Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter VIII

“Speak up, Ike, an ‘Spress Yo’se‘f”

Sentimental Romance Revisited in Ntozake Shange’s

Betsey Brown

The Passing-for-White Plot: “Talking Out the Sides of Her Mouth”

Reconsidering sentimental fiction, Shange’s text plays with another convention: the-fin-de-siecle/beginning-of-the-twentieth-century obsession with passing, a scenario where the mulatto character is faced with the choice of adopting a white-masked identity and of denying his/her black belonging. Initiated by the nineteenth century realities, the passing-for-white plot kept reappearing until the first half of the twentieth century. It can be traced in Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1852), Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), and John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1959). If in the above works the passing-for-white is a powerful plot, after the 1960s—a time when the emergence of the Black Power Movement stressed the importance of blackness as a value per se—the plot of passing disappears or is turned into a subplot.

Representatively, in Harper’s and Fauset’s texts, sentimental romance is subsumed to the novel-of-passing: their main protagonists can easily assume a white identity, having light complexions and refined manners. As shown above, both writers make use of the stereotypical image of the tragic mulatta. However, they subvert this stereotypical image, and save their light-skinned characters from the trap of accepting the privileges of the white race and rejecting their darker half. “The best blood in my veins is African blood,” declares Iola, “and I am not ashamed of it" (Harper 1893, 209). Even if Iola initially believes that she is white, and even if Angela is lured by the social empowerment of whiteness, both heroines learn to appreciate the value of their racial inheritance.

Shange’s Betsey Brown reworks the passing-for-white plot in an indirect, covert way. The leitmotif of passing emerges via the older generation, woven by grandmother’s memories of grandfather’s light skin and ability to pass, to behave like a white man “even when he opened his mouth” (29):

Fine diction, mighty fine articulation, Vida’d recall. His dark hair hangin like a drop of black honey cross his eye; that part as a Cherokee’s aim. Yes, her Frank was a truly fine man. Not on the order of the modern men of color she’d come across in her daughter’s life. No, there was a gentleness bout Frank that they’d lost (29).

Shange contrasts here grandmother’s mentality with the younger generation’s ideas represented by Jane, the light skinned daughter, who prefers to get married to a darker man, thus revealing an understanding of values that transgresses the predicaments of the color line.

In addition, the writer suggests that the passing-for-white plot can also emerge nowadays in a camouflaged way: adopting a white code of conduct. The Browns’ middle-class condition is comparable with that of white people in similar circumstances. Metaphorically, their lifestyle can pass for white. As Greer suggests, the feeling of belonging can be maintained only through racial awareness and social protest. Hence, his daily “Africanizing.” Hence, his desire to publicly demonstrate together with his whole family against racism: “the time has come for us to do something about our second-class citizenship, and this separate but equal travesty we call our lives” (156).

Greer’s enthusiasm is not shared by Jane who in her turn protests by moving away from home for a while. For her, family values must be placed above the racial ones: “My babies aren’t cannon fodder” (159). As in her daughter’s case, leaving home for Jane proves to be a necessary moment of redefinition.¹⁷

In the centrifugal forces of Shange’s text, one of the most audible voices raised against the adoption of a white code of manners comes from the black mammy/housekeeper, Carrie. At a time of crisis when the mother figure is absent, Carrie’s strong sense of values maintains the family’s cohesion: “We gonna make this house be as grand as we want it to be” (169). She helps Betsey and the other children consolidate their feeling of belonging to the black community, so that they will not turn into “dicty niggers.”¹⁸

A surrogate maternal figure, Carrie resembles Hetty Daniels, Angela’s mammy in Fauset’s Plum Bun: both Carrie and Hetty are symbolic barometers for the main protagonist’s consciousness in time of inner crisis.¹⁹ However, there is a major difference between the two characters. If Fauset’s de-sexualized heroine suits the mammy stereotype, Shange rethinks the mammy stereotype and sexualizes her protagonist, who not only takes care of the household chores, but also likes “entertainin gentlemen callers.”

Most importantly, Carrie’s guiding role assists Betsey in her most challenging self-assertion. It is Carrie—the black illiterate—who prompts Betsey to use the power of literacy in order to demonstrate the danger of adopting a white literary canon. In the same way in which Carrie physically fought another woman, so Betsey can mentally fight the white teacher who banished the blacks to another country and denied them national status, sustaining that “being colored meant you couldn’t write poems or books or anything” (183). When Betsey’s remarks—“nobody listens to me cause it’s just another nigger talking out the sides of her mouth”—Carrie advises her to stand up for herself using the very word meant to diminish her (183). Carrie’s advice circles back to Dunbar’s poem, the emblematic refrain of the novel: “Speak up, Ike, an’ ‘spress yo’se’f.”

In conclusion, by relating her main protagonist’s destiny with a number of prominent female figures, Shange’s novel creates a polytropic character that subverts women’s stereotypical representations. Like Harper and Fauset, Shange makes use of the specific tropes of black sentimental romance, whose pattern she revises in accordance with actual priorities. The author preserves accordingly the major concerns with domestic setting and heroic quest, and correlates them with contemporary social and feminist issues.

Drawing attention to identity as a literary construct to be disentangled from stereotypical representations, Betsey Brown is a powerful example of authorial struggle to liberate the black self from racist ideology. Shange thus demonstrates that African American literature is shaped by a range of social contexts that determine the emergence or disappearance of narrative types. The African American character emblematically becomes part of a dynamic process that operates cultural revision and change.

NOTES