Excerpt: But what if a more nuanced portrayal of their relationship, one that acknowledged that initial shock, existed?
If there’s a scene that proves that The Queen’s Gambit is fundamentally about the triumph of whiteness, it’s the very last one.
Our heroine Beth Harmon, who has overcome a life that began with her parents’ death at 7, adoption as a 12-year-old, and the obstacles facing a female chess player in midcentury America, steps out of the car in a Russian-inspired outfit (she’s in Moscow, having just defeated a formidable Russian chess champion and her biggest rival). Everything about it and her is white. She sports a white Ushanka-shaped hat, a striking contrast to her bright reddish-orange hair, a white coat and boots, her white skin and enormous hazel eyes and the pink pouty lips we’ve become accustomed to gleaming in the winter light. There might as well be snow swirling in the air, to accentuate the blinding, throbbing whiteness of her triumph.
Queen’s Gambit, based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel, was released as a limited, seven-part series in late October 2020, one of the few shows to make their debut in a year when production on most shows and films had been stalled due to the pandemic. Its enormous success was in part due to the scarcity of fare but also because, in a world so marked by #MeToo, its seemingly strong feminist statements appealed to viewers. Also appealing, doubtless, was its aesthetics, a combination of midcentury and mod (the plot moves from 1958 to 1968), and the fashion on display, as this gushy Vice review indicates.
Both the book and the series are about Beth Harmon who is placed in the Methuen Home for Girls at the age of eight, after the death of her mother. She has few friends there, with the exception of Jolene DeWitt, the only Black girl who is already twelve when Beth arrives (“difficult to place” to use the language of adoption agencies, whether human or animal).
Critical responses to the show have been overwhelmingly positive, but some, like Gloria Oladipo and Bethonie Butler rightly pointed out that Beth’s whiteness was accentuated by the tokenistic, “Magical Negro” figure embodied by Jolene who appears, disappears, and then reappears, each time serving to do little more than help the very white girl along her journey with all the Sassy Black Friend snappiness typical of such characters.
The critics are right, but Jolene’s presence is even more complicated when we consider some telling details about her and her relationship with Beth that did not make their way from the novel to the series. Jolene in the Netflix version is a product of a present-day tension between liberal wokeness and liberal racism (arguably, there’s not much difference between the two): the desire to provide “good representations” of non-white characters inevitably means that they are painted either as saviours or perfect embodiments of every virtue. And, really, who can blame creators for such? Any appearance of complicating flaws—or even the mere suggestion that non-white people are anything but perfect—and entire careers will roll like heads at a revolution’s guillotine. But Jolene’s role in the novel by Tevis is vastly more complicated and less reducible to a Magical Negro trope, a fact that’s particularly interesting given that the book was written in 1983, by a white man.
It is, in general, pointless to compare a novel to its screen adaptation. The requirements for each are different. Inevitably, a screenplay has to be paced differently than a book to allow for a more luxurious immersion in time, or characters have to be cut because they don’t quite fit the narrative thrust that emerges when a story has to be pared down for live action. And inevitably, no matter how hard creators of films and shows try to be faithful to the spirit of the text, there will be grumbling among die-hard fans of The Book. Fans have some right to be upset when changes mean going against the very spirit of a world they know and love. But, a book is a book and a film or a show is just that, and the two are different entities, requiring different modes of appraisal.
Except, of course, when the changes mean a difference in the worldview of a book and, in the case of Queen’s Gambit, an entirely different way of thinking about and through a critical matter like race. That the series Queen’s Gambit is markedly less successful on race than the book written nearly forty years ago reveals that while we’ve made significant progress on race and representation, we’ve also become even more mired in tokenism even as representations seem eager to do better. Not only is Jolene in the novel less of a token, her relationship with Beth is not the idealistically portrayed Best Black Friend and Chosen Family as it is in the series. The show has Jolene tell Beth she’s helping her because “I’m here because you need me to be here—that’s what family does, that’s what we are.” This trite rubbish does not exist in the novel, whose acidic Jolene would have sooner died than utter such lines. In the novel, Jolene exists with a complexity that cannot be sustained outside it, that cannot bear the burden of representation in today’s So Woke World where Blackness is relegated to simplistic tropes.
In Tevis’s novel, Jolene and Beth’s relationship is founded on a potentially explosive moment. Where a conventional novel of today might have focused on the defining trauma therein, Tevis’s narrative has the two girls moving on and away from that first encounter and becoming close friends who tease each other about their looks and their races. The result is a particularly complicated perspective on love, friendship, and race that contemporary audiences for a Netflix show would be unable to grasp (or, even if they were fine with it, they would be bullied out of their appreciation by online mobs).
