Jessie Redmon Fauset — Plum Bun with Bremond Berry MacDougall and Lisa Endo Cooper

Langston Hughes called Jessie Redmon Fauset “the midwife of the Harlem Renaissance” with good reason. As literary editor at The Crisis magazine from 1919 until 1926, Fauset discovered and championed some of the most important Black writers of the early 20th century. Her own novels contributed to The New Negro Movement’s cultural examination of race, class and gender through the lens of women’s experiences. Fauset’s 1928 novel Plum Bun was republished this spring by Quite Literally Books, a new publishing venture that reissues books by American women authors. The founders, Bremond Berry MacDougall and Lisa Endo Cooper, join us to discuss their mission and take a closer look at Fauset’s life and work.

Mentioned in this episode:

Quite Literally Books

Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset

The Pink House by Nelia Gardner

The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 9 on Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 140 on Zora Neale Hurston

Persephone Books

Virago Books

Cita Press

The Crisis magazine

“What is Racial Passing?” on PBS’s The Origin of Everything

“The Dinner Party That Started the Harlem Renaissance” by Veronica Chambers and Michelle May-Curry

Langston Hughes

Jean Toomer

Arna Bontemps

Countee Cullen

Gwendolyn Bennett

W.E.B. Dubois

Charles Johnson

Alain Locke

Regina Andrews

The Talented Tenth

“The New Negro Movement”

Harlem Rhapsod

Transcript

[Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain minor errors and typos.]

AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit.com and click “Become a Patron” to find out more. 

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off the work of forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host Amy Helmes. 

AMY: Listeners, the sad trombone always plays for us when we find out a lost lady's work is no longer in print. 

KIM: Yeah. Sometimes we have to work to track down a copy of a book we're interested in exploring. It's why we're so grateful. There are publishers out there like Persephone, Virago and Cita Press, who focus exclusively on getting classic works by women back in print.

AMY: Today we get to add a new publishing venture to the mix, Quite Literally Books, a heritage press devoted to American women authors who have been shelved for too long.

KIM: Quite Literally books launched this spring with an inaugural list that includes Nelia Gardner White's The Pink House, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher's The Home-maker (and longtime listeners will remember that that latter title is one of the very first novels we featured on this podcast. It's episode No. 9 If you want to go back to listen.) 

AMY: Today we're going to be focusing on the third novel released by Quite Literally in April, Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun. Langston Hughes described her as "the midwife of the Harlem Renaissance." Fauset discovered Langston Hughes while she was the literary editor at The Crisis magazine, publishing his first works and fostering many other up and coming black literary figures of that era.

KIM: Oh my gosh, how has she been so sidelined? Why have we waited so long to feature her? 

AMY: It's a good question, Kim. She has been waiting patiently in our database, actually almost since the inception of this podcast. And we did a previous episode on the letters of Zora Neale Hurston, and I remember that Fauset was one of the people Hurston corresponded with. So her name keeps sort of coming up.

KIM: Totally. And this new reissue provides the perfect impetus for us to finally move Jessie Redmon Fauset to the front of the queue. And lucky for us, we have the founders of Quite Literally Books with us today to talk about her. So let's raid the stacks and get started.

[intro music plays]

Our guests today, Bremond Berry MacDougall and Lisa Cooper, are the co-founders of Quite Literally Books. Friends since seventh grade, having bonded over their “book nerd” status, this venture had its genesis in the midst of the Covid pandemic. I feel like the two of you are women after our own hearts, because Amy and I are also longtime besties (though not quite as long, but close) who came up with this podcast during the pandemic. And you both are based in New York City, but if you lived in Los Angeles, I like to think we'd for sure hang out. Welcome to the show. We are thrilled to have you on. 

LISA COOPER: Well, we're so thrilled to be here. Thank you! And I have to fan girl for just a minute because I started listening to your podcast during the pandemic, and it actually did, in a way, have an influence on our decision to start publishing.

AMY: What? Oh my gosh.

KIM: That gives me the chills. That is so cool!

AMY: I love that. I had no idea that there was any connection. Wow. 

KIM: No, love it. Oh, this is so cool. Thank you. Thank you.

LISA: Absolutely. 

AMY: Tell us more, Lisa. It's an ambitious idea.

