Making Up Race

aggie ELLERSLEY, the working-class heroine of Jessie Redmon .Fauset's There Is Confusion (1924), does not cry when her hus- band leaves her. Instead, she searches the pockets of the poplin suit in which she was married and pulls out a business card for "madame hark- ness, Hair Culturist" (127). The next day, she embarks on a career as a beauty specialist, an occupation that sustains her financially through- out the novel. Although linked by name, poverty, and description to the young girl-turned-prostitute of Stephen Crane's Maggie (1893), Fauset's Maggie avoids entering the ranks of sex workers by becoming a beautician.1 This story begins Fauset's career-long habit of testing the promises of the African American cosmetics industry—a testing that evolves, in her subsequent novels and those of her younger and better- known contemporary, Nella Larsen, into a remarkable challenge to as- sertions of racial authenticity. This essay traces the "making up" of race in Fauset's Plum Bun (1928) and The Chinaberry Tree (1931) and Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Writing in an era marked by unprecedented sales of mass-produced beauty products, both Fauset and Larsen imagine women of color empowered in contradictory ways through commercial beauty culture.2 Reading these novels as a commentary on the convergence of "racial uplift" rhetoric and cosmetics consumerism, I suggest that their protagonists are best understood as consumers of a racialized beauty cul-