The Intuitionist

“Because her father taught her that white folks can turn on you at any moment. She fears for her life in O’Connor’s because she believes that the unexpected scrape of a chair across the floor or a voice’s sudden intensity contains the potentiality of a fight.”

While the previous quote illustrates the ever-present racial anxiety experienced by Lila Mae, this quote shows that the anxiety goes far beyond enduring uncomfortable comments by individuals like Big Billy. In O’Connor’s, where alcohol flows freely and where Lila Mae is frequently the only Black person, the racial tensions can quickly erupt into a matter of life and death. Whitehead renders this vividly by investing enormous suspense in otherwise trivial details like a chair scraping across the floor.

“Did Pompey resent Lila Mae for presenting them with a more exotic token, thus diluting their hatred toward him, the hatred that had calcified over time into something he came to cherish and savor as friendship; or were his haughty stares and keen disparagements his attempt at a warning against becoming him, and thus an aspect of racial love?”

Lila Mae’s relationship to Pompey is one of the most illuminating character dynamics in the book. She reduces him to a conciliatory “Uncle Tom” figure, thereby completely misinterpreting his reasons for resenting her. As Lila Mae will discover later in the novel, Pompey’s resentment toward her is rooted in something far simpler: He was the first Black elevator inspector, and Lila Mae never acknowledged how much harder he had it than she did.

“The neighborhood is changing again. Its meaning blurs at the edges as white people return, obeying the city’s rules of teeming density and insidious rents. Only the real estate agents, who understand that meaning is elastic, know the borders of the neighborhood for sure, modulating their sales pitches to reassure their clients that they are not moving into the colored neighborhood, but into the farther reaches of the adjacent white neighborhood.”

Although Black people enjoy greater opportunities in the narrative’s unnamed city than they do elsewhere in the country, there remain spoken and unspoken limits on where these individuals may rent and purchase homes. The elevator may have enabled such comparatively “progressive” cities to emerge, but the real estate agents still serve as gatekeepers, keeping the city segregated without the need for the Jim Crow laws which exist farther South. This is indicative of the practice of “redlining” in American cities throughout the 20th century, which robbed Black Americans of generations of inherited wealth by freezing them out of the higher-value real estate markets.

“One of the side effects of people intent on erasing you from their lives is that sometimes they erase you when it might not be beneficial.”

Throughout the narrative, Lila Mae uses her invisibility as a Black woman to her advantage. This is particularly evident later in the book when she hides in plain sight at the Funicular Follies simply by wearing a kitchen staff uniform. It is only when a Black person steps out of their societal role that they are truly seen by white society. While that is a dehumanizing dynamic, it is also something that Black characters can exploit.

“Verticality is such a risky enterprise.”

In The Intuitionist, elevators and elevation are metaphors for racial uplift. Introduced by turn-of-the-century Black elites like W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, racial uplift ideology stipulates that Black communities are responsible for lifting themselves up, particularly through the efforts of a community’s most educated and wealthy members. While there is promise to this ideology, there are also enormous perils; for example, placing the burden of uplift onto Black communities alone lets policymakers and white America more broadly off the hook, despite the disproportionate amount of power and responsibility they hold for establishing the racial dynamics in America. What also makes uplift a “risky enterprise” is the fact that Black advancement is usually met with a fierce and often violent backlash from whites.

“Dressed, she’s in front of the mirror. Armed. She puts her face on. In her case, not a matter of cosmetics, but will. How to make such a sad face hard? It took practice.”

Lila Mae’s practice of “put[ting] her face on” is another illustration of the double consciousness phenomenon. It is an effort to wield some control over how the world sees her. Moreover, in transforming her sad face into one that projects toughness, Lila Mae shows how the despair American racism causes calcifies into a hardness, as she arms herself against painful, dehumanizing barbs.

“They sent Pompey to sabotage the elevator stack in the Fanny Briggs building, Lila Mae is sure of that. It would have appeased their skewed sense of harmony to pit their two coloreds against each other.”

For all of Lila Mae’s shrewdness and resiliency, there are significant blind spots in her worldview, none of them more glaring than her estimation of Pompey. Her inability to see him as anything more than an Uncle Tom caricature causes her to rule out all other possibilities pertaining to the Fanny Briggs crash. In doing so, she deprives Pompey of agency, as if he is merely a pawn in white men’s games. Ironically, the white men at the Guild do not have to “pit [Lila Mae and Pompey] against each other” ; they do that on their own as they cope with painfully fraught racial dynamics.

“I’m all for your people. You might not think so, but I am. I’m all for colored progress, but gradual. You can’t do everything overnight—that would be chaos.”

