Passing: A Novel

by Patricia Jones

Overview

Like a glass of lemonade that is both sweet and tart, writer Patricia Jones mixes up a refreshing blend of deep emotion and raw truth, tempered by a grounded dose of wisdom.

To Lila Giles, the term "passing" refers to those pale-hued folks who take advantage of their creamy shade by crossing into the white world. Descended from a long line of an elite Baltimore family awash with "high-colored" skin just right for "passing", family lore told Lila that not one of them would have thought to deny their true selves and rich history in such a way. It is this sense of pride that bonds the Giles family together -- a bond strongly enforced by Lila's controlling stepmother Eulelie. But the delicate balance of this branch of the family Eulelie has so carefully engineered is threatened when Lila's brother decides to marry a woman from an oh-so-very-wrong family.

A proud though severe matriarch, Eulelie Giles has ruled her four grown stepchildren with a heavy self-righteousness that could break the spirit of the most sound opponent, let alone the nearly thirty-year-old Lila. Relentlessly loyal to her privileged world, Eulelie has ingrained upon Lila and her three other stepchildren the importance of distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable blacks. Despite her strident belief in an unyielding class line, Eulelie has kept a secret about her own past that manages to affect, in more ways than a few, anyone who enters her life. As the wedding day draws closer, Lila begins to look at her reality versus Eulelie's, and what Lila finds leads to a confrontation between stepmother and stepdaughter that could finally shatter Eulelie's reign over Lila and the family, but ultimately, one that will lead Eulelie back to the truth.

Filled with multi-dimensional characters and rich with atmosphere, Passing is a story of tangled family relationships; the secrets, misunderstanding, and deceptions that hold them together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061922909
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/19/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	388
Sales rank:	566,942
File size:	699 KB

About the Author

Patricia Jones was a native of Baltimore but lived inNew York City with her daughter. Throughout her writing life, her work appeared in Ms., Essence, Family Circle, Woman's Day, and the New York Times. The Color of Family is her third novel.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Worlds Apart

Eulelie looked guilty. Like a thief trying to steal in the night. Over both shoulders she checked, and scoped out everything oncoming — traffic, strollers, even two young men on bicycles. She was walking home from that conceptual aberration known outside of her world as simply the corner store, after getting the milk for the creamy gravy her son so loved. With the din of approaching motors, Eulelie could only pray that no one in her insular universe had witnessed her walk to, or presently from, the other side of Hilton Street, that other place beyond: the reservoir, that other place where other black people who were not like her lived, all so that her son would not be without gravy at Sunday dinner. And her daughters had tenaciously refused to go.

The only thing that kept her mind off her inelegant situation was that reservoir. Once she reached that reservoir, shiny and still, placid as her heart felt when surrounded by her children, Eulelie could momentarily forget about what she'd just had to do, from where she'd just come. Behind her, and beyond the reservoir, lay nothing terribly special. Still, all she could think about was who could see, who would talk. Is there one thing a mother would not do for the love of her son?

A jittery concoction of fear and anger and even a tiny touch of sadness with roots running too deep to probe had spread a damp warmth across her forehead, in her armpits, under the waistband of her skirt, as she thought of the possibility of Dottie Pettigrew-Van Dyke, heiress to the Afro Gazette, seeing her. WouldDottie go so far as to put something like this in the Gazette? The Gazette was Baltimore's newspaper on all matters black, and Eulelie could just imagine the headline', LOOK WHO EULELIE GILES IS RUBBING ELBOWS WITH THESE DAYS. How would she ever live this down? Somehow, though, as she walked and thought, Eulelie managed to slow her leaping imagination long enough to allow common sense to prevail. People walk to the store every day, she reasoned. Even Dottie Pettigrew-Van Dyke runs out of milk. The Afro Gazette had published some outlandish stories in its day, but a walk to the low-brow part of Hilton Street was hardly newsworthy, not even for the Gazette; not even in a slow news week. But it wasn't just Dottie Pettigrew-Van Dyke who worried her. It was the Breckenridges, or the Ballards, or any of the women from the Black Barristers' Wives Social Club; that's who she didn't want catching her slumming on the other side.

Eulelie opened the screen door, the only thing that separated the sanctity of the Giles home from the rest of the world on this Sunday afternoon. "I'm back, girls," she said from the front hall with a wearied voice, looking particularly frumpy in her church suit, which seemed a size, maybe a size and a half, too big for her, as if she might be wearing some other woman's fine linen suit. Its roominess put anuncomely emphasis on her frail body, of which she seemed most unaware, making her look plainer than a plucked chicken.

Lila scrambled out of her mother's chair and went to the front hall. "Momma, my God! You look like you're in distress. Are you okay?"

"Of course I'm not okay, Lila. What do you think? I am never doing that again. I'm telling you that other side of Hilton Street is another world. I should have driven. My heart beats a little faster when I even have to sit at that comer at a red light, and here I am crazy enough to walk down there. I'm telling you I should have driven." She pointed one long, thin, pale finger at Lila, then said: "Your father, the Judge, is probably turning over in his grave right now knowing I went down there."

Lila took the bag with the milk from her mother and passed it on to her sister Lucretia, who had come into the hall for it. Lila looked blandly at her mother, then said: "Well why didn't you drive?"

"Oh, Lila, you know how those people down there will plop their bottoms on your car before you're even good and out of it. I didn't even want to put myself in the position to have an altercation with any of them." Eulelie walked past Lila and into the living room, peeling her jacket off. She threw her hand in the -air in a queenly, dismissive way and said to Lila, "I don't care. The next time we're just going to have to be without gravy. I will not do that again. I just hope nobody saw me."

Her ears strained to hear the radio. "Turn that up, will you, dear?" she asked Lila.I",

As the volume rose, a male voice, not too deep, but not pansy light either, filled the room with the adventures of spawning salmon in the Pacific Northwest. "The salmon thrash their bodies against the water... " he was saying. Nothing she wanted to hear.

But before Eulelie could settle into another of her tirades about those awful corner-hanging, car-sitting, fringe dwellers on the dark side of Hilton Street, the voice of her youngest, Linda, floated in to her from the kitchen.

"Momma, dinner's ready, where's Gil?"

So, This Is Momma Eulelie

Gil washed the last swallow of scotch and soda over his tongue before surrendering it to his throat, his belly waiting for the burn. Scotch and soda, as many as it took, was the weekly ritual in Preparation for Sunday dinner with Mother. As he set the glass on the bar, a Pleasure/pain grimace took straight to the deepest pit of his gut, where more pain, behold of his face in poetic reply to the liquor scorching a trail yond the physical, lived.

Passing. Copyright © by Patricia Jones. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

Generally the term "passing" refers to masquerades of race or sexuality, as in Nella Larsen's well-known novella Passing. The title of this clich -packed, overlong novel of African-American lives in Baltimore instead denotes class pretense. Eulelie Giles is the overly protective stepmother of four adult children in a privileged African-American family. An overt snob toward black people darker or less wealthy than she is, Eulelie has contributed her prejudices to the four siblings she has raised. In a narrative as obvious as this one, Eulelie's mean-spirited, ultra snooty airs indicate that she will be revealed as the product of an impoverished background. When Gil Giles announces that he plans to marry a working-class paralegal from East Baltimore, his family's latent bigotry is both revealed and challenged. Jones's trite prose is enervating, and even inadvertently funny: "She woke with a start... like someone had set her underpants on fire." The use of multiple narrators simply multiplies unanswered questions: is Gil an alcoholic? will Lila ever date handsome private detective Pick? By the end of the story, most readers will have ceased wondering. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly