“Funny, isn’t it?” she said, speaking to Julia’s reflection in the mirror. “I get as much trouble for not being colored as for not being white. White people think I’m sneaky, putting on airs, and Negroes can be even worse. I sometimes think it would be simpler just to pass.”
Pass. The word hung in the quiet room. Such a short syllable for something so complicated. Julia first knew the term from Christophine’s occasional muttered disapproval. She would frown and call it foolish, bound to end badly. Julia always supposed she meant the risks of discovery were too great. Some white people considered it a kind of brazen fraud, like traveling first-class with a third-class ticket. Others viewed passing as a spectator sport, cheering on the rule breakers like schoolchildren urging twins to torment their teachers by answering to each other’s names. Pablo’s mixed soirees were exactly that, a smug poke in the eye of social norms. And he’d certainly enjoy a good snigger later tonight at the Plaza’s expense. Worse, and unfortunately more common, were those whites who feared some kind of contamination, as if Negroes might infect their air or soil their furniture.
For herself, Julia considered passing one of those harmless deceptions everyone, to some degree, practiced. Surely most people hid what they didn’t want known about themselves and fabricated or embellished what suited them. Julia had sworn Christophine to secrecy about her reading spectacles. Christophine called her alterations “mending.” And good Lord, Philip had not one drop of Kydd blood, and still the name opened every door in town to him. Diverting as those deceptions might be, in the end Julia had always considered them inconsequential and so not worthy of looking at too closely.
“I must admit,” Julia said, head down, watching Eva obliquely, “I had no idea you were colored when we met. That is what you mean? That you can pass for a white person?”
Eva’s earrings swung as she dipped her chin to one shoulder. The corners of her mouth rippled at some bitter joke. “Oh yes. My mother was light, and my father’s a white gentleman. Back in Louisville. Theodore Stillwater Byron Love the Third, if you can believe such a dicty name. We called him the professor.”
“You knew him?” Julia asked. “If it’s not impertinent to ask,” she added, realizing too late what she had presumed. Miscegenation, especially in the South, rarely involved families.
“Yes, I knew him. He cared for my mother for years.” She refilled her glass. “I don’t mind your asking. I don’t get much call to talk about him. We had a little house on the back of his property. His wife was an invalid, and Mama was her nurse. I must say he was good to us, made sure we had nice clothes and things. He even arranged for tutors after he saw what we got in the colored schools. And oh my, the books he gave us. Armloads of books, every year. He even helped me write a little newspaper, the Deaver Road Occasional, I called it.” She rolled her eyes. “I wanted to be an author even then, I suppose. A little Jo March I was.”
Her gaze roamed around the room. She lifted her elbow, patted the towel against her damp hip, and took a long swallow. “When I was fourteen, we had to leave. The professor’s wife died, you see, and he remarried. I saw him a few times after that, but he pretended not to recognize me. He had to, really, to please his new family.”
Julia knew the sting of a father’s rejection. Her own had died when she was six, before she was old enough to garner his interest. But Eva’s story was worse. To be loved for years and then spurned in public? Unthinkable.
“I don’t understand,” Julia said slowly. “You look utterly white. Why don’t you just call yourself white? No one would know.”
Eva’s beautiful mouth curved in a wry smile. “It’s not that simple. I can pass, but Ella was too dark. It happens. Even just a touch of the tarbrush can sometimes show. I know a man who threw his wife out into the street after their third baby turned out colored.” Her long fingers stroked the back of her neck. “She let him think she had a Negro lover rather than tell him the truth. To save her other children, you see. She was crazy, having those babies. It’s kin that counts, not skin.”
One sister dark and another light? Julia was taken aback. Then she remembered that of course skin color could be as unpredictable as that of eyes or hair. One sibling among several might sport Grandfather’s freckles or Grandmother’s olive complexion. As Billie Fischer had so crassly demonstrated, white people came in many shades too. Julia wondered vaguely who decided who was “white.”
“Yet it must be tempting,” she said, “to go anywhere, to just . . .” The sentence trailed off. She meant simply to live unencumbered, in the ways that had always seemed ordinary—for her.
She knew of course about race segregation and the great disparity between what was accessible to white Americans and what to coloreds. “Separate but equal” was anything but. The inequality was no secret; in fact, it was the point. Yet many white people, including Julia and likely everyone else at the party, lived peaceably under the system not because they endorsed it but because they never thought about it. Race separation made Negroes invisible to many whites. They literally never saw colored people except as maids, cooks, groundskeepers, bellhops, porters, and the like, roles that seemed to fuse race with subservience. The system was pervasive, which made it seem inevitable: as natural a feature of American life as celebrating Thanksgiving or motoring on the right-hand side of the road. If asked, many whites might rue its unfairness, but mostly they just forgot. They didn’t see it. Julia saw their blindness but wondered now about her own.
Maids, cooks. The words snagged like a thorn in
