The Tongue Kindles a Great Fire in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s “Comedy: American Style”

Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Comedy: American Style opens with a description of Olivia Cary (née Blanchard), at the age of nine before she “had attained to that self-absorption and single-mindedness which were to to stamp her later life.” Preceding her “self-absorption,” Olivia thought about a text she read in Sunday School: “Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth” (James 3:5b). At first, the passage perplexes Olivia, but thinking about it further, she comes to the conclusion “that ‘the little fire’ was a match and ‘the great matter’ of course was a great fire.”

After that day, the narrator tells us that Olivia probably never thought about the verse again, letting it slip unnoticed from her mind. Even though she didn’t think back to this verse, a few years after that Sunday School lesson, “a little fire kindled for her a great matter with which she was destined to combat all her life.” The “little fire” that arose to spark a great flame was Olivia’s confronting the social constructions of race in a society steeped in white supremacy and ideals of success centered on race. Two incidents in her childhood led to this: a girl calling her a racial slur and a teacher, thinking Olivia is Italian, treats her negatively due to her supposed ethnicity.