Mixed Race Studies

Red Bone Woman, A Novel

John Day Company
1950
314 pages

Carlyle Tillery (1904-1988)

The Stark Novel Of A Swamp Girl And A Lonely White Man — Carries The Wallop Of Faulkner And The Skills Of Caldwell

Literary Guidepost

Corsicana Daily Sun
Corsicana, Texas
page 18, column 2
Thursday, 1950-04-06

W. G. Rogers

Red Bone Woman, by Carlyle Tillery (John Day; $3.)

Son George packs up and goes off to a city job: daughter Molly is already married to Bill; wife Rose has died. That leaves Mr. Randall all by himself on the big Randall place in Louisiana, with a lot of his land exhausted, too much stock for one fellow to tend to and too many acres to plant.

A man can go from lonesome to shiftless to worse, or he can figure, as Mr. Randall does, that he isn’t finished just because he’s abandoned, and that if the first family he raised has left him, there’s time to raise a second.

For he isn’t so old, and he gets to thinking about the barefoot Red Bone girl down the road a piece. She is Temple Hamper, who stands day after day fishing in the creek near where he hoes. White women would rather live in the city, he has discovered; anyway, he isn’t young enough nor well enough off for a white woman. So though he knows how some folks in his neighborhood feel about the Red Bones, or Spanish white as they call themselves, he ups and asks Temple how she’d like to live in the big house with him.

She would, she says. After they settle down to the daily chores in the fields together, after he becomes used to her ways about his home, ho decides, though it seems unnecessary to her, to marry her. That’s pretty hard for George to take, and Molly won’t take it at all. These Red Bones, with skin darker than whites’ and lighter than negroes’, are almost illiterate. Temple, and Randall, too, are not educated enough to philosophize about race relations: they just solve them, for after all, they are intelligent. A determined couple, they make a happy life for themselves, a life so happy it is worth fighting for when a white-sheeted gang threatens it.

They are a rare couple, too, simple and honest, trying doggedly to master their personal and social problems. Sharing in their delights and appalled at their tragedy, the reader will remember them with a lasting affection. Tillery is a name to add to the large list of distinguished southern writers.

Harmless Like You: A Novel

W. W. Norton
February 2017
320 pages
5.9 × 8.6 in
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-324-00074-7

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Written in startlingly beautiful prose, Harmless Like You is set across New York, Connecticut, and Berlin, following Yuki Oyama, a Japanese girl fighting to make it as an artist, and Yuki’s son Jay who, as an adult in the present day, is forced to confront his mother’s abandonment of him when he was only two years old.

The novel opens when Yuki is sixteen and her father is posted back to Japan. Though she and her family have been living as outsiders in New York City, Yuki opts to stay, intoxicated by her friendship with the beautiful aspiring model Odile, the energy of the city, and her desire to become an artist. But when she becomes involved with an older man and the relationship turns destructive, Yuki’s life is unmoored. Harmless Like You is a suspenseful novel about the complexities of identity, art, adolescent friendships, and familial bonds that asks—and ultimately answers—how does a mother desert her son?

Kiss Me Someone

Tin House Books
2017-09-12
288 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-941040-75-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-941040-76-8

Karen Shepard

From the author of The Celestials, a collection of stories that will appeal to readers of Lucia Berlin, Mary Gaitskill, and Mia Alvar.

Bold and unapologetic, Karen Shepard’s Kiss Me Someone is inhabited by women who walk the line between various states: adolescence and adulthood, stability and uncertainty, selfishness and compassion. They navigate the obstacles that come with mixed-race identity and instabilities in social class, and they use their liminal positions to leverage power. They employ rage and tenderness and logic and sex, but for all of their rationality they’re drawn to self-destructive behavior. Shepard’s stories explore what we do to lessen our burdens of sadness and isolation; her characters, fiercely true to themselves, are caught between their desire to move beyond their isolation and a fear that it’s exactly where they belong.

The Celestials

Tin House Books
2013-06-06
320 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-935639-55-8

Karen Shepard

In June of 1870, seventy-five Chinese laborers arrived in North Adams, Massachusetts, to work for Calvin Sampson, one of the biggest industrialists in that busy factory town. Except for the foreman, the Chinese didn’t speak English. They didn’t know they were strikebreakers. The eldest of them was twenty-two.

Combining historical and fictional elements, The Celestials beautifully reimagines the story of Sampson’s “Chinese experiment” and the effect of the newcomers’ threatening and exotic presence on the New England locals. When Sampson’s wife, Julia, gives birth to a mixed-race baby, the infant becomes a lightning rod for the novel’s conflicts concerning identity, alienation, and exile.

