When It’s Safer to be Someone Else: BAME characters and “dressing-up”

The “revelations” this past week over Harvey Weinstein’s repeated assaults on women brought up some very troubling conversations about women.  Many of the news reports showed Weinstein with various actresses who have accused him of sexual assault; the actresses were often smiling and near enough to Weinstein for him to have his arm around them.  But as anyone who has ever been sexually assaulted by someone more powerful than them knows, smiling doesn’t mean you’re happy.  It means you are being someone else, trying to survive.  An article in the Independent this week (http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/harvey-weinstein-sexual-harassment-mental-health-women-suffering-anxiety-a7996511.html) suggests that most women, once they hit puberty, have to learn psychological coping skills to deal with the gaze of powerful men—and even then may be labelled as anxious or depressed.  The reaction to the hashtag #MeToo (tweeted over half a million times as of Monday, according to CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/15/entertainment/me-too-twitter-alyssa-milano/index.html) shows that sexual assault—for men as well as for women—is all too prevalent in our society, and yet those assaulted feel so alone and so threatened that it is hard to speak up about it.  For many of us (yes, #MeToo), it is safer to smile if we want to survive.  It is safer to be someone else.

In Errol Lloyd’s Nini at Carnival, Nini gains power through the act of dressing up as an African queen.

This coping mechanism of being someone else has various translations in literature; in children’s books, it is often through the trope of dressing up.  Dressing up can simply allow a character to try out a different persona and see if it fits; but it is interesting to look at how BAME characters in books “dress up,” especially female characters.  Prior to puberty, dressing up is about becoming powerful.  Two very different notions of power can be seen in comparing Errol Lloyd’s Nini at Carnival (Bodley Head, 1978) with Mary Hoffman’s Amazing Grace (Frances Lincoln, 1991).  In Lloyd’s book, the titular character is part of a carnival parade, but she doesn’t have a costume.  Her “fairy godmother” (really her friend dressed up in a fairy costume) comes along and gives her a piece of cloth in a pattern that could be intended as a Kente cloth (the royal cloth of the Akan people in Africa), wrapping it around her like an African ceremonial dress  and saying that Nini is now “pretty enough to be Queen of the Carnival” (n.p.) which Nini, in fact, then becomes.  In Hoffman’s story, on the other hand, Grace likes to dress up as story characters; “she always gave herself the most exciting part” (n.p.) according to Hoffman—which in most cases, happens to be the male part.  Lloyd invests power for his Black female character in the historical traditions of African civilizations; Hoffman invests it in male characters, and often those male characters as written by white male “classic” authors such as Kipling, Longfellow, and of course J. M. Barrie.  Guess which one of these two books has never been out of print since publication?  No wonder World Book Day costumes are fraught for BAME Britons.

Grace in Mary Hoffman’s book feels powerful when she acts out stories of white and/or male heroes. Illustrations by Caroline Binch.

In YA books, dressing up changes from a focus on power to a focus on survival, particularly for BAME young women.  Two different approaches to dressing up can be seen in Tanya Landman’s Passing for White (Barrington Stoke, 2017) and Catherine Johnson’s The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo (Corgi, 2015).  In both books, the main female protagonist must escape those who have the power to destroy her happiness and security by becoming someone else.  Rosa, in Landman’s book, is light enough to “pass for white” because she is the daughter of her slave master.  Her master wants to keep Rosa enslaved, and destroy her family life and chances for happiness.  And as Rosa and Benjamin, another slave with whom she falls in love, knows, “White folks can do whatever the hell they pleased . . . And then they’d say it was your own damned fault” (3).  So Rosa dresses up in the most powerful costume she can think of: that of a rich, elderly, white man, with Benjamin as her slave, in order to escape to freedom.  A colleague who teaches slave narratives said that students often argue that passing for white is being a “traitor to your race”—but such attitudes are similar to those who say that women who accept contracts in Hollywood after being assaulted were “trading on sex”.  Survival in the face of overwhelmingly powerful enemies sometimes depends on pretending to be like the powerful.

For BAME characters in YA novels, “dressing up” was not just fun and games.

