When it comes to literary examinations of race and racial identity, one of the most complex and controversial subtopics is that of passing. Passing is generally defined by a person of color or of multicultural ancestry moving into and being accepted by a different racial group, usually unbeknownst to its members. This often connotes the idea of a Black person passing for white, although the act is hardly limited to any specific race or ethnicity, nor is it always voluntary or intentional (as a light-skinned Mexican-American who is regularly taken for Italian, Jewish, Greek and sundry other olive-hued, wavy haired Caucasian peoples, I speak from first-hand experience).
Although racial strife continues to carry the day in America, our integrated and multicultural society makes the act of passing, at least in the traditional sense, increasingly rare, although it’s by no means extinct (see the Rachel Dolezal farce for an extreme example).
Regardless, the subject has proven fertile ground for storytellers throughout the decades, up to and including today’s writers. Passing has been at the center of various important literary works across all categories, including biographies and memoirs (James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Gail Lukasik’s White Like Her), cultural histories (Allyson Hobbs’s A Chosen Exile, Marcia Dawkins’s Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity), sociological experiments and exposés (John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me) and, of course, fiction.
It’s in this latter category where the topic finds its greatest purchase, in political satires (Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal), speculative dramas (George Schuyler’s Black No More), modern retellings of fairy tales (Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird) and, especially, crime and noir.
It’s hardly surprising that so many authors within the latter genre would want to write about passing, given that the act carries with it an inherent deception (if not necessarily an inherent duplicity), requires a level of secrecy and usually includes an element of danger. And while subject has often been exploited for tabloid prurience, there are several examples that give full consideration to, and showcase a deep understanding of, the personal, political and spiritual toll that passing takes.
Here are nine crime, suspense and noir novels that revolve around the act of racial passing.
(Warning: several of these synopses contain, by necessity, major spoilers for the books they cover.)
Light in August, William Faulkner
The paterfamilias of southern gothic literature, William Faulkner often used stories of crime, madness and mystery as the backdrop for his modernist masterpieces. Such is the case with 1932’s Light in August, which looks at the bloody ripple effect on several inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha County (the fictional setting for many of Faulkner’s best-known stories) caused by a brutal murder and arson. The suspected culprit is one Joe Christmas, a violent, self-destructive, self-hating Mississippi bootlegger who believes he is half-black and half-white—although his true racial identity, like his culpability in the murder he’s accused of and eventually executed for, is never confirmed.
Faulkner is one of our most obsessive literary titans, with race—and particularly the psychology of racial identity—ranking high on his list of obsessions. While his personal beliefs and insights on the subject are certainly outmoded in today’s world, the power of his bleak vision remains as emotionally impactful as ever, with Light in August standing as one of his most troubling and haunting works.
Passing, Nella Larsen
This slim, perfect novel from Nella Larsen, an influential (but, until relatively recently, overlooked) figure of the Harlem Renaissance, charts the doomed friendship of two light-skinned black women in 1930’s Chicago. Irene Redfield is a responsible, civic-minded wife and mother whose attempts to tend to her family are constantly interrupted by the intrusive, but seductive presence of Clare Kendry, a childhood acquaintance who has successfully managed to assimilate into the white upper class.
After a chance meeting at an upscale white restaurant (where both women are passing), Clare yearns to reconnect with the community she fled from, even as she continues to enjoy the spoils of white society. Her reckless attempts to navigate both worlds simultaneously, along with a series of deep personal betrayals, conclude in a shocking act of…murder? Suicide? A tragic accident? Larsen’s beautifully written, closely observed novel is strewn with tension and mystery throughout, but it’s final, haunting pages cement it as true-blue noir.
The Expendable Man, Dorothy B. Hughes
This entry might raise some eyebrows, as none of the characters within the story—which revolves around a black med school graduate who finds himself suspected of a murder he didn’t commit—are technically passing. However, Hughes (the author of the classic roman noir, In a Lonely Place) only reveals the race of her wrong man protagonist halfway through the story. Thus, it could be argued that the book itself is a meta-textual experiment that replicates the act of passing.
It’s a bold narrative choice given that the novel was published in 1963, at the beginnings of the nascent Civil Rights movement, but it works beyond the initial shock value. As Walter Mosely (who shows up a little further down this list) wrote in his afterword to the 2012 NYRB reissue of The Expendable Man, Hughes’s novels were “ahead of their time in their use of psychological suspense and their piercing observations of race and class.”
The Burnt Orange Heresy, Charles Willeford
Hughes wasn’t the first novelist to jolt readers out of their blithe prejudice by suddenly and casually revealing that the protagonist they’d been following all the time was Black. Hardboiled maestro Charles Willeford got there first with his bleak 1955 masterpiece Pick-up, which saves its grand twist for its final knockout sentence.
That said, it’s another of Willeford’s novels that deserves mention here. The Burnt Orange Heresy, published in 1971, is a brutal and twisted send-up of the creative class as narrated by one of Willeford’s most transgressively seductive anti-heroes, a conniving, amoral art critic of Puerto Rican heritage named James (formerly Jaime) Figueras. An egomaniac of the first degree, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Figueras doesn’t pass for Anglo-Saxon in order to fit in to white society, but rather to hold himself above it, explaining to his partner that he decided to rid himself of all ethnic signifiers in order to “prove to myself…that a Puerto Rican’s not only as good as anybody else, he’s a damned sight better.” It’s a small, but important character detail that represents one of the many psychological walls Figueras has erected to guard against his troubled conscience—walls that come tumbling down once he commits the ultimate act of damnation.
