As trickster, Roxborough succeeded in fooling white Atlanta, where blacks and whites still did not mix socially. With whom could she laugh about her supreme ruse, however?
While Roxborough/Manet lived and worked in midtown Manhattan among white professionals, in little ways the slow but continuous emergence of black consciousness and black pride went on without her. Concealing her identity, living with a white roommate, she could not rationalize bringing Ebony magazine into her apartment when it unostentatiously appeared in November 1945. She could not invite her Uncle John or her friends Joe Louis, or Langston Hughes, or even Arthur Miller- who had known her only as Negro- to her apartment, or even mention to anyone that she knew them. She would feel uncomfortable discussing the headlines about President Truman’s attempts to establish a Fair Employment Practices Commission-the precursor of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action. Trying to act like a real Caucasian, Roxborough/Manet became a caricature, a poor imitation of mainstream society and its values.
Novelist and screenwriter Ernest Lehman- the script for North by Northwest is one of his credits – was a fellow writer for Fascination. He used to gossip with editor Herczeg about the mysterious Mona who year-round was wrapped in mink, as if the ultimate in furs provided protection against the psychological chill. From Lehman’s account it is obvious that she went through a metamorphosis of personality in making her race change. No longer was she aggressive, dynamic, “wild.” As white, Roxborough/Manet became passive, defenseless. Lehman writes:
I had no idea that Mona was “passing.” She was vulnerable and appealing and glamorous without being threatening to anyone…. I had the impression that Geza was doing whatever he could to help her survive. He definitely gave her her job with the magazine. He was certainly her protector, perhaps a father-confessor. Mona was unattached. There were no men in her life that year [1946]. She never seemed to come onto men in a noticeably sexy way, even though she was young and attractive and a kind of woman about town. We were always happy to see each other when our paths crossed. She told me one reason she liked me: I reminded her of Arthur Miller, the playwright….
Mona moved in the magazine world, the world of fashion, restaurants, and nightclubs. She enhanced any gathering she was in. She was sweet, self-effacing, low in self-esteem, tinged with sadness. I doubt whether there was anyone who didn’t like her. As far as I know, she never connected in New York with any truly important magazine. Fascination was not first-rate, and soon folded.
If in “passing” she seemed to have lost some of her drive and intelligence, it probably was due to the pernicious effects of the thousand ploys one would have to indulge in…. In those times, it was a hopeless adventure leading nowhere.
I think she remained in my memory… because of the dramatic quality of her story, once it was revealed, and the suddenness of her untimely end. To me she was like a character out of a novel or a play, such as Edna Ferber’s “Julie” in Showboat.
When her roommate returned to New York one Sunday night after a weekend in Connecticut, she found Mona dead in bed. She called Mona’s sister in Detroit, who went with Uncle John’s wife “Cutie”-they both looked white-to claim the body and bring it back to Detroit for burial. They told Mona’s New York friends that the funeral would be private, trying to conceal her racial identity even in death. There was no obituary in the New York papers under her name or either of her pseudonyms. The death certificate lists “Mona Manet, writer, white, 865 First Avenue, Manhattan, age 35,” as having died of “congestion of the viscera.”
America was in the throes of a steel strike that weekend with 500,000 workers idle, 12,000 in Detroit. Louella Parsons was extolling the movie Pinky for “attacking a daring subject in a daring way. Jeanne Crain is superb as a Negro girl who realizes the folly of trying to pass as white.” In the movie Lost Boundaries Mel Ferrer was starring in the true story of a Negro doctor and his family who did “pass” in New Hampshire. Roxborough’s former rival for the Hopwood drama prize, Arthur Miller, had a box office and critical success with Death of a Salesman. The drama section of the New York Times, which she may have read on her last morning, featured University of Michigan professor Valentine Windt for directing a Shakespeare festival in New York. Windt had been Roxborough’s teacher in Ann Arbor and she had interviewed him for the Michigan Daily -but she would not have dared to approach him as “Mona Manet.” In Detroit, the American Weekly supplement to the Times contained an article on the numbers racket, noting that John Roxborough had served two years in the Jackson Federal Penitentiary (1944-46) for payoffs to police and city officials who had “protected” his business.
Elsie Roxborough’s final passing hit the front pages in Detroit’s black press. The weekly Michigan Chronicle spread a banner headline, “ELSIE ROXBOROUGH DIES,” and attributed the cause to nerves rather than suicide because she had left no note.
Whether she actually committed suicide will never be known. Her stockings were soaking in the wash bowl, a sign of her probable intention to go out the next day. She had telephoned family the previous week for money. Nevertheless, she may have desired to end her existence for a long time, like the unsuccessful writer-heroine Russell Terrill in her Hopwood entry, A World of Difference. Terrill has a speech on her wish for death:
When I go to bed at night, I don’t care whether I live until morning or not – most times I fall asleep praying for death. I feel all lost in a great vastness, and beaten…. I go through the usual automatic rituals, eating tasteless food, talking meaningless talk, laughing soulless laughter. I’m too much of a coward to really die – I’ve only prayed to sneak out in my sleep…. If I were only of some use to the world!
Elsie Roxborough knew that black Detroit expected much of her. The expectations she had for herself may have been even greater. Detroit had told her: you are the best; you have had every chance; here you are powerless; go elsewhere and shine brighter than the whites. So Roxborough maneuvered and schemed, wriggling through all the possibilities she could devise. Ambivalent about how to express herself racially, she may have wanted to communicate a message to both her white and black peers: “Be careful of appearances. People of both colors are talented and beautiful. We have hidden riches.” However, when she passed to a professionally acceptable identity, her writing as a “mixed” sensibility became garish, as in Fascination or maudlin, as in “Charming Escort” for Love Story. Elsie Roxborough had felt unique when she set off for Ann Arbor in 1933, as if all she had to do was play her cards right and the game was hers. But being Negro, she was programmed for failure. Barbara Christian has said of Jean Toomer, a light-skinned Negro fiction writer, that “as a result of the touching of two cultures [his] women’s lives are painfully truncated, their spirits abused and repressed.” Alice Walker has noted that Toomer’s intellectually repressed black women “stare out at the world wildly, like lunatics, or quietly, like suicides.”26 Like one of Toomer’s desperate women, Elsie Roxborough vigorously sought a way out, and then lost the gaiety and energy of her youthful ambition. It is ironic that both her suitors, Joe Louis and Langston Hughes, “made it” in the white world by pursuing their talents as Negroes, whereas Roxborough, aping whites, did not. Having lost the finest elements of her personality by choosing to pass, she could find no place out from under the long white shadow; there was “no such house at all.”