise of granting him a new home following her marriage to Henry. Though those plans dissolved with her engagement, Oliver hopes that a similar arrangement could work now that she has married a Frenchman, and he quickly mails a request. The new information begins to burrow into his everyday thoughts, so he waits impatiently for a return letter. Unfortunately, he soon receives a response from his sister that carries with it the news that her husband is unaware of her race and has spoken “very bitterly about people of mixed blood, especially Americans” (163). The inevitable conclusion means that Oliver has no hope of escape or asylum. Jones describes Oliver in this instance as

“an outsider in his own family and a displaced person rejected by his mother and sister”

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(62). His hopes dashed, Oliver resorts to the only escape he can find from this imprisoning liminality of familial marginalization: suicide.

The obvious parallel here is with Clare Kendry Bellew of Nella Larsen’s Passing.

In her liminal existence, she attempts to live a double life, traveling between the white reality of her marriage and the black reality of her social group in Harlem. Though scholars remain divided on the truth of Clare’s death—suicide, accident, or homicide at the hands of Irene—the cause here becomes irrelevant; the fact remains that, by whatever means, Clare’s only resolution appeared in death. In Fauset’s novel, then, Oliver discovers the same conclusion. Throughout much of his life, Oliver feels the symptoms of his liminality, which Friedel terms “inner decimation,” without ever fully realizing his imprisonment and his state of tractionless momentum (76). When Oliver reads his mother’s letter, as if eating the forbidden fruit, his eyes become opened to the terrible truth. Seeing the walls closing in upon him, Oliver takes the only remaining path toward freedom.

No evidence exists to indicate that Fauset celebrates or condones suicide; rather, this conclusion to Oliver’s narrative demonstrates the tragic extreme of liminal existence.

Paired with his departure via death, Olivia’s lack of remorse further emphasizes the detrimental effects of blind color prejudice, as she seeks to quench her obsession for whiteness at all costs. What remains is a harsh critique both of American racist society and the colorism it engenders. Once again, as is the case elsewhere in the novel, a transnational setting reinforces the subject’s liminal state. Unlike his mother and sister, however, Oliver never even receives the opportunity to travel abroad, yet his sister’s life in Toulouse and his mother’s desire to move to France and be subsumed into the Parisian

134 white culture enact upon him a static imprisonment from which he has no chance to escape.

In the end, Olivia finds herself in a dejected and lonely situation; she has exiled herself, and she has lost her family as well as her much-valued physical possessions.

Highlighting the final act’s irony, duCille calls it “a play on forms as its title is a play on words. For comedy ‘American style’ is of the Greek kind: Fauset’s novel is not a comedy of manners but a tragedy of them. Only in America, the text tells us more than once, can skin color breed such comic tragedy—such ‘artificial dilemma’” (93). A telling indication of Olivia’s negative impact upon her family, the elder Christopher presents no offer of reconciliation when she requests assistance in the form of a trip home: “Olivia, . . . what you ask is not only out of reason. It is impossible. I am much better. I am hoping to regain some of my old practice. But it will be a long while before I can send you any such sum as you require. The best I can do is to promise you fifty dollars a month. When I am able I will send you more” (234-35). In a turn of the tables, Olivia’s family cannot find a way to reincorporate her into their lives, just as she once sought to remove them from her ideal existence. Describing this scene, Erica L. Griffin demonstrates, “Olivia Cary seeks life in Paris in order to flee racial barriers completely, yet because she denies her identity she is punished by being alienated from both races. . . . She does not mature mentally or emotionally as a result of living in a segregation-free environment” (82). Though she finds herself legally free and no longer racially segregated, her new state of exile emphasizes her lack of home and satisfaction to an even greater degree, as she struggles to find any human interaction at all. Elizabeth Ammons, in her Conflicting Stories:

American Women Writers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1991), succinctly

135 delineates Olivia’s conclusion: “exile, whiteness, silence, living death” (152). At one time, Olivia had equated both whiteness and Europe with her desired liberation, yet they prove to be nothing more than a “fabled freedom” (Comedy 233). Her liminality, albeit self-inflicted, can only place her in the non-space of loneliness and destitution.

As a follow-up to Fauset’s earlier novels, then, Comedy: American Style breaks the mold with its purely tragic conclusion. However, the ending is what sets the novel apart and grants the insight not present elsewhere. Though Fauset makes strides in her first three novels, their inevitable resolution presents the positives of racial pride.

Comedy: American Style acts as the amalgamation of her compounding examination of race by finally demonstrating the detrimental effects of blind, unchecked colorism. Its complex, cynical story has historically taken a backseat to Fauset’s more critically appreciated works, but I argue this pivotal departure emphasizes the need for continued study of her last novel. While transnational liminality appears frequently in other novels of the Harlem Renaissance, the Carys provide the most interesting iteration. In this case, the tragedy is necessary to remove the idealization of Europe and therefore to underscore persistent marginalization that occurs at the intersection of race and class. Olivia Cary is not a model character, but her tragedy results from a culturally-instigated prejudice, despite her role in its continuance.

Fauset’s four novels therefore proffer an undeniable connection between African

Americans, often women, and a transnational identity. Though the plots of her novels revolve around a variety of conflicts, at the center of each is the quest for freedom. These texts convincingly demonstrate the ways in which the racial and social barriers of the

United States create a dissatisfactory liminality, one that the protagonists seek to escape

136 by means of transatlantic travel. Unfortunately, these narratives mostly end in tragedy or an unrealized hope. Nevertheless, these works shed light on a significant element of

African American literature, providing a discourse by which to engage with other texts. If the Harlem Renaissance globalized the plight of the African American and the Black

Diaspora, Fauset demonstrates the degree to which racial homelessness cannot be remedied through a simple international transition. With transnational and diasporic studies at the center of contemporary academic currents, a deserved reconsideration of

Fauset’s fiction provides relevant connections of the American past with the American future.

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Chapter Four

Authorial Emplacement in Langston Hughes’s Life Writings

On the shoals of Nowhere, Cast up—my boat, Bow all broken, No longer afloat. On the shoals of Nowhere, Wasted—my song— Yet taken by the sea wind And blown along.14

In her major book, At Home in Diaspora (2005), Wendy W. Walters aptly suggests that “the notion of diaspora can represent a multiple, plurilocal, constructed location of home, thus avoiding ideas of fixity, boundedness, and nostalgic exclusivity traditionally implied by the word home” (xvi). While this concept accurately applies to much of Harlem Renaissance literature, it especially sheds light on Langston Hughes, who was perhaps the most well-known participant of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes composed poetry, fiction, plays, songs, essays, and autobiographical writings that spanned the length of his life. An exhaustive analysis of his entire work would be insightful. Drawing on the vast size of Hughes’s work, I will focus this chapter primarily on the elements of transnational liminality that appear in his two autobiographies, The

14 This is Hughes’s poem “Flotsam.” Published posthumously in the June-July 1968 edition of Crisis, it is “the last of seven poems which Hughes submitted to the magazine before he died” (Collected Poems 691).

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Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956). More candidly than his fictional creations, these life narratives highlight the problematic and fluid nature of home that

Walters describes, which is perhaps best encapsulated in some of Hughes’s working titles for his second autobiography: “Around the World Home,” “Around the World to

Harlem,” and “Harlem to Samarkand and Home.”15 In The Worlds of Langston Hughes:

Modernism and Translation in the Americas (2012), Vera M. Kutzinski underscores this theme in Hughes’s life writings, arguing that “home remains elusive on both sides of the

Atlantic” (32). From a similar perspective, I stress the global identity that Hughes manufactures and presents through his autobiographical texts.

Overwhelmingly, Hughes’s life writings have been critically neglected, especially when compared to the corpus of articles and monographs dissecting his poetry and fiction. Nonetheless, several scholars, including Ruth Mayer, Laura Quinn, and R. Baxter

Miller, have begun the task of examining Hughes’s autobiographical texts critically, arguing for their literary merits and insightful inclusions in American literary and historical scholarship. Miller, for example, claims that the structure of the two books

“reveals a theory of the performed arts and an imaginative revision of literary as well as historical sources” (Art and Imagination 9). By extending their work and analyzing

Hughes’s autobiographies as primary texts on their own, rather than as merely

15 Kate A. Baldwin addresses these potential titles for I Wonder as I Wander in her

Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and

Red, 1922-1963 (2002), stating that they demonstrate “an interrelatedness between various geographic locales in Hughes’s articulation of self” (283n19).

139 supplementary or auxiliary resources, I emphasize the importance of the genre of life writing itself. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in their second edition of Reading

Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2010), provide a systematic, theoretical framework for exploring Hughes’s The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander.

Smith and Watson state:

We as subjects are bodies inhabiting space; but more important, we are

positioned subjects, in and of place. Emplacement, as the juncture from

which self-articulation issues, foregrounds the notions of location and

subject position, both concepts that are inescapably spatial. The concept of

location emphasizes geographical situatedness; but it is not just

geographical site. It includes the national, ethnic, racial, gendered, sexual,

social, and life-cycle coordinates in which narrators are embedded by

virtue of their experiential histories and from which they speak. (42)

Using this concept of a metaphorical yet spatial site for self-identification, I attempt to demonstrate the extent to which Hughes’s writings exhibit a perpetual liminality between nations, communities, races, ideologies, and identities. Unlike the liminality of the other

African American writers, which was discussed in previous chapters, Hughes’s state of in-between is not necessarily negative. Instead, he takes hold of this nebulous state between the structure of cultures and societies and presents it as a feasible home for the

African American identity. In this way, Hughes’s liminality resists resolution as well, instead creating its own new space that, in time, becomes a legitimate, recognized space.

This is the ultimate goal of the Harlem Renaissance, as laid out by Alain Locke in The

New Negro when he writes, “In the very process of being transplanted, the Negro is

140 becoming transformed” (6). In this way, Hughes’s tendency toward transnational movement is truly transformative as he embodies the concept of a global identity.

