Flight (Voices of the South)

Today's obsession with American racial categories makes this formerly long-out-of-print Harlem Renaissance-era novel by Walter White, a former president of the NAACP, as relevant as when it was published in 1926. Flight deals with the peculiar phenomenon known as "passing," whereby fair-skinned African Americans, in an effort to escape racism, masqueraded--"passed"--as Caucasian. White, who with his blond hair and blue eyes could have easily passed himself, writes about the perils of Mime Daquin, a New Orleans-bred mulatto who is forced to leave her sheltered Creole community in the Crescent City and move to Atlanta, where she encounters the color line. Shamed by an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, she flees to Philadelphia and finally ends up in Harlem where she crosses the line for good. White weaves a tale that deals with racism, caste, and the eternal pull of racial and cultural bloodlines not easily severed. --Eugene Holley Jr.