LISA: It is an ambitious idea. We would've loved to have had a bookstore together, and that didn't seem practical or doable for some reason. And yet starting a publishing company did seem practical and doable, like, for example, Persephone Books, you know, who's doing exactly what we're doing, but in the UK and have been for 25 years. And we were in the middle of the pandemic, we'd been talking a lot more on the phone and we both turned 50 and we were like, “Hmm, time to think about what to do with, you know, this next chapter in our lives.” And we knew we wanted to do something together if we could, and it made sense to have it centered around books. And so, you know, we were starting to talk about the things that we love to read and the things we're focusing on. I'd been listening to your podcast. And we were like, there are so many amazing American women writers that are not being noticed; ones that have been shelved. And we were like, “What if we were the ones to help, not just unearth them, but bring them to light and put them back on the shelves and into hands of, you know, modern readers?”

AMY: Amazing.

KIM: This is just so cool. 

AMY: Kim's just still a little shellshocked that you were listening to our podcast. But I want to say also, I love your book covers and I want to tell a little anecdote about that because of course, I have books covering every square inch of this house, basically, because of what we do. So my husband is used to seeing books thrown around everywhere, like on countertops, tables, nightstands, whatever. He happened to be walking through our kitchen and he saw this copy of Plum Bun and he stopped and he said, “That's a really cool book cover.” So I just, I really love the aesthetic of these. 

LISA: Thank you. You're pointing out something that actually makes us so happy, because we did think about the design of the book. Not only do we love a good story, we love a good physical book. So these books were printed in Germany on Munken paper. We painstakingly thought about the size and about the spine. It has lay-flat binding so that the spine never breaks but will lie flat, you know, when you're reading it. 

AMY: That's major. I can't tell you how many times I'm trying to type, and then I have to put my coffee mug on the book itself to keep it open. Yes, and you're right, I don't have to do that with this book! Yeah. I'm just now noticing that. 

LISA: And for those of us who are like really too precious with our books, this is wonderful because you can like, you know, flip it over when you're in the middle of it, flip it over and let it spread and it's fine. It just, you know, it'll close again. It's perfect. 

KIM: I love that. Absolutely. 

BREMOND MACDOUGALL: So these books were designed by Anthony Russo, who's a fairly well known artist, and um, we think he just nailed it. 

KIM: Oh, he totally did. The font and everything is perfect too. They're works of art. 

LISA: Louise Fili who is an amazing designer, has a long history in book design, but all kinds of other, you know, design here. If you walk around New York City, she's represented in so many different brands. So we were very fortunate to be able to partner with her, not only in designing our books, but also in designing our brand. 

AMY: Did you guys know anything about the publishing world before you started this? 

BREMOND: We did not know anything about the publishing world, so this is a complete flying leap into the unknown. And we have been told by several people that we're being "so brave," which sounds like, "Wow, you are never going to do this." So yeah, we have learned as we have been going along and we have learned what we didn't know, which was a lot, and we probably still have a lot to learn going forward. We're going to be publishing three more books in November, and hopefully that will be a little smoother than our first production. 

LISA: Our learning curve has been very, very steep, but we've been working together on every single aspect, and that makes it, you know, more fun and a little less scary.

KIM: What a great adventure.

AMY: Yeah. None of us see the learning curve. We just see these amazing books. I'm very impressed with them.

KIM: Yeah. I would never think that you didn't have experience in publishing. 

LISA: Our only bonafides for this project is that we've just been voracious readers since we were very young, and, honestly, that is sort of the lens with which we approach all of this, which is like, “Is it a good book first and foremost?” That's the test, you know? If it's not a good read, then even if it has a lot of other value, I think we would be hesitant to bring it back. 

KIM: Well, that's a perfect segue into what I wanted to ask you. What made you hone in on Plum Bun as one of your first releases? 

BREMOND: Well, when we started, we were just looking for female American authors, and there are lots and lots and lots and lots of white female American authors who have been forgotten, and we thought that we really wanted to be a little more intentional about including other voices. But Jessie Redmon Fauset is not really forgotten. She is out there, and so it did not take long for us to find her because she really is a fairly well known figure from the Harlem Renaissance. And so we started reading her books and thought, “Wow, why aren't people reading this? They're reading other books from that time period and why aren't they reading Jessie Redmon Fauset’s?” So we loved There is Confusion, which is her first book, but we decided to start with Plum Bun.

LISA: We do look at our sets of three books that we put out sort of as a suite of books, and we try to find a common thread. That could be anything, but when we were putting together our first suite of books, we'd been talking a lot about the home because we'd all been spending a lot of time in our homes and we thought about wanting our brand to be a home for readers, and so this idea of “home” was front and center. And so each of our three books has a really strong and different interpretation of what home is, right?

KIM: That's so perfect. I love that. So Plum Bun was published in 1928 and it was Fauset's second novel. It tells the story of Angela Murray, a Black woman from Philadelphia who's routinely mistaken by others to be white, so she opts to abandon her roots and capitalize on this fact. She wants to secure a more prosperous life for herself as a white woman in New York City. This book was published in the same year as Nella Larsen's Passing, but the two books are quite distinct from one another despite having a similar premise. Fauset and Larsen, were also very good friends, by the way. 

