Estrangement on a Train: Race and Narratives of American Identity

Abstract

Estrangement on a Train:Race and Narratives of American Identity Julia H. Lee Despite their disparate genres and disciplinary affiliations, John Harlan's dissenting opinion to the court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Charles Chesnutt's novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and Wu Tingfang's memoir America through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat (1914) share one event in common: a scene in which a Chinese man and an African-American man encounter each other and Jim Crow laws in a segregated train car or station. These scenes are a direct response or allusion to the 1892 arrest of Homer Plessy for riding on a white train car in Louisiana, the incident that triggered the Plessy court case and affirmed de jure segregation in the United States. In each text, the scene becomes an allegory about the role that race plays in deciding who can be included in America. Harlan imagines a nightmare scenario in which the despised Chinaman rides legally in the whites-only train car while the Christian, patriotic Negro cannot. In The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt depicts a Chinese laundryman and a black female servant boarding a whites-only train from which his protagonist, Dr. Miller, has just been ejected. This pairing of Chinese and African-American laborers catalyzes Miller's thoughts on how the train makes visible the intersecting relationships between race and class. Finally, in his memoir, Wu recounts an incident in which he hesitates over which compartment he should enter at a Washington, D.C. train station: "white" or "colored." Although a porter eventually leads him to the "white" area, Wu writes that he does not seem to belong in either space. What makes these moments so intriguing—and explains this essay's motivation for reading them in relation to each other—is that while each of the works depicts the confrontation between a Chinese and black man, the historical record shows that no Chinese man was in fact present at the time of Plessy's arrest. The three texts make one thing clear: the Chinese man had become as integral to telling the tale of national identity and exclusion as the African-American man whose rights were violated. In staging one of the most notorious scenes of white injustice against blacks, these textual re-enactments remind us of how entangled and buried the relationships and interactions between black Americans and Asian Americans have been. [End Page 345] That all three texts focus on the relationship between an African American and a Chinese man indicates how closely bound those two figures were in marking the limits of a racially-exclusive American identity in the early twentieth century. But into this racial equation, we must also consider another variable: the setting of this drama on a train, an indicator of the turn-of-the-century's persistent association between the railroad and racial conflict.1 The long historical and cultural association between the railroad, African-American mobility, and Chinese labor clearly informs these textual representations, but the importance of the train to nineteenth-century American life as a whole cannot be underestimated. Alan Trachtenberg notes that the train was the most vivid and dramatic sign of modernity of that century.2 Scholars from a variety of disciplines have commented extensively upon the train's conflicted status in American iconography: the railroad frequently appears as either a symbol of progress that allowed Americans to experience the individual freedoms that the nation offered or as a symbol of the anti-democratic tendencies that increasing industrialization and corporatization were wreaking on America.3 Less clear is what made the train the exemplary site of racial tensions and imperatives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. How can we explain the link that these three texts make between race and the railroads? Thus, in considering the significance of the Chinese and African American figures in these texts, this essay takes seriously the setting of the train as a way of illuminating the cross-racial representations in these three works, focusing particularly on The Marrow of Tradition and America through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat. The Afro-Chinese encounter that Wu and Chesnutt describe, however, rewrites Harlan...

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