Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 73

Miss Em’s Voyeuristic Gaze of P in k y

69

the] mulatto being ... a neither/nor proposition.” In the North, Pinky (played by
Jeanne Crain) “passes” as white, pursues a nursing career; and finds romance with
a white physician. Motivated either by guilt for having abandoned her black grand
mother whose labor as a washerwoman had enabled Pinky to attend nursing school,
or by the need to reconnect herself with her past, to feel complete, whole, or be
longing, Pinky returns to the South, Mississippi. She finds her black grandmother.
Dicey (played by Ethel Waters), in a dilapidated shack, hanging clothes on the front
yard. Dicey fails to recognize her granddaughter, mistaking Pinky for white. The
lack of recognition and acceptance of each other becomes the basis for the conflict
that follows - as white/whiteness is juxtaposed against black/blackness.
Racialized Spaces
Q