Building Your Library: Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset

Published in 1929 Plum Bun is a novel for anyone interested in early-twentieth-century representations of New York, the Harlem Renaissance, race, gender, coming of age. These are just a few of the subjects that the novel tackles.

Written by Harlem Renaissance figure Jessie Redmon Fauset (Fauset played so many roles in the Harlem Renaissance it is difficult to confine her to only one). Fauset was an editor of The Crisis magazine, mentor to Langston Hughes and the first editor to accept and publish a poem by him, a translator of Francophone literature (usually by authors of African descent), and well-known salonniere (meaning she opened her salon/home up to further cultivate the artistic culture of the movement). Fauset’s novel Plum Bun is about a beautiful young woman, Angela Murray, whose ability to pass for white leads her on a journey of self-discovery from her hometown of Philadelphia, where she cannot escape the legacy of race, to New York City, where, alone and anonymous, she passes for white only to find herself unfulfilled and beset by dangers.

Part of the challenge of reading the novel is at once the complexity and cruelty of Angela as a main character. If novel heroines are often too easy to identify with, Fauset definitely foreshadowed the current movement to write more complex female characters by writing a complex and not always likable or relatable character. This is definitely a novel for the advanced reader in this sense because the novel is morally ambiguous. Though Fauset’s novel is often accused of advancing a problematic politics of bourgeois respectability, remember the subtitle of the novel “A novel without a moral” and rethink any easy interpretation that might neatly wrap a bow on the plot and allow us as readers to consign the novel to a simple moral tale. Fauset’s subtitle is a guide that any moral we find is our own. Particularly telling in this regard is the opening section of the novel, which details the meeting of Angela’s parents and Angela’s early life in Philadelphia. Angela’s mother Mattie, in particular, serves as a cypher for reading a double bind where race and gender intersect to make resistance at the same time complicit so that there often seems to be no right answer for Angela.

Nevertheless, Angela is a strong female character with the will to survive and ambition that makes her story seductive. Fauset, through her portrayal of Angela depicts the challenges of being a Black female artist in New York, a struggle her legacy suffers from to this day as an author who has been profoundly undervalued as a writer. The edition I read is the Beacon Press edition, which has a great introduction by Deborah McDowell. If you are looking for another New York novel to read add this one to the list. It will definitely be making an appearance on my New York novel syllabi in the future.