AMY: Yeah. And before we dive more into Plum Bun, let's give a quick rundown of Fauset's background and any elements that she might have drawn from in writing this book. So Lisa, what do we know? 

LISA: Well, there are definitely autobiographical elements in Plum Bun, as well as in Jessie Redmon Fauset's other works. She herself was born in 1882 in New Jersey. Her mother died when she was very young, and her father remarried a white woman. In their home, there was a lot of emphasis on education and reading and discussion, and initially she applied to a teacher's college because she wanted to be an educator, but she was denied. She then applied to Bryn Mawr, and they didn't really want to make a decision around admitting a Black student, so she ended up going to Cornell where she was the first Black woman to graduate. And then coming out of Cornell again, she still wanted to be a teacher. She was denied a position in Philadelphia. She taught in Baltimore for a year, and then she ends up in Washington, DC where she teaches French for about 14 years. And it was during this time that she started contributing articles to The Crisis, which is the NAACP's magazine. And this caught the attention of W.E.B. Du Bois .And The Crisis, it was founded in 1910, and for its first 24 years, it was edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, and it's considered the world's oldest Black publication. And The Crisis itself was a really important medium for young Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance, especially from 1919 to 1926 when Jessie Redmon Fauset was its literary editor. 

KIM: Right. So this role as an editor at The Crisis was pivotal for her in so many ways. It seems like it would've placed her in just this sort of intellectual scene that Angela in Plum Bun is desperately craving. Bremond, can you tell us a little bit about Fauset's role at the magazine and what sort of power players in the Black community she interacted with there? 

BREMOND: Um, to start with, she discovered or encouraged a number of writers that are fairly well known even today. Uh, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Jean Toomer. And under her guidance, The Crisis was the leading publisher of young Black authors, and she influenced Black people everywhere because she exposed Black people in the entire country to the literature and poetry that she was editing. And she also was instrumental in something called The Brownies Book, a monthly magazine for the Children of the Sun, which was an offshoot of The Crisis and was specifically full of stories about prominent Black people, stories about Black culture and heritage to teach the next generation of Black children about their past. It only lasted a year, which was unfortunate. She worked very closely with W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke at The Crisis. And as you probably know, W.E.B. Du Bois was the coiner of The Talented Tenth. Um, and Locke was the coiner of The New Negro Movement. So heady company. 

KIM: Right, right. So she's doing this critical work for the NAACP, but she's also working on her first novel at the same time, There is Confusion, which she published in 1924. In the forward to your edition of Plum Bun, Danielle T. Slaughter writes about the launch party for the debut of Fauset's book. It was a really pivotal moment, again, for the Civil Rights movement, but at the same time, Fauset was overshadowed that night. Do you want to explain what happened?

LISA: Yeah, well there's not a lot that was written about this event in mainstream media at the time, but there's this really wonderful New York Times article just last year where they like go through the archives and um, I think it was Veronica Chambers and Michelle May Curry, they try to reconstruct what happened on this fateful evening. And basically on March 21st, 1924, like you said, Jessie Redmon Fauset's book had been published, and this was supposed to be the big debut for There is Confusion. And there was a celebration planned at the Civic Club in downtown Manhattan, and this party was basically hijacked for maybe a greater purpose. So Charles Johnson, who was a sociologist and founder of The Opportunity, which was the preeminent Black magazine at that time, and Alain Locke, who was the Harvard-educated professor, first Black Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, um, they thought, “Okay, this is a great time to bring together the best and brightest from the Harlem cultural scene,” which was exploding, and white liberal purveyors, including publishers of that cultural scene and put them in a room together and create sort of an unprecedented opportunity to have something really grow out of it. And the guest list was drawn up by Regina Andrews, which is someone we want to call out because she's one of the few Black librarians in the city at the time. (And kind of a fun side note, she shared an apartment with two roommates who worked at The Opportunity magazine and their apartment was known as Dream Haven because friends and neighbors would come in and they'd workshop poetry and couch surf.” But back to the party, so Gwendolyn Bennett read a poem dedicated to Fauset, and Countee Cullen, who'd recently published, read his work too. And it looked like it was going, you know, in the direction of celebrating Fauset. But then a bunch of people stood up and gave speeches acknowledging that there was a cultural and growing interest in Black American voices in both literature and music. In the years that followed that dinner party, Black writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance, as we now know it, published more than 40 volumes of fiction, nonfiction, poetry. And it's that body of work that's credited with changing the landscape of American culture. So it was a big deal, and again, maybe it was done for the greater good, but Jessie Redmon Fauset never got over the fact that that was supposed to be her night, and she did not get the credit she was due. And in 1933, she wrote a letter to Alain Locke saying that through his consummate cleverness, he managed to keep the attention that night away from the very person that they had gathered, you know, to root for. 

