“Cora Unashamed”
Cora’s love narrative, despite not corresponding to an emblematic fairy, suggests that Eros does not succumb to color-linked racism. In other words, true Eros is unquestionably color-blind: “Even Cora, the humble, had a lover once. He came to town on a freight train (long ago now), and worked at the livery-stable. (That was before autos got to be so common.) Everybody said he was an I.W.W. Cora didn't care. He was the first man and the last she ever remembered wanting. She had never known a coloured lover. There weren't any around. That was not her fault.” Cora’s affection for the white suitor is based on wholesome Eros that has not been fouled with shadowy racism. Cora is not bigoted; otherwise she would not have tangled with a race that she disfavors.
In the perspective of Lacanian theory, Jessie is Cora’s uppermost Objet Petit a: “Cora hated to think about her going away. In her heart she had adopted Jessie. In that big and careless household it was always Cora who stood like a calm and sheltering tree for Jessie to run to in her troubles. As a child, when Mrs. Art spanked her, as soon as she could, the tears still streaming, Jessie would find her way to the kitchen and Cora. At each school term's end, when Jessie had usually failed in some of her subjects (she quite often failed, being a dull child), it was Cora who saw the report-card first with the bad marks on it. Then Cora would devise some way of breaking the news gently to the old folks.” Cora acts as Jessie’s utter maternal icon notwithstanding their racial and rank discrepancies. Cora’s worship for Jessie outstrips the admiration that Jessie’s mother bequeaths her. In view of the fact that Cora was bereft of a daughter who would be Jessie’s age, mothering Jessie bequeaths Cora maternal gratification. Their eerie connexion validates that biology is not the outright contributing factor of Mother-daughter link for Jessie and Cora’s love for surpasses their genetic irregularities. Jessie’s manifestation in Cora’s existence is unqualifiedly quintessential because she arouses her as an existent daughter would. Jessie’s bereavement is correspondent to the expiration of a nonpareil Object Petit a which reassures Cora’s pronouncement to vacate her occupation at the Studevants’.
“Passing”
A white versus black binary stimulates Jack’s affirmations in “Passing”: “Funny thing , though Ma, how some white people certainly don’t like colored people, do they? (If they did, then I wouldn’t have to be passing to keep my good job.) They go out of their way sometimes to say bad things about colored folks, putting it out that all of us are thieves and liars, or else diseased-consumption and syphilis and the like.” Animosity is the well-made wall that guarantors the aggravating whites versus blacks antagonism. Jack accedes to the conditioning that decodes black people to mediocre humans who undertake depravities such as larceny and dishonesty and immorality (which is reflected in the blacks’ contamination with infirmities such as syphilis). The intimidating conditioning bankrolls deleterious stereotypes to belittle the blacks’ worth.
Employment-related bigotry ominously extends the Black versus White Binary: “No wonder it’s hard for a black man to get a good job with that kind of false propaganda going round. I never knew they made a practice of saying such terrible things about us until I started passing and heard their conversations and lived their life.” “False propaganda” is a manoeuvre that ratifies the dishonoring of the blacks to pacify the racist whites’ conceited longings of being grander. Jack’s premeditated ‘passing’ is a surreptitious expression of supposed black subservience that perpetuates his illusion of pre-eminence relative to the blacks who are debased due to their skin color.
