The subject of Part I in Passing is Clare Kendry’s ability to “pass” for white, and essentially fool her abhorrently racist husband into thinking she is white. During Jack’s rant about the apparent darkening of Clare’s skin, she asks him, “My goodness, Jack! What difference would it make if, after all these years, you were to find out that I was one to two per cent colored” (40). He responds, apt to his character, “I draw the line at that. No niggers in my family” (40).
This particular statement was, unfortunately, not confined to Jack Bellew. At this time in America, especially the South, there was a social concept known as the “one-drop rule.” The one-drop rule was simple: if you had even a single ancestor that was black, you were considered black. Of course, this doesn’t translate in the opposite direction. If a black person had a white ancestor, that didn’t make them white. The one-drop rule was actually representative about the anxiety white people felt about the ability of black people to “pass.”
The one-drop rule and it’s legality was called into question during the annulment proceedings to dissolve the marriage of Kip Rhinelander and Alice Jones Rhinelander. Kip Rhinelander was the son of a wealthy man, but was awkward and unintelligent. He courted Alice Jones for nearly three years before they eloped. His father forced him to file for an annulment based on fraud. Rhinelander Sr. didn’t want a colored woman in the family, and he tried to claim that Alice had never revealed to Kip that her father was “mulatto”, or mixed race. Alice claimed that she had, and that she could not conceal it from him, especially in the marriage bed. She was forced into a brutal courtroom display, in which she was forced to strip and show the judge and jury her naked legs and breasts as evidence of her blackness. Their private letters were even read aloud to an “amused” courtroom.
(source: NPR)
Shockingly in the context of the era, Alice Jones won the case. The jury elected not to award Rhinelander an annulment based on fraud, and he had to proceed with a divorce filing. She won alimony and an annuity in the case, but spent the remainder of her life as a recluse and never remarried. Kip Rhinelander died at age 32.
This case, and the one-drop rule, highlight the precariousness of Clare Kendry’s situation and her ability to “pass.” Irene and Gertrude are appropriately appalled by Jack Bellew’s words, but Irene is struck by Clare’s peculiar reaction to it all. She describes looking up during the tea and “encountering [Clare’s] peculiar eyes fixed on [Irene] with an expression so dark and deep and unfathomable that she had for a short moment the sensation of gazing into the eyes of some creature utterly strange and apart” (40). Irene is also angry at the situation she had been forced into. At the time, “Irene thought it was unbelievable and astonishing that four people could sit so unruffled, so ostensibly friendly, while they were in reality seething with anger, mortification, shame” (42). Clare wrote a letter of thanks for the visit, but Irene’s reaction is given as: “As if, she thought wrathfully, anything could take away the humiliation, or any part of it, of what she had gone through yesterday afternoon for Clare Kendry” (47). Gertrude, on the other hand, is sympathetic and fearful. She says, after leaving the tea, “I wouldn’t be in [Clare’s] shoes for all the money she’s getting out of it, when he finds out. Not with him feeling the way he does” (44). Gertrude and Irene’s encounter with a man who so clearly adheres to the ideas behind the one-drop rule, not knowing that, for just this second, the all women in front of him are “passing,” is representative of the danger and risk Clare Kendry is undertaking by defying her race. This risk is one that Alice Jones took, if unwittingly, and for which she paid dearly.
As the episode you describe happened in the 1920s, it provides a key context for Laresen’s engagement with “passing,” not only as an individual choice, fraught with danger, but as a conversation that was very much a part of the national imagination, as we see in this remarkable case. Other important historical items to note would be the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson in the late 1890s, which upheld strict racial segregation laws known as “separate but equal.” Plessy could pass as white, and the case in many ways revolved around definitions of race even as it was informed by anxieties of racial purity. One could also note the many laws enacted during the first few decades of the twentieth century that codified that “one-drop rule,” which was a long-standing assumption about what defines whiteness and blackness along strictly binary lines. Great background here!