Plum Bun: Reflections on Racial Ambiguity

“Power, greatness, authority, these were fitting and proper for men; but there were sweeter, more beautiful gifts for women, and power of a certain kind too. Such power she would like to exert in this glittering new world, so full of mysteries and promise. If she could afford it she would have a salon, a drawing-room where men and women, not necessarily great, but real, alive, free, and untrammeled in manner and thought, should come and pour themselves out to her sympathy and magnetism.” Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset.

In an essay in The Souls of Black Folk titled “Of the Coming of John” W.E.B. Du Bois details the lives of two young men from the same southern town with the same first name. One is a privileged young white man who is given every advantage wealth, race, and legacy can offer, the other is a young Black man with none of the same advantages. In the essay their paths cross again in New York City at the Opera. There, the Black John gains entry into the Opera. He purchases a ticket, looking in wonder at the opulent surroundings and losing himself in the beauty of the music and performance. Then he accidentally brushes elbows with the white John’s date, who, taking offense, demands he be kicked out. Though John has purchased a ticket, he is escorted out of the opera without seeing the ending. His ticket is not refunded. John’s visible race accompanies him wherever he goes, denying him any safe haven or any enjoyment. there is no respite from systemic racism.

In contrast in Plum Bun Jessie Fauset spends the first part of the novel drawing a contrast between the protagonist Angela and her mother Mattie, who are both capable of passing for white. These two characters are contrasted with Angel’a sister Virginia and her father Junius, whose race is visible. Virginia (Ginny) and Junius represent characters with a seemingly strong moral character who, finding themselves consigned to a role in life, embrace their opportunities and find a certain contentment in the achievements they are allowed. Ginny is defined by an ability to resign herself to the unpleasant task of studying and is rewarded by achieving her goal of going to a teacher’s college and becoming engaged to a steady young man. Junius steady character wins him Mattie’s love, to his surprise and in spite of his skin color.

Mattie and Angela are defined by an unresolved identity struggle that mirrors the ambiguity of their skin tone. As Mattie observes, there is a burden that comes with appearing white, of having to confess (and, indeed, the impossibility of confessing) race wherever she goes, and this burden manifests in Angela’s life too, where, as a child, in lieu of finding any girls like herself at her high school she is ostracized until a new girl arrives. This white girl, unaware of Angela’s race, befriends her. Angela is then painfully rejected when her friend discovers her race and accuses her of deception. In this episode Angela is only guilty of omission, and understandably so. It is terrible to go through high school friendless. But another episode highlights Angela and Mattie’s agency. Enjoying the privilege of passing on a shopping excursion from which Ginny is tellingly excluded, they see Virginia and Junius and fail to say hello. Mattie immediately feels guilty and when she gets home she apologizes to her husband for not revealing herself and welcoming her husband and darker daughter onto her shopping trip. Angela, however, without guidance from her mother, reads the event as a confirmation that race should be denied, whatever the cost. Thus Mattie passes on what is, at this moment, her “weakness” from her husband’s point of view, to their daughter. It is unclear what effect this episode has on Ginny. Mattie is thankful her younger daughter did not see them, but her husband does not confirm this, making it seem likely that if he saw Mattie and Angela, so did Virginia. These moments, seemingly unwitting for Mattie and increasingly calculated for Virginia, show the violence of race as a construct, but Fauset doesn’t fully condemn Mattie or Angela. It would be too essentialist, and Fauset is more complex than that. Instead, she casts Mattie’s passing as an act of resistance and refusal to be forced into constant racial confession in an unjust system.

Mattie, who is content to lead a stable, humble, but comfortable life as a Black woman uses her enjoyment of white spaces like restaurants and the seats for white patrons at the opera, incognito, as a strike against the system, and she is not wrong. In a system/society that subscribes to the belief that race is essential and always discernible, to penetrate white spaces as a raced woman is a potent act of defiance used in literature to illustrate how race and the one drop rule are constructed and arbitrary. But it is also an act of conformity. Mattie wears her appearance like a privilege, privately enjoying these spaces. it is an individual act of resistance that also marks a certain level of conformity, and that succumbs to the temptations of passing in an unjust system rather than standing up to it. Mattie’s failure to acknowledge her husband and daughter, and even her willingness to take one out passing, while the other will never be able to pass, reveals the impotence of Mattie’s resistance and sets the stage for Angela’s more ambitious attempt at the lessons in passing she learns from her mother.

But the question Fauset gives Mattie about the difficulty of revealing her racial identity begs the reader to ask what kind of life would that be? This question haunts the narrative, daring us to confront the incoherence of race while illustrating how it functions as a tool of oppression. it is the ever tricky double-bind of racial identity, whichever identity Mattie and Angela take, if the only choices are between black and white then to choose is also to reaffirm the binary. In that case, what does resistance look like?