#4: Adaptations - Passing

I really need you to understand that Marge Simpson is black. aka Anatole and Me.

Savvy readers of my ‘main’ newsletter will know that this is largely a repost. I suspect the formatting on Substack is nicer than on tinyletter but I’d ask you for forgive me - it’s Christmas, after all.

My main take on Passing Rebecca Hall’s 2021 directorial debut (now available on Netflix)? Fine, perfectly fine. The score was missing maybe one extra theme and some of the foreshadowing was clunkily done and would’ve benefitted from an editor being firm. Ruth Negga as a particular kind of dotty pre-war party girl - flakey and flappy as they come - has a certain charm; unfortunately Tessa Thompson has borrowed too much from the Kerry Washington bottom lip school of acting to make this performance feel really rooted and embodied. She acts jealous of her old friend and husband’s new friendship; we see her act it out, but I didn’t feel it very much. However, it’s an encouraging first feature for Hall who I hope goes on to make more films.

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The first clue was Marge Simpson's hair. It grows upwards, just like mine. When I first started watching The Simpsons, this fact was something that always felt curious, but now I'm sure. Marge Simpson is black. 

Fear of Flying is an episode from the show’s sixth series. In it, Homer impersonates a pilot to get served at the final bar in town, by an airport, after getting chucked out of Moe’s for a prank. He gets taken to the cockpit, despite his protests to the air traffic control guy (“You flyboys crack me up!”). The safety breach results in the Simpson family getting a free trip courtesy of the embarrassed airline. However, they don’t manage to leave the airport: it turns out Marge cannot handle planes. 

In the subsequent days, Marge begins to unravel, spending hours through the night preparing a wedding banquet for the cat and dog who have been ‘living in sin’ for years. It’s as though her body has remembered something awful, but she cannot yet place what or where that was. Eventually, the family intervenes and she finds herself in a therapist’s office, who starts asking about her childhood and father. 

Initially, she is avoidant, but recalls her excitement as a little girl about her daddy’s work as a pilot. She speeds off to find him, escaping her mother’s grip and running up the stairs to follow him into the airplane. It’s an urge I understand; when I was about four, I took advantage of my pregnant mother’s tiredness and got out the back door one evening to find my father at his work at the hospital. I explained this all to the woman who spotted me in my nightie on the road and took me to him. I remember him finding us at reception, but the embarrassment I recall behind his friendly hello probably comes from learning in later years that the woman who found me was, in fact, a social worker. 

I was lucky - what could have been a very distressing story is something I can bundle in with the time I ran away from a shop with my father and managed to get into a school nearby and sit down in one of the classrooms, again before I’d started reception. I use these incidents to describe a quality about myself that I like: sometimes I have places to go, alone. Marge’s memory is more formative, but the shame attached to it means it is not readily available to her conscious mind. 

We see the scene in a flashback. Little Margie’s hand slips out of her mother’s and she marches up the airplane stairs. When she gets aboard, she turns left, aiming for the cockpit. But she finds her father to the right, offering passengers pre-flight snacks. She calls for him. He is desperately ashamed, crying out “Don’t look at me!” covering his face with the doily-like apron he’s wearing. 

“My father,” she confesses tearfully to her therapist, “was a stewardess.” 

The apron that provides Clancy Bouvier a shield from his daughter’s gaze is a key source of the pain. It wouldn’t form part of a modern cabin crew’s uniform, regardless of gender. It puts in mind a domestic worker, like a maid or a housekeeper. Marge expects to see her father steering the ship, but instead learns that he makes his money by catering to the whims of those wealthier than him. The apron is gendered, yes, but it also distinguishes him from other customer service workers. On that plane, he becomes the help. The history of uniforms in domestic work means their presence racialises workplace relations. In Kiley Reid’s novel Such A Fun Age, Emira babysits a white child from the affluent Chamberlain family and is unembarrassed about the work that that entails. While she is concerned about her job title not conferring her with the protection of health insurance, her white boyfriend Kelley, is bothered that her employer, Alix, gets her to change clothes when working in the house. 

“Emira,” he said. “Don’t tell me she makes you wear a uniform.” 

“Well, she doesn’t make me do anything.” 

Homer impersonates a pilot and is rewarded with free travel; Clancy’s fabrication results in his daughter’s extreme fear of flying. Homer is repeatedly rewarded for his mishaps, much to the chagrin of his ill-fated colleague Frank Grimes. Despite his protestations, he is taken for a pilot. Why would being one be out of the reach of Marge’s dad in the 1960s?

Season Seven’s Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield opens with the family’s tv having just stopped working. On the drive to the out-of-town outlet, Marge is firm with the family whose expectations for a new television set far outstrip their budget: “We can’t afford to shop at any store with a philosophy.”

While Homer is getting taken in by an electricals salesman, Marge and Lisa go to the clothes store, Steppin’ Out. It’s there that Lisa finds Marge’s ticket to the big time: a pink Chanel suit with black piping, $90 down from $2800. Marge uses an argument familiar to those of us with an urge to spend but with no real justification behind it: “it’ll be good for the economy.”  

A few days later, she’s spotted in the suit by someone with whom she went to school. Her appearance impresses Evelyn, who had written her off, having heard about Marge’s marriage to Homer. Evelyn extends Marge and her an invitation to the local country club.

At the start of the episode, it is Marge reigning in the family’s aspiration for a life bigger than their own. By the end, she has gutted the family savings account to purchase a new Chanel gown, having exhausted the possibilities for altering her discount suit. Her embarrassment at her family and their ways - oafish Homer, boisterous Bart and sanctimonious Lisa - comes to a head when the family walk up to the country club for Marge’s new member welcome party. Marge won’t let Homer drive up and have a taste of a valet experience, so mortified is she by the state of their old motor. The episode ends neatly: Marge announces her love for each member of her family, because, rather than in spite of, their flaws. The family finds validation in themselves as a unit, so she never finds out she did in the end make the cut and achieve country club member status. 

The company Marge ends up dodging are just as snooty as the exclusive Los Angeles neighbourhood in which Stella Vignes joins in The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett’s second novel. Beyond the impossibility of my passing, one of the things that I would hate the most would be stumbling upon the true feelings of white people when not in ‘mixed company.’ What would it feel like to be sat at a dinner party in Connecticut when some comment or other is made about Black people and you are unable to say anything, all the while knowing that your younger sister has married a leading civil rights lawyer and activist? Would the access have made it worthwhile?

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Learning about the life of Anatole Broyard helped me understand and contextualise my suspicions about Marge. In contrast to the many works of fiction depicting the tragic impact of women who try to live on the other side (The Vanishing Half, Nella Larsen’s Passing, the films Devil in a Red Dress and Imitation of Life), Broyard was largely rewarded for his decision.

Hailing from a New Orleans family who made their way north to Brooklyn during the Great Migration, Anatole Broyard navigated the arts scene of post-war Greenwich Village and eventually became literary critic at the New York Times, holding the post for 18 years. He and his wife moved out of the city to Connecticut where they raised two children. He died in 1990. He did all this as a white man, despite being raised in a black family, to black parents and siblings. And in the main, he got away with it. 

The Broyards, much like the Bouviers, would have fit in easily amongst the Vignes, Decuirs, Thibodeauxs and Fontenots that make up Mallard, the small town at the heart of The Vanishing Half. Mallard, a place so small and insular it can’t be placed on a map, is in Louisiana, a state with a history of French colonialism whose traces are most clearly seen in the surnames of the region. The ‘-ux’ ending, rather than a more traditional ‘-au’ or ‘-ou’ is a Creole or Cajun tell: the stock characters of the Cajun jokes making fun of people from the region are Boudreaux and Thibodeaux; if they were from Marseille he would more likely be known as Boudreau. 

I doubt that I would have heard of Anatole without the work of his daughter Bliss Broyard, whose family memoir One Drop, I wolfed down in my final year as a student when more relevant texts were not as engaging. Bliss and her brother Todd only found out the truth about their father’s ethnic background as he was dying; it was their Norwegian-American mother who let them know. The revelation encouraged Bliss to delve into her father’s lineage and in so doing, explore the multiethnic communities and distinct racial mixing and slavery laws in Louisana that would eventually allow Anatole to pass for white full-time after his stint in the army during the Second World War. 

In his New Yorker article about Broyard (“White Like Me”), Henry Gates Jr. acknowledges that much of what motivated the critic to pass was the pursuit of artistic freedom. As a white hipster whose tastes were developed in the avant-garde scene of Greenwich Village, and a bookstore to boot, Broyard was qualified to reflect on contemporary literature for almost two decades at the NYT. As a Black guy at the time, he would’ve been tasked with chronicling and reflecting on the Harlem Renaissance and probably only that.

I am sympathetic with Broyard’s choice, although as a dark-skinned Black woman it’s one I do not have the option to make. The first artform I started regularly reviewing and writing criticism about was theatre, back as an undergrad for the student paper. I left university, and continued at it, sometimes blogging, sometimes wanting to review for publications, and eventually starting up this newsletter in 2016. 

The theatre blogging community was a live spot during the early part of the 2010s in particular. Lots of engaged people were at it: die-hard critics, arts administrators with things to say, writers, directors and theatremakers who wanted to contribute their perspective to this growing mass of conversations happening online. The scene was pretty white, and that was pretty unremarked upon. But every now and then, a show would be produced that would get one or two of our backs up, or leave us feeling more exposed than we would like. 

Two examples spring to mind. I heard about Exhibit B while in Edinburgh in August 2014. Someone saw it and said it was brilliant, who told someone else to go see it...who told me. Rumours of the good shows go around the city during the month the Fringe and the International Festival spread very quickly - often too fast to read a review or description and book a ticket before it sells out. So I was intrigued. But then I saw a blog post from a Black theatremaker who had deep reservations about the work. As it turned out, the piece was a depiction of the human zoos that would see Africans carted around Europe as displays. Exhibit B had already toured to cities such as Amsterdam, with an ensemble cast made up of Black performers local to the given area. For each showing, the cast would create tableaus similar to those of the original human zoos; the audience’s job was to walk through the displays and watch. 

I discovered it and was furious that none of the people who had recommended the show to me flagged this detail. The presumption of the piece appeared to be that the audience members had an inherited guilt to reckon with, the descendants of those who had attended those demeaning spectacles. But what if you lived your life aware that your features would have you treated as a curio, even as recently as the 1960s? 

I wasn’t alone in this discomfort. The Black theatremaker who wrote about the work did so hesitantly, aware that the weight of her opinion and perspective would rule it as ‘the Black opinion.’ The show went on, until it reached the Barbican in the autumn of the same year. Protests, which the art centre claimed threatened the safety of the team, led to the early closure of the work. I didn’t sign the petition for the show’s closure owing to my wariness around artistic censorship, be that for Jerry Springer the Opera or grime and drill artists. But I did note that Exhibit B was framed as the work of a leading artist from the continent of Africa and I struggled to find examples of non-white Africans supported in the same way, to the same trumpeting by the venue. 

A few years later, another work of significant acclaim. This time it’s Macarthur Genius Grant recipient Branden Jacob Jenkins’ An Octoroon, staged at the Orange Tree Theatre directed by Ned Bennett. The show’s run is extended so I manage to grab a ticket, in the second row, before it sells out again. The Orange Tree is in Richmond, and after getting off the Overground, I’m struck by how much whiter this area is than most of the places I usually find myself in in the city. The show is not white, though the director is. The show is urgent and vital, which is to say: it’s a show about blackness and the structures that make ‘blackness’ a topic worth exploring. It’s about being a promising young playwright who wants to remix and respond to the problematic texts that make up his cultural inheritance. It’s about being boxed in as an artist due to your race. It’s about making the audience laugh during a slave auction scene and silent in the face of a lynching projected overhead. It is competent, assured, audacious and made me and the other Black people in the auditorium very aware of how visible they were by the other patrons. 

This feeling sticks with me on the commute to Cambridge that week and I explain my feelings to my boss. “You write about these things” he notes. “Maybe you should write about this.”

I do, but am aware that when the piece gets published on the website Exeunt, it is not a review. I wasn’t invited to press night or previews; my response feels like backlash owing to the fact I heard about it late and had to debate if it was worth the trek out somewhere new and the ticket price. The feedback is great, in a sense: people share it lots on Twitter and I gain followers. I want to hide - I am not, and cannot become, some kind of community spokesperson. Black theatre leaders DM me, ask me for coffee. 

I am sure I have got work off the back of that article. But I am too cowardly to become a regular Black theatre critic, because the calls for more of us often imply we will then agree with the shows we see. One time I agree with Michael Billington, the now retired theatre critic for the Guardian, about a show at a London venue everyone thinks is doing the right thing. Detractors say he doesn’t get it because he is an old white man and not the target audience. I am the target audience and I agree with his criticisms and am relieved I don’t have to share this view publicly. As a theatre fan, I want exciting, innovative, compelling, rigorous work and I also want to champion promising makers too. But the work of a critic, constantly striving for the best a thing can be, sits in opposition to being supportive of the execution of one’s community all of the time. I am too ambivalent to be a cheerleader, I want to say. You've got the wrong person.

Anatole Broyard’s memoir Kafka was the Rage was first published in 1993, a few years after his death. It begins ‘My life, or career, in Greenwich Village, began when Sheri Donatti invited me to move in with her.’ For Broyard, life is work - being able to create and curate (as he did with his secondhand bookshop) was what allowed him to be. And if that meant telling lies or omitting truths, then so be it. 

The early pages of Kafka was the Rage has the writer detailing scenes that would not be out of place in a queer coming of age story:

I went back to Brooklyn, packed my clothes and books and kissed my parents good-bye. They didn’t know what to say - I was a veteran now. Though I regretted the lie, I told them I’d have them over to my apartment when it was fixed up. 

But there’s a hardened editor behind the text, rather than a doe-eyed teen making their first steps out into the big city. There was not just one lie about a visit, but a host of decisions about scrubbing a family history. Presumably his parents didn’t know what to say in part because he was also leaving behind his wife and young daughter. He enlisted in the army as white, in order to access better opportunities, and like many men from African American backgrounds, returned after fighting in Europe unwilling to be a Negro any more. 

Passing narratives often contain protagonists who want to be someone else. In Larsen’s Passing, Irene claims not to remember the dominant friend of her adolescence, Clare, who goes on to marry a white man after a parental death cuts her off from her African American neighbourhood. This doesn’t seem plausible, particularly when Irene repeatedly comments on Clare’s beauty and ability to capture the attention of those around her. More likely is that Irene had to break up with Clare in her head when she moved away. Her unwillingness to reconnect with her friend as an adult feels like preservation, avoiding an obsession she understands cannot be fulfilled satisfactorily. While in The Vanishing Half, Des’ree prides herself on being able to mimic Stella expertly, and demonstrate a deep knowledge her more meticulous sister cannot reciprocate through mimicry. Stella has her secrets and her own motivations that Des’ree is forced to acknowledge only when she returns to their flat to find her sister gone. 

For Broyard, it’s Sheri he wants to be and inhabit. When he writes about his former lover in the opening page of his memoir, it’s as though he is writing about himself: 

Sheri Donatti had the kind of personality that was just coming into vogue in Greenwich Village in 1946…[she] was her own avant-garde, She had erased and redrawn herself, redesigned the way she walked, talked, moved, even the way she thought and felt. 

Sheri and Anatole move to the city to become themselves. Who can blame them?