Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset

 

Hello my lovely readers!

Oh. My. Goodness.

This book would NOT LET ME GO.

I loved this book so much, I actually surprised myself! Let's just get right into it.

"I’m sick of planning my life with regard to being coloured . I’m not a bit ashamed of my race. I don't mind in the least that once we were slaves. Every race in the world has at some time occupied a servile position. But I do mind having to take it into consideration every time I want to eat outside of my home, every time I enter a theatre, every time I  think of a profession."

SUMMARY
Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset was written in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. It follows Angela who grows up with her Black family in Philadelphia. However, both Angela and her mother are light enough to pass as white. 

When Angela gets a taste of passing after her mother accidentally does so one day, Angela moves to New York and lives her life as a white woman. But she soon finds that life in New York and living life as white woman isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

MY THOUGHTS
Like I said before, I gobbled this book up. The characters were all so amazingly layered.

I felt as though this book and this author flew under the radar when compared to the other big steppers of the Harlem Renaissance--Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes. There was even another book on this same subject that was published the same year: Passing by Nella Larsen. So it's easy to see why this novel isn't as revered as the other novels that came out during this time, but that doesn't make it any less fascinating of a book.

Sure, this book deals with gender, racial injustice, passing and relationships, but I think the main theme that stuck out to me was the theme of loneliness.

"Loneliness settled over her like a pall, frightening her seriously because she was realizing that this time she was not missing Roger so much as that a person for whom she had let slip the ideals engendered by her mother's early teaching, a man for whom she had betrayed and estranged her sister, was passing out of her ken."

Angela thinks she's going to have this great life in New York, which she does at first, but she's not prepared to confront the feelings of loneliness that comes with passing, living alone in a new city and the death of relationships.

Fauset wrote a complex novel with imperfect characters and such a beautiful ending that I couldn't stop smiling after I finished.