Emplacement, as Smith and Watson suggest, provides us with a key concept in the study of life writing. The notion of emplacement refers to the process in which the autobiographer places himself or herself within a setting, in three distinct modes: first, physically, through retroactive storytelling; second, temporally, through that same act of recalling a previous experience; and third, authorially, through the conscious or unconscious emphases, details, and omissions that provide the reasoning behind the recollection in the first place. By utilizing Smith and Watson’s theory on autobiography and life writing, we can examine Hughes’s deliberate recollection of memory in his autobiographical writings16 as a spatialized site that parallels the geographical travels and locations he details throughout The Big Sea, I Wonder as I Wander, and other life writings. The significance of this type of analysis is twofold. First, these two nonfictional works provide a firsthand account of Hughes’s international travels from the 1910s to the

1930s. These transnational experiences emphasize the importance of global politics within the Harlem Renaissance. Second, the memory writing itself creates a diasporic and liminal site between borders and boundaries, autobiographer and constructed self, thereby calling into question the appropriateness of Harlem as the namesake of this Renaissance.

Smith and Watson assert: “Life narratives . . . may serve as repositories for preserving

16 I resist referring to Hughes’s “two autobiographies” because, as I explicate later in this chapter, his autobiographical considerations and projects are not limited to his two published autobiographies.

141 memory against the erosion of time and the rewriting of new generations of historians”

(48). In this way, the genre of autobiography becomes much more than just a supplement to Hughes’s better known literary endeavors. Rather, an in-depth analysis of Hughes’s life writings is critical in reinterpreting and reestablishing the goals and influences of the

Harlem Renaissance.

Through his autobiographical texts, Hughes details his travels to numerous locations during the first part of the twentieth century. His experiences include a tour of the U.S. South, travels along the western coast of Africa aboard a freighter, personal journeys through Europe including stops in France and Spain, and an extended stay in

Asia during the 1930s. For the figure commonly remembered as the most prominent

Harlem Renaissance writer, he spent a good portion of the movement’s peak years absent from Harlem. Compared to other writers of the movement, however, Hughes’s travels were more the norm than the anomaly. This international black identity in Hughes’s writings, which was also a common factor in the work of McKay, Fauset, and Larsen, provides a firsthand account of the importance and impact of transnational movement to the formation of Harlem Renaissance literature and culture. While several of the aforementioned authors produced writings detailing these trips to varying degrees,

Hughes’s autobiographies are the most thorough of the time period. These works create a retrospective and spatialized site defined by the intersection of a black diasporic identity with recurring transnational movements. In “The Creative Voice in the Autobiographies of Langston Hughes” (2013), Joseph McLaren recognizes this characteristic, positing that

“Hughes’s internationalism, his global vision, underlies his creative articulations in the two autobiographies” (121). The friction created as a result of Hughes’s self-

142 identification and his travels across nations and cultures creates a space in flux, wherein the only constant element is inconsistency. However, Hughes comes to embrace this existence, as we see time and time again throughout his recalled (not to mention, rewritten) memories. The creative aspect of autobiography creates the opportunity, in The

Big Sea, for Hughes to divulge his family background, thus revealing his multiracial heritage and his strained relationship with his father. At this juncture, his autobiography seemingly defies the conventions of the genre by leaping backwards in time to examine his early formative years. This stylistic choice allows the reader to peek behind the curtain and realize that a logical narrative timeline takes the backseat of a fluctuating narrative that is being woven in tandem with the in-between space created through the author’s writing and recollection of experiences. The resulting space is liminal, wherein

Hughes feels a greater sense of home and belonging in this transitional in-between state that he can relive through his autobiographical recollections.

Another significant point to highlight at the onset of this chapter is that I analyze

Hughes’s life and travels through the lens of his life writings. While autobiographical study has at times taken the form of fact checking and historical reconciliation, my goal is not to seek out the veracity of Hughes’s writings or to expose the embellishments or omissions therein. Rather, I am interested in Hughes’s autobiographies from the perspective of literary construction and self-representation. The factual status of

Hughes’s “nonfiction” is therefore unimportant in this project; his life writings supply much greater significance as artifacts of autobiographical gestation, uncovering the concepts he felt worthy of emphasis. Yet, by engaging with Hughes’s archival materials detailing the research and writing process and by juxtaposing those notes and drafts with

143 the published products, I hope to establish the author’s innate transnational and liminal identity (whether conscious or subconscious) as being present throughout the lengthy process. In this way, the notes and other materials of or about Hughes maintain the same level of significance as the publicly available copies of The Big Sea and I Wonder as I

Wander. My primary focus is one of black transnationalism and liminality, and I also hope to emphasize the importance of autobiography as literary text. Smith and Watson establish the concept of emplacement in terms of autobiographical product; however, I expand their useful concept by applying it to autobiographical production and proliferation.

To achieve these ends, I will examine Hughes’s autobiographical production in two parts. First, I will explore The Big Sea as a case study and demonstration of Hughes’s interaction with the global nature of his identity. Encompassing his adolescence and the

1920s, Hughes chooses to grant more space to his travels than to his family upbringing or his involvement in the Harlem Renaissance. In this section, I will perform a close reading of the published text, emphasizing the parts (largely housed in the center “Big Sea” section of the book) in which Hughes recalls his travels abroad and their contributions to his growth both as a person and as a writer. This reading establishes the lens by which we can understand the remainder of his life writing. Second, I will consider I Wonder as I

Wander and Hughes’s planned third volume in terms of his authorial control, not solely in the composition process but also in the marketing of his work. The content of his second autobiography continues where the first left off, detailing his travels of the 1930s including trips to Uzbekistan, Mexico, Spain, and Japan. More useful than another close reading, however, are the materials available in Hughes’s letters and research notes that

144 demonstrate his attempts at directing the reception of his book. In this approach,

Hughes’s emplacement becomes much more obvious, through the unique position of selling his constructed self by means of the literary business. Similarly, his plans for a third autobiography that never gained traction demonstrate his persistent consideration of self-definition. A number of his letters and notes reference his desire to write another volume. Though information on this autobiography is scarce, the available materials reinforce the significance of transnationalism in connection with Hughes’s self-identity. I therefore utilize the remnants of Hughes’s planning for this entry as pivotal information that connects the artificial neatness of an autobiographical text with the ambiguity of the autobiographical subject. As with the concept of liminality, this examination of Hughes as author and autobiographer resists resolution. Nonetheless, my hope is that such a study can shed more light on the monumental significance of Hughes in transnationalism and his continuing legacy.

Setting the Global Stage in The Big Sea

The better known of Hughes’s two published autobiographies, perhaps because of its scope encompassing his adolescence and the Harlem Renaissance, The Big Sea solidifies his identity as a global citizen. The three sections of the text—“Twenty-One,”

“Big Sea,” and “Black Renaissance”—provide us with key details on the first twenty- nine years of his life, granting insight into his personal and literary development while constantly underscoring their transitory elements. In the first volume of his comprehensive biography, Arnold Rampersad aptly describes the book and Hughes’s writing style as “a study in formal sleight of hand, in which deeper meaning is deliberately concealed within a seemingly disingenuous, apparently transparent or even

145 shallow narrative” (1:376). Indeed, Hughes sets up the autobiography in a way that is calculated and creative. An important quality of Hughes’s autobiographies is the construction of his personal story through deliberate choices and omissions in his narrative. Brian Loftus, in “In/Verse Autobiography: Sexual (In)Difference and the

Textual Backside of Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea” (2000), recognizes the creative compositional choices, claiming that “Hughes uses irony, omission, and distortion to reconstruct his subjects. Ironically, omissions function to produce meaning rather than to repress it” (142). Just as his frequent travels and movements solidify the work’s theme of liminality, so too does his obvious wrestling with his identity. As is the case in most instances of liminality, the core issue relates to identity discovery and expression; the irresolution of the quest for home arises from the inability to locate a place or situation in which the identity construction can occur. A critical examination of Hughes’s nonfiction, then, provides insight into his life and the themes he deems significant to his professional production.

Rather than taking a traditional, chronological approach, Hughes begins in medias res with a scene of a twenty-one-year-old’s departure aboard a freighter. While Hughes has a number of eye-catching scenes that could have served as an introduction of his book, this specific choice emphasizes the liminal qualities of a text that foregrounds the instability and transitory nature of water as a central motif. Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic sets up the Atlantic Ocean as a site of movement and transnationalism. In a way, Hughes prefigures Gilroy by positioning the Atlantic, or the titular Big Sea, as the spatial home of his life story. In a chapter of Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes

(2007), Isabel Soto posits that Hughes’s autobiography “outdoes Gilroy himself in its

146 self-conscious appropriation of the oceanic metaphor” (172). In fact, Hughes’s entire autobiographical canon operates on the notion of transition, both of identity and space.

The Big Sea specifically revolves around the Atlantic, with voyages and water imagery recurring frequently. In a letter to Arthur Spingarn dated January 20, 1940, for instance,

Hughes refers to his project as an “autobiographical travelogue,” which had yet to be published at that point. Hughes therefore founds his life writing upon the idea of fluidity and movement, foregrounding travel ahead of his literary development.

As Hughes’s first autobiographical text opens, the reader meets with an appropriately thematic epigraph: “Life is a big sea / full of many fish. / I let down my nets / and pull” (xxvii). Here, we see the title of the work, and we also see an immediate connection to the first chapter, wherein Hughes details his departure from New York aboard the S.S. Malone and acts upon the desire to throw his books into the rushing waters.17 Our knowledge of this “Big Sea” thereby splits into two possible definitions: an allegorical name of the Atlantic Ocean and a metaphorical sea of his life. The title and epigraph set the tone of the book, reading as a series of episodic insights into the human

17 While he uses the name S.S. Malone in his autobiography, the ship was actually the

West Hesseltine (Rampersad 73). Rampersad also provides the fact that Hughes did not truly toss all of his books into the sea, since he saved his copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass from this watery grave (377). For my purposes here, however, the veracity of each fact is not fully relevant or necessary. As such, I will refrain from reconciling

Hughes’s statements except in cases where it impacts the examination of transnational liminality and self-articulation within his writings.

147 condition and Hughes’s experiences.18 Hughes’s literary introduction to the text makes it seem more like a novel than a memoir; yet it serves the purpose of attracting the reader while also emphasizing the import of this “big sea” in Hughes’s personal identity construction, a move that seemingly creates the new genre of nonfictional bildungsroman. Alluding to this kind of narrative, Linda M. Carter describes The Big Sea as “an episodic record of Hughes’s journey from boyhood to manhood” (199). When juxtaposed with the book’s concluding scene, this theme becomes a framing device that solidifies the work’s status as more than a merely ancillary text: “Literature is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I’m still pulling” (335). In a matter of sentences (though separated by several hundred pages of content), Hughes equates life and literature through a transatlantic metaphor. J.D. Scrimgeour places weight on

Hughes’s statement, believing that “[o]ver the course of the book, ‘life’ has become

‘literature,’ and, while he has not stopped pulling, the use of the past tense asserts that at least one act of ‘pulling’—the autobiography—has taken place. Only through transforming his life into literature is Hughes able to realize and enact his conception of self as a web of netting that ensnares and embraces the greatest possible audience” (111).