In the series: Beth’s introduction to Jolene happens before they even meet physically: as she walks into Methuen for the first time, she hears Jolene screaming “Cocksucker!” at someone, and being taken away to have her mouth literally washed out with soap. It’s the 1950s, such disciplinary practices were not uncommon, and children were even routinely spanked or whipped. Institutions like Methuen also dosed their wards with tranquilisers every day (the practice has long been discontinued, having been domesticated by the use of drugs like Ritalin which parents and schools use regularly), and Beth ends up addicted to them.
One day, Beth stumbles upon Mr. Shaibel, the institution’s custodian, who spends much of his time in the basement playing chess—a game at which, it turns out, she’s a prodigy. Shaibel takes her under his wing, teaching her the basics and also encouraging her to play in public, making Beth something of a minor celebrity before she’s adopted at the age of 12. Her new parents are Alma Wheatley and her husband, only ever referred to as Mr. Wheatley. The former is soon deserted by the latter and when she realises that there’s considerable money to be made at chess tournaments, Mrs. Wheatley becomes a manager of sorts to Beth. The teen rapidly becomes a celebrity in the fullest sense, her picture and profiles splashed across magazines, the public and media riveted by the idea and the look of a young woman in possession of such formidable talent in a world dominated by men. She outgrows the bowl haircut mandated by Methuen and switches her boring orphan garb for high fashion, adding to her allure in the public eye (and allowing Netflix to go wild with styles and designs).
Alma dies of hepatitis during a trip to Mexico, and by then Beth is already a fully confident woman with enough money to buy out Mr. Wheatley’s stake in the house she was brought to live in as a child. But money can’t last forever. Beth has acquired an expensive drinking habit and an addiction to tranquilisers and she stumbles in some championships. She needs to get to Moscow for a chance to defeat Vasily Borgov, her most formidable opponent ever—who has already defeated her twice—and is able to fly out only because Jolene gives her money that she had been saving for law school, no mean feat for a young Black orphan woman in that era. Beth wins.
This is the story as presented by Netflix. The show wants desperately to be seen as feminist and anti-racist, in an era of #MeToo which is also a time when the Black Lives Matter movement forces the entertainment industry to at least feign interest in race and gender. Netflix’s solution is to imbue Beth’s speech with anachronistic turns, like her use of “fuck,” as when she tells her school bullies to fuck off, a peanut-gallery move (it’s highly unlikely that a real-life Beth would have been allowed to mouth off like that without repercussions—but we take our fantasies where we can get them). Jolene is allowed to derisively call Beth a “cracker,” and this is again done in a way that winks at the audience: Look, we let the Black girl talk back!* But none of this means very much because Jolene is still painted as the Sassy Black Friend and only serves as a foil to Beth’s ascension to fame and womanhood and, ultimately, transcendent whiteness.
In Tevis’s novel, Beth meets Jenny Baynes, an innocuous member of a gaggle of hangers on in a group that includes Townes and Benny, both stellar male chess players. In the show, it’s this group that eventually helps Beth win, by calling her, long distance, the night before her big tournament and showing her how to win. In the book, their advice only holds for a little while as Beth realises that Borgov is in fact an excellent player who cannot be restricted by the moves her friends have plotted out for her (please don’t ask me, not a chess player, to go into further details) but she calms down and says to herself, “I’ve always done things on my own,” and then proceeds to intelligently and brilliantly outmaneuver Borgov in a series of moves that even he has to admire.
The 1983 book, in other words, places the onus of her win squarely on Beth’s shoulders, a far more feminist, if you will, take on her genius at chess. The show, operating in a world still dominated by men and apparently unable to feel the freedom of existing in 2020 where a woman can bloody well succeed without the help of men, is compelled to attribute her success to them.
But there’s another crucial difference: in the show, Jenny has been transformed into Cleo, a sultry young French woman and model (Netflix leaves no cliché untouched) who follows Beth to Paris and shows up the evening before. She invites Beth to drink and the latter agrees, despite the fact that she has a very important tournament the next morning against Burgov. Already struggling with her addictions, the inevitable happens, Beth runs late, is muddled, and loses. As she rushes out of her room in the morning to get to the tournament, we see a glimpse of Cleo in the bed, makeup smudged and a dreamy smile on her face. The move to include a possible queer moment was widely applauded by outlets like The Advocate, but it’s in fact a displacement of another, much more provocative and even potentially explosive moment that exists in the novel: a moment that can be read as the sexual abuse of Beth by Jolene, years prior to Paris.
