Trans-American modernisms: racial passing, travel writing, and cultural fantasies of Latin America

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TRANS-AMERICAN MODERNISMS:
RACIAL PASSING, TRAVEL WRITING, AND CULTURAL FANTASIES
OF LATIN AMERICA

by

Ruth Blandón

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Ruth Blandón

ii
Dedication
For Mariana who gave me life; for Gilbert who shares my life; for Dario who is my life.

iii
Acknowledgments
This dissertation could not have come into fruition without the help and support
of my dissertation committee, friends, colleagues, and family. Susan McCabe
(dissertation committee chair), Joseph Allen Boone (committee), John Carlos Rowe
(committee), and Roberto I. Diaz (committee) have offered intellectual sustenance and
generosity throughout my academic journey, as have Carla Kaplan, Rebecca Lemon, Ron
Gottesman, and Heather James. I thank the University of Southern California’s English
Department and the College of Letters, Arts, and Science for years of fellowships,
research and travel grants, and other financial support.
I will always be thankful to my colleagues and friends for their time, their brilliant
insights, and their emotional support. I thank Jeffrey Solomon, Katherine Strong, Alice
Marie Villaseñor, Thomas Francis O’Leary, Marci McMahon, and Lucia Hodgson in
particular. They always helped me strive for the felicitous sentence.
Words are not enough in my effort to thank my family. Their undying support,
love, and kindness propped me up when I thought I could not write another word, much
less another sentence. I thank my brothers, Thomas Byron Gross and David Blandón,
and my best friend, who has been my sister for over twenty years, Abelina Galustian. I
thank my husband, Gilbert, and my son, Dario for being my constant source of
motivation and inspiration. Finally, I wish to thank my mother, Mariana, to whom I owe
everything. There are no words to adequately express my eternal gratitude for her love
and tireless support. This dissertation is for Mariana Blandón, Gilbert Davila, and Dario
Emiliano Blandón-Davila.

iv
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgments iii
List of Figures vi
Abstract vii
Introduction 1
Chapter One:
Reading, Misreading, and Language Passing in
James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an
Ex-Coloured Man and Along This Way 23
Blackness under the law 27
James Weldon Johnson’s Along This Way 35
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man 53
Conclusion 84
Chapter Two:
Brazilian Schemes and Utopian Dreams in
Nella Larsen’s Passing, Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun,
and Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven 87
Historical Context 94
From Liberia to Brazil—A Change of Venue 97
Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven 98
Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, “Home,” and Brazil 109
Larsen’s Passing and Brazil as Utopia/Dystopia 119
Conclusion: Utopia vs. Brazilian Reality 131
Chapter Three:
All-American Me: William Carlos Williams’s
Construction and Deconstruction of the Self 142
Cultural Context—Casta and Passing 152
Blurring Cultural Boundaries:
“Only the whites of my eyes were affected.” 168
The Specter of Blackness: “I had visions of being lynched …” 208
In The American Grain: “I am—the brutal thing itself.” 223
Translation: “El que no a vista Sevilla, […] no a vista maravilla!” 233
Conclusion: “I’ll keep my way in spite of all.” 242

v
Chapter Four:
“Look Homeward Angel Now”: Travel, Translation,
and Langston Hughes’s Quest for Home 245
Langston Hughes in Mexico and Cuba—
1907-1948: Mexico 248
Cuba 258
Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén in Spain 262
Translation, Analogy, and the “I” 269
Of Poetry, Jazz, Son, and Rumba 271
The Translations 275
Conclusion: Translating, Travel, and “Home” 292
Bibliography 295

vi
List of Figures

Figure 1: James Weldon Johnson,
photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1932. 42

Figure 2: “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.” Pablo Picasso, 1907. 89
Figure 3: “Noire et Blanche.” Man Ray, 1926. 90
Figure 4: "Blues." Archibald Motley, 1929. 91
Figure 5: "An Idyll of the Deep South." Aaron Douglas, 1934. 91
Figure 6: Bessie Smith, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936. 92
Figure 7: Billie Holiday, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1949. 92
Figure 8: The Williams Family 146
Figure 9: "De Español y Mulata; Morisca."
["From Spaniard and Mulatto, Morisca."] Miguel Cabrera, 1763. 155

Figure 10: "De Mestizo y d India; Coyote."
["From Mestizo and Indian, Coyote."] Miguel Cabrera, 1763. 155

Figure 11: William Carlos Williams, circa 1903. 167
Figure 12: Elena Hoheb Williams 181
Figure 13: Langston Hughes 253
Figure 14: Diego Rivera with Frida Kahlo,
photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1932. 257

Figure15: Nicolás Guillén 274

vii
Abstract
In my historical examination of the literary works of Nella Larsen, William
Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and
Carl Van Vechten, I investigate U.S. modernists’ interest in Latin America and their
attempts to establish trans-American connections. As they engage with and write about
countries such as Brazil, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Costa Rica, and
Venezuela as utopian spaces, these writers often tend to relegate Latin America to the
status of a useful trope, one that allows them to negotiate a variety of identitarian and
sexual anxieties.
The domestic political landscape that informs the desire for migration to the Latin
Americas—whether real or fantastical—in the early twentieth century leads to Johnson’s
depiction of the savvy and ambitious titular character in his first and only novel,
Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, to Van Vechten’s, Larsen’s, and Fauset’s
fantastical Brazil in their respective Nigger Heaven, Passing, and Plum Bun. Hughes’s
translation of Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s poetry illustrates his straddling of national
and color lines through the translation of language. These writers react to Jim Crow
laws, one-drop rules, and color lines in their connections to and fantasies of the Latin
Americas. What then of writers who make similar trans-American connections and
constructions, but who write from a space of relative privilege, however resistant they are
to that privilege? Consider William Carlos Williams, who negotiates the pressures of
assimilation in the United States as he attempts to assert his Afro Puerto Rican and Anglo
Dominican heritages. Although Williams is commonly recalled as an “all-American”

viii
poet, his works betray his constant attempts to harness three perpetually shifting and
overlapping identities: that of a son of immigrants, of a first generation “American,” and
of a son of the Americas.
The trans-American connections I reveal span the fantastical to the truly cross-
cultural. In placing United States modernism and the Harlem Renaissance within a larger
hemispheric context, I shift our sense of U.S. modernism in general, but also of the
Harlem Renaissance’s place within U.S. modernism in particular.

1
Introduction
The true moment that gave birth to this project was James Weldon Johnson’s
depiction of his experience on a train as he travels with his long-term houseguest and
friend, the Cuban Ricardo Rodriguez Ponce. In his autobiography, Along This Way
(1933), Johnson describes being prompted by a porter to move to the “colored” section,
even after Johnson and Ponce have shown him their first class tickets. It is only when
Ponce asks Johnson in Spanish to translate the porter’s words, followed by Johnson’s
response in Spanish, that the porter ceases his insistence that they move, punches their
tickets, and moves on without another word. For me, the pivotal point in Johnson’s
anecdote is the moment that Ponce speaks Spanish, followed by Johnson’s translation
from English to Spanish. The moment they speak Spanish is the precise moment in
which both Johnson and Ponce confuse the porter’s reading of their bodies and also
confuse the cultural context in which they are read and that determines their treatment by
other United States citizens.
Given Johnson’s interpretation of the anecdote, in which he pronounces that “any
negro will do, as long as he’s not a U.S. citizen” (65), I wondered how many other
modernist writers had looked at race in a transnational and, specifically, in a trans-
American context and had used the Latin Americas comparatively or made trans-
American connections to comment about race in the United States. Upon further
investigation, what I found for the most part was more complex than mere commentary,
as I will discuss in the chapter descriptions. I also found that few scholars wrote about
these modernist Latin American interests. Those who did so wrote about single authors
and their connections (as in the case of William Carlos Williams and Langston Hughes),

2
but none that I have read to date offer analysis about these connections in the context of
modernism. When I speak of “modernism” I refer not only to the works produced by the
authors I include, but also to the historical moment, the legal discourses, the social and
cultural climates that produced these works and deemed them necessary.
The works I include are a product of their cultural and historical moments. It
therefore makes sense to arrange them in a roughly chronological fashion in order to trace
the race discourses as they respond to changing laws and shifting cultural climates.
Interestingly, this project begins and ends with two African American writers, both
concerned with disparate citizenship and both having observed the difference in how race
is constructed and treated in Latin America. There is a difference, however. Johnson is
in Latin America as an agent and thus, the official voice, of the United States, and his
occasional slips of the tongue betray this. Langston Hughes, on the other hand, is in the
Latin Americas under far different circumstances, and while he appropriates work even
as he translates it, he must still grapple with the original source. In other words, we
experience Latin America through Johnson’s lens and also through Hughes’s translation,
but within Hughes’s vision, the original source is nonetheless present and self-
respresented.
In the broadest sense, my argument is that modernism is more rich and complex
than the high modernist, trans-Atlantic aesthetic movement that it has been presented as
being. The movement is more dynamic in its response to the social climate, and more
fluid in its geographical movement. In fact, current constructions of modernism as a
literary and artistic phenomenon that was primarily informed by a trans-Atlantic flow of
aesthetic and philosophical influences are refuted by the very writings of the modernist

3
period. Many writers of the time looked south toward the Latin Americas for literary
inspiration. Virginia Woolf, for example, describes the travails of Rachel Vinrace and
first introduces Richard and Clarissa Dalloway in The Voyage Out (1915), as they travel
by ship to South America. In Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), the fictitious
Costaguana in Latin America serves as the locale for his story of corruption amid silver-
mining and political exploits. Mina Loy wrote of the poverty and destitution she suffered
upon settling in Mexico City with husband Arthur Cravan, who went to Mexico to escape
conscription and later disappeared as he sailed off to sea, in her poem “Mexican Desert”
(1921).
Writers in the United States were also looking toward the Latin Americas, but
sought more than mere inspiration; they sought a refuge from racism in the United States,
and sometimes sought a foil against which they could assert their national identities.
Wallace Stevens, for instance, established an epistolary relationship with Cuban writer
and publisher José Rodríguez-Feo—a relationship that betrays Stevens’s contradictory
positions on imperialism and masculinity. Meanwhile, Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican
Americans feature heavily in John Steinbeck works such as Tortilla Flat (1935), The
Pearl (1947), and the screenplay he wrote for Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952). But for
the six authors whose works serve as case studies in this project, Latin America offers
political respite, political asylum, and the space—whether real or imaginary—for
identitarian play, political activism, and social commentary upon a fragmented existence
in the United States. Modernist fluidity that includes back and forth movement between
the United States and the Latin Americas is my more specific argument, for it is an aspect

4
of modernism that has been largely ignored, and thus results in a blind spot in the
scholarship on modernism, as well as in how it is taught.
Despite an interest in the study of race, ethnicity, and national culture within
modernism, recent scholarship has all but ignored the interplay of United States and Latin
American modernisms during this period, and how such interplay affected
understandings of race, culture, taxonomy, and consequent axiology. This dissertation
exposes the ways in which these writers yearned to escape the oppressive political and
cultural mores of the United States by fantasizing about a utopian Latin America, and
thereby negotiating identity within a space that traversed the fantastical and the real.
Identitarian play, such as race passing, were responses to U.S. laws and social
policies of the time, such as Jim Crow laws, and immigration policies that targeted those
classified as “non-white.” Contrary to the British writers that included Latin America as
the setting or landscape for their works, U.S. modernists grappled with and negotiated
identities that were subject to the whims of the U.S. legal system, and did so through the
trope of and connection to Latin America in their works. As I analyze these trans-
American connections, six main points emerge: (1) modernist connections to Latin
America range from the fantastical to the real, the fantasy often resulting in the
homogenization of Latin America and its people; (2) The Spanish language, linguistic
play, language manipulation, and translation confuse ocular analysis that is based on
bodily legibility and cultural signifiers; (3) Latin America often functions as a foil by
which one is able to assert a U.S. identity that is also a masculine identity; (4) Travel
writing contributes to fantasies of Latin America, and also debunks them. It also results
in a comparison of race across borders and in enriched race discourses; (5) Race and

5
ethnicity (and how they are read/misread) affect the limits and expanses of citizenship
and rights; (6) A binary understanding of race seems to be a prominent understanding of
race in the United States—all authors in this project recognize this and fight this, but
often subscribe to the same understanding.
In the modernist trans-American connections that I investigate, I explore how
modernist writers imagined Latin American countries such as Brazil, Puerto Rico, the
Dominican Republic, Cuba, Venezuela, and Costa Rica as utopian, feminized spaces, ripe
for migration because they appeared to offer more malleable workings of race and
identity. While “Latin America” is the standard reference to Latin American countries,
including parts of the Caribbean, I have chosen to also use “the Latin Americas” in order
to emphasize the cultural and historical differences of each Latin American country,
despite cultural overlaps. I thus strive to extricate “Latin America” from the idea that it is
one place (or space) with one language, populated with a homogenous people—an
assumption that some of the authors featured in this project sometimes betray.
Despite occasional carelessness with Latin American identity on the part of some
of these authors, “identity” itself is the very thing that informs their works. My historical
and chronological examination of the literary works of Nella Larsen, William Carlos
Williams, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Carl
Van Vechten reveals trans-American connections as a way by which these writers
negotiated and rebelled against racial and cultural identities imposed upon them within
the larger cultural framework of the United States—a political struggle that has been
overlooked for the most part in scholarly characterizations of the United States modernist
experience, Harlem Renaissance, and “American studies.” The fragmented existence so

6
frequently touted as a “high modernist” aesthetic concern, is not only a theme in the
works in this project, but the reality that drives these writers to create their literary works
to begin with.
Given that U.S. laws, social policies, and even geopolitics inform the literary
interests of the writers in this project, this dissertation relies heavily upon a historical
framing of the literary works included. Within that historical frame, I include legal
discourses and the subsequent immigration and race discourses that emerged as a
consequence. I begin this study with the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case, which
declared that “negroes” had no rights to citizenship and therefore no rights as citizens,
including the right to sue in court. This decision, as well, as the social climate that
preceded it, informed the emigration discourses originated by Martin Delany, who
suggested Latin America and Africa not only as sites where African Americans would be
welcomed, but also as sites where they could thrive socially and economically.
Emigration discourses continued, especially in light of the 1896 Supreme Court
ruling in the Plessy v. Ferguson case that upheld the constitutionality of segregation.
Homer Plessy may have lost his case, but he, and the confused bodily readings his
whiteness evoked, brought public attention to legal definitions of blackness and to the
“logic” that informed race-based pseudo-science, taxonomy, and laws. Inevitably,
comparisons of the treatment of race in United States to that of other countries continued
to inform not only emigrational possibilities, but also discourses about race, race
classifications, and the lines that divided black from white, black from Latin American,
and Latin American from white.

7
The failure of the “Back to Africa” movement, along with the travel writing
about Latin America, once again brought Latin America to the attention of the black
intelligentsia as a site desirable for emigration. With the possibility of emigration,
however, emerged the possibility of national, cultural, and even racial absorption—
especially if racial categories in Latin American countries were as lax and fluid as the
current travel writing reported.
However, most of the travel writing ignored the realities of race in the Latin
Americas. These realities include a caste or casta system that, although centuries old, still
informed (and inform) Latin American anxieties about race, skin color, and bodily
readings. The travel writing that emerged from such historical and legal contexts thus
also contributed to race discourses and “race theories” that looked at race comparatively.
Aside from race discourses and studies on racial passing, I include visual examples, such
as sixteenth century casta paintings and art from the primitivist movement, under the
rubric of “race theory.”
Much of the travel writing that influenced both emigration discourses and the
literary works of the modernist period was published in newspaper publications, such as
in Robert Abbott’s Chicago Defender. The biographical and autobiographical details I
include, however, also contain elements of travel writing that reflect the social climate of
the time and influenced it.
Admittedly, autobiography as a genre has been studied as an amalgamation of fact
and fiction, thus shedding doubt not only on the veracity of its contents, but also on the
practice of hinging entire arguments upon autobiographical details. According to Paul
Eakin, it is impossible for autobiographers and their readers to distinguish between

8
memory and the imagination in practice, for they become “intimately complementary in
the autobiographical act” (6). While this could certainly be the case with Johnson’s,
Williams’s, or Hughes’s autobiographies, subjective memories that mar the “facts”
nonetheless inform the literary works included here. For example, the “facts” that
Johnson reports in Along This Way inform the creation and readings of his fictional
“autobiography,” particularly if such facts are in actuality embellishments or altogether
fictitious. But as Sidonie Smith argues, “Autobiographical practices become occasions
for the staging of identity, and autobiographical strategies occasions for the staging of
agency” (189), thus rendering the intersection of autobiography, biography, and literature
a fascinating performance that consciously makes public carefully orchestrated and
divulged information. More often than not, however, these intersections betray what was
meant to be silenced and locked up.
William Carlos Williams’s autobiography, for example, when read alongside his
poetry and other writings, illustrates everything that he never said or only uttered in code.
His cryptic autobiographical insertions about his Uncle Carlos, as well as his silence
about his wife Flossie, speak volumes about his suppressed, racial desires. These strange
insertions and omissions also illustrate some of Williams’s agency in bringing to the
surface what has been suppressed and oppressed by social mores and cultural
expectations.
In other words, although it is problematic to hinge entire arguments upon the
“facts” of autobiographies, the literary intersections I describe shine a floodlight on a
variety of unconscious desires that would otherwise be overlooked. Take, for instance,
Langston Hughes’s works of translations, which when read and interpreted through the

9
lens of his autobiography, show how he performs his problematic domestic politics
through the acts of appropriation and mistranslation. Such intersections betray desires
that will not be silenced or closeted, but that also cannot be uttered or acted upon.
A similar type of performativity that is inherently political and performative
occurs with the act of racial, ethnic, or cultural passing. According to Steven Belluscio,
there are two understandings of passing. The first is a “commonsense” understanding,
which has been described by theorists such as Gunnar Myrdal, St. Clair Drake, and
Horace R. Cayton as the act of concealing a “unitary, essential, and ineffaceable racial
identity,” and substituting it with a purportedly artificial one (9). This understanding of
passing links the act to perfomativity, involves deception, dishonesty, fraudulence,
betrayal, in the effort to disguise or suppress one’s racial heritage, racially marked body,
or sexual orientation, and thus “relies on a binary logic of identity” (9). Neil Brookes’s
description of passing adds that the act could be intentional or unintentional, stating that
“intentional passing could be one time only for a specific purpose; [or] occasional for
convenience (dining, theater, travel)” (86). Intentional passing could also be segmental,
Brookes noting that “many African Americans earned their living in the white world but
kept their personal lives in black society” (86). “Passing,” Brookes argues, is the
physical manifestation of a psychological quest to understand oneself in a society where
to be black was often not to have one consistent self but to have a double self […] or to
have a multiplicity of selves,” rather than merely impersonating another racial group (86).
Brookes’s definition of passing relies on the binary logic and understanding of
race and identity, contrary to William Boelhower’s understanding, and falls under what
Belluscio describes as a second way of understanding racial passing. This second

10
paradigm is more fluid, Boelhower arguing that it is “useless to speak of authentic as
opposed to false ethnic culture,” for “authenticity pertains to the pragmatics of simulation
rather than to a process of literal representation” (Belluscio 9). This model of
postmodern ethnicity shatters binarism and offers in its stead multiplicity and
performative possibility.
It is this second understanding of passing for which all of the authors in this study
strive, even while they are locked within the confines of the first understanding as long as
they remain within the parameters of the United States. These authors (and some of their
depicted characters) find, however, that they can escape national boundaries, even if only
“virtually,” through the use (or withholding) of foreign language and translation. Steven
Bellucio’s To Be Suddenly White (2006) and Joel Olson’s The Abolition of White
Democracy (2004) have been helpful in the categorization of race passing and race
theories on whiteness. This project differs from the “passing” scholarship that has been
published to date, however, in that no one has written on the passing phenomenon on the
linguistic level or in the context of linguistic play.
If “passing” literature and other writings that described the African American
experience with the complexities of identity came into vogue in the early part of the
twentieth century, that popularity also owed to the artistic primitivist movement that Paul
Gauguin paved with his D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous
(1897), a work that was painted in Tahiti but influenced by his years in Peru and his stay
in Panama. Pablo Picasso reinforced the movement with his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
(1907), which changed the course of European art forever. Man Ray, Carl Van Vechten,
and other artists took part in the primitivist movement, producing work that sometimes

11
conflated blackness with primitiveness. This exacerbated anxiety about racial
representations, even while African American artists and writers also produced these
types of stereotypical depictions.
Writers of the Harlem Renaissance did far more than capitalize on a stylish and
exotic curiosity in blackness—they used this exposure as a platform from which they
were able to protest segregation laws and question race logic, taxonomy and axiology.
Chapter one juxtaposes James Weldon Johnson’s first and only novel, The Autobiography
of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), with his actual autobiography, Along This Way (1933).
In analyzing Johnson’s transformation of fiction to autobiography, I draw from Johnson’s
life in Jacksonville, Florida, where he grew up among Cubans and other Latin Americans
who worked in the local cigar factories; from his friendship with his houseguest, the
Cuban Ricardo Rodriguez Poncé; and from his observations in Venezuela, Nicaragua,
and Costa Rica while he was on diplomatic duty. I argue that Johnson’s observations of
the less rigid workings of race in Latin American cultures were germinal in the creation
and depiction of the unnamed ex-coloured man in his novel—a character who poses both
an epistemic and axiological dilemma for those who read (and misread) him on racial and
subjective levels.
Shame is central in the depiction of the ex-coloured man, whether it is shame in
being “coloured,” shame in belonging to a race so despised, or the shame of crossing the
color line once and for all. In order to explain anger that turns upon itself and becomes
shame, I employ psychoanalytic theories, which inevitably inform the race theories used
in this chapter, as well as informing the very act of passing by whatever means necessary.

12
Much of the racial passing that the ex-coloured man enacts involves
incorporating the Spanish language as part of his masquerade; in turn, this strategic use of
Spanish and its performance of cultural difference complicates the legibility of his body
and also exposes disparate access to the benefits of citizenship and cultural capital. And
as both Johnson and the ex-coloured man observe, culture, any culture so long as it is not
African American culture, trumps race in terms of access to the benefits of citizenship
and cultural capital. By exploring the complications that arise when “foreign” cultures
and languages are combined with race, Johnson did important work in questioning race
logic derived from race laws and established the groundwork for what is known today as
“race theory.”
This first chapter establishes Johnson’s novel as the originating trans-American
modernist connection. It also establishes the function and use of language in the passing
phenomenon—an aspect of passing that has to this date remained unexplored. In the
context of this first chapter, I call this “language passing,” which I define as the
conscious use of language to disrupt what Carlyle Van Thompson calls “ocular analysis,”
that is, the imposition of legal constraints and legal meaning “based largely on ocular
evidence” (51). How does language, I ask, complicate a reading and misreading of the
body that is based on ocular evidence and bodily signifiers? The idea of national
constraints upon blacks that are disrupted through foreign language use and manipulation
is especially important, for it simultaneously questions “black” identity outside U.S.
borderlines.

13
My second chapter deepens this exploration of Latin America as a space of
freedom. Here I explore how travel writing and migration discourses inform “Brazil” as
an imaginary space for utopian dreams: escape from rigid race and gender constructions
and the possibility of sexual freedom. African American connections to Brazil that began
with Martin Delaney’s proposal for immigration to Latin America in 1852, and continued
with Chicago Defender founder Robert Abbott’s travel writing in the 1920s, inevitably
inform Nella Larsen’s use of Brazil in Passing (1929), Jessie Fauset’s Brazilian character
Anthony Cruz/Cross in Plum Bun (1929), and Carl Van Vechten’s comparison of
Brazilian and U.S. racial taxonomies in his controversial novel, Nigger Heaven (1926).
The relatively unexplored references to Brazil in these three novels contextualize
the politics and discourse of the U.S. black immigration movement, illuminate the socio-
political realities of blacks in a post-World War I United States, and yet homogenize
Brazil and Latin America, and thus displace anxieties about primitivism, race, and
representation. In tandem with their troping on Brazil as fantasized utopia, all three
writers employ the passing figure as one who passes for non-black rather than for white.
For the protagonists who participate in this triangulated mode of passing do so to be seen
as Jewish, Latin American, Italian, or Spanish. Often, the latter three identities are
employed as if they mean the same thing. “Passing” has been discussed as a phenomenon
without nuanced politics, as if passing for white is the same thing as passing for non-
black. I explore the socio-political complications that lie in that gap, and term the act of
passing as the other “other,” “triangulated passing.”
The desperate attempt to access “Brazil” by Dick in Nigger Heaven, by Angela in
Plum Bun, and by both Brian and Irene in Passing, challenge the one-drop rule and laws

14
of hypo-descent in the United States, while at the same time questioning the feasibility
of Brazil as a constructed utopian space. Dick’s angry refusal to accept a U.S. racial
categorization that is based on the arbitrary “one drop” rule certainly makes reference to
the race discourse of the time, but it also exposes the fact that only people who identified
as black and were “fair enough” could pass and even entertain the thought of crossing the
color line in the United States or, according to Van Vechten, the culture line in Brazil or
any of the other Latin Americas.
As the anxiety produced by Johnson’s novel illustrates, passing poses a danger to
white cultural capital, and Van Vechten underlines this idea with his depiction of Lasca
Sartoris. What makes Lasca especially dangerous is her negation of boundaries, and the
logic with which she defies racial limits. While she identifies as “coloured,” she does not
accept racial discrimination. Lasca Sartoris does not pass. She identifies as black, but
defies the social conventions that constrain her as black. Yet, as her name suggests, she
is the sartor, the tailor of her own public fashioning. Carl Van Vechten consistently
associates her with Latin and/or Spanish/Italian culture through “Spanish brocade,”
“Spanish lace” (240), with beauty, mystery, and excitement, as well as with sexual
boundlessness, the primitive and the occult. If Lasca embodies racial ambiguity and
consequent racial and sexual freedom, and if through this ambiguity Van Vechten
suggests that she is symbolic of a Latin American space where both racial and sexual
freedoms can be played out, then he also conveys the anxiety of unknown spaces and the
dystopic possibilities that can emerge from a utopian project gone awry.
The anxiety stemming from color gradation within the black community and
within the same family that Van Vechten depicts in Nigger Heaven is not only an anxiety

15
about whether or not one can pass without incident. The “misreading” of race results
in a disparate release from the constraints of race (albeit temporary), when others who
cannot capitalize on such misreadings of their bodies are instead fixed racially. The
anxiety depicted is rooted in the dilemma experienced by the privileged who can racially
pass, and who are thus privy to the cultural capital that comes with whiteness when
others are irrefutably denied “white” capital.
Jessie Fauset explores similar anxieties and dilemmas in Plum Bun and comments
on the domestic anxieties concerning race, ethnicity, and how they affect the limits and
quality of citizenship—concerns common to all four chapters in this dissertation. For
Fauset, “home” is always in quotes, although only figuratively, just as “United States
citizen” is always in quotes when linked to “African American.” Fauset effectively
explores the liminal space of “citizen yet not citizen,” and disrupts a priori legal readings
of “blackness” and identity through the character Anthony Cruz/Cross—a Brazilian
character unexplored and rarely alluded to in Plum Bun scholarship. The concept of
“home”—its significance to place and displacement—is inextricably tied to the act of
passing. Only by turning toward a symbolic Brazil does main protagonist Angela,
ultimately gain access to “whiteness” through triangulated passing—implicitly as Latin
American or of “darker” European stock, explicitly as non-black.
The interesting aspect to Angela’s absorption by Brazil through her impending
marriage to Anthony is the question of whether once married, once read and culturally
inscribed as Brazilian, is Angela passing? The guilt and burden of passing is tied to laws
and knowledge of such laws within a specific national and cultural context. It also has to
do with the acknowledgement and tacit acceptance of these defining laws and racial

16
logic, whether privately or publicly. The symmetry attained in pairing Angela with
Anthony—one a U.S. “citizen” who does not have the benefits of citizenship, the other
identified as Brazilian, both of similar hue and racial ambiguity—allows Jessie Fauset to
illustrate and question U.S. race logic and law comparatively.
While Fauset depicts cultural absorption and Brazil as ideal alternatives to the
domestic “race problem,” Nella Larsen depicts the same alternatives as laden with racial
and homoerotic panic. Passing’s Irene Redfield takes both subversive and privileged
pleasure in passing for non-black, reflecting to herself: “White people were so stupid
about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the
most ridiculous means, finger nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other
equally silly rot … They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, A Mexican, or a
gipsy” (150). And it is “her warm olive skin” (183), so commonly associated with a
homogenously hued Latin America that Irene emphasizes.
Passing, whether triangulated or not, affords Irene and the object of her desire and
repulsion, Claire Kendry, pleasure rooted in a disassociation from the body. Such
disassociation allows for an almost objective observation of the hierarchies of citizenship
based on the valuations of race and categorization that plays out much like theater. This
leads to insight, and a feeling that a window into the human drama is open as to no other.
While some of the benefits of passing include access to material goods, to a higher level
of service in places that deny service to blacks, to the benefits of full citizenship, the
pleasure of passing is also oriented in transgression against race laws and rebellion
against social conventions.

17
For Irene, however, the act of passing involves strict control. Irene’s husband’s
(Brian) desire to emigrate to Brazil, as well as Clare’s reckless passing in tandem with
her overt desire, threaten Irene’s iron grip on what she perceives as her racial and sexual
identities. If Brian’s Brazil, as Irene reads it, represents the open space that allows racial
and sexual freedom that is no longer ambiguous but instead publicly asserted, then
Irene’s projected Brazil simultaneously represents the end of conflated racial and sexual
play that depends on her repression, and the end of her secured public identity. The
unconscious space that Brazil represents in Passing allows for the expression of utopian
desire as well as for the repression of dystopian anxiety. Passing into Brazil thus
symbolizes passing from the unconscious to the conscious, and passing from projection
and reaction formation to open desire. Going south means going deep into the
unconscious, something that Irene fears and refuses to do.
The Latin American identity may offer temporary refuge and alleviation from
anti-black racism, but the cultural and historical realities of such an identity expose
identitarian complexities, contradictions, and negotiations. In chapter three, William
Carlos Williams simultaneously struggles against and embraces an identity as a son of
immigrants, as a first generation “American,” and as a son of the Americas. Williams,
whose mother was from Puerto Rico and whose father was English but raised in the
Dominican Republic from the age of five, seeks and asserts his heritage through his
literary and historical exploration of Latin America and through his use of the Spanish
language in works such as Al Que Quiere (1917), In the American Grain (1925), and
other writings. Although Williams is commonly dubbed an “all-American” poet, his
writings display his disavowal and inclusion of cultural, ethnic, and even racial selves.

18
Williams is the exemplum of the Latin American passing figure, rife with
contradictions and failed negotiations. He may have African ancestry, but he is not
overtly racially marked. His roots are in the Latin Americas, but his surname and his
patrilineage have tended to erase this fact from current literary history, and have reduced
his ethnic roots to little more than a sentence in most of his biographies. Williams also
reverses the migratory direction that is a pattern in this project. Instead, Williams is
about arrival and the integration of the Latin American and U.S.-“all-American” figure.
As Williams grapples with his position and identity in the United States, we witness the
palpable tension present in the struggle to retain a Latin American identity while feeling
the sway of assimilation pressures. These anxieties play out sexually, unconsciously, and
through language.
Williams consistently complicates his affirmation of national identity by invoking
Spanish—his first language, which although it is the primary language spoken by both his
parents, he attributes mainly to his mother. He asserts his first language and his Latin
American identity even as he disavows them. Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic
are thus foils for his masculine and U.S. national identity. And yet, Williams’s
transformation of his legal citizenship into his public persona as an “all-American,” virile
poet reveals much about his cultural anxieties and vacillations, for being legally
recognized as a U.S. citizen is not the same thing as being recognized as “all-American”
or all masculine. Williams shifts between attempts to reconcile these two disparate
positions and attempts to rebel against one or the other. All the while revealing his
identitarian struggles, a conflicted Williams attempts to construct and explore “Latin

19
America” through his writings in an effort to inscribe himself in it, even as he
disavows it.
To date, no one has written about Williams as a “passing” figure or how his acts
of passing complicate his identity in gender and racial hierarchies. This is surprising,
since the struggles, complexities, and contradictions evident in Williams’s works are
rooted in these types of identitarian negotiations, which are inevitably tied to the
sociopolitical and the geopolitical. Such omissions and neglect may be attributed to
ignorance. After all, in occupying an in-between space between black and white, Latin
Americans in the United States were perceived as non-black, and therefore privy to white
cultural capital, even if it was limited. These limits, however, translated to almost non-
existent political and social capital that meant occupying the grey area of invisibility.
As stated in his autobiography, Williams is decidedly non-white, and he occupies
a slippery space that defies racial categorization—even when he, himself, attempts to
assert and categorize his own identity. Williams’s cultural, racial, and even linguistic
negotiations can be seen in the context of play, conscious compromise, and even
unconscious confusion. In short, these conciliations that ebb between consciousness and
unconsciousness can be examined as the negotiations of a passing figure.
The importance of language cannot be understated, for language is one of the
primary links (if not the primary link) to cultural affiliation and ethnicity. The
Williamses’ bilingualism (and sometime multilingualism) is also intertwined with
biculturalism, especially for the Williams brothers who found themselves to be the sons
of immigrants and also first generation “Americans.” Throughout the life of William

20
Carlos, language becomes the site of cultural affirmation as well as that of cultural
repudiation. This linguistic ebb and flow is apparent in Williams’s public acts of
translation, in his translation works, and his occasional refusal to translate at all, choosing
to remain silent instead. Willliams’s linguistic play is thus identitarian play that has the
potential to inscribe and describe him culturally, as well as to distance him from cultural
affiliations and ocular analytic assumptions altogether.
This dissertation culminates and ends with Langston Hughes’s defiant refusal to
pass racially, even as he straddles cultural and linguistic lines through translation.
Hughes’s connections to and observations of Mexico and Cuba influence and culminate
with his 1948 translation of Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén’s poetry. Hughes’s act of
translation negotiates between race passing and the reluctance to pass. The act of
translation cannot be understood solely as the literal translation of work from one
language to another; these acts are further complicated and informed by the specific
historical moment that deems the straddling of linguistic and cultural lines necessary and
symptomatic of a cultural malaise specific to the United States. Acts of translation
therefore simultaneously congeal and disrupt notions of national identity. Hughes’s
translations of Guillén’s poems, “Tú No Sabe Inglé” (1930), “La Canción Del Bongó”
(1931), and “El Abuelo” (1934), betray an analogous relationship with the plights
described in the original Cuban poems that also illustrate Hughes’s problematic
relationship to the United States.
Langston Hughes found some respite from U.S. Jim Crow laws by crossing the
border, living in Mexico for some time, and enjoying celebrity in the Latin Americas
when he was not as well known in the United States. Spanish-language translations of

21
Hughes’s poetry were published in Cuba as early as 1928 and in Mexico by 1931.
After a 1934 stay in Mexico (which included the company of artists such as Diego
Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, among
others), Hughes began to translate Mexican short stories and poetry for publication in the
U.S.. He later translated and published a collection of poems by the Cuban poet Nicolás
Guillén in 1948.
Hughes’s experience of translating and being translated thus asks the question:
What does it mean to translate and be translated under oppressive historical conditions?
The transnational exchange, in this case, seems more bidirectional and evenly cross-
cultural than those previously examined in this project. The results are a bilateral
exchange and mobilization that are informed by comparative racial/racist concerns and
by socio-political necessity. While translation can be a trick or performance of
racial/ethnic passing, for Hughes there is something more: language and cultural
translation (and even mistranslation) is a dialogic performance that (sometimes
simultaneously) asserts the self, seeks unity with an “other,” and creates distance from
self by questioning assumptions of cultural essence. Translation involves constant
identitarian negotiation.
While I’ve established William Carlos Williams’s play with translation and the
identity conflicts that play out through language, my case study of Langston Hughes and
translation goes further, in that it addresses the ontological and political motivations to
translate and be translated. Susan Bassnett’s translation theory of analogy is invaluable
in explaining aspects of Hughes’s interest in translation, but I extend her theory further in
factoring the role of race, ethnicity, and the color line in acts of translation. Translation

22
theory generally deals with the linguistic mechanics of translation or, when angled
politically, with the post-colonial and socio-political ramifications of being translated.
No work to date deals with translation and the color line, with translation and black
identity, or with translation as political performance.
While Hughes presents himself as the definitive translator of Guillén’s work (of
which he was the first in the United States), his linguistic display is also a display of
straddling cultures through language fluency and in the process, creating a third space.
While he straddles a linguistic line, in which he may or may not pass on information to
one side or another, he also occupies a third space of fluidity, as he negotiates modes of
translation as well as whether to translate at all. If the act of translation is an unconscious
revelation of the translator’s social reality and of the translator’s anxieties, what then of
conscious acts of mistranslation? In such cases, the translated work becomes a
springboard for the translator’s personal politics. Conscious mistranslation can thus be an
act of willful appropriation.
Many recent scholars have recently begun to challenge and complicate narrow
understandings of modernism, and my project participates in this intervention by linking
canonical modernists to Harlem Renaissance authors, and beyond, to the Latin Americas.
For what is commonly perceived as an insular modernist movement in the United States
reveals itself instead to have been a trans-American phenomenon that has yet to be
excavated to its full extent. This project begins to address some of these scholarly gaps,
adds to and complicates current dialogues on race passing and translation studies, while it
configures a new archive of modernist writing on Latin America.

23
Chapter One
Reading, Misreading, and Language Passing in James Weldon Johnson’s
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Along This Way

Introduction:
The literature that came out of the Harlem Renaissance is predominantly read as
an art form that gave a white audience (and potential patrons) a glimpse at black life at a
time when all art African-derived was in vogue. Writers of the Harlem Renaissance did
far more work than just capitalize on a stylish and exotic curiosity—they used this
exposure as a platform from which they were able to protest segregation laws and
question race logic, taxonomy and axiology. I concentrate on the writings of James
Weldon Johnson in this chapter, specifically his first and only novel, The Autobiography
of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), and his actual autobiography, Along This Way (1933).
The novel was a foundational text that questioned the internalized logic of rigid race
categories. Johnson’s own autobiography, which was written to refute the assumption
that his novel was his real story, generously offers many details that help the critic read
the way Johnson deploys race and culture within his novel. More specifically, I cull
relevant evidence from Johnson’s life in Jacksonville, Florida, where he grew up among
Cubans and other Latin Americans who worked in the local cigar factories, as well as
from his experiences and observations in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica while he
was on diplomatic duty. His observations of the more malleable workings of race in
Latin American cultures, I argue, greatly influenced the creation and depiction of the
unnamed ex-coloured man in his novel.

24
Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man was authored
anonymously upon its initial 1912 publication. The novel caused a bit of a panic in that it
suggested that color did not offer the taxonomic certainty that whites had assumed it did
all along. Was it possible, as Johnson’s novel suggested, that one could befriend, live
next to, and even marry someone who appeared white but was indeed black, as defined
by U.S. law? The panic that Johnson’s novel elicited mirrored the panic and paranoia
that had been experienced by Southerners for generations. The paranoia and fear about
the specter of “invisible blackness” is, as sociologist F. James Davis notes, what
prompted laws that defined blackness and thus established legal separation between the
races (56). Johnson’s novel, however, depicts a racially ambiguous man (racially
ambiguous at least to those who attempt to read his race through bodily signs, including
himself) who jumps this constructed legal color line at will. He thus poses both an
epistemic and axiological dilemma for those who read (and misread) him from the
outside as well as for himself. As the ex-coloured man in Johnson’s novel attempts to
negotiate his identity, much of the racial passing that he does is passive, for in
incorporating language in his “masquerade,” he complicates the readability of his body
by performing “culture” via the Spanish language. And as both Johnson and the ex-
coloured man observe, culture, any culture so long as it is not African American culture,
trumps race in terms of access to the benefits of citizenship and cultural capital. By
exploring the complications that arise when “foreign” cultures and languages are
combined with race, Johnson did important work in questioning race logic derived from
race laws and helped establish the groundwork for what is known today as “race theory.”

25
In this chapter I frame Johnson’s novel and autobiography within the legal
discourse that eventually became a naturalized race “logic.” But I propose to do more
than trace law and public policy in order to explicate the legal transgressions of the
unnamed ex-coloured man in Johnson’s novel; I will also explore the function and use of
language in the phenomenon and practice of passing—an aspect of passing that has to
this date remained unexplored. I call this “language passing,” which I define as the
conscious use of language to disrupt what Carlyle Van Thompson calls “ocular analysis,”
meaning the imposition of legal constraints and legal meaning “based largely on ocular
evidence” (51). How does language, I ask, complicate a reading and misreading of the
body that is based on ocular evidence and bodily signifiers?
Many scholars have written about the novel’s ex-coloured man’s inability to read
accurately. Literary critic Robert Stepto, for instance, claims that the ex-coloured man is
caught “in a kind of illiteracy that argues that technique can pass for art” (125-126).
Stepto and other critics who recognize the limits of the ex-coloured man’s “literacy” are
accurate in their readings. To this, however, I add that readers who solely read the ex-
coloured man as an “ex-black man” who turns his back on his race ultimately misread,
since their readings are informed and limited by a binary understanding of race. An
understanding of race in the United States in which one is either black or white, not both,
and not “other,” is constantly complicated by “foreign” understandings of race and
culture. These more complex, nuanced, and often complicated understandings of race
were not lost on the African American community since, as Davis documents, “Some
not-so-light mulattoes passed by taking Latin names and moving to an appropriate locale”
(56). Although this type of “passing” was common, Davis notes that many who passed

26
for Latin American “found that passing was easy but that the emotional costs were
high, and some therefore returned to the black community” (56). Nonetheless, what is
clear here is that people who would normally be categorized as “colored” or “black” had
the ability to manipulate perception and consequent taxonomy through surnames and the
strategic use of language.
Despite the contradictions and illogic that arise when language collides with the
assumptions that inform ocular analysis, there still exist many unquestioned beliefs about
racism and assumptions that immediately link the root of racism with hierarchies of color
and race. While it is true that racism may be experienced as a result of ocular analysis
and the reading and misreading of our bodies, more work needs to be done exploring thw
ways in which ocular perception/analysis is then complicated by language reception,
despite the fact that many African American essayists and novelists have mentioned the
phenomenon in their works. One example of the lack of importance that language has
been given in the context of race passing is Van Thompson’s literary criticism of
Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. He describes the ex-coloured
man’s stint as a reader at the Jacksonville cigar factories where he learns to “make cigars,
smoke, swear, and speak Spanish” (64). Following this description, Van Thompson
remarks upon the ex-coloured man’s class bias and glosses, “This places emphasis on the
importance of language in the masquerade of assuming another identity” (64). While
Van Thompson highlights the function of language in masquerade, his analysis of
language and masquerade goes no further than the above-mentioned statement.
Language may place one within a specific cultural and national context, and when
combined with color, may mean the difference between life and death. No image

27
illustrates this better than that of a Moroccan man, described by Booker T. Washington
in Up From Slavery (1919), finding that his language exempts him from the racism and
violence that his color elicits:
I happened to find myself in a town in which so much excitement and
indignation were being expressed that it seemed likely for a time that there
would be a lynching. The occasion of the trouble was that a dark-skinned
man had stopped at the local hotel. Investigation, however, developed the
fact that this individual was a citizen of Morocco, and that while traveling
in this country he spoke the English language. As soon as it was learned
that he was not an American Negro, all the signs of indignation
disappeared. The man who was the innocent cause of the excitement,
though, found it prudent after that not to speak English. (60)

In this case, the English language in tandem with the Moroccan man’s coloration resulted
in a misreading of cultural context, taxonomy, and position on the U.S. social ladder.
Most urgently, however, it also determined the man’s lack of access to civil rights and
protection under U.S. law –upon being read as “black.” It is only when he is
contextualized outside of the institution of slavery and made exempt from racist
taxonomy and axiology that his status as foreigner and “guest” are returned as well as the
rights that go along with this status. The contradictions, hypocrisy and illogic that could
pronounce a man “black,” nearly cause his lynching, and then result in a retraction of the
“indictment” mirrors the illogic of United States law. It also betrays the paranoia, fear of
contamination and sexual repression that informed the edification of race and segregation
laws.

Blackness under the law:
The lexicon that separated “white” from all non-whites, and that bestowed whiteness
with special status is documented from as early as the seventeenth century. According to

28
Gary Taylor, “in the Anglophone world as a whole, whiteness became a legal status in
the half century between 1644 and 1691, when white entered the statute books of 13
separate English communities” (191). And although the word, “white” as a description
of a people had been in use, Taylor remarks that “the first use of white in colonial
legislation is usually attributed to the divided Rhode Island legislature of 1652” (191).
The language of the legislation separated white from non-white in a legal context, if not
in terms of physical separation, then in terms of status, citizenship, and cultural capital.
Moreover, racial and cultural separations preceded the physical separations that were
later legally mandated by Jim Crow laws.
“Jim Crow” was the blanket term that described the segregation laws that separated
the legally white from the legally black in the United States. Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a
white actor who donned blackface and performed the “Jim Crow” minstrel act made the
character “Jim Crow” famous all across the United States, taking him from Louisville to
New York by 1832, and then later even to London and Dublin. Rice’s act helped
propagate the stereotype that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites, more beast than
human, and therefore unable to be integrated with white people. It is perplexing that this
blanket term got its name from minstrelsy, but does this history also betray the projected
desires and anxieties of the white populace onto the black and indeed, the projection of
what Taylor documents as the language and act of “colorphobia,” as discussed in black
papers (5)?
1
Rice’s performance was a popular source of entertainment, but it may also

1
In Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity From Columbus to Hip-Hop (2005)
Gary Taylor notes how and why the more apt term, “colorphobia” was replaced by the
term “racism”: “Despite its long-lived utility, the term colorphobia has been replaced by
the term racism. Why? In part, because colorphobia belonged to the marginalized

29
have provided the space in which white anxieties about race passing could be played
out safely. After all, a white person playing black was seen as both temporary and
laughable, but a black person playing white was terrifying. “Jim Crow” was being used
as a derogatory reference to blacks, more akin to “coon” or “darkie” by 1838, but by the
end of the nineteenth century it described the segregation laws that separated black from
white.
Although the laws that marked these separations were not documented until after
reconstruction, the Dred Scott case questioned the legal protection of blacks as well as
their citizenship. The 1857 decision in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case determined that by
nature of having been imported as slaves, indeed “bought and sold, and treated as an
ordinary article of merchandise and traffic,” no person of the African race nor their
descendents (emancipated or not) were acknowledged as United States citizens and thus
had no protection under the constitution. The court justified its decision through legal
precedence that assumed and pronounced the racial inferiority of blacks and the
superiority (and thus consequent paternalism) of whites:
They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an
inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either
in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights
which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly
and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. (Dred Scott 407)

The court seemingly marks the difference between citizen and non-citizen—whether
actual or potential—by virtue of conquest and subjugation. Van Thompson rightly points
out, “although the decision does not define a ‘negro,’ it assumes that there exists some

vernacular of African Americans, whereas racism developed out of the dominant and
authoritative white scientific discourse of race; in part, because colorphobia eventually
turned into racism” (5).

30
traditional means of making that judgment. For the judge and for American society,
this decision, more than any other, dictates the limited social, political, and economic
possibilities open to black people” (27). The “traditional means” of defining the value,
citizenship, and personhood of someone of African descent is not explicitly linked to
color, creed or race in the legal language of this decision; the means seem determined by
slavery and subjugation. Yet the distinctions that determine the value and potential of
African Americans and American Indians confuse the hierarchical logic of conquest and
prove symptomatic of the schizophrenic nature of U.S. law and socio-political policy.
The court determined that American Indians were “uncivilized” but ceded that
“they were yet a free and independent people, associated together in nations or tribes, and
governed by their own laws” (Dred Scott 403). Ignoring the fact that Africans who had
been sequestered and enslaved had also previously formed nations and tribes, the court
determined that “these Indian Governments were regarded and treated as foreign
Governments, as much so as if an ocean had separated the red man from the white; and
their freedom has constantly been acknowledged … They have always been treated as
foreigners not living under our Government,” and should they wish it, Indians would be
welcomed as citizens of the United States and granted “all the rights and privileges which
would belong to an emigrant from any other foreign people” (Dred Scott 404).
The constant negotiation and struggle between native Americans and the U.S.
concretized the Native American subjectivity with the ever-evolving conflicted narrative
of nation-building and nationhood, while Africans were robbed of their native languages,
African and familial ties, and were thus ahistoricized. An erasure of history and culture
perhaps provided the courts with the opportunity to invent the specific subjectivity of

31
people of African descent in the United States, and they did so through legal means
that created legal/criminal barriers between blacks and whites, that determined the
“identity” of a person and that created a social/racial contract that also, it could be
argued, was a legal contract. The creation of a legal and social contract (which is
imposed on only certain people, and into which people enter unwillingly) is the legal
policing of non-whites, in this case, of African Americans. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
theorizes that such policing of a people serves to teach “the place which one occupies in
the social space” (Taylor 73-74). Taylor adds, “Blacks, displaced by the slave trade, had
to be kept firmly ‘in their place’ in America. Or—according to the American
Colonization Society—they had no place at all in white America, and should be sent back
to Africa, where blacks belonged” (73-74).
Despite the anti-miscegenation laws that existed in the United States from as early
as 1661 making it criminal to cross racial boundaries through sex, evidence of these illicit
and often criminal contacts abounded. Davis remarks, for instance, “Centuries of
miscegenation had produced large numbers of mixed persons who appeared white and
who could pass when they wanted to, either permanently or for temporary convenience”
(56). Southern white anxiety grew as the bodily signs that racially marked and helped to
taxonomize a person became increasingly blurred and ambiguous. Simone Vauthier
contends:
If black, which is nonwhite, can look non-black, nay white, then the
opposition white/non-white shows up as problematic … the social
structure insofar as it determines status according to ‘race’, i.e. color, is
jeopardized … the place of the white individual within the race-based
social scheme and hence his very identity are threatened by the mere
existence of a white negro. (Van Thompson 58)

32
And it was this anxiety over what Davis calls “the specter of invisible blackness” (56),
that prodded the courts to determine who was black and who was not.
The Dred Scott case attempted to define citizenship and legal protection as
applied to those of African descent, and by extension, also made a feeble and bungled
attempt to define who was black and who was not. As a means to this end, science and
Social Darwinism became the rationale that “explained” race and justified the legal and
physical separation of “races.” Interestingly, Timothy McCarthy points out that the
“race” as “viable category of social analysis was arguably most intense during the
postbellum era, from about 1875 to the early 1900s” (1), thus making the “real heyday”
of thinking about race within a biological context a phenomenon that occurred after the
abolition of slavery. These biological and pseudo-scientific separations, states McCarthy,
came about after the abolition of slavery because it then “became more difficult to openly
exploit African Americans without class justification that was the foundation of chattel
slavery” (1). Social mores were often informed by “scientific” rationale, became the
rules by which racial (and thus cultural) identity was determined, and consequently had
much to do with legal readings of the body. The confusion about whether the child
followed the condition of the mother or whether the laws of hypo-descent (in which the
child is defined by the race of the “lower” parent) trumped the first law really did not
matter; white anxiety about intermingling and infestation produced Jim Crow laws that
would legally separate white from black (from the 1880s to the 1960s) despite confused
and illogical definitions about who was black, who was white, who was both and who
was neither.

33
A sampling of the Jim Crow laws from across the United States include a law
that barred white female nurses from working in wards or hospital rooms in which black
men were placed (Alabama), and Georgia law required separate apartments for blacks
and whites in mental hospitals, while Louisiana law required the separation of the white
blind from the black blind in entirely separate buildings and on separate grounds. Some
of the states that prohibited intermarriage, such as Maryland, Florida, Missouri and
Mississippi tried to define who was black along generational lines or by fractional
quantification (Maryland prohibited whites to marry someone who was third generation
black, while Florida outlawed it to the fourth generation; Missouri and Mississippi
outlawed marriage with anyone with one-eighth or more of black blood), while Georgia,
Arizona and Wyoming simply (and all too ambiguously) made it unlawful for whites to
marry anyone who was not white. Many states such as Alabama, Maryland, Virginia and
Louisiana applied segregation laws to the railroad system that required that blacks and
whites have separate cars, coaches or compartments. Virginia’s law suggested that if a
passenger failed to disclose his or her race, the conductor or managers were to be the sole
judge of race. This begs the question, however, about legal definitions of race that were
then left to subjective interpretation and solely based on appearance.
It was precisely this ambiguity and illogic that anti-segregationists and Homer
Adolphe Plessy exploited on June 7, 1892. Plessy was one-eighth black, seven-eighths
white, could pass as white, but under Louisiana law was identified as legally black.
When he sat in the “white” car of the East Louisiana Railroad and refused to leave he was
jailed. This event, orchestrated by a group of New Orleans African American civic and
business leaders known as the Comité des Citoyens, the senior officials of the East

34
Louisiana Railroad Company, Homer Plessy, and the detective who took him into
custody, was meant to expose the moral, economic, and constitutional illogic of the law.
John Howard Ferguson, the judge at the trial, found Plessy guilty of refusing to
leave the white car, a decision that the United States Supreme Court upheld despite
Plessy’s challenge that the ruling and the law violated the thirteenth and fourteenth
amendments of the constitution. Justice Henry Brown defended his Supreme Court
ruling by stating that the thirteenth amendment which abolished slavery is “a statute
which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races—a
distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so
long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color,” then noting that the
statute “has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races” (50-51). In terms
of the fourteenth amendment, Justice Brown reconciled his decision by arguing that the
object of the fourteenth amendment “was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of
the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to
abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political
equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either” (50-51).
The lone dissenting opinion of Justice John Marshall Harlan condemned the ruling and
precisely foretold the damage that the ruling would cause:
Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes
among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the
law...In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to
be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred
Scott case...The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not
only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the
admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is
possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes

35
which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted
the recent amendments of the Constitution. (Medley 208)

The 1896 landmark decision, described by Eric Sundquist as “a fitting gloss on
the nation’s rush toward racial extremism in law, in science, in literature” (McCarthy 4-
5), was later used to justify institutional segregation and unfortunately, Homer Plessy is
associated more with the Jim Crow laws rather than remembered as part of a carefully
orchestrated act of civil disobedience by a defiant group of activists that dared to
fearlessly take on the U.S. legal system. Despite two Supreme Court rulings that were
based on race, the legal language was still full of ambiguity. Consider, for instance,
Justice Brown’s language in his ruling, which suggests that the distinction between the
“two races” is based on color. His conflation of race with color only served to further
murk the waters, for what then did it mean to be fair-skinned enough to be read as
“white” but to still be defined institutionally as legally black? Justice Brown’s conflation
of skin color and biological race made racial arguments all the more ambiguous and
specious, a point that James Weldon Johnson makes in his anonymously published The
Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), a book that many white readers found
alarming.