If anything synopsizes The Big Sea and Hughes’s approach to life writing, Scrimgeour’s assertion does. Like the fluid and unpredictable nature of water, Hughes’s life writing has no singular goal. In this way, one can fully realize the ultimate significance of his work

18 Kutzinski similarly highlights the episodic structure of both The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander (34).

148 and the manner in which it factors into our comprehension of a liminal Harlem

Renaissance.

Therefore, when Hughes presents himself at the outset of the novel as a twenty- one-year-old experiencing the world outside of North America for the first time, this choice establishes the innate unhomeliness of the work. Unhomeliness is a concept that

Homi K. Bhabha defines as follows: “The negating activity is, indeed, the intervention of the ‘beyond’ that establishes a boundary: a bridge, where ‘presencing’ begins because it captures something of the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world— the unhomeliness—that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations.”

He continues, “The recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting” (9). Bhabha approaches this concept through a postcolonial perspective, which in turn emphasizes the necessarily postcolonial aspects of racial liminality. Not only does the oceanic setting create a liminal backdrop, but the voyage itself emphasizes the role of transnationalism. In fact, as we learn through the opening chapter entitled “Beyond Sandy Hook,” Hughes utilizes his job as a mess boy on a freighter to travel to Africa for the first time (4). The segment of the book demonstrates the transitory liminality evinced through the multifaceted aspects of

Hughes’s lineage and racial identity. This liminality becomes key to the study of

Hughes’s life writings. Whereas the appearance of liminality in other writers’ works has frequently appeared in a negative light with hopeless outcomes, it arises in Hughes’s work as a more positive element. For this reason, I label his autobiographies as exhibiting

149 liminal uplift, in which the same qualities of liminality appear—moving from one location to another, frequently occupying a marginalized space—yet the result is different. Through this liminal uplift, then, Hughes successfully locates a place of belonging, even if it remains in flux. Walters makes a similar claim in At Home in

Diaspora. Just as the other Black authors Walters highlights, such as Michelle Cliff and

Simon Njami, locate their home in a diasporic or expatriate community, so too does

Hughes find his personal calling through the traveling and relocating which he details extensively in his published autobiographies.

Hughes begins to establish his liminal existence early in The Big Sea, starting with his actual arrival in Africa. Much to his chagrin, the Africans he first encounters

“would not believe [he] was a Negro” (11). In this moment, Hughes epitomizes the frequent connection between liminality and the Black Diaspora. In this moment, we can see how Hughes and other “writers have recorded their surprise, and/or frustration when, in journeying to Africa, they are not immediately seen as brothers (or sisters) by

Africans” (Walters 15). In just the same way that McKay, Larsen, and Fauset express an ambiguous dissatisfaction correlating with the black experience, Hughes pinpoints the apparent homelessness, or unhomeliness, of black diasporic peoples, in that even the

African “homeland” is no more hospitable than “foreign” lands. Rather than immediately delving into his formative experiences in Africa, however, Hughes as autobiographer chooses to take a lengthy departure and loop back to his childhood and adolescence. For the remainder of the book’s first section, he slowly, and with several detours, ambles his narrative back to his decision to take a job aboard a freighter. Providing an opener to his backstory, he explains his multiracial lineage by declaring at the outset, “You see,

150 unfortunately, I am not black” (11). As is the case with many manifestations of racial liminality, Hughes’s identity initially arises out of the imperfect and arbitrary categorizations of race and skin color. Throughout this chapter, Hughes delineates the ancestors who granted him partial claim to black, white, French, and Indian blood. This information factors into his feelings of inadequacy when the Africans reject him as one of their own; more significant to the first third of the text, however, is the mundane, the quotidian, and the everyday foundational life of his adolescence.

During his adolescent years, Hughes spent time with portions of his fractured family in Joplin, Missouri, (his place of birth); Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas; Colorado;

Kansas City, Missouri; Mexico City; Lincoln, Illinois; and Cleveland, Ohio. Of these varying locations, only Lawrence, Lincoln, and Cleveland remained home for more than a fleeting moment. Amidst disparate tales of family dysfunctionality, Hughes utilizes a section of The Big Sea to demonstrate his rise into literature, indicating multiple times that “books had been happening to me” and “books began to happen to me” throughout his upbringing and various experiences (4, 16, 26). In a 1951 correspondence to Ing

Zdenko Alexy, the translator of the Slovak edition of The Big Sea, Hughes provides further explanation on what he implied through the repetition of this phrase. He writes:

“My life had been largely influenced by books up to that time—I had read a great deal rather than lived. Vicarious experiences in books. So I threw the books away preparing to live through actual experiences.” Prior to the discussion of his high school years, Hughes dwells upon only two adolescent moments: his forced religious conversion at a big revival while living with his aunt, and his early understanding of poetry through his mother and election as class poet. In each of these chapters, the scenes suggest moments

151 in which Hughes initially feels like an outsider; yet they ultimately become central to his burgeoning identity. Outside of these brief glimpses, Hughes essentially bypasses much of his childhood, opting instead for a macroscopic approach to his juvenile years, merely granting the reader an overview of his past life. In this way, specifics fade and make way for key themes to enter the foreground. Just as his autobiography employs a metaphor conflating life, literature, and the sea, this initial section leaves the reader with an aftertaste of poetry and transition more than anything else. The frequent moves of his childhood therefore prefigure the transnational emphasis at the heart of his autobiography.

Yet, more significant than the instability of his upbringing, his estranged father instills in him a sense of restlessness and the quest for home outside of himself. Having separated from his mother soon after Hughes was born, his father chose to “go away to another country, where a colored man could get ahead and make money quicker” (15).

Hughes’s father “went to Cuba, and then to Mexico, where there wasn’t any color line, or any Jim Crow” (15). The strained relationship with his father19 adds a sense of mystery to

Hughes’s upbringing; as a result, Hughes ultimately accepted an offer to live with his father in Mexico during the summer of 1919. Hughes’s tense relationships with his father play a key role in his identity formation and filter into his literary texts later in life. In an examination of the short story “Father and Son,” from Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks

19 Tara T. Green thoroughly examines Hughes’s relationship with his father by means of a close reading of The Big Sea, his novel Not without Laughter, and the two short stories

“Father and Son” and “Blessed Assurance” (18-42).

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(1934), Miller claims that Hughes utilizes “the mythic type of profound alienation derived from his own personal life with his father, James Nathaniel Hughes, as well as from Black American History” (Art and Imagination 6-7). This tension can also be seen in Hughes’s writing process as he originally titles the chapter “My Father,” which he later changes to the more impersonal “Father.” As with the earlier chapters, this section employs an episodic approach, favoring the detailed recollection of key memories over a thorough analysis of events. The reconnection with his father does not mend the relationships, and Hughes explains that his “summer in Mexico was the most miserable

[he had] ever known” (39). Despite that depressing summer, however, Hughes returns to

Mexico the next year. Through these combined moments with his father, Hughes discovers his desire for international travel, something his father also values, though they do not see eye to eye. James Hughes considers financial gain as his life’s motivation, which the younger Hughes disdains. Nonetheless, his father’s decision to live in Mexico and insistence that Hughes partake in Swiss and German higher education impress upon him the openness of experiences outside of the racist United States. Hughes does not accept the offer for a European education, opting instead to enroll at Columbia

University; but his father’s insistence that Paris is a place “where they don’t care about color” foreshadows the significance of the cosmopolitan city in Hughes’s later life (62).

Following his time in Mexico, Hughes becomes entrenched in the Harlem milieu before setting sail. One early episode in The Big Sea details his arrival in New York and the sheer excitement he conveys foreshadows the significance the city and travel would play in his life. This overwhelming experience can only be topped by Hughes’s recollection of his near-immediate journey toward a specific neighborhood of New York

153 after his initial arrival. He writes: “At every station I kept watching for the sign: 135th

Street. When I saw it, I held my breath. I came out onto the platform with two heavy bags and looked around. It was still early morning and people were going to work. Hundreds of colored people! I wanted to shake hands with them, speak to them. I hadn’t seen any colored people for so long—that is, any Negro colored people. I went up the steps and out into the bright September sunlight. Harlem! I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy again” (81). In this instance, Hughes provides the reader with an unconditional love and admiration for Harlem, the seat of the New Negro Movement. But this is only the beginning of his adventures. In fact, Hughes omits much of his time in

Harlem from his autobiographies, instead opting to focus on the kinetic aspects of his life.

Once Hughes finally succumbs to the beckoning “smell of the sea” and boards the

S.S. Malone, the scene which formally bookends the first section, his liminality fully achieves a double status as it becomes both physical and emotional, with each new location manifesting his innate transience of identity (89). In this way, the transnational side of Hughes’s racial liminality holds great significance. More than just a continuance of necessary transition, the move outside the boundaries of the United States, especially for Hughes, is a purposeful act of distancing himself from the limitations of American racism—not race—in search of home. Rosemary Marangoly George, in her The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (1996), explores this concept of “home” and the innate spatiality in its quest. She writes: “The politics of location come into play in the attempt to weave together a subject-status that is sustained by the experience of the place one knows as Home or by resistance to places that are patently ‘not home.’ ‘Location’ . . . suggests the variable nature of both ‘the home’ and

154

‘the self,’ for both are negotiated stances whose shapes are entirely ruled by the site from which they are defined” (2). Liminality therefore emerges as a direct result of this external/internal tension in the individual, removing agency from the subject. Racial liminality—or perhaps more accurately racist liminality—is forced upon an individual through prejudiced societal practices. Having no control over this marginalization, the subject attempts a resolution by means of embodied movement. While this transition may initially occur intranationally, its result is necessarily unsatisfactory, as the perceived movement is essentially static. An international move therefore becomes the logical next step, and the liminal perspective emphasizes the arbitrary nature of these invisible national borders, thereby emphasizing a transnational worldview. In this way, when

Hughes boards the freighter and sets sail on the (Black) Atlantic, his text dramatically establishes his subsequent identity as one outside of simply American. His first act at sea is purposefully symbolic:

It was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart—for it wasn’t only

the books that I wanted to throw away, but everything unpleasant and

miserable out of my past: the memory of my father, the poverty and

uncertainties of my mother’s life, the stupidities of color-prejudice, black

in a white world, the fear of not finding a job, the bewilderment of no one

to talk to about things that trouble you, the feeling of always being

controlled by others—by parents, by employers, by some outer necessity

not your own. All those things I wanted to throw away. To be free of. To

escape from. I wanted to be a man on my own, control my own life, and

go my own way. I was twenty-one. So I threw the books in the sea. (98)

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Leaving behind his former life, Hughes looks eastward for rescue. As he explains in this excerpt, transience was necessary for his identity construction in much the same way that

Fauset’s protagonists seek transnational relief from their inescapable oppression.

