Brit Bennett – My Own RE:public

Tulsa, Oklahoma.

While writing last year about Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, and the fictional childhood town of her protagonists, with its “coloured” populace peculiarly intent on becoming about as fair-skinned as they could; I diverged to mention the town of Eatonville near Orlando in Florida – one of the first all-black municipalities to be founded after Reconstruction – which was lived in and then “fictionalised” by Zora Neale Hurston. I didn’t investigate any further into where other such communities may have evolved and what their fate may have been. This week, though, I have learnt about one such other. Ended well did it not.

From May 31st into this June 1st day in 1921, a white mob descended on the prosperous Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, murdering hundreds of residents and destroying more than a thousand homes. One hundred years late(r), a US President will visit a place, revisit an abominable event that has found no place in history books or civics classes, and pay respects, homage … and probably not much else. The careful dance around reparations, in this case as in others, and generally, will continue.

What can be said, though, is that remembrance of this event has come at a time when ignorance can no longer be an excuse – not for governments, nor institutions and not for the public. The tragedy of Greenwood is out there for all to come to terms with. It is telling, I think, that it is another glaring omission both in the national historical narrative and, it follows, from many – or most – of the school history curricula in the United States. (If you don’t believe me or the mainstream media on this, Tom Hanks has his say. A rare high spot in the new genre of “celebrity woke essay”!) And it is a tribute to the tenacity and courage of those who have kept the memory alive, who have fought for recognition and justice.

In The New York Times; an excellent photographic and multi-media essay that juxtaposes the flourishing community that was, pulsing with human endeavour and industry, against the decimated remains after the rampage. And this NYT Magazine piece by Caleb Gayle (Black and from Tulsa) about the contemporary legacy of a trauma and a history too long wrapped in silence and rarely admitted to is a good read.

When Black is (not) white

“Passing” by Nella Larsen

With the success of Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half last year (which I wrote about here), it could hardly surprise that Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel would resurface and be talked about again, and therefore appropriate that Bennett be at the centre of this T Book Club event.

And here is Bennett’s accompanying essay, which exacerbates on some of the topics that arose in the conversation, and introduces new ones.

Not just about Passing, Brit Bennett also speaks on the person Nella Larsen, beyond the writer, and the complicated paths her life took. After years of obscurity – the NYT famously overlooked her death in 1964 – Larson was rediscovered by feminist academics during the 1970s, and given place amongst the (mostly male) Harlem Renaissance. Interest in Larsen has been sustained through the ensuing years, including what Darryl Pinckney calls a definitive biography in 2006 by George Hutchinson, which he reviewed at The Nation upon publication. I mention the biographical information (via Pinckney and Wiki) only because, it seems to me, the oddness – or, the inconsistencies – of Larson’s life are not dissimilar to those to be discerned in the novel.

Three African American women in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, ca. 1925

But, that is the thing with the unreliable; it titillates, seduces and ultimately leaves –has to leave – some things unresolved. And so it is with the voice of Nella Larsen speaking to us through Irene Redfield. I recall Brit Bennett mentioning Irene’s world to be a rare example of a historical depiction of middle-class Black America, and it is this term “middle-class” that perplexes me; but that is generally so, for its definition is very dependent upon context – in place and in time – and neither being American nor clear on the historical demographics of New York, I may have a different understanding of a socio-economic scale. And so I am left to be wowed at what a middle-class that must have been in Harlem in the 1920s! The Redfieds for instance: doctor, wife; juggling social calendar and committees; entertaining and being entertained by literary luminaries; trips abroad, private schools; upstairs, downstairs; separate bedrooms (which I mention because of the spatial factor – what it says about the relationship between Irene and Brian is another matter!); housemaid, cook. Many of these are attributes I find difficult to relate to the middle-classes – somewhat too uppity, to my mind! Is the Harlem of her novel that in which Nella Larsen lived, the society to which she aspired? Or has she over-imagined both?

The sum of their parts

“The Vanishing Half” by Brit Bennett.

Be its beginning in a matter of daring or of jest, by mistake or with deliberation, the act of passing, and in respect to racial identity, is not unique to the United States. But, with a relatively young history so defined by slavery and migration, it is the place that has long provided the most fertile ground from which to spring complex narratives of personhood – and to feed a hungry national imagination. And it is within this context, that Brit Bennett’s best-selling novel of last year The Vanishing Half finds its place.

“The Vanishing Half” pub. Random House (2020)

The title hints at where this novel may take the reader. Brit Bennett’s protagonists are the Vigne twins, Desiree and Stella. Twins are oft sought subjects in many branches of scientific research; for reasons that are as obvious as they are many. And most especially so should they be separated at birth; growing up under disparate socio-economic conditions, a nature versus nurture debate would be the consequence. However, as a fictional narrative device, twins with all their particular character attributes have been surprisingly neglected.

Bennett gifts us such a literary pair. Desiree and Stella, are not separated early in their lives, and so not the best fit for scientific experiment; in fact, they grow up together in small town Louisiana of the 1940s and 50s, intimately bound in one another’s shadow and shared experience, both bearing the trauma of witnessing as children the lynching of their father, wanting only to escape the cruel hand dealt to their mother. And, what a peculiar small town this Mallard is! Populated, and most deliberately so, by “coloured” folk determined to get less so as generations pass, and the home-town twins a shining example of do-it-yourself social engineering. A different sort of experiment. (I can’t help but wonder whether such a place as Mallard ever really existed, but it could be an imagined “coloured” – and uppity – version of Zora Neale Hurston’s Florida town of Eatonville in Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was inhabited and governed by Black people, and based on the real Eatonville that was the childhood home of Hurston. To digress: Now that is a novel I love, and must say something about sometime soon!)

Still together as teenagers, and on not much more than a whim, the girls flee their suffocating nest to the city of New Orleans. And, in search of what? Freedom, perhaps. Perhaps, not explicitly that for which their forbears had yearned for and fought for, but some how akin. As alike these light skinned pair physically, so different are they in temperament, but circumstances and chance then determine their fate – and that they will not share, for their ways now part. For the serious, reticent Stella it will mean leaving behind her very self; choosing instead a path paved with deceit, and for Desiree, in youth the so much more adventurous of the two, there will be only some years of adventure – ending badly, and back in Mallard. But both will bring forth a new generation; daughters who must make their own choices, but each burdened with those made by their mothers.