James Weldon Johnson’s Along This Way:
James Weldon Johnson stated that his reasons for writing his 1933 autobiography
Along This Way were so that it would serve as a response to those who thought that his
1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man was a work of non-fiction based
on his life. In Along This Way he explains: “I continue to receive letters from persons

36
who have read the book inquiring about this or that phase of my life as told in it. That
is, probably, one of the reasons why I am writing the present book” (239). While it must
be acknowledged that Johnson had a specific agenda that informed the writing of his
autobiography as well as its plotted narrative and trajectory, the work nonetheless
documents events in Johnson’s life that frame the 1912 novel. Whether Johnson wrote
Along This Way with the intention of guiding the reading of The Autobiography of an Ex-
Coloured Man is beside the point; the chronological details provide background
information on issues of race and culture that offer a more complicated reading of the
novel and its titular protagonist, whether Johnson intended this or not.
James Weldon Johnson’s autobiography places him in the Latin Americas as he
wrote The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and also upon its 1912 publication.
Because his diplomatic duties in Venezuela and Nicaragua began in 1906, we can
surmise that some of his observations while in the Latin Americas, and which are
documented in Along This Way, influenced his depiction of the ex-coloured man and his
adventures. I will return to his observations on race, class, and culture in the Latin
Americas later in my analysis of his novel. For the sake of chronology, however, I would
like to begin with Johnson’s own account of his experience in Jacksonville, Florida, and
his introduction to Ricardo Rodriguez Ponce—a friendship that helped shape his views
on race in the United States, that introduced him to the complications that arise when
race, culture, and language intersect, and that has not been investigated in the Johnson
scholarship to date—this, despite the fact that his experiences with Ponce and his contact
with the Latin Americas are featured rather prominently throughout Along This Way.

37
By Johnson’s own account, his father was appointed pastor of a small church in
Jacksonville, “a cigar manufacturing center” that, Johnson documents, “had a Cuban
population of several thousand” and where many boys, including his brother, Rosamond
and his friend, D--- “learned the cigarmaker’s trade” (60). When Johnson was about
fourteen years old, the owner of the El Modelo cigar factory in Jacksonville,
2
Señor
Echemendia—a friend and neighbor to the Johnsons—brought a young Cuban boy to the
Johnson household. Johnson states that the young man, Ricardo Rodriguez Ponce of
Havana, had come to Jacksonville to find a family with whom he might live and learn
English (58-59). Johnson’s father agreed to take in Rodriguez Ponce, but this hardly
seems to be a case a charity, as Johnson’s description of the young Cuban boy implies:
“[he was a] very distinguished and aristocratic-looking gentleman … The elegance and
courtliness—such as I had never seen before—of this gentleman was emphasized by
Señor Echemendia’s dumpiness and untidy appearance” (58). The comparison of race
between nations that Johnson continues to observe and document throughout his life
begins with this class-tinged distinction.
In addition to his observations on class, Johnson describes Rodriguez Ponce as
“very good-looking, with the light bronze complexion that so many colored Cubans have,
and also with the proverbial Latin temperament” (59, my italics). Having established the

2
The 1887 El Modelo Cigar Factory building still stands on 501 West Bay Street in
Jacksonville, Florida, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Although
this particular cigar factory is not listed officially as one involved in the dissemination of
Cuban revolutionary materials, the cigar factories throughout Florida played a critical
role in the effort for Cuban independence from Spain. For example, when Jose Martí
gave the order calling for simultaneous Cuban uprising on February 24, 1895, the order—
addressed to Juan Gualberto Gómez—was smuggled into the island within a cigar rolled
in Florida.

38
young Cuban’s physical attributes as well as marking him racially within the confines
of a U.S.-based “one-drop rule,” Johnson then moves on to his socio-economic status.
Johnson, quite taken with Rodriguez Ponce’s “elegance,” continues to describe his awe at
the packages sent from Cuba for the fourteen-year-old. In addition to a fresh supply of
cigarettes, Cuban sweets and preserves, there came in those boxes “fresh supplies of fine
linen handkerchiefs, hand-made shirts, initialed underwear, French neckties, French lisle
socks, [and] high-heeled Cuban shoes” (59). He then comments, “Rosamond and I had
always thought of ourselves as well-dressed boys—our mother spent a good part of her
salary on clothes for us—but such finery as this, for a boy, we had not even imagined.
Opening Ricardo’s box was always an event” (59-60).
Although Johnson expresses surprise that a boy as young as Ricardo should be so
accustomed to luxury, part of the surprise seems to also be that a young man who would
otherwise be read as a “colored” boy (just as Johnson has read him first as “colored” and
then as “Cuban”) would not only be accustomed to these fineries, but also have access to
this type of lifestyle. Although Johnson will later duly note the role of language in the
racial reading of bodies, this initial contact with a Cuban who would be otherwise racially
read within the context of U.S. law and social mores, causes Johnson to mark the
intersection of race, color, culture, and class. Johnson would not observe until later the
complicated permutations of “race” in the Latin Americas. For instance, Davis asserts,
“the same person defined as black in the United States may be considered ‘coloured’ in
Jamaica or Martinique and white in Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic” (99). To
further complicate matters, social class and money also “whitens” people who might
otherwise be considered “of color” or “black.”

39
Johnson’s remarks are noteworthy because the ex-coloured man in Johnson’s
novel will also make similar observations, albeit with a less sophisticated lens. Some of
Johnson’s autobiographical memories, which he later incorporates into his novel, have
caused some literary critics such as W. Lawrence Hogue to align Johnson’s race and
color politics with that of the fictional ex-coloured man, to a large extent. One of
Hogue’s central ideas is that Johnson’s writings predominantly perform color and class
hierarchies for the benefit of a white audience:
in this attempt to reassimilate back into this regime the ex-coloured man
and Johnson, wishing to uplift the race by showing how African
Americans can practice the values of the dominant society and thereby
prove to white people their worthiness of respect and social equality,
establish a hierarchy within African America that privileges those African
Americans who approximate or come closer to the mainstream norm and
that rejects and crushes the subaltern African American life-life that is
different, that exists outside the lines of mobility that extend into
mainstream American life. (70-71)

On the one hand, some of the parallels between Johnson’s own life and tastes and that of
the ex-coloured man that he created are striking. Johnson and the ex-coloured man, for
example, share the same heroes (Samson, David, Robert the Bruce, and Frederick
Douglass), apply to the same university (Atlanta), and experience the same cigar factory
town (Jacksonville). That said, it is not particularly remarkable that an author should cull
from the details of his/her own life to create fictional characters and situations. On the
other hand, while Hogue’s reading of Johnson is sometimes convincing, his argument
ultimately relies on a binary understanding of race and class in the United States, and
dismisses the fact that Johnson’s novel is fictional. Johnson’s understanding of how race,
color, culture, and language intersect, disrupts binary understandings and, most urgently,
disrupts legal definitions of identity. Johnson came to understand this strange

40
intersection that determined access to civil rights through his early transnational
experiences while in Jacksonville, as well as his later travels throughout the Latin
Americas—and both in the United States and abroad the use and manipulation of
language playing a critical role in shaping the more nuanced perceptions of race reflected
in his fiction.
Although Johnson’s father spoke Spanish and made both of his sons, James Jr.
and Rosamond, learn the language, Johnson’s proficiency grew with Rodriguez Ponce’s
stay and he remarks, “there had grown between us a strong bond of companionship; and
what was, perhaps, more binding, the bond of language. Up to that time my proficiency
in Spanish was much greater than his in English; so he never exerted himself to speak to
me except in his own language” (63). The Spanish language functioned as a bond
between the Johnson brothers and Rodriguez Ponce, but it also worked to open Johnson’s
eyes to a more problematic view of race and culture in the United States as he made
comparisons between U.S. cultural “truths” about race and Latin American
understandings on race. In particular, Johnson came to see how language complicated
identity as he and Rodriguez Ponce embarked on their journey to Atlanta University.
James Weldon Johnson tells a story in Along This Way that, in subtle ways,
illustrates how variants such as language and culture disrupt the readability of race, and
thereby exposes the fact that racism and segregation in this country are not about race or
color at all, but instead about cultural hierarchies and a picking away at citizenship by
both “legal” and illegal means. A train conductor orders Johnson and Rodriguez Ponce
to move to the car designated for “colored people,” despite the fact that they have
purchased first-class tickets. “But we have first-class tickets; and this is the first-class

41
car, isn’t it?” Johnson protests. While the conductor warns about the trouble that the
two will face if they stay in the car, Rodriguez Ponce, not fully understanding the
conversation turns to Johnson and asks “Que dice?” [“What does he say?”] Johnson
explains to him in Spanish. Johnson then states:
As soon as the conductor heard us speaking a foreign language, his
attitude changed; he punched our tickets and gave them back, and treated
us just as he did the other passengers in the car … Fifteen years later, an
incident similar to the experience with this conductor drove home to me
the conclusion that in such situations any kind of a Negro will do;
provided he is not one who is an American citizen. (64-65)

The idea of national constraints upon African Americans is especially important, for it
simultaneously speculates upon black identity outside United States borderlines. In
speaking the Spanish language, the train conductor takes Johnson and Rodriguez Ponce
outside the institution of blackness, outside the codes and laws of race segregation, and
sets them in a third and more ambiguous cultural space. Racial confusion that leads to
law and policy confusion on trains is a common trope in African American literature.
Johnson, however, highlights foreign language as a weapon and defense against U.S. race
laws while he also ruptures the assumption that race (or color) is the primary factor that
determines how one is situated legally and socially. Throughout his “real” autobiography
Johnson repeats this phrase: “any kind of a Negro will do; provided he is not one who is
an American citizen,” and these observations and conclusions, brought about through the
simple act of speaking a language other than English, become, I believe, a central thesis
of Johnson’s novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.

42

Figure 1: James Weldon Johnson,
photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1932.

While at Atlanta University, Johnson gains “a comprehension of the application
of American democracy to Negro citizens” (66), as he becomes “initiated” into what he
calls “the arcane of ‘race.’” (66). In addition, the idea that language can set him apart is
again underscored: “Ricardo and I talked Spanish at the table and this gave us pleasant
notoriety; we could not have excited more curiosity and admiration had we been talking
Attic Greek. Following strictly in the Yale tradition, the students at Atlanta University
thought of a foreign language as something to be studied, not spoken” (67).
What Johnson introduces here are two important ideas that add to his ideas on
race in the United States and the malleability of identity: (1) the legal limits of citizenship
for blacks within U.S. national boundaries; (2) the effects of language on perception,
whether socio-economic, cultural, or racial—as first noted on the train. The idea of

43
national constraints upon blacks is especially important, for it simultaneously questions
“black” identity outside U.S. borderlines. Johnson’s words suggest his conscious
awareness of the effects of national boundaries upon his identity:
I now began to get my bearings with regard to the world and particularly
with regard to my own country. I began to get the full understanding of
my relationship to America, and to take on my share of the peculiar
responsibilities and burdens additional to those of the common lot, which
every Negro in the United States is compelled to carry … As an American
Negro, I consider the most fortunate thing in my whole life to be the fact
that through childhood I was reared free from undue fear of or esteem for
white people as a race; otherwise, the deeper implications of American
race prejudice might have become a part of my subconscious as well as of
my conscious self. (78)

While Johnson marks the axiology of his position in the United States here, he also
suggests how vulnerable identity is when subjected to a barrage of injustices. The idea
that the delicate act of child rearing can determine how a child of color views her/himself
in the world, and also every consequent act, is a significant factor in Johnson’s creation
of the ex-coloured man. Contrary, then, to Hogue’s and others’ assertion that the ex-
coloured man masks Johnson’s ideas on race and class, I argue that in addition to being a
complex signifier for the ambiguity of race and culture, the ex-coloured man is also, to a
certain extent, Johnson’s alter ego. The ex-coloured man is, in essence, the person that
Johnson recognizes that he could have been had he not been raised to neither fear nor
hold white people as superior on either the racial or cultural hierarchy.
Yet fear of violence was always a part of riding trains throughout the South for
Johnson. Johnson describes a second incident that occurred fifteen years after the train
experience while with Ponce, in which he this time consciously manipulates language as
he travels from Jacksonville to New York. Whereas the train incident involving Ponce

44
quite by chance disclosed to Johnson the power that the Spanish language had in
contextualizing him, this later incident plays out like theater. He tells yet another story of
language possibly exempting him from the violence and discomfort that he would have
suffered, had he been taken for a black U.S. citizen, as he travels by train from
Jacksonville to New York. “Negroes who are interstate passengers on a Pullman car,” he
states, “are not subject to the ‘Jim Crow’ laws of the various states” (87), thus explaining
how he found himself entering a compartment in which the conversation ceased among
five men as soon as he entered. He was scrutinized immediately. One of the men was a
veteran of the Spanish-American war and was just returning from Cuba, and his
familiarity with Latin America prompted him to turn to his father and refer to Johnson’s
hat: “Dad, there’s a genuine panama hat” (88). The hat was passed around, and Johnson
observes that as soon as the war veteran noted the Havana-stamped lining, he turned to
him and asked “Habla Vd. [sic] español?” Johnson answers, “Si, Señor” (88). Johnson
adds, “Thereupon he and I exchanged several commonplace phrases in Spanish; but in a
short while his knowledge of that language was exhausted, and general conversation in
English was resumed” (88-89).
It is only after this exchange, which may have contextualized him outside of the
United States, that he is no longer perceived as an interloper. According to Johnson, as a
matter of fact, “the whole party spent the time in the smoking compartment, talking,
joking, laughing. The railroad official went into his bag and brought out his private flask
of whisky, from which each of us, including the preacher, took several samples, all
drinking out of the same glass. Before we reached Savannah a bond of mellow friendship
had been established” (89). After his “newly made friends” debark in Savannah, Johnson

45
says, “I went to bed repeating to myself: In such situations any kind of a Negro will do;
provided he is not one who is an American citizen” (89).
Johnson may repeat the same words that he does after describing the first train
incident, but this situation plays out differently. While initially perceived as having a very
specific role in the context of the national narrative, as soon as he is situated outside the
narrative, his status rises in the eyes of the other men in the compartment. In this
scenario, Johnson participates in a ruse while at the same time coolly observing the
nuanced differentiation of race that takes place in the context of travel and with the use of
the Spanish language. In other words, in participating in and even directing this
experimental theater, he puts theory into practice.
Johnson’s observations on how language could affect the perception of identity as
well as what rights and social niceties were bestowed (depending on said identity) are
especially noteworthy because, up until now, these experiences occurred within national
boundaries. U.S. cultural hierarchies, which both formed and were informed by law, and
which declared people of African descent to be three-fifths of a human being and
therefore “black”, are what determined the value and rights of a person.
3
Some members

3
According to West's Encyclopedia of American Law, 2nd Ed., the law that declared
people of African descent is known as the “Three-fifths Compromise.” In Article I,
Section 2 of the United Constitution, the framers wrote that “the population of a state, for
purposes of determining taxation and representation in the House of Representatives,
would be measured by counting the 'Number of free Persons, including those bound to
Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other
Persons.' This language struggled mightily to avoid the mention of African slavery but
was understood as allowing the southern states to count each slave as three-fifths of a
person in a government census. This method of population measurement, three-fifths,
was actually developed by Congress in 1783, during debate over state representation in
the federal government … The northern states eventually compromised with the southern

46
of the black community advocated for migration to countries in which the lines within
racial and color hierarchies were seemingly far more blurred, as I discuss in detail in
chapter two. While the pervading argument was that migration would provide alleviation
from Jim Crow laws and race-based violence, Johnson realized the limits of migration,
immigration, and cultural absorption during his stay in Venezuela, Costa Rica, and
Nicaragua, while on diplomatic duty. At the same time, the blurring of what in the
United States meant a conflation of race and class helped provide Johnson with the
complexities with which to create the ex-coloured man.
Johnson’s introduction to politics began in the summer of 1904, when long time
friend, Charles W. Anderson, asked him to chair the house committee for the “Colored
Republican Club.” Upon Theodore Roosevelt’s Presidential election that Fall, Anderson
asked Johnson to consider serving in the United States Consular Service. Anderson was
on friendly terms with the newly elected president as well as with Secretary of State,
Elihu Root, and thus believed that Johnson could be successfully appointed for
diplomatic service. Johnson then explicitly adds that part of the lure of leaving the
United States was his “desire to avoid the disagreeable business of traveling round the
country under the conditions that a Negro theatrical company had to endure” (223), since
at the time he also toyed with the idea of touring with Bob Cole and his brother,
Rosamond, who had just come off of a successful run on vaudeville and now intended to
start their own theater company. Two factors tipped the scale for Johnson in favor of

states to allow five African slaves to equal three free men for purposes of population
determinations and federal representation” (208-09).

47
entering the Consular Service: the chance to escape racism in the U.S. and the
opportunity to write. He began to realize:
time was slipping and I had not yet made a real start on the work that I had
long kept reassuring myself I should sometime do, that the opportunity for
seizing that ‘sometime’ had come, and that I ought not let it pass. Then,
the feeling came over me that, in leaving New York, I was not making a
sacrifice, but an escape; that I was getting away, if only for a while, from
the feverish flutter of life to seek a little stillness of the spirit. (223)

Johnson then proceeds to cite Spanish as his mastered foreign language with the
expectations of being appointed to a South American post. He is appointed the American
Consul for Venezuela and stationed in Puerto Cabello, in addition to being consul for
Cuba and Panama, and takes charge of consular affairs for France, with which
Venezuela’s President Castro “had broken off all relations” (230). His trip to his post is
an eventful one: He first travels from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico and carries
with him a letter of introduction to San Juan’s mayor from friend and Puerto Rican
native, Arthur A. Schomburg (Arturo Alfonso Schomburg).
4
He then sails to the Dutch
West Indies, where he notes with great interest the language skills of the people of

4
Born of María Josefa (a freeborn Black midwife from St. Croix ) and Carlos Féderico
Schomburg (a mestizo merchant of German heritage) in Puerto Rico on January 24, 1874,
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg embarked on a lifelong quest to refute racism in the
Americas. He was fueled by the remark made by his fifth grade teacher who questioned
whether people of color had any notable accomplishments, heroes, or even a history.
Schomburg would go on to document the accomplishments of Afro Latinos, become
involved in the Puerto Rican decolonization movement, organized support for the Cuban
and Puerto Rican revolutionary efforts, co-found the Negro Society for Historical
Research, and preside over the American Negro Academy which combated “scientific
racism.” He is most famous, however, for his massive and world-renowned collection of
slave narratives, manuscripts, rare books, journals, artwork and other documentation of
African history. In 1926, his collection was presented to the New York Public Library’s
Division of Negro History through a $10,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation. The
collection is now known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and is
known as the largest and most important collection of African-American art, literature
and history in the world.

48
Curaçao and declares “every Curaçaoan is a linguist. For them, differences caused by
language hardly exist” (228). He reports several incidents in which this facility with
language astounds him: “A boatman, an old black man, paddling me across to my
steamer, addressed me in four languages in an effort to discover what was my mother
tongue. At the club I saw four or five men playing a game of pool, and was astonished at
the lightness with which the conversation was tossed from one language to another”
(228).
5
Similar observations would later be reiterated in Autobiography of an Ex-
Coloured Man.
He finally makes his way from Caracas to Puerto Cabello and settles into a life
which he describes as a “tropical mode of life” as well as “semi-luxurious” (230). As
Johnson settles into the rhythm of his life as a diplomat, he also attains a sense of
inclusion, despite the fact that the general atmosphere throughout the Latin Americas was
anti-U.S. imperialism: “Often I joined in a discussion or merely listened to one. The
common sentiment of the members as of Venezuelans in general, was anti-American, but
I do not remember that it was never directed against me individually. I had a feeling that
I was rather popular” (231). Cultural/ethnic context is part of the reason that Johnson
was warmly received. There had been a long tradition of Latin American journalists who

5
Johnson had reason to admire such facility with language: In the “ABC islands”—
Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao—the people speak at least four languages fluently:
English, Spanish, Dutch, and Papiamento—a Creole language originating in Curacao in
the sixteenth century, and derived from Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Arawak, and West
African languages. Many people of these islands also speak French and Portuguese in
addition to the above mentioned four.

49
wrote from the United States and reported the racism and violence against people of
color.
6

In addition to being sympathetic toward “blacks” in the United States, Latin
Americans did not subscribe to the same type of racial categorizations and hierarchies.
Whereas U.S. laws had established a binary understanding of race in which one was
either black or white, powerless or in power, unprotected or protected by the legal system
(and which was all the while contingent on ancestry and pseudo-scientific concepts of
genetics), Charles Wagley documents that Latin Americans understand race in terms of
“social races” rather than “genetic race,” a point that I discuss at length in the context of
the Spanish and Latin American casta system in chapter three. Wagley contends that,
“the criteria for defining social races differs from region to region in the Americas” (13).
The understanding of race, in the region in which Johnson found himself at the time, was

6
Jose Martí, besides being the revolutionary who fought until the death for Cuban
independence from Spain, was also a journalist who wrote for Latin American
newspapers from New York. Martí wrote for the Venezuelan periodical La Opinión
Nacional, for the Buenos Aires La Nación, and for La Pluma of Bogotá, among many
others. He was published and read throughout almost the entire Latin Americas as he
chronicled life in the United States. Martí wrote about more than the mere quotidian
details of his life in New York. According to Anne Fountain, Martí was especially
vigilant about race and mistreatment in the United States. Fountain states, “Martí had
witnessed the cruelty of bondage in Cuba, lamented the death of Lincoln, who
symbolized he end of slavery in the United States, and admired America’s abolitionists.
His writing reflected this focus and underscored his concern for race relations. In a 1885
article, Martí discussed the nation’s attempts to heal the wounds caused by the Civil War
and voiced cautious optimism about black-white relations. Later writing painted a
different picture, however, showing the economic plight of blacks in the South, raids on
black communities, and lynchings … Martí wanted his readers to know about Native
Americans in the United States—especially their mistreatment at the hands of scheming
government agents, and their miserable life on the reservations” (18). It is no wonder
then, that James Weldon Johnson was not treated with the hostility reserved for “white”
people from the U.S. upon his arrival in Venezuela, and during his stay in Nicaragua and
Costa Rica.

50
and is blurred. Julian Pitts-Rivers, for instance, notes that “skin color is merely one of
the indices among physical traits that contribute to a person’s total image. It is not
necessarily more significant than hair type or shape of eye” (62). He adds, “in Latin
America, a person with non-white physical traits may be classed as white socially” (63),
and he concludes:
The problem of race relations in North America and Latin America are,
therefore, fundamentally different. One concerns the assimilation of all
ethnic groups into a single society; the other, the status distinction between
persons who have been assimilated for hundreds of years but who are still
distinguished socially by their appearance. The two are comparable only
at the highest level of abstraction. (67-68)

As I will later show in chapter two, however, this blurred and less rigid understanding of
race in the Latin Americas did not and does not translate into a utopian-like society in
which racism does not exist. In fact, Pitts-Rivers points out, “the significance of
phenotype also varies greatly according to context. Political or commercial alliances are
not the same as alliances through marriage. Their products are of a different order.
Profits are colorless, children are not. Hence, phenotype may not matter in commercial
dealings, but it is never more important than in marriage” (69).
Johnson would not have been privy to these unspoken conventions. He was
instead entranced by the different hues that were bound by culture, language, and history.
Consider for instance, his study and commentary on color and phenotype in describing
people and situations which he found striking. He describes Cuban Consul, Señor
Zangroniz as being far from “typically Cuban.” “His complexion was almost ruddy,” he
describes. “His eyes were blue-gray; he cultivated a short but rather fierce mustache; was
punctilious with regard to the finer points of Spanish etiquette; indeed, he might easily

51
have passed for a Spaniard of one of the northern provinces” (234). The Nicaraguan
President, he states, “was light bronze in color, slightly bald, rather stout, and possessed
of perfect poise and charming manners” (257), and he is astounded by one of
Venezuela’s President Castro’s generals, whom he notes is “a gigantic, full-blooded
Negro” (243). As described here, Johnson not only describes hue, color, and race; he
also notes with interest the social positions of these people, their manners, poise, charm—
all indicators of social class in which race, as he observes, has no bearing. A few years
later, as Johnson vacations from his duties as Nicaraguan Consul, and takes his wife
Grace to San José, Costa Rica, he recalls:
One night while walking through a lesser street, we heard a strange but
familiar sound. It was nothing other than the singing of a Methodist
hymn, led by a lusty voice. We drew alongside the house whence the
singing came and found that it was an improvised church. The preacher
was just about to begin his sermon, and the preacher was a jet-black
Negro. The congregation was composed of a few Negroes and
overwhelmingly of Costa Ricans. That constituted the most curious sight
we saw in Catholic San José. (275)

Johnson’s assessment of this scene as “curious” establishes his inscription in U.S.-
specific racial roles and mores. Although he sees that race (in particular, “negritude”)
plays no part in the sense of shared culture that he witnesses, his initial reading of this
“integrated” congregation is that it is incongruous and thus surprising. Johnson senses
that there are limits to his own inclusion in these cultures and societies. He cultivates a
friendship with Zangroniz and bestows his confidence upon the Cuban Consul, stating:
“there were some things that appeared to be shortcomings in the Venezuelans and
Venezuela that I felt I could discuss only with Zangroniz, of all the foreign language men
in Puerto Cabello. Even so, on my side, I sensed limitations; for I realized that, after all,

52
in language, religion, and traditional background, Zangroniz and the Venezuelans were
one” (235).
Johnson gains an understanding about the boundaries of culture, despite the fact
that in these observed Latin American cultures lies the potential and, for some, the
promise of cultural absorption and subsequent escape from rigid and racist taxonomic
constraints. While Johnson’s observations inform his views on race in the U.S. and give
him a sense of a pan-African diaspora, his own position as an agent of United States
interests in the Latin Americas influence his own subjectivity. It is curious, for instance,
that he would describe the Spanish-speaking and Cuban Zangroniz as a “foreign
language” man in Venezuela—a slip that betrays U.S. imperialistic interests, intentions,
and worldview, and with which, to a certain extent, Johnson unconsciously identifies.
The observations, moments of astonishment, and cross-cultural experiences
described by Johnson while living in the cigar factory town of Jacksonville, while
cohabitating for years with the Cuban Ricardo Rodriguez Ponce, and then while on
diplomatic duty in Venezuela and Nicaragua, irrefutably shaped the lens with which he
viewed race and with which he witnessed the workings of racial constructions within
U.S. borderlines. That no scholarship to date has framed Johnson’s creation of the ex-
coloured man within the context of these transnational and international contacts is
perplexing, especially given that the writing and publication of his novel occurred while
he lived in Venezuela and Nicaragua. Indeed, it was while in Venezuela that Johnson
recalls, “I began in earnest work on The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, of which
I had already made a first draft of the opening. The story developed in my mind more

53
rapidly than I had expected that it would; at times, outrunning my speed in getting it
down” (238).

The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man:
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) is a novel that influenced the
way many Harlem Renaissance writers wrote and thought about race. Consider, for
instance, Jessie Redmon Fauset’s treatment of race and class, further complicated by the
idea of passing culturally through the use of language, in her last published novel
Comedy: American Style (1933), as well as George Schuyler’s satiric Black No More
(1931), which uses essential notions of race against those who have the power to wield
them. In addition to contributing to the foundation of what is now known as “race
theory,” Johnson’s novel was also stylistically innovative. As Eugene Levy points out,
“Johnson was the first black writer to use the first-person narrative in fiction. He had
before him the non-fictional models furnished by Douglass and Washington” (Stepto
106).
Many critics praise the novel for the complexities it offers—within the narrative
as well as within its rhetoric and language—and still others take a sort of voyeuristic
pleasure in what the novel’s titular character can offer the eager reader. Literary scholar
Thomas Morgan, for example, recognizes the complicated position that the ex-coloured
man occupies while, at the same time, he provides a window through which the reader
can glimpse his fragmented existence: “the project of rewriting black representational
space that Johnson’s text takes on is underwritten by the narrator’s passing, for without

54
the ability to exist in both the black and white worlds, the narrator’s revelations about
these two worlds would not be possible” (225).
Yet, despite the fecund field of theoretical and rhetorical complexities that
Johnson’s novel provides, the one staid detail that critics emphasize and thus misread is
that the ex-coloured man is stuck between two worlds—the black and the white. While it
is true that the ex-coloured man’s parents are identified as “white” and “colored,” the ex-
coloured man is actually able to transcend binary constructions that assume that the
United States is solely black and/or white, if only temporarily through language and
while working in a cigar factory. Johnson thus conveys a more problematic and
sophisticated reading of race in the United States, and debunks the binary that these very
critics uphold. In the process, he exposes how those U.S. identities that seem caught
between black and white, (1) are simultaneously African, European, Native American,
and sometimes Asian; (2) are all the while invisible; (3) are given access to citizenship
and white cultural capital.
The title, which identifies the narrator as “ex-coloured” has been misinterpreted as
meaning “ex-African American,” and perhaps the title that Johnson originally had in
mind (The Chameleon) would have lended itself to a broader interpretation of what it
means to pass through or transcend boundaries that otherwise have been thought of as
fixed. Nevertheless, Johnson’s choice if naming (or not naming) his main protagonist
immediately connotes race, culture(s), and the legacy of slavery, one being the role of the
father, or the lack thereof. I thus argue that Johnson writes a tale of fatherlessness, of the
mystery of identity, and of the conscious and unconscious performance of race and
culture that all the while debunks fixed notions of race. The son replicates the father’s

55
“mystery” through language, by mirroring the physical features of the father, and
finally by being a man of mystery by becoming cultureless and, arguably, raceless.
Johnson’s only novel was published while he was on diplomatic duty in
Nicaragua, where a revolution was in full swing. There is controversy among scholars
about the degree of success that The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man may or may
not have had upon its anonymous and first publication in 1912. What scholars do agree
upon, however, is the degree of controversy that the novel caused. Neil Brookes, for
example, states, “Some reviewers went so far as to denounce the book as a ‘vicious lie,’
since a black passing as white was to many simply an impossibility” (85). On the other
side of the controversy, Jessie Fauset wrote in support of Johnson, declaring that the book
dealt with “practically every phase and complexity of the race question” (Goellnicht 19).
The “complexity,” all too briefly described by Fauset, includes intersections of race,
culture, fatherlessness and consequent psychological trauma. This complicated vortex
results in consequent behaviors and reactions, such as psychological introjection and
retroflection,
7
which describe and explain the ex-coloured man and which I will examine
more closely later. I do not, however, mean to diagnose the ex-coloured man and
subsequently sweep his behavior under the umbrella of psychological pathologies—this
would gloss over the agency that he exercises, as well as the socio-political critique that
results from his tale, whether the critique is conscious or not.

7
The psychoanalytic concept of introjection was used as early as 1909 by Sándor
Ferenczi, who defined introjection as the “process in which the ego forms a relationship
with an object and so includes that object within the ego” (Savege Scharff 53); was used
by Sigmund Freud in 1912 in the context of “cannibalistic introjection, selective
identification, and the formation of the superego” (Savege Scharff 50); and was later
expanded by Melanie Klein, who conceptualized it as part of the development of the
internal world.

56
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man begins in retrospect, as the
perpetually unnamed and anonymous ex-coloured man discloses his story—a sad tale of
finding himself between cultures, between races and between worlds. Ultimately, this in-
between state leaves the narrator with no cultural identity whatsoever. The ex-coloured
man’s journey, however, marks not only the shunning of his mother’s racial and cultural
identity, which so many scholars have rebuked, but also sheds light upon his exploration
of the elasticity of racial and cultural categories through the strategic use of language.
Rather than join the chorus of scholars who emphasize the tragedy of cutting one’s
cultural ties, I wish to explore his cultural play that, although causing him to slip through
the cracks of culture and race, help expose the tenuousness of racial taxonomy in the
United States.
The defining moment in the ex-coloured man’s life occurs when his grade school
teacher asks him to sit down after having asked all of the white boys to stand up in class
for a count. She continues the count by then asking all of the “colored” boys to stand up.
This time she insists that the future ex-coloured man stand up. The result is devastating
to the young boy and he woefully recalls, “when school was dismissed I went out in a
kind of stupor. A few of the white boys jeered me, saying, ‘Oh, you’re a nigger too.’ I
heard some black children say, ‘We knew he was colored.’” (7, my italics). The idea of
“knowing” is not only about epistemology, but is also tied to social power and the power
to name. It is the difference between naming and being named, and about who controls
identity. In other words, it is about power relations and how these relations determine
identity, taxonomy, axiology, and consequent quality of life, including access to legal
protection under the constitution.

57
The ex-coloured man marks the moment in which his identity is changed
forever as “the miracle of my transition from one world into another,” and he recalls, “I
did indeed pass into another world” (9). He simultaneously describes a death and a birth,
and foretells his choice to pass from one world to another at will. That identity,
personhood, citizenship and the rights that are part of full citizenship in the United States
can so drastically change in an instant and, most poignantly, at the naming by those with
social and legal power, is more the crux of this story than the theme of racial betrayal that
most critics have chanted by rote.
The tensions between social ambition and altruism, between cold pragmatism and
fantasy and, ultimately, between shame and pride are especially interesting in the novel,
for these traits offer the reader a glimpse into the ex-coloured man’s instability that has
more to do with society’s construction and imposition of identity, rather than with his
own intrinsic flaws. The ex-coloured man’s reading of texts, of situations, and of bodies,
race, and culture offer a glimpse into how the character processes and analyzes. His
readings also are a commentary on what it is like to be categorized within rigid racial
hierarchies in the context of U.S. law and public (and private) policy, and how such
perceptions disrupt the assumptions behind those laws, policies, and racial/cultural
policing.
The act of reading is central in this novel for the relationship between the ex-
coloured man’s self-consciousness about how he is read, how he reads and consistently
misreads, contribute to the sealing of his fate. After his traumatic experience in school,
the ex-coloured man takes interest in biblical stories. He reports, for instance, “I became
interested in the life of Christ, but became impatient and disappointed when I found that,

58
notwithstanding the great power he possessed, he did not make use of it when, in my
judgment, he most needed to do so” (11). The ex-coloured man’s assessment of Christ’s
folly is noteworthy here in that he does not remark that these were the childish musings
of a young boy without the full understanding of the Christ story. Moreover, he reads the
story in terms of power and its implementation, therefore thinking within the limits of the
practical and the pragmatic—a reading/judgment habit that he will be unable to
transcend. His new knowledge about who he is influence his choice of reading materials:
I read with studious interest everything I could find relating to colored
men who had gained prominence. My heroes had been King David, then
Robert the Bruce; now Frederick Douglass was enshrined in the place of
honor. When I learned that Alexander Dumas was a colored man, I re-
read ‘Monte Cristo’ and ‘The Three Guardsmen’ with magnified pleasure.
I lived between my music and books, on the whole a rather unwholesome
life for a boy to lead. (21)

It is telling that he has ingested the construction of biblical characters as “white,” or at
least as non-“colored.” These types of slips, that go unmarked and without analysis,
reveal the ex-coloured man’s limited “reading” ability, for he reads with a lens that has
already internalized racial hierarchies as tied to power, heritage, and prestige. And yet,
at the same time, his declaring the reading habits of a boy as “unwholesome” seem to
suggest some awareness of the false perception and warped lens that he develops, as a
result of constructing a “reality” and “truth” from the fiction he reads. In his case, fiction
breeds fiction.
If his reading interpretations and choice of reading materials betray his values and
perceptions, his omissions do so as well. When he reads Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, he indignantly declares it “direct misrepresentation” (18), and sadly
remarks, “It opened my eyes as to who and what I was and what my country considered

59
me; in fact, it gave me my bearing. But there was no shock; I took the whole
revelation in a kind of stoical way” (19). Disgusted with the servile representation of
Uncle Tom, the ex-coloured man echoes his disgust with powerlessness and the
impracticality of not using power when one has it, just as expressed earlier with his
impatience with the crucifixion story. This disgust will later climax at the witnessing of a
lynching.
The ex-coloured man concentrates on the depiction of Uncle Tom, but tellingly
never mentions the characters who participate in racial passing within Stowe’s novel,
such as Eliza and George. As Stepto argues, “Johnson’s use of what I’ve previously
called a rhetoric of omission seems to be the most pertinent here, principally because it
fuels the aforementioned contrapuntal machinery of the narrative” (105), and Brookes
also points out the action conveyed through the ex-coloured man’s silences: “His
attempts to narrate a life of concealment and disguise produce a text that can only be
understood through what it conceals, through the gaps and the unspoken” (84). It can
also be understood through what is subtle or coded. The ex-coloured man’s silences are
just as interesting (if not more so) than his disclosures, for the lack of mention of
characters who pass color and culture lines within Stowe’s novel seems to indicate that
the act of passing registers so deeply as to be unutterable. This omission is interesting in
light of his earlier observation about academic honesty: “It is strange how in some things
honest people can be dishonest without the slightest compunction” (12-13).
After the ex-coloured man immerses himself in the writings of African American
writers and in African American culture and life, he enthusiastically declares his life aims
to his mother: “For days I could talk of nothing else with my mother except my ambitions

60
to be a great man, a great colored man, to reflect credit on the race, and gain fame for
myself” (21). The commonplace conclusion here is that the ex-coloured man’s intentions
cannot possibly be sincere and heartfelt because his actions are consistently orchestrated
to bring attention and profit only unto himself. This is the argument some critics such as
Lawrence Hogue and Martin Japtok establish, and one of the reasons why so many
readers are unsympathetic to the ex-coloured man, reading him as chronically self-
serving.
8
While I by no means argue that his actions serve as exempla, I mean to stress
that this story is not just about racial and cultural passing, or about color privilege within
the black community (although of course it is about these complicated subjects all the
while), but that it is also a tragic story about the fatherlessness of a young boy and how
such family dynamics determine the color line even while their very existence question
fixed racial identities.
If the ex-coloured man becomes a profiteer in all aspects, one contributor to this
character trait is his father. He learns to associate his father with material goods, money
(literally gold), and with gross neglect. As a young boy he remembers his father’s shiny
boots and shoes (2), and later, as a twelve-year-old young man, is able to identify him

8
Lawrence W. Hogue, for example, argues, “In thinking that he is white, the ex-coloured
man enjoys the social power of being in the majority all the time, of being routinely
connected psychologically to a whole spectrum of normative institutions. His whiteness
gives him security and privilege” (69). Martin Japtok has a similar reading of the ex-
coloured man and gives his desire to market ragtime music as an example: “Though on
the one hand, the narrator uses ragtime as proof for African Americans’ ‘originality and
artistic conception’ (87), he seems eager to pull the music out of its ethnic orbit and give
it a ‘universal,’ i.e. a non-ethnic and non –essentialist, cast. For the narrator, a true sign
of ragtime’s success is that in ‘Paris they call it American music’ (87)” (39).

61
and recognize him by the “slender, elegant, polished shoes” (15).
9
But it is the gift of
gold as well as the gesture that produces a mix of promise, regret, and a silence about
racial history for the ex-coloured man:
I remember how I sat upon his knee, and watched him laboriously drill a
hole through a ten-dollar gold piece, and then tie the coin around my neck
with a string. I have worn that gold piece around my neck the greater part
of my life, and still possess it, but more than once I have wished that some
other way had been found of attaching it to me besides putting a hole
through it. On the day after the coin was put around my neck my mother
and I started on what seemed to me an endless journey. (2)

Jennifer L. Schulz has noted:
Like the gold piece, [the ex-coloured man’s] relationship with his father is
taken out of circulation and emptied of social value. Then again, the
presence of the gold piece (which, because it is gold, still holds economic
value), and the frequency with which the narrator reminds us that it has
been tied around his neck, tells us that the real burden for the narrator is
this wholly economic relationship in which the father claims the son
simply as property, divesting their bond of any emotional value. (43)

In addition to Schulz’s keen reading of this moment, I would stress that this lesson is not
only learned, but it is also absorbed and lived. Few scholars have pointed out the impact

9
Interestingly enough, just as trains and footwear play significant roles in Johnson’s
writings, they do so as well in Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery. Note for
instance, Washington’s anecdote about a “Homer Plessy” type of character on a train:
“There was a man who was well known in his community as a Negro, but who was so
white that even an expert would have hard work to classify him as a black man. This
man was riding in the part of the train set aside for the coloured passengers. When the
train conductor reached him, he showed at once that he was perplexed. If the man was a
Negro, the conductor did not want to send him into the white people’s coach; at the same
time, if he was a white man, the conductor did not want to insult him by asking him if he
was a Negro. The official looked him over carefully, examining his hair, eyes, nose, and
hands, but still seemed puzzled. Finally, to solve the difficulty, he stooped over and
peeped at the man’s feet … the trainman promptly decided that the passenger was a
Negro, and let him remain where he was” (58-59, my italics).

62
of the father’s presence and absence in the formation of an ex-coloured man, but, as I
will argue shortly, the influence is profound and determinant.
From the beginning, the ex-coloured man is a child without cultural training. His
father was absent for the most part of his life and his mother was silent about her
contribution to his cultural heritage and ancestry. The ex-coloured man “learns” culture
through books and consequently has an extrinsic relationship with his culture as well as
with the abstract concepts of culture and ethnicity. After reading Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, and as he embarks on a trip to the South to attend Atlanta University, for example,
he observes people through the lens of the novel, and lives out a sort of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin fantasy as he makes his way through the South by bestowing distinct dialect to
characters within his narrative, according to physical characteristics and class—very
much a la Stowe.
When he seeks to rent accommodations from a proprietor whom he describes as
“a big, fat, greasy looking brown-skinned man” (24), and he stipulates his intentions to
only stay for two or three days, he reports that the proprietor responds, “Oh, dat’s all right
den … You kin sleep in dat cot in de corner der. Fifty cents please” (24). Note the role of
language that the ex-coloured man has established, and which he links to region, race,
color, and social class. He attempts to shape the reader’s perception of his travels, and
the people he encounters through the strategic use of dialect, much like Harriet Beecher
Stowe or Mark Twain. Through the shift between dialect and King’s English, he makes
himself distinct from others as he sees fit, maintaining a class-based and, arguably, a
race-based difference at his will and pleasure. Interestingly, within the mire of dialect,
the statement of the cost of the room is crystal clear. Anything to do with money is not

63
lost in translation for the ex-coloured man and, as this passage indicates, he clearly
understands the language of economic exchange. He does not, however, understand the
true worth or true cost of things.
The anthropological and quasi-novelistic observations continue when he arrives at
Atlanta University: “Among the boys, many of the blackest were fine specimens of
young manhood, tall, straight, and muscular, with magnificent heads; these were the kind
of boys who developed into the patriarchal ‘uncles’ of the old slave régime” (28). The
ex-coloured man makes taxonomic, ethnographic, and implicit ethnological observations
akin to what we read in Stowe’s novel, and then strikes parallel comparisons to the Uncle
Tom character. In the process of this narrative, he betrays the lens with which he
examines his surroundings, the people who surround him, and which provides distance
between himself and these very people and places.
As money and material possessions sublimate the real connections that the ex-
coloured man lacks (such as connections to his father and to any type of culture), he
places special importance on the instances in which he either acquires money (such as in
the gift of gold) or loses it. The incident which he marks as life-changing is one in which
his money and some items of clothing are stolen from his suitcase, which he leaves in the
room he rents and shares with some porters, as he tours Atlanta University. Unable to
now pay for books, tuition, room and board, he makes his way back to the University to
plead his case, but he begins to question the believability of his story. What then
transpires within his panicked thoughts is portentous and telling of the inner turmoil that
drives his life-changing choices: “would not my story sound fishy?” he thinks, and
wonders, “Would it not place me in the position of an imposter or beggar” (29)? The

64
following are words that will later be closely reiterated in a similar context of shame
and that will result in a life-altering choice: “The shame and embarrassment which the
whole situation gave me caused me to stop at the gate. I paused, undecided, for a
moment; then turned and slowly retraced my steps, and so changed the whole course of
my life” (29). This moment of shame has echoes of his grammar school experience, and
his resistance is directed against being classed and pegged in a way other than how he
sees himself.
The shame he feels is associated with being an imposter, a beggar even. This
shame will be echoed later, when he declares himself an imposter through the deliberate
act of permanent passing, but it is especially noteworthy here because the shame is so
incongruous. He feels shame when he should feel anger over the bad luck, the unfairness
of his being robbed, not just of his money, but also of his academic future. Moreover,
instead of taking action and fighting for his education at all costs, he succumbs to
embarrassment and turns his back on his academic dreams. Sigmund Freud describes this
as a withdrawal of the libido from an object-choice after a slight or disappointment,
followed by the libido withdrawing into the ego, rather than a displacement onto another
object (586). A definition of retroflection, described as anger turned inward toward
oneself instead of outward toward those who have inflicted harm, is helpful here.
Psychologist Joel Latner describes the phenomenon of retroflection as a blurring of the
boundary that separates the outer environment from the inner environment, which thus
results in the subject being “on both sides of the boundary, doing to ourselves what is
intended for the other” (39). This inverted anger that results in shame begins early on in
the ex-coloured man’s childhood with his abandonment by his father. The ex-coloured

65
man exhibits what Freud describes as “an identification of the ego with the abandoned
object,” an object-loss transformed into an ego-loss, Freud states, in which the ego is
“altered by identification” (586). According to Diana Fuss, “all identification begins in
an experience of traumatic loss and in the subject’s tentative attempts to manage this
loss” (38). The ex-coloured man’s identification with his father—or more specifically,
with his abandonment by his father—affects his performance of race and also determines
the choices he makes.
It is clear that the ex-coloured man does not literally retrace his steps—he instead
takes a whole new course that will change his life. But if the ex-coloured man’s past is
carefully examined and we take into account the impact of his father on his development,
his studious attention to physical traits begins to reveal some telling details. The ex-
coloured man describes his father as “a tall man with a small, dark mustache” (2). Aside
from the description of his father’s shiny shoes, these are the only physical features to
which the reader is privy, and on which the ex-coloured man remarks. Tellingly, his
reading of the father only within the limits of visible and physical traits bespeak the
psychological impact of a lack of relationship, a lack of connection with a father who is
little more than a stranger.
After losing his money and, along with it, his academic aspirations, the ex-
coloured man makes his way to the cigar-factory town of Jacksonville, where he
continues to register ethnographic and phenotypic impressions of others. Upon meeting
the husband of his new landlady, the ex-coloured man describes him as “a light colored
Cuban, a man about one half her size, and one whose age could not be guessed from his
appearance. He was small in size, but a handsome black mustache and typical Spanish

66
eyes redeemed him from insignificance” (31). It is interesting that the one feature that
this Cuban man has in common with the ex-coloured man’s father is the one feature that
distinguishes him in the eyes of the ex-coloured man. We can see his growing
fascination with the ambiguity and illegibility of appearance, even if only in the context
of age.
This fascination almost immediately spills into the realm of race and culture. As
he sits at the breakfast table with his fellow boarders, he describes his new environment
in which the lines between race, color, and culture are increasingly blurred for him, and
in which the ability to read appearance and literally interpret language becomes impaired.
“There were eight or ten of them,” he describes. “Two, as I afterwards learned, were
colored Americans. All of them were cigar makers in which the color-line is not drawn.
The conversation was carried on entirely in Spanish, and my ignorance of the language
subjected me more to alarm than embarrassment” (31). The ex-coloured man then speaks
of their barrage of Spanish—none of which he could understand.
There are two important insights that occur for the ex-coloured man during this
experience of “illiteracy” and language confusion, the first being that he himself cannot
distinguish the Cubans from the “colored Americans.” Upon learning exactly who is
Cuban and who is a “colored American” in the group, he makes the quick transition from
culture to race and immediately categorizes and segregates the Cubans from the
“Americans” in his mind. The second insight is that despite his immediate taxonomic
separations, language unites all of those at the table, thus blurring the “color-line” which
is ever present in the ex-coloured man’s mind and is the source of all his anxiety. Why
does this cause him more alarm than embarrassment? What separates him from

67
everyone else is language, not color, nationality, or even culture. Even the “colored
Americans” to whom he believes he should feel connected are more connected to the
Cubans through language than they are to him, thus producing in him the fear that he is in
essence connected to no one, to no culture and to no race. In this case, language
undermines his sense of stability of identity—an observation about the power of language
that he will later undertake and implement strategically to confuse the perception of
others.
His fear of disconnection or the inability to connect at all results in a knee-jerk
reaction to “connect” quickly and at all cost, and he thus introjects his environment, a
behavior that Latner describes as taking in “an element of the environment without
digesting it” (38). Introjection or “introjective identification,” as Melanie Klein puts it, is
a form of projection, where the subject “embodies in the self-representation attributes of
the object, real or fantasized” (Sandler 10). In this case, “admiration, love, and esteem
for the object are transferred to one’s own self” (Sandler 10). Thus while the boundaries
between the self and object remain, they are nonetheless blurred. As with projection,
introjection sets the boundary not between ourselves and the environment, but between
one part of ourselves and another” (Latner 38). This behavioral description thus
complicates the impetus behind the ex-coloured man’s surface readings of race, culture,
situations and even people. In light of his introjection, in tandem with the lack of basic
cultural education from either parent, the ex-coloured man’s limitations on how he
“reads” become clearer.
Having never been taught to internalize “culture” or “race,” the ex-coloured man
learns about both through surface observation and through the superficial reading and

68
analysis of books. He can observe either only through the surface reading of physical
signs such as color, phenotype, and class-signifiers, as well as through aural signs such as
language, which he immediately recognizes as having the power to shift the perception of
others in terms of the legibility, interpretation, taxonomy and consequent classification of
one’s personhood. While this is an apt example of his tendency to introject and thus read
the surface of things vis-à-vis his projected desires, there is, however, some value and
accuracy in some of the ex-coloured man’s observations. As he becomes more
acquainted with his co-workers in the cigar factory and he begins to learn some Cuban
history, he begins to distinguish the difference in how race is read in Cuba as opposed to
how it is read in the United States. As he converses with one of his Cuban co-workers,
the subject of Cuban independence arises. This being the “subject nearest his
[companion’s] heart,” the ex-coloured man describes his co-worker’s story:
He was an exile from the island, and a prominent member of the
Jacksonville Junta. Every week sums of money were collected from
juntas all over the country. This money went to buy arms and ammunition
for the insurgents. As the man sat there nervously smoking his long,
‘green’ cigar, and telling me of the Gomezes, both the white one and the
black one, of Maceo and Bandera, he grew positively eloquent.
10
(33)

The reference to Cuba’s fight for independence from Spain reflects Johnson’s
exposure to and knowledge of the Cuban exile community in Jacksonville as well as his

10
The “Gomezes” of which he speaks are Máximo Gómez Báez (1836-1905) and Juan
Gualberto Gómez (1854-1933) respectively, and the other revolutionaries of which he
speaks are Antonio Maceo y Grajales (1845-1896)—leader of the Mambi Army and
known as “the Bronze Titan”—and Quintín Bandera Betancourt (1833-1906), his second
in command. The descriptive, “Mambi” was taken from the Congo language—
particularly appropriate since it is estimated that about ninety-two percent of Cubans who
participated in the Mambi Army were Cubans of African descent. The Mambi Army
defeated Spain through two wars (1868 to 1878 and then again from 1895 to 1898), and
is known as the National Army of Liberation as well as “Maceo’s Army.”

69
knowledge of the organizing that went on in cigar factory communities and in the cigar
factories themselves. But it also indicates, at worst, Johnson’s superficial understanding
of the history of these fighters for Cuban Independence or, at best, his consistent
representation of a character—the ex-coloured man—who cannot read beyond the
surface. This is especially pronounced given his highlighting of the “white” and “black”
Gómezes (Maximo Gómez and Juan Gualberto Gómez, respectively). The ex-coloured
man notes here how names do not distinguish one Gómez from the other, and it is unclear
whether it is he or his co-worker who mentions “color” in a Cuban context—a curious
insertion, since Juan Gómez is famous not only for the fight for Cuban independence, but
also for pushing forth the idea of el “hombre sin adjetivo” [man without adjective].
Nonetheless, the ex-coloured man notes that these men are spoken of in the context of
Cuban nationalism without compromising their claims to citizenship, duty or honor. He
realizes, just as he did at the breakfast table when language seemed to congeal a group
while transcending cultural boundaries, that here lies a different take on race and culture.
As these “border crossings” are linked to and facilitated by language, the ex-
coloured man finds it necessary to learn the Spanish language. He documents his method
and process for learning, and painstakingly describes how his landlord helps him learn
Spanish, how he practices with his colleagues at the cigar factory, and how he begins to
read Cuban newspapers and Spanish literature. “ I was able in less than a year to speak
like a native,” he boasts, and concludes his bluster by letting the reader know, “it was my
pride that I spoke better Spanish than many of the Cuban workmen at the factory” (34).
While the ex-coloured man’s linguistic gifts mirror Johnson’s facility with language, it is
clear, within the context of the novel, that his being able to speak “better” Spanish than

70
any of his co-workers is an impossibility. More interesting and consistent is what this
assertion seems to suggest: The ex-coloured man seems to associate the mastery of
language with the mastery of grammar and speech. In other words, for the ex-coloured
man, to speak “correct” Spanish means to speak a standardized Castilian Spanish, an
insensitive bias that privileges Spain at a time when Cuba is striving for independence,
and that simultaneously betrays his ignorance about culture(s) and language variance, as
well as his superficial understanding of language, idioms, culture, and affiliation. His
preoccupation with “purity” of language also suggests his internalized notions of racial
purity, and his perception of himself as essentially “impure.”
The ex-coloured man soon thereafter makes a curious juxtaposition that may be
more telling than confusing. Ever the braggart, he continues to boast of his language
skills: “After I had been in the factory a little over a year, I was repaid for all the effort I
had put forth to learn Spanish by being selected as ‘reader.’ The ‘reader’ is quite an
institution in all cigar factories which employ Spanish-speaking workmen” (34). And he
is not wrong, since the “reader” or lector played an important part in the organization of
the Cuban Revolution in Florida and was, in fact, the center of information within the
cigar factory.
11
This passage indicates a formidable amount of immersion in Cuban
culture and politics, the cigar factory culture, and in the Spanish language. A few lines
later, the ex-coloured man relays how he has become “acquainted with the best class of

11
The word lector is the Spanish translation of “reader.” The lector played a particularly
important role in the cigar factory, since he alleviated the tedium of the cigar workers by
reading newspapers or books to them as they worked. But the lector also played a central
role in Cuba’s uprising against Spain, since it was the lector who spread information by
reading “incendiary” political tracts and organization information and stratagems to the
workers.

