Taking Sides

ANDREA LEE'S first book, Russian Journal, received unanimous praise and was nominated for a National Book Award. It also never mentioned the fact that its author "happened to be Black." Fortunately, Lee chose to write about her background in Sarah Phillips. The book is mislabeled a "novel"; it is really a collection of finely shaped autobiographical short stories--some of which have appeared in The New Yorker--that could stand alone, but are held together by the common themes of confusion, intellectuality, the Black bourgeoisie and the civil rights movement.

Literature about the Black middle-class has tended to be self-consciously critical, defensive and guilt-ridden. A character like Toni Morrison's Jadine, a Black model who flees her roots and exploits whites in Tar Baby, seems to affirm the idea of the desolate isolation of a young, privileged, materialistic Black member of the bourgeoise. But Lee succeeds in transcending this "bitch" stereotype with Sarah Phillips.

The stories are hardly flawless, yet by making Sarah painfully honest, Lee ensures that her character's confusion is not reduced to an endless search for "identify." Sarah's identity cannot be formed by escaping to Paris, as she discovers in the first story/chapter. Each succeeding story is a small, significant part of herself, written in a way that seems to reflect Lee's own experience.

But interesting as the question is, whether Sarah Phillips is autobiography or fiction is irrelevant. As fiction, the stories reveal a fine craftmanship; some passage are as lightly knit as poetry. Describing Sarah in Paris. Lee is not afraid to be flippant about subjects that cause other writers to tread lightly--if they tread at all: "I had graduated from Harvard, having just turned twenty-one. I was tall and lanky and light-skinned, quite pretty in a nervous sort of way. I came out of college equipped with an unfocused snobbery, vague literary aspirations and a lively appetite for white boys." The one description seems at first to sum up Sarah's college experience, but Lee continues to unravel her personality with a sensitivity that makes Sarah more sympathetic than we might expect.

SARAH'S BACKGROUND does parallel Lee's; she too, is a child of middle-class Philadelphia Blacks. Her father is a preacher in the prosperous and ironically named New African Church. Reverend Phillips is also active in the civil rights movement. Sarah recalls Sunday sermons punctuated by Baptist baptisms with the same uneasiness she feels about the historic March on Washington, in which her parents participated. To the young Sarah, the civil rights movement seems "dull, a necessary burden on my conscience, like good grades or hungry people in India." For a girl whose most dramatic bouts with racism are social snubs at a prep school, the battles of the '60's seem far away. Sarah is brought up among other prosperous Blacks and whites, and she naturally assumes many of their values. When her older brother brings home a Jewish classmate, the scene resembles "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" with a twist. The Black parents resent the white woman, but Sarah's brother Mathew retorts by pointing out that they should have expected an interracial affair. The problem is that these privileged Philadelphia Negroes would like their children to marry other nice colored people, a prospect Sarah and Mathew find excruciatingly dull.

Interracial, intercultural sex is given for Sarah, who is bent on defying the respectable expectations of her family. But even in Paris, when she lives with a Frenchman, Henri, and his two friends, Sarah is reminded of her roots in an ugly scene. Henri calls her "notre Negresse pasteurisee" and describes her background as a symbolic rape of an Irishwoman by a big, Black buck. In his insults, Sarah decides, Henri has summarized the heritage she must inevitably face by returning to America.

THE MAJOR PROBLEM with Sarah Phillips is the question of alliances. Although Sarah is honest about others' prejudices, is she aware enough to see the racism that makes her jealous of a childhood friend who has lighter skin and longer hair? Is the fact that she always describes herself as a "light-skinned" Black simply a physical reality, or the racism of a Black pigmentocrat?

Sarah may be the victim of white society's warped values, but Lee is consciously gnawing away at the mythical New Negro. At the height of the civil rights movement, Sarah is in a lush girl's prep school. Her best friend, a white girl, asks her: "Don't you think it's rather romantic to be a Negro?...My father says Negroes are the tragic figures of America. Isn't it exciting to be a tragic figure? It's a kind of destiny!" In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, 30 years earlier, a white philanthropist said almost the same thing.

Sarah Phillips is a Black woman's attempt to grasp her own destiny by telling her story instead of leaving it up to others. Andrea Lee depicts a child of the civil rights movement--privileged, confused, rebellious, and finally empowered by facing herself honestly and clear-eyed.