Carter, and Other People
1921
Don Marquis's "Carter" is a lacerating portrait of a man who falls through the cracks of American racial identity. Born in Atlanta to a white father and Black mother, Carter possesses the light skin that might grant him passage into the white world, but never the acceptance. He watches his half-brother, Willoughby, inherit their father's name and fortune while he inherits only the stigma of his blood. The story traces Carter's journey from the South to New York, where he hopes the city's anonymity might offer respite from a lifetime of being neither fully Black nor fully white. He finds love with a woman who claims not to see his color, but the novel's devastating core lies in Carter's internal war: he has absorbed the very prejudices that exclude him, and he cannot forgive himself for what society has made him. This is a story about the violence of categories and the quiet catastrophes they produce in the hearts of those who cannot fit.
