V. THE UNLEARNING OF COLORISM

V.1 Union of Dark and Light in Dorothy West’s The Wedding

A book that takes up the philosophy of the sixties and its emphasis on racial unity is Dorothy West’s novel The Wedding. The approach to this core mes- sage, however, is radically different to that of the two novels that have just been discussed since the dark-brown West mainly shows the plight and the perspective of her light-skinned characters. Dorothy West, known today mainly as the youngest member of the Renaissance, was born 1907 into a Black middle-class family in . Her father, a dark-skinned ex-slave with stunning blue eyes, was the “Black ba- nana king” of Boston. His successful business supplied the money for the big house in which an extended family came to live. Thus Dorothy West, although she was an only child, grew up in the midst of a group of vari-colored cousins. While her golden-and-pink-skinned mother made it quite clear that there were to be no color prejudices in the family, West quickly learned that there were color prejudices outside of it. She was the darkest of the rainbow assembly of children and her mother often dressed her and her blond cousin alike in order to “drive the white folks crazy.”1 West’s mother taught her to disregard the “color foolishness” that demanded, for instance, that a fair-skinned person should marry another fair person in order to produce fair offspring.2 But al- though West claims that skin color was of no importance to her as a child, she admits that she consciously decided to stay indoors rather than play outside with her cousins so as not to embarrass them after she overheard people won- dering why such light-skinned children would want to play with “that nig- ger.”3 West would later comment in an interview that because of her dark complexion many people did not realize that her family was light-skinned. But through her color difference Dorothy West and her family gained a double perspective on colorism: “Just like my light family learned through me how

1 Dorothy West, The Richer, the Poorer. Stories, Sketches, Reminiscences, New York: Anchor Books, 1996, 171. 2 Cf. Lorraine Elena Roses, “Interviews with Black Women Writers: Dorothy West at Oak Bluffs, , July, 1984,” SAGE, 2.1 (Spring 1985) 47-49: 48. 3 Cf. Sybil Steinberg, “Dorothy West: Her Own Renaissance,” Publishers Weekly (July 3, 1995) 34-35: 35. 234 THE UNLEARNING OF COLORISM some light people feel about dark people, I learned how some dark people feel about light people.”4 In West’s fiction skin color has always played a role. In her semi- autobiographical first novel The Living is Easy, published in 1948, West sati- rizes the class and color politics of the Black bourgeoisie.5 In the fifties West began to work on the story that was to evolve into her second novel, The Wed- ding, but abandoned the project in the sixties since she felt that there was no readership for a story about successful, middle-class Blacks.6 Convinced that the Black Panthers in particular “condemned anybody who was light-skinned, or a doctor” and that white publishers “were afraid to offend blacks”7 she put the manuscript aside. She came back to it more than a decade later when the political climate had changed and The Wedding was finally published in 1995, forty-seven years after her first novel. The story is about the Black upper middle class – West’s own class – and consequently most of the characters are fair-skinned. As the author explains, “because there are quite a few light-skinned people in my family, I always take up the cudgels for them. Because you can understand what happened, don’t you? They were fair because they were the children of their masters...”8 Both parents of West’s mother were, indeed, the children of their white mas- ters. Before the foil of this family history it might be understood why West as a dark-skinned author felt called upon to defend fair African Americans from the charge of colorism. The Wedding is set on Martha’s Vineyard in the fifties (West herself lived on the island in her family’s cottage from 1943 till her death in 1998).9 It is the story of the Coles family, a story that starts – although it is not told chrono- logically – with “the ebony woman.” This dark black foremother is bought as

4 Genii Guinier, Black Women Oral History Project Interview with Dorothy West, May 6, 1978, Cambridge, MA: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, 1981, 1-75: 39. 5 Significantly, the fair-skinned Cleo – like West’s own mother – tells her dark daughter to pinch her nose so that is will become narrower. Cf. Dorothy West, The Living Is Easy, New York: Arno Press, 1969, 39 and Genii Guinier, Black Women Oral History Project Interview with Dorothy West, 60. 6 Cf. Sybil Steinberg, “Dorothy West: Her Own Renaissance,” Publishers Weekly, July 3, 1995, 34-35: 35. 7 Alexis DeVeaux, “Bold Type: Renaissance Woman,” Ms. (May/June 1995) 73. 8 Genii Guinier, Black Women Oral History Project Interview with Dorothy West, 5. Note that Dorothy West in an interview talks about a fair-skinned niece whom she has to “scold” be- cause the young woman claims that she cannot trust light Blacks. West drily states that her niece has been “brainwashed during the revolution.” Genii Guinier, Black Women Oral His- tory Project Interview with Dorothy West, 39. 9 The location itself is significant. Martha’s Vineyard is a place closely associated with the col- orist Black upper middle class. In her novel Good Hair Benilde Little has one of her charac- ters who suspects the other of color prejudices casually ask if his grandparents did not have a place on Martha’s Vineyard. He understands the insinuation and replies that they did not try “to make it this exclusive thing. A lot of those folks will only associate with you if you’ve been going for generations. There’s all kinds of caste systems within the group [...].” Benilde Little, Good Hair, 57.