In a strange way, the beating scene itself is almost structured like a joke. We’d watched her mope through the whole movie about not wanting to be Black. We knew we were wrong to laugh, but we were too young to take much seriously, let alone a character like Sarah Jane, whom we found more pitiful than pitiable. The frenetic music in the background, the melodramatic slaps, Sarah Jane’s slow crumple to the asphalt. I’m not proud to admit that in elementary school, my best friend and I used to watch this scene over and over again, not because we thought it was tragic, but because we found it funny. “Is your mother a nigger?” he sneers, before beating her in an alley. Instead, the scene that sticks with me is halfway into the movie, when Sarah Jane meets up with her white boyfriend, who has secretly discovered that she is Black. There’s a scene in the 1959 melodramatic film “ Imitation of Life” that I have seen dozens of times, but it’s not the one you’re probably imagining: the climatic funeral scene where Sarah Jane Johnson, a young Black woman passing for white, flings herself onto the casket of the dark-skinned mother she has spent the entire film disowning. to a virtual conversation, led by Brit Bennett, about “Passing,” to be held on March 9. This essay is part of T’s Book Club, a series of articles and events dedicated to classic works of American literature.
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