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Tag Archives: segregation

The Agony of Passing: The Gilded Years

09 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1896, bigotry, book review, characterization, Gilded Age, historical fiction, Karin Tanabe, nineteenth century, racism, segregation, show versus tell, social ostracism, Vassar

Review: The Gilded Years, by Karin Tanabe
Atria, 2016. 379 pp. $16

In autumn 1896, Anita Hemmings returns to the place she loves most, the Vassar campus, for her senior year. Not only is she the class beauty (by popular vote), she excels at Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and music, the subjects deemed most suitable for young ladies–along with hygiene, of course. Social convention funnels Vassar graduates toward a single profession, teaching school, if not marriage to a wealthy Harvard or Yale man. But Anita dreams of further study, a professorship, perhaps even fieldwork involving ancient Greek artifacts. For someone of her ability, it’s possible.

the-gilded-years-9781501110450_lg

Yet it’s also not. Anita is African-American, so for three years she’s been passing as white. To look at her, no one would guess her secret. But if the school were to find out, she’d be expelled, for Vassar doesn’t admit Negroes. In fact, as the story opens, the Supreme Court has just supported segregation, through the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case. Consequently, Anita has survived three years by remaining on the fringes, not exactly keeping to herself, but avoiding the spotlight.

Her senior year, however, she rooms with Louise “Lottie” Taylor, heiress to a New York fortune and a social dynamo. Lottie loves to shock, talking freely, and (perhaps) knowingly, about sex, alcohol, and other forbidden subjects. As she says, “There has never been a woman more worried about appearances than my dear mother. Luckily she has me to appall her around the clock.” So Lottie’s the perfect foil for Anita, pushing her into adventures that threaten to blow her cover, but which Anita can’t resist. It’s not just that Lottie’s a force of nature; it’s that Anita has desires like anyone else. And those yearnings lead her toward Porter Hamilton, a Harvard man smitten with her, a handsome, forward-thinking son of a Chicago lumber baron.

It’s a wonderful setup (based on a real person, incidentally), and Tanabe goes interesting places with it. Every move Anita makes, she risks pain, indignity, or exposure, all of which she must keep to herself, which provides a constant source of tension. The first meeting of the debating club takes up Plessy v. Ferguson, and Anita has been chosen to argue for segregation. By chance, Lottie meets her roommate’s brother, Frederick, and falls for him. Anita suffers her classmates’ casual references to blacks as inferior, which she must of course swallow in silence.

With that much going for it, I wish The Gilded Years had done more to live up to its promise. The slings and arrows that Anita must endure deserve sympathy, but she never explores them to any depth. Tanabe misses many chances here, starting with the Plessy v. Ferguson debate, which could have revealed much, but which the author prefers to summarize after the fact. That explanatory style, telling versus showing, hurts the novel in several respects, especially in character portrayal. To name one example, Anita declares her passion for intellectual subjects, yet her drive to obtain top grades seems to grip her more, because you see and feel it. But her intellectual ambitions pale beside her hopes of marrying Porter Hamilton, a notion that takes her captive maybe six minutes after they meet. I sense that Tanabe’s rushing things because she wants to compress the subplot to fit a grander design, but that comes at a cost. Anita’s undue haste makes her come across more like her flighty, less substantial roommate than herself.

But even the lightning love affair might work if Anita were reflective enough to penetrate her conflicts, rather than simply ricochet off them. Shakespeare’s Juliet famously observed that a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, precisely the idea here. But Anita merely dips her toe into what life would be like with Porter but having to deny her family, or how her experience differs from, say, Frederick’s, who could pass physically but hasn’t tried. Despite that good head on her shoulders, she never asks herself what the many accolades she receives from her racist classmates imply about perceptions of beauty, character, intelligence, or social standing. Nor does she ever wonder what makes the Vassar community so sure of its racial and social superiority, what feelings might lie behind this, or how that shapes the world around her. She’s not quite a full person, in other words.

What’s more, it’s Lottie who commands attention, generous and grasping at once in her self-absorption, a grand manipulator and benefactress. It’s she who propels the narrative, has a clearer physical presence (it’s curious that Anita, the campus beauty, doesn’t even rate a physical description), and brings about a climactic confrontation. If Anita can’t drive the action, she could at least spend that energy internally, ripping things apart and trying to reassemble them. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do either.