71
colored people in Jacksonville,” then adding, “this was really my entrance into the
race. It was my initiation into what I have termed the freemasonry of the race. I had
formulated a theory of what it was to be colored, no I was getting the practice” (34). And
here it becomes more clear that the ex-coloured man’s theory about what it is to be
“colored,” what it means to be “raced,” differs from and becomes a resistance to the
imposition of race and taxonomy in the United States, much like the resistance to the one-
drop rule on the part of Latin Americans as described by Davis: “many Hispanic
Americans with black ancestry resist the rule if they can” (133).
Davis describes a consequent sort of compromise: “[Hispanics] may accept and
make use of the marginal status position, adopting a marginal identity rather than a black
identity, perceiving and dealing objectively with the black and the white communities
both while not being fully a part of either, and often being a liaison person between the
two” (150). Davis’s language suggests a deviation from “the rules,” and thus an
imperialistic imposition of law and social mores upon a people who do not subscribe to
the one-drop rule. It must be reiterated that the one-drop rule was invented by “white”
people in power who strived to maintain this power. The cigar factory culture, which is
already inscribed in the politics of resistance and independence, and the Latin Americans
who form and inform this culture provide the ex-coloured man with a different and more
fluid interpretation of “color” and being “of color”—one that defies rigid categorization.
The cigar factory town and the factory itself thus provide an alternative culture that defies
the U.S. culture at large. Indeed, it is here that the ex-coloured man gets practice in being
“colored” or, more precisely, of color in the United States and is thereby able to remain

72
outside the margins of what it means to be legally “black.” Armed with the Spanish
language, the ex-coloured man can now put theory into practice at will.
Before he does so, however, he has a series of adventures and misadventures
which begin with his squandering of money (a habit he claims to have picked up from the
Cubans) which results in his giving up any idea of returning to Atlanta University. He
moves to New York and there meets a man to whom he becomes a traveling companion,
and travels throughout Europe with him. It is during his travels that he experiences a
disconcerting moment that at once crosses the issues of fatherlessness with those of
legalized complications of race: the legacy of slavery, miscegenation, shame,
“illegitimacy,” bloodlines, and incest.
During a performance of “Faust” at the Paris opera house, the ex-coloured man
notices and becomes attracted to a young girl. When he recognizes one of her
companions as his father, however, he realizes that the girl to whom he is attracted must
be his sister. Johnson’s use of “Faust” as the operatic backdrop is hardly random, as the
story of a man who sells his soul to the devil for the promise of pleasures, knowledge,
riches, and the carnal love of a woman speaks to the illicit attraction that the ex-coloured
man feels for his sister—a transgression which he feels even before he realizes that the
young woman is his sister, since he confesses, “I felt to stare at her would be a violation;
yet I was distinctly conscious of her beauty” (62).
Upon the realization of the common bloodline, the ex-coloured man’s emotions
instantly shift from attraction to brotherly affection to profound loneliness. As the opera
singers perform the second act of “Faust” the ex-coloured man despondently declares, “I
could have fallen at her feet and worshiped her … Slowly the desolate loneliness of my

73
position became clear to me. I knew that I could not speak, but I would have given a
part of my life to touch her hand with mine and call her sister” (62). His feelings parallel
the action in the second act of the opera, since Mephistopheles appears to a depressed and
suicidal Faust and enchants him with seductive dreams of Margarita, whom Faust
demands to meet upon awaking. This operatic tragedy—a strange and disturbing blurring
of boundaries that, tellingly, occurs outside national border lines—however, is not only
descriptive of the ex-coloured man’s encounter with his beautiful sister, but indeed
foretells the consequences of his choices—a point which I will revisit later.
Upon returning to the United States the ex-coloured man travels to the South and
experiences a hell that will mark the turning point in his life. He witnesses a man being
dragged into town, and just as they put a rope around his neck, someone yells “Burn him”
(88)! As people scramble for fuel, oil and the torch, the ex-coloured man describes how
the man was “too stunned and stupefied even to tremble” (88). But then the writhing
begins, as do the groans and screams. All the while, the ex-coloured man stands
powerless, fixed to the spot where he not only witnesses the murder, but also the yells
and cheers from the crowd. The horror of this murder and of having to witness this
atrocity does not turn into rage for the ex-coloured man. Curiously, his horror turns to
shame: “A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged
to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example
of democracy to the world should be the only state on earth, where a human being would
be burned alive” (88).
Once again, at a moment when the ex-coloured man should feel outrage he feels
shame instead. When his university tuition was stolen from him, he also felt shame at the

74
event rather than rage at having his academic future stolen from him. But in order to
feel outrage, one must feel and believe that s/he has been wronged, that s/he is owed
some justice and retribution. The ex-coloured man has never truly believed this, has only
observed identity at the surface rather than felt it at its core—just as he sees and uses
language as a utilitarian entrance into “culture.”
Many psychologists argue that shame is a process that involves a diminished self-
concept, a defensive transposition of both fear and sadness, as well as a disavowal and
retroflection of anger.
12
Moreover, with every disavowal of anger, a sense of self
increasingly slips away, as the unconscious desire of this disavowal is a paradoxical
desire to connect with those who inflict the harm. This link between anger and shame, in
which shame is inverted and anger is “swallowed” rather than expressed, is the one
connection that the ex-coloured man makes on a deep level and that results in
introflection, or the superficial and projected readings of situations. If, for the ex-
coloured man, identity means nothing beyond surface readings of culture that can be
performed through masquerades, and has nothing to do with community and familial ties,
then the ex-coloured man’s words in which he describes his (in)action after the lynching
take on a sadder and more profound meaning: “When I decided to get up and go back to
the house I found that I could hardly stand on my feet. I was as weak as a man who had
lost blood” (89). The words are simultaneously metaphoric and prophetic.
“I was occupied in debating with myself the step which I had decided to take,” the
ex-coloured man remembers. “I argued that to forsake one’s race to better one’s condition

12
See, for instance, Integrative Psychotherapy in Action (1988), by R.G. Erskine and J.
Moursund, Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex and the Birth of the Self (1992), by D.
Nathanson, and The Psychology of Shame (1989), by G. Kaufman, to name a few.

75
was no less worthy an action than to forsake one’s country for the same purpose” (90).
After he deliberates, he finally comes to the conclusion which will seal his fate, which is
to be neither “black” nor “white,” and yet at the same time to reject neither: “I finally
made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race”
(90). The textual evidence refutes literary critics who argue that the ex-coloured man
decides to pass for “white” upon witnessing the lynching. In fact, he continues to
describe his somewhat passive intentions, stating, “I would change my name, raise a
mustache, and let the world take me for that it would; that it was not necessary for me to
go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead” (90). Indeed, the ex-
coloured man decides to participate in what I can only describe as “passive passing,”
since he decides to let the world read his identity as it wills, impose taxonomic
categorization and value upon his body as deemed by protean social mores and fashion.
Brookes describes the nuances of passing and aptly ties the act to the
psychological self:
In fact, passing could be intentional or unintentional: intentional passing
could be one time only for a specific purpose; occasional for convenience
(dining, theater, travel); segmental (many African Americas earned their
living in the white world but kept their personal lives in black society);
and the permanent passing that the narrator of Johnson’s novel is engaged
in at the book’s conclusion. ‘Passing,’ then, does not simply refer to an
impostor impersonating another racial group—‘crossing the color line’ as
it was referred to—but rather to the physical manifestation of a
psychological quest to understand oneself in a society where to be black
was often not to have one consistent self but to have a double self—as
described by W. E. B. Du Boise and others—or to have a multiplicity of
selves—as does Johnson’s narrator. (86)

Rather than depicting the “passing” subject as an impostor who violates a racial and
social contract, Brookes argues for a psychological understanding of passing. I must add

76
that the act of “passing,” while connected to psychological survival, is also about
ontology and politics—the politics of being, if you will, and which constitute acts of
defiance.
As pointed out earlier, the ex-coloured man marks and remarks upon the
mustache of his landlady’s Cuban husband, while residing and working in Jacksonville—
a significant observation and utterance on his part because the mustache, as a physical
feature, also signifies the father. Simultaneously, this seemingly insignificant feature
signifies disguise, masquerade, and ambiguous readings of distinction as well as cultural
misreadings later. In growing the mustache, the ex-coloured man also attempts to
embody the father, all the while signifying the lack of and the reclaiming of the father.
The mustache is also a firm visual indicator of his ‘bloodline’, but one that can be erased
at will. Note, however, that he does not grow a mustache until he consciously makes the
decision to live in racial/cultural ambiguity.
Although the textual evidence refutes the common and reactionary readings that
assume the ex-coloured man simply decides to pass as white, many literary critics
understand Johnson’s novel only within binary constructions of race in which one can
only be either black or white in the United States. While Brookes is one of the few
critics who refute the staid readings that assume only black and white identities, he also
falls into the same type of binary thinking:
The ex-coloured man, on the other hand, can only be understood through
his simultaneous visibility and invisibility. He does not live underground;
he lives next door. He does not wage war with the Monopolated Light and
Power Company; he probably owns shares in it. To accept that he is only
an African American who has ‘sold out’ is perhaps to deny one of the
book’s central purposes: to show ‘the unreality and arbitrariness of race in
America’ (Lawson 1989, 94). The narrator is an outsider to both white

77
and black institutions precisely because he has the skill to fit so easily
into both. (93)

What has been ignored is that the ex-coloured man also has the skill to fit into other
groups who are not identified and do not identify as black or white. In other words, in
transcending the limits of those racial boundaries and rigid categorizations, the ex-
coloured man inadvertently debunks racial taxonomy in the United States.
His decision to be neither black nor white is nonetheless traditionally read as an
act of cowardice and cultural betrayal in his act of omission and “passive passing.” For
instance, he divulges his conscious understanding of what motivates his decision when he
confesses:
All the while, I understood that it was not discouragement, or fear, or
search for a larger field of action and opportunity, that was driving me out
of the Negro race. I knew that it was shame, unbearable shame. Shame at
being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse
than animals. For certainly the law would restrain and punish the
malicious burning alive of animals. (90)

It is irrefutable that fear and self-preservation inform his reaction to the lynching and his
series of choices which ultimately encase him in whiteness. Franz Fanon, moreover,
offers a more psychological reading of situations such as the one the ex-coloured man
finds himself in after witnessing the lynching. Fanon comments on the violence that
racism wields on the psyche, stating, “I begin to suffer from not being a white man to the
degree that the white man imposes discrimination on me, makes me a colonized native,
robs me of all worth, all individuality, tells me that I am a parasite on the world, that I
must bring myself as quickly as possible into step with the white world” (98, my italics).
Fanon echoes the ex-coloured man’s sentiments. But Fanon makes his case (and,
arguably, that of the ex-coloured man’s) more explicit:

78
When the Negro makes contact with the white world, a certain
sensitizing action takes place. If his psychic structure is weak, one
observes a collapse of the ego. The black man stops behaving as an
actional person. The goal of his behavior will be The Other (in the guise
of the white man), for The Other alone can give him worth. (154)

Fanon’s psychological analysis of how racial and racist violence fractures an already
weakened ego and moves the recipient of such violence even closer toward the one who
wields it helps explain the choices of the ex-coloured man. Yet, the movement towards
the white world, and his choice to “pass,” also suggest agency.
Despite the perceived cowardice and cultural betrayal, the ex-coloured man’s
action/inaction suggests socio-political and legal transgression as well as ontological
rebellion, although frequently it seems that his raison d’etre is located solely in money.
Note, if you will, his implied definition of and road to success: “I had made up my mind
that since I was not going to be a Negro, I would avail myself of every possible
opportunity to make a white man’s success; and that, if it can be summed up in any one
word, means ‘money’” (91). Economic capital, however, is less valuable than the
cultural capital he gains through being “non-black.”
The ex-coloured man “betters [his] condition” by acquiring a position in the
South American department of a downtown wholesale house in New York, and here he
rhapsodizes on his good luck: “My knowledge of Spanish was, of course, the principal
cause of my good luck; and it did more for me; it placed me where the other clerks were
practically put out of competition with me” (91-92). But beyond winning him a coveted
position, the Spanish language also allows him to be not only non-black, but, in fact,
“Latin American” and thus makes white cultural capital more accessible.

79
For the ex-coloured man culture trumps race, building on the lessons he has
already learned in the cigar factory: culture is malleable and can be performed. Since he
conflates culture and identity, identity is also malleable and can be performed as well.
All notions of identity remain at the surface level for the ex-coloured man, a fact of
which he never seems quite conscious until he meets and falls in love with a white
woman. It is then that he worries, ”Up to this time I had assumed and played my rôle as
a white man with a certain degree of nonchalance, a carelessness as to the outcome …
My acting had called for mere external effects. Now I began to doubt my ability to play
the part” (94, italics mine).
It is not until he falls in love with and begins to court a white woman that he
explicitly describes himself as “a white man.” This is the climatic moment that parallels
the “Faust” opera, the moment where he consciously crosses an invisible line that seals
his fate. This line, however has little to do with the color line, but instead has everything
to do with the line on which identity, ontology and the psyche lie. Interestingly, he meets
his future wife at a musical performance at which she sings, a moment that not only
echoes the “Faust” performance, but also disturbingly, his initial “meeting” of his sister.
His description of both mirrors the depiction of the Margaret/Gretchen
13
character whom
Faust falls in love with, lusts after, and sells his soul for.
I revisit the ex-coloured man’s encounter with and description of his sister to
draw eerie parallels between her and the object of his desire as well as with the opera
heroine, Marguerite/Gretchen. Although he apologetically states that he “cannot describe

13
Goethe uses the nickname “Gretchen” for Margaret. The two names are thus used
interchangeably.

80
her either as to feature, color of her hair, or of her eyes” (62), he nevertheless describes
his sister as “so young, so fair, so ethereal … I was distinctly conscious of her beauty,”
and then confesses, “I held my programme as though studying it, but listened to catch
every sound of her voice” (62). Upon meeting his future wife, the ex-coloured man
seems almost bewitched by her features:
When I saw the girl, the surprise which I had felt at the first sound of her
voice was heightened; she was almost tall and quite slender, with lustrous
yellow hair and eyes so blue as to appear almost black. She was as white
as a lily, and she was dressed in white. Indeed, she seemed to me the most
dazzlingly white thing I had ever seen. But it was not her delicate beauty
which attracted me most; it was her voice, a voice which made one
wonder how tones of such passionate color could come from so fragile a
body. (93, my italics)

The reader is left baffled by the ex-coloured man’s initial descriptions of the saturation of
color, followed by a description that evokes the whiteness and fragility of southern
womanhood, only to end with a description of “passionate color” that is unseen because it
is unreal. This frenzied fixation on color—both its lack and its saturation—mirrors his
almost manic swings between trying to be “colored,” and trying to be devoid of all
color.
14

Johann von Goethe’s literary description of Margaret in the 1808 publication of
Faust—First Part does not stress her physical description as much as it does her youth
and the circumstances that surround Faust’s first sight of her. Mephistopheles and a
witch give Faust a drink that will bring him a vision of Margaret and fill him with lust
and want. Faust drinks and the witch tells him, “Here is a song for you! If you would

14
Johnson’s depiction of the ex-coloured man’s love interest is especially fascinating
when juxtaposed against his 1915 poem, “The White Witch,” later published in Countee
Cullen’s Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties (1927).

81
sing it now and then, / you will experience its special powers” (lines 2591-92).
Mephistopheles encourages Faust to let himself be guided by the drink and by the song.
Upon receiving the vision of Margaret, Faust exclaims, “The woman’s form was, oh, so
fair” (line 2600)! He later rhapsodizes on her youth: “My God, this child is beautiful! /
I’ve never seen the like of it” (lines 2609-10).
The ex-coloured man’s fate is not lost upon meeting this “lily”-white woman; it is
lost upon declaring himself white upon meeting her, and in thus making the conscious
decision to carry out a white life upon marrying her. But before marriage and during
courtship, he is compelled to confess himself to her, however, and upon telling her of his
racial identity, he states, “under the strange light in her eyes I felt that I was growing
black and thick-featured and crimp-haired” (96). And soon his shame causes him
figuratively to sell his soul and to realize, Faust-like, his desires: “This was the only time
in my life that I ever felt absolute regret at being colored, that I cursed the drops of
African blood in my veins, and wished that I were really white” (96-97, my italics).
After the confession follows a brief separation, but the object of his affection accepts him
and they have two children—a girl, whose description he quickly glosses over, only
noting that she has “hair and eyes dark like [his],” and a boy, upon whose description he
sensuously lingers: “fair like his mother, a little golden-headed god, a face and head that
would have delighted the heart of an old Italian master” (99). It seems at first that the ex-
coloured man lingers on the description of his son because he is so much like his “white”
mother, but upon closer examination, we see that the ex-coloured man has linked the
child to himself with the genealogical language of fantastical ancestry. Consider, for
example, the description of his son’s face and head as something that would have

82
delighted an old “Italian master,” and his description of himself that just precedes that
of his son’s: “I am certain, too, that, in spite of my Italian-like complexion, I was as red
as a beet” (93).
The repetition of the Italianate descriptions serve multiple purposes: His subtle
self-description, coupled with that of his son’s further his own passing, assures his son’s
social, racial, and cultural positions as non-black. This passage also betrays the ex-
coloured man’s moving away from an ambiguous racial identity, to one that is firmly
rooted in Europe, a subtle movement that is also exhibited in the European spelling of the
title of the ex-coloured man’s narrative, and the recurrence of the words “rôle” and
“programme” toward the end of the tale.
15
The ex-coloured man’s wife dies giving birth
to this god-like son, and the ex-coloured man is left alone, locked in a white world with
an identity that is both a secret and a public performance. He reflects, “it is difficult for
me to analyze my feelings concerning my present position in the world. Sometimes it
seems to me that I have never really been a Negro, that I have been only a privileged
spectator of their inner life; at other times I feel that I have been a coward, a deserter, and
I am possessed by a strange longing for my mother’s people” (99). In the end, he
observes, “I am an ordinarily successful white man who has made a little money … I

15
While the Italian identity was declared legally “white” in cases such as Rollins v.
Alabama (1922), at the time that Johnson wrote his novel, it was also subject to
questioning, exclusion, and violence. Matthew Frye Jacobson documents in Whiteness of
a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998) the debate
over which Europeans were and were not to be granted “white” status and identity,
following the mass European migration to the United States starting around 1840 and
lasting until 1924, when the Immigration Act of 1924 and Virginia's "Racial Integrity"
Act of 1924 were put in place. The Immigration Act severely restricted the immigration
of Europeans from Southern and Eastern Europe, and targeted Jews in particular. The
“Racial Integrity” Act banned non-Caucasian blood from the “white race,” and was
ideologically rooted in the eugenics movement.

83
have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage” (99-100). Most critics tie the selling of
his birthright with the implied denial of his African American heritage as he consciously
enters the “white” world. Jennifer Schulz, for example, argues, “Johnson’s work
confirms that one cannot refuse participation in the racial contract; to attempt to do so is
to mistakenly believe that one can remake oneself entirely—transcend the racial
contract—simply by changing geographical location, passing for white, or reclassing
oneself” (34). The reader cannot deny the ex-coloured man’s regret and claustrophobic
situation, but a reading that assumes racial essence, as well as a conflation of racial
essence with cultural affiliation, ignores the complexities of race formations,
constructions, and malleable racial identity represented by Johnson as he illustrates these
qualities filtering and being read through multiple national and cultural borderlines.
A reading that positions the ex-coloured man as either black or white is not
unreasonable given his last words about selling his birthright for a “mess of pottage”—a
biblical reference to Esau, son of Isaac and Rebekah, and twin brother to Jacob, who sells
his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of lentils—not recognizing the broader impact of his
actions upon his descendants until it is too late.
16
Some readings of the biblical story
interpret Esau’s rash action as his selling his birthright to satisfy his lust, a reading more
in line with the ex-coloured man’s decision to ultimately veer into the “white” upon
marrying the “white lily” and fathering their children, as well as with the Faust story.
Esau, Faust, and the ex-coloured man all end up selling themselves only to end up
confined in a type of hell. The “twin” symbols could be read arguably as a metaphor for

16
See Genesis 25: 27-34.

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double consciousness—one black, the other white. But, while I recognize the ex-
coloured man’s eventual sinking into and absorption by whiteness, I maintain that Latin
American identities that are recognized as neither black nor white, paradoxically
acknowledged as both black, white, and “other” and given access (albeit limited) to white
cultural capital, provide a conflicted space for the ex-coloured man to negotiate the
complexities and contradictions of race and culture. And the ensuing confusion he
experiences ruptures presuppositions that maintain rigid and binary understandings of
race in the United States—twin pillars that uphold the fiction of racial essence and
axiological hierarchies.

Conclusion:
The question implied by the ex-coloured man’s narrative, and asked explicitly by
Davis, of “who is black” is a complicated one that continues to unravel the more that one
investigates the “fact” of race. In the 1920s, the United States would fund a study to once
and for all determine the “race” of Latin Americans and appropriately categorize them on
the racial hierarchy; the study would prove vexing and a failure, and I discuss this in
detail in the next chapter. It is the impetus to impose “order” in the “order of things”—to
borrow Foucault’s words—that results in false categories, faulty logic, and bad law.
Legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris sees U.S. race laws rooted in the successful effort
to give property value to whiteness. If whiteness is thus property, passing into the white
world, Harris asserts, is “not merely passing, but trespassing” (1711). Moreover, she
states, it is trespassing with a “false passport” (1711). The value of being legally white is
the myth of purity; more specifically, it is constructed as an identity that has not been

85
tainted with the servitude and receiving end of the violence of slavery: “The dominant
paradigm of social relations … was that, although not all Africans were slaves, virtually
all slaves were not white. It was their racial otherness that came to justify the
subordinated status of Blacks” (Harris 1717). In other words, Harris continues, “‘Black’
racial identity marked who was subject to enslavement; ‘white’ racial identity marked
who was ‘free’ or, at minimum, not a slave” (1718). It must be noted then, that “white”
identity is different from having “white” skin, for as many a “passing” novel has shown,
having white skin is not enough to exempt one from being declared legally “black.” And
as Booker T. Washington’s anecdote about the Moroccan man in the South, and James
Weldon Johnson’s observations about his and Ricardo Ponce’s experience on the train
has shown, dark skin does not necessarily inscribe one into cultural “blackness”—much
to the consternation of some African Americans who interpret Latin American eschewal
of “blackness” as an attempt to pass for white.
Yet, in response to such accusations, it must be emphasized that the one-drop rule
is a U.S. construction, and to impose it on another people is an imperialistic gesture.
Moreover, the question raised in the text—and which remains to this date—is why the
one-drop rule goes unquestioned and unchallenged among the African American
community. Consider Davis’s observations on how this contributed to the solidification
of laws, “truths,” and “knowledge(s)” about race:
Although, in the light of history, there is bitter irony in the fact that blacks
support the one-drop rule, there is no mystery about how that happened.
The rule was created in the slave south, where miscegenation was
widespread, to force all racially mixed individuals with any known black
ancestry into the status of slaves. Later the rule buttressed the Jim Crow
system and other patterns of segregation and discrimination, became
accepted as the nation’s norm, and was backed by law. (185)

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James Weldon Johnson raises many questions about legal “blackness,” about
what biological and factual race is and means. These are questions and tensions that exist
today, and thus explains why the novel continues to fascinate readers, critics, and
scholars from many disciplines. It is also Johnson’s subtlety that makes this text so rich.
His crafty use of language, whether it is the implementation of the Spanish language or a
strategically placed accent, move the ex-coloured man geographically and culturally, and
thus (re)position him ethnically and racially. In utilizing language as he does, Johnson
disrupts “common sense” about race and disturbs racial logic and legal language that
have become naturalized.
Johnson’s writings were influential also because of his prominent position within
the black intelligentsia. Both his novel and autobiography can be read as travel writings
that did the work of disrupting concepts of race through language passing and by
introducing Latin American ideas about race—ideas that seemed porous and lax in
comparison to the rigid racial categories in the United States. As I discuss at length in the
next chapter, Latin America was subsequently homogenized and constructed as a racial
utopia, in which one could either start anew, be absorbed into a different culture simply
through the acquisition and strategic use of the Spanish language, be non-black, and just
be.

87
Chapter Two
Brazilian Schemes and Utopian Dreams in Nella Larsen’s Passing,
Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun,
and Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven

“And now when twilight dims the skies above
recalling thrills of our love
there’s one thing I am certain of
Return –I will –to old Brazil”
1

Introduction:
While the possibility of proposed African American immigration to Central and
South America had been an topic of interest in the United States from as early as 1850,
the topic resurfaced in the 1920s when Robert Abbott (founder of the influential Chicago
Defender) published a series of articles about his trip to Brazil. The historical details of
the U.S. African American connection to Brazil inevitably inform Nella Larsen’s use of
Brazil in her 1929 novel Passing, Jessie Fauset’s Brazilian character Anthony Cruz/Cross
in her 1929 novel Plum Bun, and Carl Van Vechten’s comparison of Brazilian and U.S.
racial taxonomy in his controversial novel, Nigger Heaven (1926). Yet, no books or
articles to date address the presence of Brazil in either Jessie Fauset’s or Carl Van
Vechten’s works, and of the Larsen scholarship on Passing to date, only three articles
deal seriously with Larsen’s treatment of Brazil. Most articles on Passing dwell on one
of two themes: racial passing or lesbianism, but do not explore the intersection of race,
gender, and the utopian/dystopian dreams/nightmares that Brazil signifies. If Brazil is

1
“Aquarela do Brazil” (1939) by Brazilian composer Ary Barroso (November 7, 1903-
February 9,1964. English language lyrics by S.K. Russell (1942), Peer International
Corporation.

88
mentioned at all in Larsen scholarship, its significance is mentioned neither within the
text nor within the novel’s cultural and historical context.
It is my contention that the relatively unexplored references to Brazil in the novels
of Nella Larsen, Carl Van Vechten, and Jessie Fauset contextualize the politics and
discourse of the U.S. black immigration movement, illuminate the socio-political realities
of blacks in a post-World War I United States, and ambiguously homogenize Brazil and
Latin America. Larsen and Fauset utilize Brazil as a complex trope that (although it
offers historical context) represents both literal and symbolic escape. Like Van Vechten
before her, Fauset also raises questions about race and taxonomy. All three employ the
passing figure to question laws that determine the color line. Until this point, however,
“passing” has been discussed as a phenomenon without nuanced politics, as if passing for
white is the same thing as passing for non-black. I explore the socio-political
complications that lie in that gap, and use the term “triangulated passing” to describe the
act of passing as the other “other.” This term and its definition hinge on black-white
binary assumptions about race. The gap between the black-white binary offers the
subject the space to slip out of rigid racial categories, and can it also result in invisibility.
The subjects who participate in triangulated passing in the novels, do so in order to be
taken as Latin American, Italian, or Spanish (and often, these identities are used as if they
mean the same thing).
Immigration discourses may have influenced a literary preoccupation with the
Latin Americas and with Brazil specifically in the context of the writers investigated in
this chapter, but the neo-primitive movement in the arts also influenced how Brazil was
depicted. The confused and confusing Brazilian identities portrayed by Van Vechten,

89
Fauset, and Larsen have ties to the neo-primitivist artistic interests introduced at the
end of the nineteenth century with some of the works of artists such as painter Paul
Gauguin and composer Antonín Dvorák. A decade after Dvorák declared “the spirituals
to be America’s first authentic contribution to world culture and urged classical
composers to draw upon them to create sui generis symphonies” (Gates Jr. 163), Pablo
Picasso stumbled into an ethnographic museum, later produced Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon (1907), and transformed European art. Henri Matisse and Man Ray, among
other artists, followed suit, primitivism and cubism thus becoming an important, if not
central, part of the early twentieth century cultural climate and the modernist movement.

Figure 2: “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.” Pablo Picasso, 1907.

90

Figure 3: “Noire et Blanche.” Man Ray, 1926.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues that “African art—ugly, primitive, debased in
1900; sublime, complex, valorized by 1910—was transformed so dramatically in the
cultural imagination of the West, in such an astonishingly short period, that the potential
for the political uses of black art and literature in America could not escape the notice of
African-American intellectuals” (163). Leon Coleman concurs, noting that the black
intelligentsia of Harlem “saw in African primitive art the possibilities of extending the
roots of black culture beyond the African American’s slave heritage back into a dignified
African past” (56), and indeed they did. Consider, for example, the art of Sargent Claude
Johnson, Aaron Douglas, Richard S. Roberts, Archibald J. Motley Jr., and Winold Reiss,
among others, who celebrate a vibrant African American experience that is often
combined with a romanticized African past. The aim of such artistic production was not
solely to restore dignity to African American heritage, as Gates asserts. It was also a
means by which African Americans could “save themselves politically” in the United
States (164), which tacitly suggests that the audience for which this art was produced was
not just African American.

91

Figure 4: "Blues." Archibald Motley, 1929.

Figure 5: "An Idyll of the Deep South." Aaron Douglas, 1934.

The paintings, sculptures, and photography that depicted African America with
dignity, however, were not the sole representations of neo-primitivism. Instead of
symbolizing a “dignified African past,” a stereotypical primitivism was often conflated
with, attributed to, and even performed by African Americans. Gates observes that “much
has been made of the Harlem Renaissance’s […] overdependence on white patronage and
a pandering to debased white tastes in the form of primitivistic depictions of black
sensuality and hedonism in the literature, art, music, and dance of the period” (165-66),
and Coleman describes performances by African American entertainers that “became

92
more oriented toward jungle scenes and tom-tom dancing” (62). For example, literary
depictions by writers such as Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset focus on
the powerful and primitive force of even the smallest amounts of “black blood” in some
of their characters.

Figure 6: Bessie Smith, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936.

Figure 7: Billie Holiday, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1949.

Van Vechten’s play with primitivism, on the other hand, is difficult to interpret.
Some of his photography seems meant to illustrate a comparison and relation between
African Americans and African primitivist artistic depictions, and at the same time to
exploit a faddish fascination with a Harlem that is conflated with primitivism. Yet, when

93
compared to Man Ray’s play with a similar photographic composition, Van Vechten’s
portraits suddenly become an ironic and even sarcastic response to Man Ray’s rendition
of primitive, inanimate, and even fixed iconography, which is explicitly and sharply
juxtaposed with whiteness and the implied non-primitive or civilized. Undoubtedly, a
primitivist art movement that became confused with presumed African American
primitiveness must have been a source of anxiety for the black intelligentsia and other
Harlemites.
For Van Vechten and Larsen, in particular, Brazil becomes not only a site and
space for racial freedom, but also an open space, rife with unknown and even dangerous
possibilities, one onto which anxieties about primitivism and the stereotypes associated
with primitiveness could be displaced. Coleman states that although the image of the
New Negro was widely reflected in the arts, “this resemblance was somewhat obscured
by jungle shadows” (62). For Van Vechten, Larsen, and Fauset, the image of the African
American is obscured by and is in danger of being swallowed whole by the shadows of
the tropics, whether it is Byron who is led into a hedonistic hell by the lascivious Lasca
Sartoris in Nigger Heaven, Angela’s “incorporation” into Brazil through implied laws of
coverture in Plum Bun, or Irene’s desperate actions to avoid such absorption by an
imaginary Brazil in Passing.
The desperate attempt to access “Brazil” by Dick in Nigger Heaven, by Angela in
Plum Bun, and by Brian in Passing, challenge the one-drop rule and laws of hypo-descent
in the United States. At the same time, these depictions question Brazil as a constructed
utopian space, and reveal displaced anxieties about primitivism, blackness, and cultural
absorption.

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Historical Context:
It is necessary to address the history that forms the social and political discourses
of the time, and that subsequently frame the narratives of Nigger Heaven, Plum Bun, and
of Passing. The possibilities and relief that immigration to Africa offered to free blacks
had been a topic of urgency from as early as 1788 when, according to historian Toyin
Falola, the Negro Union of Rhode Island proposed a mass exodus (13). Martin Delany, a
member of the African Consciousness Movement, an African American known as one of
the most infuential thinkers and leaders of the mid-nineteenth century, co-edited the
antislavery Rochester North Star with Frederick Douglass, and spoke out against the
conditions of blacks in the United States. Most notably, he was persuaded that the
empowerment of blacks would only happen through mass immigration and posited
Central and South America as possible sites of immigration that would offer a solution to
slavery and racism.
Delany displays his knowledge of Afro Cuban literature and history in his The
Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States
(1852); within this historic political tract he specifically discusses Mexico, Nicaragua,
and New Grenada (present day Colombia and Venezuela) as places that present no
obstacles and offer boundless opportunity in regard to racial freedom and consequent
economic exploitation.
2
After traveling to the Niger Valley in May of 1859, Delany

2
Delany shows his awareness of Cuban politics, slavery in the Caribbean, and the
important voice that the writer Placido had: “Of the West India Islands, Santa Cruz,
belonging to Denmark; Porto Rico, and Cuba with its little adjuncts, belonging to Spain,
are the only slaveholding Islands among them—three-fifths of the whole population of
Cuba being colored people, who cannot and will not much longer endure the burden and
the yoke. They only want intelligent leaders of their own color, when they are ready at

95
proposed immigration to Africa, and yet continued to discuss Central and South
America as well as the whole of Brazil as “the regions desired; and that can be obtained
as the seat of Negro civilization and empire” – this despite the fact that Delany and his
coalition were well aware of the current enslavement of Africans in Brazil (239). The
sites of proposed immigration are of marked importance here, because they were hardly
considered arbitrarily. A history of slavery and therefore a sense of Pan-Africanism
connected these continents in the mind of Delany, and later in that of Marcus Garvey
during his rise in the years 1915 through 1925.
Having been left with the distaste and disgust for U.S. racism and ingratitude after
having served in the Great War, a black population was once again ready to reconsider
immigration. With the tenuousness of the “Back to Africa” situation, the Latin Americas
as a site of immigration once again became a topic of serious consideration.
Marcus Garvey had traveled through several Central American countries, lived in Puerto
Limon, Costa Rica and Colon, Panama, years before embarking on his “Back to Africa”
project. Despite the revolutionary fervor of his Pan-African and “Back to Africa”
movements, many obstacles (economic and political) helped detract from the credibility
of his movement and leadership, as did the real political scandals in Liberia that exposed
the enslavement of native Liberians by the immigrated Americo Liberians.

any moment to charge to the conflict—to liberty or death. The remembrance of the noble
mulatto, PLACIDO, the gentleman, scholar, poet, and intended Chief Engineer of the
Army of Liberty and Freedom in Cuba … who [was] shamefully put to death in 1844, by
that living monster, Captain General O’Donnell, is still fresh and indelible to the mind of
every bondman of Cuba” (215-16). Delany’s two books, The Condition, Elevation,
Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States and the Official
Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party are considered to be “two of the most
important books on Black emigration written during the nineteenth century” (Falola 7).

96
Robert Abbott’s African American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, put forth
an alternative to Liberia: Brazil.
3
As David Hellwig explains, it was possibly the
prominence of Robert Abbott and of his newspaper within the black community that gave
special credence and weight to his 1923 travel writings. Hellwig asserts that, in his
attempt to counter the repatriation movement, Abbott “urged his readers to look to Brazil
both as a refuge from racism and as a new frontier offering economic opportunities in
abundance, especially for those with a trade or an entrepreneurial bent” (18). In
conjunction with the absorption into culture and an erasure of socio-historical past that
Abbott suggested Brazil could offer, he also raised the possibilities of African American
capitalist exploitation—Brazil as conquerable space in economic terms, mirroring the
exploitative possibilities that Martin Delaney had also discussed approximately seventy
years beforehand, and recalling the economic exploitation of Liberia by Americo
Liberians.
The amalgamation of capitalistic possibilities with the “promised” escape from
U.S. institutional racism (that had and has inextricably linked race with socio-political
access and economic gain or the lack thereof) concretizes the otherwise ethereal concept
of the utopia put forth by the black intelligentsia. The utopic vision offered physical
escape from U.S. racism and race-based violence, as well as economic possibilities.

3
Robert Abbott founded the Chicago Defender in 1905. It grew from a four-page paper
of handbill size to one of the most important and leading African American newspapers
within a decade, and was clearly influential in informing the public as well as in forming
the news.

97

From Liberia to Brazil—A Change of Venue:
It was on October 17, 1920 that Marcus Garvey announced a $2 million Liberian
Construction loan for the repatriation movement, but by this time he had also fallen out of
favor with the black intelligentsia of Harlem, and was seen as an embarrassment to black
people. Depicted as unrealistic and despotic by black leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois,
who edited Crisis, as well as A. Phillip Randolph who founded and co-edited The
Messenger, Garvey alienated the black elites to whom Randolph had introduced him, and
his movement was written off by many as ill conceived. The “Garvey Must Go”
campaign gained fervor after he met with Edward Young Clarke, leader of the Ku Klux
Klan on June 1922. This meeting, his remark that black people had not built the railroad
system and should therefore not insist on sharing the same cars with white patrons, as
well as the article published in The Messenger entitled “Marcus Garvey! The Black
Imperial Wizard Becomes Messenger Boy of the White Ku Klux Kleagle,” further
marred and questioned the intentions of the repatriation movement.
4

Nonetheless, the fact that there was a repatriation movement and that people did
actually move to Liberia and created new national identities as Americo Liberians speaks
to the need for respite from the racist realities in the United States and the all too slow
progress for blacks in a post-Great War U.S. Despite hopes that their service in the U.S.
military during the war would ensure the benefits of full citizenship for all African

4
The “kleagle” is a title within the Klu Klux Klan that indicates status, such as “Grand
Wizard,” “Exalted Cyclops,” and “King Kleagle.”

98
Americans, black veterans as well as the black community realized that the inequities
continued and that their service meant little, if anything, to the United States.
It is important to mark that the descendants of ex-slaves who moved from the
United States to Liberia as early as 1816 identified themselves as Americo Liberians, thus
retaining remnants of the “American” identity, as well as their history of slavery in the
U.S. –a recognition of the violent rupture in their history.
5
Yet an interesting question
implied in the novels of Van Vechten, Fauset, and Larsen is whether a person who is
culturally inscribed, read, and contextualized as black in the United States can discard the
racial and cultural inscription, as well as the citizenship that condemns one to and
incarcerates one in a static identity.

Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven:
Carl Van Vechten’s novel Nigger Heaven (1926) was quite successful in its day—
it immediately sold 100,000 copies to a waiting public, for which Van Vechten received
68,000 dollars. The novel went through fourteen printings in two years and was
translated into ten languages and sold in countries such as Poland, Italy, Sweden, France,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Norway, Denmark, and Germany (Coleman 111-12,
121). The novel was highly controversial for two reason: Van Vechten’s title which
many critics found offensive, and the perception that Van Vechten exploited the seamier
side of black life in Harlem for titillation and notoriety. White reviewers of Nigger
Heaven tended to praise the novel, while a black audience (with the exception of most of

5
An ironic and tragic note here is the 1931 scandal exposing that the Americo Liberians
had enslaved some of the African-born Liberians.

99
the black intelligentsia) condemned the book and vilified Van Vechten. According to
Leon Coleman, “the most evident sources of irritation […] were the title, the use of
dialect, the types of characters, and the accentuation of the demi-monde atmosphere”
(119). W.E.B. DuBois and Countee Cullen indeed saw fit to break their relations with
Van Vechten over the book, only renewing the friendship years later.
Despite such controversy, Van Vechten’s novel was touted by some readers as an
important work that humanized black people. Coleman states that some correspondents
“informed Van Vechten that for the first time they received the impression that Negroes
were people,” adding that the novel brought an international awareness of the race
problem in the United States. In addition, the novel brought fame and tourism to Harlem,
although some critics noted this interest as morbid and exploitative.
Today the work is rarely taught or read, and scholarship on the work is either
more broadly related to the 1920s, responding to the controversial title, or defending Van
Vechten’s intentions. Scholars have not given enough attention to Van Vechten’s
treatment of racial taxonomy in the United States, a categorization and pseudo science
that he, in concert with his good friend James Weldon Johnson, questioned and debunked
through literature and politics. Most regrettably, literary critics have glossed over Van
Vechten’s repeated references to Latin America, and to the “Spanish”-type skin color and
hues in his novel, in the process ignoring the socio-political discourse that included both
the topics of emigration as well as the tenuousness of race.
“Nigger Heaven” indicates the balcony section of segregated movie theaters, to
which blacks were relegated, as well as Harlem itself. But in Nigger Heaven, Carl Van
Vechten explores the daily dramas of the people who live there, and thus, the heaven and

100
hell that is this little piece of the U.S.A. The heart of the drama lies in the story of
Mary Love, an intellectual and race-conscious librarian (reportedly modeled on Jessie
Fauset) and Byron Kasson, a struggling writer whose ambivalence about his racial
identity prompts him to write racially neutral fiction that repeatedly fails. Byron’s lack of
a cohesive identity may be betrayed in his inability to write successful (read
“appropriate”) fiction, and yet his character’s literary failure may have more to do with
Van Vechten’s belief that black writers should exploit what they know in order to
capitalize on public fascination with Harlem life.
6
Byron’s bad writing mirrors his bad
judgment in love. He ultimately leaves the chaste arms of Mary Love, for the golden-
brown, devil-worshipping Lasca Sartoris, which ultimately leads to the murder of a rival,
and to Byron being wrongly blamed for the crime, resulting in his incarceration.
7

Through the drama of the Byron, Mary, and Lasca love triangle, as well as through the
complexities of life in Harlem, Van Vechten explores issues such as the color line,
passing, talk of emigration, differences between being of mixed race in the United States
and in the Latin Americas, and color within the black community.
Nigger Heaven lingers on skin color and the nuances of color that establish public
meanings of race. Note, for instance, Van Vechten’s reference to color that, for the first

6
In the ongoing dialogue that went on in the Crisis in 1926, Carl Van Vechten warns:
“the squalor of negro life, the vice of negro life, offer a wealth of novel, exotic,
picturesque material to the artist … the question is: are negro writers going to write
about this exotic material while it is still fresh or will they continue to make a free gift of
it to white authors who will exploit it until not a drop of vitality remains”(219)?

7
Lasca Sartoris was modeled after the notorious and scandalous former cabaret singer
Nora Holt, who was a close friend of Van Vechten’s.

101
time in the novel, conjoins it to issues of public interpretation and subsequent codes
of behavior:
The girls took in most of the good plays and musical entertainments,
revues, and song recitals alike, downtown, usually sitting in the balcony to
save expense, although Olive was light enough and Mary’s features were
sufficiently Latin so that they were not rudely received when they asked at
the box-office for places in the orchestra. Once or twice, however, when
they had been escorted to the theatre by some man of darker colour, they
had been caused some humiliation and embarrassment. On one such
occasion, after the usher had seated them, the house-manager had
descended the aisle to demand a view of their stubs. On examination, he
informed them that a mistake had been made, assuring them that their
seats were for another night … The lesson was learned. Thereafter Olive
always took charge of the stubs and, if a view of them were requested,
held them up so that the figures might be deciphered, but refused to permit
them to leave her fingers. (43)

The issues of race loyalty/disloyalty on the part of Olive (Mary’s roommate), Mary, and
the usher are complicated by the theoretical color lines that are called into question and
rebelled against, but nonetheless have material consequences such as whether one sits in
the orchestra section or in the unupholstered balcony section (or “nigger heaven”). The
physical/geographical separation of “races” in the theater does more than define the limits
of access for one group and the privileges of another; it makes the theoretical lines that
determine hierarchical taxonomies of race public and visible.
Van Vechten highlights Olive’s fingers as she defiantly grips the tickets to call
into question the “signs” that supposedly betray race, essence, and authenticity. In a
letter to novelist and historian Edna Kenton (dated August 1924), he sketches out a
description of writer Walter White that debunks preconceptions about color lines and the
“signs” that help read race and consequent taxonomy. In this letter he reports that White:
speaks French and talks about Debussy and Marcel Proust in an offhand
way. An entirely new kind of Negro to me … Being a great deal whiter

102
than Waldo Frank he does not travel in Jim Crow cars. He relates with
glee his experience with a Georgia cracker who boasted he could always
tell a nigger. “They always have a purple streak in their finger-nails,” he
explained, pointing to Walter’s hands without the streak. (Kellner 69)

Having determined that no clear signs exist to alleviate the obsession with racial
categories, Van Vechten exploits white anxiety about the color line and about racial
contamination in depicting characters that cross the line at will. A conversation in Nigger
Heaven between Mary, Olive, and their friends Dick and Howard puts forth the stigma
and limits of social and political “blackness,” the color lines that are precariously
tenuous, and the performance of race. Upon discussing the racial passing of an
acquaintance, Dick announces his intentions to “pass, go over the line, and marry a white
woman,” and adds: “It serves them jolly well right for forcing us to” (48). The idea of
being “forced” to pass is tied to desire for full and equal citizenship in a country in which
race logic fails to be logical. Political theorist, Joel Olson, observes, for instance:
One’s race is determined by one’s status, not the other way around. The
cause is the consequence. You are not Jim Crowed because you are
Black; you are Black because you are Jim Crowed … If a Black person is
one who must ride Jim Crow, the corollary is that a white person is one
who need not: It is not that [you] enjoy privilege because you are white;
you are white because you enjoy privilege … Jim Crow does not oppress
people. It creates the dark world, and the white world as well. Races are
political categories. They are produced by power; they do not exist prior
to it. (22)

What Dick clarifies to his friends and to the reader is that the color line that divides white
from non-white is culturally and nationally specific, and is determined for political
reasons that mean to keep the subject “black” and from citizenship. To Olive’s assertion
that she just wouldn’t feel her race if she passed, he exclaims, “What race? … What race

103
do you feel? If you lived in Brazil and had one drop of white blood you’d be
considered white. Here the reverse is true. What’s the coloured race ever done for you”
(48)?
Olive’s feeling of no longer feeling “her race” suggests the loss of community ties
through “social death.” Orlando Patterson theorizes that social death is tied to a power
relation that has three facets: (1) the social facet involves the use and/or threat of
violence to command control over another person; (2) the psychological facet of
influence or the persuasion used to change how a person perceives her interests and
circumstances; (3) the facet of authority derived from Rousseau’s belief that the
powerful transform “force into right,” and “obedience into duty” in order to ensure
themselves “continual mastership” (1-2). Social death is inextricably tied to the legacy
of slavery, as Patterson observes. “Because the slave had no socially recognized
existence outside of his master,” he asserts, “he became a social nonperson” (5). More
than a “nonperson,” however, Patterson states that the slave is “a socially dead person”
because he is alienated from all rights, claims of birth, and is “culturally isolated from the
social heritage of his ancestors” (5). Although Patterson writes specifically of the power
dynamics involved in slavery and in the making of the slave, his ideas on social death are
helpful in how they inform ideas of racial/cultural ties and the alienation experienced by
post-emancipation African Americans when passing. Olive’s suggestion that if she does
not “feel her race,” she would not feel herself comments on a loss of identity, tied to a
naturalized sense of race, and thus to a race-based community.
While Dick’s angry refusal to accept a U.S. racial categorization that is based on
the arbitrary “one drop” rule obviously references the race discourse of the time, it also

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exposes the hard fact that only people who identified as black and were “fair enough”
could pass and even entertain the thought of crossing the color line in the United States,
or the culture line in Brazil or any of the other Latin Americas. Indeed, the anxiety
stemming from color gradation within the black community and within the same
family—a topic that Van Vechten depicts in Nigger Heaven—is not only anxiety about
whether or not one can pass without incident, but also about what it means to
acknowledge and capitalize on the “misreading” of race when others cannot. In other
words, what does it mean to accept the cultural capital that comes with whiteness when
others are irrefutably denied “white” capital? Van Vechten explicitly constructs such a
situation by contrasting Mary’s and Olive’s passing abilities:
Olive alone was white enough to be spared any anxiety on this count, and
even Mary, accompanied by Olive, succeeded in passing, but when their
companion had unmistakably African features, difficulties rose … The
taboo, it appeared, was solely one of colour, and there were, it sometimes
occurred to Mary, the highest advantages, both social and economic, in
being near white or yellow, or, if dark, possessed of Spanish features and
glib enough with words in some foreign tongue to convince the waiter that
one belonged to a dark European race … (44)

One aspect of the utopian discourse that Carl Van Vechten describes in his novel involves
the possibility of physical escape to another land, country, or culture as well as the
prospect of appearing to be from another country or culture through a combination of
racial, cultural, and linguistic passing. But most marked is the obvious point that only
some who are “white enough,” or at least olive enough, are privy to these possibilities,
suggesting color lines within the black community and thus an ability to exercise agency
that is commensurate with hue.

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Immediately, Van Vechten raises dystopic realities in the schemes that would
make a utopia out of Brazil. Intra-racism sours utopian possibilities, but ignorance of
race in Brazil makes them impossible. Nigger Heaven’s Dick betrays the ignorance of
Brazil’s racial realities that ran rampant throughout the writings of the black intelligentsia
and fed Brazilian utopian myths, establishing that Brazil is more a space to be filled with
imaginative and theoretical possibilities than a real place with real people and real
problems, just like any other country.
Carl Van Vechten quite likely alludes to the mysterious space that is Brazil/Latin
America through Lasca Sartoris. The name “Lasca” has etymological ties to the Italian
“lascivo” and the more obvious “lascivious.” Van Vechten’s bestowal of such a name to
his character reinforces stereotypes about “hot-blooded” hyper-sexuality, even while he
displaces anxieties about a stereotypical primitive sexuality that was linked with the
African American body onto the more ambiguously raced body. The surname “Sartoris”
also has Latin roots and alludes to Thomas Carlyle’s major work, Sartor Resartus (1838),
or “The Tailor Retailored.” Immediately, Lasca is associated with attire, both that she
wears and that of her skin. A photograph of Lasca catches and holds Mary’s attention,
and as she admires it, she assesses the fantastically embroidered Spanish shawl that lies
across the unknown woman, and compares her own skin color to that of the woman in the
photograph: “apparently light brown—very like my own colour, Mary decided—
certainly much darker than yellow or tan, the features were not Negroid. Rather they
suggested a Spanish or a Portuguese origin. The nose was delicate, the mouth
provocative and sensual” (79-80). Mary attempts to add up the material and physical
markers of race and culture that are social constructions, but yet inform her reading of

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Lasca’s body in the photograph as well as her consequent racial categorization.
Lasca’s racial and cultural ambiguity, however, disconcerts Mary’s careful taxonomic
study, and she turns instead to markers of economic status, noting, “the lady was dressed
in the smartest mode of the moment; moreover, [she] observed at once, she wore her
clothes with that manner which is rare with women of any race or colour … she could
not, however, at the moment, bring to mind a single figure of either race … who gave
such a vivid impression of magnetism and distinction” (80). Mary’s admiration is tinged
with anxiety about the power of clothes and skin to transform and allow for the slipping
in and out of racial and social categories at will. Lasca’s ability to tailor and re-tailor
may make her distinctive in Mary’s eyes, but it also makes her protean and therefore
dangerous.
Lasca soon moves from distinctive to notorious—lascivious, primitive, and even
animalistic and dangerous. “Lasca Sartoris!” Mary exclaims in her head, “Why, she was
almost a legend in Harlem, this woman who had married a rich African in Paris and had
eventually deserted him to fulfill her amorous destiny with a trap-drummer from a boît de
nuit” (81). It is not long before Mary is privy to Lasca’s power and prowess in person,
however, and not long before she begins to lose Byron to her. As Mary catches Byron
dancing with Lasca at a ball, she likens them to panthers, and assesses Lasca as “the most
striking woman [she] had ever seen,” observing that the clinging turquoise-blue satin
dress is “circled with wide bands of green and black sequins, designed to resemble the fur
of the leopard” (163), at the moment suggesting the danger she poses to Mary, but in
reality intimating that Byron is her prey.

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What makes Lasca especially dangerous is her negation of boundaries, and the
logic with which she defies racial limits. While she identifies as “coloured,” she does not
accept racial discrimination. When Byron asks, “what about discrimination?
Segregation?” Lasca replies: “They just don’t exist for me. I wouldn’t tolerate such a
thing. I live in New York exactly as I live in Paris. I do just what I want to and go where
I please … You see, most Negroes are so touchy and nervous that they obey the
unwritten Jim Crow laws” (235). Through Lasca Sartoris, Carl Van Vechten depicts the
defiance of all three facets that comprise Patterson’s theory on power relations, and with
this defiance comes the acquisition of power, a power that, curiously enough, enables
Lasca to lead Byron into “hell.”
It is ominous that a bloodbath occurs the first time Byron meets Lasca after the
dance. Just before she calls out Byron’s name, he witnesses an altercation between an
Italian and a Jew that culminates in the Italian drawing out a long knife and plunging it
into the Jewish man’s white horse. This foretells the plunging of another knife at a club
that Lasca interchangeably refers to as “hell” and the “Black Mass.” As they snort
cocaine on the way to the Black Mass, Lasca lustfully cries out to Byron, “I’d like to be
cruel to you! … I’d like to cut your heart out! … I’d like to bruise you! … I’d like to gash
you with a knife! … Beat you with a whip” (252)! To all this, Byron seems willing. The
Black Mass subsequently described is a bacchanal that includes “wild music, music that
moaned and lacerated one’s breast with brazen claws of tone, shrieking, tortured music
from the depths of hell” (254), a “witches’ sabbath” prodded along by “demoniac
saxophones” that wail like “souls burning in an endless torment”—a call to a “profane
glory” (254-55). The orgiastic frenzy escalates as a young girl, described as “pure black,

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with savage African features, thick nose, thick lips, bushy hair which hovered about
her face like a lanate halo, while her eyes rolled back so far that only the whites were
visible,” begins to “perform her evil rites” and ends by stabbing herself with a knife (255-
56).
The Latin name “Sartoris” clearly situates Lasca as the Italian in the first scenario,
and the slaying of the white horse symbolizes her dominance and ultimate massacre of
Byron’s masculine prowess. The symmetrical scene, however, extends Byron’s identity
from failed masculinity (reflected in his repeated literary failure and his inability to entice
Lasca for the long term), to failed racial identity. Especially noteworthy is Van
Vechten’s treatment of the last scene, in which he associates “blackness” with the
primitive, the stereotypically savage and African, as well as with the occult. Whereas the
slaying of the “white” horse occurs in broad daylight and in public, the ritual sacrifice of
the “black” girl takes place in darkness, witnessed only by a select few. The chiasmic
construction of the two scenes in which color is inverted debunks the argument that
“primitivism” and the stereotypical primitiveness associated with it comes from dark
Africa.
Lasca Sartoris does not pass. She identifies as black, but defies the social
conventions that constrain her as black. Yet, as her name suggests, she is the sartor, the
tailor of her own public fashioning. But what does it mean that Van Vechten consistently
associates her with Latin and/or Spanish/Italian culture through “Spanish brocade,”
“Spanish lace” (240), with beauty, mystery, and excitement, as well as with sexual
boundlessness, the primitive and the occult? If Lasca embodies racial ambiguity and
consequent racial and sexual freedom, and if through this ambiguity Van Vechten links

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her to a Latin American space where both racial and sexual freedoms can be played
out, then he also conveys the anxiety of unknown spaces and the dystopic possibilities
that can emerge from a utopian project gone awry.

Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, “Home,” and Brazil:
Alain Locke consistently expressed little appreciation for Jessie Fauset’s writing,
and he expressed these sentiments publicly and in print. She finally responded to
Locke’s attacks in a letter dated January 9, 1934: “I have always disliked your attitude
toward my work dating from the time years ago when you went out of your way to tell
my brother that the dinner given at the Civic Club for There is Confusion wasn’t for me”
(Davis, T. xxxii). She then rebukes Locke for branding her work “mid-Victorian.”
Despite her strong response to Locke, his labels and his disdain for her work have
negatively influenced the critical reception and scholarship of her work. Fauset has
subsequently been categorized as a “second tier, Harlem Renaissance novelist, whose
major contribution to the arts was her promotion of more talented figures such as
Langston Hughes” (47), or so states Carol Allen. Allen explains that Fauset’s work has
been deemed blindly imitative of Jane Austen (48), even as some critics, including
Stanley Braithwaite have, from early on, compared her work to that of Willa Cather,
Edith Wharton, and Ellen Glasgow. Yet while scholars have concentrated on the theme
of home in Fauset novels, they have typically examined “the home” in terms of the
domestic sphere and in the context of Victorian novels. Even Allen explores Fauset’s
trope of the home conventionally, asserting that the home in Fauset’s novels is “the place
from which social codes could be unpacked” (73), “the home bases that African

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Americans have imagined,” and that serve “a slightly different function than those
belonging to white Americans,” for it is the “buffer against dominant racism, while it also
tends to foster isolation” (51).
Few scholars to date, however, have looked closely at the socio-political tension
that makes it clear to the black subject that s/he is not at home in the United States. In
other words, “home” in Fauset’s Plum Bun is always in quotes, although only
figuratively, just as “United States citizen” is always in quotes when associated with
“African American.” In this novel Fauset effectively explores the liminal space of
“citizen yet not citizen,” and disrupts a priori legal readings of “blackness” and identity
through the character Anthony Cross—a Brazilian character unexplored and rarely
referenced in Plum Bun scholarship.
Both Fauset’s Plum Bun and Larsen’s Passing were published in 1929. Nella
Larsen received the Harmon Foundation’s Bronze medal for Passing that year.
8
Perhaps
this is part of the reason that Plum Bun receives very little scholarly attention and tends to
be mentioned as part of a trend of passing novels.
9
Scholars who do seriously write on
Fauset’s novel tend to focus, as I have suggested, on her depiction of “home.” Yet the
concept of “home’—its significance to place and displacement—is inextricably tied to
the act of passing. Indeed, immigration discourse informs Jessie Fauset’s construction

8
The Harmon Foundation was founded in 1922 by William Elmer Harmon, a white,
wealthy real estate magnate. In 1926, the foundation began to sponsor awards for
outstanding achievement in the arts and science, and provided financial support to black
artists and writers.