AMY: I can just imagine this whole scene playing out and her silently watching the speakers. And Locke in particular, he gets up there and decides he has his own thing that he wants to start talking about. And what do you do? Because of course you just want to be gracious and you can't make a scene. And it also was a pivotal moment. His speech was important. She can't deny that. So what does she do? Does she get angry? It’s such a great example of men's louder voices being able to grab the spotlight and women just needing to smile and be polite. “Yeah, go ahead. It was my night, but that's fine.” It sort of underpins how Fauset and her novels, which tend to revolve around women's experiences, got sidelined over time. This is what happened to her books! 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, she's not just writing about race, she's also writing from the viewpoint of a woman, and there's definitely an intersectionality to her work. And that's a great segue into the second novel of hers, Plum Bun. So as we already mentioned, the protagonist of the book is engaging in passing, having watched her own mother employ this strategy successfully at times throughout her childhood. 

AMY: And I just want to interrupt quickly to say that if you want a really good context on the history of passing among people of different cultures, there's a great 10-minute video created for a PBS show called “The Origin of Everything.” We'll link to it in our show notes, but I'd recommend checking that out in conjunction with reading this novel. Anyway, in short, Angela makes this decision to walk away from her Black family, friends, and community because she knows that passing for white will grant her immediate access to privilege, protection and economic and social capital. She wants to grab the brass ring and she feels certain that this very calculated move will help her to accomplish it. So in the book Fauset writes: It seemed to Angela that all the things which she most wanted were wrapped up with white people. All the good things were theirs. Not some coldly reasoning instinct within was saying because they were white, but because for the present they had power and the badge of that power was whiteness. Very like the colors on the escutcheon of a powerful house. She possessed the badge, and unless there was someone to tell, she could possess the power for which it stood. 

LISA: What's really interesting about that particular quote is later on she makes another observation, except this time it's about men and their power, and it juxtaposes exactly with that particular comment. And it kind of goes back to what you were saying earlier I think, Amy, about this man who takes over, you know, in this moment, and it's okay that he does that, but there's this quote: Everything was for men, but even the slightest privilege was to be denied to a woman unless the man chose to grant it.

And I thought that was talking about that same kind of privilege, that same absolute power. 

KIM: That's such a perfect quote. Yep. 

AMY: And yet she sees like, “Wait a second. I have the key to the door. Inadvertently, just through the fate of my genetics, I have the badge. So I'm going to try to use it.” We should also stipulate that Angela never really deliberately claims to be white in the book. She never says she's white. It's other people who make the presumption about her. Lisa, why don't you tell listeners about the very first example where this happens in the book. 

LISA: Well, she comes by that knowledge very organically, right? She's with her mother, and her mother is light skinned, and she does this sort of for fun, you know, when she's out and about, she can go into stores, into restaurants that darker-skinned people cannot, and it's a little game that she plays. “A little pleasure,” I think she calls it. And Angela starts to join her on that. And there's this one really intense moment where they're coming out of a hotel together. Her mother has just tipped the doorman, and she loves being able to do that. You know, she's tipping someone else, right? Probably a white person. And they see Ginny, who is Angela's younger sister who's darker, and Junius, her father, who is also darker skinned, and they choose not to say hello. They choose not to reach out to them, and Ginny and Junius don't see them. So they pass on. And that is the first moment we see Angela start to formulate her own ideas about race and the power that's inherent in being white. And then later on we see that kind of really gel in what we call the “Mary Hastings” incident, which is so deeply wounding for her. And it's this moment in school, you know, she's got this new best friend, like the "it" girl has come to your class and she chooses Angela to be best friends with. And the "it" girl gets chosen to be like a class rep on the school paper or something. And she chooses Angela to be her first assistant and this awful snotty girl who knew Angela was Black points it out in front of everyone, and Mary Hastings is just floored and basically breaks up with Angela. And here, Jessie Redmon Fauset says this in narrating that story, she says: This was a curious business, this color. It was the one god, apparently, to whom you could sacrifice everything on account of it. Her mother had neglected to greet her own husband on the street. Mary Hastings could let it come between her and her friend. And so Angela comes to this conclusion that Mary Hasting only because she finds out that she's Black. So if she'd never known, everything would've been fine. And again, Jessie Redmon Fauset has like such a sharp eye on this. And she says: And she began to wonder, (she being Angela), she began to wonder which was the more important: a patent insistence on the fact of color or an acceptance of the good things in life which could come to you in America if either you were not colored or the fact of your racial connections were not made known.

And that's the seed that's planted. 

KIM: Right, right. And she continues to mull it over. 

AMY: Yeah. And I think that's key, that “I'm just not going to say anything.” And that's the phrase that keeps echoing several different instances in the book where a person will find out that she's Black and will say, “Well, you never told me!” And then Angela says, “Why should I? Why do I have to go around announcing to people that I'm Black?” Yeah. 

KIM: She's not lying. 

BREMOND: Exactly, but the white people all feel like they've been duped in this way, when in fact they were the ones that made the assumption in the first place. 

LISA: This feeling of having been lied to.

KIM: Yeah. Like it's a betrayal. Yeah. 

BREMOND: And lied to about something so fundamental in their minds and so important in dividing you into, you know, the group that has power and the group that doesn't. 

KIM: So she's mulling over all of this, and then her parents eventually die and she comes to a decision. She tells her younger sister, Virginia, about her plan. She's going to take on a new persona in New York City. And as we said, Virginia's complexion is much darker than Angela's. So she's basically abandoning her little sister, which is very hurtful to Virginia. 

AMY: And Fauset does such a good job at explaining why she's doing it, but it's not always easy, or at least for me, it was not always easy to sympathize with Angela. Sometimes you're just cringing. Like, “Come on girl, that's your sister!”

BREMOND: She's not very likable in a lot of ways, but it may be that the ways in which she's not likable are very pragmatic, very practical. And she's going to do what she needs to do. 

KIM: She didn't create the system, but she's going to use the system in the best way she can to get what she wants from life.

BREMOND: We pulled a conversation between Angela and Ginny where Angela says: “Now be practical, Ginny. After all, I am both white and negro and look white. Why shouldn't I declare for the one that will bring me the greatest happiness, prosperity, and respect?” Ginny says, “No reason in the world except that since in this country public opinion is against any infusion of Black blood, it would seem an awfully decent thing to put yourself even in the face of appearances on the side of Black blood and say, ‘Look here, this is what a mixture of black and white really means.’” 

KIM: Yeah, I mean, she's basically saying to sacrifice herself for the greater good, and it's understandable that she wouldn't necessarily initially want to do that. I think though the hardest part for me was Roger and the things that he said about Black people in front of her and that she continued to have a relationship with him.

AMY: Well, Kim, explain who Roger is for listeners.

KIM: Oh, yeah, that's right. We haven't discussed him yet ... so Roger, she starts dating a wealthy man who does not know that she's Black. But he often shows his actual loathing for Black people and he says some pretty horrible things. 

LISA: And can we point out that he seems like exactly what she's looking for because he is wealthy and he is good looking and he pursues her hard. And she's like, “You know, I've gotta make something good come out of this. Somehow it has to mean something more.” 

AMY: We're talking, you know about intersectionality and so there's gender and there's race, but in this instance, there's also class, because she's not good enough for him, not because she's Black, because he doesn't know. She's not good enough for him because she doesn't come from wealth. He wants to keep her as a side piece in her own little apartment. He has no interest in introducing her to his parents as a prospective bride, you know, and that all comes down to her background isn't good enough, even if she was white. 

KIM: Exactly. 

LISA: Let's remember too that she's moved to New York to make her life as an artist. So she's interesting and she's beautiful and she's educated. And she's talented, but she's not from the social class from which Roger would consider, you know, finding a bride. 

KIM: And can I just say with all of this, um, it's not a depressing book. There's a level of lightness to it that is really nice to read. I just don't want listeners to think that it's like too much of a downer. It isn't, I don't think. 

LISA: It's not a downer. Yeah, and I think a lot of why it's not a downer is because Angela herself is not brought down by it, right? Like she's scrappy, she's always trying to figure it out. And that practicality piece really keeps her afloat.

BREMOND: And she's interesting. Yeah. Talking about her not being likable and you know, a lot of times she's not, but she's fascinating. 

KIM: She's absolutely fascinating. Yeah, I agree. Okay, let's talk a little bit about the structure. So it's divided into four different sections. They're titled Home, Market, Plum Bun, and Home Again. Can you talk a little bit about what you think Fauset wanted to convey with this particular framework? 

BREMOND: Do you guys know the poem for children? 

AMY: Yeah. The, “To market, to market..”