Following this line of reasoning, the detailed travels through Africa and Europe are ultimately the most pivotal scenes in The Big Sea.

The central and most vital of the three sections of Hughes’s autobiography is the one simply titled “Big Sea.” This segment establishes Hughes’s transnational identity.

Here, perhaps more significantly than any other part of his autobiographies, the recursive act of emplacement through the process of life writing foregrounds our understanding of

Hughes as both character and author. In this moment, we must understand Hughes in his duality of roles, settings, and times. Scrimgeour recognizes this doubling, describing

Hughes as “at once the individual, unembittered autobiographer white reviewers desire and the sterling leader of his race that black reviewers expect. Such a self-creation is fraught with dangers and elisions—Hughes, for example, must keep his ambiguous sexuality a secret, since neither audience would have been receptive to it—yet it demonstrates an impressive, necessary, and striking creativity in response to the expectations of African-American autobiographers” (97). Ultimately, this tension between fiction and nonfiction becomes imperative to my examination of Hughes’s life writing. The central section of the chapters therefore creates the best space wherein

Hughes can establish his malleable identity, via the fluidity of oceanic travel.

Mayer shares a similar sentiment when she declares: “For Hughes and for many other black travelers in the twentieth century, the Atlantic was indeed an important site of identification, and it was certainly no accident that Hughes chose to entitle his

156 autobiography The Big Sea, indicating a transatlantic dimension and thrust in his life”

(96-97). Within the central section of the autobiography, the most significant scenes are

Hughes’s trips to Africa and Europe. His arrival in Africa is a self-defining moment, which is why he introduces the monograph with the captivating scene. In the period leading up to his first glimpse of the continent, Hughes considers the weight and import of the locale: “All those days I was waiting anxiously to see Africa. And finally, when I saw the dust-green hills in the sunlight, something took hold of me inside. My Africa,

Motherland of the Negro peoples! And me a Negro! Africa! The real thing, to be touched and seen, not merely read about in a book” (10). The concept of Africa, then, holds a great connection to his self-identity up to that point, and he perhaps grants it too much power. As is frequently the case with liminal subjects in the move away from a marginalized space, the next location holds a potential agency to remove the liminality and, therefore, resolve the internal identity. In my chapter on Larsen, I invoke Michel de

Certeau’s theory of the Concept-city, which is also applicable here, though, obviously, the continent of Africa has a magnitude much greater than that of a city. More than just a personal savior, Hughes sees Africa for its connection to his ancestral past, which he details when reconsidering the composition process for his well-known poem “The Negro

Speaks of Rivers” aboard a train on his second trip to Mexico (55). Nonetheless, Hughes places his hope in Africa, a hope that is shattered when he discovers it to be “the only place in the world where [he had] ever been called a white man” (103). Hughes’s liminality rises to the foreground in this moment as his black blood places him as Other in the United States, and his white blood grants him the same in Africa. Becoming

157 disillusioned with Africa as the answer to racism and ostracism, Hughes nonetheless continues on his journey to “see the world” (89).

Following a brief hiatus in the States, Hughes soon sets out again, this time with his sights on Paris. Fitting of Hughes’s modus operandi at this point, he arrives in Paris by way of ship jobs that initially take him to the Caribbean and Holland. Hughes glosses over these trips, but the plotline slows soon thereafter. His time in Paris occupies the most space of his autobiography, even appearing more formative than his examination of

Harlem later in the book. Interestingly, Paris does not grant a full distance from liminality and racism. This series of chapters paints the picture of a man who gains a firsthand understanding of hunger, poverty, and unemployment.20 However, while his initial weeks in the City of Light are quite tentative, Hughes ultimately creates successful memories for himself there. In the Parisian neighborhood of Montmartre, Hughes finally discovers the black community for which he has sought; to borrow Walters’s title, Hughes makes his home in diaspora. Yet prior to his entrance into the night club scene via a job as doorman,

Hughes details one of the few scenes of his life writings in which he connects with someone else and feels a sense of community.

Upon first arrival in Paris, Hughes’s elation dissipates quickly as he discovers during the first few days in the city that work is nearly unobtainable for an African

20 Hughes similarly does not hold himself back from describing the vulgarities and imperfections of Europe in his short story “Home” (1934), in which protagonist Roy

Williams develops a “sadness” while in Berlin and ultimately exclaims of his time abroad, “Rotten everywhere” (38).

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American with no talents for the entertainment venues and nightclubs; compounding this realization, Hughes also discovers that even the cheapest hotels will leave him moneyless in just a matter of time. Yet during the initial days of his stay in Paris, he meets Sonya, a

Russian ballet dancer in a similarly despondent situation. As is the case with Hughes,

Sonya has become a captive in the city; neither one of them can gain employment to provide income, food, or lodging; each also lacks the funds to procure transportation out of France. Forced together out of “the quick friendship of the dispossessed,” the two pool their resources to share a room and food (150). The quick bond unites them in a way that enables each to survive another day. While Hughes delves into several other key relationships during his time in Europe, this early experience with Sonya establishes the hope Hughes places in global settings. Loftus highlights the section’s emphasis on

“economic interdependencies” rather than sexuality to address Hughes’s “ambiguous relations with women” and his apparent homosexual desire (154). Loftus is not incorrect in questioning the obvious omission of sexuality when Hughes discusses the living situation that requires the two roommates to share a bed; yet, for my purposes, the community in which Hughes engages with Sonya is much more significant. If liminality arises out of the inability to locate “home,” then the presence of mutual support momentarily sates the liminal quest for belonging, albeit in an instance of uncertainty itself. Later in The Big Sea, Hughes documents his travels with key Harlem Renaissance figures, including Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston; nevertheless, I argue that the time with Sonya is more foundational to Hughes’s identity, which he corroborates based on the number of dedicated pages for each.

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Significantly, through Hughes’s travels (and their recollection and rewriting) is the constant motion aboard a ship. Rather than traveling through Africa and Europe, he ventures from one port to the next aboard vessels of flux. In the times throughout his narrative when he is not near the ocean or on a ship, Hughes mostly chooses to travel by train, another instance of agentless travel, allowing him to act as a neutral passenger. In this way, he prioritizes the portions of his life that do not relate to the Harlem

Renaissance. For instance, the third section of The Big Sea, “Black Renaissance,” begins to address Hughes’s literary experiences and artistic circles; yet this description takes a backseat to his transnational experiences that pivotally contribute to his identity formation. Hughes prioritizes his life abroad over his time in the United States, effectively granting more insight into his international travels than his literary career.

This thematic focus leads Scrimgeour to view the text as “more of a travelogue, a chance for Hughes to detail the places he has seen, the events he has witnessed. . . . [T]he book does not seem to be nearly as much about who Hughes is as what he has seen” (98).

Based on this reading, the Hughes of The Big Sea is a young world traveler more than he is a significant literary figure. Nonetheless, as a historical account of the period, this concluding third of the text grants interesting and entertaining insight into the workings of the Harlem Renaissance, “never [to] be surpassed as an original source of insight and information on the age” (Rampersad 1:379).

The majority of The Big Sea’s final section employs an episodic rather than a comprehensive approach to Hughes’s involvement in the Harlem Renaissance. The first several chapters of “Black Renaissance” establish the milieu of 1920s Harlem, as Hughes details his literary connections and the prominence of rent parties and speakeasies during

160 a time “when the Negro was in vogue”21 (228). More relevant here, however, is his continued emphasis on travel during his time in America. Though more cursory than his treatment of Paris, the details of his trip through the southern United States solidify the fact that Hughes feels most at home when in a transitory state. Hughes illustrates this concept most succinctly in the chapter titled “New Orleans—Havana” wherein, as the author, he combines scenes of stasis and transition frequently to create a result rife with liminal tension. When arriving in New Orleans, for instance, Hughes stresses his procurement of “a room not far from the railroad station, with a lady who rented out rooms, both transient and permanent” (290). This room is perfect, with its location and description underscoring Hughes’s need for transition. In fact, he soon leaves for a spontaneous trip to Havana. More than desiring a visit to Cuba, however, Hughes characterizes this decision as a desire for the journey itself: “I walked along beside the

Nardo under the swinging cargo nets, wondering where she voyaged to, and feeling a bit homesick for a job on a boat myself. . . . And in a few minutes I was signed up for a trip to Havana and back” (291). His actual time in Cuba occupies very little space in the book, once again accentuating the process of travel over the destination itself. The remaining chapters of the book follow this same pattern, showcasing Hughes’s many interests and travels as he flits from one place to the next. In concluding the autobiography, he returns to the epigraph to leave the narrative where it began. His final statements make it clear that he has not finished his story.

21 David Levering Lewis riffed on this phrase when he titled his monumental history of the era When Harlem Was in Vogue (1979).

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The Big Sea houses great value in terms of understanding both the Harlem

Renaissance and the literary figure of Langston Hughes. I have bypassed large portions of the text to focus my inquiry on Hughes’s travels and self-articulation as a global figure.

While both of his published autobiographies employ these themes, the first establishes a transnational identity in tandem with the story of his adolescence and rite of passage into life as an adult and a writer. By understanding the ways in which Hughes prioritizes this reading of himself within The Big Sea, we can move our interaction with his later autobiographical works to a more external perspective.

Around the World Home: I Wonder as I Wander and Beyond

The second of Hughes’s autobiographies picks up where the first leaves off and continues the preoccupation with travel. In terms of emplacement, Hughes is much older as the narrator of I Wonder as I Wander than he was for The Big Sea, with a gap of sixteen years between the publications of the two texts. Nonetheless, the action of his second autobiography continues the thematic liminal motion that he emphasizes in his first one, a “pattern of ceaseless wandering” as Sidonie Smith terms it (75). Richard K.