9
See, for instance, Valerie Smith’s article, “Reading the Intersection of Race and Gender
in Narratives of Passing” in Diacritics /Summer-Fall 1994, 43-57. Although an
interesting article, it primarily discusses the 1934 John Stahl film Imitation of Life, while
she writes three meager paragraphs about Fauset’s Plum Bun as it relates to passing.

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and deconstruction of the home in Plum Bun, as well as her making Anthony
Cruz/Cross the symbol of an imaginary and constructed Brazil. In turn, Brazil, for the
main protagonist Angela, ultimately represents access to “whiteness” through
triangulated passing—implicitly as Latin American or of “darker” European stock,
explicitly as non-black. In other words, she consciously passes as the other “other.”
Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun depicts the romantic lives of two women, Angela and
Virginia, and the complications that arise because one sister can (and does) pass for
white, while the other cannot. Angela Murray consciously crosses the color line and
changes her name to Angèle Mory—a utilitarian act that assumes the “darker” races of
Europe. Like Passing’s Irene, Angela takes advantage of the “legal” misreading of her
body and consequent taxonomic confusion. What does it mean, however, that she passes
for an identity that is non-white and is also non-black? The confusion revealed in the
exchange with Anthony sheds light on how falling between the racial cracks results in
identitarian quandaries. Brazilian student, Anthony Cruz (who has changed his name to
“Cross” in order to avoid mispronunciations and “confusion”) identifies Angela’s/
Angèle’s surname as “Spanish.” Angela denies being “Spanish” and Anthony from then
on misidentifies her as “white.” Yet Anthony has unknowingly identified Angela’s
situation, for in translating “Mory” to the Spanish “morí” which literally means “I died,”
he makes explicit what she has unwittingly named: her social death by alienating herself
from her community. Van Vechten treats the issue of racial passing with a wink –as if it
is a well-deserved joke played on “whites” that also debunks the socially constructed
color line. Fauset, on the other hand, expands the issue by including the social, familial,

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and psychological consequences that passing brings, because passing is more than a
trick—it poses the danger of isolation from any race/cultural community whatsoever.
The contradictions in how Angela reads Anthony’s body through his cultural
affiliation are particularly disruptive to the logic of racial categorization and value in the
United States. As Angela weighs the risks of “coming out” as black to Anthony she
deliberates: “Colour, colour, she had forgotten it. Now what should she do,—tell
Anthony? He was Spanish, she remembered, or no,—since he came from Brazil he was
probably Portuguese, a member of a race devoid, notoriously devoid of prejudice against
black blood” (265). But Angela has got it wrong on all counts, for Anthony is neither
Spanish nor Portuguese; he is a Brazilian who speaks (or at least spoke) Portuguese, and
as I will argue later, Brazil is hardly the racial utopia that Angela imagines.
The confusion continues as the narrator describes Brazilians as having “the blood
of many races” in their veins (287), by which it is safe to assume that Fauset means that
Anthony also has African blood. Nonetheless, when Angela contemplates escaping the
career struggle of the artist through marriage she begins to plot: “ ‘I might marry—a
white man. Marriage is the easiest way for a woman to get those things [position, power,
wealth], and white men have them.’ But she knew only one white man, Anthony Cross,
and he would never have those qualities, at least not by his deliberate seeking” (111-12).
The taxonomic inconsistency and ambiguity that identifies Anthony as Spanish,
Portuguese, Brazilian, then white, but ultimately non-black—despite a public
acknowledgment of Brazilian racial mixture—mirrors the confusion revealed by Robert
F. Foerster’s Department of Labor study. At the same time, the ethnographic study that is
not only public but also official and that acknowledges Brazilian racial mixing that

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includes African blood, and yet pronounces a homogenous Latin America as non-
black, disrupts the logic of racial designation in the United States.
As long as Latin Americans are institutionally described as non-black, they are
then exempt from the Jim Crow laws. Economic and social class complications inform
the reality of Latin American access to the full benefits of citizenship in the United
States, as I explain at length in chapter three. However, the perception that the legal
categorization of Latin Americans as non-black gives them access to the social and legal
benefits of “whiteness” (despite Foerster’s official protestations) is difficult to refute.
Angela’s confusion in racially situating Anthony has more to do about how his Brazilian
identity and body are read, interpreted, and defined as non-black and therefore “white,”
by those with the institutional and cultural power to name and define, than it has to do
with race in Brazil. The realities of race in Brazil however, have little to do with
Anthony’s function within the novel. If Brazil is perceived as the locus of racial mixture,
as the blurring and erasure of color lines, and the space in which romance without racial
anxiety is possible, then Anthony indeed functions as a metaphor for Brazil and deserves
the close examination his character has yet to receive.
The Brazilian Anthony is a vexing character because of all his identitarian
inconsistencies. While Angela sees him interchangeably as Brazilian, Spanish,
Portuguese, and white, the most revealing aspect of his function as a character is how he
identifies himself. Art school classmate, Paulette Lister introduces Anthony to Angela as
“Anthony Cruz” from Brazil, who has changed his surname to “Cross” to avoid the
mispronunciation of his name: “His name is Anthony Cruz—isn’t that a lovely name?
But he changed it to Cross because no American would ever pronounce the z right, and

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he didn’t want to be taken for a widow’s cruse” (95). His story, as he tells it to
Angela, reveals that he is the son of Maria Cruz of Brazil, and John Hall of Georgia.
John Hall, despite being a man of property, is legally black as defined by the United
States and is eventually lynched by a white mob after he attempts to protect his wife from
racial and sexual violence.
As Anthony reveals to Angela his blackness, and that he therefore cannot be with
her because she is white, the reader cannot help but be confused by Anthony’s disclosure.
If he initially identifies himself as Brazilian, how can he then be black? If he
conclusively identifies as black in the United States, why does he take his mother’s name
and never takes his father’s name, especially since his parents are legally wed in Brazil?
Anthony may try to avoid the “mispronunciation” of his name, but his function within the
novel certainly depends on misreading and misinterpretation. Anthony’s name play holds
the key to this riddle, for he represents the racial taxonomic ambiguity that is a
homogenous Brazil (at least according to Fauset) through the name “Cruz,” and he
signals the statue of Christ the Redeemer, located in Rio de Janeiro that is a Brazilian
icon, through the reference to “Cross,” thus suggesting his embodiment of Brazil. The
narrative also reveals Anthony’s allegorical function in that he is the “widow’s cruse,” or
the biblical, earthenware container that ultimately fills Angela’s identitarian void.
Fauset’s father was an African Methodist Episcopal Minister, and her religious
background partially informs her construction of Anthony. The Old Testament reference
to the widow’s cruse, found in I Kings 17:9-16 and then again in 2 Kings 4:2-7 conveys
the belief that no need will be left unmet, for it will be fulfilled miraculously. The story in I
Kings, for example, places the prophet Elijah in the household of a widow. Elijah asks for

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food, but the widow has only enough food for herself and her son. But Elijah presses
her to cook that last meal, promising that there will always be enough food for both she and
her son. She obeys and, miraculously, flour and the oil from her cruse are continuously
replenished. A similar allegory in 2 Kings illustrating the importance of faith is also told
through the “widow’s cruse”: A widow finds herself plagued by debt upon her husband’s
death. Because she lacks the means to pay the debt, the creditor threatens to take her two
sons as slaves. Upon hearing her plight, Elisha (Elijah’s successor) tells her to borrow as
many pots, pans, and jars from her family and friends, fill them with olive oil and then sell
them in order to pay the creditor. The oil ceases to flow from the widow’s cruse only after
she runs out of pots and jars to fill. Elisha instructs her to sell the oil, pay her husband’s
debt, and tells her that she will have enough money left over for her family to live on. The
miracle, thus provides the happy ending, just as the miracle of Anthony’s disclosure
eventually provides Plum Bun’s neat and happy ending.
The initial miracle that Anthony as widow’s cruse performs is releasing Angela
from her lie. The last miracle the “widow’s cruse” performs, however, is his ability to
untangle himself from Virginia (to whom he has managed to get engaged, not knowing that
she is Angela’s sister), and get himself to Angela (who has escaped to Paris on an art
scholarship) on Christmas morning. Plum Bun is seemingly a traditional romance with the
complication of race thrown in, which is perhaps why most scholars write about it as
imitative of Wharton or imitative of even Austen. The tidy ending that matches Angela with
Anthony, and Virginia with Matthew, however, divulges some intra-racial politics, as well as
the gender politics of the romance. In pairing Angela up with Anthony and Virginia with
Matthew (whom Virginia has always loved, although he has loved Angela), Fauset
constructs a color parity that is still to this day instilled in people of color. Fauset describes
Angela as having inherited “her mother’s creamy complexion and her soft cloudy, chestnut
hair,” as well as her father’s “aquiline nose” (14). Interestingly, Anthony’s physicality is

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never as explicitly described, as is that of the other characters. Instead, Anthony’s state
of mind or mood tends to be highlighted. For example, the “sadness and strain” fades
from “his thin, dark face”; “his slow dark gaze” rests upon Angela; and since he is
“Spanish,” Angela reflects, he must be “terribly proud” (101-2). Although Anthony is all
ambiguity and there are hints at “darkness,” Angela ultimately pronounces him “white.”
There is no ambiguity in the reading of Virginia’s and Matthew’s bodies, nor in how we
interpret their physical markings of race: Virginia’s body is all “rosy bronzeness,” and
she has “deeply waving black hair” (14), while Matthew is a “yellow man with freckles on
his nose and red ‘bad hair’ ” (24). The color parity illustrated in these matches, conveys
more than superfical, romantic symmetry; it increases Anthony’s and Angela’s racial
ambiguity on a visual level and suggests the possibility of “passing” as a Brazilian couple
and, therefore, passing as “white,” although only passively and through the cultural reading
and placing of Anthony’s surname.
The translation of “Cruz” to “Cross ” more explicitly marks Anthony as a martyr,
a Christ figure who willingly takes on the burden of blackness in a specifically U.S. context,
and who ultimately “saves” Angela. Most importantly, however, he is literally and
figuratively the Brazilian Cross. He is conflated with the Rio de Janeiro statue, Christ the
Redeemer that was near completion upon Plum Bun’s publication, and thus takes on the
role of Brazilian icon and generalized Brazilian representation. Anthony as Brazil
complicates what has been viewed as a typical romance—as indeed Plum Bun is. The
gender assumptions that inform the conventions associated with this variation on the
romance genre must first be examined to understand the novel’s racial conventions. The
romance is the love quest that ends in marriage—a marriage in which the roles and status
of the man and the woman are clearly defined. A woman must marry “up,” never down
in order to be successful, for she is defined by her husband (by his status, land holdings,

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money), by social conventions informed by colonial laws of coverture, as the taking
of the husband’s surname illustrates.
10
A woman is thus absorbed by marriage. If
Anthony embodies Brazil, then Angela—in marrying Anthony, in taking his surname, in
being absorbed through marriage—is absorbed by Brazil. Angela, therefore, becomes
exempt from U.S. institutional racism and achieves through marriage what she set out to
do at the beginning of the novel: pass as the other “other” or, in other words, participate
in triangulated passing.
The interesting aspect to Angela’s absorption into Brazil through her impending
marriage is the question of whether once married, once read and culturally inscribed as
Brazilian, is she still passing? The guilt and burden of passing is tied to law and
knowledge of that law within a specific national and cultural context. It also has to do
with the acknowledgement and tacit acceptance of these defining laws and racial logic,
whether privately or publicly. Consider for instance, the critic Kathleen Pfeiffer’s
description of Coleman Silk’s lover suspecting “the truth” about him in Philip Roth’s The
Human Stain. Roth makes clear, Pfeiffer observes, that “Silk’s thirty-four-year-old lover
Faunia Farley, deduced the truth about Silk early on, and the narrator Nathan Zuckerman
realized it for himself in a moment of shocking insight at the funeral, when he recognizes
Silk’s sister Ernestine” (148). But what does it mean to know “the truth?” What is “the
truth” about Anthony and what is “the truth” about Angela? Are their “truths” different?

10
The laws of coverture that formed and informed the conventions about marriage first
appeared in 1765, in Sir William Blackstone’s authoritative legal text, Commentaries on
the Laws of England. In this work, Blackstone determines that “By marriage, the
husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the
woman is suspended during marriage, or at least incorporated and consolidated into that
of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover she performs every thing; and
is therefore called … a feme-covert...."

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As I explain in chapter three, “passing” in the Latin Americas often has little to do
with race or color because there are no formal laws that determine who and what a person
is according to blood ratios and ancestry. This is not to say that there is no racism, but
the point I wish to make is that the absence of color lines, determined by ancestry rather
than actual color, means that people are defined visually rather than historically. The
symmetry attained in pairing Angela with Anthony—one a U.S. “citizen” who does not
have the benefits of citizenship, the other identified as Brazilian, both of similar hue and
racial ambiguity—allows Fauset to comparatively illustrate and question U.S. race logic
and law.
Aside from the absence of a formal “color line” in Brazil, the racial realities of
Brazil are really of no use to Jessie Fauset. Anthony Cruz/Cross/Hall allegorizes racially
utopian possibilities, as does Brazil proper. Angela’s tendency is to associate Anthony
with Van Cortland Park—a place associated with their courtship that has more than just a
romantic association. Van Cortland Park is all greenery and open space, and suggests
wild, conquerable, virgin space, as well as the color of money and possibility, thus
echoing the language of economics that was tied to Brazilian immigration discourse.
This, in conjunction with a more complicated depiction of Anthony, implies a utopian
and unreal Brazil that offers the possibilities of a livable life unhindered by race laws and
social convention. Brazilian identity, as Anthony illustrates, reveals Fauset’s perception
of Brazil as the locus of racial stability or equilibrium, in which (1) a subject can publicly
acknowledge all aspects of her/his racial make up while (2) not defining the subject’s
identity according to a bifurcated sense of race. Brazil as the space by which Angela is

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figuratively absorbed thus functions as her racial utopia, but only through romance
and marriage, and therefore, through patriarchy.

Larsen’s Passing and Brazil as Utopia/Dystopia:
Nella Larsen’s Passing apparently depicts a love triangle in which Clare Kndry
stands in between Irene and Brian Redfield. The narrative places Clare not just in the
middle of the Redfield marriage, but also in a space of ambiguity, since she is a woman
who has crossed the color line and passes as white—both publicly and within her
marriage. As the story progresses, it is clear that Clare not only occupies a racially
ambiguous space, but a sexually hazy one as well. It also becomes clear that Irene’s
increasing paranoia makes her an unreliable narrator, whose projections most likely
betray the fissures in her psyche rather than offering a clear narrative that the reader can
take at face value. Larsen introduces the idea of triangulated passing through Irene
Redfield’s thoughts: After nearly fainting on the street on a scorching Chicago afternoon,
Irene makes her way to the Drayton Hotel, a hotel that she knows is restricted to whites.
She takes both subversive and privileged pleasure in passing for non-black, reflecting to
herself: “White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted
that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, finger nails, palms of hands,
shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot … They always took her for an Italian, a
Spaniard, A Mexican, or a gipsy” (150). And it is “her warm olive skin” (183), so
commonly associated with a homogenously hued Latin America, that Irene emphasizes.
Irene’s observations of racial misidentification make reference to and exploit the
ambiguous space that Latin Americans occupy in the United States. A 1924 study

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ordered by James J. Davis, secretary of the Department of Labor, and conducted by
Robert Foerster, titled, The Racial Problems Involved in Immigration from Latin America
and the West Indies to the United States attempts to study and determine the racial
composition of Latin Americans, country by country. In this study, Foerster ties together
each country’s history of colonialism with the language of racial purity, Anglo European
supremacy, and eugenics, in order to calculate the racial make up of a people and
determine what and who they are and, implicitly, where they fit in the racial order
determined by “white” dominance. The motivation for this study is to answer the
question: “Of what races are these American immigrants,” who, according to Foerster,
can influence the “race stock” of the United States (4). The study, however, goes beyond
plotting out patterns of immigration; it seeks to make racial and color distinctions among
immigrants, determine who is “white,” and reinforce the U.S. law of hypo-descent, as
Foerster’s thesis makes clear: “What follows in this report will make it clear … that the
designation of ‘white,’ at least where natives of the southerly countries are in question, is
made to apply to many mixed stocks in which one of the two elements present is not
white” (5).
Foerster writes of Spanish conquest, African slavery and intermarriage in Mexico,
and concludes: “The stock of the Mexican people is, then, principally of mixed Indian
blood … It is entirely fitting, since no confusion will result to call this stock Mexican, but
if a color designation is used it is plainly a mistake to continue the common practice of
speaking of the stock as white, for its basis is more copper than white” (11). Foerster
stresses the racial diversity of each Latin American country, yet reveals the U.S. tendency
toward racial taxonomy in his observations and in his suggestion that Brazil should be

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seen as two countries: “The southern States are progressive white communities …
Above the southern tier of States, with a less favorable climate, negro, Indian, and half-
breed elements are the dominant types, the white counting for much less” (33). While
this statement seems to be an economic observation, and also apparently acknowledges
racial/ethnic categories other than black and white, it puts non-white people in the same
category. The study thus reveals a U.S. cultural lens that only sees people as white or
non-white, and the penchant to create racial bifurcations.
Despite Foerster’s attempt at racial categorization, and his identification of people
from Latin America and the West Indies as “mainly Asiatic (Indian) or African, mainly
brown or black” (60), he displays his frustration with taxonomic confusion by finally
referring to Latin American and West Indian people as “non-white”: “Under existing
legislation, which is the fruit of many years of study and debate, a greater proportion of
current immigration is of nonwhite stocks than at any previous time in the history of the
Republic” (60). After trying to organize Latin Americans by color, race, race/color
permutation, Foerster, who in this case officially represents the United States, finds it
necessary for his intents and purposes to homogenize Latin America as simply “non-
white” “people of Latin America.” The confusion that undermines Foerster’s project
stemming from a taxonomic misreading that homogenizes Latin Americans is precisely
the event on which Irene Redfield capitalizes: in being read as non-white, she is also read
as non-black.
The identitarian space that is interpreted as non-black as well as non-white indeed
defies these bifurcated and socio-politically constructed identities. In this space lies a
mystery that defies bodily reading, interpretation, and taxonomic inscription. While

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some pleasure may lie in the act of deception, I believe that Irene’s and Clare’s
primary source of pleasure is a disassociation from the body that allows for an almost
objective observation of the hierarchies of citizenship based on the valuations of race and
categorization that plays out almost like theater. This leads to insight, and a feeling that a
window into the human drama is open as to no other. While some of the benefits of
passing include access to material goods, to a higher level of service in places that deny
service to blacks, to the benefits of full citizenship, the pleasure of passing is also rooted
in transgression and rebellion. Here I mean transgression in a legal sense, which is
defined as: (1) a crime or any act that violates a law, command, or moral code; (2) the
committing of acts that violate a law, command, or moral code; (3) an act or the process
of overstepping a limit. If the act of passing is transgressive, it is also rebellious.
Rebellion is defined as: (1) an organized attempt to overthrow a government or other
authority by the use of violence; (2) opposition or defiance of authority, accepted moral
codes, or social conventions. Because passing defies the legal reading of the body, and
because law and social convention define and rule the body, determining its social value,
the delight of passing lies in individual agency and defiance. Passing defies race “logic”
and the pseudo-science and race laws stemming from such “logic.”
While Irene is divided between relishing her subversive glee, delighting in the
cultural and racial misreading of her body, and in feeling the shame brought on by the
implied denial of her race, it is important to distinguish between the temporary appeal of
passing as opposed to the cultural passing and absorption implied by the Brazilian
migration movement encouraged by black leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois as well as
Robert Abbott. The distinction between controlling where and when one passes and

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cultural absorption seemingly informs Irene’s refusal to move to Brazil, despite her
husband’s desire to migrate. If, for instance, crossing over the color line and passing for
white (or non-black) on a permanent basis means social death, as in the case of Clare
Kendry (at least as read by Irene), what then, does uprooting and leaving one country in
order to be absorbed by another constitute? Irene’s fear of uprooting and of being
absorbed indicates her fear of losing control, either at a surface level where the loss of
color line manipulation lies, or on a deeper identitarian level where Irene conflates her
racial identity with her sexual identity.
Brian’s affinity for all things foreign frightens Irene who, alarmed, realizes that
she may have suppressed Brian’s desire to migrate but has failed to squelch it. She
observes,
he had never spoken of his desire since that long-ago time of storm and
strain, of hateful and nearly disastrous quarrelling, when she had so firmly
opposed him, so sensibly pointed out its utter impossibility and its
probable consequences to her and the boys, and had even hinted at a
dissolution of their marriage in the event of his persistence in his idea.
(187)

Irene’s concerns later manifest themselves in repugnance. Upon being asked about a
cultural artifact or piece of art in her home,
11
Irene responds: “Brian picked it up last
winter in Haiti. Terribly weird, isn’t it? It is rather marvelous in its own hideous way ….
Practically nothing, I believe. A few cents …” (218). The worth she attributes to the
Haitian artifact betrays Irene’s valuation of overt “Africanness.” It also illustrates an
anxiety about being linked to primitivism as an artistic movement, and all stereotypes
about a primitiveness that is linked to Africa. Consider her response to Hugh

11
Many scholars speculate that the Haitian artifact is probably a mask, thus lending itself
to the theme of “masking” and performance. This is never explicit in the novel, however.

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Wentworth’s
12
asking her about the aesthetic and sexual appeal of an “unusually
dark” black man. When he asks if she finds him “ravishingly beautiful” she cries out: “I
do not! And I don’t think the others do either … I think that what they feel is –well, a
kind of emotional excitement. You know, the sort of thing you feel in the presence of
something strange, and even, perhaps, a bit repugnant to you; something so different that
it’s really at the opposite end of the pole from all your accustomed notions of beauty”
(205). Irene refers to the physicality of race here, but she could just as easily be talking
about the fascination with primitivism and Harlem, as well as lesbian desire.
The general consensus among Passing scholars is that Nella Larsen sketched out
the character of Hugh Wentworth with Carl Van Vechten in mind. This important detail
is telling in how we can read the dialogue between Irene and Hugh. While Van
Vechten’s bisexuality and sexual escapades were not necessarily public, they were hardly
private—his close friends, of which Larsen was one, were privy to his confidence.
Hugh’s admiration for the “unusually dark” man at the dance can be read as sexually
ambiguous. But what does Irene’s instant cry and repugnance toward this man say about
her desire? What does it mean that she does marry Brian–a black man who, to use
Irene’s words, “couldn’t exactly ‘pass’” (168)? Irene’s internalized standards of beauty
and desire do not mesh with the physicality of the mate she chooses. While one could
argue that opposites attract, no laws of attraction seem to be working between Irene and
Brian. In fact, the only currents of attraction in the novel run between Clare and Irene,
or (as Irene sees it) between Clare and Brian. If Irene indeed conflates race and sex, then
her expressed repugnance toward the “unusually dark” man, her shrinking away from

12
Hugh Wentworth is based on the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten.

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Brian as well as Clare, reflect her repression through what Freud describes as
“reaction-formation”—a reaction by the ego to the impulses of the id that blocks desire.
The essence of repression, states Freud, “lies simply in turning something away, and
keeping it at a distance, from the conscious” (“Repression,” 569-70). A subject may be
able to express an instinctual impulse (such as the sexual instinct) in childhood, but later
succumbs to suppression. Irene expresses repugnance toward the thing she really wants
in the attempt to block her desire—and she seems to desire Clare. Unable to
acknowledge her desire consciously, Irene feels threatened by Clare but reconfigures the
threat as the fantasy of an adulterous liaison between Clare and Brian. According to
Freud, “in the course of the repression of [the sexual] instinct a special conscientiousness
is created which is directed against the instinct’s aims; but this psychical reaction-
formation feels insecure and constantly threatened by the instinct which is lurking in the
unconscious” (“Obsessive Actions,” 434). With Clare being ever present, Irene’s
reaction-formation is thus unsustainable.
Upon meeting Clare by chance at the Drayton Hotel, as they are both passing,
Irene observes that “Clare Kendry’s loveliness was absolute, beyond challenge, thanks to
those eyes which her grandmother and later her mother and father had given her. Into
those eyes there came a smile and over Irene the sense of being petted and caressed. She
smiled back” (161). On another occasion, Clare brazenly enters Irene’s bedroom,
catching her before she has finished dressing and kisses “a bare shoulder, seeming not to
notice a slight shrinking” (233). The current between Irene and Clare should be marked,
but significant in these two passages are the silences and unspeakability of these actions.
Irene reflects and is awash with the sense of being caressed; Clare kisses and Irene

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shrinks back—but only slightly and, again, nothing is said. As Judith Butler states:
“The question of what can and cannot be spoken, what can and cannot be publicly
exposed, is raised throughout the text, and it is linked with the larger question of the
dangers of public exposure of both color and desire” (268). Forbidden desire made
public breeds fear in Irene, but is it Irene’s fear that when Brian speaks of Brazil, he is
speaking of the unspeakable? Is Irene’s frenzy brought on by her fear of Brian’s
homosexual desire, or by her fear of her own homosexual desire?
David Blackmore links Brian’s desire for Brazil with “queerness,” “strangeness,”
as well as a lack of desire toward women. As evidence, Blackmore asks us to consider
that when Irene approaches Brian about the “queer ideas” that their son is acquiring from
older boys, Brian retorts: “Queer ideas? .. D’you mean ideas about sex, Irene? … Well,
what of it? If sex isn’t a joke, what is it? And what is a joke? … The sooner he learns
about sex, the better for him. And most certainly if he learns that it’s a grand joke, the
greatest in the world. It’ll keep him from lots of disappointments later on” (189, my
italics). Irene does not answer. She realizes that Brian is getting restless, that “that old,
queer, unhappy restlessness had begun again within him; that craving for some place
strange and different, which at the beginning of her marriage she had had to make such
strenuous efforts to repress, and which yet faintly alarmed her, though it now sprang up
at gradually lessening intervals” (178, my italics).
Blackmore ignores the fact that Passing is told through Irene’s projections. His
reading of Brian’s homosexuality, however, is helpful in the insight it offers on Irene’s
homosexual desire. He argues that “one key to a reading of the homosexuality in Brian’s
character is his desire to escape from Harlem to Brazil” (477), noting that when John

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Bellew teases Irene about Brian having “lady patients,” she responds, “Brian doesn’t
care for ladies, especially sick ones. I sometimes wish he did. It’s South America that
attracts him” (Larsen 173). Blackmore asserts, “as a man educated about the Afro-centric
cultures of Latin America, Brian would surely be aware of the historic association of
Brazil with homosexuality” (477). “Irene’s obsessive fear that Brian will in fact escape to
Brazil,” Blackmore argues, “functions as both analogue and a cover for her anxieties
about his sexual orientation” (477). Noting that the word “queer” was used as early as
1922 in the United States to refer to homosexuality, Blackmore argues for a historic and
metaphorical Brazil that opens the possibilities for gay subjectivity and expression.
But for whose gay subjectivity does Brazil function as the space of possibility?
Blackmore forgets that we as readers interpret Brian and his intentions through Irene’s
unreliable narration. How does Blackmore’s interpretation of Brian’s desire change if his
desires are Irene’s projections? Irene begins to reflect on Brian’s “queer restlessness”
immediately after receiving a note from Clare, and soon after their first and accidental
meeting at the Drayton. As the narrative progresses, Irene begins to link Clare to Brian
more immediately in her thoughts and paranoia. Note for instance her reflections before
a party: “She regretted that she hadn’t counseled Clare to wear something ordinary and
inconspicuous. What on earth would Brian think of deliberate courting of attention”
(203)? Deceptively quotidian and commonplace, her thoughts successively link Clare
with Brian and also betray her need to cloak desire, to keep it inconspicuous, while she
then places the mandate for discretion onto Brian.
Zita Nunes argues that Clare and Brazil are interchangeable metaphors and Brazil
“comes to stand in not only for a non-racist society, but also as and for a secret, as well as

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a place-holder for the object of impossible desire, a utopic desire, and eventually, as a
double for Clare” (53-54). If Irene places queer meaning onto Brian’s desire to move to
Brazil, as well as reads desire in Brian’s and Clare’s interaction, then do not Brian’s
desire for Clare as Brazil, Brazil as Clare, reflect Irene’s desire as well as the fear of her
own desire?
Irene consciously crosses racial boundaries at will but is unconscious of how she
toys with sexual boundaries. She desires ambiguity on a racial and sexual level, both
consciously and unconsciously, but only for the short term and on her own terms. Fear of
losing the surface clarity that racial and sexual signifiers make distinct and readable is
what drives Irene to marry Brian, a man who anchors her down and reinscribes her as
black in a U.S.-specific context, and who publicly signifies her heterosexuality.
Irene’s/Brian’s Brazil, however, with its perceived erasure of color and sexual
boundaries, would make public her race and queerness. When Irene mentions Brian’s
attraction to South America to John Bellew (the white man to whom Clare is married), is
she confessing to him her attraction to Clare? If so, what does it mean then when he
bellows: “Coming place, South America, if they ever get the niggers out of it. It’s run
over –” (173). Could this mean that Clare (who is called “Nig” by her husband, although
she passes for white within her marriage) would be the exemplum of female beauty if one
could “ever get the nigger out of” her?
Bellew represents white masculine hegemony–the embodiment of New York’s
and Chicago’s phallic “rising towers”—who has the institutional power and mandate to
name and standardize the distinctions between “normal” and perverse, white and black,
between normative and queer desire. Irene’s conflation of race and sexuality, in

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conjunction with her reaction formation that echo Bellew’s racist and homophobic
standardized norms point toward an imaginary Brazil that is simultaneously utopian and
dystopian, and therefore a space to be embraced while it exists in the imagination. It is
also, however, a repulsive place once it becomes “real.” Bellew is thus Irene’s double, as
he mirrors her desire for Clare: She shuns “black” Brian and desires “white” Clare;
Bellew marries “white” Clare but desires black “Nig.” With Clare’s death, both Irene
and Bellew are released from their repugnance and their desires. Clare’s death also
protects Bellew’s and Irene’s investment in institutional power, for Bellew’s attraction to
Clare performs the master’s attraction to and subjugation of the black female slave, while
Irene, as the agent of repression, protects the semblance of institutionally sanctioned
desire.
If Brian’s Brazil, as Irene reads it, represents the open space that allows racial and
sexual freedom that is no longer ambiguous but instead publicly asserted, then Irene’s
projected Brazil simultaneously represents the end of conflated racial and sexual play that
depend on her repression, and the end of her secured public identity: “She was aware
that, to her, security was the most important and desired thing in life … She wanted only
to be tranquil … [she could now] think again of ways to keep Brian by her side, and in
New York. For she would not go to Brazil. She belonged in this land of rising towers.
She was an American” (235). Clearly, Irene does not see Brazil as part of America. For
Irene, Brazil solely functions as the constructed unconscious of the United States.
Irene will not go to “Brazil”; she will remain an “American.” In other words, she
will cleave to the public identity that cloaks her private desires and that she can
manipulate, rather than live her desires openly and publicly. If, as Nunes argues, Clare

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and Brazil are interchangeable metaphors, then Brian’s/Irene’s desire for Brazil/Clare
illustrate the tension between open and closeted desire. In order to quash closeted
homosexual desire, Irene must destroy Brian’s public desire for Brazil/Clare, and she
therefore rids herself of Clare for good—an ambiguous death that reads suspiciously like
murder. While Irene indeed rids herself of a fictional racial utopia, in ridding herself of
Clare, she also suppresses Brian’s desire for Brazil and arguably her own desire as well.
Irene destroys the embodiment of that desire by destroying Clare. As Deborah
McDowell has posited, “Because Clare is a reminder of that repressed and disowned part
of Irene’s self, Clare must be banished, for, more unacceptable than the feelings
themselves is the fact that they find an object of expression in Clare. In other words,
Clare is both the embodiment and the object of the sexual feelings that Irene banishes”
(xxix). Brazil/Clare as interchangeable metaphors for the utopian space that provides
both queer subjectivity and racial ambiguity speaks to the double oppression experienced
by queer people of color, as well as to the social norms and legal oppression that
constrained blacks in the 1920s.
The unconscious space that Brazil represents in Passing allows for the expression
of utopian desire as well as for the repression of dystopian anxiety. Passing into Brazil,
going south, thus symbolizes passing from the unconscious to the conscious, the passing
from projection and reaction formation to open desire—something that Irene fears and
refuses to do. Therefore, when Irene remarks to Gertrude—an old acquaintance who, like
both herself and Clare, passes for non-black: “You’re going south? I’m sorry. I’ve got
an errand. If you don’t mind, I’ll just say good-bye here” (176), we know that she will be

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staunch in her refusal to go to Brazil. In fact, she will destroy the possibility of Brazil
if she must—and she does.

Conclusion: Utopia vs. Brazilian Reality
Brazilian lore has it that on one rainy night in August of 1939, Ary Barroso, who
was in his living room chatting with his wife and some in-laws, suddenly rose from the
sofa, went to the piano and wrote the “Aquarela do Brasil” in half an hour. The
“Aquarela” is a love song for Brazil, a “watercolor” that attempts to paint and capture the
essence of Brazil. Most importantly, and in the context of this chapter, the Aquarela
sings to Brazil and the “mulato inzoneiro” [“intriguing mulatto”], Barroso conflating the
two in the first line of the lyrics.
13
Barroso, in his lyrics, continues to describe the “terra
boa e gostosa” [“land that is good and succulent”], and the “morena de olhar indiferente”
[“brown girl who looks upon you with indifference”]. The “terra de Nosso Senhor”
[“land of our Father/Lord”] that refers to the statue, Christ the Redeemer, built just six
years before Barroso wrote these lyrics, contains the murmuring fountains that quench
the thirst [“essas fontes murmurantes, onde eu mato minha sede”], and ends by claiming
Brazil as the land of percussion and samba [“terra de samba pandiero, Brasil”]. The gap
in meaning between the original 1939 lyrics and the 1942 “translation” or English-
language lyrics by S.K. Russell, however, illustrate the disconnection between the Brazil
that Brazilians live and a Brazil that only outsiders imagine—a space of return imagined
as a “prelapsarian” state. Russell’s lyrics refer to a paradise that also functions as a travel
site where that which cannot happen domestically can occur outside national lines and

13
All Portuguese to English translation mine.

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outside personal boundaries: a place where kissing and clinging takes place “beneath
an amber moon.” Yet what occurs and is said in Brazil remains unsaid and unspoken
when outside “Brazil”: “Then—tomorrow was another day / the morning found us miles
away / with still a million things to say.”
The same lyrics that suggest a freedom to act that is incommensurate with social
conventions that dictate domestic boundaries, echo the perceptions of characters in Van
Vechten’s, Fauset’s, and Larsen’s novels. But the Barroso lyrics that celebrate the
mulatto, the morena, and the trigueiro (wheat colored) as the essence of a Brazil devoid
of a racial hierarchy also reflect perceptions that prompted utopian constructions of
Brazil. Yet Dick’s exclamation in Nigger Heaven that if he lived in Brazil and had white
blood, he’d be considered white, Plum Bun’s narrator reflecting that Brazil is notoriously
known for being anti-racist, and Irene’s perception in Passing that Brazil is the space of
racial and sexual ambiguity, reflect more than utopian constructions of Brazil: These
constructions illustrate the utter disconnection between their projections and the socio-
political realities of Brazil, and at the same time, a willful cover up of these realities.
The last of 700,000 slaves were emancipated in Brazil as late as 1888. Despite
claims of the easy transition from slave to citizen, despite the celebration of a racial
mosaic that was touted as the strength of Brazil, the truth of the matter is that former
slaves in Brazil were left without education or recompense, and were left to compete “on
unfavorable terms for wage labor with the more than one and a half million white
immigrants who entered the country between 1890 and 1920” (Leys Stepan 38). White
emigration to Brazil was partially the result of the Count de Gobineau’s efforts to blanche
the face of Brazil. Arthur de Gobineau was appointed minister to Brazil from 1869 to

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1870 and hated it. Gobineau compared Brazilians to monkeys, condemned whites for
race mixing and being “weak,” and prescribed European immigration to Brazil in order to
“whiten” the country and counter miscegenation (Biddiss 201-203). Gobineau, known as
the “father of racist ideology,” wrote The Inequality of Human Races in 1853—probably
the first eugenicist manifesto, although the word “eugenics” (from the Greek “eugenes”
which means “wellborn”) was not coined until thirty years later in 1883 by the British
scientist Francis Galton. In The Inequality of Human Races (first published in the United
States in 1915), Gobineau contends that “the State is divided among two factions. These
are separated from each other by a certain incompatibility, not of political theory, but of
skin. The mulattoes are on one side, the negroes on the other. The former have certainly
more intelligence and are more open to ideas” (49). These ideas would find new
reverberations in U.S. and Latin American theories of eugenics, as well as in the
immigration policies informed by such pseudo-scientific reasoning.
Just as the eugenics movement had swept the United States, it also swept through
the Latin Americas—a movement that has been grossly neglected, mostly, states Nancy
Leys Stepan, because “Latin America is often ignored altogether or it is treated as a
consumer and not as a contributor of ideas, and a fairly passive one at that” (3). Leys
Stepan asserts that the eugenics movement in Brazil gained a sense of urgency given that
“in text after European text, Brazil was held up as a prime example of the ‘degeneration’
that occurred in a racially mixed, tropical nation” (44-45), such as in the writings of the
Count de Gobineau, Henry Thomas Buckle, Benjamin Kidd, Georges Vacher de
Lapouge, and Gustave Le Bon, and in the writings of other social Darwinists who

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believed that “ ‘halfbreeds’ could not produce a high civilization” (45).
14
It is no
surprise then, that by the early 1920s “the group that most agitated physicians, sanitation
experts, and reformers in Brazil was largely black and mulatto; these professionals
assumed that social ills accumulated at the bottom of the racial–social hierarchy—that the
poor were poorer because they were unhygienic, dirty, ignorant, and hereditarily unfit”
(37). By pronouncing a populace as “hereditarily unfit,” the reformers clearly attribute
unfitness to blackness in the eugenicist discourse. Although there was never a formula
that determined on what side of the color line the Brazilian stood, a stigma was associated
with miscegenation. Brazilian social analyst, Euclides da Cunha, for instance, writes in
his classic work, Rebellion in the Backlands (1902), “miscegenation, in addition to
obliterating the pre-eminent qualities of the higher race, serves to stimulate the revival of
the primitive attributes of the lower; so that the mestizo—a hyphen between races, a brief
individual existence into which are compressed age-old forces—is almost always an
unbalanced type” (85).

14
Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-62) wrote the Introduction to the History of Civilization
in England, originally published in two volumes in 1857 and 1861. This historian and
sociologist believed that natural environment (climate, nutrition, etc) determined
historical and national development.
Benjamin Kidd (1858-1916) wrote The Control of the Tropics in 1898, an application of
social Darwinism to nineteenth century U.S. and British imperialism. This work helped
justify imperialism in its mode of offering its economic benefits without the ethical
burden of exploitation and/or extermination.
Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936) was an anthropologist who developed a
Darwinist theory of the “cephalic index,” in which he made the distinction between the
“superior, enterprising” Nordic/Aryan long-headed races, the “dangerous” Semitic long-
headed races, and the “servile, plodding,” and inferior Latin and Slavic round-headed
races. It has been noted that through Hitler’s racial theorist Hans Günther, he had direct
influence on Nazism.
Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) was a French psychologist and sociologist. He authored
works on social psychology, in which he linked theories of national traits with racial
superiority. His works include the 1895 Psychologie des foules.

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The fervor with which the Latin American eugenics discourse was embraced
could hardly have gone unnoticed by a U.S. black intelligentsia that had been researching
Brazil and other Latin American countries as sites for emigration since 1859. Is it
possible that no Harlemite, no member of New York’s black elite, was aware of the
Second International Congress of Eugenics that was held in New York in 1921, its
subject matter being the trajectory of the Latin American eugenics discourse? Despite
professed interest in Brazil, did the pro-migration, black intelligentsia remain ignorant of
or choose to ignore the First Brazilian Eugenics Congress that took place in July of 1929?
Were they aware of the controversial resolution passed by the participants of the 1929
Brazilian Congress, calling for a national immigration law designed to deny entry into
Brazil to those individuals deemed eugenically unsound, according to medical exams? It
is difficult to believe that writers who were steeped in the politics of race, domestically
and abroad, would not have been aware of the realities of race in Brazil and of Brazilian
“contribution” to the pseudo-science of eugenics. Thus, in invoking the fantasy of Brazil,
it is possible that Van Vechten, Fauset, and Larsen are aware of and convey the Brazilian
utopian fantasy as misguided.
While the eugenics discourse that informs the 1929 resolution seems based in
medicine and clinical science, in reality the “medical” science that determined
“soundness of mind” was rooted in racist legal medicine. In order to realize “a practical
program of mental prophylaxis, with a focus on the mentally ‘deficient,’ disturbed, and
delinquent individuals” who were prone to commit crimes (Leys Stepan 51), Brazilian
psychiatrist Gustavo Reidel founded the League of Mental Hygiene (Lige de Higiene
Mental) in 1922, with the intention of identifying, diagnosing, and (if necessary)

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segregating the mentally deficient. As Nancy Leys Stepan points out, however, “in
legal medicine the problems of crime and responsibility became closely linked in the
minds of doctors to the racial issue and eugenics” (53).
If race was then linked to mental, social, and eugenic undesirability, then perhaps
it was this line of thinking and consequent policy making that accounts for the initial
denial of Robert Abbott’s Brazilian visa. Nunes refers to Abbott’s 1923 series of articles
entitled “My Trip through South America,” in which he erroneously describes a Brazilian
population that is racially homogenous due to generations of intermarriage, and a people
who enjoy “with conceivable ease the entire facilities of a present day democracy”
(Nunes 57). Nunes, along with Hellwig, help to debunk the utopian myth and restore
historicity to Brazil. Hellwig, for instance, remarks that like other travel writers who
encouraged migration to Brazil, “Abbott ignored or discounted actions by Brazil designed
to prevent immigration by people of African descent” (18). L.H. Stinson—one of sixteen
Afro Americans who went to Brazil to explore the emigrational possibilities for Afro
Americans, writes in 1920 that “the higher class Brazilian is very desirous of colored
North Americans settling in Brazil. They look upon the North American Negro as being
far advanced in civilization and intelligence; hence they believe that his citizenship would
be an asset to their country” (45).
Abbott’s report of his difficulties with the Brazilian immigration authorities
complicates Stinson’s glowing view of Brazil. He reports his inability to get a visa from
the Brazilian consulate, the consul giving a “flat refusal […] solely on the ground of
being Negroes” (58). It is only after being pressured by Illinois Senator Joseph Medill
McCormick that the Brazilian consul gives the visa. The initial refusal of the visa,

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Abbott remarks, “has been the experience of every American Negro during the last
few years who has sought entry into Brazil” (58). In an attempt to explain away what has
occurred, Abbott speculates: “Could this circumstance be in any way a lingering feature
of some secret prohibitive policy against Negro emigration inaugurated under the Wilson
administration” (58)? Although Abbott never adequately explains the action and attitude
of the Brazilian consuls in the United States, he waves away the experience, stating:
“suffice it to say that such is wholly contradictory to a most rigid and well established
constitutional law of Brazil” (59). Stinson could not have been more wrong, and Abbott
should have read the attitude of the Brazilian consul as something more symptomatic of
the racial and racist attitudes in Brazil. Instead, Abbott succumbs to his fantasy of and
desire for the ideal “other.”
Hellwig argues that although some writers experienced and witnessed race-based
acts of discrimination in Brazil, they were discounted as exceptional or as evidence of
“alien—usually American—influences” (6). He notes that the “the fact that the
complexion of favelados (shantytown dwellers) is darker than that of those who live in
upper-income neighborhoods,” and that the few Afro-Brazilians that “can be found on
university campuses are commonly dismissed as consequences of class-based barriers to
social mobility” rather than attributed to manifestations of racism (6). But what does it
mean that Afro American travel writers either consciously or unconsciously
misrepresented the socio-political realities of Brazil to an audience eager to suspend
disbelief and believe in the possibilities of a racial utopia? The depiction illuminates the
inability of blacks to live a livable life in the United States, the dire need for utopian
possibilities, as well as the capitalistic exploitation of the hopes of a desperate Afro

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American people—albeit of a socio-economic class that could clearly afford to
immigrate.
Is it at all problematic, however, to employ Brazil as a metaphor? Terry Caesar
indeed sees a pattern in “American” literature in which Brazil “tends to be elided into the
continent” (np), not unlike Chennua Achebe’s criticism of Joseph Conrad’s use of Africa
in Heart of Darkness (1902). Indeed, just as the African people never have a voice in
Conrad’s novel, Caesar argues that Brazil can be Brian’s happy solution “to American
racism because Brazil cannot answer back” (np). It is imperative that Brazil not answer
back, or that it is stripped of all subjectivity, Caesar asserts, because “nature as a
displaced form of race comprises virtually the whole subject of the American interest in
Brazil” (np). Moreover, he emphasizes that “American literature requires the presence of
other countries in order to sustain imaginative coherence as a national project” (np).
Larsen’s, Fauset’s, and Van Vechten’s seamless ability to interchange South
America, Brazil, Mexico, and Spain may support Caesar’s claim, despite the possibility
that Brazil, in their novels, may be couched within quotation marks. Although none of
the three novelists featured in this chapter indicate a conscious knowledge about cultural
and political differences between Latin Americans or the ability to distinguish between
Latin Americans, the Spanish, Portuguese, or the Italians, some early reports indicate that
the black community was aware of the racial and cultural distinctions. A 1905 article in
Colored American Magazine describing a Norfolk, Virginia incident confirms that the
racial and cultural distinctions resonated with the black community. The article describes
an incident in which Brazilian sailors were taken for “insolent” and “social equality-
hunting” African Americans—an case of mistaken identity that nearly set off a riot—that

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is, until the Brazilian consul at Norfolk “assured the not yet convinced and
impassioned populace” that the sailors were of “Spanish descent, and further, that they
were ‘educated and cultured,’ and perhaps brave, ‘naval officers’” (Hellwig 21, my
italics). The reporter of this article then specifies: “The truth is, these men were
Portuguese and Brazilians, who were no more of Spain than the writer is of Palestine …
Negroes? Certainly they were. Half of the population of the South have negro blood in
its veins” (Hellwig 22). The anonymous author’s unintentional ambiguity in his/her
reference to the “South” provocatively enough applies to both the southern United States
as well as to South America.
Terry Caesar’s outcry is rightly justified. The emigration discourse that did not
recognize Brazil as a real place, with real people, its own political upheavals, and its own
social problems, that instead created out of Brazil an empty space that would contain the
dreams of racial harmony, dreams of access to both economic and cultural capital,
contributed to the creation of a Brazilian utopia. Van Vechten, Fauset, and Larsen also
seemingly exploit Brazil/Latin America as the space in which dramas, informed
alternately by utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares, play out. A reading of their
novels shows their reducing of several countries, two continents, to a homogenous “Latin
America,” as well as a homogenization of Latin American people, as they strip them of
their subjectivity and use them as a self-referent. However, if their use of Brazil in their
novels is meant to critique an African American desire for the ideal “other,” and thus
meant to topple the Brazilian fantasy built by black travel writing, then the subtle
insertion of Brazil as trope in Nigger Heaven, Plum Bun, and Passing, displays a trans-
American savviness that had escaped even those who had traveled to Brazil proper.

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While this is a possibility, it is also doubtful, given the desperate desire for fantasy, in
order to acquire some relief (if only fantastical and hopeful) from racism in the United
States.
Critical in informing Van Vechten’s, Fauset’s, and Larsen’s use of Brazil as
utopian space are the roots and translation of the Greek word “utopia.” Taken from both
“eutopia” and “outopia,” I must stress that the “eu” in “eutopia” translates as “good
place,” while the “ou” in “outopia” translates as “no place.” The Oxford English
Dictionary defines “utopia” as “A place, state, or condition ideally perfect in respect of
politics, laws, customs, and conditions.” It also defines it as “an impossibly ideal
scheme, especially for social improvement” (2207). Those who sought in Brazil a good
place to emigrate and escape racism found no place for refuge. Clare Kendry’s descent
from a sixth floor window that results in death has echoes of Lasca Sartoris’s descent into
“hell” that results from her defiance of socially constructed racial, cultural, and sexual
boundaries as well as social convention.
If Clare and Lasca symbolize an imagined Brazil, in which all boundaries are
supposedly blurred, the fact that one is in the grips of the devil while the other ends up in
the grips of Death reveals that they as characters symbolized the danger and anxieties that
a world without constraints (however imaginary) posed to the authors, and possibly to the
U.S. black community at large. This is illustrated by Fauset who, in Plum Bun, harnesses
Brazil through Anthony’s containment. By reinscribing him within a U.S. context, she is
able to define and interpret him within familiar parameters. The imaginary good place is
quashed, making it no place in Passing, while in Nigger Heaven, the good place
degenerates into a dystopia. Whether an imaginary good place, an elusive “no place,” or

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a hellish dystopia, the Brazil in the novels of Van Vechten, Fauset, and Larsen
reflects the dreams and desires conveyed in both the Barroso and Russel lyrics of the
“Aquarela do Brasil”—that are ultimately unreal and out of reach.

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Chapter Three
All-American Me: William Carlos Williams’s Construction
and Deconstruction of the Self

Introduction:
In the last two chapters I examined how trans-American connections helped
alleviate some of the effects of U.S. racism within the African American community by
offering the possibility of cultural absorption—either through race or language passing.
This chapter will show something altogether different: how trans-American connections
can be a means by which a subject who straddles identitarian borderlines is able to
negotiate national and cultural identity, even when said subject is generally exempt from
U.S. racism and has access to white cultural capital. This chapter grapples with the
tension involved in being white, and not white; in being privileged, but recognizing one’s
original or ancestral cultural disenfranchisement, or rather the potential for slipping into
an underclass position. More specifically, this chapter will show the complications and
contradictions involved in such negotiations for William Carlos Williams.
Cultural, ethnic, and racial anxieties plagued poet William Carlos Williams,
despite this access to and inscription within whiteness. Although Williams is commonly
recalled as an “all-American” poet, his autobiography, his biographies of others, and his
own poetry and prose display complex identitarian struggles. Williams, whose mother
was from Puerto Rico and whose father was born in England but raised in the Dominican
Republic from the age of five—both immigrating to the United States in 1882, the year
before William Carlos was born—seeks and asserts his heritage through his literary and
historical exploration of Latin America and through his use of the Spanish language in

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works such as Al Que Quiere! (1917), and In the American Grain (1925). Williams’s
body of work betrays his complicated relationship with Latin America at large, and with
his parents and ancestry specifically. Williams’s poetry, autobiography, interviews, and
other prose offer glimpses of his sometimes explicitly defiant embrace of his Latin
American identity, as if he wants to throw it in the face of a public that sees Latin
American immigrants as second class citizens and that believes Latin America itself to be
one homogenous, uncivilized, banana republic. At the same time, Williams’s work also
illustrates his repudiation of a feminized Latin America—a conflicted repudiation that he
works out through his difficult relationship with his mother and also through the
recurring image of the fragmented female body in his writings.
In the attempt to reconcile a fragmented self, Williams simultaneously negotiates
three constantly shifting and overlapping identities: that of a son of immigrants, of a first
generation “American,” and of a son of the Americas. Williams’s claims to his Latin
American heritage, as well as his public disclosure about ambiguous racial roots, defy
domestic sociopolitical pressure toward assimilation. He grew up (and began to write)
during a time when immigration policies and laws were becoming increasingly stricter.
The United States was in the midst of immigration apprehension the year of Williams’s
birth (1883), and had just closed its open door policy with the Chinese Exclusion Treaty
of 1880. Williams grew up in the United States at a time when immigration policies were
informed by racist pseudoscience that categorized people according to rules of eugenics
and arbitrary racial assumptions (as discussed in chapter two), and when racial violence
often resulted from this climate of racial and ethnic anxiety. His artistic and political
development occurred during a time of immigration anxiety and U.S. intervention in the

144
Americas, which resulted in increasingly stricter immigration policies and a tense
relationship in particular between the United States and the Latin Americas and
Caribbean. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy,” implemented in 1933,
attempted to change the tone of U.S. relations with the rest of the Latin Americas after
years of military and political intervention. Roosevelt’s attempt at Pan-Americanism,
however, only thinly disguised a continuation of U.S. intervention in and penetration of
Latin America, which served to further “feminize” the region.
In addition to witnessing United States policy toward the Latin Americas that
fluctuated and yet remained the same politically, Williams witnessed and lived through
the expansion of the category of “whiteness” domestically. In his explanation of how the
privileging of whiteness thwarts the tenets of democracy, political science scholar Joel
Olson borrows sociologist Pierre L. van den Berghe’s term Herrenvolk democracy, to
plot out the racial hierarchical system in the United States. “Herrenvolk democracy”
describes a “peculiar kind of democracy […] in which the white world enjoys democratic
rights and political equality while the dark world is subjected to the tyranny of the white
majority” (xxiv). The Herrenvolk regime, Olson argues, persisted until the civil rights
movement, and it determined that “all whites are political equals while all not-white
persons are relegated to an inferior status” (42). Olson’s summation is particularly
trenchant here because it describes the racial atmosphere that greeted the newly
immigrated Williamses, and it describes the value of whiteness that William Carlos
Williams witnessed, not only in Rutherford, New Jersey, but indeed, throughout his
travels in the United States.