BREMOND: Yep. And it, yeah, it's very old. And first, the traditional ways that people would go away from their home to buy or barter things that they couldn't get at home. And then they would, you know, go back home and, um, Angela's very clear-headed, and she goes out and enters that market and tries to, you know, get the best deal she can. 

LISA: So “home” is an origin point, but it's also a destination in this book, and she doesn't arrive back at the origin point. Like she's a really different person, which she gets there.

KIM: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. It's definitely a journey. 

AMY: Yeah. And the irony of the whole book is that everything she is pursuing in the white world already exists for her. It's like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. It was in your backyard all the time, you know?

KIM: I love that. Exactly. Yes.

AMY: Particularly in New York City, when she gets there, we see Harlem, which is the Black community, staring her right in the face and you're just like, “Girl, look! It's there!”

KIM: Yeah. And her sister ends up living it. 

AMY: Yeah, her sister ends up moving to Harlem, and I thought Fauset's description of Harlem was so wonderful. Bremond, would you mind reading that first time Angela encounters it? 

BREMOND: Not at all. She was amazed and impressed at this bustling, frolicking, busy laughing great city within a greater one. She had never seen colored life so thick, so varied, so complete. Moreover, just as this city reproduced in microcosm all the important features of any metropolis, so undoubtedly life up here was just the same. She thought dimly as life anywhere else. Not all these people. She realized glancing keenly at the throngs of black and brown, yellow and white faces about her were servants or underlings or end men. She saw a beautiful woman, all brown and red, dressed as exquisitely as anyone she had seen on Fifth Avenue. A man's sharp hybrid face etched itself on her memory. The face of a professional man perhaps might be an artist. Um, and then later she says. She watched the moin groups on Lennox Avenue, the amazingly well-dressed in good-looking throngs of young men on seventh Avenue. They were gossiping, laughing, dickering chaffing, combining the customs of the small town with the astonishing cosmopolitanism of their clothes and manners. Nowhere downtown did she see life like this. This was fuller, richer, not finer, but richer with the difference in quality that there is between velvet and silk.

LISA: And what's so great about this description, other than it's a beautiful description, is how incredibly, vastly different from the opening paragraph of the novel where she's describing Philadelphia, which is drab and sad and, you know, everything feels very gray. 

AMY: So more Wizard of Oz comparison there even in, you know, the, the black and white of, uh, Kansas.

LISA: One hundred percent, you're so onto something with that.

AMY: And also I want to go back to this, um, The Brownies magazine that Fauset had edited, which you always kind of see as like a little, almost like a little footnote in her bio, like, “oh, and then she did this Brownies magazine and it didn't last very long,” but she wanted to show Black Americans as being successful. She wanted to represent them in a way for children that they could look at that and have ambition for themselves to be something greater. And um, I think she was doing that across all of her work, right? She really wanted to show upper middle class Blacks, which in some ways I think drew criticism. 

BREMOND: Yeah, the critics dinged her for that.

AMY: She was just writing what her life was in New York City. That's what she knew. 

BREMOND: Yeah, definitely. Just in that description of Harlem that we just read. 

KIM: So speaking of that, um, are there any roman a clef elements to this novel? I’m thinking in particular of this minor character, Van Meier? He's a Black civic leader who gives talks in Harlem. Do you know who he is based on? 

BREMOND: He seems to me to be sort of a mix of W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, because the things that he talks about are things similar to The Talented Tenth, which was the idea that the Black people who have gotten education and entered the professional classes or, you know, sort of brought themselves up into a different class, maybe are responsible for the people that haven't been able to do that, and that it's their responsibility to bring those people along with them. Then there's also the idea of The New Negro, which is what Alain Locke talked about. This idea of Black people having pride in themselves and in their society and in what they do. It's a new way of thinking for Black people that you know, they are just as worthy of pride as anybody else. 

AMY: We should probably talk about the fact that Fauset had a sort of… well, not “sort of”, she had a secret romance with W.E.B. Du Bois, and I thought about that as I was reading this novel because of course he is in no way like the character of Roger, but W.E.B. Du Bois was married, had a wife and kids, and Fauset was his coworker. They were romantically involved and they needed to kind of keep it under wraps. I don't want to read too much into that, but the idea of maybe she felt, “Oh, I'm good enough to be your mistress but not good enough for anything beyond that,” you know? I don't know. 

LISA: Yeah. So one of the things that we would point out is that I don't think that there's anywhere where it's explicit that they had this relationship. I believe Victoria Christopher Murray, who wrote Harlem Rhapsody, which is a newly released historical fiction account of Jessie Redmon Fauset, did a lot of research and she sort of landed, you know, after reading W.E.B. Bois's biography and some letters and things, like, they never explicitly acknowledged this relationship. But reading between the lines, she saw them more as star-crossed lovers. And she also wanted to make it clear that Jessie Redmon Fauset was not his side piece. Um, there was 14 years of some kind of intense relationship and she talks about it more as like a parallel marriage almost. But yeah, it should probably be pointed out that even though we sort of take it as an assumption that they had this relationship, they were really good at hiding it, and nowhere is there a smoking gun, so to speak, of that being true. 

