Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, Whiteness, and the Color Line: A Novel of Morality Without a Moral

“Tell you that I was coloured! . . . Why should I?”—Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun

This is the shocked retort of Angela, the very light-skinned protagonist in Jessie Fauset’s 1929 novel, Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral, when Angela’s racial heritage is publicly revealed to her close friend, a new girl at their school. By denying responsibility for policing so-called racial boundaries, Angela challenges a system of morality structured by white supremacy and embedded in histories of Atlantic American modernity. According to this (im)moral system, Angela is required to divulge her racial heritage to protect her hitherto unsuspecting white friend. To pass, even unintentionally, is, in this context, to lie. Angela and the new girl, Mary Hastings, stand on opposing sides of a yawning chasm of cultural silence about the significance of whiteness as it exists between them in their time period, within which whiteness wields an all-encompassing power.

In engaging whiteness and Blackness as two separate yet connected manifestations of the same cultural moment, Fauset defies what the Black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois described as “the problem of the Twentieth Century . . . the color-line” by exposing its immorality through Angela’s experiences.[1] Angela’s retort to Mary crystallizes the legacy of racialized social relations as they arise from Atlantic America’s intimate connection with capitalism and its reliance on slavery. As Werner Sollors explains in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both (1997), the mixed-race character derived from these historical circumstances inhabits and embodies a moral paradox:

This character was a living challenge to the central contradiction of the New World, where the anti-aristocratic [sic] promise of abandoning hereditary systems in favor of self-made men clashed with slavery and segregation, which reinstated a particularly sharp focus on the question of a character’s ancestry. The mixed-race character represented a testing of boundaries and a quest for knowledge of origins.[2]

By making visible the hidden historical assumptions arising in Atlantic America (or the New World) contained within unspoken aspects of the cultural understanding of whiteness at the historical moment in which she wrote, Fauset splinters its common acceptance of a normalized, hierarchical relation between Blackness and whiteness. In Plum Bun, she dismantles unquestioned understandings of Blackness through a complicated analysis of such considerations in relation to ideas of right and wrong. As a result, the true problem here revealed becomes one not of color, but of morality and immorality as imbricated with color, defined as white and Black, and historically woven into the American social system.

Although whiteness has, for too many years and in too many historical contexts, camouflaged itself as a norm whose cultural position must simply be embraced, yet, nevertheless, whiteness paradoxically implies color. In scientific terms, whiteness encompasses all color because “white” contains every wavelength of visible color. Science offers to whiteness the possibility of egalitarian, rather than hierarchical, social relations, but what is important here is a consideration of whiteness in terms of its actual meaning with regard to color. This must necessarily be a disorienting and uncomfortable prospect, as it requires working through what is silent and silenced—what Fred Moten would call the fugitive[3]—what is not authorized within our accustomed intellectual protocols, but which, notwithstanding, is.

Through the operations of hierarchy and racialization (as these are implemented in colonizing contexts), the relationship of whiteness to color becomes one of denial. Yet its need to deny color in order to be what it is also indelibly connects it to the reality of color—that is, to Black, which is scientifically, incongruously and oppositely—the absence of all color. While a colonizing whiteness cannot escape this fundamentally dialectical relationship, it can—and does—render this organic connection invisible in everyday social interaction. It effects this through the subtle power contained in the fact of radical denial, or, even more concretely, the act of denying—in the very ability to deny.

The act of denial itself is an offensive, rather than a defensive operation, naturalized as if indisputably normal, and surrounded by a pristine and impregnable silence, one seemingly impervious to threat or transgression, even as it invisibly yet determinedly assaults its victim(s). To challenge this impervious normality, as Angela does, is to reject the assumption of whiteness-as-usual by identifying its artificiality, the intrepid readiness to speak into the silence over which whiteness holds sway. It is, in the words of the late-20th-century Chicana lesbian Cherrie Moraga, in her essay, “La Güera,” to shatter that silence by usurping the accustomed place of whiteness within it, seizing language and setting it in rigid opposition to that cultural signification: “I think: what is my responsibility to my roots—both white and brown, Spanish-speaking and English?”  Moraga writes. “I am a woman with a foot in both worlds; and I refuse the split.”[4]  In this, in the refusal to uphold the denial demanded by whiteness, Moraga, like Fauset decades earlier, engages the same moral duplicity that surrounded the matter of color in early twentieth-century American society.