Barksdale describes I Wonder as I Wander as “a carefully edited account of names, places, and events which he had seen and encountered during his world-circling search for meccas of promise which might relieve the world of political oppression and economic exploitation” (Langston Hughes 71). Barksdale rightfully highlights the liminal impetus behind Hughes’s travels. However, in an examination of Hughes as author, the composition and writing process demonstrates that Hughes took an integral interest in the marketing of the book. In this case, then, while still examining the key factors of the published product itself, I will place a greater emphasis on Hughes’s external control over

162 the book’s reception. Inherently connected, due to the genre of autobiography, Hughes’s actions essentially influence his authorial identity as main character. Again, his dual roles through the process place liminal stress upon the creation and reception of I Wonder as I

Wander.

The idea of personally engaging with the public in an attempt to market his books was nothing new; in 1940, Rampersad notes, “he seized every opportunity that came his way to promote The Big Sea” (1:390). Despite these efforts, The Big Sea was a commercial failure in Hughes’s eyes, not obtaining the successful status of Richard

Wright’s Native Son (1940) as Hughes had hoped (1:393). Even though it received various language translations throughout the 1940s and “[e]veryone, it seemed, wanted to read the story of his life,” the book was not profitable and he still “lived close to poverty”

(2:113). Regardless of the sixteen-year gap between his two autobiographies, Hughes certainly desired to avoid a similar letdown with the publication of I Wonder as I

Wander. His involvement in the promotion and marketing of the book, as evidenced through his letters and other archival materials, demonstrates not merely Hughes’s quest for financial and critical success but also the deliberate construction of his character- identity through the act of recursive life writing and emplacement.

Soon after the publication of The Big Sea, Hughes knew he would write another autobiography and began the planning process almost immediately, despite several false starts and the ultimate delay in completion. Over the course of the sixteen years, he kept the second volume in mind even when he had to forsake it for other projects. For

Hughes’s second autobiographical effort, Carl Van Vechten suggested that he attempt to include more information specifically addressing race relations in America; in a 1941

163 letter, Hughes responds, “I agree with you about the second part of The Big Sea. Only I don’t want it to get so weighty that it weighs me down, too” (Selected Letters 233). At play within the text of I Wonder as I Wander, then, is the tension between Hughes’s personal experiences and more general (and political) commentary regarding the racist laws and societies of his travels. Hughes conveys the challenge of this balancing act in a

1956 letter to Arna Bontemps, in which he explains, “I’ve now cut out all the impersonal stuff, down to a running narrative with me in the middle on every page, extraneous background and statistics and stories not my own gone by the board. The kind of intense condensation that, of course, keeps an autobiography from being entirely true, in that nobody’s life is pure essence without pulp, waste matter, and rind—which art, of course, throws in the trash can. No wonder folks read such books and say, ‘How intensely you’ve lived!’” (334). In a parenthetical aside to Bontemps in the letter, Hughes continues, “The three hundred duller months have just been thrown away, that’s all, in this case; as in

THE BIG SEA, too. And nobody will know I ever lived through them. They’ll think I galloped around the world at top speed” (334). In a vein similar to the liminal travels he depicts in his autobiographies, Hughes here conveys the in-between space of the authorial process itself. As autobiographer, he discovers the falsity of the text that mounts with each cut and consolidation.

While Hughes expresses apparent dismay at this attribute of the editing process, he soon relies upon the various sensationalized elements in an attempt to gain a broader readership. Based on his letter to Bontemps, one may surmise that Hughes seeks to create truth through his autobiographical writings, or at the very least that he hopes to create a historical account of his firsthand experiences with certain locations and figures (Miller,

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Art and Imagination 28). This interpretation may appear logical in light of Hughes’s comments to Bontemps; yet he ultimately takes advantage of the compelling momentum afforded his autobiographies via the omission of the “duller months.” In the post-creation period of his second autobiography, Hughes frequently employs the selective magnification of various elements of the published work. In contrast to the supposed complaint in his letter, this practice purposefully avoids a holistic consideration of the book, instead presenting it in a less-than-truthful light at times. While the letters and archival materials on this subject are limited, they still offer an insightful glimpse into the other side of the page, melding the emplaced character of Hughes with the authorial one in a dichotomous juxtaposition.

In his introduction to the 1993 second Hill and Wang edition, Rampersad similarly proposes the effect Hughes’s cuts and edits have on the finished product: “Like almost all provocative autobiographies, I Wonder as I Wander raises questions about the tension between truth and design—about the relationship between the facts of Hughes’s life and the art of autobiography, which inevitably involves selection, suppression, and more than a little invention, as the writer seeks both to make his or her story vivid and to present a self-portrait that is compelling and also credible” (xv). In this way, Hughes’s dense second autobiography employs the craft of creation and alteration to a great degree; even in a 400-page text, the amount of condensation and consolidation illustrates the ultimate tone of the work, which Hughes conveys to Bontemps. For instance, only covering a fraction of the time explored in the first autobiography (six years versus twenty-nine), I Wonder as I Wander nonetheless includes a detailed examination of

Hughes’s international travels. In fact, six of the book’s eight sections utilize primary

165 settings outside of the continental United States. The autobiography, which spans 1931-

1937, follows Hughes as he travels to such places as Cuba, the American South, San

Francisco, much of the Soviet Union, Japan, China, Hawaii, Carmel-By-the-Sea,

Cleveland, New York, Spain, and France. These years are not straightforward and

Hughes does not follow a simple trajectory. Quite fitting with the identity he creates in

The Big Sea, then, these recollections paint Hughes as a man seeking adventure, essentially as a vagabond with no definite destination in mind. On an undated page in his research notes, Hughes itemizes his travels, with the “TOTAL MILLAGE [sic]

TRAVELLED IN NARRATIVE COVERED IN ‘I WONDER AS I WANDER’” listed as 53,799. Clearly, one of Hughes’s primary goals through writing and promoting his autobiography is to demonstrate his affinity for travel. As Hughes stands in Paris on New

Year’s Eve at the end of the book, he recounts the various places where he celebrated

New Years past, specifically naming Cleveland, San Francisco, Mexico City, Carmel, and Tashkent (405). The necessary byproduct of the editing and writing process— namely, the reductive collapsing of his grand journeys—could easily be seen as a downfall of the autobiography, calling its veracity and value into question. Indeed,

Hughes expresses this concern himself to Bontemps. But Hughes also uses this issue to his advantage, calling on the diverse elements present in his text to extend his authorial identity construction outward from the content itself to the eventual audience reception.

At this moment, following the publication of I Wonder as I Wander, Hughes appeals to the business of literature.

Partaking in the publicity of a published work is not surprising or unheard of for an author; however, Hughes’s role in the marketing of his second autobiography takes

166 publicity a step further, primarily due to the genre of his promotion. As I hope to have established by now, the autobiographical act is necessarily recursive and creative; through this process, the autobiographer emplaces him/herself within the narrative, thereby splitting him/herself into the dual roles of author and character. In writing the autobiography, the autobiographer employs creative license to interpret the newly fictionalized character. As I examine The Big Sea, this consideration of Hughes’s emplacement in the text plays a key role in the investigation. Here, in presenting

Hughes’s efforts external to the text, the dual roles that split through the autobiographical process attempt to reunite, as the marketing and promotional materials insist the two— autobiographer and protagonist—to be one. Following this line of reasoning, we can see how Hughes attempts to maintain more authorial control over the reception of his second autobiography, thereby continuing his act of self-articulation.

This attempt directly relates to Hughes’s continual crafting of his identity through his life writings. For instance, a synopsis labeled “Brief Resume of I WONDER AS I

WANDER” included in his archival materials, appearing, based on the handwritten edits, to have been written by Hughes himself, embraces sensational marketing tools to emphasize the various elements of the book. As a theme of Hughes’s I Wonder as I

Wander promotional materials, international travel appeals to the audience’s sense of adventure while mentions of race and politics seek to engage readers on a deeper level. In this case, Hughes utilizes both, initially describing the autobiography as “a personal narrative of travel and adventure in the world of both poetry and politics from the

America of the depression period to Russia of the famine years, from Harlem around the world to Samarkand and back via the Golden Gate, from Topeka to Tashkent. It is the

167 simple yet dramatic chronicle of a Negro writer’s wanderings from the Caribbean to

Soviet Asia, China and Japan, with poetry as a passport and the written word as a ticket into the cities and homes and hearts of people around the world.” Hughes purposefully calls upon the controversial political milieu of Asia to entice potential readers; yet scholars have frequently pointed out that Hughes neglects to reveal many details regarding his leftist leanings and ties to the Communist party during the 1930s.22 Though the scenes mentioned in the write-up technically exist in the book, it verges on false advertisement if the readers come to expect lurid details from within the Soviet Union.

With the Second Red Scare fresh in the minds of Americans, this fact surely raised some interest in prospective readers. In the synopsis, Hughes states: “This book contrasts, too, the handling of the color line in such varied places as Haiti and Uzbekistan, the United

States and the USSR, but always in terms of people not problems, of incidents not social theory. . . . [T]his is a book about the men and women and children and dogs around the world whom the author, regardless of class, color, or politics, liked or disliked in his years of wandering. It is a warm and intimate and almost continuously amusing book revealing the personality of an American writer in his journeying around and about this warm and human and exciting earth he loves.” In a way, these final comments pander to the audience, attempting to give them a well-rounded book full of exploration, intrigue, and heart. This attempt at universal appeal seemingly conflicts with Hughes’s previous strivings toward self-identity, yet the recurring tropes of his marketing material succeed in reiterating his global focus.

