of twentieth century is of color W. E. B Du Bois famously asserted in Forethought to his classic The Souls of Folk a full century ago now (209). Events proved his prophecy to have been all too accurate. Interestingly enough, however, of most problematic aspects of this problem of color has proven to be concept of color line itself. What exactly does term the color mean? First of all, we must acknowledge that no such line actually exists as a tangible entity, even in way that something like Mason-Dixon Line or Maginot Line can be said to exist; there is nothing that we can point to or draw on a map or graph and say, There's color line. Secondly, idea of a dividing line indicates that all items can be separated and placed on of line or other, yet long history of figure of mulatto proves that this is not case with regard to color line, as mixed-race people have a legitimate claim to belonging on both sides of line--unless, of course, we apply one drop rule, which is itself an idea fraught with problems. Finally, color line differentiates based on appearance, and yet we all know that there is often a discrepancy between appearance and reality: a person may look White while being Black. (1) As a concept, then, color line disintegrates even as we begin to try to explain or define it. Nowhere have problematics of color line been made more salient than within tradition of racial passing in African American culture and literature. If a person is able to color line without anyone else realizing it, then what does that line actually signify? The project of African American passing novel can thus be seen as deconstructive, undermining very basis by which racial is theoretically determined. As Jacquelyn Y. McLendon has noted in writing about Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nella Larsen, drawing attention to physical appearance versus biological reality, both writers call into question socially constructed notions of race (72). Samira Kawash, similarly, writing of James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), asserts that the figure of passing as it is narrativized in these [passing] novels challenges received notions of race, identity, and cultural difference that continue to inform our understanding of politics of representation. [T]he passing narrative is not about representation of blackness or whiteness; rather, it is about failure of blackness or whiteness to provide grounds for a stable, coherent identity (62-63). Johnson's title makes this point clear: if being colored is an essential part of one's being, then how can cease to be colored without ceasing to exist altogether? And yet that is exactly what protagonist, ex-colored man, claims to have done. By end of Langston Hughes's satirical short story Who's Passing for Who? (1952), to cite another example, reader can't tell whether two of characters are Blacks passing as Whites passing as Blacks, or Whites passing as Blacks passing as Whites. Thus Valerie Rohy, like McLendon and Kawash, has stated that discourse of racial passing reveals arbitrary foundation of categories 'black' and 'white' (227), while Valerie Smith has written that bodies of mixed-race characters defy binarisms upon which constructions of racial depend (45). African American writers, in telling stories about characters who pass as White, can therefore be seen as urging readers to do away with such terminology altogether, to disavow whole notion of color line as an antiquated concept, that is incapable of explaining a reality more complicated than such an either/or division allows. And yet these same writers more often than not castigate very characters who try to cross line, either killing them off (think especially of Clare Kendry in Larsen's Passing [1929] but also Clarence Garie in Frank Webb's The Garies and Their Friends [1857] among others) or having them return to their proper place on Black side (as do Iola Leroy in Frances Harper's novel of that name [1892] and Rena Walden in Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind Cedars [1900], to cite two instances). …