This line, spoken by Chancre, is indicative of attitudes held by Northern “progressive” whites in mid-century America. Chancre may support racial equity to a greater extent than, say, an openly segregationist Senator in the South, but he still wants to impose limits on Black Americans’ capacity for uplift. This is why Lila Mae is so eager to locate “the black box,” which will supposedly herald a “second elevation” by which Black Americans will vault ahead and finally capture equal rights and opportunities. This “second elevation,” however, turns out to be a mere illusion.

“She thinks, these white men see her as a threat but refuse to make her a threat, cunning, duplicitous. They see her as a mule, ferrying information back and forth, not clever or curious enough to explore the contents. Brute. Black.”

In another example of the double consciousness phenomenon, Lila Mae observes how others see her and underestimate her. Although she acknowledges the advantages of being underestimated, she also feels the acute pain that comes with dehumanization. This is symbolized by the fact that, no matter how many times her apartment is searched, the interlopers never discover the safe behind the painting, which contains artifacts of her true identity.

“When they walk into town she makes him walk closely behind her, she clutches him behind her back, as if to shield him from the eyes of the white people. As if she thought they would see him and take him away from her. She does it less now that he is older and taller, but it seems to him it was always unnecessary. The white people do not see colored people, even in broad daylight, in the middle of town.”

Like Lila Mae, Fulton identifies a measure of safety in being unseen. However, his mother knows better, aware as she is of the incongruity of a Black woman walking with a white-passing young boy. This incongruity can lead to danger for her and her child, even though it is the white people whose prejudice causes them to fear for their safety.

“Fulton a spy in white spaces, just like she is. But they are not alike. She’s colored.”

It takes the entire last half of the book for Lila Mae to grapple with the discovery that Fulton was Black. At first, she feels only limited kinship with him, given his ability to navigate white spaces while being taken for white himself. Yet the more she re-reads his work and the more she learns about his true attitude toward Intuitionism and elevation, she comes to realize that passing as white comes with its own psychological difficulties. They may both be “sp[ies] in white spaces,” but he is the one living a lie.

“Fulton’s nigresence whispered from the binding of the House’s signed first editions, tinting the disciples’ words, reconnoting them. Only she could see it, this shadow. She had learned to read and there was no one she could tell.”

Through the act of re-reading Fulton’s texts within the context of his newly discovered Blackness, Lila Mae develops what she later calls a “new literacy” (230). This linkage between literacy and empowerment is important to antebellum slave narratives and post-slavery racial uplift ideology, both of which Whitehead recalls here. Crucially, Lila Mae develops this literacy in secret, reminiscent of the anti-literacy laws in the South, which prohibited teaching enslaved people to read or write.

“They do not see her. The colored help brings the food and clears the tables, the white waiters refill the drinks. They ask the white waiters about the action at the cocktail bar, but do not ask the colored help for anything except for what they offer from the hors d’oeuvre tray. Food.”

To the white guests at the Funicular Follies, Lila Mae and the other members of the Black kitchen staff are virtually invisible. To the extent that they are seen at all, the cooks and waiters are viewed as little more than fixtures dispensing food. Once again, Lila Mae uses this invisibility to her advantage, remaining anonymous even though she is atop the Guild’s most wanted list. Advantageous or not, Lila Mae’s anonymity is a dispiriting reminder of how her white colleagues view her.

“Lila Mae does not mention it either, telling herself it is because she does not know the silent women she has been working with, whom she has not talked to all evening for her concentration on the Follies. She tricks herself that that is why she does not mention what she has seen, tells herself it is because she is undercover and speaking to them might trip her up, a dozen other reasons. She thinks the other women are so beaten that they cannot speak of the incident, when all of them, Lila Mae included, are silent for the same reason: because this is the world they have been born into, and there is no changing that.”

After the hideously racist minstrel show, the Black women of the kitchen staff go on working as if they didn’t just witness an abject assault on their dignity. Initially, Lila Mae views herself as separate from these women—assertive, confident, and unwilling to stay silent in the face of such insults and horrors. Yet her justifications for keeping quiet fall flat, as she realizes she is as “beaten” as they are, inured to the indignities visited upon them daily by a culture of white supremacy.

“She laughed. She laughed at Chancre’s fat ass as it lolled in agony on the stage. Laughed at the drunken rallying of her colleagues as they rushed to help their leader, the foolishness of the Intuitionist campaign and Mr. Reed’s Continental affectations. She laughed because Fulton was colored and no one knew and now she had an ally. Her laughter ceased at the thought of Natchez, resolving into a steady grin. The thought of him and their secret.”

Throughout The Intuitionist, Whitehead’s characters engage in what scholars and journalists like Touré call “Black irony”—laughing at racial injustice as a way to reclaim one’s emotional response to it. Lila Mae’s laughter is especially cathartic because it comes immediately after the horrific minstrel show, which drew guffaws from the white audience. Chancre’s pratfall may seem like a rather shallow source of humor, but it is illustrative of a more sophisticated satirical commentary on the general absurdity facing Lila Mae and the other Black characters.