Liana

Charles Scribner’s Sons
1944
285 pages

Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998)

Her Color Was No Barrier—To Men

A French-owned island of the Caribbean is the setting for a haunting story of the tragedy of a marriage between a lovely, untutored mulatto and a rich, lonely white man. He has married her to spite the woman he wants and loves—and has failed; he has reaped ridicule where he had had envy. Then comes on the scene a bitter young French refugee, in love with his last century, detached from the pitfulls and vices of a trepical island community. More hires him to teach Liana—he leaves then to their own devices—and then is startled into jealous suspicion when infidelity is whispered. The thought is fertile seed—and emotional complications confuse the issues of young Pierra’s desire to serve his country. A tragic ending sounds the inevitable finals to an impasse. Simply told, with emotional undertones. —Kirkus Reviews

Ninth Avenue

Avon Publishing Company
1951 (originally published in 1926)
267 pages

Maxwell Bodenheim (1892-1954)

He Loved Her Too Much To Marry Her — Without Telling Of His Negro Blood!

“Ninth Avenue is about a poor hard-ass Irish-Catholic family in Hell’s Kitchen New York, who’s daughter, through all the racist trials and tribulations, falls in love with a black man and they go off to marry and live happily ever after.” —Michael Sampson Sweeney, HOBOHEMIA – The Life and Writings of Maxwell Bodenheim.

The Passer

Midwood/Tower
1962
189 pages
Catalog ID: F170

Sam Mervin Jr. (1910-1996)

Fred Williams had a secret—He was half negro passing as all white; but the many white women who vied for his arms made no secret of what they wanted.

Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill: A Novel of Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Oxford University Press
2005-09-29 (originally published in 1882)
544 Pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780195143959

Cirilo Villaverde (1812-1894)

Edited by:

Sibylle Fischer, Associate Professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and Comparative Literature
New York University

Translated by:

Helen Lane (1921-2004)

Cecilia Valdés is arguably the most important novel of 19th century Cuba. Originally published in New York City in 1882, Cirilo Villaverde’s novel has fascinated readers inside and outside Cuba since the late 19th century. In this new English translation, a vast landscape emerges of the moral, political, and sexual depravity caused by slavery and colonialism. Set in the Havana of the 1830s, the novel introduces us to Cecilia, a beautiful light-skinned mulatta, who is being pursued by the son of a Spanish slave trader, named Leonardo. Unbeknownst to the two, they are the children of the same father. Eventually Cecilia gives in to Leonardo’s advances; she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby girl. When Leonardo, who gets bored with Cecilia after a while, agrees to marry a white upper class woman, Cecilia vows revenge. A mulatto friend and suitor of hers kills Leonardo, and Cecilia is thrown into prison as an accessory to the crime.

For the contemporary reader Helen Lane’s masterful translation of Cecilia Valdés opens a new window into the intricate problems of race relations in Cuba and the Caribbean. There are the elite social circles of European and New World Whites, the rich culture of the free people of color, the class to which Cecilia herself belonged, and then the slaves, divided among themselves between those who were born in Africa and those who were born in the New World, and those who worked on the sugar plantation and those who worked in the households of the rich people in Havana. Cecilia Valdés thus presents a vast portrait of sexual, social, and racial oppression, and the lived experience of Spanish colonialism in Cuba.

An Extraordinary Union: The Loyal League #1

Kensington Books
320 pages
2017-03-28
Paperback ISBN: 9781496707444
ePub ISBN: 9781496707451

Alyssa Cole

• An Entertainment Weekly TOP 10 ROMANCE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
• A Bookpage TOP PICK
• A Kirkus BEST BOOKS OF 2017
• A Vulture TOP 10 ROMANCE BOOKS OF 2017
• A Publishers Weekly BEST BOOKS OF 2017
• A Booklist TOP 10 ROMANCE FICTION 2017

As the Civil War rages between the states, a courageous pair of spies plunge fearlessly into a maelstrom of ignorance, deceit, and danger, combining their unique skills to alter the course of history and break the chains of the past…

Elle Burns is a former slave with a passion for justice and an eidetic memory. Trading in her life of freedom in Massachusetts, she returns to the indignity of slavery in the South—to spy for the Union Army.

Malcolm McCall is a detective for Pinkerton’s Secret Service. Subterfuge is his calling, but he’s facing his deadliest mission yet—risking his life to infiltrate a Rebel enclave in Virginia.

Two undercover agents who share a common cause—and an undeniable attraction—Malcolm and Elle join forces when they discover a plot that could turn the tide of the war in the Confederacy’s favor. Caught in a tightening web of wartime intrigue, and fighting a fiery and forbidden love, Malcolm and Elle must make their boldest move to preserve the Union at any cost—even if it means losing each other…

Kingsblood Royal

Modern Library Classics (an imprint of Penguin Randomhouse)
2001-04-10 (originally published in 1947)
352 Pages
5-3/16 x 8
Paperback ISBN: 9780375756863

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)

Introduction by:
Charles Johnson, Professor Emeritus
University of Washington

A neglected tour de force by the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Kingsblood Royal is a stirring and wickedly funny portrait of a man who resigns from the white race. When Neil Kingsblood a typical middle-American banker with a comfortable life makes the shocking discovery that he has African-American blood, the odyssey that ensues creates an unforgettable portrayal of two Americas, one black, one white.

As timely as when it was first published in 1947, one need only open today’s newspaper to see the same issues passionately being discussed between blacks and whites that we find in Kingsblood Royal, says Charles Johnson. Perhaps only now can we fully appreciate Sinclair Lewis’s astonishing achievement.