AMY: Okay, so I read Harlem Rhapsody, and yeah, so I probably got caught up in the fictionalization of that a little bit because I took it as like, Oh, they definitely did. And we will never know for sure, I guess, but I think in that novel you did feel frustrated on her behalf, you know? 

LISA: Yes. And you're absolutely right that it would make sense that they had this relationship and that that sort of poured into the pages of Plum Bun, because over and over again, Angela's really struggling with this idea of marriage. And there's one point where she's feeling super lonely because she's eschewed her family and she's alone. And all she's got is this awful man, Roger, and Jessie Redmon Fauset writes: She thought of marriage. Well, why not? She had thought of it once before as a source of relief from poverty as a final barrier between herself and the wolves of prejudice. Why not now as the means of avoiding loneliness? I must look around me. Her thoughts sped on and she blushed and smiled in the darkness at the cold bloodedness of such an idea. But after all, that was what men said and did. How often has she heard the expression? He's ready to settle down. So he is looking for a wife. Procedure of men, it should certainly be more so the procedure of women since their was so much more deeply involved.

That's so astute. 

KIM: Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't remember the exact passage, but she goes on to talk about how she's looking for power. That's a huge piece in this, and she sees the attaining of a certain kind of marriage as the ultimate power that she is able to get as a woman. You know, leaving out the whole issue of being Black.

AMY: And that goes back to the whole transactional idea of the, “To market, to market to buy a plum bun.” 

LISA: Yeah. I think that she even uses this line, but this is like, talking to Roger and she's like, Why is it that men like you resent an effort on our part to make our commerce decent?

She's talking about the marketplace, you know? 

KIM: Yeah. Are there any other wider messages that you think really stand out in this book? 

LISA: Well, there's this quote from towards the end of the book I've sort of been chewing on, and I would love to sort of discuss it here in this group if that's okay.

It's: Would it be worthwhile to throw away the benefits of casual whiteness in America when no great issue was at stake? Would it indeed be worthwhile to forfeit them when a great issue was involved? Remembering the material age in which she lived in the material nation of which she was a member, she was doubtful of her mother's old dictum.Recurred. Life is more important than color. 

AMY: What drew you to it? What struck you? 

LISA: Yeah. I think that the description of the nation and the nation that she's a member of, again, a really practical look at like “this is who we are,” so, you know, what does it mean to have the ability to be able to swim in this pond better? And what is the trade-off? What are the trade-offs that you're making when you let someone else decide your identity and you go with it? That's what the whole novel is talking about are these trade-offs, right? It's constantly figuring out what you're willing to give up and what you figure out you need, actually.

KIM: Yeah, and I think that is what makes it a compelling read for now, because I feel like that can really resonate with everything we're going through as a nation currently, and the power and privilege and what people are willing to stand up for. 

LISA: Yeah. And she says, you know, at the end, her mom's dictum is, Life is more important than color. But that's not always how we let things play out here, right?

KIM: No, no, exactly. 

LISA: It’s an acknowledgement of that, an explicit acknowledgement of that. So I feel like it's very timely.

AMY: Well, it takes me back, too, to some of the conversations that Angela has towards the beginning of the book in Philadelphia with some of her young adult friends (I'm particularly thinking of the men), and she kept saying that she doesn't want to discuss race with them, like I'm not going to buy into this. I'm not going to allow this to be a thing for me, which is why she ultimately makes the decision that she does. But throughout the whole course of the book, she's having to come to terms with that very question that they were discussing at the beginning of the novel. 

LISA: And that's the very definition of privilege. That she can choose, right?

AMY: Yes. Right. She was able to say, race isn't an issue because it wasn't for her as much at the time. Yeah. 

BREMOND: That’s part of what people say today, you know? It's not an issue. Well, yeah, it's not an issue for me because it doesn't have to be. But it is an issue. It's an issue for all of us. Whatever you look like, it's all of us.

AMY: We mentioned that Nella Larsen's Passing came out the same year as this book, and I haven't actually read Passing, but I did see the film adaptation that came out in 2021 by Rebecca Hall. I think there might be an inclination for some listeners if you've read Passing to think, “Oh, I don't need to read another novel on this subject.” But I think that they are actually very different in point of view and style. Do you guys have any thoughts on that? I agree. 

