The Color Fetish

In The Origin of Others, Toni Morrison, America’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Here is an excerpt from the book on William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.

Of constant fascination for me are the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative — especially if the fictional main character is white (which is almost always the case). Whether it is the horror of one drop of the mystical “black” blood, or signs of innate white superiority, or of deranged and excessive sexual power, the framing and the meaning of color are often the deciding factor.

For the horror that the “one-drop” rule ex- cites, there is no better guide than William Faulkner. What else haunts e Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom!? Between the marital outrages incest and miscegenation, the latter (an old but useful term for “the mixing of races”) is obviously the more abhorrent. In much American literature, when plot requires a family crisis, nothing is more disgusting than mutual sexual congress between the races. It is the mutual aspect of these encounters that is rendered shocking, illegal, and repulsive. Unlike the rape of slaves, human choice or, God forbid, love receives wholesale condemnation. And for Faulkner they lead to murder.

In Chapter IV of Absalom, Absalom! Mr. Compson explains to Quentin what drove Henry Sutpen to kill his half-brother Charles Bon:

And yet, four years later, Henry had to kill Bon to keep them from marrying. . . .

Yes, granted that, even to the unworldly Henry, let alone the more traveled father, the existence of the eighth part negro mis- tress and the sixteenth part negro son, granted even the morganatic ceremony . . . was reason enough. . . . Much later in the novel Quentin imagines this exchange between Henry and Charles:

— So it’s the miscegenation, not the incest which you can’t bear. . . .
Henry doesn’t answer.
— And he sent me no word?…He did not have to do this, Henry. He didn’t need to tell you I am a nigger to stop me. . . .
— You are my brother.
— No I’m not. I’m the nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister. Unless you stop me, Henry.

Equally, if not more, fascinating is Ernest Hemingway’s employment of color-ism. His use of this wholly available device moves through several modes of color-ism — from despicable blacks, to sad but sympathetic ones, to extreme black-fueled eroticism. None of these categories is outside the writer’s world or his or her imaginative prowess, but how that world is articulated is what interests me. Color-ism is so very available — it is the ultimate narrative shortcut.

Note Hemingway’s employment of color-ism in To Have and Have Not ( The Tradesman’s Return). When Harry Morgan, a rum smuggler and the novel’s main character, speaks directly to the only black character in the boat, he calls him by his name, Wesley. But when Hemingway’s narrator addresses the reader he says (writes) “nigger.” Here the two men, who are in Morgan’s boat, have both been shot up after a run-in with Cuban officials:

. . . and he said to the nigger, “Where the hell are we?”
The nigger raised himself up to look. . . .
“I’m going to make you comfortable, Wesley,” he said. . . .
“I can’t even move,” the nigger said. . . . He gave the Negro a cup of water. . . . The nigger tried to move to reach a sack,
then groaned and lay back.
“Do you hurt that bad, Wesley?” “Oh, God,” the nigger said.

Why the actual name of his companion isn’t enough to drive, explain, or describe their venture is not clear — unless the author intends to pinpoint the narrator’s compassion for a black man, a compassion that might endear this bootlegger to readers.

Now compare that rendering of a black man as constantly complaining, weak, and in need of his (more seriously injured) white boss’s help with another of Hemingway’s manipulations of racial tropes — this time for erotic, highly desirable effect.

In The Garden of Eden, the male character, called “the young man” first and David later, is on an extended honeymoon on the Côte d’Azur with his new bride, called alternately “the girl” and Catherine. They lounge, swim, eat, and make love over and over. Their conversation is mostly inconsequential chatter or confessions, but running through it is a dominating theme of physical blackness as profoundly beautiful, exciting, and sexually compelling:

“. . . you’re my good lovely husband and my brother too. . . . when we go to Africa I’ll be your African girl too.”
[….]
“It’s too early to go to Africa now. It’s the big rains and afterwards the grass is too high and it’s very cold.”
[….]
“Then where should we go?”
“We can go to Spain but…It’s to early for the Basque coast. It’s still cold and rainy. It rains everywhere there now.”
“Isn’t there a hot part where we could swim the way we do here?”
“You can’t swim in Spain the way we do here. You’d get arrested.”
“What a bore. Let’s wait to go there then because I want us to get darker.”
“Why do you want to be so dark?”
“. . . Doesn’t it make you excited to have me getting so dark”?
“Uh-huh. I love it.”

This strange brew of incest, black skin, and sexuality is so unlike Hemingway’s separation of “Cubans” from “niggers” in To Have and Have Not. Although in that novel both in fact refer to Cubans (people born in Cuba), the latter is deprived of nationality and a home.

There is a perfectly good reason for the part colorism plays in literature. It was the law. Even a casual examination of the “so-called” color laws makes the case for the emphasis on color as indicator of what is legal and what is not. e legislative acts of Virginia to enforce slavery and to control blacks (collected by June Purcell Guild as Black Laws of Virginia) are, as the fore- word notes, representative of laws which “permeated the life of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Negro, whether slave or free; and by implication, the fabric of life for the white majority.”

For example, a statute of 1705 stated that “Popish recusants, convicts, Negroes, mulattoes, and Indian servants, and others not being Christians, shall be incapable to be witnesses in any cases whatsoever.”

According to a criminal code of 1847, “Any white person assembling with slaves or free Negroes for purpose of instructing them to read or write . . . shall be con ned in jail not exceeding six months and ned not exceeding $100.00.”

Much later, under Jim Crow, the General Code of the City of Birmingham of 1944 prohibited any negro and white, in any public space, from playing together in “any game with cards, dice, dominoes or checkers.”

Those laws are archaic and, in a way, silly. And while they are no longer enforced or enforce- able, they have laid the carpet on which many writers have danced to great effect.