The Last Plantation: Color, Conflict, and Identity: Reflections of a New World Black. - book reviews

Reason, Feb, 1998 by Itabari Njeri

Njeri, long familiar with such contradictions in her own life, has found that syncretism yields the best solution. She grew up as an opera lover and even trained for a classical singing career, and as a result she was judged by her black peers as not black enough. Even so, the voice of Mahalia Jackson or James Brown on a Bermuda night stirs her to the core. Because she fit no physical stereotype, she says, she suffered alienation from many camps. Similarly, her light-skinned cousin Jeffrey spent his life trying futilely to be "the baddest nigger on the block," only to end up imprisoned and eventually shot dead in the street. In 1960, her physician grandfather, an NAACP integrationist in a small Georgia Klan town, was killed by drunken white youths as he drove home. When his fair-skinned wife arrived on the scene, a white bystander told her not to worry, "it was just a nigger." The youths, though identified, were never charged.

Such biographical details explain Njeri's own preoccupation with race, but not all the biographical material she has included supports her themes as well as she thinks it does. There are lengthy confessional forays - descriptions of highway panic attacks caused by the trauma of her grandfather's death, her allergies, her manic-depression - that are stuck between passages of reportage and analysis, distracting from the trial story and the compelling issues it raises. Njeri comes across as a passionate, humane - if conflicted - woman, but her melding of two genres - investigation and autobiography - is sometimes uncomfortable and prevents her from capitalizing on the dramatic potential of either.

Njeri carries around a lot of anger over her family's past, anger which erupts at unexpected moments with unexpected effects on her book. For example, a well-meaning politician tells her, "One day we'll look back and say, 'In the 1990's they had all these race categories. But in the year 3001 race is not so important. How stupid they were back then. Now we're all living in harmony. We're all one color.'" Njeri becomes furious, taking these utopian platitudes as espousals of the total obliteration of distinct identities. So she tries "not to slam the phone down on its cradle after thanking him for the interview." It's an overreaction born of rage, and while the author has admirably put forth her biases, she has also raised questions about her judgment.

But when Njeri eschews confession, The Last Plantation is filled with captivating passages, such as when she takes us to the scene of an event or examines cases like that of Velina Hasu-Houston, a black-Japanese-Blackfoot playwright who decides to become a multiracial activist after experiencing a variety of humiliating incidents.

A policeman calls Hasu-Houston a "half-breed bitch" as she holds her half Euro-American baby after someone crashes into her car; she finds that neither black theaters nor Asian-American theaters will produce her play about an African American and an Asian woman. (It doesn't occur to Hasu-Houston to court a theater that doesn't define its repertoire in ethnic terms.) Hasu-Houston's multiracial actress friends spend their time shuttling back and forth between casting directors, who study them as if they are museum artifacts and send them away. In this way, Hasu-Houston argues, the people who embody the "melting pot" ideal most are shut out everywhere they turn. As the rate of interracial marriages continues to rise, more Americans will find themselves in dilemmas like Hasu-Houston, rendering the practice of using racial categories to define ourselves and our public institutions increasingly impractical.