“Not a lot of elevators in this neighborhood. This is the place verticality indicts, the passed-over flatlands, what might as well still be forest and field.”

Once again, the limitations of racial uplift are evident in the metaphor of a neighborhood without elevators. Even Lila Mae and Pompey, who have fought their way into the Elevator Inspectors’ Guild—the most elite of white spaces—are relegated to a neighborhood the city’s builders have left behind. For all their success arbitrating big city verticality, Lila Mae and Pompey feel like they’re still in the wilderness of “forest and field.”

“The race sleeps in this hectic and disordered century. In this dream of uplift, they understand that they are dreaming the contract of the hallowed verticality, and hope to remember the terms on waking. The race never does, and that is our curse. The human race, she thought formerly. Fulton has a fetish for the royal ‘we’ throughout Theoretical Elevators. But now—who’s ‘we’?”

This is a stark example of how Fulton’s literature takes on whole new meanings once Lila Mae learns he was Black. Words that may have held merely metaphorical resonance to the matter of racial uplift now seem to comment on the phenomenon explicitly. Fulton characterizes racial uplift as even less potent than a mere illusion; rather, it is a dream whose terms cannot even be recalled when one’s eyes are open.

“Don’t talk to me about oath. I got two boys.”

Pompey tears through Lila Mae’s entire worldview with this succinct rejoinder. For a man who doesn’t want to raise his kids in an environment he views to be dangerous and toxic, oaths and duty are things Pompey cannot afford. It is in this scene that Lila Mae starts to question her allegiances, as well as her assumptions about Pompey.

“Did you think this was all about philosophy? Who’s the better man—Intuitionism or Empiricism? No one really gives a crap about that. Arbo and United are the guys who make the things. That’s what really matters.”

In one of the book’s bigger reveals, Urich explains that the battle for the soul of elevation is not between Intuitionism and Empiricism; it’s between two competing corporations. Lila Mae may have thought she was fighting on philosophical fronts, but in reality she is merely a pawn in a profit war between two giants. This is consistent with Whitehead’s theme that racial justice efforts will usually take a backseat to greed for those who are powerful enough to make a difference.

“No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man’s books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time.”

Again, Whitehead links literacy to empowerment, doing so here in even more explicit terms. He invokes anti-literacy laws in place across the antebellum South, which enslaved people contravened in secret. Yet despite the centrality of literacy to racial uplift narratives, Lila Mae’s “new literacy” will give her the tools to see through uplift as a sufficient liberation strategy.

“She thinks, what passing for white does not account for: the person who knows your secret skin, the one you encounter at that unexpected time on that quite ordinary street. What Intuitionism does not account for: the catastrophic accident the elevator encounters at that unexpected moment on that quite ordinary ascent, the one who will reveal the device for what it truly is.”

Even the perfect elevator—or, by metaphorical extension, the perfect racial uplift strategy—can fall victim to “the catastrophic accident.” By revealing the cause of the elevator’s freefall to be purely cosmic in nature, rather than the result of sabotage, Whitehead subverts the traditional detective novel trope in which all is cleverly explained. For Lila Mae, there is no satisfying answer to the mystery of the Fanny Briggs disaster, just as there is no satisfying answer to the book’s more psychological and philosophical questions.

“Pompey gave them a blueprint for colored folk. How they acted. How they pleased white folks. How eager they would be for a piece of the dream that they would do anything for massa. She hated her place in their world, where she fell in their order of things, and blamed Pompey, her shucking shadow in the office. She could not see him anymore than anyone else in the office saw him.”

Here, Lila Mae acknowledges the part she plays in her and Pompey’s shared resentment toward one another. Rather than consider the larger cultural reasons for Pompey’s behavior, Lila Mae sees him through the same lens her white colleagues do. It is a startling example of how the higher-ups at the Guild need not turn Lila Mae and Pompey against one another; the racial dynamic of the office is enough to do that.

“Lila Mae knew he was joking because he hated himself. She understood this hatred of himself; she hated something in herself and she took it out on Pompey. Now she could see Fulton for what he was. There was no way he believed in transcendence. His race kept him earthbound, like the stranded citizens before Otis invented his safety elevator. There was no hope for him as a colored man because the white world will not let a colored man rise, and there was no hope for him as a white man because it was a lie.”

The notion that Intuitionism is simply Fulton’s “joke” is another important example of Black irony. Fulton copes with staggering racial injustice by telling what he views as the biggest joke of all: that white America would ever allow Black America to achieve racial uplift. Yet Lila Mae seems to suggest that the line between a “joke” and a “lie” is very slim.