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Olson’s analysis goes beyond the expected racial pitting of white against
black; it also looks at the complexities of non-whiteness in a Latin American immigrant
context. In one case study, Olson describes racial tensions between white and Mexican
workers in East Texas, tensions that spanned from the Civil War to World War II. The
white workers attempted to force the Mexican workers into a “racially subordinate
status,” which the Mexicans resisted. Curiously, the Mexican workers fought against
racial discrimination, even while in “trying to prove themselves white [they did so]
largely by distinguishing themselves from African Americans” (26). The Mexicans
failed to become white, but also, according to Olson, “fell in between Black and white,
revealing the inadequacy of the bipolar model” (26). Exposing the inadequacy of the
bipolar model, however, did not make the model irrelevant. Olson notes that
Given the bipolar nature of the racial order, [the Mexican workers] were
forced to prove they deserved membership in the white world or face a
subordinate status. Caught between the compactor walls of privilege and
subordination, Mexican workers both resisted discrimination and tried to
prove themselves white, the latter of which involved such sundry tactics as
denying their African and indigenous roots and protesting their
exclusion from lynch mobs. (27)

Each Latin American country has a distinct method by which it negotiates race.
Especially noteworthy in this context, however, is how Latin Americans were perceived
in the United States, how there was an attempt to categorize them according to a
perceived racially inferior status, and how many Latin Americans, in turn, attempted to
identify with a U.S.-constructed whiteness that depended on blackness as a point of racial
differentiation and social stratification.

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Although many pseudo-scientific theories such as phrenology and eugenics
were based on biological claims, race was not seen solely in biological terms. According
to Olson, whiteness “was not a biological status but a political color that distinguished
the free from the unfree, the equal from the inferior, the citizen from the slave” (43).
Thus, there were (and are) degrees of United States citizenship that correlated with race,
color, and culture. Citizenship often guaranteed nothing to a person of color, a fact and
contradiction that immigrants quickly learned. And even if one was considered “white”
in her/his home country, this type of self-identification meant little. Olson notes,

Figure 8: The Williams Family, From top left to
right: William George, William Carlos, Elena, and
Edgar.

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“recently arrived immigrants quickly learned that, like citizenship, membership in the
white race could not be assumed but had to be earned. One did not receive the rights of
American citizenship because one was white but rather the reverse: one was white
because one possessed such rights” (44-43). Not only did William Carlos’s claim to
English ancestry mean little—even his father William George’s English citizenship was
suspect because he was culturally Dominican. Granted, William George’s white skin
would have allowed for an immediate bodily reading of him as white, but his cultural
identification with the Dominican Republic and his primary use of the Spanish language
would have made the claim of whiteness fraught.
Given Williams’s lack of identitarian fixity, it is no wonder that his subject
position is in frequent flux. Many people ignore their complex heritages. This chapter
asks why Williams chose to grapple with it. His assertions of his complicated Latin
American heritage are troubled, as are the mysteries shrouding his matrilineage and
patrilineage, which I describe in detail in the next section. While Williams uses his
Latin American connections for social and professional advancement, he also sometimes
separates himself from Latin Americans by feigning ignorance of the Spanish language,
and by distinguishing and elevating himself according to social class. His literary works
also betray his complex relationship with and toward Latin America, for in asserting a
Latin American identity, he simultaneously betrays views toward the Latin Americas
that mirror those of the U.S. government.
Williams was practical: He chose to be a physician in part so as not to starve
while he wrote his prose and poetry. He may have lived the bohemian life vicariously
through some of his artist friends, but he had no desire for it, nor did he see the logic in

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enduring it. William’s practicality, however, by no means made him a conformist,
for he often displayed the soul of a rebel. Perhaps this is partly why is he was conscious
of wanting to assert his Latin American identity when it was not popular to do so. His
ethnic identity was as complicated as his bifurcated identity as a respectable family man
and doctor, and as a bohemian poet. Williams managed, or at least tried to manage,
simultaneously to perform an identity that was white and Latin American, a citizen of the
United States and a son of the Americas. Some Williams scholars have argued that
Williams sought to embrace his “wild” side with his use of this middle name which made
public his Latin American roots; this is not my point here. In this chapter, I establish
Williams’s vexed relationship with his roots, how this plays out in his writing, and how
his literary play with Latin America changes how modernism has been traditionally
viewed and studied—an aspect of Williams and his work that has not been explored with
any depth or seriousness to date.
Although Williams claims his Latin American roots, he also asserts his United
States national identity, which is constructed as a masculine identity in relation to the
Latin Americas. U.S. geopolitical constructions and propaganda of Latin America as
weak, decadent, uncivilized, and easily penetrated, informed a femininization of the
region. In sharp contrast, U.S. intervention and the exercising of “international police
power” fanned the flames of jingoism and the hyper-masculinity that such colonial
projects produce.
1
Historian Lester Langley, for example, states that the United States, in

1
In Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine he states that “in the
Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may
force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or
impotence, to the exercise of an international police power …” (282).

149
implanting itself in the Latin Americas and Caribbean, had not “been unwillingly
thrust into empire […] but had consciously chosen that path” (5). The act of feminizing
Latin America, however, worked as a justification for intervention and occupation, for
the reasons for U.S. interest in the Latin Americas were not so much economic as they
were strategic. Langley adds that the U.S. construction of the Panama Canal offered an
excuse for interfering in Latin American and Caribbean internal affairs, and
“safeguarding of the ‘vital waterway’ always served as an unassailable reason for the
sometimes objectionable practice of ‘gunboat diplomacy’ that seemed to characterize
American policy” (5).
2
Undoubtedly, Williams was aware of U.S./Latin American
politics and relations, which must have informed his conflicted relationship with his Latin
American roots.
Williams consistently complicates his assertion of national identity by invoking
Spanish—his first language—which, although it is the primary language spoken by both
his parents, he attributes mainly to his mother. He asserts his first language and his Latin
American identity even as he disavows them. Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic
are thus foils for his masculine and national identity. And yet, Williams’s transformation
of his legal citizenship into his recognition as an “all-American,” virile poet is telling of
his cultural anxieties and vacillations, for being legally recognized as a U.S. citizen is not

2
A political relationship between nations or states with disparate powers is inherently
gendered and, according to International Relations scholar, Whitney T. Perkins, is
inherently imperialistic. Perkins observes, “unless a dominant state extirpates a weaker
and penetrated entity as a functioning society, politics is not extinguished in their
relationship. Rather, it flows between domestic and international settings, not just
resolving or reshaping particular issues but giving definition to the identities and interests
of the participants” (xi).

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the same thing as being recognized as “all-American” or all masculine. Williams
shifts between attempting to reconcile these two disparate positions, and attempting to
rebel against one or the other. All the while revealing his identitarian struggles, a
conflicted Williams attempts to construct and explore “Latin America” through his
writings in an effort to inscribe himself in it. For example, in researching and writing In
the American Grain (1925), Williams shows his expertise in United States history, as
well as his expertise in the history of conquest in the rest of the Americas. In other
words, he is able to straddle cultural lines by becoming an authority on the Americas, and
in so doing establishes his own authenticity as a son of the Americas. To a large extent,
Williams’s pursuit of his Latin American self is a personal and complicated quest laden
with identitarian contradictions that are informed by oedipal conflicts. At the same time,
his very public and repeated pronouncement of his roots along with his use of the Spanish
language in his poetry are motivated by a desire to shake up preconceptions about poetry,
aesthetic value, and are also motivated by his desire to expand the notion of “America.”
Williams’s motivations are layered and complex—far more complex than merely
being informed by the “split” personality that some scholars describe in their studies of
Williams. For example, Robert Coles explores his dual and conflicted “natures” of
physician and poet, of scientist and artist, while Julio Marzán (to whom I refer heavily
because his is the only book-length study of Williams’s Latin American roots to date)
writes about “Bill” and “Carlos,” split selves that can never be integrated and have
political aims that are often at odds. Lisa Sanchez-Gonzalez argues that Williams was
never seen as white and that he was only later constructed as a white poet. As her
argument develops, however, she ends up firmly planting him as a representative of the

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white Boricua community,
3
and pitting him against the Afro Boricuas that scholars
like Arturo Schomburg represented.
4
Barry Ahearn’s argument that Williams
“negotiated between zones of stability” and “invigorating but dangerous adventures”—a
negotiation that Ahearn attributes to the tension between “measure” and the “other”—lies
closer to the exploration of Williams’s negotiations in this chapter (ix).
Although some of the above mentioned scholars have attributed Williams’s split
to his negotiation of culture, race, and nationality, to date, no one has written about
Williams as a “passing” figure or how this complicates his identity in gender and racial
hierarchies. This is surprising, since the struggles, complexities, and contradictions
evident in Williams’s works are rooted in these types of identitarian negotiations, which
are inevitably tied to the sociopolitical and even to the geopolitical. In other words, this
chapter examines a difficult grey area that Williams inhabited rather than attempting to
identify binaries or tidy compartments. In addition, this chapter explores possible
explanations for this textual neglect. The neglect may be attributed to ignorance. After
all, in occupying an in-between space between black and white, Latin Americans in the
United States were perceived as non-black, and therefore privy to white cultural capital,
even if it was limited. These limits, however, often meant having almost non-existent
political and social capital that resulted in occupying the grey area of invisibility.
Nonetheless, this configuration in which Latin Americans have access to whiteness then

3
“Boricua” is interchangeably used with “Puerto Rican,” and refers to the Island of
Borinquen, which is the pre-Columbian, Taino/Arowak name—Boriken. Columbus
changed the name of the Island upon conquest.

4
Arturo (Arthur) Alfonso Schomburg (1874-1938) is best known as a scholar and
collector of Pan-African literature. See detailed notes in chapter 1, footnote 4.

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begs these questions: why would any Latin American consciously or passively pass
for white? Was this even done? If access to cultural capital was limited, and indeed
meant settling for the crumbs of whiteness, the question can be rephrased as, why
wouldn’t all Latin Americans pass for white if their physical markers allowed them to do
so?

Cultural Context—Casta and Passing:
Passing had been practiced in the Latin Americas since the sixteenth century.
Although there is controversy about the extent to which mestizaje or race mixing was
encouraged and affirmed, there existed categories of identity that relied on more than skin
color. Suzanne Bost explains that “race came to be identified with religion, culture, and
behavior” (29), and therefore hinged on more than the physical markers upon which the
U.S. taxonomic project primarily depended. Moreover, as Michael Conniff and Thomas
Davis assert, “persons were defined as white, for example, not only by phenotype but
also by their European language, Christianity, class, formal learning, and style of life”
(312). These social markers show that passing in the Latin Americas involved more
complex factors and performative acts than were involved in racial passing in the United
States. Bost adds that the term casta “was used to designate status based on these
multiple factors,” and that this “‘social race’ was the foundation of hierarchies, since the
multiple different shades of brown by Spanish American mestizaje problematized color-
based hierarchies” (29-30). Ultimately, however, the term casta or castas referred to
people of mixed ancestry. The designations determined the inheritance of money and

153
other material possessions, and they established hierarchies within this group of
“mixed-bloods.”
5

The color line was documented, and reinforced in the Latin Americas through the
use of the libro de castas or libro de color quebrado [book of mixed-bloods or book of
broken color] which recorded the names of people of mixed Spanish, Indian, and/or
Black African blood. Spaniards and Criollos (Spaniards born in New Spain or in the
Americas) had their names recorded in the libro de españoles [book of Spaniards]. These
books, along with baptismal records were of dire importance in New Spain because they
determined not only ancestry, status, and inheritance, but also admittance to universities,
professions, guilds, noble orders, and exemption from having to pay tributes, as required
of castas (Carrera 4).
Despite the existence of this color line, miscegenation occurred as early as the
sixteenth century—something that deeply frightened the Spaniards and Criollos because
they feared an impending shifting of power. In the effort to suppress revolt and
conspiracy, the Spaniards attempted to control all aspects of the castas’ lives: castas were
encouraged to marry endogenously and laws were set so that Africans could not improve

5
The categories detailed in the casta system included strange permutations such as “De
Español y de India Produce Mestiso” (“Spaniard and Indian produce a Mestizo”); “De
Español y de Mulata Produce Morisco” (“Spaniard and Mulatto Produce a Morisco”);
“De Lobo y de India Produce Lobo Que Es Torna Atras” (“Wolf and Indian Produce a
Wolf Which Is a Return-Backwards.” The many permutations were confusing, as were
the differing sum, products, or interpretations of some of the racial/ethnic combinations.
Compare for example, Juan Rodriguez Juárez’s circa 1725 casta painting entitled, “De
Mulato y Mestisa Produce Mulato es Torna Atras” (“Mulatto and Mestiza Produce a
Mulatto Return Backwards”) to José Bustos’ circa 1725 “De Mulato y Mestisa Produce
Mulata (“Mulatto and Mestiza Produce a Mulatto”), which illustrates the arbitrary nature
of the casta system and the casta paintings that reinforced the system (Katzew, New
World Orders, 18-19).

154
their social condition nor improve the status of their children. According to curator
Ilona Katzew, “colonial law even attempted to regulate friendships, dress codes, and
marriage choices.” However, “despite the imposition of such severe measures, which
were also often contradictory, race mixing became an ineluctable aspect of colonial life,
and efforts to keep each group to itself remained largely ineffectual” (Casta, 41).
Spaniard/Criollo fears about a coalition of castas were not entirely unfounded. Katzew
notes, for example, that Spaniard and Criollo fears were justified, for “throughout the
seventeenth century, several revolts threatened to overthrow the Spaniards”(Casta, 41).
After two centuries of racial mixing, visual representations of races and, more
specifically, the classification of races became highly fashionable by the eighteenth
century, if only because the visual representations or casta paintings provided titillating,
visual representations of racial permutations, and the implied warning against
miscegenation that was transmitted through such paintings. While the paintings that were
sent to Spain had an exotic appeal, there was certainly an audience for them domestically
in Mexico and in other Latin American countries, and they continued to be produced up
until the first decade of the nineteenth century. According to Katzew, “the first striking
feature of casta paintings is that they were constructed as a progression of images
recording the process of mestizaje, or race mixing, among peoples from the New World”
(Casta, 5). There is controversy about the purpose of these paintings. In 1908, French
anthropologist R. Blanchard declared the casta paintings to be ethnographic documents
that helped provide “the names of the different types of mixed races” (Katzew, Casta 6).
Yet, and in sharp contradiction to his own idea that the paintings provided the language
and labels for such racial categories, Blanchard considered the “rendering of the various

155
figures to be ‘purely fantastic,’ thus constituting the works’ principal flaw” (Katzew,
Casta 6). It is difficult to dispute, however, that the paintings served as a type of
iconography that either reinforced the written documentation differentiating castas from
Spaniards/Criollos, or replaced it entirely for the illiterate. In either case, it served to
document categories of race, no matter how fantastical these representations of castas,
and representations of self were on the part of the Spaniards/Criollos.
The casta system depended on strict documentation of lineage, and yet, Angel
Rosenblat states, “the casta regime tended to dissolve into a series of economic
differences” (180). In the casta system then, money—along with other economic
material makers such as education and style—was elastic and unstable enough that it
allowed people to actually change casta categories or even erase them. In fact, Bost

Figure 9: "De Español y Mulata; Morisca." ["From Spaniard
and Mulatto, Morisca."] Miguel Cabrera, 1763.
Figure 10: "De Mestizo y d India; Coyote." ["From Mestizo and
Indian, Coyote."] Miguel Cabrera, 1763.

156
notes that many light-skinned mestizos chose to pass for Spanish (30), not only
because mestizos were marginalized in Mexico by both indigenous Mexicans and lighter-
skinned Mexicans, but also because it was convenient for them to join a bourgeoning
aristocracy that privileged whiteness and supported “pigmentocracy” (30-31).
Although the complicated casta system of racial hierarchies was officially
abandoned in the early nineteenth century, Bost observes, “celebrating mestizaje as an
ideal often remained at the level of rhetoric, as individuals were still ranked by arbitrary
color divisions” (31). According to Bost, despite the abandoning of the casta system in
1822 upon gaining independence from Spain, the Mexican upper class depended on
marriage records and an unofficial casta system (31). Because William George Williams
was ethnically English, he was white in the Dominican Republic, and the Hohebs with
their European education and money would also have been categorized as white. But
they certainly would not have been categorized as such upon immigrating to the United
States, not only because of their immigrant status, but also because of their Latin
American ties, and because of how their use of the Spanish language marked them as
outsiders. It seems convenient for Williams scholars to ignore the complicated casta
system that was abolished in the early nineteenth century but that still informed social
hierarchical systems in the Latin Americas. It also seems efficient to merely construct
William Carlos Williams as a white “all-American” poet in accordance to U.S. binaristic
understandings of race, and thus ignore his complicated lineage. To closely scrutinize his
background would mean to question assumptions about race and racial categories—issues
that, while debunked by scholars, are often simultaneously and unconsciously upheld.
Thus, while it may be efficient to ignore Williams’s ancestry, his early domestic life, and

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his relationship to the Spanish language, it is also inaccurate: the result is a body of
Williams scholarship that is incomplete.
Williams is the exemplum of the Latin American passing figure in that he is rife
with contradictions, failed negotiations, and the impetus toward full cultural and racial
disclosure, even while he has access to white cultural capital. He may have African
ancestry, but he is not racially marked. His roots are in the Latin Americas, but his
surname and his patrilineage has tended to erase this from current literary history, and has
reduced the fact to a footnote in most of his biographies. Although many Williams
biographers have chosen to ignore or gloss over Williams’s Latin American roots, the
fact remains that these roots had meaning and determined some of Williams’s
experiences, his world views, and his poetry and prose while he grew up the son of
immigrants in New Jersey. His background and cultural context cannot be ignored, and
the experience of Latin American immigrants during the late nineteenth century up until
the civil rights movement cannot be ignored either.
Williams’s struggles and his identitarian negotiations offer an insider’s
perspective of this Latin American identity as it was lived and performed in the United
States. Despite the difficulties involved in these negotiations, this “Latin American”
identity was often homogenized, and often confused for other ethnic identities as we have
already seeen in chapter two. Latin American identity was also sometimes coveted and
utilized in African American literary works in which the protagonists attempt to pass, not
for white but for non-black, the dark ethnic other, or for Latin American.

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The ethnic groups in literary critic Steven Belluscio’s study found the need to
intervene politically through literature, as Belluscio explains:
In a time of racist pseudoscience, racial violence, and fervent anti-
immigrant sentiment, American writers of Italian, Jewish, and African
descent wrote in part to counter popular and official narratives of racial
aptitude and to demonstrate the ability of their co-ethnics to participate
fully in the fundamentals of American citizenship. (6)

This theory of marginalized people writing in order to access “American” citizenship, if
not whiteness, contains the elements of performativity and defiance simultaneously, and
Belluscio’s theory is certainly helpful in framing Williams’s works, such as In the
American Grain (1925). While the passing narrative is commonly attributed to African
American literary works, Belluscio’s work on the phenomenon of passing for white
among Jewish, Italian, and European ethnic groups is helpful in framing some of the
psychology that simultaneously informs passing and the resistance to pass. Clearly, the
context Belluscio describes is one in which the subject is unburdened by the physical
markers that exclude her/him from whiteness.
While some of the writing described by Belluscio was certainly done to attain
“American” citizenship, it was also motivated by the desire to ameliorate the anxiety that
immigration provoked at the time. Immigration at large provoked nativist anxiety, but
legal backlash against immigration targeted Asia first. Rutherford B. Hayes signed the
Chinese Exclusion Treaty in 1880, which limited the number of Chinese immigrants
allowed to immigrate to the United States, as well as limiting those allowed to become
naturalized citizens. He thereby reversed the open-door policy that the United States had
set in 1868. This treaty was followed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which
barred the immigration of Chinese for ten years, and which also marked the beginning of

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harsh anti-immigration policies. The Chinese Exclusion Act was extended for another
ten years by the Geary Act of 1892. In 1904, the Extension Act made these policies
permanent, and they were not reversed until 1943, when the United States needed the
Chinese as political allies. The Japanese and Korean Exclusion League was established in
San Francisco in 1905, and it sought to implement policies such as including Japanese
and Koreans under the Chinese Exclusion Act. It also encouraged segregation. By 1906,
the San Francisco school board ordered the segregation of Asian children in its public
schools, thus acting on the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision that deemed segregation
legal. Seeking to ease racial tensions in California, Theodore Roosevelt entered into an
agreement with Japan in 1907 (known as the Gentleman’s Agreement) that would limit
the immigration of the Japanese to the United States to only wives, children, and parents,
thereby stopping new immigration of Japanese people seeking work. Many of these
policies would inform the restrictive anti-immigration policies of the 1920s.
At the same time that the United States government grappled with immigration
policies that seemed to target predominantly immigrants from Asian countries, it also
penetrated Latin America and intervened in Latin American politics. Roosevelt, for
example, not only attempted to control Latin American nations through U.S. occupation,
but also to disrupt cultural cohesion in countries such as Cuba and Puerto Rico. Hispanic
tradition, asserts Langley, “was intentionally denigrated” in these countries (18). The
texts that Cuban teachers were forced to teach were translations of U.S.-American books
and they were drilled in U.S.-American credos of instruction before entering their
classrooms (Langley 18). Unable to determine the trajectory of their educational system
during U.S. occupation, the Latin American people who were pronounced “monkeys”

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and “dagoes” by Roosevelt protested U.S. policies and asserted their national
identities through the plastic arts and literature—works that frequently dealt with political
issues, whether transnational or domestic.
Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (more explicitly
declaring the United States protectorate of the Americas), as well as his Gentlemen’s
Agreement of 1907, Harding’s 1921 Stop-gap measure (based on the 1910 census) that
welcomed British, Irish, and Northern European immigration, but strongly limited
Mexican immigration, illustrate the racism and xenophobia of the time as well as the
subsequent scramble to control all things “foreign.” In essence, the anxiety about non-
white immigration was both xenophobic and economic, since Asian and Latin American
workers were seen as taking jobs away from whites. These immigration policies were
was thus rooted in protecting the rights and entitlements associated with whiteness. Legal
scholar Cheryl Harris describes this sense of entitlement as propertied whiteness. Her
argument, which I discuss in chapter one, illustrates how whiteness is not merely about
pigment or cultural capital; it is an economic asset or property to be protected. The
anxiety about immigration was rooted not only in a sense of economic entitlement, but
also in the fear of infiltration and taint to whiteness.
To further compound infiltration/immigration anxiety and blur the borderlines of
whiteness, the United States experienced unprecedented European immigration from the
1890s to the early part of the 1900s. While Northern and Western Europeans (read
“white”) continued to immigrate to the United States, their numbers declined while
immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe skyrocketed. Southern and Eastern
Europeans (read “non-white”) made up seventy percent of immigrants by 1910. The

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Spanish-American War of 1898 also saw an influx of “immigration,” since, in
defeating the Spanish in Cuba and the Philippines, the United States annexed the
Philippines, Guam, and also added Puerto Rico and Cuba to its territories. U.S.
expansionist efforts and ambitions also resulted in the acquisition of Samoa and Hawaii
at this time, though not as a consequence of the Spanish-American War,
6
and also
resulted in deeper involvement in other parts of the Caribbean, such as the Dominican
Republic.
As a result of U.S. expansionism, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans,
and other Caribbean people were added to the U.S. population, although the Dominican
Republic’s situation differed from other Spanish-American countries that sought
independence. The Dominican Republic—the country in which William George was
raised—was curious in that, as early as the mid 1800s, the island’s “political figures
connived at various times with Haitian factions and repeatedly sought support from
Spain, France, and the United States, offering concessions and even annexation” (Perkins
40). In addition, Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine resulted in a fifty-year
treaty between the United States and the Dominican Republic in which the U.S.
controlled the customs administration and, through the customs proceeds, helped reduce
the Dominican Republic’s foreign debt. United States involvement in the Dominican
Republic became complicated as the U.S. found itself mediating the country’s political

6
The commonwealth of Puerto Rico was created in 1952; Cuba gained formal
independence in 1902, but The United States retained the right to intervene in Cuban
affairs and accrued Guantanamo Bay per the conditions of the Platt Agreement; The
Phillipines did not gain independence from the U.S. until 1946; Hawaii was annexed in
1898, became a U.S. territory in 1900 and became a state in 1959; Western Samoa
became U.S. territory in 1900; Guam was claimed by Spain in 1565 and was ceded to the
U.S. in 1898 after the Spanish-American War.

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elections. By 1916, the United States Marines occupied the island, an occupation that
lasted until the U.S., under much public pressure from the Dominicans, presented a
withdrawal proposal in 1921.
7

It was in this political context that Williams grew up the son of Puerto Rican and
Dominican-English immigrants. Although the Williamses had emigrated to the United
States in 1882, it is particularly noteworthy that neither Elena nor William George
actively sought United States citizenship. In fact, it was the Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917,
which made all Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens, which imposed citizenship upon Elena. The
Jones-Shafroth Act and U.S. involvement in the Dominican Republic, which resulted in
some Dominican immigration to the U.S., may have incorporated Williams’s parents into
the United States, but this did not mean that people such as the Williamses were seen as
legitimately “American.” There was much anxiety, not only about immigration as a
whole, but also about taxonomy. Anxiety about taxonomy, however, also reveals
trepidations about the expanses and limits of whiteness, and therein lies the impetus for
frenzied categorization. The anxiety about where these newly incorporated people fit or
did not fit in drove the United States Department of Labor to send government agent
Robert Franz Foerster to the Latin Americas in 1925 in order to definitively categorize
Latin American people, as discussed in chapter two. Foerster failed, and in so failing the

7
Dominicans resisted United States intervention and the right the U.S. claimed to suggest
or, more accurately put, to tell the Dominicans what to do. Perkins documents, “The
Dominican minister in Washington questioned the basis for supervision, since the
revolutionists had continued to fight [for] free elections” (51). As the U.S. moved to take
control of the Dominican Republic’s customs, internal revenues, and public works,
Perkins states that these measures were blocked and that, moreover, “A flavor of patriotic
resistance could be sensed amongst claims for patronage and subsidy” (55), thus
reflecting the growing resentment about the loss of sovereignty.

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taxonomic project, it seemed that the U.S. government had no choice but to squelch
its anxieties to whatever extent it could, although this certainly did not mean that the U.S.
public dealt with its xenophobia in any reasonable way.
In the attempt to ameliorate anti-immigrant sentiment, legal backlash, and
violence resulting from such xenophobia, Jewish American and Italian American authors
capitalized on the immigration debates to further complicate simplistic notions of race,
and to humanize their protagonists. Of these writings, Belluscio adds, “If the theoretical
problematics of ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race’ went unresolved, it did not matter, because the racial
ideologies contained therein were becoming increasingly less threatening to white ethnics
than they were to other, more racially marked Americans” (11). In addition, many non-
white (yet non-black) immigrants benefited from exploiting U.S. racial binaries by pitting
themselves against African Americans. For example, Olson effectively borrows Claire
Jean Kim’s Asian American model, which describes race as not a simple binary, but “at
minimum a triangular relationship of white superiors, Black inferiors, and Asian
inassimilables” (27). However, while Olson acknowledges the value of Kim’s model, he
also holds that the triangulation is supported by a bipolar racial order. It is thus helpful to
see the non-white position in this triangulation as dependent and exploitative of a black-
white racial binary, and also as interested in aligning itself with whites against blacks,
and even occasionally against other non-blacks. In the attempt to claim whiteness, Olson
states that the “tragic choice forced on Asians and Mexicans has been to either prove
themselves white (as Irish, Italian, Greek, and other immigrants before them did) or
endure the degradations of not-white status, a status reserved particularly but not
exclusively for African Americans” (27-28).

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Aside from Mexicans, other newly immigrated Latin Americans chose to
align themselves with whiteness as well. Bost explains that “Puerto Rico’s diverse color
spectrum did not easily lend itself to black-white discrimination” (107), which made
Puerto Rican immigration to the United States confusing and contradictory since upon
arrival, Puerto Ricans began to imitate anti-black racism (107). Rosario Ferré states that
anti-black racism was a byproduct of the U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico, and that
although they were considered “Caucasian” in Puerto Rico, upon visiting the United
States, Puerto Ricans found that “their skin was never as white as that of the Americans
milling around them; it had a light olive tint to it, which made them suspect in the eyes of
the conductor when they were about to board the first-class coaches in New Orleans”
(25). Bost adds, “the hypocrisy of Jim Crow laws in a country founded on legal equality
confused Puerto Ricans and made them fearful of their own ambiguous racial status, too
light to be black but too dark to be white” (108).
In order to “lighten” themselves and attempt to conform to U.S. standards of
whiteness, Ferré notes that many Puerto Ricans conducted bloodline searches in secret.
Spanish “Bloodline Books,” or libros de castas, she states, were introduced by Spanish
priests in the colonial period, and were meant to keep Spanish blood free of Jewish or
Islamic “taint” (Bost 107). In fact, art historian Magali Carrera states that official
certifications establishing the “purity of Spanish blood,” without taint of Black African,
Moorish, or Jewish blood, were known as limpieza de sangre [blood cleansing] (2).
However, Bost adds that although the Bloodline Books recalled U.S. anti-miscegenation
ideology and laws, “Spanish racialization” via the Bloodline Books was more centered in
religious and national exclusivism than in color (107). With the passing of the Jones-

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Shafroth Act in 1917 the Bloodline Books were officially abandoned. One could only
speculate that the Bloodline Books served to support intraracism and to uphold social
hierarchies in Puerto Rico. Once granted U.S. citizenship, it is possible that this sudden
incorporation produced an anxiety about cultural loss and conquest that overrode the
desire for race and class-based separation. In other words, while intraracism and social
hierarchies still existed (and exist), they ceased to exist in any official sense for the sake
of cultural cohesion in light of U.S. control of the island.
Clearly, Puerto Rico’s colonial past was fraught with slavery, racism, colorism,
and anti-black sentiment, and Puerto Rican anti-black racism, therefore, cannot solely be
blamed on a U.S. introduction of racist ideology. Nevertheless, the cultural difference in
how race was seen lies in Ferré’s observation that “Anglo-Saxons were less lenient about
‘exotic physical traits’ than were the Spaniards, who were less suspicious of olive skin or
curly dark hair after having been ‘colonized by the Moors for seven hundred years’ (26)”
(Bost 108). Puerto Ricans and other Latin Americans found themselves in a strange
political and liminal space, in that “the mestizaje originated by Spanish colonization
clashed with the overt structures of U.S. racism” (Bost 108). Puerto Ricans were thus
caught in a racial triangulation in which they either chose to align themselves with a pan-
African political struggle (as did Arturo Schomburg), maintain that in-between space and
straddle lines whenever necessary, or pass themselves off as white—with or without the
help of the Bloodline Books and, of course, depending on skin coloration.
Despite the fact that some African American authors were willing to pass for the
Latin American or the dark, ethnic “other” because of the slippage involved in attempted
ocular analysis and subsequent categorization, many had no idea of the complicated

166
history that informed Latin American identity, and most were ultimately politically
and ethically rooted to an African lineage. Belluscio suggests that this limited how
African Americans enacted race and how many chose to write about race. As Belluscio
explains, black authors of passing narratives “knew that to identify as biologically black
meant to write oneself into a history of slavery and a contemporary reality of Jim Crow,
miscegenation law, one-dropism, and racial violence” (11). And while passing narratives
debunked racial categories in the United States, understandings of those very racial
categories were generally limited to U.S. constructions of race. Other racial
constructions—such as those in the Latin Americas—were either consciously overlooked
or possibly ignored for lack of knowledge of the complicated histories of such
constructions. Many Latin Americans also had African ancestry by way of slavery in the
Latin Americas and the Caribbean—a fact acknowledged and indeed documented by
Foerster—yet they were inscribed outside the narrative of blackness in the United States.
This, however, did not mean that they were white.
Williams’s Latin American roots place him outside the realm of whiteness,
despite more recent constructions of him as an “all American” poet and physician from
New Jersey. Williams himself suggests that more than his disclosure about his roots gave
away his Latin American lineage. In one anecdote, he describes a fellow intern’s reaction
upon seeing him for the first time, as Williams began his internship at New York’s
French Hospital. According to Williams, Gaskins (the intern) expected a “rough, sandy-
haired Welshman” given Williams’s name. Upon seeing him, Gaskins “let out a wild
howl” and exclaimed “There it is, there it is. Didn’t I tell you?” Williams then adds,
“[Gaskins] blamed Henna and family connections and whatnot for my success in getting

167
on the staff” (Auto. 84). This story is not about mere nepotism; it is a story that
reveals how Williams was read bodily or at least how Williams perceived that he was
read as Puerto Rican. Gaskins instantly read Williams as Puerto Rican and immediately
connected him to Dr. J. Julio Henna, one of the elder chiefs of the medical staff who also
happened to be Puerto Rican.

Figure 11: William Carlos Williams, circa 1903.

As stated in his autobiography, Williams is decidedly non-white, and he occupies
a slippery space that defies racial categorization—even when he, himself, attempts to
assert and categorize his own identity. Williams’s cultural, racial, and even linguistic
negotiations can be seen in the context of play, conscious compromise, and even
unconscious confusion. In short, these conciliations that ebb between consciousness and
unconsciousness can be examined as the negotiations of a passing figure, and as
Belluscio argues “a passing character involves also representing the ‘free-floating

168
consciousness’ of a person capable of shifting among racial subject positions” (58).
Although Belluscio deals solely with literature, it’s important to note that the literary
passing characters were sketched from the life experiences and observations of the
authors in Belluscio’s study. I draw from Williams’s lived experience, poetry, and prose.
As a case study, Williams shows how access to cultural, racial, or ethnic play makes
these negotiations and crossings no less difficult (although the limits of race and culture
are admittedly different) than those experienced by the African American writers I have
explored thus far, despite the constructions and projections that define this in-between
identity as desirable.

Blurring Cultural Boundaries: “Only the whites of my eyes were affected.”
William Carlos Williams was born to William George Williams of Santo
Domingo, Dominican Republic and to Elena Hoheb of Mayaguéz, Puerto Rico on
September 17, 1883. Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, Williams was brought up with the
privileges of any “all American” boy. The Williamses were not rich, but William George
provided a life for his family in Rutherford that was more than merely comfortable as a
representative for the Florida Water Perfume Company. At one point when William
Carlos was fourteen, William George was to be sent to Buenos Aires, Argentina for more
than a year to set up a factory for the Florida Water perfume company. Whether the
reason for the trip was business or otherwise, William George and Elena decided that she
and the Williams boys would live in Europe during William George’s absence. William
Carlos and his brother Ed were subsequently enrolled at a school at the Château de Lancy
near Geneva, Switzerland, where, according to Williams, both he and Ed rubbed elbows

169
with pupils from at least twelve nations (Auto. 31). Upon leaving Geneva, William
Carlos and Ed attended the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, a school that Williams asserts was
one of the better high schools in Paris (35). When the Williamses returned to the United
States, William George and Elena found the education at the Rutherford Public School to
be undistinguished. Williams comments, “I don’t know how Pop could keep on sinking
money into our education as he did” (Auto. 43), as he reflects upon the cost involved
when both he and Ed were enrolled in New York City’s Horace Mann School, an elite
private school which he felt was the “best high school […] in the East” at the time (43).
Despite an education and access to travel that was all but reserved for the more
privileged classes, Williams was aware that he was the son of immigrants. Williams’s
paternal grandmother, Emily Wellcome, had moved to the Caribbean with her second
husband and her child from her first marriage, William George, who was born in
England. Although William George was born ethnically English and maintained his
British citizenship throughout his life, he was raised in the Caribbean from the age of five
and was shaped culturally by his environment. His roots were a confluence of British and
Caribbean influences, a tangle that William Carlos, in his poetry, deems inevitable and
determined by one’s environment. Although Williams describes his father’s competing
cultural pulls in his poem, “Adam” (which I explicate later), Williams begins to plot out
the accident of birth, circumstance, and cultural context in his poem, “Dedication for a
Plot of Ground” which is a snapshot record of Williams’s paternal grandmother, Emily
Wellcome’s life. In a quick succession of lines the reader learns of her two marriages,
her losses, and the itinerant trajectory that her life takes. Before Williams punctuates the
poem with a period we are privy to the following:

170
“Dedication for a Plot of Ground” (from Al Que Quiere!, 1917)
This plot of ground
facing the waters of this inlet
is dedicated to the living presence of
Emily Dickinson Wellcome
who was born in England; married;
lost her husband and with
her five year old son
sailed for New York in a two-master;
was driven to the Azores;
ran adrift on Fire Island shoal,
met her second husband
in a Brooklyn boarding house,
went with him to Puerto Rico
bore three more children, lost
her second husband, lived hard
for eight years in St. Thomas,
Puerto Rico, San Domingo, followed
the oldest son to New York,
lost her daughter, lost her “baby,”
seized the two boys of
the oldest son by the second marriage
mothered them—they being
motherless—fought for them
against the other grandmother
and the aunts, brought them here
summer after summer, defended
herself here against thieves,
storms, sun, fire,
against flies, against girls
that came smelling about, against
drought, against weeks, storm-tides,
neighbors, weasels that stole her chickens,
against the weakness of her own hands,
against the growing strength of
the boys, against wind, against
the stones, against trespassers,
against rents, against her own mind.

Williams traces a geographic and linguistic triangulation, with includes Europe, North
America, and the Caribbean, and linguistically, English, Portuguese, and Spanish. While

171
Williams documents Wellcome’s trails and tribulations, a life lived adventurously and
fearlessly, he also inscribes himself in her narrative. If one’s environment is formative,
then Wellcome’s cultural makeup is more complicated than a passport would indicate.
Williams conveys this complex aspect of identity and identity/cultural formation with
this brief and compressed poetic biography. By extension, he also illustrates his own
multi-cultural lineage to those who know his autobiographical details and can identify
Emily Wellcome as his paternal grandmother. In the final stanzas Williams describes his
grandmother’s physical contact with the earth, as she toils in it, buys it, and is buried in it:
She grubbed this earth with her own hands,
domineered over this grass plot,
blackguarded her oldest son
into buying it, lived here fifteen years,
attained a final loneliness and—

If you can bring nothing to this place
but your carcass, keep out.
(CP, 105-06)

With the final two lines, Williams reinforces the idea that “place” and body must
co-mingle and eventually fuse for a life to have any meaning at all. In other words, a
body that has not become part of its environment in life is a carcass. This established,
Williams complicates the perception that his grandmother was merely a transplanted
English woman, and by extension, he publicly complicates his own lineage. In his
autobiography, as well as in many of his interviews, Williams repeatedly establishes his
parents’ Latin American roots, and thus his own. While he describes his father as
English, and has even gone so far as to state that he resented his father being English

172
rather than “American” (Sutton, 47), Williams nonetheless describes his father’s
journey to the United States as trans-American emigration rather than one that was trans-
Atlantic.
William George did not leave the Dominican Republic until he married Elena in
1882 and both moved to Rutherford that same year, a year before William Carlos was
born. Williams recalls that guests to the Williams household were either his
grandmother’s English friends or Elena’s friends and relatives from the West Indies or
Caribbean (Auto. 14). In addition, Williams notes that his mother spoke little English in
his early childhood, and that his father spoke better Spanish “than most Spaniards” (15).
Spanish was the primary language spoken in the Williams household, and thus it was the
first language that the Williams brothers—William Carlos and Edgar—learned to speak,
although Williams claims that he also heard French spoken in his home when he was
growing up (15).
The importance of language cannot be understated, for language is one of the
primary links (if not the primary link) to cultural affiliation and ethnicity. The
Williamses’ bilingualism is also intertwined with biculturalism, especially for the
Williams brothers who found themselves to be the sons of immigrants and also first
generation “Americans.” Throughout the life of William Carlos, language becomes the
site of cultural affirmation as well as that of cultural repudiation—a point that I will
revisit and expand later in this chapter. Williams describes his father as being fluent in
both English and Spanish, although Spanish was the principle language spoken in
William George’s workplace at the Florida Water Perfume Company:

173
It was an office in which Spanish was the language spoken among the
staff. My father spoke Spanish quite as easily as he spoke English; he
would never have been employed there if it had been otherwise. So that
when I was a child Spanish was the language spoken in the household
except by Mrs. Wellcome, my father’s mother, who when there was need
of it, employed what was called español de cocina, pig Spanish, which
was not pretty to hear. (Yes, Mrs. Williams 4)

With Spanish being the primary language in the Williams household, and Emily
Wellcome’s English being peripheral yet present, Williams describes the linguistic
blurring that he first illustrates with the language triangulation described in “Dedication
for a Plot of Ground.” By extension, linguistic blurring signals the blurring of cultural
and even national borderlines and points of identification.
Williams continues to explore the blurring of cultural boundaries and the tension
between nature and nurture, or the tension between essentialism and cultural/identitarian
malleability with “Adam”—a central poem in his 1936 collection, Adam & Eve & the
City. This biographical poem casts his father William George as the primordial man.
Note, in particular, how Williams not only places “Adam” in the landscape, but also
makes him of the very environment by stripping him of his name and instead using the
pronoun “he” until the proper noun, “Adam” emerges in the fifth stanza:
“Adam”
He grew up by the sea
on a hot island
inhabited by negroes—mostly.
There he built himself
a boat and a separate room
close to the water
for a piano on which he practiced—
by sheer doggedness
and strength of purpose
striving

174
like an Englishman
to emulate his Spanish friend
and idol—the weather!

And there he learned
to play the flute—not very well—

From the very beginning of the poem there is tension between being of the environment
or not, of being outdoors “close to the water,” or indoors practicing the piano or playing
the flute—albeit poorly. With the inclusion of these musical instruments, Williams
highlights a marked European identity. The flute and the piano are instruments of
European origin and it is particularly telling that “he” fails to play at least one of the
instruments well, and must practice the other in order to play it and perform adequately.
In other words, he attempts to perform civility or the civil arts according to European
mores, but flounders. In fact, he’s pulled by the lure of the tropics or by his environment,
which places him in an identitarian crux. Marriage and duty later on enslave the thus far
nameless “Adam,” therefore recalling the space that he inhabited as paradise not only in
the physical or perceived sense, but also because it is devoid of man-made conventions.
The absence of social conventions and institutions, however, incite “Adam” to
attempt restraint, discipline, and “civility” through the forced practice of European
instruments, as if these are the instruments to ward off the spellbinding forces of the
tropics. The contrast between the Eden-like imagery and the imported instruments
suggests that self-policing is necessary when in the wildness of paradise. A certain
anxiety about going wild is palpable here. Moreover, the anxiety takes on a racial quality
with the immediate noting that the island is inhabited by “negroes—mostly.” The
emdash provides the space that lets the racial anxiety brew and later become a conflated

175
racial/sexual anxiety that is also gendered. In lingering on the “negroes” on the “hot”
island, Williams projects his desire and the anxiety such desire produces. The tension
here is between succumbing to the natural world, one’s natural desires, and restraint;
between Latin America and Europe. In fact, the tension and the anxiety are so great, that
an irrational grasping at Europe is evident even with the description of the weather on
this Latin American island which is described as Adam’s “Spanish friend.” It is as if the
European winds of change are what prompt Adam to choose a duty which will enslave
him for the rest of his life over hedonistic pleasure:
Thence he was driven—
out of Paradise—to taste
the death that duty brings
so daintily, so mincingly,
with such a noble air—
that enslaved him all his life
thereafter—

And he left behind
all the curious memories that come
with shells and hurricanes—
the smells
and sounds and glancing looks
that Latins know belong
to boredom and long torrid hours
and Englishmen
will never understand—whom
duty has marked
for special mention—with
a tropic of its own
and its own heavy-winged fowl
and flowers that vomit beauty
at midnight—

But the Latin has turned romance
to a purpose cold as ice.
He never sees
or seldom
what melted Adam’s knees

176
to jelly and despair—and
held them up pontifically—

With each stanza Adam’s separation from Paradise and its inhabitants grows. “Adam”
stands apart from the mass of “negroes” or “Latins”, and on one hand, cannot understand
what “Latins” take for granted. At the same time, he has a clearer vision (for, in essence,
he is an Englishman) and is thus more susceptible to the spell under which he’s fallen.
Adam is stuck between ecstasy and despair, a man caught in the middle culturally, and
who is pulled in different directions by his conflicting and competing desires. In trying to
escape the incantation of those dark “whisperings” that in reality are his own shushed and
repressed desires, Adam consciously tries to perform Englishness. This recalls Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness, but the “dark continent” is replaced here with the tropics, which are
just as dangerous because of the dark people who inhabit them, with their dark spells,
with strange magic in the air that pulls any European into an abyss filled with castrating
black women who prey on English boys:
Underneath the whisperings
of tropic nights
there is a darker whispering
that death invents especially
for northern men
whom the tropics
have come to hold.

It would have been enough
to know that never,
never, never, never would
peace come as the sun comes
in the hot islands.
but here was
a special hell besides
where black women lie waiting
for a boy—

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Naked on a raft
he could see the barracudas
waiting to castrate him
so the saying went—
Circumstances take longer—

The internal cultural tension and the cultural lacunae culminate with the sudden
appearance of the Spanish language without the relief of translation. Consider that the
untranslated line contains critical information that puts his very identity as an Englishman
in doubt, for here it is revealed that “Adam” has not lived in England since the age of
five. It is as if Spanish has become “Adam’s” primary language—which it has, but the
implications of cultural absorption are loaded in that untranslated line as well. And yet,
the stereotypical “coldness” of Northern blood is emphasized here as Williams hurries
past the Spanish-language line. Paradise quickly becomes “hell’s mouth” and Adam’s
passport out is his British passport—which is “always n his pocket.” But the passport is
never used to exit Paradise/Hell’s mouth within the confines of the poem. Adam instead
continues traveling throughout the Latin Americas, as he rides “muleback over Costa
Rica,” having to endure a wretched feast—black ants—the last descriptive in a line with
no punctuation. The last line of the stanza describing the insect pâtés enjambs onto the
next stanza where the immediate subjects are the “Latin ladies.” Are the “latin ladies”
the black ants that he devours?
But being an Englishman
though he had not lived in England
desde que tenia cinco años
he never turned back
but kept a cold eye always
on the inevitable end
never wincing—never to unbend—

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God’s handyman
going quietly into hell’s mouth
for a paper of reference—
fetching water to posterity
a British passport
always in his pocket—
muleback over Costa Rica
eating pâtés of black ants

And the Latin ladies admired him
and under their smiles
dartled the dagger of despair—
in spite of
a most thorough trial—
found his English heart safe
in the roseate steel. Duty
the angel
which with whip in hand …
--along the low wall of paradise
where they sat and smiled
and flipped their fans
at him—

He never had but the one home
staring Him in the eye
coldly
And with patience—
without a murmur, silently
a desperate, unvarying silence
to the unhurried last.
(CP 407-10)

The poem ends with and leaves unresolved the question of where Adam’s “one
home” is located. Is it England, whose coldness supposedly runs through his blood? Or
is it the very environment in which he’s lived since the age of five, the region that he
continuously travels through and that he never leaves, despite having a passport to
facilitate escape? The internal battle is not just between an identification with England or
with Latin America; implied is the battle between the civilized world and the wild heart

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of darkness that is both paradise and the mouth of hell, between disciplined rectitude
and the succumbing to unbridled desires. The conflation of sin and “duty” expel Adam
from paradise, but the questions remain: what is this duty that sets Adam’s eye on the
horizon? Is it the duty to perform his European roots, to not forget England, to resist the
pull of paradise? What sin does Adam commit to merit his expulsion from paradise? Is
it the sin of being English in Latin America or of yearning for the artifice of “civilized”
Europe while in a perfect paradise? Ultimately, in depicting a fragmented Adam, who
has a confused and conflicted sense of self and little cultural coherency, Williams
questions what makes us who we are and the extent to which our environment forms us.
Fundamental to Williams’s questions is the concept of cultural essence. Its
existence is ambiguous in the poem, for it is unclear whether Adam is called by the
essential pull of his English blood, or whether this identification with England, to
whatever extent, is inculcated and artificial. Although it is clear that the subject of the
“Adam” poem is William George, the questions about culture, essence, and identity also
apply to Williams himself. What makes him who he is? If he is a product of Rutherford,
New Jersey, then why does he continue to revisit the Caribbean and Latin America in his
writings, as if pulled by places he has only known through familial narratives? What
does it mean to grow up the son of immigrants in Rutherford? What does it mean to be
“American” in this context? Williams’s own questions, internal conflicts, and
identitarian contradictions begin to break down the myth of “America” and put it in its
proper context and nomenclature—in other words, to call out “America” as a landmass
comprised of more than merely the United States.

180
It’s curious that Williams chooses his father, cast as primordial man, to
explore Latin American culture, cultural pull, and by extension, his own fit in the
American hemisphere. Why does he not choose to explore this via his mother? Instead,
his poetic treatment of her is far different. Instead writing about the Spanish language in
the context of his mother, Williams first introduces the subject through his father. In his
writings and interviews, Williams states that his father found it easier to speak to Elena in
the Spanish language, although he was fluently bilingual, thus making the household one
that was Spanish-speaking. It is clear here that Williams’s Spanish was fluent enough to
distinguish between his parents’ fluent Spanish and his grandmother’s “pig Spanish.” It
is also clear that in terms of wielding language as a tool (or even a weapon), William
Carlos exhibits agency and ability, while his mother and his grandmother are cast as
linguistically limited and in a thus more passive role—perhaps even marginal. The
Williams household may have been one that was Spanish-speaking, but although
Williams introduces the subject through the abilities of his father, in later writings he
tends to link Spanish predominantly with his mother. Perhaps this linkage reflects some
of the class and cultural conflicts that he suffered as a first generation “American.”
Because Elena’s limited English fixed her as an immigrant, which in turn fixed Williams
as not quite “American,” it seems that his class and cultural tensions play out through a
conflation of language and his mother, for Elena, like the Spanish language, is a figure
that he both embraces and disavows throughout his writing career.
Elena Hoheb’s lineage is shrouded in mystery. While she identified as Puerto
Rican, she also embraced French and Dutch roots. Some biographers such as Robert
Coles point out a Jewish and Afro-Boricua ancestry that Elena attempts to downplay,

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while William Carlos Williams attempts to uncover it. Williams critic and biographer
Julio Marzán, for example, remarks that the “racial question” surfaces in Williams’s
biography of his mother, Yes, Mrs. Williams (1959). While Elena insists that her father’s
name was Hoheb and that he was only a half-brother to the Enriquezes, Williams notes
that Hoheb bore the Enriquez name until he grew up. Marzán extrapolates the meaning
of a name in this case, stating, “More commonly spelled ‘Henríquez,’ in Puerto Rico this
surname is legendarily associated with African blood. In her unusually long life Elena
undoubtedly dropped this tidbit of Puerto Rican lore” (49). Elena’s withholding of
information about Afro-Boricua ancestry speaks to Latin American attempts to “lighten”
and “whiten” a family history, a tradition very much in line with the embracing of
Bloodline Books as evidence of European ancestry, non-blackness , and ultimately, as
evidence of entitlement to the privileges of whiteness.

At the same time, Elena may have also felt the racial tension experienced by
many Puerto Ricans upon immigrating to the United States. As previously discussed,
some Puerto Ricans were frequently eyed suspiciously and taken for “mulattoes” because
of their olive skin. In other words, Puerto Ricans found that U.S. bodily readings

Figure 12: Elena Hoheb Williams

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conflicted with far more complex Puerto Rican (and generally Latin American)
bodily readings. The irony here is that a history of racial mixture or mestizaje in the
Latin Americas would have categorized Elena as mulatto and perhaps even black under
U.S. law.
8
Joel Williamson traces the history of “mulattoness” in the United States,
stating that the one-drop rule did not always prevail, for before 1850 “race relations in the
lower South partook of the character of race relations among its Latin American and
especially its West Indian neighbors,” in which free mulattoes “used their freedom to
pursue and achieve white culture (2, my italics). After 1850, however, there was
increased intolerance for miscegenation and mulattoes among whites (3). By the 1920s,
mulattoes were deemed black—a reflection and consequence of the hysteria that the
United States was experiencing over the color line. For example, according to Carla
Kaplan,
so-called ‘Americanization’ organizations were hell-bent on holding
people to strict racial categories and extending segregation’s legal and
economic reach by making all movement across racial lines seem both
undesirable and unnatural. Groups like the American Legion proclaimed
the ideal of an all-white, non-immigrant nation. (xv)

In short, upon forcibly becoming a United States citizen through the passing of the Jones-
Shafroth Act, Elena not only suffered the U.S. occupation/annexation of Puerto Rico, but
also was now caught in an identitarian and political crux. Suddenly, she found herself
having to straddle cultures and cultural definitions about who and what she was.
To a large extent, Elena’s disclosure about Afro-Boricua ancestry is akin to the
ex-coloured man’s disclosure to his wife and audience in James Weldon Johnson’s

8
The Puerto Rican population in 1887: Total population = 798,656, of whom 474,933
were whites, 246,647 mulattoes and 76,905 negroes.

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Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1913), in which there is almost an
uncontrollable compulsion to confess or purge oneself of “the truth.” It is difficult to say
whether Elena’s disclosure hints at a moment of regret—a moment common to nearly all
passing narratives—or if it is merely a statement of fact. On one hand, after living in the
United States and realizing that U.S. mulattoes who had a similar racial mix as hers
(Nella Larsen, for example, was Danish and West Indian) were categorized as black, and
thus suffered Jim Crow and segregation laws, Elena must have experienced some guilt,
anger, and shame, along with confusion. On the other hand, there is something
recuperative about Elena’s disclosure. Her disclosure of an Afro-Boricua lineage,
suggests a defiant assertion of a Latin American (and specifically Puerto Rican) identity,
and all the mestizaje/racial mixture that said identity implies. This is not to say that she
did not harbor racial and even racist anxiety. On the contrary, her careful and cryptic
revelation of this information to her son suggests that she meant this information for her
son’s ears only, and did not anticipate that it would later be offered up for public
consumption.
Williams is never explicit about when, specifically, Elena divulged her secrets to
him. It is clear, however, that he held onto her secrets until she was dead. Nonetheless,
these were Elena’s secrets and we must ask why Williams then chose to reveal his
mother’s racial confession to the world. The exposure of this information—information
that Elena deemed delicate and worthy of familial silence and secrecy—displays some of
the strange animosity Williams had toward his mother, as well as his desire for self-
exposure. In his autobiography, for example, Williams describes the joys of publication,
stating, “To get a book published! What a marvelous thing it was to me. My own

184
spillings. What else did I have? Nothing but a wife, two sons, a father dying of
cancer, a mother who was, unquestionably, a foreigner to me” (159). Both Williams and
his father pronounced Elena a difficult woman due to her passive-aggressive behavior
and her involvement with spiritualism.
9
Williams’s comment, however, seems to ignore
her difficult character and instead highlights her unknowability, her foreignness—
whether in the context of culture, language, or character. Elena never became fluent in
the English language, and thus her status as a foreigner reflected on Williams’s status as
well. Therefore, Elena did not allow Williams to play with his identity at will but fixed
him at best as a hyphenated “American,” at worst as a foreign other who had no
possibility of being perceived or accepted as “American.” Consequently, Elena limits the
extent to which Williams can invent and perform culture and identity, thereby squelching
his ability to play with and perform his identity at will.
No doubt the comments of Williams’s controversial friend, Ezra Pound, who was
born in Hailey, Idaho, but was brought up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, also fanned the
flames of discontent, as Williams seems to suggest in his autobiography:
Ezra’s insistence has always been that I never paid proper stress in my
life upon the part played in it by my father rather than my mother. Oh, the
woman of it is important, he would acknowledge, but the form of it, if not
the drive, came unacknowledged by me from the old man, the
Englishman. I’d question that sometimes, about his being English in that
Pop grew up in a Caribbean island surrounded by a semitropical sea rather
than near the Baltic. Yet he was, one had to acknowledge, at heart a
northerner. He was a stickler for fundamentals. (91)

9
Although Emily Wellcome also dabbled with spiritualism and the supernatural, Elena’s
experiences with the spiritual world are more carefully documented by Williams and
were cause for embarrassment for him and his brother. Elena’s spiritualism could be
linked with her hidden and suppressed racial identity, for spiritualism in the Caribbean is
linked with Afro-Caribbean cultures and religions.

