Abstract
This paper argues that Jessie Fauset’s short stories “Emmy” (1912-13) and “‘There Was One Time!’: A Story of Spring” (1917) reveal how white ideology operates through seemingly unracialized discourse, how one could confound this subtle process of ideological penetration, and how the author uses the motif of “literal” reading to explore strategies for resistance. In these stories, both set in early twentieth-century Pennsylvania, white-supremacist discourses are not explicitly white-supremacist. Instead, they take an egalitarian guise on the denotative level and function by subtly inviting one to make a white-supremacist interpretation. Often unwittingly, Fauset’s black characters take these discourses at face value, but such a literal approach paradoxically enables them to read against the grain and find ideologically forbidden meanings, including the availability of self-actualization regardless of one’s racial background. While both stories thus explore new possibilities of ideological resistance, “There Was One Time!” proposes a more developed strategy, as the protagonists’ literal approach helps to illuminate the otherwise invisible black masses with whom to cultivate a reciprocally empowering relationship. In tandem with Fauset’s heightened awareness that resistant reading enhances collective solidarity and vice versa, “There Was One Time!” does not stop at black characters’ personal self-fulfillment but actively addresses larger, sociohistorically informed issues such as the relationship between black and American identities.