Passing

By Toi Derricotte b. 1941 Toi Derricotte

A professor invites me to his “Black Lit” class; they’re

reading Larson’s Passing. One of the black

students says, “Sometimes light-skinned blacks

think they can fool other blacks,

but I can always tell,” looking

right through me.

After I tell them I am black,

I ask the class, “Was I passing

when I was just sitting here,

before I told you?” A white woman

shakes her head desperately, as if

I had deliberately deceived her.

She keeps examining my face,

then turning away

as if she hopes I’ll disappear. Why presume

“passing” is based on what I leave out

and not what she fills in?

In one scene in the book, in a restaurant,

she’s “passing,”

though no one checked her at the door—

“Hey, you black?”

My father, who looked white,

told me this story: every year

when he’d go to get his driver’s license,

the man at the window filling

out the form would ask,

“White or black?” pencil poised, without looking up.

My father wouldn’t pass, but he might

use silence to trap a devil.

When he didn’t speak, the man

would look up at my father’s face.

“What did he write?”

my father quizzed me.

Source: Tender (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997)

Biography

Toi Derricotte is an award-winning poet whose writings, though frequently autobiographical, treat universal subjects such as racism and identity in ways that are moving, painful, and illuminating. Her style is credited with an evocative simplicity reminiscent of Emily Dickinson, though it also contains the kind of expansive colloquial expression attributed to Walt Whitman. Derricotte is also known for treating sexual topics with . . .

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