Iola Leroy and The Blacker the Berry
The Research — "The Blacker the Berry: Gender, Skin Tone, Self-Esteem, and Self-Efficacy"
In their 2001 study, Maxine S. Thompson and Verna M. Keith find that skin tone impacts self-esteem, among Black women, and self-efficacy, among Black men. Thompson and Keith draw distinctions between self-esteem, "how we feel about ourselves," and self-efficacy, "our belief in the ability to control our own fate" (340). From the results of in-person interviews, conducted by Black interviewers, the authors find that the responses of light-skinned women indicate higher self-esteem than dark-skinned women, and the responses of light-skinned men indicate higher self-efficacy than dark-skinned men. They suggest that this discrepancy stems from gender norms in which women are judged by beauty standards and taught to value others' judgments of them, while men are judged by competency and taught to value their success in the workplace (Thompson and Keith 351).
Interestingly, further examination of the interviewees' socioeconomic statuses reveals that class background interacts with skin color's impact on self-perception. Among participants with higher income and wealth, skin color had a significantly weaker impact on self-esteem and self-efficacy. The authors' analysis found a higher correlation between skin color and self-perception among working- and lower-class participants.
These social science findings indicate a complex intersection between colorism and classism. In African-American literature, including the novels Iola Leroy and The Blacker the Berry, Black authors portray colorism and classism within the community as related prejudices, which ultimately originate from outside the Black community.
Cover, 2013 Important Books edition.
The Literature — The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life
Thompson and Keith take the title and epigraph of their research article from Wallace Thurman's 1929 novel—named in turn for a "Negro folk saying" with the full text, "The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice" (Thurman).
Emma Lou Morgan, the protagonist, is a dark-skinned Black woman who confronts colorist prejudices and discrimination in the Black community, as well as her own internalized colorism, racism, and classism.
Through Emma Lou''s interior monologue and dialogue with other characters, Thurman connects prejudice against dark skin to respectability politics and a desire to assimilate into whiteness. While attending college, for example, Emma Lou criticizes another dark-skinned Black student, Hazel Mason, wishing that Hazel could have attended an all-Black college instead: because "then, in one of those schools, her darky-like clownishness would not have to be paraded in front of white people, thereby causing discomfort and embarrassment to others of her race, more civilized and circumspect than she" (Thurman 20, emphasis added). Emma Lou resents Hazel's dialect and humor because Hazel "did not seem to know . . . that Negroes could not afford to be funny in front of white people . . . Negroes must always be sober and serious in order to impress white people with their adaptability and non-difference in all salient characteristics save skin color" (27, emphasis added).
Later in the novel, after Emma Lou moves to Harlem, Walter Truman (described as a "small slender dark youth") argues that color prejudice originates from outside the Black community, in white supremacy and Eurocentric values (Thurman 88). He points out that in American society, "white is the symbol of everything pure and good, whether that everything be concrete or abstract. . . . We are all living in a totally white world, where all standards are the standards of the white man, and where almost invariably what the white man does is right, and what the black man does is wrong, unless it is precedented by something a white man has done " (90, emphasis added). "In an environment where there are so many color-prejudiced whites," Truman continues, "there are bound to be a number of color-prejudiced blacks" (92). Through this conversation, Thurman focuses the novel as a criticism of white supremacy's influence among African-Americans of a variety of skin tone.
Dialect, Classism, and Colorism in Both Novels
Throughout The Blacker the Berry, Emma Lou Morgan judges dark-skinned characters, like her classmate Hazel Mason and her Harlem lover John, for speaking in dialect (now called AAVE or African-American Vernacular English). Some dark-skinned characters, including Walter Truman and Verne Davis, are traditionally educated and speak in standard English. However, Emma Lou seems to be more preoccupied with Black dialect as a marker of lower social standing, and African-Americans "who, when they came North, made it hard for the colored people already resident there" (Thurman 23). Emma Lou resents any association with the Black working class, especially people who remind her of stereotypes of slavery: whether Hazel, whom she labels as "a minstrel type," or John, who seems to her "too obviously an ex-cotton-picker from Georgia" (27, 57).
Watkins Harper uses dialect within her cast of characters, too, but Mary Elkins identifies a key difference in their portrayal: "While Harper uses dialect to draw caste distinctions among the black women in the novel, she does not discredit women whose speech reflects their lack of education" (46). Aunt Linda cannot read, and speaks exclusively in dialect, but as Elkins points out, she can still easily "read the white faces of [her] enslavers" to discover essential information (46). Aunt Linda is respected in her community for her intelligence and her business sense, as her husband says (understatedly) that she "knows most as much as a man" (Harper 179). After the war, Aunt Linda and her husband are property owners, placing them among the most socially and financially secure characters in the novel, in addition to being dark-skinned and formerly enslaved.
Furthermore, Iola, her brother Harry, and other characters praise and admire Lucille Delany, an educated Black woman with dark skin. Lucille is not treated as an example of exceptionalism, or as someone with intelligence and beauty enough to "compensate for her dark skin"—as Emma Lou regards the dark-skinned Black characters who meet her social standards (Thurman 31). Instead, Iola describes Lucille without caveat as "one of the grandest women in America" (Harper 225). As Elkins writes, Watkins Harper "creates no distinctions between black characters of lighter and darker skin. [She] does not use skin tone to signal levels of education, nor does she reserve the rather stilted white speech spoken by Iola for mulattoes" (50). In Iola Leroy the text, and through the eyes of Iola Leroy the protagonist, skin color, along with markers of class and education including the use of dialect, does not equate to personal worth as it does for Emma Lou in The Blacker the Berry.