22 See Rampersad, Faith Berry, and James S. Haskins.

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Continuing this mode of inquiry, Hughes’s archives include an undated list of

“Possible Blurb Material” and a list of “Possible Publicity Ideas,” the latter of which was sent to Ted Amussen, his editor at Rinehart, on September 9, 1956. These promotional materials succinctly demonstrate his desire to gain a broad audience while foregrounding certain themes in I Wonder as I Wander. In each of these cases, the advertisements emphasize a variety of elements from his second autobiography, often amplifying minor scenes or details as a way of creating a diverse series of statements. In his list of blurbs,

Hughes primarily employs the strategy of general and ambiguous statements, as can be seen in five examples: “the story of a story teller whose stories are not stories but real stories”; “the saga of a soul carrying a body about the globe cue-balled by its times—and

8-balled now and then”; “a simple history of our complex times”; “the wonder of finding the same blue sky and the same stars everywhere”; and “the beginning and the end of a book with something between the first word and the last called life.” These blurbs provide very little in terms of relevant insight into the content of the book. Instead, they aim for universality and mimic sensational headlines that might intrigue someone enough to pick up a copy. Nonetheless, one of the blurbs breaks the mold and stands out as more politically charged than the rest. Fitting with Hughes’s abstract for his autobiography, it preys upon the simultaneous fear and fascination with communism: “the narrative of a journey around the world from capitalism to communism and back.” Following a different format, another list calls upon the vast experiences of Hughes’s travels abroad, also highlighting Asian culture and politics: “If you want to know how they make LOVE

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IN UZBEKISTAN”; “If you want to travel around the whole wide world, TOXXXX23

TO TASHKENT, HARLEM TO HELSINKI, SAMARKAND TO SPAIN, MEXICO TO

MADRID”; “If you want to know how LIFE IN THE SOVIET UNION impressed a

Negro writer”; “If you want to know about the HORRORS OF SHANGHAI”; and “If you want to laugh with the MAMMY OF MOSCOW.” In each case, regardless of his apparent motive for universality or controversy, these introductions to the book remain consistent with the autobiographical self he begins fashioning through The Big Sea.

In one final instance of authorial control over the reception of I Wonder as I

Wander, Hughes writes an ad for the Chicago Defender proposing the book as “AN

IDEAL CHRISTMAS GIFT.” The advertisement labels the autobiography a “fascinating

400 page Afro-American autobiographical travelogue,” and it paints Hughes as the consummate voyager. Potential receivers of such a gift include “the friend or relative who likes good reading, adventure, and exciting far away places,” “anyone who likes to know what life is like in the West Indies, Europe, Russia, China, and Japan,” and “anyone interested in the contrasts between Capitalism and Communism, color lines in the U.S.A. and color lines in other parts of the world.” Yet again, Hughes aims for a diverse portfolio of topics when promoting his autobiography. In other words, this book is not for a specific person; it is for everyone.

Ultimately, these autobiographical marketing materials serve two functions. First, each time Hughes summarizes or presents the contents of his autobiography, he does so

23 The final portion of this word is smudged beyond recognition, though I would offer

“TOPEKA” as an educated guess.

170 in terms of a global, transnational identity. At times, he explicitly highlights the travel aspects, as he ventures from one location to the next. These materials therefore contain multiple syntactical constructions of transition. Important to the reader of these advertisements and blurbs is the fact that Hughes was well-traveled. In fact, these locations and the act of travel appear more prominently than Hughes’s name or his status as literary figure. Even the blurbs that discuss the book in the most generic of terms offer an image of a book worthy of consumption by anyone capable of reading, regardless of race, nationality, or gender. The concepts, therefore, lead organically into the second function of these pieces. Not only do these glimpses of the book continue the self- construction Hughes begins in his first autobiography, but they do so alongside the idea that the consumers could be first-time readers of Hughes. In this way, these brief synopses of the life of Hughes are more accessible than either of his published autobiographies. For some readers, the first idea they consider regarding Hughes could be the fact that he traveled all over the world, spending a good deal of time in Soviet Russia.

Yet, while The Big Sea begins Hughes’s work of emplacement and self-creation, the short, quick ads, could be what establish his identity in the minds of many.

In viewing Hughes’s efforts to publicize and sell I Wonder as I Wander, then, we can see how time and time again he sought to foreground two traits: travel and politics.

Though the travel is quite apparent, any in-depth commentary (or validation) of communism or leftist ideas is conspicuously absent. Nonetheless, he latches onto these concepts and places them in every promotional piece he creates. Also absent in the marketing materials is the reference to himself as a writer or literary figure. As is the case in The Big Sea, literary production plays a minor role in I Wonder as I Wander, taking the

171 backseat to his many journeys and voyages. Nonetheless, Hughes rarely attempts to utilize his career as a selling point. In this way, we can see that Hughes clearly views the transnational side of his identity as most important in telling his own life story. Despite his attempts to create a bestseller, his second autobiography follows in the footsteps of his first one and fails to live up to his expectations. In a review of I Wonder as I Wander, dated December 23, 1956, J. Saunders Redding provides a mixed opinion, arguing that the book “is frank and charming, though neither events nor people are seen in depth. Mr.

Hughes, it seems, did more wandering than wondering” (36). In a 1943 letter to

Bontemps, thirteen years prior to the publication of the second autobiography, Hughes seemingly admits the same thing: “‘I Wonder As I Wander’ might even now be published, if I did not wander even more than I wonder. But I expect to sit down and finish it this summer” (127). Looking back on this letter, we know that Hughes did not live up to his goal of finishing the second volume of his autobiography during the 1940s.

However, this ostensibly innocuous comment sheds light on an innate dichotomy:

Hughes’s personal struggles between living his life and writing his life. His failure to make true on his promise to complete a book comes back to haunt him later, when he plans to write a third autobiography without success. Despite its unfortunate lack of existence, the remnants of Hughes’s notes and outlines contribute to this identity as autobiographer/life writer.

Though the available secondary criticism of Hughes’s life writing is limited to his two published texts, in consideration of Hughes’s autobiographical corpus, it is worth noting that based on Hughes’s letters and archival notes, he originally planned to continue his autobiography. “I myself plan to do perhaps a third autobiographical volume

172 in due time; maybe even a fourth,” Hughes writes to Arna Bontemps in 1963, just over four years before his death. In fact, Hughes mentions a third autobiography in passing several times, such as in letters to Maxim Lieber in 1956, Roy Blackburn in 1956, and to

Bontemps in 1954 and 1962. Despite archival materials and letters directly referencing

Hughes’s intention for a third autobiography, this fact and its related information remain conspicuously absent even in Rampersad’s exhaustive two-volume biography and

Miller’s useful consideration of Hughes’s autobiographies. Even the recently released

Selected Letters, edited by Rampersad and David Roessel, contains no editorial footnote or explanation when Hughes explicitly mentions a third volume. James A. Emanuel, in his Langston Hughes (1967) written before Hughes’s death, claims that “the sequel that he hopes to record should rival” his first two autobiographies (178). In a comparison that

Hughes would surely appreciate, his autobiographical works could be considered his version of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, finding it incomplete and in need of annexation throughout his life. Hughes considered Whitman to be one of his influences, and a number of distinct references to Whitman and his poetry exist throughout Hughes’s literary canon. In his archival research notes for I Wonder as I Wander, for instance,

Hughes includes an undated scrap of paper with a Whitman quotation: “My dearest dream is for an internationality of poems and poets, binding the lands of the earth closer than all treaties and diplomacy.” Clearly, Hughes felt a connection with Whitman’s sentiment of a transnational literary identity, which continues to be evident through the various notes and research materials for a third autobiography I discuss here. In a copy of

173 a letter addressed simply to “L.G.,”24 Hughes discusses his personal understanding of his autobiographies, as well as his thoughts for a potential third: “My first autobiography,

The Big Sea, was about trying to become a writer; this one—my second—is about being a writ r [sic]; and my third will concern trying to remain a writer.” Interestingly, Hughes frames his autobiographical journey in terms of his identity as writer, despite the fact that any discussion of sheer literary endeavors comprises the minority of his writing, taking a backseat to his geographical journeys of the 1920s and 1930s. Based on the available materials indicating his plans for continued work on his autobiography, however, Hughes maintained a fascination with his global travels and he tied this interest to his self-written identity. While a third autobiography never moved past the idea stage, the information we have contributes to the complexities of Hughes’s life and writings as we look back.

Fortunately, Hughes found the archiving of his letters and other writings to be important, leading him to donate the majority of the available archival materials himself, which Rampersad establishes in the Introduction to the Selected Letters (x). These vast stores of letters and research notes enable us to understand his thought process in the preparation of his works. For example, in writing his autobiographies, Hughes initially planned for The Big Sea to encompass more of his early life, with the initial chapter outlines collapsing his ultimate “Black Renaissance” chapters into his “Big Sea” section, with a different concluding section entitled “Around the World” with chapters detailing his travels to Asia. Through the process, however, Hughes eventually scrapped these Asia chapters and granted the Harlem-centric chapters their own section. His travels to Asia

24 The adjacent paper scrap appears to indicate that L.G. refers to Lloyd K. Garrison.

174 and elsewhere would then appear as a central element of his second autobiography. A letter to Noël Sullivan, written in 1939, provides further indication of the originally planned scope of The Big Sea when he mentions he is “not yet quite up to that first trip to

California and the departure for Russia,” which would later factor as key scenes of I

Wonder as I Wander. This insight indicates Hughes’s grand plans for his writings, which frequently need revision through the writing process. This fact is interesting in regards to

Hughes’s published autobiographies, but it also sheds light and offers a possible explanation as to why a third volume never gained much momentum.

Even prior to the publication of I Wonder as I Wander, Hughes had the idea for a third volume in mind. For instance, on a list of possible titles for his second autobiography, “3rd Volume” appears at the bottom of the page next to the titles

“TOMORROW’S NOT TODAY” and “COME TRAVEL WITH ME.” Perhaps the greatest information regarding this potential third volume comes in the form of several folders in the Langston Hughes Papers with research and preparation materials directly referencing the possible title and included chapters.25 Within these folders, Hughes refers to the volume as “3rd Big Sea,” “50 Years a Negro,” and “DON’T WORRY ABOUT

THE SUNSET GUN.”26 The planning materials also include a chronology of Hughes’s

25 The Langston Hughes Paper are housed in the James Weldon Johnson Collection at

Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

26 This is a reference to Dorothy Parker’s volume of poetry, Sunset Gun (1928). A small scrap of paper here gives more information. At the top of the page, Hughes has typed

“‘DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE SUNSET GUN’ (Possible title for autobiography)”

175 travels during the 1930s and 1940s. These outlines indicate that Hughes planned for a third autobiography while he was still in the preparation stage for I Wonder as I Wander, with a red pencil line dividing a page of events from 1935-42, with the words “2nd ‘Big

Sea’” written above the line and “3rd ‘Big Sea’” below.

At some point in time, then, Hughes apparently planned for his third volume to continue the story where his second left off. More than this sheer chronological endeavor, however, the folder indicates a reevaluation of Hughes’s entire life. No official draft or outline of a potential third volume exists, but the materials in this archive include more than direct references to the possibility of an autobiography. If categorized, the clips and notes housed in this collection could perhaps more correctly be considered a scrapbook.

The largest folder houses a diverse assortment of writings and clippings, including

Archibald Rutledge sonnets, a map of Paris, childhood drawings, and career test score sheets, in addition to numerous handwritten notes. Taken as a whole, no coherent narrative or chronology presents itself. This collection of information offers no skeleton of a third volume; if anything, the folder presents a palimpsest in which the disparate articles emphasize the diversity of Hughes’s interests and lived experiences. Most importantly here, as with his two published autobiographies, Hughes is confronted with

with the following passage handwritten beneath and flowing onto the back of the page:

“Sounds like the sunset gun done sound. It is the sunset gun. What we gonna do? We gonna go. And leave these girls? Them girls don’t belong to us. Nor us to ourselves, neither. But do you think, just because the sunset gun sound, the sun ain’t gonna rise no more? We will see them girls again, boy. Don’t worry about no sunset gun.”

176 the obstacle of which elements of himself and the periphery of his life to bring into the fray of self-creation through the autobiographical act. While many of these included artifacts are surely present as signposts of memory, their inspiration houses the potential energy of recollection and rewriting. In the same way that the creation of I Wonder as I

Wander was comprised of multiple starts and stops spanning more than a decade, the vast possibilities for another autobiography surely presented a daunting task.

Following the publication of I Wonder as I Wander, it appears that one option for a third volume did not involve new chapters but rather an edited consolidation of The Big

Sea and I Wonder as I Wander. A manila envelope grants insight into this project, ultimately leading to the now well-known Hill and Wang editions of Hughes’s autobiographies. The top of the envelope provides the initial typed information regarding the idea: “PAGES REMOVED from ‘THE BIG SEA’ (English edition) and ‘I WONDER

AS I WANDER’ during the cutting of these autobiographical books for combination into a single volume under the tentative title, ‘WORLD WITHOUT END’27 for consideration by Hill and Wang, New York, February 4, 1963.” Below this paragraph, Hughes handwrites an explanation of the eventual outcome: “Hill & Wang decided to bring out each book in full. ‘The Big Sea’ was therefore republished in paper and hard covers in

September, 1963.” In keeping with the volume’s description in Hughes’s letter to Lloyd

Garrison, another idea for the book was to address the various correspondences he received over the years. A sheet of paper with the title “Different kinds of fan letters, etc. received” offers a list of five points: “White woman, Negro sweetheart”; “Man who

27 This also appears as the title of the eighth and final section of I Wonder as I Wander.

177 wants to know name of a Mexican divorce lawyer”; “Cape Town librarian wants list of

Negro books”; “Woman who wants money to educate daughter”; and “Causes wanting contributions.” Clearly, Hughes sought a way to continue his life story—and self- construction—though it took different forms over the years and did not result in anything new.

Part of me hopes to find a previously undiscovered partial draft of a third autobiography of Hughes one day, but I realize the unlikelihood of such a discovery due to the exhaustive nature of his archives and his personal willingness to contribute to this effort prior to his death. Nonetheless, I put stock in the available materials. The discussion here only scrapes the surface of the various notes and materials in Hughes’s archives, many of which appear not to have an obvious purpose for inclusion in the archives. Yet, in seeking the author’s own sense of selfhood and identity, there is no better place to look. In The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes (1989), Miller contends, “It would be an oversimplification” to believe “that Hughes wrote two autobiographies without revealing himself” (20). As I demonstrate throughout this chapter, I agree with Miller’s statement. I also believe, however, that the self Hughes reveals in his autobiographical writings is not innately the Hughes performing the writing. The real Hughes may travel the world, but he also experiences “duller months” that fail to make the roster of his writings. In viewing his unpublished materials, I contend that we can get a glimpse into the mind of Hughes, to peer through his eyes as he stares into the mirror, even if no definitive portrait can be painted from the remnants.

In his autobiographical works, then, Hughes conveys a constant resistance to resolution. Through the emplacement of himself in the published texts and the peripheral

178 articles, Hughes embraces his fluid status. And indeed, his existence as autobiographer emplaced within the act of life writing is one of continued impermanence and liminality.

Therefore, I end my discussion of Hughes on a note of contradiction and irresolution. As one of the most enduring African American writers, Hughes nonetheless remained a liminal figure oscillating between identities, enacting this transience physically through transnational travel, professionally via multi-genre prowess, and literarily by reliving his life through the composition of autobiographical writings. While his poetry and other writings certainly stemmed from personal life experiences, his autobiographies are arguably the most personal of his works, establishing most candidly his desired construction of himself. When writing himself for the first time, he chose a Big Sea as metaphor for his life. When writing himself for the last time in his final poem, which I take the liberty to read autobiographically, Hughes set himself upon that same Big Sea, no longer riding as passenger aboard a freighter, but as the titular Flotsam guided by wind and current. While his ashes may be interred in Harlem, his spirit floats on. Through this perpetual transience and liminality, then, Hughes has become one with the sea, and it is now our role to keep pulling those nets.

179

Conclusion

Continuing a New Black Transnationalism

In the twenty-first century, nearly a century since the beginning of the Harlem

Renaissance, the works of Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and

Langston Hughes remain just as relevant as when they were initially published. The

Harlem Renaissance was a period of transition, one in which the racist society created a communal liminality, something experienced by many individuals who sought freedom in self-definition. The current cultural milieu is not much different, as scenes of racial oppression and violence fill the news. The problem has therefore not dissipated, and more recent authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries continue to address the idea of transnational liminality that exists at the center of a modern black identity. Rather than rehashing my previous arguments, I extend the purview of my theoretical claims outward.

In the introduction, I established the necessity of transnational liminality and its application to a new Black Transnationalism. Here, I demonstrate the relevance of such a project.

Sidonie Smith, while examining black autobiography, provides insightful commentary on the connection between movement and liminality, a trope that continues in black literature following the Harlem Renaissance. Smith suggests, “With no geographical place of freedom, the exile may be forever plagued with a lack of at-home- ness. Such total alienation is a devastating burden. Or he may, in fact, be running from himself and his past. Either way, the act of running becomes a new form of

180 imprisonment. . . . The ultimate place of freedom lies within the self, which alone must be content to create its own ‘free’ consciousness” (75). As she succinctly explains, the black subject experiences liminality and transition following the forced exile from the overarching society, a society that shuns the racial minority into a marginalized existence.

Regardless of the impetus for motion, individual quests for identity and freedom are just as internal as they are external. Therefore, several recent novels exhibit this same degree of racial dissatisfaction.

A prime example from the mid-twentieth century is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

(1952). The invisibility of the unnamed narrator doubles as liminality; the novel could just as legitimately have been titled Liminal Man. The dense text details the protagonist’s development from an optimistic young man determined to impact his race to a man self- aware of his liminality who ultimately accepts the futility of his actions. As he describes his situation in the novel’s epilogue, “I’m an invisible man and it placed me in a hole—or showed me the hole I was in, if you will—and I reluctantly accepted the fact” (572). The present-day narrator has become cynical and embraces his liminality, housing himself in a marginal and forgotten basement. The novel is a perfect example of the possible tragic conclusion that can mire a liminal subject despite any effort at escape.

Additionally, while I briefly mentioned Toni Morrison’s Beloved in my introduction, a novel that fits nicely with this theoretical approach, her more recent Home

(2012) creates an interesting addition to this exploration, as the novel employs an ironic use of the concept of home by emphasizing instability and literal homelessness.

Published in 2012, the novel’s 1950s setting examines the racist American society prior to the Civil Rights Movement. The protagonist Frank Money finds himself struggling to

181 construct his self-identity, and his return to America following his deployment to Korea presents him with the challenges of undiagnosed PTSD and racial stereotyping.

Morrison’s epigraph to the novel is a telling framing device that speaks to Frank’s racial liminality:

Whose house is this?

Whose night keeps out the light

In here?

Say, who owns this house?

It’s not mine.

I dreamed another, sweeter, brighter

With a view of lakes crossed in painted boats;

Of fields wide as arms open for me.

This house is strange.

Its shadows lie.

Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key? (xi)

Frank’s conclusion ultimately offers some sense of happiness when he and his sister finally settle into a new family dynamic of their own and attempt to fashion some semblance of home. This ending starkly contrasts with Ellison’s invisible man who only validates the presence and hostility of liminality. Nonetheless, both novels demonstrate the difficulty of establishing a home and identity that falls outside the accepted societal norm.

Each of these novels connects clearly to the African Diaspora, and they all benefit from the application of transnational liminality. Countless other contemporary authors

182 and their writings should be added to this list, which is why I propose this new approach to Black Transnationalism. For instance, Ferdinand Dennis’s Duppy Conqueror (1998) takes a page from McKay’s Banana Bottom as it follows the protagonist’s journey from

Jamaica to England and Africa during the 1930s; Lila Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom: A

Memoir in Black and White (2012) uses the genre of graphic novel/memoir and the external perspective of an Argentinian immigrant family to address the horrors of the events that prefigured the Civil Rights Act of 1965; and Mat Johnson’s Loving Day

(2015) uses the contemporary milieu of a twenty-first century global society to create the complex story of a biracial man’s return to America from Ireland and his attempts to connect with a daughter he never knew he had. The current state of literature, then, is rife with works that would benefit from this undertaking.

Nonetheless, for my purposes here, I offer up one recent novel as an exemplary model. Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) is the quintessential example of a contemporary black, transnational, liminal novel. The protagonist Julius is a Nigerian-German psychiatrist living in America. He is a biracial man whose identity seems in flux throughout the entire novel. Seeking a supposed home and family connection, he travels to Brussels in search of his grandmother, though he never locates her. He only revisits his homeland of Nigeria via flashbacks. The opening chapter foregrounds his aimless wandering, and he appears just as directionless when the novel concludes. Teju Cole’s introspective and masterful novel has received much critical acclaim and praise since its publication in 2011. These accolades have been warranted as the novel unashamedly examines and questions such relevant concepts as community, belonging, identity, and home through the perspective of Julius. In the five years since the novel’s publication,

183

Pieter Vermeulen, Katherine Hallemeier, and Igor Maver have begun the critical process by highlighting Julius’s social interactions in various locations that lend to his grand sense of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, Julius’s present-day encounters in New York and

Brussels, as well as his flashbacks to his younger days in Nigeria, illuminate the extreme diversity of communities based on ethnicity, nationality, religion, and politics in these

“shared” locations. Picking up where this analysis leaves off, and taking the topic of

Julius’s perpetual motion a step further, I propose an inspection of the way in which the constant transitions, becoming increasingly transnational, shed light on an underlying racial liminality.