Trick Baby and The Long White Con, Iceberg Slim
The work of career pimp-turned-writer Iceberg Slim (born Robert Beck) has been both celebrated and derided for its unsparing, unapologetic depiction of Chicago’s Black criminal underworld, as well as the author’s admittedly brutal treatment of women. While Slim is best remembered for his memoir, Pimp, he also chronicled other facets of the street life, including the con game.
In 1967’s Trick Baby, and it’s 1977 sequel, The Long White Con, Slim tells of the rise and fall (and rise and fall again) of Johnny O’Brien, the mixed-race son of a Black mother and white father. Growing up in the slums of Depression-era Chicago, Johnny is nicknamed ‘Trick Baby’ by the neighborhood kids, who ostracize and hate him for his white skin. It’s only when he enters manhood and is taken under the wing of a master con artist named Blue, that O’Brien, now renamed White Folks, learns to use his looks (he’s described as being the spitting image of Errol Flynn) to relieve suckers on both sides of the racial divide of their cash.
While Slim’s detailed description of the ins and outs of confidence scams is the main draw of these novels, it’s actually his bleak and often hallucinatory depiction of the psychological torment caused by mutual and all-encompassing race hate between blacks and whites that proves most memorable.
Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosley
In most classic hardboiled and detective fiction, characters of color—particularly Black characters—were usually depicted as ancillary figures, and broadly defined caricatures (if not outright stereotypes). While there were some writers of color within the genre whose work reflected and gave voice to their own experience, most of them languished in obscurity during their lifetime. The popular and acclaimed mysteries of Walter Mosley—in particular his Easy Rawlins P.I. novels—serve as a corrective to this historical exclusion, working beautifully within the framework of the genre even as they transgress it.
Mosely’s first (and best known) novel is the period mystery Devil in a Blue Dress, which follows a Black WWII vet named Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins as he gets roped into locating a beautiful and mysterious white woman hiding out in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Rawlins—a rough-around-the-edges, but inherently moral hero cut from the same cloth as Raymond Chandler’s shambolic knights errant—ends up uncovering a deadly conspiracy that reaches from the gutters of the criminal underworld to the echelons of political power, and quickly discovers that nothing is what it seems—including one key player’s true racial identity.
The Human Stain, Philip Roth
The third and final entry in the late, great Philip Roth’s American Trilogy, 2000’s The Human Stain contains one of the author’s most startling and controversial reveals (which, given his talent for meta-narrative trickery, is saying something). Initially, we’re led to believe that the story’s protagonist, the aging and newly widowed Coleman Silk, is a white Jewish man not too dissimilar to Roth’s narrator (and alter ego) Nathan Zuckerman. It’s only around the half-way mark that Roth—following in the footsteps of authors like Dorothy Hughes and Charles Willeford—reveals that Silk is actually a Black man who has spent his entire adulthood passing. What follows is a complex examination of identity by one of America’s greatest novelists working at the top of his game. The Human Stain is included here because in its back half it shifts gears and becomes something of a thriller (and, ultimately, a murder mystery), one that involves Silk’s attempts to protect his newfound love from the violent attention of her disturbed Vietnam vet ex.
While Roth never dived headlong into the genre, the thematically-linked trilogy of novels he produced at the turn of the century—American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain—all use crime as a lens through which he attempted to understand what he dubbed the “American Berserk”. In centering the final novel of that trilogy around passing, Roth connected his grand theme to the greatest of all-American transgressions.
Erasure, Percival Everett
Can someone pass for their own race? That’s one of the central questions at the heart of Percival Everett’s furious and darkly hilarious novel from 2001, about a struggling Black novelist who, exhausted by the publishing industry’s rejection of his work as “not black enough,” snaps and bangs out a cynical spoof of “ghetto lit” which, of course, ends up being embraced by the white mainstream as an authentic portrayal of the Black experience.
The novel-with-in-a-novel (originally titled My Pafology, but later changed to simply Fuck) is a grotesque update of Richard Wright’s Native Son (seemingly the touch point for a number of the novels on this list), although more than one critic has speculated that Everett was actually savaging Sapphire’s Push. Meanwhile, the fake persona his tortured protagonist adopts (his nom de plume: Stagg R. Leigh) resembles the aforementioned Iceberg Slim.
Regardless of Erasure’s specific inspirations, Everett—who 30 years and 30 books into his career can lay claim to the title of America’s most consistently underrated novelist—crystalizes the frustrations that many a writer of color has felt when their racial identity has been used to pigeonhole them.
Incognegro, Mat Johnson (writer) / Warren Pleece (Illustrator)
Writer Mat Johnson drew upon his own experiences as a light-skinned Black man for his critically acclaimed comic book miniseries Incognegro. His hero is Zane Pinchback, a black newspaper reporter living and working in Harlem in the 1930s, who uses his ability to pass for white in order to go undercover and record lynchings throughout the deep South. While Zane is unable intervene and stop the tortures and murder, he records the events and collects evidence on their perpetrators in the hope that justice will eventually catch up to them. However, his modus operandi changes when his estranged brother is arrested in Mississippi for the murder of a white woman. Along with his best friend, Zane travels to his home state posing as a member of the Klu Klux Klan in a desperate attempt to uncover the truth and save his brother.
Published by DC’s sadly shuttered Vertigo imprint in 2007, Incognegro is a riveting, often brutal, murder mystery set at the heart of one of America’s darkest periods and a brilliant example of the way the tropes of the crime and mystery genre can be used to examine and expose our shared history in all of its blood-soaked atrocity.
