passing (identity)

Abandoning her husband and nine-year-old son, Peggy takes her three-year-old daughter, Karen, and hides out in a housing project where she creates new identities for herself and Karen as African Americans.

A reprint of Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen's 1929 novel in which Irene, an African-American woman with a comfortable life, is disturbed by the return of a childhood friend, Clare, who has passed for white since adolescence and now wants to rejoin the African-American community.

As a young man, Sundrider was Bliss, an orphan taken in by Hickman and raised to be a preacher like himself. Bliss's history encompasses the joys of young Southern boyhood and bucolic days as a filmmaker.

Bennie Rosato finds herself buried alive at the hands of her evil twin Alice, but Alice, who has assumed Bennie's identity, underestimates Bennie's determination to stay alive and seek revenge.

Shanika Ann Jenkins, an African-American who has light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes, struggles with the fact her colleagues all think she is Caucasian and with her mother's insistence that she embrace her heritage; but by falling in love with an African-American man, she eventually learns that skin color doesn't make the person.

A black man whose skin is light enough to "pass" for white struggles to create an identity for himself at the turn of the century. Includes a selection of the author's poetry and non-fiction writings.

Presents a fictional autobiography in which the narrator, the fair-skinned child of a mulatto mother and white father, discusses his youth in Connecticut, his knowledge of his African-American ancestry, and his decision to join white society.