Applying this definition to Julius and his narrated story, we can see the ways in which the action (and inaction) of Open City lies “neither here nor there” and “betwixt and between” (Turner, Forest of Symbols 97). Traditionally, liminality has indicated a transitional state, one that should exist temporarily. In transitioning from one state to another, the subject becomes liminal and therefore outside the boundaries, or between the cracks, of society. In the twenty-first century, this liminality becomes more of an invisible state, operating within the subject mentally and psychologically, as is the case with Julius. Through this internalized state, then, the ostensible temporality vanishes, creating a perpetual liminality. Within Cole’s novel, a constant underlying dissatisfaction-masked-as-curiosity pushes Julius to employ a physical mode of transition as a way of mirroring his internal feelings of dislocation. In this way, the metropolitan settings of New York and Brussels lend to the creation and perpetuation of liminality.

Exploring this significance, Stefan L. Brandt posits that the city, especially within a postmodern context, becomes itself a liminal space. Though his argument predates

184

Cole’s novel by two years, its applicability to Open City is striking and useful. According to Brandt, “[t]he cityscape in postmodern literature and film seems at once empowering and claustrophobic, conveying to the intrepid flâneur an aura of mysteriousness and bottomless enigma. By privileging abstract space over historical space, postmodern urban fiction creates an eerie field of alienation and potential deconstruction, in which the center becomes periphery and vice versa. The notion of closure is further abandoned in this liminal space in favor of the concepts of transition and ambiguity” (553). Brandt’s explication perfectly encapsulates Julius’s experience, as his first-person narrative with frequent flashbacks provides clear indication of his lack of closure in diverse areas of his life, from his father’s death, to his estranged relationship with his mother, to the supposedly forgotten rape he committed years earlier. The incompleteness and nonlinearity of his narration breed ambiguity, and the aimlessness of his local and global travels conveys his unhomeliness.

As Open City begins, Julius invites the reader into his personal thoughts and musings as though they were familiar and old acquaintances. The initial sentence details his inclination to take frequents walks through Manhattan, then he quickly juxtaposes his ambulation with thoughts of bird migrations, an image and metaphor that recurs frequently in the pages to come (3). He even alludes to the importance of this emphasis on transition and migration when he retrospectively questions if the two are connected

(4). This casual start of the novel, indicative of Cole’s signature writing style, feels purposefully constructed, no seemingly minor detail without significance. In fact, the first chapter sets the entire novel in motion, a movement that persists until the very end. It is

185 this sense of restlessness, of needing constant fluidity, that connects Julius’s narrative to the writings of the Harlem Renaissance.

While Julius fills the role of flâneur at times—he traverses and observes the city frequently throughout the novel—his choice to experience the city in a mobile fashion relates to his transnational identity and therefore his liminal state. Essentially, the liminal figure complicates and problematizes the traditional flâneur by mandating movement as necessity rather than as pleasure. This liminality comes to the foreground alongside

Julius’s apparent loneliness and alienation, which leads to his daily walks as well as to his four-week vacation in Brussels. In spite of his attempt at physical transition and relocation, Julius realizes that it “did nothing to assuage [his] feelings of isolation; if anything, it intensified them” (6). This perpetual liminality becomes inseparably connected to his transnational experiences, as he seeks closure through travel. Despite the inclination for transnational movement, however, Julius discovers the ultimate failure of his utopic quest, something that Madhu Krishnan terms “the illusory appearance of freedom in the open city” (693). In this way, I contend that Julius uses the physical movement within and between the New York and Brussels of his present and the Nigeria of his past to create a tangible location for his intangible and essentially invisible liminality. Yet again, the desired home appears in the interim of relocation more so than in any finite location.

Leading to his conflict of identity, Julius inhabits an in-between space on multiple levels. A biracial man raised in Nigeria, he felt the liminality of his existence from a young age, as others pointed out the differences of his skin color and non-African first name (78). In moving to the United States for his education and career, Julius encounters

186 feelings of dislocation, yet the physical distance from Africa only mirrors the disconnection he recognized during adolescence. When he travels to Brussels in search of his grandmother, the lack of any true attempt to locate her demonstrates his desire for the journey more than the quest.

Lacking a clear backstory, Julius appears to be a character without motivation or personal connections, key traits of liminality. As the facts about Julius begin to mount, his difficulty locating a desirable home becomes more apparent. The reader gains the first bit of insight into Julius’s multiethnic lineage when he considers early on the possibility of going to Brussels to search for his maternal grandmother, whom he has not seen or contacted since he was a child. In a later chapter, when Julius recalls a memory of his childhood in Nigeria, the reader sees for the first time Julius’s understanding of himself as different from the other Nigerians around him. As he conveys to the reader, his name becomes a constant reminder. The juxtaposition of first name “Julius,” indicative of his mother’s German nationality, and middle name “Olatubosun,” a Yoruba name tying him to his father and Nigeria itself, epitomizes the dual identity with which Julius lives (78).

As a result, we slowly come to realize that Julius’s choice to leave Nigeria for the United

States following high school results as much from his status as outsider as it does from his search for a quality education. As the plot progresses, the frequent flashbacks continue to cement the fact that Julius consciously exists between cultures. In Nigeria, he was the conspicuously light-skinned son of a German woman. In Brussels, Julius chooses to hide his German ancestry and his search for his grandmother from the acquaintances he makes during the four-week vacation. In the United States, he similarly feels a lack of

187 community and solidarity when he first fails to find common ground with an African taxi driver and later when a group of black teens mugs him.

As a result, physical and psychological transition—and by extension, liminality— coexist throughout Open City. The physical is most obvious: Julius walks through New

York City frequently, and halfway through the novel he geographically relocates to

Brussels. Yet the physical functions as a sustained metaphor for a related psychological instability. Accompanying Victor Turner’s concept of liminality is the idea that the period of flux occurs at the margins, the outskirts, the threshold of society. In this way, the liminal in-betweenness concurrently creates feelings of inadequacy and unacceptance.

The complex composition of Open City addresses this concept on multiple levels. As

Julius remains both the protagonist and the narrator—importantly, the lens through which all plot is filtered—it makes sense that this dichotomous tension would emanate from him. As a psychiatrist, Julius operates at the intersection of the physical and the psychological. He therefore sees this mental liminality within his patients as well as himself.

One of his patients, only known to the reader as V., is of Native American descent, belonging to the Delaware tribe. She is an assistant professor who has written her first monograph, a work entitled The Monster of New Amsterdam, on Cornelius Van

Tienhoven. V.’s study provides an in-depth examination of Van Tienhoven’s atrocities of the seventeenth century, as he led brutal attacks against the Canarsie Indians of Long

Island, among others. Julius’s goal in mentioning V. and her work, however, does not involve a detailed summary of the book; instead, Julius appears moved by the ways in which V. experiences a personal connection with the history she considers. In a session

188 with Julius, V. admits, “I can’t pretend it isn’t about my life . . . it is my life. It’s a difficult thing to live in a country that has erased your past. . . . There are almost no

Native Americans in New York City, and very few in all of the Northeast. It isn’t right that people are not terrified by this because this is a terrifying thing that happened to a vast population. And it’s not in the past, it is still with us today; at least, it’s still with me”

(27). She finds herself in a state similar to Julius, as she cannot reconcile her heritage with the present nation in which she lives. This preoccupation eventually takes a toll on

V., as Julius later learns that she has died, apparently by suicide. Julius does not seem to experience depression to the same degree, but he does find himself trapped psychologically. By the end, Julius’s own mental health is called into question, primarily as a result of his suppressed memory of rape eighteen years earlier.

Cementing itself within the realm of twenty-first century literature, Open City has no final resolution to the problem of liminality. Yet it is this refusal to resolve that emphasizes the transitional state in which Julius finds himself. There is no closure, yet the novel establishes no expectation for resolution from the very beginning. In the first chapter when Julius introduces his strolls through the city, he labels them “aimless wandering” (3). Later in the novel, while in Brussels, he similarly “wandered aimlessly”

(108). When he contemplates the reasons for ultimately traveling to Brussels, he conveys the same sense of meaninglessness, composed within a sentence that feels just as aimless:

“I was there, it seemed to me, to no purpose, unless being together in the same country, as I and my oma now were (if, that is, she were still alive), was, by itself, a comfort”

(100). The novel is marked by this meandering attitude, as Julius habitually spends more

189 time recalling incongruous and achronological events than he does narrating his present- day travels and experiences.

In the end what is left is an insightful novel that resists simple categorization.

However, the novel is relevant today. Gone are the days of binary categories for identity- creation. In a world becoming increasingly global and transnational, where the boundaries and borders separating nations and other communities become blurred, this novel raises the questions that need to be asked. Kristian Shaw insightfully posits that

Open City “strengthens the focus on the global risks of non-elite migration in localized urban settings.” He continues to press the significance of Cole’s literary work, positing that the novel’s “local settings therefore operate as microcosmic analogies for the global relations of the wider world and betray how globalization of space both affects localized experience and destabilizes existing global-local distinctions.” This conflation of the local and global spheres therefore creates the adverse effect of proliferating racist and classist hegemony, thereby eliminating spaces outside of the dominant society. For twenty-first century liminal figures, like Julius, the only remaining uncontested space is the non-space of transition, the flux Gilroy witnesses in the Black Atlantic.

In our post-9/11 society, the concept of transnational liminality and its connection to race and ethnicity is as relevant as ever. As in the lives and writings of McKay, Larsen,

Fauset, and Hughes, many contemporary authors explore questions of identity throughout their novels and (semi-)autobiographical texts. Though the Harlem Renaissance fizzled out, roughly eighty years ago, the questions of identity that the constituent members explored continue to expand into writings of the late twentieth century and the nascent twenty-first century. In striving toward a fruitful and relevant examination of literature of

190 the African Diaspora—a new Black Transnationalism—the awareness of transnational liminality is necessary.

191

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