Daniel J. Sharfstein
The Penguin Press
“The difference between black and white was less about “blood” or biology or even genealogy than about how people were treated and whether they were allowed to participate fully in community life. Blacks were the people who were slaves, in fact or in all but name; the rest were white. Jordan Spencer’s community could accept him as an equal as long as he never forced them to acknowledge his ancestry. As long as he was one of the crowd, people could forget what made his family different.”
This is just one of several passages that I marked in Sharfstein’s The Invisible Line. The author traces the lives of three families: the Gibsons, the Spencers, and the Walls. All three families went from being classified as black to white through the generations. The quote above comes from the early chapters about the Spencers, a family who lived in eastern Kentucky in the early 1800s. Not much is known about Jordan Spencer’s early life but he was possibly some kind of kin to George Freeman, a black man who was a respectable member of a small community in Kentucky. After moving to Kentucky to live with Freeman, Jordan decides to pass as white even though he has dark skin. At the time Kentucky was a place that required all newly freed slaves to leave the state so as not to encourage slaves to attempt escape and so that whites wouldn’t have to think of freed slaves as equals.
Jordan Spencer used to paint his hair red to appear more “white”. For the community it didn’t matter to them that he didn’t look white but that his behavior was considered white. To my amazement, the outlook of the community was something that was happening all over the South. People were ignoring the skin color of their neighbors if they possessed land, owned slaves, or just “behaved” white.
I found The Invisible Line to be a pretty interesting read. When I think of passing, I usually think of people who left everything behind, including family, to become white. I never thought about people who passed not by the color of their skin but because of community standards. Also interesting was reading about the effects that this kind of denial has on an individual and later generations. There were a few parts that seem to drag but overall the book is engaging.