Johnson’s book addresses sexual assault head-on, also in a historical novel, by opening her book with the main character’s rape. Mary Wilcox, alone and friendless, is raped by two farm boys even though she is dirty, weak, and “looked like a savage” (2).  Mary knew that rape happened to women “acting the coquette and suffering the consequences” (1) but when she is raped that night, she understands that it is not about women “asking for it” but about men exerting power.  And while she rejects that kind of power, she still knows that to survive, she would have to be somebody else: “an Amazon warrior woman who could turn on her attackers.  Better still, a fighting princess, a beautiful girl with a dagger at her waist and a quiver of magical arrows.  They would not dare touch her then” (4).  Mary does not become a warrior, but she does become a princess from an exotic land, the Lady Caraboo, who speaks no English but reflects back “only what your people wanted me to be” (193)—the beautiful, the strange—to a white family who takes her in.  In becoming someone else, she survives; but her disguise also allows her “to be something other than who I was; something fresh, something good, something capable of love and being loved” (194).  This heartbreaking statement—that Mary thinks she has to be someone else to be loved—rings true for many women who think that their broken self will never be good enough to be worthy of love.

Becoming “what they want you to be” is another way to survive, as in Catherine Johnson’s novel. Cover photo by Bella Kotak.

Historical fiction is perhaps the easiest genre in which YA literature can represent the concept of becoming someone else for survival, but I want to end with one last example from fantastic fiction.  Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses (Doubleday, 2001) concerns a world where the power positions between Black people and White people are reversed from contemporary society.  But Blackman’s novel is less about race and more about power; both Crosses (Black people who hold most of the society’s power positions) and Noughts (White people who generally have to serve the Crosses) suffer from unequal power relations, but Noughts suffer far more.  Callum, the Nought protagonist, has a sister named Lynette, who was “beaten and left for dead because she was dating a Cross” (124).  Her way of coping with her powerlessness is through disguise: she tries to convince those around her that she is a Cross.  As a blonde, White girl, her disguise is only self-deception.  When forced to confront her despised whiteness, Lynette commits suicide, knowing she will never be able to cope with “a return to reality” (170).

From Ian Edginton and John Aggs’s graphic novel version of Noughts and Crosses–Lynette’s “madness” is her only chance at survival.

Everyone, at every age, practices “dressing up” to be a little bit different from our ordinary selves sometimes.  But we need to be aware that dressing up can also be a way of hiding—or of surviving.  Literature for children can remind us that sometimes it is safer to be someone else in societies where powerful people get away with crimes against the powerless.

How to Survive in a World that Doesn’t Want You: Catherine Johnson’s Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo

If you Google “Caraboo” sometime, one of the sites that comes up is a hypertext edition of an 1817 account of the life of Mary Wilcocks Baker, also known as the Princess Caraboo (http://www.resologist.net/carabooa.htm#N_13_). The mysterious editor of the site (he goes by Mr. X) begins the hypertext with a stern condemnation of the “romantic fictions” that modern versions of Caraboo’s story have presented; and the 1817 account itself acts as a general warning to kind-hearted ladies who take in foreign-looking women. The 1817 version, by John Matthew Gutch, cannot help but admire Mary Wilcocks Baker’s skill at survival and ability to escape detection for so long. At one point he writes, “Cervantes himself could not have expected the realization of so fine a scene” (18). Mr. X, whose other interests include lake monsters in Canada, cannot share in Mr. Gutch’s admiration; he wants to unmask Caraboo as an “imposter”.

This is a copy of Mr. E. Bird’s portrait of “Caraboo” in the clothing that she made as part of her “native” costume. An engraving of this portrait was inserted into John Matthew Gutch’s version of Caraboo’s story, and it is also mentioned in Johnson’s version.

For Mr. X, the reasons why this young woman would have taken on a new identity are irrelevant. To imagine that criminals have honorable motives is nothing more than romantic fiction. But Mr. X—who, interestingly, has himself taken on an alternate identity— has never, if we can take him at “face” value, been a woman. Catherine Johnson, in her recent novel for the young adult audience, The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo, clearly does know what it is like to be a woman, and she shows in her eponymous character a vulnerable, poor, mixed race girl in Britain’s early 19^th century who rises above the situation in which she finds herself to not only survive, but thrive.