185

Pound’s comments, as relayed by Williams, are rife with stereotypes about Latin
America, the Caribbean, and the people who inhabit these places. For instance, in
pronouncing that the form of Williams’s life, including how he has formed his life and
how he has thus been driven to form it, is directly attributable to William George’s
English blood, Pound also pronounces the superiority of Northern European blood, thus
parroting the ideologies of immigration policies of the time. Implied in that statement are
the ideas that no real value or good can come from Elena’s Latin American stock, for
Latin Americans, in being deemed a mixed race, were often categorized as a mongrel
race in need of being civilized and educated.
10
. According to Marzán, people in the
United States viewed Spain as the “arch-competitor in the enterprise of discovery,
conquest, and worship,” and it was also associated with “cruel and rapacious monarchies,
Papists, and the Inquisition” (124-25). The Spanish language fared no better, for it was
thought of as
racially and geographically obnoxious, a Mediterranean language with
close proximity to Moorish African savagery, spoken by a people whose
blood was mixed with Arab, Jewish and (in the Americas) African and
Indian blood: any way you grabbed it, you came up with sensuality and
sinfulness. A language of a people so daring, impure, and physically
expressive could produce nothing spiritual and eve less intellectual. (125)

Pound expressed these sentiments to Williams on several occasions and in different ways.
Despite Pound’s facility with languages, Marzan states that Pound disdained the Spanish
language (125), on one occasion giving Williams two volumes of a four-volume set of

10
The “darker races” have typically been depicted as being wild and uncontrolled in their
emotions, as in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), which depicts “dark”
wildness as well as the dangers of its contagion. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847),
Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the insane Bertha’s geneology is traced to the
West Indies.

186
Spanish poetry for which he had no use. Declaring this action tantamount to an
insult, Marzán remarks that, for Williams, the insult fueled some of his work, such as an
essay entitled “A Letter” to Reed Whittemore,” in which he included the parenthetical
remark “(read your Spanish lit.:’just savages’ E.P.)” (125).
Despite being aware of Pound’s disdain and prejudices, however, Williams does
not dismiss Pound’s comments about Elena’s inconsequential role in his artistic life.
Neither does he dismiss outright Pound’s elevation of William George’s ancestry over
Elena’s. Williams first questions Pound’s assumptions about William George’s culture,
but he ends by capitulating to Pound’s stereotypes and assumptions about
cultural/racial/ethnic essence, as he acknowledges his father’s fastidious nature, which he
ends up attributing to Northern European racial essence. Elena or “the woman,” does not
fare well in Pound’s assessment. Neither does she fare well in Williams’s narrative of
said assessment. These are only a few of Williams’s disparaging comments about his
mother, which thus exhibit the contentious relationship between the two. It is no wonder
that he so publicly disclosed racial secrets that Elena meant to keep within familial
parameters.
Williams addresses his uneasy relationship with his mother in his poetry. “Eve,”
the poem that naturally follows “Adam” in Adam & Eve & the City, has nothing to do
with “Eve’s” or Elena’s place in a paradise lost. Instead, Elena, as a placeholder for
Latin America, is paradise lost, as I discuss later, and Williams’s feelings toward Latin
America, which vacillate from unfamiliarity to disdain, surface through lines that are
seemingly only about mother-son tension:

187
“Eve”
Pardon my injuries
now that you are old—
Forgive me my awkwardnesses
my impatience
and short replies—
I sometimes detect in your face
a puzzled pity for me
your son—
I have never been close to you
--mostly your own fault;
in that I am like you.
It is as though
you looked down from above
at me—not
with what they would describe
as pride but the same
that is in me: a sort
of shame that the world
should see you as I see you,
a somewhat infantile creature—
without subtlety—
defenseless.

The line, “in that I am like you,” manages to align the persona with “Eve,” or Williams
with Elena. At the same time, the emphasis on the one trait they have in common creates
a great distance between mother and son, since this line implies that this is the only thing
that mother and son share; in everything else they are at odds. In particular, the persona
confesses feeling shame toward “Eve” for being infantile and, in fact, defenseless and
weak.
And because you are defenseless
I too, horribly,
Take advantage of you,
(as you of me)
my mother, keep you
imprisoned—in
the name of protection

188
when you want so wildly to escape
as I wish also
to escape and leap into chaos
(where Time has
not yet begun)

The above lines are not just about Elena and her son’s relationship. If Williams has all
along identified the Spanish language with Elena, and if through language he identifies
Elena with the Latin Americas, then the conflation of the two in the above stanza reveals
his own patronizing sentiments toward both. Moreover, the stanza illustrates the uneven
power relations between the United States and the Latin Americas that informed U.S.
policies such as the Monroe Doctrine and Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the doctrine.
Note the lines, “you are defenseless” and “I too, horribly, / Take advantage of you” …
“[I] keep you / imprisoned—in / the name of protection.” All this echoes the language of
U.S. socio-political policy and establishes the uneven relationship. In identifying Elena
with the Latin Americas, Williams sees their weaknesses as analogous. Elena’s dabbling
with spiritualism can also be read as culture-specific and can even be racialized. It
represents the unknown, the exotic, the frightening; for Williams, it represents the
shameful. It is an interesting co-mingling of shame and love, in which the persona wants
to protect “Eve” from shaming herself (and him) publicly.
What follows is a shift that conveys Williams’s real shame over public spectacles,
while it also indicates a spiritualism that is not only regional, but also racialized. To a
large extent, communication with the dead goes beyond language; it’s something
altogether incomprehensible that produces fear of and fear for the subject in question—
again, a mirroring of U.S. xenophobia. It follows then, that the negotiation of such fear

189
results in a wielding of masculine political power that is thinly disguised in the
language of shame and imposed protection:
I realize why you wish
to communicate with the dead—
And it is again I
who try to hush you
that you shall not
make a fool of yourself
and have them stare at you
with natural faces—
Trembling, sobbing
and grabbing at the futile hands
till a mind goes sour
watching you—and flies off
sick at the mumbling
from which nothing clearly
is ever spoken—

It not so much frightens
as shames me. I want to protect
you, to spare you the disgrace—
seeing you reach out that way
to self-inflicted emptiness—

As if you were not able
to protect yourself—and me too—if we did not
have to be so guarded—

Williams layers resentment about the collapse of the parental role with shame in the last
lines of the above stanza. The speaker in the poem resents having to take care of his
mother rather than she being able to protect him, indicating the shameful defenselessness
described at the beginning of the poem. The complex mix of shame, resentment over
Eve’s inability to take care of herself in the world, along with the impulse to protect and
even police Eve, is particularly interesting in that it mirrors a similar complicated
frustration common in the children of immigrants. Limited in their abilities to speak a

190
new language or navigate around a new country upon emigration, newly arrived
immigrants are often at the mercy of their children for translation and protection.
Inevitably, guilt arises, and with it, the persona’s promise of immortality through letters;
this is his method by which he seeks expiation:
Therefore I make this last plea:

Forgive me
I have been a fool—
(and remain a fool)
if you are not already too blind
too deaf, too lost in the past
to know or to care—
I will write a book about you—
making you live (in a book!)
as you still desperately want to live—
to live always--unforgiving

Note that the stanza, which begins with a plea for forgiveness, ends with an
accusation and pronouncement of Eve as unforgiving—an accusation that betrays
projection and says more about the persona’s resentment than about Eve’s willingness to
forgive. If “Eve” or Elena does indeed embody or represent the Latin Americas, then in
that embodiment Williams takes out his shame about U.S. –Latin America power
relations, the uneven relationship between the respective inhabitants, and his own
position in this power struggle. He creates distance from Elena by positioning himself as
her protector and police, and further distances himself and the reader through the sudden
insertion of untranslated French. As opposed to the way Williams associates “Adam”
with the untranslated line in Spanish, Williams links “Eve” with untranslated line in
French in the eighth stanza:

191
I’ll give you brandy
or wine
whenever I think you need it
(need it!)
because it whips up
your mind and your senses
and brings color to your face
—to enkindle that life
too coarse for the usual,
that sly obscenity
that fertile darkness
in which passion mates—
reflecting
the lightnings of creation—
and the moon—
“C’est la vieillesse
inexorable qu’arrive!”
(CP 413)

It is noteworthy that the language associated with “Eve” is French, for this is one of the
languages associated specifically with Elena and her brother, Carlos. This is a strange
triangulated relationship between the three (Elena, Carlos, and William Carlos), in which
Elena has molded her son to follow in Carlos’s footsteps, at least in terms of education
and profession. Elena pushed her son to become a doctor because her brother was a
successful surgeon. Williams, who was interested in the arts and forestry because they
garnered him solitude, must have resented Elena’s prodding and ultimate success at
determining his profession. Could Williams have retaliated by disclosing the racial
family secrets even if in code? French is not only a language associated with the
European country; it is also associated with colonized Caribbean islands in which race
mixture has taken place. Consider that leading up to the untranslated lines, Williams uses
coded language such as, “[it] brings color to your face / to enkindle that life too coarse
for the usual,” followed by a reference to “that fertile darkness” (my italics). To end in

192
French then, may associate the Hohebs with Europe at first reading, but upon reading
more closely, the effect is that the language becomes racialized. The European linguistic
link thus becomes “tainted” with blackness, suggesting not only the slavery and
miscegenation historic to many Caribbean islands, but also the African ancestry that
Elena had spoken about cryptically and had confided to Williams.
Williams’s sly and coded disclosure is a wielding of power, as is his refusal to
translate the lines in French for the reader. The lack of translation is an act of linguistic
defiance and at the same time it is central to Williams’s power play with code and
functions as his inside joke. The persona in the poem has power over an aging “Eve”—
he gives her wine, not when she asks for it, not when she wants it, but whenever he thinks
she needs it; she’s at his mercy and age/aging has contributed to this; age/time has
become her nemesis and has cooperated with the persona, who has over time acquired
power over her. French may be Eve’s beloved language, but it is the persona who uses it
to declare her defeat against time: old age has arrived, so once again, the persona and
time have worked together and have used language against “Eve.” Moreover, this last
line of the breathless stanza brings with it a finality over a power struggle between Eve
and the persona, Eve and time, Eve and mortality. Eve is mortal—painfully mortal, and
it’s almost as if the persona (or Williams) takes glee in her mortality, in the glaring reality
of mortality and the body:
One would think
you would be reconciled with Time
instead of clawing at Him
that way, terrified
in the night—screaming out
unwilling, unappeased
and without shame—

193

Might He not take that wasted carcass, crippled
and deformed, that ruined face
sightless, deafened—
the color gone—that seems
always listening, watching, waiting
ashamed only
of that single and last
degradation—

The persona in the poem asks for forgiveness only then to hack away at Eve’s body and
at her mortality. He takes particular glee from her losing battle with time and at the
physical weakening and decomposition of her body. Despite the persona’s plea for
forgiveness from his mother, his acrimony quickly returns and taints the final stanza:

No. Never. Defenseless
still you would keep
every accoutrement
which He has loaned
till it shall be torn from
your grasp, a final grip
from those fingers
which cannot hold a knife
to cut the meat but which
in a hypnotic ecstasy
can so wrench a hand held out
to you that our bones
crack under the unwonted pressure—

Consider that the first line of the final stanza begins with the words of negation and
defeat: “No. Never. Defenseless […].” While the persona describes Eve’s fight for life
in her weakened state, she ironically finds strength and draws new breath when in a
hypnotic trance and while stepping momentarily into the world of the dead. In the end,
this poem ceases being all about Eve, and instead becomes about the persona … or

194
William Carlos Williams. It ends with a complaint about Eve’s wrenching grip, the
pressure she puts upon others so that they crack under it, which conveys the burden that
she is while in between spaces—the world of the living and the world of the dead, and
perhaps even in between cultures. Strangely enough, she gathers her strength from the
dead and wields that strength against the living who surround her.
Cracking under “unwonted pressure” may result in the passive–aggressive hinting
about family secrets, but on the other hand, Williams’s disclosures have much to do with
his own identitarian negotiations. Williams delayed three decades in writing his mother’s
biography, Yes, Mrs. Williams, which was finally published in 1959 (four years before
Williams’s own death) and is a mixture of narrative and disconnected anecdotes. Perhaps
he saw fit to disclose the family secrets after her death, or perhaps it was the
sociopolitical climate of the time that compelled him to further assert his Puerto Rican
heritage, to hint at his family’s racial mixture, and to travel to Puerto Rico for the first
time. Martin Luther King succeeded in desegregating the buses of Montgomery in 1956
and West Side Story opened on Broadway in 1957, a play, that humanized Puerto Ricans,
that showed the plights and tensions associated with immigration, and that explored the
ironies of assimilation when coming from a land that had been a commonwealth of the
United States for nearly sixty years at that point. The staging of West Side Story while
the civil rights movement was well underway in the United States must have been
particularly relevant for Williams, who could identity with the difficulties of Puerto
Rican immigration and the pressure to assimilate, and who also felt it necessary to hint at
African ancestry quite publicly. Marzan speculates that, “Williams’ once obscure and

195
exotic background had become newsworthy. The time seemed to be right for a self-
confrontation” (77).
But if the time was now right, late in Williams’s life, it had not been quite right
earlier on, as he vacillated between prominently placing the very Spanish “Carlos” in
between his first and last name, and being the all-“American” boy next door. Sanchez-
Gonzalez suggests that too much freight has been put on Williams’s middle name by
scholars such as Ahearn and Marzán who wish to explore Williams’s “dark” side.
“Rendering his Puerto Rican and Dominican background as the dark, exotic, and
mysterious side of Williams,” Sanchez-Gonzalez argues, “is a perennial device among
Williams scholars, usually couched in essentialist flourishes on his middle name” (256).
Sanchez-Gonzalez rightly points out the scholarly preoccupation with the exotic.
Ahearn, for example, states that in choosing to announce his tripartite name to the world,
Williams identifies himself as both Anglo-Saxon and Spanish, thereby announcing “that
element of ‘wildness’ to the world” (2). While Ahearn rightly pinpoints Williams’s
reluctance to be categorized, it is unfortunate that he misidentifies and categorizes Elena
as “Spanish,” especially in light of her politics and of her being thrust into U.S.
citizenship after the Spanish-American War.
Yet, perhaps Sanchez-Gonzalez is too hasty in dismissing the significance of the
“Carlos” in William Carlos Williams, for “Carlos” signifies two significant elements: (1)
the important role that Elena’s brother, Carlos Hoheb, played in Williams’s life; (2)
Williams’s choice to present himself publicly as “William Carlos” and what this meant in
terms of his identitarian play. What’s in a name? Perhaps many of Williams’s
identitarian preoccupations. But Marzán also points out a third issue, which is the strange

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scholarly silence surrounding the middle name: “Where Carlos has yet to figure is in
any serious exegesis of Williams’s work, in which his Hispanic background has routinely
been perceived as being of secondary or marginal interests” (3). Perhaps then, the issue
with Williams’s middle name is not that too much freight has been put upon it, but
instead that it has not been explored with enough complexity and nuance to date.
In 1882, Elena met William George in the home of her brother, Carlos. While it’s
clear that Williams was named after his uncle, his Uncle Carlos would also affect the
trajectory of his life, since, as Marzán notes, Williams “had wanted to become an artist,
but succumbed to his parents’ wishes to emulate his namesake Uncle Carlos and become
a physician” (11). In a 1950 interview, Williams describes his uncle, Carlos Hoheb, as
his mother’s only brother and “beau idéal.” He states, “I was named after him, so that,
well, I was rather pushed into medicine rather than choosing it myself. My own choice
was to be a forester, strange to say. Yeah. I had no desire to be among people” (Gerber
& Wallace, 5-6). Although Williams peppers his autobiography with inconsequential
appearances by his Uncle Carlos, most of which linger upon Carlos’s adventures with
women—rumors that reached his ears throughout his childhood, it is clear that Carlos
Hoheb affected his namesake’s life. This fact then, begs closer examination of seemingly
trivial anecdotes.
One story, as Williams reports it, situates Hoheb in Paris where he studied
medicine, married a Frenchwoman, and fathered her three children. All does not end
well, as Williams narrates: “On his return to Puerto Rico, the gal took one look,
abandoned the whole outfit on the islands and fled back to Paris, where she disappeared”
(Auto. 37). Whether this story is true or mere gossip does not matter, for the message to a

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young Williams was the same regardless: this was a cautionary tale about the
consequences of visually disclosing one’s origins, and more specifically, about the
consequences of such disclosures and introductions when one’s origins were based in the
Latin Americas, which were viewed as underdeveloped and primitive.
The second story intersects the political and the amorous. According to Williams,
Hoheb fled Port au Prince, Haiti in the early 1880s, only just being able to escape on a
United States gunboat as revolutionists marched in at the far end of the street. A United
States officer warned Hoheb about the oncoming revolutionaries and announced that it
was his last chance to flee, at which time Hoheb sent his second wife and nine children
ahead to the gunboat, as he went into his pharmacy and swept up all the cash he could.
“Everything had been left just as it lay, food, silver, clothes, surgical equipment,
everything. And so to Panama where they spent the rest of their lives” (Auto. 314). This
strange anecdote that begins about almost getting caught in the middle of geopolitical
crossfire, instead becomes one about the consequences of Hoheb’s infidelities, and
ultimately, about cultural identity and the role language plays, when Williams curiously
adds:
That is what comes of an amorous disposition! For had his wife Rita not
objected to Carlos’ popularity with the ladies, he would not have left Santa
Isabel [Puerto Rico] to go to Haiti out of spite, and so, first-rate surgeon
that he was, he would not have had to subject them all to such outrages.
No doubt but for the fact that he was more French than Spanish and
adored the language of his beloved Paris, he would not have been attracted
there. (Auto. 314)

Williams recalls this story as he stands on a dock in Port au Prince, when he visits
Hispañola for the first time en route to the Dominican Republic and then Puerto Rico in

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1956. The connotations of identifying as more French than Spanish here are multi-
layered. In conjunction with the description of Hoheb’s “amorous disposition,” the
identification with France over Spain implies the rejection of Catholicism in lieu of a
more hedonistic treatment of sex. Most importantly, however, is the very fact that neither
Puerto Rico nor any other Latin American country are places with which Williams
immediately identifies Hoheb. In this passage, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Panama are places
Hoheb inhabits, not places with which he identifies culturally. Even in the negation of a
“Spanish” identity, Williams identifies Hoheb with Europe and linguistically, specifically
with France.
Francophilia in the Latin Americas was not uncommon. Decades after gaining
independence from Spain, many Latin American writers and artists sought to establish art
and literature that was specifically Latin American. Instead of looking toward Spain as a
source of influence, many Latin Americans looked toward France instead.
11
Yet,
Williams’s linking of Hoheb with France does more than to point him out as a
Francophile and a product of his times; it also functions to culturally stratify Hoheb from
his fellow Puerto Ricans. In fact, linking Hoheb with France is intraculturally
performative in that it signals that Carlos (and Elena) were educated in Europe and given

11
Despite the Latin American trend that looked toward Europe, and more predominantly
toward France for intellectual, artistic, and literary influence, there was domestic
intellectual debate about what Latin American artistic/cultural production should be and a
call for the rejection of European influences. According to Doris Sommer, for example,
the Venezuelan intellectual, Andrés Bello argued that it made no sense to replace
Spanish habits with French philosophical models or fads in the pursuit of Latin American
progress. In fact, Bello asserted that “young radicals like José Victorino Lastarria and
Jacinto Chacón were leading themselves and their students astray by courting foreign
models, French models in this case, which focused on the ‘philosophical’ patterns of
history” (8).

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a specifically French (Parisian) education. This detail publicly performs socio-
economic class distinction and even racial separation, for in discussing Hoheb in the
context of European identification and glossing past Puerto Rico, Haiti, or Panama,
Williams glosses past Latin American issues of race entirely. Instead, with the European
references, Williams signals a racial and class difference from the Puerto Ricans that
implies European blood devoid of African ancestry. Nonetheless, the specter of
blackness is present in the passage, and subliminally informs the amorous desires of
Hoheb and his namesake.
The amorous aspect of this last anecdote contains the elements of compromise
and acquiescence—compromise specifically being something that, Marzán asserts, was a
leitmotif in Williams’s life. Marzán argues that aside from succumbing to his parents’
wishes to pursue a medical career, Williams also compromised the locus of his amorous
desires. “He lusted after dark women, but married the white flower Florence. On the
other hand,” Marzán muses, “Williams refused to resign himself to having to actually
compromise anything. After he became a doctor, he spread his time between his family,
his patients, and his writing; even though married, he appeared to satisfy his lusts
surreptitiously—or at least vicariously” (11-12). Part of this certainly seems supported
by Williams’s reminisces upon his medical school days: “Why, I remember once as a
medical student falling in love with the corpse of a young negress, a ‘high yaller,’ lying
stripped on the dissecting table before me” (Auto. 55). In the context of his memoir, this
is the only time that Williams expresses lust or love for a woman so explicitly or with
such little complication. Never does he express himself with such unadulterated lust

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toward another woman, including his wife, thus betraying his secret fetishization of
the corpse of his dead and buried ancestry.
One could only wonder if Williams’s desires can solely be expressed toward a
dead, black woman. This expression of lust and desire toward a corpse is particularly
poignant in light of how Williams spoke about lust in a 1960 interview. When asked
about critics who had classified him as “a primitive,” Williams stated that they were
mistaken, using his control over sex as an example: “I was very sexually successful, as a
young man, but I did not believe in going so far that I lost my head. I wanted always to
be conscious. I didn’t want to indulge in sex so much that I lost my head” (Sutten, 55).
For Williams, the way one goes about the business of sex differentiates the “primitives”
from the civilized. If what Williams expresses in his medical school anecdote is a
suppressed desire for blackness that can only be expressed about and toward a dead,
black woman, then perhaps the inconsequential story that introduces Carlos Hoheb to the
reader is not so unworthy of attention after all. The only appearance by Hoheb in the
following story is in the line, “One Fourth of July, when Uncle Carlos and my cousins
Carlito and Raquel were here on a visit—I was nine or ten years old—we children were
playing with a toy cannon, loading it with black powder, hammering a wad of damp
paper down the muzzle, then putting the fuse from a firecracker into the touch hole to set
it off” (Auto. 18). Predictably, the young Williams almost blinds himself when he leans
his face in to see why the cannon has not fired, and the explosion flares out the touch hole
into his face:
I screamed that I was blind! My face was peppered with powder burns
but, by the greatest of good luck, only the whites of my eyes were
affected. No infection ensued. For weeks after I lay with bandages about

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my face while Raquel with a needle picked the powder grains from my
cheeks, nose and forehead. For years there was one black spot on the
sclera of my left eye between the iris and the inner canthus, but this too
finally disappeared. (Auto. 18)

Although Carlos Hoheb appears only peripherally in this anecdote, his presence signifies
his impact on his nephew’s life. It cannot go unnoticed that on this Independence Day, in
which William Carlos is almost permanently marked, his uncle, the doctor takes no part
in his healing. Instead, it is Williams’s cousin Raquel who picks gunpowder from his
face. It is as if Hoheb’s very existence restricts the extent to which Williams can be free
at all, or even the extent to which he can see and determine the trajectory of his own life.
The effects of inheriting his uncle’s name, however, also carry the weight of ancestry,
race, and history—whether Williams is blind to this familial history or not. A
metaphorical reading of the anecdote suggests that Williams is marked by a racial history
about which he had been blind. Blind to racial history or not, however, ancestry is ever
present and always leaves its mark. Consider that only the whites of Williams’s eyes are
affected and that for years, one black spot remains permanently imbedded in his eye …
until it disappears. Williams’s seemingly insignificant anecdote actually encodes layers
of meaning about the burden of ancestry. Metaphorically, it is a testimony of the fusion
of conscious and unconscious desires to both acknowledge and obliterate the “black
stain” of race.
It is odd that Williams finds so little to say about Flo in his memoir, while he
describes the other women in his life—his mother, the dead, black woman—so much
more vividly. Williams’s 1923 poem, “From a Book” reveals perhaps why that is, with
the lines, “I would rather look down / into the face of / a bed of portulaca / than into the

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level / black eyes / of the virgin whom I love” (CP 248-49). The portulaca, being a
tropical flower, metaphorically represents Williams’s preference for things more tropical
than his black-eyed virgin—an odd mixture of black and snowy purity that also
symbolizes his suppressed and sublimated desires. The public act of marriage to a white
woman contrasts sharply with his private and lustful desires for a dead black woman and,
in the context of his memoir, the white woman he married is more a white blur and a
placeholder for whiteness. Williams’s own 1916 poem, “Naked,” suggests his
sublimated desires for a naked, dead woman, even while initially associating her with the
whiteness of snow:
“Naked”

What fool would feel
His cheeks burn
Because of the snow?
Would he call it
By a name, give it
Breasts, features,
Bare limbs?
Would he call it
A woman?
(Surely then he would be
A fool.)

And see her,
Warmed with the cold,
Go upon the heads
Of creatures
Whose faces lean
To the ground?

The persona in the poem creates “a woman” from inanimate, snowy whiteness,
who is hardly whole. Instead, the persona’s attempt to create something living from the
inanimate, results in the haphazard construction of a female from fragments that are

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randomly thrown together. This synecdoche, in which a mound of sexualized parts
(breasts, bare limbs) stands in for a nameless female, speaks to the persona’s (and thus
Williams’s) inability to imagine the woman whole. Instead, only pieces of female parts
are able to elicit the sensual and the sexual here. Moreover, this mound of body parts,
this partitioned snow queen, recalls Williams’s first love—the dead woman on a slab—
who, according to Williams’s own projected lust, is warmed by the cold, thus being able
to inspire love and lust in him. As Susan McCabe attests, “Williams’s assumes visual
‘authority’ over the [female] body,” and in so doing, projects his own unconscious
desires, for McCabe states, “his poems insistently propose a male spectator disarrayed by
his own desires” (93). The suggestion of death intermingled with the projected desire for
life and animation continues in the following stanza:
Would he watch
The compassion of
Her eyes,
That look, now up
Now down,
To the turn of
The wind and
The turn of
The shivering minds
She touches—
Motionless—troubled?

On the surface, the metaphor of snow for the object of lust and desire (or vice versa)
suggests mere play with images of nature or pastoral thematics. Yet, Williams returns to
the imagery of death, recalling the dead woman, when he describes fluttering eyes only to
linger upon and end the stanza with the word, “motionless.” How does snow penetrate
and touch the mind? She can’t, unless she’s not only personified, but also imagined as

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the sublimated stand-in for the forbidden and imagined object of desire. She
penetrates the private realm of the mind, but the last word of the stanza—“troubled”—
remains an ambiguous descriptive. Who or what is troubled? The shivering minds?
Williams leaves the interpretation open, and constructs the last line of the stanza so that
the word, “troubled,” functions as a bridge from the private realm of the mind and the
imaginary to the self-conscious awareness of being in public, among townspeople and
family:
I ask you—
I ask you, my towns people,
What fool is this?

Would he forget
The sight of
His mother and
His wife
Because of her?—
Have his heart
Turned to ice
That will not soften?

Particularly interesting here is the linking of the wife and mother, not only to each
other, but also to the rest of the eyeing public. He rhetorically asks the public for its
judgment on his amorous musings—musings that escalate to the point that the persona
lingers on the possibility of amnesia. Amnesia is convenient here because it forgoes
agency and responsibility for one’s actions. Rife in this stanza is the avoidance of
conscious and deliberate action. Instead of choosing to leave his wife and mother for the
object of his desire, instead of consciously choosing and taking appropriate actions, the
persona does nothing. In fact, something is done to him. The ice (or icy) maiden causes
the amnesia and she turns his heart to ice. But if this imagined female renders the

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persona powerless in his own imagination, the wife and mother render him powerless
in his everyday life, and thus the relinquishing of power in his fantasy is merely an
extension or mirroring of his relinquishing of power and responsibility in his real life.
We must ask then, why the wife and mother are significant here.
A psychoanalytic reading of Williams’s poem suggests that his mother and his
wife, Flossy, are significant and intertwined in how Williams harnesses his desires.
Williams’s desire for the dead black woman is complicated by his mother’s confession
about her (and his) ancestry, and particularly by a pact of silence implied in his lengthy
silence about the subject. By keeping his mother’s disclosure about their racial
background secret until after her death, Williams is locked into a pact and coerced into
performativity. In keeping the pact, in keeping the secret, he tacitly acknowledges the
shame in their racial background, and also succumbs to the pressure of suppressing his
own desires, for in entering a pact of silence about race, he also accepts the assumption of
blackness as a shameful burden, and ultimately, as a taboo in terms of desire. In negating
his desire and in performing “whiteness” Williams marries white—the perceived cultural
and racial antithesis of black, as if this will whiten him either culturally, or even
perceptually on a physical level, just as it occurs with the “Ex-Coloured Man” in James
Weldon Johnson’s novel, as I discuss in chapter one. Suppressed desire and sublimation
are evident throughout the poem, evident with the conflation of a dead, naked woman and
snow. It is not until the final lines of the poem that Williams separates snow and female,
and thus the persona exhibits a hint of conscious desire that is not mired in metaphors:
What!
Would he see a thing
Lovelier than

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A high-school girl,
With the skill
Of Venus
To stand naked—
Naked on the air?

Falling snow and
You up there—waiting.
(CP 54-56)

Just as Venus emerges from the foam, the beloved here is finally extricated from
the weight of being hidden in metaphors, and emerges from the snow. Yet, although she
is now described as more than a mound of limbs, as more than falling snow, she is still
not of flesh and blood. Her final depiction, in fact, is romanticized to the point of being
unreal and unattainable, always out of reach. The comparison of the woman to Venus,
not only makes a mythological goddess of love out of her; it also situates her in the
context of Western standards of beauty. Moreover, although the female in the poem
finally has some subjectivity in that she is referred to as “you” in the last line, rather than
as snow, she and “falling snow” are still intermingled. The association suggests purity,
compounded further by the suggestion that she waits in the heavens “up there” for the
persona. No longer dead and buried in the ground, or dead and naked on a slab, she rises
to the heavens and now looks down upon mere mortals. She is in the sky with the falling
snow, co-mingled with white purity, because to desire naked blackness is taboo. The
“fourth of July/Uncle Carlos” anecdote is poignant here, for when Williams points out
that after the accident, only “the whites of [his] eyes were affected,” and that for years he
was left with one black spot in his eye, he says more about his suppressed desires than
what a surface reading of the anecdote divulges. Consider that the black spot in his eye,

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the blackness, finally disappears. In the context of his poetics, this is only possible
through his own attempts to suppress his desire for something (or someone) that has been
deemed undesirable.
Despite Williams’s unconscious suppression of his own desires and even his
ancestry, on a conscious level he rebels against the idea of “purity” and acknowledges the
hybrid nature of an “American” people. For example, in “XVIII” of Spring and All
(1923), he begins with the line, “The pure products of America / go crazy—” (CP 217),
and then proceeds to include, among the “pure products,” the mountain folk of Kentucky,
deaf-mutes, thieves, “devil-may-care men,” and filthy slatterns. Inarticulate,
undereducated, and without a sense of history and tradition, the pure products live in
poverty, ignorance, and are ultimately at the mercy of fate and of the moneyed.
Ultimately, Williams lingers upon the most vulnerable subject—a desolate girl—
during the second half of his poem. Reared by the state, sent out to work at the age of
fifteen as a domestic worker, and at the mercy of “rich young men with fine eyes” (CP
218), the young girl is a product of a marriage tinged “with a dash of Indian blood” (CP
217). Such are the “pure products of America,” and such is Williams’s desire to express
a more “exotic” ancestry than what “American” purity suggests, as well as his anxiety to
conceal it. Just as Williams introduced the object of his lust and desire as a mound of
body parts in “Naked,” Williams also describes the young girl in poem “XVIII” by her
body parts, such as her “broken / brain,” her “great / ungainly hips and flopping breasts”
(CP 218). Williams incorporates these body parts to comment on class stratification in
the United States: the girl’s “broken brain” tells the truth about the upper class for which
she works (perhaps “some doctor’s family” in the suburbs), and exposes the lascivious

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tendencies of the “rich young men with fine eyes” who hone in on and target socially
and economically vulnerable girls. Nonetheless, the girl’s “Indian” blood complicates
the reading of her body and body parts by racialzing the “broken brain,” the “ungainly
hips” and the “flopping breasts”—a depiction that is not only racial, but also racist and
stereotypical.
In “Naked,” Williams expresses suppressed and sublimated, lustful, and even
racializing desire through the fragmentation of female body parts, while in “XVIII” he
concentrates his political inclinations upon the coarsely racialized and sexualized body
parts of a girl of a lower socio-economic class—arguably, the most vulnerable member of
society. What both poems have in common is that, whether Williams expresses (and
suppresses) his libidinous desires or expresses wry observations and commentary about
class structures and “purity” in the United States, his poems are studies in his own
identitarian concerns and are, to differing degrees, self-reflexive, whether consciously or
not. The fact that his desires and crises converge with fragmented female body parts
reflects his power as a male spectator of the female body, and also, as McCabe puts it, the
masochistic enhancement of “the tropes of his own fragmentation” (94), thus blurring the
line between himself and the females he unconsciously desires or with which he socially
or ethnically identifies.

The Specter of Blackness: “I had visions of being lynched …”
According to Werner Sollors, “assimilation is the foe of ethnicity” (xiv).
Inversely, an assertion of ethnicity is the foe of assimilation. Williams vacillated between
these poles throughout his lifetime. The politics of ethnicity, however, must be explained

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in order to contextualize Williams’s dilemma as well as how he occasionally
performed racial passing. Prior to the 1920s, people in the United States were grouped
according to social Darwinist and eugenicist understandings of race, which posited racial
differences in intelligence, temperament, and sexuality. As Michael Omi and Howard
Winant note, “racial intermixture was seen as a sin against nature which would lead to the
creation of ‘biological throwbacks’” (15), a cautionary model that had some similarities
to the warning echoes of “biological throwbacks” in the casta system. Adherents of
Progressivism and of the “Chicago school” of sociology attacked this biological model
and its tacit assumption of racial essentialism,
12
introducing some of the basic tenets of an
ethnicity-based paradigm.
The ethnicity-based paradigm was not only “an explicit challenge to the
prevailing racial views of the period,” but also “an insurgent theory which suggested that
race was a social category,” according to Omi and Winant (14-15). More specifically,
race was seen only as another determinant of ethnicity:
Ethnicity itself was understood as the result of a group formation process
based on culture and descent. ‘Culture’ in this formulation included such
diverse factors as religion, language, ‘customs,’ nationality, and political
identification. ‘Descent’ involved heredity and a sense of group origins,
thus suggesting that ethnicity was socially ‘primordial,’ if not biologically
given, in character. (Omi and Winant 15)

12
Horace Kallen of the Progressive school led the attack on biologism, and introduced
the concept of cultural pluralism, which, according to Omi and Winant, became “a key
current of ethnicity theory” (15). The other major current of ethnicity theory was the
concept of assimilationism, introduced by “Chicago school” sociologist Robert E. Park,
who had been a secretary to Booker T. Washington (Omi and Winant 15).

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To some extent, this ethnicity model reflected the way people were grouped in the
Latin Americas given that social factors, rather than mere bodily readings, were
considered the basis of ethnic identity.
Social theories and models are necessarily based on the studies and observations
of the lived experience of real people; the ethnicity model was no different. While the
principles of ethnicity theories were being worked out, Williams was living these very
theories of and contradictions within ethnicity. One marker of ethnicity that Williams
played with, in order to manipulate how he was culturally read, was language. In his
autobiography he repeats his familial ties to the Spanish language, as well as his desire to
do translation work: “I have always wanted to do some translations from Spanish. It was
my mother’s native language as well as one which my father spoke from childhood”
(349). Williams thus suggests that his own background with the Spanish language should
make translation an easy task for him. On another note, he indicates a conflicted
relationship with the Spanish language.
In the same passage, he expresses what could be interpreted as condescension for
the language’s literary ties: “But more than that the language has a strong appeal to me,
temperamentally, as a relief from the classic mood of both French and Italian. Spanish is
not, in the sense to which I refer, a literary language. It has a place of its own, an
independent place very sympathetic to the New World” (349). Williams’s was well
versed in the field of Spanish literature, as his 1939 essay on Federico Garcia Lorca
indicates.
13
In his essay, Williams contextualizes Lorca’s work within a rich history of

13
Williams goes to great lengths, in his essay on Lorca, to establish his expertise on
Spanish history and literature. In this compressed study, he begins with the thirteenth

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Spanish literary tradition beginning with El Cantar de mio Cid / Poema del Cid [Song
of My Cid], including Juan Ruiz’s El Libro de buen amor [The Book of Good Love], Luis
de Góngora’s ”elevation” of Spanish poetry, and ending with Lorca’s own Llanto por
Ignacio Sánchez Mejías [Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter.] The litany of writers
and poets included in Williams’s essay on Lorca illustrates his solid knowledge of
Spanish literary history, and thus, his comment about Spanish not being a literary
language has more to do with the Spanish language itself than with Spain’s literary
history.
Williams’s comment about the Spanish language thus indicates an awareness of
the marginal place that Spanish holds as a language, possibly because of its link with
Latin America—a bias that he rebelled against with his Spanish-language titles and
translated works. In his interview with Gerber and Wallace, in fact, Williams states that
his Spanish-language title for his poem, “El Hombre,” in Al Que Quiere (1917), came
about because he was “sick and tired of French titles” (23). “You know how the arty
person loves to talk in French?” he asks. “Whether he can talk French or not, he always
has to use a French term, that shows that he’s smart, I suppose. Well, in order to change
that around, I thought Spanish was a good language too, a very much neglected language
[…]” (23). Williams’s use of Spanish-language titles had started earlier than with the
publication of Al Que Quiere. His 1910 poem, “Misericordia” for instance, and the
poem, “Con Brio” in The Tempers (1913) show his interest in going against a Eurocentric

century, and illustrates the influence of Alfonso X, or Alfonso “the wise,” in unifying
Spanish literature under the umbrella of a common language.

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(specifically Francophone and Anglophone) literary trend that began to define high
modernism.
If Williams rebelled against a trend that situated modernism predominantly in a
trans-Atlantic literary context, he more specifically directed his ire at T.S. Eliot and at his
friend, Ezra Pound. In an interview with editor Dorothy Tooker, he brings up Eliot as an
example of European snobbishness and anti-U.S. bias: “Eliot is a good takeoff point for
what I was saying about Europe. He walked out on America. He tried to become
English and take advantage of it. Imagine giving up America—gosh” (33)! In a later
interview, in which Williams discusses the influence of Walt Whitman on idiom and
form in U.S. poetry, Williams notes, “both Eliot and Pound rejected Whitman as a
master. He didn’t have anything to teach them. But they didn’t know what he had to
teach them. The idiom itself, which they did not acknowledge” (Sutton 43). When
interviewer, Walter Sutton points out Pound’s use of an “exaggerated American dialect”
in his poetry, Williams responds, “He tends to clown it as Lowell does, in a Yankee farm
accent, but he doesn’t do it well. He clowns it so obviously that—It’s a kind of hayseed
accent, which is entirely in his own mind. No one would ever talk that way” (43). He
then adds, “He thinks he’s smart, and he’s not smart. He’s inaccurate. He attempts to
make fun of all American speakers, but he doesn’t know what he’s talking about […]
Agh, Old Ez. A pain in the ass” (43). Williams’s Spanish-language titles thus addressed
an anti-U.S. literary trend in modernism, a revision of “America,” and literary rivalries
simultaneously.
Williams’s use of Spanish-language titles, however, do not specify an interest in
Spanish-language modernist influences in a trans-American or a Latin American context.

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The Spanish-language ties are left ambiguous, moreover because Williams tends to
write and more overtly comment about writers and artists from Spain, such as Lorca and
the artists, Juan Gris, Velásquez, Goya, and Picasso. And although Williams translated
works by Latin American authors, such as the Mexican author, Octavio Paz (“Hymn
Among the Ruins”) and the Guatemalan writer, Rafael Arévalo Martinez (“The Man
Who Resembled a Horse”), he often seems more entrenched in Spanish works than in
Latin American literature, which perhaps betrays his own ambiguity about his Latin
American roots.
The passage about Spanish not being a literary language contains inflammatory
language that could be misconstrued as a baffling condescension toward Spanish-
language literary works. Although this is not the case, Williams’s comment suggests that
he held hierarchical beliefs about language as linked to culture and region. This passage
suggests more than Williams’s desire to assert his Latin American heritage through
language, or to exercise and display his prowess with the Spanish language. It also
betrays his conflicted relationship with his heritage, which in this case, is symbolized by
the Spanish language. He may have wanted to assert his cultural affiliation, but he also
desired to hide it at his convenience.
Williams’s use of language was elastic, in that he used it to assert his heritage,
and he also withheld it to distance himself from other Spanish-language speakers, thereby
implicitly negating any shared group affiliation. At one point in his medical school
experience, Williams was offered the opportunity to make extra money by family friend
and colleague, Dr. Julio Henna. Williams was to escort Henna’s patient (who had
become ill in France) and his family from New York to San Luis Potosí, Mexico.

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Williams describes Henna’s patient as “Señor Gonzales, a sheep owner and railroad
executive, tremendously wealthy,” who had suffered complications from pneumonia and
wanted to die at home (Auto. 72). He also describes Gonzales as a “wonderful man, a
tough, grizzled old primitive” (Auto. 73), a description of Mexicans that tends to be
echoed repeatedly throughout his writings. According to Williams,
in the party was [Gonzales’s] son, his son’s wife—in their early thirties,
dark-skinned and bitter at all Gringos—and another woman. I’ve
forgotten who. My job was to keep the old boy alive till we made his
home town. It didn’t look as though I’d do it. More than once I had
visions of being lynched if I arrived at the border in a couple of days with
a corpse. (Auto. 73)

Just as with his medical school/object of desire anecdote and with his poem, “Naked,” the
“corpse” that symbolizes his racial anxieties and desires emerges once again. With his
reference to “lynching” as a possible consequence for failing his mission, Williams
assumes the language of the threatened ethnic minority, thus separating himself from the
Gonzaleses and also from the Mexicans in San Luis Potosi. In using the lynching/lynch
mob image, Williams displays a psychotic reversal disguised as mock fear of being
lynched, in which he identifies as black. While one immediately visualizes the lynchings
of African Americans, the truth of the matter is that Mexicans and Mexican-Americans
were routinely lynched from 1848, after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo,
14
and up to around 1930 when lynching was replaced with forced deportation.
15

14
The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was the peace treaty that ended the Mexican-
American war (1846-1848). Mexico ceded 55 percent of its pre-war territories (not
including Texas) to the United States in exchange for fifteen million U.S. dollars and the
absorption of Mexico’s debt to some U.S. citizens. The ceded territories included parts
of what are now known as Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming, as well as the
whole of California, Nevada, and Utah. The treaty ensured the pre-existing property

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Even though Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were lynched in the Southwest, the
mainstream associated lynching with the persecution of African Americans, and there is
no indication that Williams would have known about the documentation of
Mexican/Mexican-American lynchings—further evidence of his lack of interest in and
lack of identification with this segment of the Latin American population, an example of
his internal incoherence, and possibly also an indication that, for Williams, persecution
occurs in the context of a black/white binary.
In his resistance to identify with the Gonzaleses, Williams claims a limited
knowledge of the Spanish language, when he has already established Spanish as his first
language and has declared his interest in translation, which clearly suggests some type of
facility with the Spanish language. In pronouncing his sudden language limitations, he
puts even further distance between himself and those in his care. He states, “My Spanish
wasn’t so hot, but we all had a few words of French, the others kept to themselves, the
son or son-in-law giving me dirty looks from time to time—but never the old man” (Auto.
73). This language triangulation helps Williams establish and perform his
cosmopolitanism and also his European education, while it also helps the Gonzaleses
perform and mirror a similar cosmopolitanism and moneyed class, despite Williams’s
labeling of the Gonzales patriarch as a “primitive.”

rights of Mexicans in the transferred territories. This stipulation in the treaty was often
not honored.

15
Mexicans were lynched at a rate of 27.4 per 100,000 of population between 1880 and
1930. This statistic is second only to that of the African American community during that
period, which suffered an average of 37.1 per 100,000 population.

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Given Williams’s description of Gonzales’s son/son-in-law and daughter-in-
law as “bitter at all Gringos,” Williams seems to assume that the dirty looks he receives
from them is due to the fact that they read him as one of the “Gringos” they hate. But
another possibility exists. It is possible that the younger Gonzaleses read Williams quite
accurately as someone who desires to pass for “Gringo” in the immediate context, and
who attempts to do so by feigning ignorance of the Spanish language, thereby distancing
himself from the Mexican family. Regardless of the reason for the younger Gonzaleses’
coolness toward Williams, it seems clear that the son felt he had something to prove to
Williams upon their arrival in Mexico. Williams describes their last interaction:
“Downstairs the son counted out ten twenty-dollar gold pieces which he put into my
hand, one on top of the other saying, bitterly, as he always did, and motioning about him
that I might observe the well-paneled room, ‘you see, we live a little better—un poco
mejor que los negros,’ [a little better than the blacks] and I realized something of what he
had been through” (Auto. 74, my translation). Did Williams realize what the Gonzaleses
had been through with the “Gringos” toward whom they felt such bitterness, or did he
realize at that moment what they had just been through via their interaction with him?
Williams’s anecdote gives us no answer. The fact that the Gonzales son states that they
live a bit better than the blacks, not only refers to the Gonzales wealth; he references a
binary with which he believes that both he and Williams can identify, and he also
acknowledges a comparative level of racist persecution. Williams, however, is unable to
identify with the younger Gonzales, and his sparse commentary suggests an inability to
understand the loaded comment at all.

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Williams wonders how he spent his twenty-dollar gold pieces, only to later
speculate that he spent them on the publication of his first book of poems (Auto. 106). It
was with this first publication of a serious collection of poems, which was The Tempers
(1913), that Williams first used his full name, “William Carlos Williams.” He notes, “an
advertising friend of my father’s spoke up strongly for plain W. Williams […] To me the
full name seemed most revealing and therefore better” (Auto. 108). “Carlos” would not
be suppressed, as the family friend suggested it should be. Instead, Williams goes out of
his way to “reveal” all that his middle name suggests, make his middle name part of his
public persona, and to thus publicly assert or at least suggest a Latin American
connection. To further convey a Spanish-speaking background, Williams included the
poem with the Spanish title “Con Brio” [“With Shine” or “With Brilliance”] in The
Tempers, as well as “Translations From the Spanish ‘El Romancero’”.
Did Williams mean to suggest a Spanish and thus European lineage with the use
of his middle name or even with the inclusion of Spanish-language titles or translations of
Spanish works? Occasionally, Williams misuses the adjective, “Spanish,” as he does
when he describes a problematic exchange with friend, author, and publisher Robert
McAlmon.
16
While visiting McAlmon in Juarez, Mexico,
17
where McAlmon lived at the

16
Robert McAlmon (1896-1956) was a poet, writer of short stories, publisher, friend and
contemporary of many notable modernist writers, such as William Carlos Williams and
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). With the founding of his magazine, Contact, McAlmon, Williams
recalls, “had his life’s dream come true.” Williams recalls that during the mid-twenties,
“the world was full of celebrities—among them Ford Maddox Ford, James Joyce, and
Ezra Pound” and that McAlmon, always desiring to “know the literary celebrities
intimately, and to do something for them,” now had the opportunity to do so with the
founding of Contact (“Foreword,” viii).

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time, Williams describes their exchange after he commented on the scent of a woman:
“As Bob McAlmon said after the well-dressed Spanish woman passed us in Juarez (I had
said, Wow! There’s perfume for you!): ‘You mean that?’ he said. ‘That’s not perfume, I
just call that whores” (Auto. 289, my italics). Williams seems to interchangeably use
“Spanish” for any other Latin American identity, just as Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and
Carl Van Vechten do, as described in chapter two. While this careless use of descriptive
identities could possibly be attributed to ignorance about the politics between Spain and
the Latin Americas on the part of non-Latin American communities, the same cannot be
said for Williams, given that both his parents had suffered through the Spanish-American
War and that United States citizenship was then foisted upon Elena upon the annexation
of Puerto Rico.
Another problem with this exchange is McAlmon’s insult which is put forth
without further commentary from Williams. McAlmon’s comment may have had to do
more with taste level—the Mexican woman’s taste in choosing seemingly poor quality
perfume, and Williams’s bad taste in possibly admiring the scent—rather than in the
profession of the woman. Nonetheless, this comment made by a white man (albeit a gay
white man) about a Mexican woman is a microcosm of U.S.-Latin American relations—
an example of denigration and disrespect toward native people, in a country in which a
white man is on an extended holiday. Does Williams leave the responsibility of rebuking

17
Williams does not give a date of travel, but McAlmon biographer, Robert Knoll, places
McAlmon in Mexico in 1929. According to Knoll, McAlmon, ever the drifter, went to
Mexico after hearing rumors about a vital art movement in Mexico City. Although
Langston Hughes became part of Mexican literary/intellectual circles and found artistic
inspiration in them, as I discuss in chapter four, for McAlmon, Mexico “turned out to be
disappointing, or rather, not permanently interesting” (17).

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McAlmon to his reading audience? Perhaps. In no way does Williams’s silence
suggest that he agrees with or condones McAlmon’s denigrating expression about a
Mexican woman, but neither does Williams come to her defense—or at least not as he
describes the incident in his autobiography. Whether Williams’s silence reflects his
attempt at masculine camaraderie, or even reflects a “clever” way to end a chapter in his
autobiography—all at the expense of a woman who is a stranger to him—his silence
suggests an unwillingness to identify with the woman culturally. Perhaps he feels no
need to defend the woman, especially if he does not identify with her culturally.
Nonetheless, the inclusion of this anecdote, in which he seems momentarily pitted against
McAlmon, is curious.
In the Gonzales anecdote, as well as in the McAlmon one, Williams’s silence—
whether he withholds language in order to separate himself from others or he refuses to
defend a woman against insults—serves to create distance from Mexicans. Williams’s
actions (or inactions) suggest a class-based and perhaps even an ethnicity-based
separation, and a lack of identification. In short, Williams enacts the Spanish casta
system, most explicitly with his description of Marguerita, his parents’ Mexican maid,
and her actions immediately following the death of William George. Williams states,
“That night, Marguerita, from fear or loyalty, brought her mattress and bedclothes in a
roll, clasped in her short, thick arms, down from the attic. She spread them on the floor
by Mother’s bedside and remained there like a dog” (Auto. 167). Williams makes a point
of describing Marguerita’s physicality, which goes from human form (“her short, thick
arms”) until he transforms her to animal form. The animalistic comparison echoes the
same comparison and also the animal-based categories of people in the Spanish casta

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system. While Williams may describe Marguerita’s loyalty in this passage, he also
uses the language of disdain.
In further descriptions, his disdain and lack of identification is tinged with pity.
On another visit to McAlmon in El Paso, Texas, after which they both go to the border
town of Juarez, Mexico,
18
Williams describes some of the sensory joys of crossing the
United States-Mexico border:
At dawn I saw the sign Tucson on a station platform and the same day at
three, after crossing the desert miles near the Mexican border, left the
beautiful train (if anything is beautiful) to meet Bob McAlmon coming
grinning up the platform at El Paso where the Hubbards had lived in the
old days. Juarez, across the bridge. Three cents the trip. Sur le pont
d’Avignon—is all I could think of. The sparrows at night in the park—
Bob and his brothers, George and Alec and their wives—tequila at five
cents a glass, a quail dinner and the Mexicans, the poor Indians—one
huddles into a lump against the ironwork of the bridge at night—safe
perhaps from both sides, incredibly compressed into a shapeless
obstruction—asleep. (Auto. 388-89)

Why is it that Williams evokes a bridge in Southern France while in Mexico? The
insertion of French landmarks and the French language only serve to immediately recall
his European education, his European patrilineage, and to create distance from himself
and the Mexicans, whom he homogenizes and immediately equates with indigenous
Mexicans. Worse yet, and despite his pity, Williams grants little human quality to the
“Indians” he describes. He begins this passage by describing the “beautiful train,” the
bridge, the sparrows, the tequila, the quail dinner, and ends by comparing the “poor
Indians” to “lumps” who huddle against the bridge at night, until they degenerate into

18
Again, Williams does not give a date of travel. Knoll places McAlmon in El Paso in
1946. By the time McAlmon moved to El Paso, his literary life was over. McAlmon
wandered and lived hard, states Knoll, and “he was of considerable concern to his old
friends” (18). He would die in the desert ten years later, “discouraged and embittered at
the last” (19).

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“shapeless obstructions,” perhaps commenting on their formless invisibility in
Mexico, or perhaps attributing this very formless invisibility to them. The only human
subjects in Williams’s narrative are his friends, with whom he partakes of the sensual
culinary pleasures, and with whom he identifies. If Williams regarded Mexicans/Indians
with such pity and what bordered on disdain, what must he have felt when while in Paris,
Mina Loy sketched him in pencil as a “wild Indian?” He does not say. He ends this
anecdote by merely stating, “Good-bye Mina” (Auto. 232). Again, one has to wonder
why Williams would include such anecdotes in his autobiography.
Although attributing Williams’s intracultural conflicts to an eighteenth century
Spanish casta system could be interpreted as tangential or anachronistic, it must be
understood that this system left its mark on social relations and informed social
stratification in the Latin Americas that are still in play today. In Williams’s context,
one only has to look to his mother and her family for evidence of such intracultural
tension. Elena and her brother Carlos identified strongly with their European roots, and
they made that identification public through their education (Carlos going to France for
medical school and Elena following for art school), and through their speaking of French
while in Puerto Rico. They kept any suspicion of Afro-Boricua roots quiet. Elena
employed an indigenous worker rather than identifying with her, and she married an
English man who, although raised culturally Dominican, was still European by birth. In
other words, Elena maintained and enjoyed a triangulated relationship to blackness and
indigenousness that was passed down to and occasionally performed by Williams.
William Carlos married white Florence (“Flo”) Herman, for whom he named his 1937
novel, White Mule; one of his first loves was a dead black woman, which made his lust

222
surface consciously, if only because death made the physical manifestation of this
love/lust impossible and unreal; and he held a distant relationship to the Mexican
Gonzaleses of San Luis Potosi, to the Mexican and indigenous Marguerita, as well as to
the indigenous Mexicans he renders inanimate as he travels through Juarez, Mexico.
At the same time, it seems that for Williams, occasional identification with
European roots and identification with non-indigenous/non-African Latin American roots
did not always mean an identification with whiteness. For example, when he rejected his
friend Wally Gould’s poetry for publication, Gould lashed out at Williams by letter, and
displaced his anger on Williams’s intentions to send his sons to Europe. “Why take them
to Europe?” he exclaimed. “Why don’t you send them down here to school […] and
make white men of them?” (Auto. 259). According Williams, Flo was furious and neither
she nor Williams responded to Gould’s letter. This was the last they heard of him.
For Williams, whiteness was not just an issue of skin color, but was more
markedly a political category in the U.S. which bestowed cultural capital and the full
benefits of citizenship upon those who fit under the rubric of whiteness. As a son of
immigrants, he struggled with his own identity and with his relationship to his first
language. But he also struggled against others in contradictory ways, such as his passive
aggressive linguistic struggle with the Gonzaleses, his bearing of insults from Ezra Pound
and his consequent conflicts with the poet, and against those who read him as Puerto
Rican and thus positioned as he was because of nepotism. Williams’s conflicts continued
to play out in his historical prose, In The American Grain (1925), as he attempted to
establish his identity more broadly than perceived by others, and also on his own terms.

