In Passing

In Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing, two childhood friends reconnect as adults, after having followed a similar course: they have married, become mothers, and entered into the comforts of the middle and upper classes. One of them continues to identify as Black (except when it’s convenient not to do so), while the other has publicly claimed the white side of her mixed-race parentage to deceive her virulently racist husband.

The practice of racial passing gives Larsen’s book its animating force, from the moment the women run into each other in a de facto whites-only rooftop bar to the tragic ending when the truth comes out. It’s also used to explore the nuances of race and class in a time that featured both intense discrimination and Black flourishing. (Drawn to Harlem’s rich culture, the white-passing character takes increasingly dangerous risks to once again experience what she has relinquished.)

Now, nearly a century later, Tara Gereaux’s Wild People Quiet turns to the same generative premise, telling the story of one woman’s transformation and, in doing so, illuminating the larger struggles of Métis people during the first half of the twentieth century.

When the story begins, in the summer of 1946, Florence Banks is a secretary at an insurance firm in Torduvalle, Saskatchewan. In her early fifties, she leads a quiet, highly regimented life, excelling at work, regularly attending church, and ornamenting her home with purchases made at estate sales. There are ample hints that she has made an escape of some kind. The objects, for instance, are described as “insulation against the poverty she never wants to know again.” Another kind of severing from her past is her beauty routine. Once a month, she bleaches her hair blond with peroxide, covering up her dark roots.

We learn that, eleven years earlier, she chose to live in Torduvalle, a town that resembles “a game board with houses and cars for pieces and easy-to-understand rules,” specifically for its lack of cultural memory. “There were no statues of its first residents, no historical buildings with plaques to describe their past importance,” the narrator explains. “It was a town with no history. It was perfect.”

The pieces of herself that Florence has relegated to the shadows slowly come to the fore. When three Métis men arrive in town to work as farmhands — and one of them recognizes her as his long-lost sister — her identity as a middle-class white woman begins to fray.

From here, Gereaux transports us back thirty-eight years, when Florence wasn’t a Banks but a Campeau — on the cusp of adolescence and tenuously living in a small Métis community situated on government land set aside for future roads. Her mother discourages her and her younger brother, Clancy, from speaking Michif. She tells them they’ll be treated better if they speak English, though their affectionate father playfully forgets this edict. Similarly, beading is not allowed at home, but Florence’s Aunt Lillian manages to pass some of her traditional knowledge on to her interested niece. Under her guidance, Florence creates designs inspired by nature and characterized by movement, so that “even the colours sprout, grow. Burst. They fill the eye.”

Two key events mark this early period of Florence’s life. The first comes when she’s eagerly welcomed into a new store while shopping in a nearby town; she’s been mistaken for a white customer, and it’s only her beaded moosehide coin purse that betrays her origins. One of the owners uses a slur against her. “Crawled out from the rats’ nest,” a bystander mutters.

Despite the pain of this incident, Florence emerges with a new view of herself. Unlike Clancy, who has inherited “Maamaa’s soil-black hair and Paapaa’s dark skin,” she has her father’s brown hair and skin “as light as dried prairie grass in the fall.” Once she is alone and has shed anything that could give her away (she gets a new purse at the first opportunity), Florence can remake herself. “There are two separate parts to her now,” Gereaux writes, “two different ways to be in the world, but she feels whole, more complete, like she never has before.”

The second event follows closely on the first. Florence’s father is killed in front of his family by a mounted police officer in a misunderstanding fuelled by racial animus. She’s forever altered. “Instead of breaking,” Gereaux writes, “Florence decides to split, like a thread frayed in two, and part of her will have no memory of this night.”

The novel alternates between Florence’s past and present, a structure that balances propulsion with depth. Clancy’s arrival in Torduvalle comes at a politically fraught time. With the passing of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act, designed to counter drought and soil erosion on agricultural land, many Métis communities are being forcibly displaced. Clancy has moved to a nearby town for work, and he’s brought along their ill elderly aunt. Not only are they living on a government plot, but Clancy is also organizing with other Métis, a pursuit that he suspects has not endeared him to the local authorities.

Florence initially responds to her family members’ struggles with cold pragmatism, desiring above all to protect her new life. For the first half of the novel, she comes across as one-dimensional, a rigid and exacting woman in thrall to her work and routines. It’s only through her backstory, which is disclosed gradually, that she comes into focus. Particularly compelling is her decades-long stint in Regina, a booming industrial centre that affords her opportunities, however hard won, to transform herself into her ideal: literate, upwardly mobile, and white.

The Regina episodes reveal the difficult choices she’s made, allowing us to fully understand all she stands to lose in the present. As she gets closer to Clancy and her aunt, she starts to see all there is to gain. Florence rediscovers her earlier self, the one who spoke Michif with ease and lived in the close embrace of family. She also reconnects with beading, recalling the reverent hours she spent creating intricate, multicoloured designs. An epigraph from the artist Christi Belcourt reinforces the joy that comes from these acts of reclamation. Beadwork, Belcourt has written, announces “that Métis culture is not fossilized, but alive.”

When Florence is guided back to her former self, it’s gratifying if not exactly surprising. In fact, Wild People Quiet offers few surprises, from the rises and dips of the plot to the assured pace and the mannered syntax. It’s well constructed and harmonious, like a prestige television show. But compared with Passing, which is as much about friendship, jealousy, and the power of personality as it is about race and class mobility, Wild People Quiet is a smaller, less dynamic work. The story it tells — of a Métis family caught in the web of assimilationist policies in a settler state — is important, but the narrative lacks the vibrancy of the culture at its heart.

As Florence continues to bead, she’s increasingly drawn to using the medium to explore new subject matter. In addition to traditional designs, she depicts symbols representative of her journey: a bottle of peroxide, a gifted candy dish, her typewriter. Her beadwork, she thinks, “won’t be balanced and there won’t be harmony, but it will hold meaning.”