The few old schoolmates who ran into him had to pretend they’d never met. He was often seen around town with one of his best friends. the Indian-born actor Sabu, an alliance that brings to mind the “arranged” Hollywood marriage of a closeted gay actor.
Black novelist Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars, about a man who passes for white, has a sentence that could apply to Korla: “Our customs grip us in bands of steel. We become the creatures of our creations.”
From slavery right down to this morning, countless African Americans have passed as white because they were evading the lynch mob or wishing for an equal opportunity. The subject has been taboo: Crossing over means denying who you are, means banishing friends and family from your life. You live in a gray zone, and it is the loneliest of places.
Passing for Asian was a little different, because you did not blend into white society. The practice went on long before Korla Pandit first appeared. In the late 1930s, Harlem’s Amsterdam News reported that a Syracuse University football star named Wilmeth Sidat-Singh was, as a columnist put it, “about as much Hindu as flatfoot floogie.” In 1947, around the time that Juan Rolondo was turning into Korla Pandit, the Los Angeles Tribune, a lively black newspaper, heralded a stunt pulled by a brown-skinned New York minister. He prepared for a visit through the Deep South by donning a purple turban, affecting “a slightly Swedish accent,” and concocting a tale about being a visiting Eastern dignitary. He was doted on and able to eat at white-only restaurants. In Mobile, Alabama, he impishly asked a waiter what would happen if a Negro came to eat. The Negro wouldn’t be served, he was told. “I just stroked my chin and ordered my dessert.” said the pastor.
When John Redd crossed over, he didn’t sever all ties with the world he had known. “It was not top secret,” says Ernest. “Among the family we knew what he was doing and very little was said about it. There was times when he would come by, and it was kind of like a sneak visit. He might come at night sometime and be gone before we got up. He had to separate himself from the family to a certain extent. They would go to see him play, but they wouldnt speak to him. They would go to his show and then they would leave, and the family would greet him at a later time.”
The situation became even more complicated once Korla’s Father, Ernest Sr., moved to Los Angeles, by the early ’50s. Reverend Redd became the pastor of Trinity Baptist Church, a prominent institution in the community. Any night he wanted to, Reverend Redd could come home from the church, switch on the television, and watch his son play the organ, with that strange look in his eyes and that turban on his head. Korla kept in touch with his family, and on occasion he and Beryl scheduled a covert mission to the parents’ West Adams home. But even then, detection could not be discounted. Even then, Korla wore the turban. He didn’t bring Shari or Koram, his and Beryl’s sons.
RJ Smith, “The Many Faces of Korla Pandit,” Los Angeles Magazine, June 2001, 148-149. https://books.google.com/books?id=aF8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA73#v=onepage&q&f=false.
