Esi Edugyan’s novel Half Blood Blues, with its tale of mixed-race characters, jazz, and Nazi Germany, focuses chiefly on the presence of ‘undesirables’ – people who the status quo rejects in some form or another. In the case of 1939 Berlin, people of non-white descent (such as the half-white Hiero Falk) were targeted for elimination and arrest. This left others who could mask their ‘undesirability’ (such as the lighter-skinned Sid Griffiths) to have an easier time escaping the horrors of World War II and Nazism. Many things are mixed in Half Blood Blues, as its title suggests – races are mixed to make walking contradictions like Sid and Hiero, musical genres are mixed to create the jazz music and culture that pervades the novel, and more. Through his exploration of mixing and ‘undesirables’ in Half Blood Blues, Edugyan posits that mixing can both bring us together and make our differences that much more visible.
The mixing of race is an inexorable part of the novel, as the main characters must deal with the contradictions of their own ethnicity in the face of a world that values racial purity. Right from the start of the novel, Sid, Hiero, Delilah and Hieronymous Falk attempt to survive in 1939 Europe, with the height of the Nazi sense of racial hatred beginning to rear its head. The characters are a mix of black and white, who are even further out of their element in Europe. The language barrier is yet another crutch – “We talked like mongrels, see – half-German, half-Baltimore bar slang. Just a few scraps of French between us” (Edugyan 5). The characters fret about going out, they witness synagogues being burned down, and overall feel unsafe in a world that attempts to oust any glimpse of non-white presence. This is certainly fitting the times in which the book is set: Nazi Germany’s priorities were quickly attuned to racial purity. “Fascism in Germany was built along racial lines and hammered this theme home insistently” (Lusane 90). Hitler thought of blacks as third-class citizens, being disparaging of African Americans and being concerned with ‘blackness’ as a concept in the new Nazi World Order (Lusane 90). To be fair, however, there were many different kinds of receptions to black people depending on circumstance – Afro-Germans, native Africans and African-Americans – all of whom had a different experience.
Sid’s particular variant of mixed ethnicity allows him a greater sense of freedom than others of his kind, which is a particularly complex social issue even in today’s age. Because of his lighter skin, he is able to pass through Nazi-era Berlin and Paris much more easily than his friends can, something which runs in his family, “floating like ghosts through a white world. Afraid of being seen for what they truly was” (Edugyan 89). In order to become ‘desirable,’ Sid must essentially become white and abandon his heritage – something Hiero and others do not have the luxury of doing. To that end, Sid’s relative privilege in this dire situation is something he often takes for granted and cannot reconcile with who he is. This increased ability to move around due to being lighter-skinned was absolutely a factor in World War II; people like Josephine Baker, a woman with Black and Indian heritage, were recruited by spies to work in France due to their ability to blend in, and their status as performances (Lusane 235).
The racial and emotional guilt that Sid feels over having sabotaged Hiero over their mutual love interest, Delilah, is related to this sense of race mixing. Because of Hiero’s need for the visas (which were hid by Sid so he would get caught), Hiero himself lacked the same skin-based privilege that Sid enjoyed. Therefore, his ‘undesirable’ nature got him arrested without the visas needed to escape. Sid’s issues with his identity – mostly related to his romantic feelings for Delilah, which Hiero was perceived as usurping – led him to distrust his friend and get back at him the only way he knew how. In this way, the mixed-race elements of his own identity allowed him the ability to make this move against Hiero, which also sacrificed his own humanity (something that he carries with him until forgiven by Hiero at the end of the novel). The confrontation of dealing with his own racial issues is similar to the Nazis being unable to accept their own black population – Hiero’s presence (insofar as being a romantic rival for Delilah) was ‘undesirable’ just as the blacks and Jews of Nazi-era Europe were ‘undesirable’.
Jazz music’s pluralistic and recombinant nature plays into the same theme of mixing; just like Sid and Hiero are mixed-race, jazz is a creative combination of several other musical genres, from folk to blues to the Negro spiritual (Shipton 12). The mixed nature of jazz is likened at many different points to the mixed nature of the characters in the novel, as the song in the title is not “true blues,” since it lacks a proper chord structure, but they remind themselves that “blues wasn’t never bout the chords” (Edugyan 275). In much the same way, the characters are perceived as being impure because of their lack of strict whiteness, but are still good and valid people despite this impurity (McKibbin 413).
The likening of jazz to moral decay among the Nazis is a recurrent theme in the novel, showing just how ‘undesirable’ the music was as compared to the people who play it:
“Jazz. Here in Germany it become something worse than a virus. We was all of us damn fleas, us Negroes and Jews and low-life hoodlums, set on playing that vulgar racket, seducing sweet blond kids into corruption and sex. It was a plague sent out by the dread black hordes, engineered by the Jews. Us Negroes, see, we was only half to blame - we just can't help it. Savages just got a natural feel for filthy rhythms, no self-control to speak of. But the Jews, brother, now they cooked up this jungle music on purpose. All part of their master plan to weaken Aryan youth, corrupt its janes, dilute its bloodlines” (Edugyan 78).