The publisher calls The Gilded Years “Passing meets The House of Mirth,” evoking Nella Larsen’s 1929 tale of race relations, set mostly in Harlem, and Edith Wharton’s story about social climbing among Fifth Avenue bluebloods, published in 1905. Like other attempts to “package” a novel, the glib comparison misrepresents all three books. Tanabe’s publicists would have done her better service by letting The Gilded Years stand on its own.

The official pub date of The Gilded Years was June 7.

Disclaimer: I received bound galleys from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Weary of So Much: Driving the King

16 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1955, African-American, Almena Lomax, boycott, historical fiction, Jim Crow, Montgomery, music, Nat King Cole, race relations, Ravi Howard, Rosa Parks, segregation, twentieth century, World War II

Review: Driving the King, by Ravi Howard

Harper, 2015. 325 pp. $26.

It’s November 1945, and Nat Weary, home from French and Belgian battlefields, wants nothing more than to marry his sweetheart and settle down to the life that World War II interrupted. He’s got a perfect proposal setup, too. Weary’s boyhood friend, the up-and-coming Nat King Cole, is in town to perform and has agreed to cue the big question from the stage. What could be more romantic?

But this is Montgomery, Alabama, where the unwritten law–the law that matters–says that African-Americans have no right to count on anything except humiliation and heartache. When a white man rushes the stage and attacks Cole with a lead pipe, Weary leaps to his friend’s defense, battering the assailant with a microphone. The white man gets three years; Weary gets ten. Once more, his life is interrupted, but this time, his fight against a racist enemy brings no reward except the belief he did the right thing. A decade and its promise have been stolen from him, simply because he’s black.

What I like the best about Driving the King–and there’s much to like–is that the narrative shows the moment-to-moment calculations, adjustments, and self-restraints an African-American must undertake to remain safe, which take such a drastic toll on the body and spirit. Safe is of course a relative term, because there are no guarantees or minimum standards. As the magnificent, harrowing prison scenes reveal, there’s always more to lose, unless you’re dead, which means there are always more games to play to keep life a hair’s-breadth more bearable.

Weary’s voice, as his name aptly suggests, is tired, measured, tamping down the fury only far enough so that it doesn’t cost him. A more passionate narrative would be hard to find. Yet Howard never lectures, rants, or explains, letting the story (and its images) do the work. What more fitting metaphor could describe the contest between Weary and the white thug–unequal in the eyes of the law–than a battered microphone? Weary, after all, has no voice that any power will listen to, and he may shout all he likes, but no one will ever hear. Likewise, when he recalls German wartime brutalities against his captured comrades, it’s plain that he’s also thinking about American racists.


 

The Germans had taken their time, bayoneting them and cutting off fingers. Those spared the knife were beaten. Maybe the marks had come from rifle butts or boots, but whatever the weapon was, they’d struck them over and over. My mind filled up with that sickest kind of wondering, thinking about who had to be the first to feel it coming down. I wondered who was the last and had to see the rest die before he did.

 

From such a powerful start, Driving the King should go farther than it does. Most of the second half is entirely predictable, and though Weary’s struggles to cope with his losses earn all my empathy, the tension drains, and the ending feels anticlimactic. It doesn’t help that the narrative repeatedly (and annoyingly) jumps back and forth in time, for no particular purpose I can see except to delay the inevitable.

The National City Lines bus on which Rosa Parks was arrested during the Montgomery bus boycott. (Henry Ford Museum, courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

The National City Lines bus on which Rosa Parks was arrested during the Montgomery bus boycott. (Henry Ford Museum, courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

This is unfortunate, because the novel offers a worthy subplot, the Montgomery bus boycott that takes place after Weary’s released from prison. The boycott involves many, many courageous people, of whom Rosa Parks was neither the first nor the last. Weary’s relatives take an active part; a young Martin Luther King makes a cameo appearance; and Almena Lomax, who ran an African-American newspaper in Los Angeles, figures heavily in the story.

But where’s Weary himself? Working for Nat Cole in LA, which leaves him on the sidelines. There’s a lot about bringing Cole back to Montgomery for a gig, but though the two men treat that as unfinished business, it feels small next to everything else. I don’t know whether Howard felt hampered by the historical record or thought his narrative delivered fully on its promise, but I wish he’d chosen otherwise.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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