In Plum Bun, Fauset takes on the problem of whiteness and by implication, that of color, in a frontal attack on racialized morality. Fauset’s protagonist Angela is confronted by (im)moral choices created by and for white dominance from the very beginning of the novel. The first confrontation happens in Angela’s own family, where she forms a number of doubtful attitudes toward the cultural significance of whiteness, then again later as she solidifies these ideas in the world beyond her home. The crucial difficulty is that by a genetic accident Angela, unlike her sister Virginia, can pass for white, a physical reality that places the issue of color and its attendant difficulties squarely at the center of her existence. She becomes, in effect, a figurative, and quite visible, representation of the color line. Because Angela can pass for white, she finds herself presented with a terrible choice:  accept the designation of Black woman and its attendant cultural difficulties, or decide to reject everything from her background, including family relationships, in presenting herself to the world as a white woman.                                                                                                 

Fauset previewed these issues in a 1922 essay, “Some Notes on Color,” where she articulates access to wealth as a morally complicating manifestation of color. “The good things of life, the true, the beautiful, the just, these are not meant for us,” Fauset writes.[5]  This sentiment is echoed by Angela who, as Fauset describes her, “had no high purpose in life.”[6] In contrast to her sister Virginia, Angela lacks the depth of character that would alert her to the ethical concerns of passing for material gain under the rubric of the color line Angela first learns about this world in Saturday morning forays with her mother Mattie, when both enter it ostensibly as white women due to their light skin. But while for Mattie these adventures were “pursued without malice or envy…[and] contrived to cast a glamour over Monday’s washing and Tuesday’s ironing…,” for Angela, unbeknownst to her mother, “colour, the mere possession of a black or a white skin…was clearly one of those fortuitous endowments of the gods” (Fauset, Plum Bun, 16, 14).

Her new ideal is made visible one Saturday as Angela and her mother are standing in the doorway of a great hotel when Junius, Angela’s father, and Virginia, both much darker-skinned than Angela and her mother, pass very close to them, yet neither Angela nor her mother acknowledges them. Later, Mattie is ashamed as she recounts the incident to her husband, but Angela is simply glad they hadn’t been compromised. Fauset is very careful to explain that for Junius and Mattie, there is no moral “principle” involved—it is clear between the two of them that there was no intended rejection grounded in an externally imposed shame regarding their racial connection. This distinction is important because it is the basis upon which the novel shifts the problem from one of color, specific to African Americans, to one of morality and immorality in the broader context of racialized American life. And in questioning the issues of morality and immorality, the novel seeks to attack what it perceives as an understanding of whiteness within which race--in the form of Blackness--is held hostage.

Angela believes that white skin is her most prized possession. Once this perspective is established within her private life, it is then locked into place by her experiences with color beyond the home. As the novel begins to explore Angela’s public life at school, the problem of color finds her in all of its egregious ugliness. The novel details Angela’s early friendships with white classmates, friendships that taper off as those she had thought were her friends slowly drop her. These actions take place in a stony silence about motive in which the color line is baldly apparent, though unspoken. With the arrival of a new girl, Mary Hastings, this situation radically changes for Angela, because Mary unequivocally likes her and prefers Angela’s company to that of the other girls. This friendship reopens a door for Angela who finds herself again included and at the center of things (Fauset, Plum Bun, 41–42).  However, when Mary wins an elected position on the school newspaper and naturally chooses Angela to be her assistant, one of the girls with whom Angela had grown up (and who therefore knows her family history and, as a result, her racial heritage) contests the decision by revealing that history and heritage: 

Esther Bayliss pushed forward: “I don’t know how it is with the rest of you, but I should have to think twice before I’d trust my subscription money to a coloured girl.”

Mary said in utter astonishment: “Coloured, why what are you talking about? Who’s coloured?”

“. . .Angela Murray, that’s who’s colored. . . .”

Mary said again: “Coloured!”  And then, “Angela, you never told me you were coloured!”

Angela’s voice was as amazed as her own: “Tell you that I was coloured! Why of course I never told you that I was coloured! Why should I?”

“There,” said Esther, “see she never told Mary that she was coloured. What wouldn’t she have done with our money!” (43–44)

The imputation is that Angela has lied about her race, and is, therefore, immoral. At this point, Angela’s relation to color becomes what Gavin Jones, quoting Dubois, identifies as “an . . . ‘ethical paradox’ . . . at the heart of the color-line”[7] Here the problem of color becomes an actual dilemma for Angela, as she finds herself accused of, and considered dishonest for, something she did not actually do—that is, intentionally pass for white. She has simply been—herself. As such, the implied question concerns the morality of a situation, sanctioned by assumptions embedded in white privilege, which required such a revelation on Angela’s part. Is Angela really a liar in this instance? If so, what exactly makes her one? The question “Why should I?” ousts color as moral rationale and shifts the interrogation to a larger, generalized morality invested in whiteness.

The problem Fauset introduces in this incident is complicated, unearthing deeply rooted cultural ideas about expected, and therefore “proper,” behavior regarding the color line in early twentieth-century America. Filtered through a modern lens, such expectations, which might ordinarily demand a moral, cannot find their mark. Instead, as the problem of morality rather than race becomes the central problem of the text, the racial dilemma presented by Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral can seek resolution only in paradox--that of a novel of morality, lacking its requisite moral.