BREMOND: We think it's totally different. I think the biggest difference and what makes it feel different to read is that Plum Bun is told from the point of view of the person who is passing, and Passing, the novel, is told from the point of view of someone who is not. So as if it were told from Ginny's point of view it would have a completely different flavor. And so Passing does have a difference. 

LISA: I would add one little piece of nuance, which is kind of apropos what we were saying earlier, which is, Irene, as a light-skinned Black woman, can and does pass and she chooses not to, whereas Ginny doesn't have that opportunity, right? And so I think that's why we see this tension point between Irene and Claire, because there is some part of Irene that kind of would like to, because of what we've been saying. Like, Claire gets all of the good stuff, you know, things seem easier for her. And Claire has a lens very similar to Angela, like it's based in pragmatism, again.

KIM: I feel like the tone is so different between the two also. I just feel like the tone of Plum Bun. There's an upbeatness. 

AMY: I agree. I mean, I'm just taking it from the movie, but Passing, the movie, felt very dark and atmospheric, and Plum Bun is more vibrant in the city.

LISA: There's less judgment I think, in Plum Bun, whereas, I mean, Passing is all about judgment. It's a tragedy. 

KIM: Yeah. The consequences are different. Is there anything else we haven't discussed about Plum Bun that you think is important to mention? 

LISA: I have, I'm sorry, I'm going to read another passage 'cause this is like one of my favorite passages in the book and it has nothing to do with passing or being a woman. It's actually about social class. Angela is in Greenwich Village. She's going to art school and she's hanging out with artsy, cool kind of Bohemian people. And so there's this little gathering she goes to at her friend's house and Fauset says: The little gathering to which Martha had invited her was made up of members as strongly individual as the host and hosts. They were all specialists in their way and specialists for the most part, in some offshoot of a calling or movement, which itself was already highly specialized. Martha presented a psychiatrist, a war correspondent, a dramatist, a corporate lawyer, a white faced conspicuously beautiful poet with a long, evasive Russian name, two press agents, a theatrical manager, an actress who played only Shakespeare roles, a teacher of defective children, (which I don't think we say that anymore, so I'm sorry if we need to bleep that out). And a medical student who had been a conscientious objector and had served a long time at Leavenworth. He lapsed constantly into a rapt self communion from which he only roused himself to utter fiery tirades against the evils of society. And then a little bit later she goes: But she felt the thinking again, (she being Angela), about that evening she had spent with Martha and the people whom she had met. And again it seemed to her that they represented an almost alarmingly unnecessary class. If any great social cataclysm were to happen, they would surely be the first to be swept out of the running. Only the real people could survive. 

AMY: Well, that reminds me also, because they are in Greenwich Village… we did an episode on Heterodoxy, which is a club in Greenwich Village at the same time period comprised of women who were doing a lot of the list of things that you just explained, like, um, social activist, doctors, lawyers, playwrights. So that was really happening there. That was the atmosphere of Greenwich Village at the time. These amazing people. 

LISA: To a certain extent, maybe it was the atmosphere in which Jessie Redmon Fauset was in. Because it's like, you know, they're all highly educated, a lot of like art and theater and stuff happening right in Harlem. And so she's kind of poking fun, I feel like, at maybe her own artistic class as well.

AMY: Yeah. Like, they’re almost too successful. “Where are my normal friends?”

KIM: It's so fantastic we have this new edition of Plum Bun, and we're looking forward to discovering more women writers through Quite Literally Books. 

AMY: Yeah. I know you guys said you have a new batch coming out in November. Can you say yet what they are or is that going to be a reveal for later? 

LISA: Well, we can tell you one, because we've been letting people have a sneak peek. And that's Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

AMY: Oh, yes. I read that in college. It's a good one. We talked about it in the episode we did on Miriam Michelson. We did a kind of similar, um, science fiction tale about an all-woman community. Ooh, okay!

KIM: Yes. Can I just say we want to be whatever you need, we want to support you in your endeavor. It's wonderful. I'm so excited to watch what happens next and hopefully be a part of it. So keep us posted on everything, and if you need anything, we're so excited to spread the word about what you're doing.

LISA: Thank you so much. You have no idea how thrilled we are to be on your show. 

BREMOND: And also how nervous we've been prepping for this, like we were prepping for final exams!

KIM: Yeah, no, this was fantastic. I had the best time.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Thank you to everyone who makes the production of this little independent podcast possible, including a shout out to some of our newest subscribers like Erin Dove, Laura Mack, Irene Fisher Davidson, Jennifer Mielo shook. Rita Von Schwarzenberg and Mary Beth Collins. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.