I experienced David Bowie’s death through Twitter, spending that morning poring over his widely-publicized 2013 list of 100 favorite books. I read reviews and plot summaries, searching for a title where our tastes might intersect. I settled on Nella Larsen’s Passing, a novel written during the height of the Harlem Renaissance about two African American women who “pass” as white. Reading a book called Passing as David Bowie passed from this world to the next seemed intriguing and poignant.
I then proceeded to tweet that Passing was my pick. Within minutes, @littlelodestar, or Kristen Ploetz, replied that she had bought the very book just last month. She attached a picture of the cover as proof of life, for the coincidence seemed too great. “I’m game to read in tandem w/you,” she tweeted. “It’s a deal,” I replied. We read it at the same time, this MLK weekend.
Kristen and I have a lot in common. We are in a similar phase of life, having both left legal careers to write. We are mothers and avid readers who often write about kids and books, in between working on our fiction. We support one another’s work, liking and retweeting wherever we can. I’ve come to count on and look forward to Kristen’s tweets and replies, to her thought-provoking writing. And, now, suddenly our relationship had shifted to a new place. Having never physically met, we would be reading the same book together, sharing the intimate space of novel-reading.
Like the Starman, Bowie was always lurking in the background of this space; that we were reading HIS book influenced our reading at every turn. He was a third party to our communion, another self-professed avid reader. It was a literary threesome of sorts. I found myself wondering how Bowie came across this not-exactly-mainstream book in the first place, who recommended it to him, did he really read it, how old was he when he did? Was his 100 books list legit or ghost-written by some literary expert?
As I read, I felt Bowie over one shoulder and Kristen over the other, wondering where we all matched up, where we didn’t.
I proceeded to get to know the two main characters of Passing. Claire Kendry, the light-skinned daughter of a white woman and a black man, decides to pass completely into the white world by marrying a rich, white man. Her husband is a racist of epic proportions, and, to maintain her marriage, she must keep her race a secret and leave the African American community of her childhood behind. Meanwhile, Irene Redfield, who is also very light-skinned, chooses to marry a black man and live within the black community, but to pass when it is convenient to avoid Jim Crow laws. Not having seen each other for years, they run into each other in a whites-only restaurant and rekindle their friendship.
Layered on top of this fluidity between black and white is sexual fluidity. The book is filled with homosexual overtones; Larsen strongly intimates that Irene is sexually attracted to Clare. Theirs is a dangerous relationship, not only because such sexual attraction must be repressed, but also because the discovery of the friendship by Clare’s husband would result in Clare’s downfall, as well as place her daughter’s future in jeopardy.
Larsen’s characters, and the complexities of their choices, are exquisitely drawn. Larsen’s writing reminds me of Jane Austen or Edith Wharton. She is a master of detail, of understanding and portraying the nuances in human relationships, and of infusing just the right amount of ambiguity into her book. Perhaps the depth of her writing comes from its overlap with her own experiences, as Thadious M. Davis, Larsen’s biographer, lays out in the introduction to the book. Larsen herself was the daughter of a white, Danish mother and a mixed-race father from the Danish Virgin Islands. When her father died, her mother remarried a white man and had another daughter, making Larsen the only brown-skinned person in her family. Davis explains that Larsen “became the lone ‘colored’ person in a family that had refashioned itself, consciously … erased its racial past, and, with the disappearance of that past, obscured familial ties to the dark child in its midst.”
In addition, Larsen experienced numerous shifts in her own life: she was a librarian, then a famous author embedded in the Harlem artistic culture, then a divorced woman who had to support herself with something other than her art. She went from being a Guggenheim fellow in Europe writing a third novel to an anonymous nurse working the night shift (perhaps even passing as white to do so).
From beginning to end, Larsen forced me, as a white reader, to analyze my own white privilege, because I realized on page-after-page that I had not thought much about many of the issues she raises, and certainly not with her nuance. I have never been tempted to hide who I am, my race, or my family background. I have never thought that my life might be better, safer, easier, or richer if I weren’t white. I have never felt that race closed off opportunities for me.
I had also never deeply considered how a person who passes into another race might have to forsake her culture and hide her connection to her family, friends, and past to avoid discovery. Clare says, “You don’t know, you can’t realize how I want to see Negroes, to be with them again, to talk with them, to hear them laugh.” She was right; I didn’t know. Larsen’s book very vividly explores what it is like to lead a secret life, to miss one’s community, to feel out of place in the new one, to assimilate into a racist culture that hates one’s true self, to experience the self-hatred that is concomitant with choosing to be white instead of black.
As I read, I wondered: was Larsen’s novel also making Kristen Ploetz ponder white privilege? And what about David Bowie?
With Kristen, finding the answer was easy. In an Instagram post the day she finished Passing, she specifically highlights white privilege, explaining:
I’ve unintentionally read it the weekend before MLK’s birthday, and though it was published in 1929 it is still so unfortunately relevant today when it comes to the painful subject of race in our country… This book gets at one of the many aspects of what it is like to be black (actually, biracial in this story) in a world with so much white privilege, both in 1929, and sadly, still today.
Kristen also expresses frustration with the way in which our society tends to gloss over the original source of white privilege:
It’s the kind of book that has me seething that although my second grader is learning about MLK in school …, she is not simultaneously being taught/given the context of slavery that comes with the reason behind his and others’ work to eradicate racism. Why is that? It’s not right. Last night we had a talk, she and I, about slavery and I tried to fill in some of the very important gaps.