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In The American Grain: “I am—the brutal thing itself.”
When Williams apprised Ezra Pound of his intention to write In The American
Grain (1925), Pound responded by asking “what a ‘bloomin’ foreigner’ like Williams
knew about America to talk about it” (Marzan 10). According to Marzan, a deeply hurt
Williams responded by quoting Pound in his ‘Prologue’ to Kora in Hell,” and thus got
even (10). This encounter may have also influenced how Williams approached In The
American Grain, as well as how he described becoming “American” in the work.
Williams explicitly states in his autobiography that his intentions for writing In
The American Grain were to embark on “a study to try to find out for [himself] what the
land of [his] more or less accidental birth might signify” (178). Given that all cultural
roots are due to the accident of birth, Williams suggests that he could have been born in
the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, or anywhere else in the world other than
Rutherford, New Jersey, and that this particular accident could have also determined the
trajectory of his life. To investigate what the United States, as his birthplace, might
signify might have been his intentions, but what results is a more expansive project that
questions the boundaries of “America.” As a result, Williams does not merely look at the
land of his “accidental birth,” but instead muses upon the long forgotten idea of sources
and origins that, once examined, debunk an “all-American” identity that is taken for
granted as being informed by whiteness, xenophobia, and isolationism. Hence, in
conducting this study, Williams indeed examines an all-American identity that is
informed by the history of all of the Americas and in the process, tries to situate himself
in the scheme and fluent definition of America.

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Williams’s methodology shows that he was far from removed from this
project. He notes that he gave every free moment to his research, conducted at the New
York Public Library, and proclaims, “the plan was to try to get inside the heads of some
of the American founders or ‘heroes,’ if you will, by examining their original records. I
wanted nothing to get between me and what they themselves had recorded …” (Auto.
178). Yet, it is he himself who gets in between the original texts and his rendition of
these histories, whether through his mediation or through his heated reaction to the
original records. Abrupt shifts in narrative tone, as well as the occasional apparitional
appearance of Williams, the narrator, make this collection of historical essays uneven.
But these lapses, if you will, also betray Williams’s attempt to gain a historical and
comprehensive understanding of the Americas—and as a result, his place in the
Americas.
It is particularly noteworthy that Williams does not begin his study with the
arrival of the Mayflower, but instead begins with Leif Erikson’s exploration of North
America’s Vinland or modern day Newfoundland. Williams follows this with essays on
Columbus’s so-called discovery of the Indies, on Cortez’s encounter with Montezuma, on
Ponce de Leon’s search for the fountain of eternal youth, and on De Soto’s seduction by
the New World. Only after establishing these alternative American renditions of
exploration, conquest, and emigration, does Williams touch on Sir Walter Raleigh’s
founding of Virginia. In delaying U.S. history in a book called In The American Grain,
Williams decenters a specifically United States history in the broader history of the
Americas, and questions the assumed political and hegemonic centrality of the United
States in trans-American affairs.

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In decentralizing the position of the United States, Williams also destabilizes
whiteness as native and therefore inherently dominant in the U.S. He does so by offering
a history of emigration by Europeans in sharp contrast to an already present indigenous
population throughout the American continents. Williams’s description of the indigenous
people is particularly interesting given his conflicted commentary about the indigenous in
his autobiography. In In the American Grain, Williams tends to paint the indigenous
with broad, romantic strokes, but he also uses taxonomic or even casta language to
describe what they are and are not. In the chapter, “The Discovery of the Indies,” for
example, Williams lingers on the nakedness of the native inhabitants, equating it with
their innocence, good will, and possibly even with their naiveté. After receiving gifts of
admittedly little value from the Spaniards, the native people make their way to the
Spanish ships in order to reciprocate with gifts of parrots, cotton threads, darts, and
whatever else they have to give. At this point, the narrator’s description takes on the
language and description of the casta categories, in which some specimens are given
animal-like qualities: “Their hair short and coarse, almost like the hairs of a horse’s tail.
They paint themselves some black, some white, others red and others of what color they
can find. Some paint the faces and others the whole body, some only round the eyes and
others only on the nose, they are themselves neither black nor white” (25). In other
words, in failing to be neither black nor white, in failing to fit into a dichotomous
understanding of race, the indigenous fall into animalistic categories by default, as the
Columbus persona that Williams takes on here describes them.
The narrator of In the American Grain mixes his criticism of conquest and
conquerors with a grudging admiration throughout this study. Consider the chapter, “The

226
Destruction of Tenochtitlan,” for example, where the narrator defends Hernan Cortez,
stating, “Cortez was neither malicious, stupid nor blind, but a conqueror like other
conquerors. Courageous almost beyond precedent, tactful, resourceful in misfortune, he
was a man of genius superbly suited to his task. What his hand touched went down in
spite of him” (27). Admiration for courage and resourcefulness soon turns into an
attempt to excuse Spain for what the narrator terms, “the crassness of the discoverers”
(27), and it also shifts from an admiration of agency and action to placing blame on
beauty, nature, religion, or whatever force spellbinds the explorers, forcing them to act
against their wills. Note the shift in language, in which the “discoverers” no longer act
according to their wills, but act instead according to whatever external force moves them:

They moved out across the seas stirred by instincts, ancient beyond
thought as the depths they were crossing, which they obeyed under the
names of King or Christ or whatever it might be, while they watched the
recreative New unfolding itself miraculously before them, before them,
deafened and blinded. Steering beyond familiar horizons they were driven
to seek perhaps self-justification for victorious wars against Arab and
Moor; but these things are the surface only. At the back, as it remains, it
was the evil of the whole world; it was the perennial disappointment
which follows, like smoke, the bursting of ideas. It was the spirit of
malice which underlies men’s lives and against which nothing offers
resistance. (27)

The “crassness of the discoverers” then is not something they control or wield; it is
driven by “instincts,” by “King or Christ,” by some pathological repetition of past wars,
but ultimately, by an evil that overtakes them and which they cannot control.
Yet, by the next chapter, the narrator has taken on a different voice and his
criticism gains momentum and venom. In “The Fountain of Eternal Youth,” the narrator
exclaims:

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History, history! We fools, what do we know or care? History begins
for us with murder and enslavement, not with discovery. No, we are not
Indians but we are men of their world. The blood means nothing; the
spirit, the ghost of the land moves in the blood, moves the blood. It is we
who ran to the shore naked, we who cried ‘Heavenly Man!’ These are the
inhabitants of our souls, our murdered souls that lie … agh. (39)

Here Williams begins to touch on what will be the central point of his study, which is not
to offer a historical overview that encompasses all of the Americas, but to negotiate his
European, indigenous, and even African roots in light of this history. He identifies with
the murdered indigenous in this chapter and can make no excuse for European
expansionism that includes slavery, exploitation, and murder, finally pronouncing his
conflicted self a few pages later, “If men inherit souls this is the color of mine. We are,
too, the others, ” later followed by, “we are the slaughterers” (41). In this section, he
debunks the justification for the enslavement and murder of Indians, sarcastically stating,
“Indians have no souls; that was it. That was what they said. But they knew they lied—
the blood-smell proof” (41). With this statement, Williams calls into question a casta
categorization that likens non-whites to “soulless” animals, and he also questions the
project of the Catholic church, for if slavery, murder, and the occupation of lands were
justified by declaring the Indian “soulless,” then what did it mean that Spain’s Catholic
church was present in the New World for the very purpose of converting the soul of
heathens to Christianity?
Each chapter, with its shifting narrative voice and alternate point of view, begins
to show the holes in such justifications and arguments. Is conquest about expansionism
in the name of king, Christ, or ambition? “De Soto and the New World, ” which
Williams finished writing while traveling through the South of France, as well as “Sir

228
Walter Raleigh,” suggests that conquest is an unquenchable thirst or hunger that is not
only sexualized, but also directed at the feminized. The New World is beautiful,
abundant in and even free with her gifts, and, of course, ripe and eager for European
penetration. The narrator in “De Soto and the New World,” which seems to be part of De
Soto’s consciousness, is explicit about this feminization of the New World, repeatedly
referring to it as “She,” and repeating “She” rhythmically like a mantra or a prayer. She
or the New World is depicted as a temptress—a conflation of the biblical Eve and the
more marginal Lilith of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Both overpower men with their wiles,
tempt them, and lead to their demise, just as the New World has the power to do so. She
coos, “Believe it. You will not dare to cease following me—at Apalachi, at Cutifachiqui,
at Mabilla, turning from the sea, facing inland. And in the end you shall receive of me,
nothing—save one long caress as of a great river passing forever upon your sweet corse
[sic?]” (45). Throughout the chapter, De Soto remains servile to She, until the seduction
is complete and De Soto turns “native”: “And if, to survive, you yourself in the end
turned native, this victory is sweetest of all. Bitter the need that at Nilco will cause that
horrid slaughter: You already sick, in grave danger, thinking of the men. Let them talk,
my Indian: I will console you. None but you, the wise, the brave, could have answered”
(51).
A few important shifts take place in this passage: First, in the midst of his
sickness, De Soto succumbs to the New World, but not without condition, for only in
order to survive does he turn “native;” second, the “native” is not only claimed by the
New World, but is also conflated with nature and thus with the New World; third, De
Soto, the conqueror is passive throughout this strange seduction. This chapter is, in fact,

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a rewriting and a perversion of Adam and Eve myth, in which Eve is the tireless
temptress and Adam is the passive victim of his own undoing. At the end, De Soto is
literally absorbed by the New World. “She—It is I” (51), he proclaims before his death,
and then only through his death, is able to move past seduction and complete the sexual
act with nature/the New World, and yet remain passive because he is dead: “Down,
down, this solitary sperm, down into the liquid, the formless, the insatiable belly of sleep;
down among the fishes …” (58). In this narrative, De Soto experiences the horror of
absorption by a force that is unconquerable, despite his efforts. Yet, this horrific
absorption in which he literally becomes part of the natural world is also a passive
submission to the sublime.
In contrast, the “Sir Walter Raleigh” chapter that follows De Soto maintains the
sexual aspect of conquest, but its tone is one of aggressive, triangulated sexuality. While
the conquest of the New World drives Raleigh’s adventure, the narrator’s invocation of
“the muse” is ambiguous. If the muse the New World itself, similar to De Soto’s
consuming “She,” is she Raleigh’s queen, or is she the thirst for empire in the name of his
queen? As the narrator invokes the muse to sing of Raleigh, she is at least situated as one
of the narrators of Raleigh’s fate and story, although she remains silent and the first
narrator continues to describe Raleigh’s exploits: “beloved by majesty, plunging his lust
into the body of a new world—and the deaths, misfortunes, counter coups, which swelled
back to certify that ardor with defeat” (59). It is particularly telling that Raleigh’s queen
and the lust he plunges into the body of the New World is separated only by a comma.
Soon afterward, Williams is more explicit: “But through all else, O Muse, say that he
penetrated to the Queen” (60), and with more fervor and momentum he follows with a

230
plea for the muse to say that Raleigh “became America,” and that the voyage he has
conceived, upon which he has thrust himself, has “turned out to be a voyage on the body
of his Queen: England, Elizabeth—Virginia” (60)! As Williams explicates the logic of
the metaphor, going from England, to Elizabeth, to Virginia, the idea of triangulated
sexuality becomes linear and directly traceable to empire in the name of Queen Elizabeth.
Although the theme of absorption is still present here, this chapter shows a constant
sublimation that manages to hold the realities of the New World at bay. Whereas De
Soto ends by giving himself to the New World while “She” readily takes him, Raleigh
looks for a substitute England—in no way a new world, but instead the space to remake
the old one.
This contrast is highlighted in the chapter, “Pere Sebastian Rasles,” in which
Williams inserts himself personally, as well as gives vent to his exasperation with
romantic constructions of the Americas—an ironic frustration, since he commits the same
sin in his memoirs. Williams is never more clear about the central thesis of In The
American Grain than he is in this chapter, and never does he betray more about his
personal reasons for embarking on this study than he does here.
The narrative starts has he begins to converse with a French national, a certain
Larbaud, during a six-week stay in Paris. Oddly enough, and despite his refusal to
identify with the Gonzaleses on the train trip to San Luis Potosi described in his
autobiography, as soon as Williams begins to interact with Larbaud, he not only likens
himself to the Aztec calendar; he describes himself as the very thing made of stone and
block, and not in flattering terms, necessarily: “He is a student, I am a block, I thought. I
could see it at once: he knows far more of what is written of my world than I. But he is a

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student while I am—the brutal thing itself” (107). Much like the ex-coloured man,
who feels himself grow crimp-haired, thick lipped, and course-featured under the scrutiny
of his “lily-white” beloved, Williams experiences a similar metamorphosis rooted in
intellectual scrutiny, in perceiving himself to be the center of strange anthropological
interest, and in believing himself to be undereducated in or ignorant of his Latin
American roots and history. His anxiety is explicit: “He presumed too much. I am not a
student; presently he will ask me questions I cannot answer” (107)! And how does
Williams compete with the French man’s “expertise” when Larbaud pulls out four thick
volumes on the history of Venezuelan Simon Bolivar and his Latin American unification
project? How can he live up to the burdens of representation—especially when “Latin
America” in their conversation is referenced as if it comprised one country, one people,
and one culture?
Williams’s may exhibit anxiety about embodying an identity that he feels he does
not know how to express knowledgably and broadly, but Williams suggests that this
bodily reading by Larbaud has recognized something in him that, as Williams himself
puts it, is “straining for release under [his] confining ribs” (108). Nonetheless,
Williams’s restraint and resistance may be informed by his suspicion that Larbaud wishes
to “taste, perhaps its freshness,” rather than to understand (108). Williams’s resistance to
being exoticized while he is at the same time being held up as broadly representative of
all Latin American cultures is central to why he holds Larbaud at arm’s length, refusing
at this instant to identify with his own paternal European roots, and instead choosing to
identify with the Aztec calendar—a “block” representative of an ancient and
mythological Azteca. It is also why he is willing to burden himself with the shame of

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only living one aspect of a Latin American identity rather than knowing volumes
worth of broad Latin American history.
The ontological crisis in which Williams finds himself goes beyond a
metaphysical question of being; instead the question becomes one of how one came to be.
In other words, Williams’s primary concern, and central to his project, is one of origins
and sources. At one point during his interaction with Larbaud, he muses, “I said, it is an
extraordinary phenomenon that Americans have lost the sense, being made up as we are,
that what we are has its origin in what the nation in the past has been; that there is a
source in AMERICA for everything we think or do […]” (109). Williams laments the
ignorance of source origins in the United States, regrets the consequences that follow
such willful disregard for a broader, more inclusive, and thus more accurate history, and
includes himself as part of the guilty collective that has ignored U.S. origins. Yet, he
vacillates among identifying with either the U.S. “all-American,” the Latin American, or
the pan-American. While he had included himself with the “Americans” in the United
States who have forgotten their origins as a nation, a few pages later, he adopts divisive
language that marks the split between “us” and “them.” As Williams conflates
immorality with “America,” he explains his reasoning: “You see the cause. There was
no ground to build on, with a ground all blossoming about them—under their noses.
Their thesis is a possession of the incomplete—like senseless winds or waves or the fire
itself” (114-15). While Williams is not explicit in differentiating between the United
States, “America,” or even the Americas, the text suggests that he refers to the United
States here, commenting on random possession and a project of Empire that is not
thought out in terms of the future, nor in terms of the past.

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Williams’s suspicion of Larbaud’s motives for his interest in him, and his
resistance to Larbaud’s distant and therefore easy analysis of what it means to be
American in the pan-American sense is substantiated, as when Larbaud expresses some
stereotypical “insights” on Williams’s conflicted sense of his own origins, stating:
I see you brimming—you, yourself—with those three things of which
you speak: a puritanical sense of order, a practical mysticism as of
the Jesuits, and the sum all those qualities defeated in the savage men
of your country by the first two. These three things I see still battling
in your ear. This interests me greatly—and it pleases me still more
that you show a taste for books. Does this indicate, I say to myself, a
new force in your country? Are you today presenting me with a new
spectacle, a man, no matter what his qualities may be, who has begun
to reach a height but who still retains his warmth; that moment when
all greatness is conceived. It is no more than a moment, it is the birth
of a civilized interest in the world. (116)

In protest, Williams cries out, “No, no no,” and continues to plead his true intentions: “I
speak only of sources. I wish only to disentangle the obscurities that oppress me, to track
them to the root and to uproot them--” (116). Here Williams articulates the root of In The
American Grain, as well as the root of all of his autobiographical and biographical
writings. Williams’s origins are obscure and shrouded in mystery, murmurings, and half-
told stories, and these obscurities are also the source of those poems and translated works
that depict culturally conflicted personae.

Translation: “El que no a vista Sevilla, […] no a vista maravilla!”
In his autobiography, Williams reflects, “I have always wanted to do some
translations from Spanish. It was my mother’s native language as well as one which my
father spoke from childhood” (349). Both parents helped Williams translate Spanish-
language works. William George helped him translate Rafael Arévalo Martinez’s work,

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and, for amusement, Elena helped her son translate the work of Don Francisco
Quevedo. The way in which Williams relays the story of the Quevedo translation that he
and his mother undertook, however, reveals that translation was not only a scholarly or
literary exercise for Williams; it was a way to understand his mother, for he conflated her
with the Spanish language.
Williams was looking for something with which to amuse his octogenarian
mother, after she broke her hip, making it impossible for her to ever walk again. Mother
and son translated a French novel together and then, Williams states, he “hit on the
scheme [he] wanted” (YMW 25, my italics). Williams proposed translating an old book
that Ezra Pound had either discarded or left behind at his home. The “old book” was
Quevedo’s El Perrro y la Calentura [The Dog and the Fever]. It turned out to be a
nearly impossible task that took over a year to complete, and as Williams says, the
project “baffled [them] almost completely” for the language in the Quevedo was
seventeenth century Spanish slang (Auto. 351).
Marzan reflects that “by referring to the translation as a ‘scheme,’ Williams
suggests that something more than a project to occupy Elena was involved,” and that the
Quevedo translation, the translation of that “old book,” “became his metaphor for
understanding the old woman” (78). Marzan adds, “[His mother] and Quevedo were
fused in his imagination …” (78), and if so, then Williams continued to be perpetually
baffled by his mother up until the end. But it was not just Quevedo and Elena who were
fused in Williams’s imagination; the Spanish language and Elena were as well, this
despite the fact that the bilingual William George also spoke mostly Spanish. Elena
spoke French and Spanish, and sometimes spoke a mixture of the two—something that

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fascinated her son. Nonetheless, Williams associates Elena with Spanish, and the
conflicted feelings he had about the Spanish language mirror the feelings he had toward
his mother. Just as Williams’s identity is intertwined with both his parents’ cultural and
racial histories, so is it linked with the Spanish language.
The act of translation (or refusing to translate) is a fundamental part of
Williams’s uneven cultural and ethnic performance; it is also a favorite ploy by which he
negotiates his cultural conflicts, as noted in the Gonzales/San Luis Potosí anecdote.
Translation, remaining silent when spoken to in Spanish, refusing to translate, or even
bad translation are all part of Williams’s ethnic performance. Williams’s bad translation
is particularly strange for three main reasons: (1) Spanish was his first language; (2) He
had access to his parents for translation; (3) the bad translation got past his editors. When
Williams writes about his trip to Spain in his autobiography, he exclaims, “Then Seville,
‘El que no a vista [sic] Sevilla,’ as Mother would say, ‘no a vista [sic] maravilla!’ The
cathedral there—that mountain—in front of which I caught a beggar changing from his
rags into a decent business suit. He smiled at me with a shrug” (Auto. 122). My
translation of Elena Hoheb’s words are “He who has not seen Sevilla has not seen the
marvelous.” The past participle “seen,” should be the Spanish “visto,” not “vista” as
Williams writes, and he omits the article “la” [“the”] before “maravilla.”
If the bad translation was unintentional, it’s curious that this would escape
Williams’s own perfectionist, self-editing eye, and then get past Williams’s editors.
More interesting is the possibility that Williams’s bad translation was intentional—
whether consciously or not—and an aspect of his play with language, cultural
performance, and ethnic passing. Just as Williams feigns ignorance of the Spanish

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language with the Gonzaleses, resorting to speaking French and English instead, and
thus performing a “gringo” role, he performs a limited knowledge of Spanish in his
anecdote about Spain for the benefit of his literary audience. It is as if in the context of
race and ethnicity, Williams appears and recedes at will, refusing to be labeled, and only
willing to define himself on his own conflicted terms. In terms of his ethnic and
linguistic play, he is the beggar caught changing into a business suit who then smiles with
a shrug.
Williams’s culturally conflicted self plays out in several of his early poems that
precede In the American Grain, beginning with the 1917 publication of Al Que Quiere!.
This collection of poetry announces itself as an act of defiance from the start with a title
that dares the reader to read it, and that simultaneously suggests disregard toward
audience reception. Although publication by definition implies the desire to make work
public, the title of Williams’s collection suggests that this collection is more private than
public. In other words, the collection is not written primarily for the audience and dares
the audience to read its contents.
In choosing a Spanish-language title, Williams immediately puts distance between
himself and a reader that perhaps does not have immediate access to the Spanish
language. Williams thus situates himself as the translator, evident in his letter to
Marianne Moore in which he writes about Al Que Quiere!:
I want to call my book: A Book of Poems: AL QUE QUIERE!—which
means: To him who wants it—but I like the Spanish just as I like a
Chinese image cut out of stone: it is decorative and has a certain integral
charm. But such a title is not democratic—does not truly represent the
contents of the book, so I have added: A Book of Poems: AL QUE
QUIERE! Or THE PLEASURES OF DEMOCRACY. Now I like this
conglomerate title! It is nearly a perfect image of my own grinning mug

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(seen from the inside), but my publisher objects—and I shake and
wobble. (SL 40)

One could only wonder if Williams’s internal glee or “grinning mug” is rooted in the
mystery, privacy, and inaccessibility that the space between language and translation
allots him. Translation makes Williams the keeper of the keys, and only he knows the
meaning behind the pleasures of democracy to which he refers as he parses out
information and clues in cryptic fashion. As early as 1910, Williams had begun to use
untranslated, Spanish-language titles for his poems, such as “Misericordia,” followed by
“Con Brio” and “Contemporania.” in the 1913 collection, The Tempers. He continued to
use untranslated titles such as “La Flor” (1914), the trend culminating with the inclusion
of four untranslated Spanish-language titles for his poems in Al Que Quiere! (“El
Hombre”, “Libertad! Igualdad! Fraternidad!”, “Mujer,” and “Divertimento”).
In likening his use of Spanish in the title with a decorative, stone-carved Chinese
image, Williams gives the impression that he has less than full comprehension of the
Spanish language and that he uses it for solely ornamental purposes. The epigraph he
chose to introduce Al Que Quiere!, however, suggests something altogether different.
Williams chose an excerpt from Guatemalan writer Rafael Arévalo Martinez’s 1915 short
story, El hombre que parecia un caballo, or “The Man Who Resembled a Horse, ” for his
epigraph. Williams translated the story with the help of his father and published it in
1918, a year after the publication of Al Que Quiere!.
19
Consider the emphasis on roots
and tierra nueva or “new earth” in the excerpt from Arévalo Martinez’s story:

19
Williams’s translation of the Arévalo Martínez short story was published in The Little
Review (Dec. 1918) under the title “the Man Who Resembled a Horse.” Williams
mentions the writer in his poem, “A Celebration” in the Sour Grapes collection of 1921:

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Había sido un arbusto desmedrado que prolonga sus filamentos hasta
encontrar el humus necesario en una tierra nueva. Y cómo me nutría! Me
nutria con la beatitud con que las hojas trémulas de clorofila se extienden
al sol; con la beatitud con que una raíz encuentra un cadaver en
decomposición; con la beatitud con que los convalecientes dan sus pasos
vacilantes en las mañanas de primavera, bañadas de luz; … (CP 480-81)

The following is Williams’s translation of the passage:
I had been an adventurous shrub which prolongs its filaments until it finds
the necessary humus in new earth. And how I fed! I fed with the joy of
tremulous leaves of chlorafile that spread themselves to the sun; with the
joy with which a root encounters a decomposing corpse; with the joy with
which convalescents take their vacillating steps in the light-flooded
mornings of spring; … (CP 480-81)

The given excerpt does not indicate the overarching themes of Arévalo Martinez’s
famous short story—the malleability of human nature according to the shifting
surroundings, and its relationship to Freudian projection. Arévalo Martinez’s story which
explores the tension between the human and natural worlds (sometimes conjoining them),
and which illustrates the environment’s mastery over the human being, is also a recurring
theme in Williams’s poetry and in In the American Grain. Williams’s interest in the
natural world as a metaphor for sources and origins—which he’d later explore
consciously and more explicitly in In The American Grain—is evident here, but not
explicit.
Even in Williams’s chosen excerpt of Arévalo Martinez’s work, the “corpse”
representing all of Williams’s buried cultural/racial desires and anxieties emerges. The
fact that it emerges in the act of translation as well as in the choice of translated work,
indicates just how significant a role language plays in Williams’s identitarian desires and

“This falling spray of snow-flakes is / a handful of dead Februaries / prayed into flower
by Rafael Arévalo Martínez / of Guatemala” (CP 142-43).

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anxieties. The ebb and flow of Williams’s shifting locus of identity appear
throughout Al Que Quiere!, such as in “Dedication for a Plot of Ground,” and in
“Foreign.” The first two lines in “Foreign,” most explicitly illustrate Williams’s need to
situate himself in terms of identity: “Artsybashev is a Russian. / I am an American” (CP
79). The question for Williams throughout his life and which he explored throughout his
writings was just how did the Americas define or redefine the “American” identity?
Williams may have produced Al Que Quiere!, with all of its Spanish-language
titles, in defiance of a Francophone and Anglophone trend in high modernism, in the
process, putting his “American” stamp on his own modernist experiment.
20
However, the
collection is also a self-reflexive exercise, as his poetry illustrates the negotiation, the ebb
and flow, of his own identity. For example, in Al Que Quiere!,Williams defines himself
as one who “walks the back streets”(“Pastoral”) (CP 64), and he finds himself “Poking
into negro houses” (“Sub Terra”) (CP 64).
Williams’s buried desires for the racialized female emerge throughout Al Que
Quiere!, although he tends to link initially the females to someone other than himself.
Note, for instance, that he hears stories about dancing women who are “stark naked
below / the skirts raised round / their breasts” (“Canthara”) from an old black man, rather
than experiencing the thing itself (CP 78). He is stirred to writing by the “colored

20
Eliot’s “Prufrock” came out in 1917, the same year as Williams’s Al Que Quiere!.
Williams’s intellectual and artistic acrimony toward Eliot is scathing. In an interview he
states, “I had a violent feeling that Eliot had betrayed what I believed in. He was looking
backward; I was looking forward. He was a conformist, with wit, learning which I did
not possess. He knew French, Latin, Arabic, God knows what” (“Dialogues,” 64).
Williams’s ire also has a patriotic tinge to it that he blends with the personal: “I felt he
had rejected America and I refused to be rejected and so my reaction was violent […] I
knew he would influence all subsequent American poets and take them out of my sphere”
(64).

240
women” who have “faces like / old Florentine oak” (“Apology”), the simile linking
them with the European inanimate (CP 70). And when it comes to female sexuality and
biology, Williams only thinly disguises the racial stereotype of black women, exclaiming,
“Oh black Persian cat! / Was not your life / already cursed with offspring?” (CP 78). He
then complicates a reading of the stereotype by giving his poem, the Spanish-language
title, “Mujer” [“Woman]. For Williams, race, culture, and language are a muddle in grey
space. He may come in and out of conscious awareness of this muddle, choosing to
explore it in a more ambiguous, and thus more palatable, space, such as in his poetry. In
“A Portrait in Greys,” he asks, “Will it never be possible / to separate you from your
greyness?” The lines the stanzas that follow are telling of his conscious struggle:

Must I be always
moving counter to you? Is there no place
where we can be at peace together
and the motion of our drawing apart
be altogether taken up?
I see myself
standing upon your shoulders touching
a grey, broken sky—
but you, weighted down with me,
yet gripping my ankles,—move
laboriously on,
where it is level and undisturbed by colors.
(CP 99)

Williams’s struggles with inhabiting a grey or liminal space, but he also struggles against
desiring blackness, and chooses to counter his desires by Europeanizing black women
and also portraying them metaphorically in his poems. Williams also mediates his hidden
desires through untranslated Spanish-language titles, for he is able to encode his meaning,

241
convey it only to a select audience, and thus control the disclosure of his own self-
reflexion.
For Williams, translation is not only a scheme, it is also a trick that cloaks
meaning and forms part of his performance. As he conveys in the 1922 poem, “When
Fresh, it was Sweet, ” in which he muses over Nikita Balieff’s theater group, the Chauve-
Souris,
21
“Removed from the intimate / It is all intimate, closely observed / To be deftly
translated to the stage—“ (CP 246). Skillful “translation” of the intimate does not mean
literal translation. In fact, the deft translation of observed intimate details of one’s life
often calls for sly staging, mistranslation, or no translation at all. By the ninth stanza of
the poem, Williams answers the question, “why translate?”:

It cannot be more than it is
without in a peasant’s cottage
being mercenary to the landlord
who kills the splendor of national character
by his demands for rent, the filth of
stupidity which has no escape
—blend to make impossible
all that is not imagined by men who have
lived yet unsated
by life’s endless profusion
and color
and rhythms, who seeing the brevity
of their transit through the spinning world
have resort to—

21
The Armenian actor, Nikita Balieff (1876/1877–1936), created his art theater troupe,
the Chauve-Souris (French for "bat") because he desired to perform comedy after years of
being cast in dramatic non-speaking roles. His group had much success in Moscow, and
after going into exile in Paris following the Russian Revolution in 1917, the group was
noticed by the British theatrical producer Charles B. Cochran, who then brought the
troupe to London. Williams’s admiration for Balieff is interesting in the context of his
play with language and translation, for Balieff was well known for his mix of Russian,
French, “faulty” English, and slang, which he coupled with comical gesticulation
onstage. His limited English was completely feigned.

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translation
Here life’s exquisite diversity
its tenderness
ardor of spirits
find that in which they may move—
(CP 347-48)

The corpse reemerges as the killed “splendor of national character,” so that the realities
of immigration and immigrant quotidian life means carrying such a corpse on one’s back.
Only translation provides the space in which the tender and arduous spirit of “exquisite
diversity” can move fluidly. This fluidity of expression and identity is what Williams
seeks through his writings, for in “fluidity” all of Williams’s identitarian contradictions
could coexist and even make sense. Time, however, also factors into Williams’s ideas on
translation. As he expresses in his poem, his urgency to translate has to do with the
brevity of one’s “transit though the spinning world,” so that translation—and all of the
problematic aspects of translation that Williams introduces—reflects Williams’s desire to
understand himself and to be understood by others, contradictions and all.

Conclusion: “I’ll keep my way in spite of all.”
In his biography of Williams, Marzan argues that “while the specifics of the
racial doubts in Elena’s family are left murky, Williams’ conviction of racial mixture in
him is clear. His certainty of having been conceived in ‘the best spirit of the New World’
gave him the confidence to see himself as a ‘pure product of America’” (50). Williams’s
Latin American background, and all the cultural and racial mixture that it suggests,
certainly made Williams reflect about his place in the United States and what it truly
meant to be “all-American.” He was hardly confident, however, in how he viewed his

243
place in “America” [read the United States] or in the Americas. His writings
illustrate his conflicts, his negotiations, and his contradictions, and illustrate the dilemma
of the “American” artist.
The conventional and common understanding of an “all-American” identity
brings forth iconic images of the U.S. flag, apple pie, and whiteness. Williams may have
desired to be “all-American” in the conventional sense, and he has even been constructed
as such, but he simultaneously sought an all-American locus of identity in the context of
the Latin Americas. Williams’s identity, or his seeking of a cohesive identity, however,
cannot be conveniently and easily explained as a “split” in a dual sense as some
biographers have argued. In Williams, we see competing identitarian desires, as well as
libidinous desires produced by identitarian conflicts, that come into relief at unexpected
times and surprising places. That said, Williams indeed represents the all-American
experience in the truest sense, as well as the experience of a first-generation “American”
who is the son of immigrants.
Williams’s poetry and other writings could be reconsidered to very new effects,
given his cultural conflicts and contradictions that I describe in this chapter. Moreover,
Williams, as an example of a Latin American passing figure, adds complexity to studies
on race formation and racial/ethnic passing. More broadly, Williams’s trans-American
interests and explorations shake up notions about modernism that have been tacitly
accepted and perpetuated in academia, such as the trans-Atlantic connection that is taken
for granted as the primary (if not the sole) source of artistic and literary influence.
The rebellion against this literary trend was clearly not Williams’s sole motivation
in incorporating the Spanish language; his interests were also identitarian and political.

244
The act of translation and the unwillingness to translate was for Williams a means by
which he could defy modernist convention. It was also his way of expressing a complex
Latin American identity, which he sometimes expressed with open defiance, as one
stanza in his 1914 poem, “Self-Portrait 2” illustrates:
As for me—?
Beat upon my head
And upon my shoulders
You frighten me but little.
Let your very eyes pop out
Against the feather I wear
And dance down the edge
Of my sombrero--!
I’ll keep my way in spite of all.
(CP 48)

In this stanza, Williams is the Native American to whom he showed condescension, and
he is the Mexican with whom he refused to identify. And the “sombrero” he wears, the
hat he’ll throw down for the amusement of others, is untranslated. It is not a “Mexican
hat,” it is a “sombrero” which is quickly punctuated with an exclamation point. As I
discuss in the next chapter, translation is dynamic. It allows for slippage, performativity,
self-assertion, cultural identification, as well as cultural distance. For Williams, it was a
way to define himself, even as he refused to be pinned down by others.

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Chapter Four
“Look Homeward Angel Now”:
Travel, Translation, and Langston Hughes’s Quest for Home

Introduction:
Publications such as Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Along This Way,
Plum Bun, and Passing debunk race logic, the color line, and thus by extension, the laws
based on such constructions. William Carlos Williams negotiates his national, cultural,
and racial identities in his prose and poetry. While his struggles take place publicly on
the pages of his writings, he often encodes his racial and ethnic anxieties, frequently
playing out his angst through the female body. Alleviation from oppressive Jim Crow
laws and immigration policies (written or unwritten), includes slipping back and forth
across national boundaries, either through language passing, through racial or ethnic
passing, through immigration, or through play with the Spanish language in the literature
and poetry of Johnson, Van Vechten, Fauset, Larsen, and Williams. All of these coping
methods, however, are also linked to travel, migration, and immigration—whether
fantastical or real.
In similar fashion, Langston Hughes’s father, James, moved to Toluca, Mexico
around 1903 in order to escape racism in the United States. Langston Hughes also found
some respite from Jim Crow laws by crossing the border, living in Mexico for some time,
and enjoying celebrity in the Latin Americas when he was not as well known in the U.S.
Spanish-language translations of Hughes’s poetry were published in Cuba as early as
1928 and in Mexico by 1931. After a 1934 stay in Mexico (where he enjoyed the
company of artists such as Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and

246
José Clemente Orozco, among others), Hughes began to translate Mexican short
stories and poetry for publication in the U.S.. He later translated and published a
collection of poems by the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén in 1948.
Hughes’s experience of translating and being translated thus poses the question:
What does it mean to translate and be translated under oppressive historical conditions?
The transnational exchange, in this case, seems more bidirectional and evenly cross-
cultural than those previously examined in this project. Most importantly, for Hughes
this exchange is rooted in real travel and real cross-cultural experience, as opposed to
fantastical constructions and observations made at a distance. The results are a bilateral
exchange that functions as political mobilization, and that is necessarily informed by
comparative racial concerns. While translation can be a trick or performance of
racial/ethnic passing, for Hughes there is something more: language and cultural
translation (and even mistranslation) is a dialogic performance that (sometimes
simultaneously) asserts the self, seeks unity with an “other,” and creates distance from
self by questioning assumptions of cultural essence. It is a constant identitarian
negotiation.
To date, scholarship on Hughes and translation has mostly compared his
translated and translation works. The few scholarly works that have explored this aspect
of Hughes’s writing have been invaluable. Martha Cobb’s Harlem, Haiti, and Havana
(1979) has been especially helpful in its configuration of black diaspora triangulation,
transnational convergence, and poetic exchange, as has been Richard Jackson’s Black
Writers and Latin America (1998). Although Hughes’s transnational connections to
Spain, Haiti, and the Latin Americas have been established, the scholarship describing

247
the impetus for his translation works goes no further than to assess political affinities
and his need to connect to a global, black diaspora. This chapter expands and builds upon
this scholarship by looking at the socio-political and historical conditions behind the
impetus for translation, by positing translation as performance, and by looking at the
relationship between identity and translation. While I’ve established William Carlos
Williams’s play with translation, his encoded meaning, and the identity conflicts that play
out through language, my case study of Langston Hughes and translation goes further, in
that it addresses the political and psychological motivations to translate and be translated.
I thus fill theoretical gaps in current translation theory. Translation theory generally deals
with the linguistic mechanics of translation or, when viewed politically, with the post-
colonial and socio-political ramifications of being translated. No work to date deals with
translation and the color line, with translation and black identity, or with translation as
political performance.
Judith Butler’s definition of the performative act as the “coincidence of signifying
and enacting” (198), most aptly describes Hughes’s performance through the act of
translation. In response to J.L. Austin’s How to Do things With Words (1975), which
suggests that there is a “deliberation that precedes that doing, and that the words will be
distinct from the things that they do” (Butler 198), Butler asks, “what would it mean for a
thing to be ‘done by’ a word or, for that matter, for a thing to be ‘done in by’ a word”
(198)? The thing “done by” a word, or words, in the case of Hughes’s translation, is the
straddling of national cultures and, consequently, the straddling of ethnic identity, since
language functions as means by which the body is read. As Hughes’s translation of
Guillén’s work shows, however, the thing “done in by” words or translation, is the

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original source work. The performance enacted through translation, therefore, is
politically, but appropriation and even obliteration of the original work results. Hughes’s
translation as performance is enriched and complicated by his stay in Mexico and Cuba—
a trans-American aspect of modernism that, like the examples in the preceding chapters,
enriches our understanding of Harlem Renaissance writings specifically and modernism
at large.

Langston Hughes in Mexico and Cuba—1907-1948:
Mexico:
“You see, unfortunately, I am not black,” Hughes declares in his 1940
autobiography The Big Sea (36). He then qualifies his statement: “There are lots of
different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word ‘Negro’ is
used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is
more pure. It means all Negro, therefore black” (36). This initial negation of
“blackness,” followed by his acknowledgment of family and cultural history, is a
declaration of distance from and rejection of the “one drop” rule. (Hughes’s experience in
Africa, in fact, inverts this law so that it becomes an “all drop rule.”) Hughes’s statement
also suggests that he writes from personal experience, travel, and observation, rather than
from experience and hearsay via the travel writing of others.
Indeed, Hughes’s travels began at an early age and they were indirectly shaped by
the U.S. color line. “I am brown. My father was a darker brown,” Hughes describes
(36). Just as Langston Hughes rejects “blackness” under the law, so did his father, James
Nathaniel Hughes. According to literary critic and co-administrator of the Langston

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Hughes estate, Arnold Rampersad, James Nathaniel Hughes was ambitious. He had
been a schoolteacher, a law clerk in a lawyer’s office, a farmer, a grocery operator, a
homesteader, and a surveyor’s assistant. But when he passed the civil service
examination required to work in the post office in Louisville, “he languished as he waited
for a position” (Rampersad 10). James was then prevented from taking the bar
examination because of his race, which thus encouraged James to move on and look for a
better situation. “My father went to Cuba, and then to Mexico, where there wasn’t any
color line, or any Jim Crow,” Hughes explains in The Big Sea (39). He does not,
however, clarify whether James left his mother Carrie Hughes while she was pregnant
with him. In James’s search for respite from U.S. racism and for more lucrative
opportunities within which race would not be a factor, he left for Cuba with eight
hundred dollars in cash in December of 1901. Langston was born on February 1, 1902.
James was in Mexico by October 1903 where he began work as a confidential secretary
to the general manager of the American-owned Pullman Company in Mexico City. He
stayed in Mexico until his death in 1934.
James and Carrie attempted to reconcile when Langston was five years old.
1

Carrie, Langston, and his grandmother, Mary Langston set off for Mexico in 1907. The
reunion, Rampersad states, lasted until 11:34 p.m. of April 14, 1907, “when the ground
rumbled and shook for four and a half minutes throughout a vast region of Mexico that
included Mexico City, Acapulco, Chilapa, and Chilpancingo” (11). The cathedral that
cracked from top to bottom, the spiders and scorpions that crawled out from the crevices,

1
There is slight discrepancy about Langston Hughes’s age at this point. Arnold
Rampersad declares him to be five years old, while Hughes states that he was six in The
Big Sea, page 53.

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the hundreds of people left dead, and the thousands left injured and homeless, were
enough to make Carrie Hughes flee from Mexico with her mother and son immediately.
Langston would not see his father again until the summer of 1919 when he
returned to Mexico. This return trip marked the beginning of Langston’s hatred for his
father. Langston was late upon arriving in Laredo, Texas, where he was to meet his
father and then travel on to Mexico. “Why weren’t you at the train last night?” his father
asked. “We moved, and I didn’t get your wire till this morning,” Langston responded.
“Just like niggers. Always moving!” James exclaimed (Hughes, TBS 54). “Look at the
niggers,” James sneered, as he saw some workers in a cotton field as he and Langston
passed through Arkansas. “My father hated Negroes. I think he hated himself, too, for
being a Negro. He disliked all of his family because they were Negroes and remained in
the United States, where none of them had a chance to be much of anything but servants,”
Hughes explains (TBS 56). In response to his father’s grim beliefs, Rampersad surmises
that any “boyhood fantasy” that Langston had about James Hughes “quickly died” (33).
James’s contempt for poverty was conflated with race. Hughes describes his father as
being “just like the other German and English and American business men with whom he
associated in Mexico,” and declared that his father deemed Mexicans to be “ignorant and
backward and lazy. He said they were exactly like the Negroes in the United States,
perhaps worse. And he said they were very bad at making money” (TBS 55-56). James’s
racism, along with his impatient and judgmental disposition was more than merely off-
putting to the young Langston; this racism was the catalyst that solidified Langston’s
personal politics, and clarified to him his desire to champion the marginalized people that
he embraced in his subsequent politics and writings.

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Just as James Weldon Johnson and William Carlos Williams had observed,
Hughes also noted that the strategic use of language has the capacity of performing racial
or ethnic identity, as well as, to a large extent, determining one’s bodily reading. The
use, manipulation, and even the withholding of language, thus allow the subject to engage
in “passive passing,” and also to orchestrate a theatrical performance that is pleasurable
because it is subversive and that even serves as a sociological experiment. As Butler
asserts, language “acts,” and it “posits itself in a series of distinct acts” with a primary
function that could be understood as a “kind of periodic acting” (198). Language acts
and creates, and as Hughes observed while in Mexico, language has the capacity to either
fix one’s identity in a national and cultural context, and also to make one’s identity
ambiguous and thus fluid.
While the importance of the acquisition of languages and the observation that
language intersected with race and culture would be something that Langston would
observe throughout his lifetime, in Mexico he began to note the socio-economic
importance and benefits of knowing the Spanish language. In 1909 James began to work
for the U.S.-owned Sultepec Electric Light and Power Company. “His brown skin,
knowledge of American and Mexican law, and fluency in Spanish,” asserts Rampersad,
“made him especially valuable when most of the gringos fled before the followers of
Pancho Villa and Zapata after the fall of the dictator Porfirio Diáz” (33). James was, in
fact, so important to the company that he was given power of attorney by his superiors
(who happened to be white), and thus had the power to transact all business, including the
sale of property if it was deemed necessary. James skin color, along with his ability to
speak fluent Spanish in a time of civil unrest and war, granted him safety in Mexico at a

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time when his white superiors were not safe. This intersection of language, color, and
possibly race and culture creates a political space in which there is mobility and value in
identitarian ambiguity. This respite from racial determinism is what James wanted for
Langston all along.
Although the young Langston suffered illness and his father’s ire while in
Mexico, he also escaped the racial violence that plagued the United States from June to
December of 1919. During this time period, the Cleveland papers reported riots in two
dozen cities after seventy-five blacks were lynched by whites; John Shillady, the white
secretary of the NAACP, was beaten and left unconscious in the streets of Austin, Texas,
after he tried to prevent the organization from being closed down by the state; a black
swimmer crossed an imaginary line in the water separating the “white” beach from the
“black” beach, which resulted in a Chicago riot in the month of July in which thirty-eight
people died; and two hundred blacks died during riots that followed protests against the
cotton industry in Arkansas (Rampersad 35).
Langston’s reentry into the U.S. in September of 1919 was also marked with
racial tension. He passed as a Mexican on the train trip from San Antonio to Cleveland,
but Rampersad notes that “on the first evening out a white man squinted at him across the
dining table, then leaped up: ‘You’re a nigger, ain’t you?’” (35). According to Hughes,
as he waited for a connecting train in St. Louis on a hot and humid September afternoon,
he decided to cool off with an ice cream soda. He reports the following exchange: “The
clerk said: ‘Are you a Mexican or a Negro?’ I said: ‘Why?’ ‘Because if you’re a
Mexican, I’ll serve you,’ he said. ‘If you’re colored, I won’t.’ ‘I’m colored,’ I replied.
The clerk turned to wait on some one else” (63). Reminiscent of James Weldon

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Johnson’s experience on his train trip from Jacksonville to New York in which he is
contextualized as Latin American because of his use of the Spanish language and the
Panama hat he wears, and in which he declares, “any kind of a Negro will do; provided
he is not one who is an American citizen” (ATW 89), Hughes pronounces, “I knew I was
home in the U.S.A.” (63).

Figure 13: Langston Hughes

Although Johnson’s experience is one of “passive passing,” as I’ve described in
chapter one, and Hughes’s experience is one in which he’s directly confronted and forced
to define and disclose who he “really is,” the juxtaposition shows Hughes’s defiance and
his staunch refusal to destabilize his identity as a U.S. citizen. He suggests a distinction
between a “Negro” identity and a “colored” identity, and groups all non-white identities
under the rubric of “colored” in both volumes of his autobiography. In doing so, he
shuns an identity in which he is merely a product of the United States and thus subject to
the laws and the architects of the laws that define him as legally “black.” Instead, he
simultaneously contextualizes himself globally and locally.

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By the summer of 1920, Langston Hughes had graduated from Central High
School and had been accepted to Columbia University. The problem was that he had no
financial means with which to attend the prestigious New York university. Langston
subsumed his anger toward his father and went back to Toluca, Mexico with the intention
of asking him for the money for school. He ended up staying in Mexico for a year.
Although his education at Columbia was delayed, it was hardly a year gone to waste.
During this year in Mexico, he met Carlos Pellicer, an intellectual involved with the
journal Mexico Moderno and also associated with a group of young progressives who
were reputed to be the most intellectually and artistically gifted in Mexico City.
This trip also proved to be a frustrating one. Langston was unable to convince his
father initially to fund his education in New York, because James wanted him to study in
Europe where he’d be away from the color line. As a result, Langston decided to make
money by teaching English in order to get himself out of Mexico. James Hughes finally
agreed to fund Langston’s U.S. education. The surprise expressed by Langston’s
replacement teacher is an anecdote worth telling. Hughes describes his replacement as a
“poor-looking lady of the stringy type, who probably had never been away from her
home town before” (TBS 81). The woman was from Arkansas, and when she finally
realized that Hughes was the instructor she would replace, Hughes describes that “her
mouth fell open and she said: ‘Why, Ah-Ah thought you was an American’” (81).
Hughes replied, “I am American!” To which she explained, “Oh, Ah mean a white
American” (TBS 81)! This exchange is especially interesting in that it is a sort of a power
standoff in which different translational methods are used as weapons. The woman from
Arkansas immediately translates Hughes through recodification in an attempt to

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“reconstitute” him. She translates Hughes’s body as “black” and nothing more,
thereby returning him to what she deems as his original and “true” state. In the process,
she strips him not only of his title of and status as teacher, but also strips him of his
identity as an “American.” Hughes, on the other hand, exacts his revenge by combining
translation with transcription. He may “report” his exchange with the woman, but he also
makes sure to transmit her regionalisms and all the stereotypes that they suggest. It is
clear that the power of translation, by whatever means and methods, was not lost on
Hughes. Soon after this exchange, Hughes left for the United States. His presence
throughout the Latin Americas remained nonetheless.
Hughes’s poetry was published in Mexico in 1931, in the journal
Comtemporáneos (1928-1931), but it would not be until 1934 that he would return to
Mexico to settle his father’s estate after his death. The debacle resulting from the reading
of his father’s will led to another lengthy stay in Mexico for Hughes. Unable to disclose
the contents of James Hughes’s will until Langston arrived in Mexico, the lawyers
contacted Langston and asked him to travel as soon as possible. Having lived in Mexico
for thirty years, James Hughes had amassed money and property. James’s sister funded
Langston’s trip and advanced him three hundred dollars toward her interest in the content
of the will. When the will was read, however, it was discovered that James had left
everything to the three elderly Patiño sisters with whom he had made a home after his
stroke, and had left his family—Langston, his sister, Sally, his German wife, Berta
Schultz—absolutely nothing. James made sure that the will was legally binding, for as
Hughes mentions, “Mexican law says that a wife must be mentioned in a will, even if the
husband does not wish to leave her anything—otherwise she may legally contest it. At

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the very end of my father’s will there was a single sentence: ‘I have a wife, Frau
Berta Schultz Hughes.’ Period. That was all” (IWAIW 286). Nevertheless, the Patiño
sisters insisted on dividing the money with Hughes. When his share was converted into
U.S. dollars, however, it was only enough to repay his Aunt Sally. He subsequently
decided to stay in Mexico for the winter to make money, and, in spite of the
circumstances and the outcome of the trip, Hughes declares, “For me it was a delightful
winter. I have an affinity for Latin Americans, and the Spanish language I have always
loved” (IWAIW 286)—a strange consolation of culture and language in light of James’s
final shunning of him, his mother, and his aunt.
By 1935 Hughes had reconnected with the intellectual Carlos Pellicer and formed
part of a group known as the “international advance guard” which also included Pablo
Neruda of Chile, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina, Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal,
Jacques Roumain of Haiti, Aimé Césaire of Martinique, and Nicolás Guillén of Cuba.
This stay proved intellectually and professionally advantageous in that it resulted in the
rise of Hughes’s fame throughout the Latin Americas. But it also confirmed his beliefs
about the instability of racial taxonomy, and the arbitrary nature of the U.S.-based “one-
drop” rule and the consequent color line.
During this stay in Mexico, the Mexican artist (and Harlemite) Miguel
Covarrubias introduced Hughes to Diego Rivera. Hughes seemed surprised by Rivera’s
physical appearance, describing him as a “mountain of a man” who was “darker than
[Hughes] in complexion” (IWAIW 289). Hughes then announced to Rivera that “he
looked more like an American Negro than a Mexican Indian” (289). To this, Rivera
replied, “One of my grandmothers was a Negro” (289). Covarrubias and Rivera were

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compelled to educate Hughes on the history of Africans in Mexico, after which
Hughes observes and ruminates:
Certainly, Diego Rivera had large and quite Negroid features and a deep
bronze complexion. But fortunately in Mexico color did not matter as it
does in the United States. My father had gone to Mexico when I was a
baby, to escape the color line in Oklahoma, where he had been refused
permission, because of race, to take the law examination for the bar. He
practiced in Mexico City instead, and came back only once in thirty years
to his native land. (IWAIW 289)

Figure 14: Diego Rivera with Frida Kahlo,
photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1932.

Hughes rightly notes the difference a borderline makes, in that Diego Rivera would have
been considered legally black in the United States and more than likely afforded neither
the opportunities, the cultural capital, nor the laudations that he enjoyed as a son of
Mexico. Of equal interest, however, is how Hughes’s thoughts turn to his father. Despite
the poor treatment he had suffered from James Hughes, despite falling ill from ire at his
father, Langston’s thoughts turn to James’s plight and struggle with the U.S. color line—
a point to which he refers and which he repeats in both volumes of his autobiography.
The way in which Hughes refers to his father immediately after “the United States”
suggests his problematic and yet inextricable relationships with both. The political and

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the personal are thus conflated. Hughes’s observations of the color line in Cuba
would also inform his philosophy on the function of art and his impetus to translate
poetry and culture.

Cuba:
Between 1928 and 1931 Hughes’s works were translated and published in Cuba,
Mexico, and Argentina by writers such as José Antonio Fernández de Castro, Rafael
Lozano, Xavier Villarrutia, and Jorge Luis Borges.
2
It is no wonder then that when Cuban
journalist, Fernández de Castro found out that Hughes was in Mexico, he contacted the
Mexican press to apprise them of Hughes’s intellectual and literary importance.
Fernández de Castro then followed this with a publication about Hughes’s poetry. This
call to attention to Hughes’s work by Fernández de Castro resulted in, as Hughes
describes, “a number of newspaper interviews, sessions with photographers and artists,
and translators asking me how to translate the syncopated rhythms and Harlem slang of
my poems into Mexican idioms and Spanish meters” (TBS 290).
Literary critic Richard Jackson describes Hughes’s popularity in the Latin
Americas as stemming from shared political spaces and views. He speculates that
Hughes was doing the same thing their own local national heroes were doing might have
contributed to Hughes’s “enormous popularity in those lands whose national poets have
been vehemently anti-American” (89). Criticism of U.S. law and policy is far different

2
José Antonio Fernández de Castro translated and published “I Too am America” as
“Yo, también” in Social (September 1928): 30, and Jorge Luis Borges translated and
published “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” as “El negro habla de los ríos,” in Sur 1 (Fall
1931): 169.

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from being “anti-American,” however, and Hughes would negotiate this difference
time and again in his writings. Nevertheless, the Latin American literati saw in Hughes
an innovative writer who proudly and defiantly used African American culture in his
poetry for the purpose of social critique. This was exciting to poets who desired
something new and who attempted to extricate themselves from the traditions of
modernismo.
Hughes’s first trip to Cuba was a matter of chance and spontaneity. An invitation
to read his poems at Fisk University in the spring of 1927 brought him to the South.
Having finished his business in Tennessee, Hughes made his way down to New Orleans.
As he walked along the docks, watching cargo being unloaded from fruit boats, he came
across a freighter called the S.S. Nardo. He asked the steward where they were heading
and whether they needed a mess boy. Hughes had prior experience in working as a mess
boy, and by these means, in fact, he had traveled to Europe and Africa. “In a few minutes
I was signed up for a trip to Havana and back,” Hughes states (TBS 220).
Although Hughes scholar Dellita Martin-Ogunsola claims that Hughes met with
the Cuban poet, Nicolás Guillén for the first time during his 1927 trip to Cuba, Hughes’s
own accounts date this meeting in 1931. With the intention of writing a cross-cultural
opera with racial motifs, Hughes decided to go to Cuba to look for a Negro composer
who could co-write the work with him. Miguel Covarrubias believed that the person who
could best direct him was the journalist and intellectual José Antonio Fernández de
Castro who wrote for Diario de la Marina, a newspaper that had first featured Nicolás

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Guillén’s poetry in 1929.
3
Covarrubias had written Hughes a letter of introduction
previously, but Hughes would not need it until this trip.
Hughes’s opera project never came to fruition, but this third trip to Cuba proved
to be productive and eye-opening for Hughes for several reasons. The popular and well-
connected Fernández de Castro introduced Hughes to the Afro-Cuban rumba—a
marginalized form of music and dance at the time that was considered suitable only for
the poor and déclassé, according to Hughes (IWAIW 43). Hughes describes the music as
“hip-shaking,” Afro-Cuban with an Arab-Moorish flavor, and comprised of “the tap of
claves, the rattle of gourds, the dong of iron bells, the deep steady roll of drums [that]
speak of the earth, life bursting warm from the earth, and earth and sun moving in the
steady rhythms of procreation and joy” (IWAIW 43). The spiritual and bodily response
produced by the music, along with its marginalization due to its African roots, is akin to
the pleasures and ghettoization of jazz in the United States. That Hughes would make the
analogous connection is apparent, as he would later encourage Guillén to incorporate the
rumba and the son into his poetry just as he himself had done with jazz. Martin-
Ogunsola notes Hughes’s influence but places limits upon it, stating: “It is obvious that
the North American poet through his cultivation of blues and jazz poetry served as a role
model and mentor to the Caribbean bard, but Guillén was already on the road to
discovering his own voice in Cuban rumba and son poetry along with other practitioners
of Afro-cubanidad (Afro-Cubanism), as it was called during the 1930s” (7).

3
Nicolás Guillén’s “Small Ode to a Black Cuban Boxer,” from the forthcoming Sóngoro
cosongo was published in the Sunday literary supplement of Diario de la Marina in
1929. Guillén’s Motivos de son first appeared in the Sunday literary supplement of
Diario de la Marina on April 20, 1930.

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As these observations about the marginalization of African-based music
suggest, Cuba was no racial utopia. Hughes, in fact, would experience color-based
racism that would refute the fantastical utopian constructions about race in the Latin
Americas that were upheld by some of the travel writing and fictional works of the
Harlem intelligentsia, such as Robert Abbott, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Carl Van
Vechten. His observations burst any fantasies about migration resulting in freedom from
color and race-based discrimination:
But in Cuba one quickly notices that almost all the clerks in the bigger
shops are white or near white; that in the daily papers almost all the
photographs of society leaders are white, or light enough to pass for white;
that almost all the gentlemen who represent the people and sit on
government commissions and staff the Cuban consulates and ministries
abroad are white, or at least ‘meriney,’ as American Negroes term that
reddish blond border line between colored and white. But this scale is not
100% true. Occasionally a very dark Negro occupies a very high position
in Cuba. That is what misleads many visitors who are looking anxiously
for a country where they can say there is no color line—for Cuba’s color
line is much more flexible than that of the United States, and much more
subtle. There are, of course, no Jim Crow cars in Cuba, and at official
state gatherings and less official carnivals and celebrations, citizens of all
colors meet and mingle. But there are definite social divisions based on
color—and the darker a man is, the richer and more celebrated he has to
be to crash those divisions. (IWAIW 46)

Hughes noted what he termed a “triple color line,” which functioned more like a color
hierarchy in which the darkest of skin color were at the bottom rung, the lighter browns
of “mixed blood” at the middle, and the near or pure whites at the very top (IWAIW 45).
Despite this color hierarchy, Hughes noted, the “Latin Islands are more careless
concerning racial matters” (45). While this system is no less insidious than the color line
implemented in the United States, it certainly was (and is) more porous and flexible. Yet,

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while no one was legally defined as “black,” everyone read and reads each other at
the surface level of the epidermis and according to melanin concentration.
As U.S. money and “interests” infested Cuba, however, it also affected this so-
called racial carelessness, as Hughes would experience. He was refused entrance to a
Havana beach club, where he was to meet a group of journalists that included Fernandez
de Castro. The manager was an “old American boxer—white of course” and the incident
escalated and ended with a wail of sirens and with Hughes being arrested. Fortunately
for Hughes, the judge who presided over the case and whom Hughes describes as “a
kindly old mulatto gentleman—who might have been termed a Negro had he lived in the
United States, but who was “white” in Havana” (IWIAW 49), dismissed the case and
demanded that the club attendants apologize to Hughes.
Despite Hughes’s affinity for all things Latin American, despite his inclusion in
the avant-garde of literary circles, and despite his fame and literary success throughout
the Latin Americas, Hughes’s own experience proved that the Latin Americas provided
no racial haven and no utopian dreams. This conclusion, however, seemed to inspire
Hughes to action rather than to demoralize him. He cultivated a sense of diasporic
connection to all people of color—a connection that would gain complexity as he served
as a journalist in Spain, along with Nicolás Guillén, during the Spanish Civil War.

Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén in Spain:
Hughes’s connection to Nicolás Guillén and thus to Latin America continued and
was reinforced in Spain, when in 1937 the Baltimore Afro-American sent Hughes there to
cover the Spanish Civil War. He traveled to Spain via Paris by train with Nicolás Guillén

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who was to report on the war for a Cuban newspaper. As they traveled with their
“enormous basket of edibles,” bought and compiled to combat the food scarcity in Spain
against which they were warned, the jovial Guillén entertained Hughes with cubanismos
(or Cuban idioms) and folk songs:
Oyelo bien, encargada! Listen well, you in charge!
Esta es la voz que retumba— This is the voice that resounds
Esta es la ultima rumba This is the last rumba—
Que bailamos en tu morada. That we’ll dance at your place.

(IWAIW 313, 403)

What to make of the fact that Hughes provides no immediate translation of these lyrics,
relegating them instead to the endnotes of his autobiography? More than a mere display
of linguistic acrobatics, the absence of immediate translation has the effect of creating
distance between himself and the non-Spanish language-reading audience and therefore,
also between the reader and Guillén. The triangulation establishes Hughes as a translator
of Guillén’s words, and thus the liason between the reader and Guillén. While Hughes
presents himself as the definitive translator of Guillén’s work (of which he was the first
in the United States), his linguistic display is also one of straddling cultures through
language fluency and in the process, creating a third space. While he straddles a
linguistic line, in which he may or may not pass on information to one side or another, he
also occupies a third space of fluidity, as he negotiates translation choices as well as
whether to translate at all. That he chooses not to immediately disclose the meaning of
Guillén’s words has the effect of encapsulating both poets within a moment in which only
they (and those who understand not just Spanish but Cuban idioms or cubanismo) are
“in” on the joke.

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Although language provides access to a particular culture and can facilitate
“passing” for someone of another culture, it can also save lives, as I have illustrated in
chapter one with Booker T. Washington’s story of the Moroccan man. Hughes brings
Washington’s story to mind as he tells a story that describes language as life saving.
Hughes describes an Afro American soldier in the International Brigade who was initially
taken for a Moor fighting for Franco: After capturing a “Franco truck” with a French
brigade, Walter Cobb found himself behind the lines in Aragon. It was unfortunate that
there had been no time to paint over the insignias that marked the truck as belonging to
the Franco regime, for Cobb, who drove the truck, was stopped by some Loyalist soldiers
who were on patrol duty. Cobb escaped only through his use of Spanish, as Hughes
reports:
When they saw me, dark as I am, and saw that truck with those Fascist
insignias on it, they thought sure I was a Moor that had got lost and come
across the lines by accident. They yelled at me to jump down quick with
my hands up, and they held their guns cocked at my head until I got of that
truck. Man, I started talking Spanish right away, explained I was an
International. So they let me show them my papers and tell them how we
captured that truck from the Fascist, and that it belonged to us now.
Then, man, they almost hugged me! But suppose I didn’t keep in practice
with my Spanish? As much like a Moor as I look, I might have been dead,
driving a Franco truck! It pays to habla español. (IWAIW 340)

Hughes was amused by the confusion that the “American Negroes” in the Brigade
caused, since they were sometimes asked “if they were Moors fighting on the Loyalist
side” (IWAIW 340). Since many Moors spoke little or no Spanish, skin color, in
conjunction with the Spanish language, and perhaps in tandem with his accent, situated
Cobb nationally and politically. Cobb, in essence, was translated, interpreted, and
situated through language, which thus saved his life.

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Cultural/racial confusion, followed by cultural/racial translation in Spain is
foregrounded in Hughes’s observations, not only because accurate cultural translation
determined what side of political lines one stood, thus determining the difference
between life and death, but also because of the irony of the Moors fighting for Franco.
The irony lay in that after having ruled Spain and the rest of the Iberian peninsula from
711 to 1492, being expelled from Spain by Isabela and Ferdinand, the Moors were not
only back in Spain, but recruited into Spain. But as Hughes explains, the irony also lay
in that colonial Moors, who were victims of oppression in North Africa themselves, now
fought “against a Republic that had been seeking to work out a liberal policy toward
Morocco” (IWAIW 341).
4
These ironic turn of events in which, in some cases, a person
of color was compelled to fight against another person of color was of great consternation
to Hughes, suggesting that he believed race and color creates affinities stronger than
those delineated by national boundaries and language barriers. He expressed this dismay
in some verses in the form of a letter, in which the writer is an Afro American soldier in
the International Brigades who writes to a relative in Dixie:
Dear Brother at home:
We captured a wounded Moor today.
He was just as dark as me.
I said, Boy, what you doin’ here,
Fightin’ against the free?
He answered something in a language
I couldn’t understand.
But somebody told me he was sayin’
They grabbed him in his land
And made him join the Fascist army
And come across to Spain.

4
Morocco suffered oppression by Spain and France from 1904 to 1956. The “Moors”
who were recruited into Spain to fight for Franco were thus still living under this
oppression during the Spanish Civil War.

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And he said he had a feelin’
He’d never get back home again.
He said he had a feelin’
This whole thing wasn’t right.
He said he didn’t know
These folks he had to fight.
And as he lay there dyin’
In a village we had taken,
I looked across to Africa
And I seen foundations shakin’—
For if a free Spain wins this war,
The colonies, too, are free—
Then something wonderful can happen
To them Moors as dark as me.
I said, Fellow, listen,
I guess that’s why old England
And I reckon Italy, too,
Is afraid to let Republic Spain
Be good to me and you—
Because they got slaves in Africa
And they don’t want ‘em free.
Listen, Moorish prisoner—
Here, shake hands with me!
I knelt down there beside him
And I took his hand,
But the wounded Moor was dyin’
So he didn’t understand.
5
(IWAIW 342)

In the six months that Hughes spent in Spain, covering the war with Guillén and
writers such as Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Tom Driberg, Alejo Carpentier, and still
others who fought, such as Ernest Hemingway,
6
he observed the complex and often

5
Hughes’s poem is known by the title “International Brigades, Lincoln Battalion,” but
was published as “Letters from Spain” in Volunteer for Liberty, the official magazine of
the International Brigades, on November 15, 1937.

6
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967): U.S. writer of poems, short stories, and screenplays;
Lillian Hellman (1905-1984): U.S. dramatist and author of The Little Foxes (1939); Tom
Driberg (1905-1976): British journalist, member of Parliament, and author of
Colonnade, 1937-1947 (1949); Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980): Cuban novelist, poet, and
essayist, widely known for his theory of “lo real maravilloso” or “the marvelous real”;

267
contradictory workings of racial and cultural intersections. While his letter in verse
illustrates the untranslatable fissures and chasms between races, ethnicities, and cultures,
the soldier he depicts nevertheless attempts brotherly connection and verbal
communication. Hughes’s belief that affinities and bonds based on color and common
ancestry trump political alliance is illustrated with his repetition of his idea of color. “He
was just as dark as me,” he writes, later repeating this idea with “Moors dark as me.”
Each time the speaker of the poem is reminded of this color and racial affinity, he tries to
reason with the Moor. “Boy, what you doin’ here,” he asks, and he later tries to make the
Moor “listen” to reason. He bemoans his failure to understand the language of the Moor
as well as the Moor’s inability to understand him. This failure is especially distressing as
the soldier continuously draws the Moor closer to him through analogy and simile. As he
writes to his brother, he immediately tells him, that the Moor “was just as dark as me.”
As he begins to articulate the reasons for fighting in the war, he rationalizes that the
colonies will be free, and that life will brighten for “them Moors as dark as me.” He then
also pits himself and the Moor against English and Italian “slave owners” who fight
against the Loyalists, thus situating himself and the Moor in the same plight, and thus
attempting to make the Moor understand his folly and also their common ground. The
soldier attempts to bridge the linguistic gaps with physical contact, as he takes the Moor’s
hand in his. Hughes ends his poem with the despondent line, “So he didn’t understand,”
and yet the soldier holds the dying Moor’s hand in his. Is the attempt at linguistic,
political, or identitarian connection futile? Despite the obstacles and the potential for

Ernest Hemmingway (1899-1961): U.S. novelist, short-story writer, and journalist,
Nobel Prize in Literature winner (1954).

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failed connection, Hughes’s writings suggest that the attempt is necessary. This is
one reason, I argue, he translated works by Guillén, Gabriela Mistral, and Federico
García Lorca, among others.
Hughes met Spanish poets Rafael Alberti and Manuel Altolaguirre,
7
who helped
him start his translation of Lorca’s Primer romancero Gitano (1928) and Bodas de
sangre (1932).
8
Because Lorca was assassinated by the Franco regime in August of 1936
at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, and his work was banned throughout Spain by
Franco,
9
Hughes’s motivation for translation goes beyond the desire to connect. The act
of translation, in this case, is one of political defiance and transgression. Since Hughes’s
declaration, “Give Franco a hood and he would be a member of the KKK” (Jackson 25),
suggests constant cultural comparisons and analogies of political oppression, it is not
farfetched that the act of translation would take on political and transgressive overtones.
It would simultaneously suggest the need to connect while constantly negotiating the
concepts of national, racial, and cultural identity.

7
Rafael Alberti (1902-1999): Spanish painter and poet, awarded the Premio Cervantes—
the highest award in Literature in Spain—in 1983; Manuel Altolaguirre (1905-1959):
Spanish poet, publisher, and editor, member of the Generation of ’27.

8
Bodas de Sangre was never published. Hughes’s translation of Primer Romancero
Gitano was published by Beloit College in 1951. David Ignatow was co-editor of the
Beloit Poetry Journal and was responsible for bringing this into print. The typed "Note to
the Editor" on first leaf says "First translated at the Alianza de Escritores in Madrid
during the Civil War with the aid of the poets, Rafael Alberti, Manuel Altolaguirre, and
other friends of Lorca's. Revised in New York, July, 1945, with the aid of Miguel
Covarrubias; and in June, 1951, the poet's brother, Francisco Garcia Lorca, at Columbia
University. Checked with the Lloyd, Spender, Humphries, and Barea versions of certain
poems, also with the published French and Italian translations. Final copy, July 10,
1951."

9
The ban was rescinded in 1953. Lorca and his work were not openly discussed until
Franco’s death in 1975.

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Translation, Analogy, and the “I”:
As I have illustrated, Hughes’s experience with and observations about different
cultures (in this case, Spanish-speaking cultures) consistently ended with comparative
mental annotations. He compared color, hue, and race within the context of culture and
nationality, he compared socio-political plights, and he even compared music. In Cuba
he compared the rumba to jazz, and when in Spain he compared “Gypsy Spanish music”
to “Negro spirituals” (IWAIW 323). His experience of other cultures thus was comprised
of constant identitarian, spatial, and existential negotiations. How was he different from
other people and how were they different from him? How were they alike and were they
in any way the same? In order to externalize his observations, cultural comparisons, and
analogies Hughes went beyond merely writing down his experiences through travel
writing. His need to externalize and negotiate the limits of cultural connection resulted in
translation. The late translation scholar André Lefevere voices the relationship between
translation and connectivity when he explains, “contrary to traditional opinion, translation
is not primarily ‘about’ language. Rather, language as the expression (and repository) of
a culture is one element in the cultural transfer known as translation” (TRATMOLF 57).
Translation theorist Susan Bassnett’s concept of analogy is helpful in framing the
impetus to bridge cultural gaps through the act of translation. Analogy is “the most
obvious form of negotiation between textual and conceptual grids is that of analogy; it is
also the most superficial one, and the one that leads, inevitably, to the obliteration of
differences between cultures and the texts they produce,” Bassnett states (CCEOLT 7).
She goes on to argue specifically about the analogous relationship between cultures in
relation to the translation of words and wording. Analogy, as a conceptual tool, is helpful

270
not only in discussing the translation of texts from one language to another, but also
in discussing the motivation and impetus to translate culture.
The very limits of language, however, present obstacles in the attempt to connect
through analogy and translation. Perhaps the experiment is doomed from the very start,
for as Saussure argues, “in language there are only differences” (Holquist 31). Michael
Holquist summarizes Bakhtin in support of the idea of language as a signifier of
difference when he states:
We may say that for the units of existence we call “selves,” as for the units
of language we call “words,” “their most precise characteristic is in being
what the others are not.” While the self/other distinction does not operate
as a complete algorithm of natural language, it does share with language
the three fundamental features of function, means, and purpose. The
function of each is to provide a mechanism for differentiating; each uses
values to distinguish particular differences, and the purpose of doing so in
each case is to give order to (what otherwise would be) the chaos of lived
experience. (31)

The act of translation may be the attempt to convey the cultural analogy, to display the
porosity of cultural lines and, therefore, the blurring of racial lines, but it is inevitable that
the translator inserts herself/himself in the final product. Holquist argues that language
itself, at the performance level and at the moment of utterance, marks the speaking
subject as an individual “I.” The “I” that speaks thus, “marks the point of articulation
between the pre-existing, repeatable system of language and [the subject’s] unique,
unrepeatable existence as a particular person in a specific social and historical situation”
(28).
Faithful translation, in the attempt to avoid the insertion of the “I” or of the
translator’s own context may be a utopian attempt to protect the original source, and by
extension, to protect and balance the cultural connection. Lefevere pronounces this

271
attempt “utopian” and, as a strategy, futile. Given the futility, the attempt and
consequent failure is telling of the struggle and the investment in the attempt, for
Lefevere notes that “Translated texts as such can teach us much about the interaction of
cultures and the manipulation of texts” (TRATMOLF 51). Hughes’s translation of
Guillén’s poetry illustrate the attempt and failure described by linguistic and translation
scholars, but it also suggests a struggle to be faithful and a paradoxical immersion in
another’s experience that results in the assertion of the “I” and the erasure of the original
subject.

Of Poetry, Jazz, Son, and Rumba:
Is it any coincidence that both Hughes and Guillén employ music, whether in
content or form, in their poetry? The relationship and influence that their respective
poetic musicality implies has been a source of scholarly debate since the comparison was
first made. Cuban journalist, Ramon Vasconcelos, for example, wrote, “Cuba is not the
North American South nor is the son the ‘Blues,’ just as the guitar is not the banjo.
Neither better nor worse, it is a different matter,” in an article titled, “Motivos de son”
(Mullen 30).
10
Guillén himself refuted Vasconcelos in an El Pais article titled, “Sones
and soneros,” published on June 12, 1930. Critic Regino E. Boti went further in one of
his articles, vehemently denying any influence Hughes might have had over Guillén’s
work:
… the tone of Nicolás Guillén’s poetry being strange to Cuba, there was
the necessity among critics to search abroad in order to assign him a

10
Quoted in Fernando de Ortiz, “Motivos de son, por Nicolás Guillén,” in Archivos del
Folklore Cubano, 5 (July-September 1930): 228.

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heritage. And they found one in Langston Hughes, and I now
answer—questioning in turn—those who have asked me in person what
literary relationship exists between Hughes and Guillén? In the lyrical
aspect, none. Just as a yankee and a Cuban have nothing in common, the
two poets are different, and so are their poems. The muse of Hughes
waits. Guillén’s cries out. Given this, why insist on a false heritage?
11

(Mullen 31)

There is no denying that Hughes and Guillén shared similar attitudes about people of
color, whether in the United States, Cuba, or in Spain, and given that both employed
musical content and forms that were considered marginal and déclassé (Jazz in the United
States, Afro Cuban son and rumba in Cuba), it seems strange to quash the possibilities of
intellectual exchange and influence in lieu of cultural protectionism.
Having been introduced to Hughes by Fernández de Castro in 1930, Guillén
conducted an interview with Hughes in which they discussed poetry, Hughes’s life in the
United States, his trips to Africa and Europe, and the plight of black people. The
interview illustrates cultural comparisons in regard to black people in the U.S. and Cuba:
Guillén states of his interview:
Hughes is very concerned about blacks in Cuba. Wherever he goes he
asks about blacks. ‘Do blacks come to this café? Do they let blacks play
in this orchestra? Aren’t there black artists here? Boy, I’d like to go to a
black dance hall.’ So I took him to a black dance hall. From the very
minute he enters, he acts like he’s possessed with the spirit of our people.
‘My people!’ he exclaims. For a long time he stands next to the band
which is wildly playing a Cuban son and is gradually overcome by this
new spirit within him. Afterwards, while he looks at a black man dancing
rhythmically he exclaims with an air of insatisfaction: ‘I’d like to be
black. Really black, truly black’.”
12
(Mullen 29)

11
Regino E. Boti, “La poesía cubana de Nicolás Guillén,” in Revista Bimestre Cubana 29
(May-June 1932): 352.

12
From Guillén’s interview of Hughes, “Conversación con Langston Hughes” in the
literary supplement, “Ideales de un Raza,” of the newspaper Diario de la Marina, March
9, 1930.

273
Hughes links “true blackness” with an African-rooted authenticity that is
transmitted through music and dance. For Hughes, Afro Cuban music and dance have a
direct lineage to a perhaps romanticized African past, reinforced by the fact that both
developed to the beat of the African drum—something that is missing in African
American music, given that drums were outlawed in the United States by slave owners.
Music was clearly important to Hughes, not only given his jazz poetry, but also given
how he insisted on traipsing about Russia and Spain with his records and phonograph. In
fact, when he was asked in Russia why he had not officially joined the Communist Party,
he stated that he would not join because “jazz was officially taboo in Russia.” When
someone responded, “But jazz is decadent bourgeois music,” Hughes responded, “It’s my
music and I wouldn’t give up jazz for a world revolution.” Hughes then remembers,
“The Russians looked at me as if I were a decadent bourgeois writer and let it go at that.
But they liked my jazz records as much as I did, and never left the room when I played
them” (IWAIW 141). When the famine-plagued and bombarded Madrid had become too
dangerous, and nearly all journalists and writers tried to escape to either Barcelona,
Valencia, or Paris, Guillén and Hughes were fortunate enough to secure passes on a bus
out of the city. Hughes, with his books, manuscripts, typewriter, and records, had no
choice but to hope that the amiable Guillén would help him with the load he had
accumulated. The two were so loaded down that they had to stop every few hundred
yards to put everything down and rest. Guillén cried out that they would miss the bus out
of Madrid. Hughes told him to drop his things on the ground and leave him, but that he
would not leave without his things. In the end, Hughes states, “Guillén stuck with me”
(IWAIW 377-78).

274

Figure 15: Nicolás Guillén

Aside from the friendship both poets shared, they also shared a poetic connection
to music. Guillén’s Motivos de son, which first appeared in the Sunday literary
supplement of Diario de la Marina on April 20, 1930, marked his artistic departure from
earlier works, which were more in line with the modernismo of Rubén Darío.
13
Of
incorporating Afro-Cuban music and form in this new poetry, Guillén explained in an
interview:
I have tried to incorporate into Cuban literature—not as simple musical
theme but as an element of genuine poetry—what might be called the
poem-son based on the technique of that style of dance which is so
popular in our country. My purpose has been to present, in the form
which perhaps best suits them, pictures of native customs made with a
stroke or two, and types of people we see struggling by our side. Just as
they speak and just as they think. (Cobb 105)

In her study, Harlem, Haiti, and Havana, scholar Martha Cobb notes that Guillén
underscored his position that “Blacks are their most authoritative interpreters,” in a 1931
interview with Hughes in which Guillén “expressed his admiration for the ‘self-conscious

13
Rubén Darío (1867-1916): born Félix Rubén García Sarmiento in Nicaragua, Darío led
the modernismo movement, a literary movement that marked a shift between Latin
America’s literary relationship to Europe.

275
blackness’ of The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew” (105). Before ever
meeting Hughes, Guillén had been interested in the common plight of blacks, whether in
Cuba or in Harlem, illustrated with his 1929 publication, “El Camino de Harlem,” in
which he criticizes Cuba’s racial structures.
14
It is true that the Afro-Cuban son and
rumba are different from African-American jazz. The fundamental difference may lie in
that African drums were deemed illegal in the United States with the importation of
African slaves, whereas in Cuba, Brazil, and Borinquen (presently known as the
commonwealth of Puerto Rico) they were not. Vasconcelos and Boti almost willfully
ignore, however, what was obviously common to both jazz and Afro-Cuban music: the
lyrics in these marginalized genres commonly told the story of racism and race-based
economic and socio-political inequities. While Hughes’s use of jazz may have
influenced Guillén’s employment of Afro-Cuban music in his works, and Hughes’s
experience with Cuban culture may have influenced his own worldview, his poetry, and
even his motivation to translate, it is evident that something is lost in translation, as I
show with Hughes’s translation of Guillén’s poetry. Perhaps the loss can be attributed to
the historical loss of the drum, and all that this loss symbolizes.

The Translations:
Langston Hughes claimed: “I have no theories of translation. I simply try to
transfer into English as much as I can of the literal content, emotion, and style of each
poem. When I feel I can transfer only literal content, I do not attempt a translation”
(Martin-Ogunsola 4). One may surmise that these were Hughes’s intentions in 1948,

14
In Diario de la Marina, April 21, 1929.

276
when with the help of Ben F. Carruthers who was a Spanish teacher at Howard
University, he translated eight monologues of Motivos de son as “Cuban Blues,” which,
along with some later Guillén poems, he published as a volume titled Cuba Libre.
Martin-Ogunsola contends, “Hughes’s use of language for aesthetic as well as
therapeutic effects goes hand in hand with his desire to form bonds with people, places,
and things globally” (2). However well intentioned, Hughes’s translations betray the
limits of translating cultural nuance and detail from one language to another. As I show
in the following translated poetic examples, identification with a culture through
analogous thinking at some point gives way to an employment of the original source for
the purposes of saying something about one’s own culture. In this way, a performance
through translation, which begins as an analogous act, subsumes the original source. The
performance, while not a failure, continuously shifts in its aims.
The following three poems exhibit Bassnett’s translational theory of “analogy,”
which occurs to varying degrees in each poem. The culturally specific use of dialect in
Hughes’s translation of Guillén’s “Tú No Sabe Inglé” is interesting in how it reads to
Hughes’s targeted audience, which is predominantly the African American community; it
also raises interesting questions about the function his translation serves within the
targeted community.

[from Motivos del Son (1930)] [from Cuba Libre under the heading
“Cuban Blues” (1948)]

“Tú No Sabe Inglé” “Don’t Know No English”

Con tanto inglé que tú abía, All dat English you used to know,
Vito Manuel, Li’l Manuel,
Con tanto inglé, no sabe ahora All dat English, now can’t even

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Decir: ye Say: Yes

La mericana te buca, ‘Merican gal comes lookin’ fo’ you
Y tú le tiene que huir: an’ you jes’ runs away.
Tu inglé era detrái guan, Yo’ English is jes’ strike one!
Detrái guan y guan tu tri … Strike one and on-two-three.

Vito Manuel, tú no sabe inglé, Li’l Manuel, you don’t know no English
Tú no sabe inglé. You jes’ don’t know!
Tú no sabe inglé. You jes’ don’t know!

No ten amore más nunca, Don’t fall in love no mo’,
Vito Manuél, Li’l Manuel,
Si no sabe inglé, ‘cause you don’t know no English,
¡si no sabe inglé! Don’t know no English.

The speaker of the poem taunts a certain “Vito Manuél” who, having flaunted an
English-language fluency in front of his friends that he does not have, must now flee
from an “American girl” in order to save face, since he cannot communicate with the
woman. The poem is farcical but contains serious undertones and questions. Why would
“la mericana” look for Vito Manuél? Is she a tourist looking for recreation that is
otherwise forbidden at home in the U.S.? Could she be the wife, daughter, or sister of a
diplomat or some agent of U.S. interests and enterprise, also eager to enjoy and amuse
herself with forbidden fruit? Either of the scenarios is possible and probable.
Whether the “American” in the poem is a tourist or not, her presence in Cuba
suggests foreign penetration in the pursuit of U.S. interests. The fact that an American
woman pursues a Cuban man signals the reversal of stereotypical gender roles and power.
Moreover, this reversal illumines the disparity of power, whether social, economic,
political, or national. When the speaker exclaims to Vito Manuél, “No ten amore más
nunca” [Don’t fall in love no mo’] because he knows no English, the taunting becomes a

278
warning. Vito Manuél’s lack of “English” is a lack of access to social power and
mobility, and a lack of national power. One notes that Vito Manuél is taunted for not
knowing English, while the woman from the U.S. is never held accountable for not
knowing Spanish while on Cuban soil.
Both Guillén and Hughes use dialect in this poem that situates the speaker—and
by extension, Vito Manuél—according to class, region, and arguably race. Hughes
changes “Vito Manuél” to the more explicitly diminutive “Lil’ Manuel,” possibly
bringing attention to his lack of power in this situation. Hughes’s use of dialect,
however, recalls the U.S. South, rather than Cuba, and thus marks this history between
Lil’ Manuel and the “‘Merican gal” as especially dangerous. Although the woman in the
poem is not overtly described as white, the economic access that places her in Cuba, her
unfettered mobility, and the fact that she’s referred to as “American” suggest that she is
indeed white. A person of color from the United States would have been described by
race or ethnicity—a detail that acknowledges how the United States will not see non-
white U.S. citizens as authentic citizens.
The white “American” woman in pursuit of “Lil’ Manuel”—a mulatto, as
Hughes’s rubric, “Mulatto Poems” indicates and under which this poem is collected—
recalls the predation of white slave owners of their slaves. Vito Manuél’s hiding from the
woman recalls these unions that, if uncovered, would have had life and death
consequences for the non-white participant in the U.S. South. When the speaker tells
“Lil’ Manuel,” not to fall in love anymore because he doesn’t understand English, the
poem is no longer a taunting about “bad” English; it becomes a warning about regional
inter-race codes of conduct. The speaker’s words, punctuated by exclamation points

279
(where Guillén’s original is not), “You jes’ don’t know! / You jes’ don’t know!” take
on the tone of urgent warning.
Hughes preserves the physical form of the poem, and also the dialect used by the
speaker, but the translation from Cuban regional and class-specific dialect to that of
dialect associated with the U.S. South results in tonal and contextual changes in the
poem. Whereas the original farcical poem contains undercurrents of political protest and
social commentary, the translation connotes a U.S. Southern past rife with illicit desires,
miscegenation, and lynchings.
The shift in tone, connotation, and maybe cultural context thus begs the question
of whether Hughes’s translation is faithful, and whether faithful translation is possible or
desirable. Certainly, Hughes had no desire to translate only literal content. One must
assume then, that Hughes’s translation was meant to convey more immediate concerns to
a domestic audience—namely the African American community that would have access
to his works—while yet referring to Cuban culture and building cultural bridges based
on “shared” experience. There is no doubt that racism and unequal power relations
existed in both Cuba and in the United States, but a translation that is actually loose, and
yet has the physical semblance of being close, gives the false impression that the Afro
Cuban experience is not only translatable, but also exchangeable with the African
American experience.
Lefevere’s attention to the link between travel literature and imperialism is
helpful in drawing out the problems with Hughes’s translation of this Guillén poem. He
explains, “travel writers create their portraits of other cultures explicitly for home
consumption, thereby setting them up as the Other” (CCEOLT 33). While this may be

280
the case with travel writing, it may true of translation only to a point. Hughes’s use
of Southern dialect in the poem either explicitly or inadvertently makes Guillén’s poem a
product for home consumption, but the end result is not that the Cuban in the story is
displayed as the exotic Other; instead, the Cuban in the poem is virtually erased and
replaced by an African American. The comparison of shared roots, and the analogy of
racialized experience, becomes an appropriation through translation.
The tension between analogy and appropriation shifts throughout the translations,
thus displaying the balancing act that is translation. Hughes’s translation of “La Canción
Del Bongó,” for example, is quite faithful in its translation and in its keeping of the
Cuban cultural context. Some of Hughes’s word choices and one significant line break,
however, suggest an attempt to emphasize particular themes in the poem.

[from Songoro Cosongo (1931)] [under the heading “Mulatto Poems”]

“La Canción Del Bongó” “Song of the Cuban Drum”

Ésta es la canión del bongó: This is the song of the bongó:

—Aquí el que más fino sea, Here even blueblood
responde, si llamo yo. Answers if I call.
Unos dicen: ahora mismo, Some answer, “Right now!”
Otros dicen: allá voy. Others say, “On my way!”
Pero mi repique bronco, But my hoarse rejoinder,
Pero mi profunda voz, Deep bass voice,
Convoca al negro y al blanco, Calls both black and white
Que bailan el mismo son, To dance the same son.
Cueripardos o almiprietos Brown of skin or brown of soul
Más de sangre que de sol, More from blood than sun,
Pues quien pore fuera no es noche, Those who are not night outside
Por dentro ya oscureció. Get darker deep within.
Aquí el qu más fino sea, Here even blueblood
Responde, si llamo yo. Answers if I call.

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En esta tierra, mulata In this mulatto land
De africano y español Of Spaniard and African,
(Santa Bárbara de un lado, (Santa Bárbara on one side,
del otro lado, Changó) on the other Changó)
siempre falta algún abuelo, there’s always a grandpa missing
cuando no sobra algún Don, or there’s a Don too much,
y hay títulos de Castilla and there are titles from Castile
con parientes de Bondó: with cousins in Bondó.
vale más callarse, amigos, [caesura or line break=Hughes]
y no menear la cuestión, Best be silent, friends,
porque venimos de lejos, Don’t overdo the point
y andamos de dos en dos. We’ve come a long distance
Aquí el que más fino sea, And we’re walking two by two.
Responde, si llamo yo. Here even blueblood
Answers if I call!

Habrá quien llegue a insultarme, There are some who would insult me
Pero no de corazón; But not deep in their hearts,
Habrá quien me escupa en público, Some who spit on me in public
Cuando a solas me besó … But kiss me in private.
A ése, le digo: To them I say,
—Compadre, Buddy,
ya me pedirás perdón, You’ll ask my pardon yet,
ya comerás de mi ajiaco, You’ll eat my pot stew yet,
ya me darás la razón, You’ll call me O.K. yet,
ya me golpearás el cuero, You’ll drum on my tight skin yet,
ya bailarás a mi voz, You’ll dance to my song yet,
ya pasearemos del brazo, We’ll be arm in arm yet,
ya estarás donde yo estoy: You’ll be where I am yet.
ya vendrás de abajo arriba, You’ll come up from below yet,
¡que aquí el más alto soy yo! For the top dog here is me!

This poem, which personifies the bongó or (as Hughes translates) the Cuban
drum, asserts the power of racial essence, while it also critiques the denial of African
roots. The drum speaks of the power of its beat, of the music it produces, and of the
response it elicits. The physical response to the drum has an almost supernatural quality
to it, in that it is immediate and without thought or contemplation. The response is
sometimes conscious and often unconscious. The beat of the drum is incessant and
undeniable, despite those who suppress their own response to its call, or deny its presence

282
altogether. The drum, however, seems to transcend race. While its call implies racial
essence, the fact that it calls upon both black and white suggests that its infectious beat
becomes a part of national culture. Culture and national identity thus become part of
essential identity.
The drum as a bridge between black and white, and as a cohesive symbol of
Cuba’s racial and cultural mixture is not without its problems. As Hughes described in
his memoirs, Afro Cuban music was considered “low”culture. The poem also refers to
this marginalization when it describes that there are those who would spit on the drum in
public, yet enjoy this African derived music in private. Disdain as public performance is
thus sharply juxtaposed with the public aural nature of drumming. The tension between
public and private is palpable. Public disdain coupled with private enjoyment recalls
illicit interracial unions that, while not unlawful, were looked upon with derision at the
very least. The reference to the “tight skin” of the drum foregrounds the image of skin,
the beating of skin, and the color of skin.
Hughes’s translation is a faithful one. Not having to contend with the translation
of dialect, he translates this poem quite literally and almost word for word. His
deviations from the original, however, are telling of anxieties about bloodlines and
genealogy. His use of the word “blueblood” as a translation of the word “fino,” for
example, is only roughly comparable in this context. Yet “fino” refers also to refinement,
consideration, decorum, prudence, and restraint, which while associated with social class
and money, are not necessarily exclusive to a moneyed class. On the other hand,
Hughes’s use of “blueblood,” suggest aristocracy and exclusivity. More explicitly, the
“blood” in “blueblood” calls to mind the anxieties about bloodlines, about “one-drop”

283
rules, and about consequent Jim Crow laws for a U.S. and specifically African
American readership.
The punctuation in the bluebloods’ response to the drum differs in the translation
and carries more urgent meaning than in the original. The “fine” people in Guillén’s
poem respond firmly but in a matter of fact way to the drum. The difference between the
colons and the periods used by Guillén and the capitalization and the exclamation points
used by Hughes to convey that the blueblood response is significant. The response in the
Hughes translation is more emphatic and more urgent.
In the second stanza, Hughes privileges the image of the “African” by switching
the order of the original “africano y español,” and rhyming it with “land” in the previous
line. Guillén, on the other hand, puts more emphasis on the African deity, Changó, with
his rhyme scheme, and then quickly follows this image with that of the conveniently
missing, omitted, or overlooked, African “abuelo.” Guillén and Hughes emphasize this
denial of African roots with the subtle but different employment of punctuation and line
formation. Both note that while aristocratic titles and direct ties to Spanish roots are
flaunted, whether denied or not, the ties to Africa also and equally are part of Cuban
identity. The relations in Bondó
15
are emphasized here with different intent. Guillén’s
use of the colon after “Bondó” indicates that a connecting idea follows. In this case, it is
a sardonic warning against proudly publicizing a lofty lineage too loudly, for it may
result in the opening of a genealogical can of worms. Hughes chooses to punctuate

15
It is unknown whether Guillén refers to Bondó in Kenya or in the Republic of the
Congo.

284
“Bondó” with a period, followed by a line break or a caesura. The warning that
Guillén or the drum in the poem gives so readily is thus delayed in the translation. It is as
if Hughes calls for some rumination upon these ties to Africa, and upon a lost or hidden
branching of the family tree.
The enjambments Hughes chooses to use in the beginning of the last stanza
sharply juxtapose the public performance of disdain with private regard. His privileging
of the contradiction, or the “but” in his lines force the reader to contend with this
hypocrisy in a more forceful and urgent way than what Guillén’s use of end-stops do.
The end-stops in the original, however, cause the reader to pause. The lines have a more
contemplative quality. Interestingly, the quicker pace of Hughes’s lines may suggest an
urgent emphasis on racial and even cultural hypocrisy and a public and private split, but it
also reflects a growing anxiety that takes on momentum throughout the rest of the stanza.
Guillén’s “bongó” directs its criticism of the public/private split toward one
person, illustrated by his use of the singular, although its social criticism is for the public
at large. Hughes’s Cuban drum charges several with this hypocrisy immediately, which
leads to a strange shift from plural to singular when it addresses “them” as “Buddy.” The
use of “buddy” may be sarcastic, angry, and a simultaneous attempt to draw in the
perpetrator of insults. Yet, the translation of “Compadre” to “Buddy” loses the tone of
the original. Guillén’s use of “Compadre” can be literally translated as “co-parent,” “co-
godparent,” or “co-godfather.” Clearly, this clumsy translation will not do. The original
“Compadre” is also commonly used for close friends, but it nevertheless connotes
familial and possibly religious/spiritual ties. Thus, the betrayal, the insults, and the
hypocrisy described take on more serious overtones: the betrayal is grave and deeply

285
felt. The familial ties, in addressing the perpetrator as “Compadre” are undeniable,
despite the perpetrator’s attempt to do so.
Hughes’s use of “Buddy” as a translation of “Compadre” not only loses the tone
of the original, it creates distance—a necessary distance from the anxiety that familial
proximity elicits. Despite the fact that Hughes keeps the general rhyme scheme and
meaning in this last stanza, as if his aim were to translate literally, there is a second
shift—this time a shift in power—that betrays anxieties about race power relations. “Ya
me darás la razon,” the bongó declares, meaning that it will be vindicated yet. But
Hughes translates this as “You’ll call me O.K. yet,” thus shifting from an assertion of
vindication to an implied desire for approval. In other words, the power shifts from the
bongó to the perpetrator through translation.
There’s an attempt at the recuperation of power with the last line of the
translation, but it falls short. The original poem places the bongó on a pinnacle. The
poem takes on the momentum of inevitability: The bongó will be vindicated, the
perpetrator will beat on its skin and dance to its tune, the perpetrator will respond to the
beat of the drum—even against his/her will because the drumbeat is no less than the
heartbeat that circulates blood, including much maligned and denied African blood. The
bongó is, in fact, life blood that nourishes body and soul and is therefore essential.
Hughes’s translation, on the other hand, relegates this essence to the realm of so-called
“American” colloquialisms with the unfortunate use of “top dog.”
Renowned linguist Edward Sapir explains, “No two languages are ever
sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The world in
which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with

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different labels attached” (69). Rather than merely criticize Hughes’s translation or
point out any shortcomings in word choice and punctuation, I mean to point out that these
differences in translation indicate much more than a crisis of language and words; they
offer a glimpse into how the act of translation is also an inadvertent assertion of self and
one’s social reality. Hughes may initially translate the “bongó” as the “Cuban drum” for
his intended audience, but he also uses his tranlation to hold the mirror up to his United
States audience’s social reality and consequent anxieties.
If the act of translation is an unconscious revelation of the translator’s social
reality and of the translator’s anxieties, what then of conscious acts of mistranslation?
The translated work becomes a springboard for the translator’s personal politics.
Conscious mistranslation can thus be an act of willful appropriation.
Hughes’s translations seem to fluctuate from what is known as “gloss translation”
and “dynamic translation.” Translation theorist Eugene Nida explains that gloss
translation is literal translation, which is “designed to permit the reader to identify
himself as fully as possible with a person in the source-language context, and to
understand as much as he can of the customs, manner of thought, and means of
expression” (129). Dynamic translation, on the other hand, is performed for a different
purpose: it “aims at complete naturalness of expression, and tries to elate the receptor to
modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture; it does not insist that he
understand the cultural patterns of the source-language context in order to comprehend
the message” (129). While the translation of Guillén’s poem, “El Abuelo,” shows the
most faithfulness in terms of literal translation, and displays the least amount of freedom

287
in terms of translated words, it also illustrates the most overt and substantial shift in
context with the mistranslations that do occur.

[from West Indies LTD. (1934)] [under the heading “Mulatto Poems”]

“El Abuelo” “The Grandfather”

Esta mujer angelica de ojos septentrionales. This angelic dame with Southern eyes,
Que vive atenta al ritmo de su sangre europea, Who lives by rhythms of her Northern blood,
Ignora que en lo hondo de ese ritmo golpea She never knew that deep within that flood
Un negro el parche duro de roncos atables. A black man beats a hoarsened drum and sighs.

Bajo la línea escueta de su nariz aguda, Her haughty, carefree facial line, sharp-nosed,
La boca, en fino trazo, traza una raya breve, Her mouth, so thin and finely etched below,
Y no hay cuervo que manche la geografía de nieve No crow spoils the geography of snow,
De su carne, que fulge temblorosa y desnuda. Her flesh, which shines and quivers, all unclothed.

¡Ah mi señora! Mírate las venas misteriosas; O madame! Look inside mysterious veins,
boga en el agua viva que allá dentro te fluye, Look, there he rows the living stream, sees
y ve pasando lirios, nelumbios, lotos, rosas; Float by the lily, lotus, rose of flames.

que ya versa inquieta junto a la fresca orilla Behold him there beside the virgin shores,
la dulce sonbra oscura del abuelo que huye, Your black grandfather’s dulcet shadow flees.
el que rizó por siempre tu cabeza amarilla. He put the curl in those blond locks of yours.

Like the poem “La Canción del Bongó,” “El Abuelo” deals with issues of hidden
or forgotten African ancestry. In this case, the blond woman, whose physiognomy
suggests “unsoiled” European blood, is unaware of the African blood that runs through
her veins. In essence, Hughes maintains the spirit and message of Guillén’s poem. With
the “mistranslation” of key words and the subjective inclusion of others as a deliberate
substitution for the original, however, Hughes displaces meaning of the original poem.
The action in the poem takes place in Cuba; the action in the translation does not.
From the first line of the poem, Hughes commits a significant mistranslation.
Whereas Guillén describes the woman’s eyes as “septentrionales,” meaning “northern,”

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and thus referring to typically Northern European features, Hughes describes the
woman’s eyes as “Southern,” and thus foretells the African ancestry that is suggested
toward the end of the stanza. In the second line of the first stanza, Guillén points out that
the woman lives her life according to the rhythm of her European blood—a separatist sort
of ideology since the Cuba she lives in is one of racial mixture. In contrast, Hughes
chooses to describe the woman in this line, as living to the rhythm of her “Northern
blood.” Hughes’s use of “Northern” here has double meaning, as it recalls the Northern
European blood to which Guillén initially refers, but it also suggests the United States
North, perceived to have been untainted by slavery, although this is clearly not the case.
Hughes, therefore, makes a deliberate decision to change the Cuban setting of this poem
to the United States.
The aim of his changes becomes more deliberate as the poem progresses. Guillén
further develops his drum conceit in the third line, in which he describes how the woman
ignores the origin and depths of those rhythms. Thus recalling the link between the
drumbeat and heartbeat that he explores in “La Canción del Bongó,” he sets up the
explicit image of the drum that appears in the last line of the stanza, thus building a
momentum that slowly but steadily emphasizes the drum, its beat, and its rhythm, as the
actual woman begins to recede in the scene he paints. Hughes breaks up the momentum
in the drum conceit by using the image of water instead. It is implied that the woman
ignores the “flood” of rhythm in which a black man beats his hoarsened drum, but this
imagery calls forth more than the idea of the beat within blood that circulates throughout
one’s body, whether that beat is denied or unknown to one. The image Hughes paints
instead is the crossing of the Middle Passage. Hughes’s substitution betrays more than

289
his analogous thinking: it also acknowledges an African diaspora that traveled the
same Middle Passage—beginning with European ships arriving in West Africa with
goods that were traded for slaves, and then transporting these slaves to the New World.
The slaves that survived the hellish conditions were then enslaved in North America,
Latin America, and the Caribbean. The “black man” who “beats a hoarsened drum and
sighs” deep beneath that “flood” can be interpreted as being the ghost of this memory, as
well as the call of that ancestral link. Hughes’s historical allusion thus recalls the
common connection and history shared by nearly all people with African ancestry, and by
Guillén and himself specifically.
Nonetheless, Hughes shifts from a global identification with slavery to domestic
concerns specifically. Whereas Guillén juxtaposes blackness with the image of the raven
(cuervo) against the image of snow, Hughes chooses to use the image of the crow,
thereby alluding to Jim Crow laws that legally separate and distinguish between black
and white through arbitrary means. This point is especially significant since the laws that
separate black from white do not exist so explicitly in Cuba, as they do in the United
States.
Hughes departs even further from the tone of the original source with his chosen
ending. The curly “blond locks” in the last line wax romantic. It is an overall more
delicate take on the woman’s features than Guillén’s description of the woman’s “cabeza
amarilla,” or yellow head. The romantic equivalent of “blond locks” would have been
“rizos rubios,” rather than the matter of fact description of “cabeza amarilla” or “yellow
head.” The romantic and more subtle description of the grandfather’s dark shadow that
Guillén describes contrasts sharply with an unromantic and stark description of a “yellow

290
head.” Yet Hughes romanticizes both grandfather and granddaughter. He uses
almost archaic language with the description of the explicitly described “black”
grandfather’s “dulcet shadow, who passes down his curls to his granddaughter, albeit
unbeknownst to her.
Perhaps Hughes, unlike Guillén, refuses to privilege one race over another in this
genealogy. But in romanticizing both grandfather and granddaughter, he also loses the
effect that Guillén exacts in stripping the woman of any racial and physiognomic
superiority. The effect of Hughes’s “mistranslation” is one of romantic reverie steeped in
mythological understandings of racial purity. Given Hughes’s audience and his own
politics, it is possible that he means to convey a mock admiration for a pure whiteness
that is, by U.S. legal definition, not white at all. At the same time, he mocks African
Americans who secretly value whiteness. Hughes’s translation thus contains encoded
meaning that might be lost on the non-black reader.
It is true that the act of translation is a teleological practice, as translation theorist
Jirí Levy observes. After all, he observes, “the objective of translating is to impart the
knowledge of the original to the foreign reader” (148). How that knowledge is imparted,
and to what ends, are the issues that must be negotiated. The factors the translator must
negotiate are word meaning, style, and the author’s philosophical view, Levy points out.
The question arises, whether Hughes is true to Guillén’s philosophy or whether he
superimposes his own philosophies onto Guillén’s poems through translation. He
certainly superimposes his own domestic concerns and his own political struggle,
although one could argue that racism and racial hierarchies are concerns that both poets
share.

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Theorists such as William Frawley might deem the freedom Hughes exhibits
in his translation an acceptable act of “recodification.” Translation, he contends, “is the
reduction of coded input into another code; inasmuch as transcription is cognizing,
translation is thus re-cognizing or re-codification” (251). Meaning thus shifts as it is
recoded, but it imparts new meaning. To merely remain within the confines of the
original code (or source text) would “border on copying” and “no new information would
be produced,” states Frawley. The argument that something new must be conveyed,
when the original has yet to be so and is in fact muffled, however, seems counterintuitive
and an attempt to justify the burial of the source text for a personal agenda.
Yet, Bassnett’s and Lefevere’s acknowledgement that translation is rewriting,
manipulation, and inevitably reflects the translator’s ideology and intention, which is then
conveyed to a specific audience, may be helpful in reading Hughes’s translation of
Guillén’s works. Rewritings, they explain, “can introduce new concepts, new genres,
new devices and the history of translation is the history also of literary innovation, of the
shaping power of one culture upon another” (TRATMOLF vii). In explicitly framing the
collection of poems within the context of Cuba and yet conveying U.S.-specific racial
conditions, Hughes accomplishes at least three feats: (1) He debunks any notions about
African American isolation in terms of race issues; (2) he introduces the idea of an
African diaspora that can work to combat racism through political activism and the arts;
(3) he refutes notions of a Latin American racial utopia.

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Conclusion: Translating, Travel, and “Home”
I have established Hughes’s experiences and observations in Mexico and Cuba as
factors that informed how he saw himself in the world. His analogous thinking, by which
he constantly compared the U.S. black experience to that of people of color in other parts
of the world, specifically Latin America, led to a complex understanding of race,
ethnicity, and culture. No experience was more jarring, however, than reaching the
shores of Africa and being told that he was not “black” but in fact “white.” Such bodily
translations and reinterpretations underscored the arbitrariness of racial categories, and
also the marked difference in bodily and racial meaning across national borderlines.
The issue of translation is thus central to issues of identity, hence Hughes’s
intrinsic attraction to the act. Rather than translating to cross cultures, national
borderlines, color lines, or racial lines, Hughes, I believe, translated in order to
temporarily occupy shifting spaces of alterity. In so doing, he was able to negotiate and
assert his racial and national identities from those alternating spaces. Sanford Budick
posits that “whenever we attempt to translate we are pitched into a crisis of alterity” and
that although we experience secondary otherness and defeat through our encounters with
the untranslatable “culture as a movement toward shared consciousness may emerge from
defeat” (22). Budick’s position raises the question of whether or not Hughes aimed for
“shared consciousness” through the experiment and act of translation.
It is clear that Hughes was always interested in people who occupied the margins
of “American” life. For example, his best friend in high school was a Polish boy named
Sartur Andrzejewski. His circle of friends included Jewish friends whom he names in his
autobiography, and his good friend at Columbia University was a Chinese youth named

293
Chun. Hughes was interested in people and the world, as he states explicitly in The
Big Sea. “I wanted to return to college mostly in order to get a better background for
writing and for understanding the world,” he explains. “I wanted to study sociology and
history and psychology, and find out why countries and people were the kind of countries
and people they are” (164). In the second volume of his autobiography, Hughes reiterates
his sentiments, but is more conscious of his comparative or analogous eye: “My interests
had broadened from Harlem and the American Negro to include an interest in all the
colored peoples of the world—in fact, in all the people of the world, as I related to them
and they to me” (IWAIW 383).
This last line is most revealing in the deconstruction of Hughes’s translations.
Despite the desire to connect across national lines and across racial/color lines, this last
line reveals his concern as to how other people of the world ultimately related to him.
In other words, Hughes’s impetus to connect and, more specifically, to connect through
translation, is his constant negotiation of his own identity in the world. Interestingly
enough, and as the translations I have explicated show, Hughes’s activism and political
concerns (although they stem from the global and cross-cultural) are oriented in the
domestic—this, despite his travels and cosmopolitan reputation. No matter Hughes’s
public outcry against and criticism of racism in the United States, no matter his travels,
through which he was able to compare the different situations and living conditions of
people of color, Hughes never seemed tempted to relinquish his U.S. citizenship, even
though people legally defined as “black” in the United States did not share the same
rights to citizenship as their white or non-black counterparts. There is steely defiance in
his claim to nationality and citizenship, as well as some longing. His travels through

294
translation allowed him to negotiate identity and the concept of “home.” As Hughes
said on one New Year’s Eve while in Paris, “That’s one nice thing about America … I
can always go home—even when I don’t want to’” (IWAIW 386). These may as well
have been the words of the expatriate, James Hughes. “Home” for Hughes does not just
refer to the United States, but also to his father whom he is never able to let go.
Translation is a means by which Hughes transmits encoded meaning, but it is also a way
that Hughes creates and maintains connections, whether those connections are between
himself and his father, himself and his friends in the Latin Americas, or himself and his
country.

295
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Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Asset Metadata

Creator Blandón, Ruth (author)

Core Title Trans-American modernisms: racial passing, travel writing, and cultural fantasies of Latin America

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 07/09/2011

Defense Date 05/04/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Al Que Quiere,Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man,Carl Van Vechten,James Weldon Johnson,Jessie Redmon Fauset,Langston Hughes,Latin America,modernism,Nella Larsen,Nicolás Guillén,Nigger Heaven,OAI-PMH Harvest,passing,Plum Bun,race passing,Trans-American,translation,transnational,travel writing,William Carlos Williams

Place Name Latin America (region), USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McCabe, Susan (committee chair), Boone, Joseph Allen (committee member), Diaz, Roberto Ignacio (committee member), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member)

Creator Email blandon@usc.edu,routheles@msn.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2333

Unique identifier UC149446

Identifier etd-Blandon-2972 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-574693 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2333 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Blandon-2972.pdf

Dmrecord 574693

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Blandón, Ruth

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu