Plum Bun (1925) by Jesi Redmon Fauset

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Plum Bun: A Novel Without A Moral (1925)

by Jesi Redmon Fauset

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania: 6/27

   I've dramatically slowed down on the pace of 1,001 Novels: A Library of American because of less job-related driving (Audiobooks) and more job-related work (reading and writing and generally running around more).   Still, I was excited to listen to Plum Bun: A Novel Without A Moral which is a forgotten classic from a key (but largely forgotten) member of the Harlem Renaissance, Jesi Redmon Fauset.  Plum Bun is a novel about the experience of "passing" where (in this context) an African-American, usually a woman, abandons her racial identity in favor of living among white people.   It's a phenomenon that is best demonstrated in Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, Passing and the introduction makes a point of asking why the canon only includes one such tale.  From my perspective, it's understandable.  Larsen's book is centered around a woman who marries a white man who believes her to be white, and the resulting action is memorable and tragic.  

  In Plum Bun, on the on the hand, protagonist Angela Murray carefully avoids such a situation and generally speaking lives more like an existentialist hero- avoiding close attachments while yearning for them at the same time- than a heroine in a novel published in the 1920's in the US.  Plum Bun is also a book that seems somewhat randomly assigned to Philadelphia because Angela Murray grew up there.  Almost the entire book is set in New York City, and New York City is really the only place that the Author puts across to the reader- I didn't get much of a sense of Philadelphia at all beyond her childhood memories of "passing" with her mother, who was also light-skinned.