In this respect, this plays into the reasons for the ‘undesirable’ nature of blacks and mixed-race people in the Nazi vision of Europe; the racial purity was also a social one, and so jazz was indicative of the kinds of conditions that led to mixed- race children and degenerate behavior. Impoliteness and sexuality are likened to ‘undesirables’ by the Nazis, as indicated by jazz, a notoriously black-centric art form. Just like the mixed-race characters of the book must deal with their intersecting cultures, Germany at the time was attempting to deal with the confluence of cultures it was confronted with – however, its solution is far more destructive.
Half Blood Blues follows the plight of African-Americans visiting Europe as part of a jazz band; their treatment is synonymous with the historical record, as the intolerance of blacks in Europe was leavened by their tolerance of jazz musicians. Nazis seemed to be able to deal with black musicians as long as they were playing ditties for them, choosing to ignore them rather than take distinctive action against them (Lusane 235). This often contradictory messaging was, nonetheless, part and parcel of the European black experience, especially for visitors. As they were not strictly part of the German ‘racial state,’ they did not need to be dealt with as harshly or immediately as Afro-Germans or Jews. Because of that, much of the book sees these African-American musicians having a relative sense of peace due to their circumstances. They were still ‘undesirables,’ but still held a purpose and were low on the priorities list. However, the Nazis still ended up banning jazz, though it was more of a ban on “American cultural products” than about jazz specifically; they simply did not want anything to violate the kind of Rheinland-centric culture they wanted to keep pure and unsullied (Shack 117).
In essence, the need to oust ‘undesirables’ is closely related to their distaste of jazz and the moral decay they perceived it represented. Race was linked to cultural identity, and so it wasn’t just blacks that the Nazis wanted out of Germany – it was a way of life that threatened unity, purity and homogeneity. However, Half Blood Blues manages to link Germanness with blackness as well, making this argument foolhardy and fallacious, the novel shows “how to reconcile black citizenry with a white cultural, national, and racial ‘heritage’”(McKibbin 413). What is ‘desirable,’ then, is an idea of purity that is related to white ideas of cultural heritage – things like propriety, privacy, solemnity and more. Mixing the more radical, gregarious and fun-loving aspects of black culture and jazz music into their plans simply would not work, as they did not desire it. Biological inheritance was the key for Nazi purity, something that Sid and the gang did not contribute to because of their nationality, their ethnicity and their own culture.
The plight of racial discrimination was certainly more overt and transparently ‘evil’ in Nazi Germany, but racial prejudice was still alive and well in the US, as evidenced by both Half Blood Blues and the historical record. Sid’s lighter-skinned nature does not get him out of trouble back in America: “Sure B-more ain’t south south, sure my family was light-skinned, but if you think Jim Crow hurt only gumbo country, you blind” (Edugyan 38). Jim Crow laws, the regulations that stipulated ‘separate but equal’ treatment of black and white in everything from civil rights to housing, transportation and more (Gates and Appiah 1211). The South even had many laws and regulations in place to make sure that mixed-race couples and children could not be created, and made life hard for mixed-race children in American (Smith 66). In many ways, these regulations were just as much about ousting ‘undesirables’ as the Nazi-era laws the characters have to deal with in the novel.
In conclusion, the struggles of the characters in Half Blood Blues stem from the mix of race and culture, illustrated and personified in their love and connection to jazz, a musical genre that is also mixed. The presence of mixed-race characters playing a composite musical genre, who are largely tolerated by the Nazis they are surrounded by, allows the novel to explore some fascinating contradictions and faults in the logic of the Nazi Party to search for racial purity. To them, jazz and black people were synonymous with a violation of the purity they wanted, and were therefore ‘undesirable,’ and yet they tolerated them until the last minute. This also has an effect on the characters as well, particularly Sid, whose lightness gives him a much better ability to ignore his race and fit into his surroundings. This gives his later actions, when he sabotages someone without that ability, an extra layer of guilt, as it is a reflection of his cutting off of the ‘undesirable’ part of his own ethnicity. The historical record backs up both the Nazi-era hatred (yet surprising tolerance) of black colonial performers and the equally difficult circumstances awaiting them in the Jim Crow-era United States. The ability for light-skinned blacks to pass relatively unnoticed in Nazi circles also has historical truth to it. All in all, this creates an atmosphere of contradiction and cultural collision that the novel exploits for maximum pathos from its characters and situations.
Works Cited
Edugyan, Esi. Half Blood Blues. Serpent’s Tail, 2011.
Gates, Henry Louis and Appiah, Anthony. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and
African American Experience. 1999.
Lusane, Clarence. Hitler’s Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of European Blacks,
Africans and African Americans in the Nazi Era. Routledge, 2003.
McKibbin, Molly Littlewood. "Subverting the German Volk: Racial and Musical Impurity in Esi
Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues." Callaloo 37.2 (2014): 413-431.
Shack, William A. Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars. University of California Press, 2001.
Shipton, Alyn. A New History of Jazz (2nd ed.). Continuum, 2007.
Smith, J. Douglas. "The Campaign for Racial Purity and the Erosion of Paternalism in Virginia,
1922–1930: "Nominally White, Biologically Mixed, and Legally Negro.’" Journal of Southern History vol. 68 (February 2002), pp. 65–106.
