Miss Roebuck and Adele befriended my parents, and seemed to live quite happily in the neighborhood, calling upon us children to earn money by running errands for them. Sometimes it was a trip to the corner store; at other times it was being on the lookout for the mailman when they were expecting a special delivery. But the times that heightened my imagination were when I was called upon to help Miss Roebuck carry packages delivered by a driver in a limousine. A long black car would pull up to the curb in front of their house, and a formally dressed driver would alight. On one occasion I spied a person sitting in the back seat, face hidden from my view. I think it was a man and he stared silently at Miss Roebuck through the darkened, partially lowered window, but I don’t remember them exchanging any words. She stared back, a slight smile lifting the corners of her mouth. Then the window was rolled shut.
After the driver loaded our arms with boxes, we walked back to her house. For weeks afterward, she would offer us fancy candies or show us some trinkets from other parts of the world, or talk about places she either had visited or hoped to visit before she was too old. Who were these women? Where did they come from? Why were they living here? And who was the mysterious man in the back seat who was delivering all these goodies?
These long-forgotten thoughts poured into my head when I signed on as an executive producer of the film Passing, an exquisite adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel that marks the assured directorial debut of acclaimed actress Rebecca Hall (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Christine). Larsen’s novel, like the book, The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro and the film of the same name by James Ivory, deal with many interior thoughts of the characters. Hall successfully achieved the visual conveyance of these interiority of thoughts and emotions through the glances exchanged between the actors, their subtlety of movements, and the underlying music with its theme of estrangement. The film stars Tessa Thompson (“Sylvie’s Love,” “Creed,” “Sorry to Bother You“) and Ruth Negga (“Loving,” “Ad Astra“) as two African-American high school friends who reenter one another’s lives as adults, but who by then are living on opposite sides of the color line. Negga’s character, Clare Kendry, is passing as white and has a racist husband (Alexander Skarsgård), who has no idea of the secret she is hiding. Thompson’s character, Irene Redfield, chooses to live her Black identity and has a rich social and family life in Harlem that Clare is drawn to like a moth to a flame. Their performances are magnetic.
The issues of race and colorism in America have always been complex, and Larsen’s book was ripe for Hall’s delicate examination of them. Why was someone considered “Black” if they had only one drop of Black blood? There were even measurements of Blackness, for instance: An octoroon was someone who had an ancestry that was one-eighth Black. So that means that seven/eighths of their heritage was white. Why weren’t they considered white? Back then the answer was ugly; the “one-drop rule” was legislated to maintain the “integrity” of the white race. These laws and classifications were also fixed to make sure that land rights, titles, money, education and even something as basic as freedom were not inherited by the descendants of African slaves.
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