Johnson has done this before. In 2001, Oxford University Press published Hero, the story of the daughter of a West Indian slave and a white Jewish mother who finds herself unprotected in the East End of London in the early 19^th century. Hero turns to prizefighting to survive when her father is sent back to Barbados and enslavement. But it is not just survival; after her father’s exile, Hero is sent to live with an aunt and uncle who, Cinderella-fashion, make her do all the housework. Hero does not want to be a “skivvy” so she tries for something better—as well as something that will allow her to make money to possibly reunite with her father.

One way to survive is to fight–as in Johnson’s earlier book, Hero.

The Curious Tale of Lady Caraboo has similar overtones, but Johnson makes clearer the threats to a young woman alone in the 19^th century. Not only is the young Mary Wilcox raped in the opening scene, she has already been bedded and abandoned, pregnant, by a young man who promised to marry her. Mary, in the midst of being raped by two farm hands, thinking of her dead baby boy, wishes to die and muses, “surely Hell could not be any worse than this” (5). It is a bleak opening, but one that completely eradicates the idea of Mary Wilcox as criminal. The criminals are the men who take what they want from women and then label them as the ones in the wrong.

It is not only farm hands who take advantage of women; wealthy young men have even more power over self-representation and sexuality. The son of a lord and the son of a banker are shown at one point in a brothel. It is made clear that they frequent the place, and that the young women are desperately dependent on the young men. When a friend implies that Fred Worrall is lucky to have a prostitute so devoted to him, Fred replies, “She wants me to buy her out of here . . . She expects me to buy her off Mrs Ingrams, then find her rooms, pay for her clothes, set her up as a respectable young lady—hah! . . . Thank God term’s nearly over—very soon I’ll never have to see the little minx again” (30). Of course, he retains his “respectability” throughout, and once he leaves London, we never hear of what happens to “the little minx”. Women are disposable in this world, especially poor women.

Johnson’s tale is only curious because a poor nonwhite female manages to survive and thrive in the early 19th century.

Mary Wilcox, face down in leaf litter, is made especially aware of this because of her skin color. She had already feared she “looked like a savage” (2) when she is attacked and the young men comment that they “Ent never seen an arse as brown as this” (2). She is triply damned, female, brown and poor. She can do nothing about the first two aspects of her life, so she reinvents herself as Caraboo, a princess from foreign lands to a wealthy family whose matriarch is American, and interested in “happy carefree woodland peoples” (8). Caraboo is never carefree, but she uses silence, her brown skin and her femininity as tools to allow those around her to paint the picture that they want to see. She refuses to speak, remaining a(n increasingly) decorative object until she hears them tell her what they imagine her to be, and then she becomes the very thing they find themselves wanting. Mary Wilcox, discarded by society, makes herself into an object of desire to that very same society.

Johnson makes it clear throughout that Mary/Caraboo’s aim is survival, but she also allows her character to thrive. Whereas the real Caraboo is unmasked and must struggle to avoid prison and make a life for herself, Johnson imagines a romance for her with the wealthy son of her patroness, who follows her to America where they make a new life. America is a place of new starts for both Mary and for Fred Worrall, who has come to regret his past disregard for women. “He should feel content and happy—he was heir to Knole and the Tolzey Bank: a long life of pretence stretched out ahead of him. Pretence that he was happy and that he was a gentleman—when any one who looked inside, who saw his heart, would know just how sullied it really was” (250). Because he recognizes his life as a lie, and wants to live his true self, like Mary does, he is redeemable. But it has to be lived in America, free from the lies that English society forces on everyone who lives in it.

Johnson’s version of Caraboo’s story might be considered by Mr. X to be “romantic fiction”; but in many ways it tells a more honest story of the difficulty of being poor, female and nonwhite in the 19^th century than the “exposé” version of the story. Johnson’s story also offers a powerful message to today’s readers: you should choose how you are defined, and not allow yourself to be summed up and discarded because of the way you appear on the surface.