Plum Bun is a classic novel from the Harlem Renaissance. This book is a pretty optimistic story that features the lives of mostly middle-class African Americans. Its subtitle is “A Novel Without a Moral,” and the book is realistic without being preachy or tragic – in fact, the ending is quite a “happy sigh” moment.

Plum Bun is about an African American woman, Angela, who is able to “pass” for white. As a child, she visits white establishments with her equally light-skinned mother, while her darker sister and father have their own adventures. After Angela’s parents die, Angela decides to try passing for white in New York City full-time. She creates a new identity for herself and studies art. However, she longs to get married someday. Her most promising suitor seems to be Roger, who is rich, but who also is planning to marry into wealth himself (Roger is also racist, well beyond the norms of the day). She also likes Anthony, who is from Brazil. Anthony is brooding, mysterious, and inconveniently poor.

The book tells Angela’s story as she tries to navigate issues of race, class, and gender in a convoluted world of family, lovers, and friends. The only person who knows about her parentage is her sister, Jinny, but after Angela ignores Jinny at a train station, Jinny concentrates on building her own happy, vibrant life as an African American woman in Harlem. Angela develops friendships with other women, but they are often busy with their own lives. Angela experiences highs and lows as she tries to figure out the best way to live and how to get what she wants.

Angela can be a selfish, shortsighted, frustrating character. She’s amazingly self-centered. But she’s also admirable in that she actively tries to get the life she wants to have. This goal affects her almost as much in terms of gender as it does in terms of race. For instance, she points out that when she leaves her childhood home to go to New York, people perceive her as selfishly abandoning her sister, but if Angela were a boy, people would admire her for the same action. Similarly, Angela chafes at her friends’ suggestions that she make herself an object for men to pursue, instead of going after the marriage she wants in a more direct and forthright way.

Romance fans will be quick to figure out early who Angela is going to end up with. The real decision is between Anthony, who is depressed, poor, dedicated to art, and incredibly ethical; and Roger, whose sense of entitlement is such that he shocks Angela by proposing she become his mistress, and who finally persuades Angela to be his lover in a scene which can easily be interpreted as date rape. (Therefore: trigger warning.)

The lasting consequences of this scene in the story have less to do with issues of consent and more to do with issues of harm to others versus self-gratification. Angela’s callous treatment of her sister and Roger’s callous treatment of her suggest that there’s a difference between taking what you want from oppressive power structures and taking what you want at the expense of individuals. Regardless of how the reader interprets the scene, Angela regards it as the closing move in an elaborate game in which her friends coached her to give Roger enough to keep him interested and not enough to make him satisfied. She has “lost” the game in the sense that she is now Roger’s lover instead of his wife. Her precarious state leaves her possessive and anxious and confused: “She could not tell whether she was utterly happy or utterly miserable.”

Meanwhile, poor Anthony wanders into the scene periodically, looks depressed, and wanders off again, visibly pining. I know I’m supposed to root for Anthony here (Roger is loathsome), but I never stopped wishing that Angela would choose a third option. My lack of investment in the romance was the only factor that caused me to drop the grade to a B+.

Plum Bun also takes a multilayered view of passing. Angela, her mother, and her father view passing as a harmless entertainment. There’s certainly nothing immoral about lying to White people, explicitly or by omission, who have set up arbitrary and unfair rules. Why obey a system that makes no sense and is fundamentally unjust? This applies to her close personal relationships as well as less trivial encounters. For example, in high school, Angela makes friends with a new student who is later astonished to learn that Angela is Black. When the friend says, “You never told me you were colored!” Angela’s response is, “Tell you that I was colored! Why, of course I never told you I was colored! Why should I?”

This is the first encounter of many in which Angela is put in a position of being expected to “come out” and being unwilling to do so for a variety of reasons. While her naïveté about people’s opinions on race changes after her school experience, her basic attitude does not: Angela believes that she has just as much right to the good things of the world as White people do and that people should judge her for her personality and her talents. If knowing her ethnicity would prevent people from judging her fairly then she has every right to keep that aspect of herself a secret from even her closest friends and lovers.

That said, the act of passing has hurtful consequences, and the story doesn’t conceal them. The person who passes has the opportunity to leave their brothers and sisters of color behind, and that choice can cause great pain. The first sign of trouble comes in a scene in which Angela’s mother ignores her husband and daughter while passing. The mom expresses remorse for this and hopes it didn’t hurt her daughter. But later, Angela ignores her sister in a train station and pretends not to know her, and that decision causes a rift between them that lasts for years. Angela changes her pattern later in the book when she chooses to support a fellow student by revealing her ancestry to a room full of reporters. She does it on impulse, but is more relieved than anything else once it’s over with, and looks at the situation with amusement: “Think of me choosing four reporters before whom to make my great confession!”

Anthony’s story is a contrast to Angela’s: Anthony has no problem taking advantage of his light skin color to enter movie theaters or get into schools and other programs. He also does not feel that it is his responsibility to “come out” to people all the time. However, he will announce his racial background in situations in which he thinks it might benefit other people of color. He also hates the complications that come with prolonged concealment, so periodically he tells everyone:

Anthony did not consider that he was making a sacrifice; his confession or rather his statement with regard to his blood had the significance of the action of a person who clears his room of rubbish. Anthony did not want his mental chamber strewn with the chaff of deception and confusion. He did not label himself, but on the other hand he indulged every now and then in a general house-cleaning because he would not have the actions of his life bemused and befuddled.

I love this book because while it honors the importance of thinking about and caring for other people (both on an individual level and in a larger sense), it also celebrates the idea that people have, as Angela insists, have the right “to be happy, simply, naturally.” Angela has to learn compassion for other people, and she has to learn to untangle her relationships. But while there are moments in Plum Bun that are humiliating or upsetting, there are no moments of tragedy, except in Anthony’s backstory, which is incredibly sad.

Angela finds that deliberately concealing her heritage causes her life to be a shallow and lonely one. Following Anthony’s example, she settles on something of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” solution – she doesn’t volunteer information about her race but she doesn’t lie about it either. This allows her to have more honest relationships without surrendering her conviction that she should take advantage of good opportunities regardless of her background.

Angela grows up during the course of the novel and takes a more mature view of life, but neither her ethnicity nor her gender doom her to a life of unrelenting sadness. Some of her friends are disloyal, but many are not, and even Anthony gets a chance to cheer up at the end as a set of extremely complicated relationships finally sort themselves out. Both characters learn to appreciate who they are, sometimes in defiance of what they’re told they should be, or how they should act.  Plum Bun is more of a coming-of-age story than a romance, but there’s plenty of romance to please romance readers and, yes, it does have a happy romantic ending. I found the book to be both enlightening and delightful.

By the way, my edition is a paperback edition from Beacon Press that includes an introduction by Deborah McDowell. The introduction gives great insight into the life of author Jessie Redmond Fauset, who was a Kickass Woman of Harlem. Today Redmond is best known for encouraging Langston Hughes and publishing his work in Crises, the magazine she edited. Plum Bun sold over 100,000 copies in the first 90 days of its release, making it a best-seller. It was also criticized by both Black and White authors at the time for being too conventional, too happy, and for placing too much focus on love and marriage – a criticism that no doubt sounds eerily familiar to romance writers today.