Plum Bun; A novel without a moral – Jessie Redmon Fauset (1928)

I hadn’t even heard of Plum Bun a few weeks ago, then I read a review of it on Julianna’s The Blank Garden blog. I knew instantly I wanted to read it and read it soon – recognising that it would make an interesting companion novel with Passing and The Vanishing Half which I read earlier this year.

The author Jessie Redmon Fauset was a contributor to the Harlem renaissance with her editorship of The Crisis, a NAACP magazine. In her own work she focused on themes such as racial discrimination, ‘passing’ and feminism. During the 1920s and 30s she published four novels – Plum Bun was the second of them, she also published some poetry, short stories and essays.

Plum Bun tells the story of Angela Murray – a young very light skinned African American woman who leaving her home in Philadelphia heads to New York where she intends to pass for white.

The novel starts with Angela in her mid-teens living happily with her family in a small house in Philadelphia. She has a younger sister Virginia (Jinny) – and parents; Mattie and Junius are simply devoted to one another. It is a happy, united family – though as she has grown up, Angela has begun to associate all the things she sees as worth having in life with being white. Like her mother Mattie, Angela has the pale skin inherited from her white ancestors – both Mattie and Angela are able to pass for white – sometimes deliberately – sometimes quite by accident. Virginia by contrast has a brown skin like her darker skinned father. Mattie sometimes chooses to ‘pass’ for convenience, and because she despises the stupid, prejudicial rules of the society in which they live. Mattie’s ability to ‘pass’ has quite an effect on her daughter Angela and unwittingly a seed is sown.

“…it seemed to Angela that all the things which she most wanted were wrapped up with white people. All the good things were theirs. Not, some coldly reasoning instinct within was saying, because they were white. But because for the present they had power and the badge of that power was whiteness…”

Angela is mistaken for white by a new girl at school – and the reaction of her new friend when she discovers her error – is profound. As she and Jinny get older the race question is one often discussed and argued over in their group of friends.

“We’ve all of us got to make up our minds to the sacrifice of some thing. I mean something more than just the ordinary sacrifices in life, not so much for the sake of the next generation as for the sake of some principle, for the sake of some immaterial quality like pride or intense self-respect or even a saving complacency; a spiritual tonic which the race needs perhaps just as much as the body might need iron or whatever it does need to give the proper kind of resistance. There are some things which an individual might want, but which he’d just have to give up forever for the sake of the more important whole.”

As young women of colour, when Angela and Jinny leave school and go out into the world to earn their own living their options are few. Angela attends an arts academy after leaving school but for both sisters the best option open to them is to be teachers. They are only permitted to work in certain schools – and both sisters start out on this path. However, Angela does not really want to be a teacher – as an artist her ambitions lie elsewhere – and she resents how much of the world is closed to her – how few chances there are because of her racial identity.

Angela finds the society of Philadelphia just too narrow for her – and she longs to break away. One of the young men in Angela and Jinny’s circle of friends has rather fallen for her – but Angela is unable to return his feelings.

In her early twenties, Angela makes the decision to go to New York city – where she intends to continue her art studies – and live her life passing as white. Once in New York she enters the bohemian, artistic scene of Greenwich Village and begins a passionate relationship with Roger; a wealthy young man, who she quickly learns is horribly bigoted.

“Angela was visual minded. She saw the days of the week, the months of the year in little narrow divisions of space. She saw the past years of her life falling into separate, uneven compartments whose ensemble made up her existence. Whenever she looked back on this period from Christmas to Easter she saw a bluish haze beginning in a white mist and flaming into something red and terrible; and across the bluish haze stretched the name: Roger.”

Her romance puts her relationship with her sister in jeopardy as Jinny comes to New York to be near her sister – and Angela is forced to make some difficult decisions. Roger represents freedom and possibilities that have been so far barred to Angela, but at what cost? Over the course of the next year – Angela comes to learn a lot about herself, and about race in the United States in the late 1920s. Jessie Fauset shows us that the issue of ‘passing’ was a complex one, one that threw up all kinds of dilemma’s about family and identity.

Plum Bun is a fascinating and hugely readable novel, which despite its subtitle I do not think is entirely without moral. I found myself fully involved in the lives of these sisters, Angela is a flawed woman, but still so likeable – she acknowledges her errors and learns from them. It is a shame that this novel is not better known.