Kristen’s criticism of the school is particularly interesting in the context of Passing. Larsen’s character, Irene, consciously chooses to shield her young sons from knowledge of racism, in much the same way that 
Kristen’s daughter’s school avoids discussing slavery. Irene’s husband strongly disagrees, arguing that their boys had “better find out what sort of thing they’re up against as soon as possible.” Irene defends her position with: “I want their childhood to be happy and as free from the knowledge of such things as it possibly can be.”
I wondered how Kristen reacted to this scene. And I also thought about all the parents of color today, who still must choose how much and when to tell their children about the historical and current crimes and discrimination against their own race. They must consider the effect telling their children about racism will have on their kids’ sense of identity and self-worth.
Where Larsen was criticizing Irene’s view, I can certainly identify with it. I have chosen not to tell my kids about things like September 11 before a certain age to protect the innocence of their childhoods and to keep them from feeling overly afraid for themselves, living in NYC. My four-year-old doesn’t know about slavery, but my first grader does. In her recent Washington Post article, entitled “What is White Privilege?”, Christine Emba explains privilege “as a set of unearned assets that a white person in America can count on cashing in each day but to which they remain largely oblivious.” If I don’t tell my children about racism and privilege early enough or fully enough, I will certainly help propagate this problem of being “oblivious,” thereby engendering entitlement.
While Kristen and I can dialogue about our reactions to Passing, we will never know what David Bowie thought about it. Google can uncover what aftershave the man used (Minotaure by Paloma Picasso), but the intimate space of his response to a novel is now closed.
It’s easy to see how David Bowie would have been attracted to a book about racial passing and sexual identity. After all, he crossed all sorts of boundaries and identities. Bowie was a white man from England with one injured dark eye and one blue eye, who married a black supermodel from Somalia. Bowie wasn’t even his real name; he was originally David Robert Jones and briefly Tom Jones. His sexual orientation was also fluid. The New York Times titled a recent article about him: “Was He Gay, Bisexual or Bowie? Yes.” He shape shifted in appearance time and time again, from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke to Major Tom to Aladdin Sane to Jareth the Goblin King to the gaunt, suited man promoting his last album (perhaps the truest of them all). He, likewise, moved in and out of musical genres, from punk to pop to lip-syncing “Fame” on Soul Train to performing “The Little Drummer Boy” with Bing Crosby.
I wonder if David Bowie placed himself and analyzed his own identity-shifting within the context of Larsen’s book. Did her novel cause him to scrutinize his own life? Given his adoption of the satiric “Thin White Duke” character, one has to believe that Bowie did ponder his own white privilege. But how much did he think about the fact that his race, gender, and fortune gave him the freedom to cross, and even profit from crossing, all those boundaries?
Identity-shifting was not without dangers for Bowie. At times he was criticized and derided for it. And the character changes were also psychologically taxing. In an interview with Mick Brown in The Telegraph in 1996, Bowie observed of his own metamorphosis:
It’s OK … as long as you’re really in control of the image, as a painter is, for instance. But when you’re using yourself as the image it’s never quite as simple as that. Because aspects of your own life get mixed into the image that you’re trying to project as a character, so it becomes a hybrid of reality and fantasy. And that is an extraordinary situation. Then the awareness that that’s not the real you, and you’re uncomfortable having to pretend that it is, makes you withdraw. And I withdrew, obviously through the use of drugs, as well, which didn’t help at all.
There was the risk, for both Clare and Bowie, of losing one’s “true” identity (if there is such a thing). Still, despite these risks, Bowie was not confined by the same constraints that African American women living in Harlem in the 1920s were. His shifting was not dangerous in the same way Clare’s and Irene’s was. Ultimately, passing leads to Clare’s tragic death, while Bowie has been lauded for his fluid identity in obit after obit.
The concept of “passing” has begun to take on a new face in our culture. In his thought-provoking article in The New York Times, “Reading About Racial Boundaries,” John Williams points out that there has long been a tradition of books about race-shifting, but some recent novels on the subject involve characters who pass for black instead of white. Think, for instance, of Nell Zink’s Mislaid or Jess Row’s novel Your Face in Mine.
And then there’s Rachel Dolezal, who posed as black in real life. Her passing struck a nerve for so many, in part because it seemed to belittle or make fun of the historical passing of blacks as whites. Whether Dolezal should be criticized or not for changing her race to get a job, her drama does show that times have changed since Nella Larsen killed off Clare in her novel. While the Clares of the 1920s led largely anonymous lives, Rachel Dolezal became a character to dissect in the modern media. Pictures from her social media accounts were analyzed and compared.
Reading a book with one of my tweeps, as well as with a famous person I felt I knew from all his media exposure—both of whom are, in fact, total strangers—it’s impossible not to ask what “passing” means in the dawning age of social media. Virtual connections to one another are fluid; boundaries of private and public are constantly breaking down. You don’t have to be David Bowie to present yourself as your own fiction online. People are now able to carefully construct their online photos to look more white or black, old or young, male or female. In fact, social media is a constant exercise in self-presentation. In many ways, this is a time of great opportunity when it comes to identity. Online, everyone is able to do what David Bowie had been playing around with for decades. Bowie’s willingness to cross boundaries so publically opened the doors for others to do so as well, and not only online. As we figure this out, I hope that we, as a society, will not forget the disturbing reasons that characters like Clare opted to change races.
I leave you with a line from Passing’s final chapter that certainly applies to Bowie now and will apply to us all someday: “One moment Clare had been there, a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold. The next she was gone.”