In Tevis’s narrative, in her time at Methuen Beth finds in Jolene a lone figure willing to show her how things operate, even if with a characteristic dry off-handedness, as seen in their first actual encounter:
“What’s your name, girl?” Jolene asked.
“Beth.”
“Your mother dead? What about your daddy?”
Beth stared at her. The words “mother” and “dead” were unbearable. She wanted to run but there was no place to run to.“Your folks,” Jolene said in a voice that was not unsympathetic,“they dead?”
Beth could find nothing to say or do. She stood in line terrified, waiting for the pills.
Jolene is resigned to life at Methuen, knowing full well she’s never likely to be adopted, as an older Black girl in a white-dominated world. One night, she steals into Beth’s bed (all the wards sleep in one large room), rubs her hand on the child’s genitals and then tries to make her do the same to her. Beth hates all of it, is “terrified,” and vocally refuses; the moment is interrupted when one of the wardens hears Jolene’s exasperated “Son of a bitch!”, comes to the door and looks in. Jolene quickly slips away but the next morning calls Beth a “white trash cracker bitch.” At that moment, Beth says nothing, “knowing it was true,” her sense of self-worth already broken by the experience of being without family or resources in a world where older, domineering wards can control her body and life. But when Jolene calls Beth “cracker” again, after a class—and, significantly, after Beth has gained an insight into how good she can be at chess—Beth this time fights back with her own word:
“Cracker!” Jolene hissed as they left history.
“Nigger,” Beth hissed back.
Jolene stopped and turned to stare back at her.
In the wake of their first furtive encounter, things ease between the two and they go back to being friends, in the kind of friendship that exists between people caught in an institution where people you care about come and go, where attachment to anyone is bound to end in heartbreak because they are adopted and whisked into a world where you may never see them again. Jolene is what all the wards refer to as a “lifer” and they live in fear of becoming one. One day, Beth watches a six-year-old named Alice leaving with her new adoptive parents, and “wanted to throw her arms around them, because they looked happy to her, but she turned away when they glanced at her.”
The best way to survive such a world is to develop a stone cold reticence, to train even your body to not display signs of attachment.
Given all this, Beth and Jolene form an unlikely camaraderie broken only when Beth is adopted out, two months short of her thirteenth birthday—Jolene is seventeen and by this time completely unadoptable. The day she leaves, Beth searches for her treasured copy of Modern Chess Moves, given to her by Shaibel, the only possession she cares about, and asks Jolene if she took it. “I got no use for a book like that” is the scoffing answer. Beth reaches out to touch Jolene, the closest version of a hug, but Jolen has already turned away.
In the series, Jolene shows up unexpectedly at Beth’s door one day because she somehow finds out that Beth has been in a spiral of addictions and, if left alone, might slip into a life of torpor or worse. In the book, Beth realises that she needs to get a handle on her drinking if she’s ever to play chess well again and tracks Jolene down to ask for help. This is a crucial difference that makes Jolene less a magical figure and more someone Beth missed and trusted, someone whose memory she had cherished all these years. When they finally meet, they are still playful with a fondness for each other and Beth “felt like crying, but kept the quaver out of her voice.” What follows is the banter between two people who know each other well. “Are you still ugly,” asks Jolene, to which Beth responds, “Are you still black?” Jolene is resplendent in a large Afro and a Chanel suit and as Beth looks at her across the table, she says “It’s good to see you” but, as the text notes, what she wanted to say was, “I love you.” Jolene returns Beth’s copy of Modern Chess Notes, admitting she had been “pissed at you being adopted.” “What about for being white,” asks Beth to which the response is, “Who could forget?”
Jolene proceeds to help get Beth back into physical and mental shape, something she’s qualified to do as a student on scholarship for a degree in Physical Education. But she also has bigger plans for herself, and is getting an M.S in political science. (In response to Beth’s stare, she responds casually, Honi soit qui mal y pense.) Jolene’s plan is to take up a very well-paying job at a law firm as a public relations executive: “What they want is a clean black woman with a nice ass and a good vocabulary. When I did the interview, I dropped a lot of words like ‘reprehensible’ and ‘dichotomy’ and they picked it right up.” She has no intention of following through on what her coaches and peers think is best for her: to work for years to become a pro athlete who might, at the end of the day, make a decent living. She knows enough to use her scholarship to get her closer to a job that pays much more, with a degree that will be more useful in a law firm that will, she notes, parade her presence as proof of their forward-thinking ways, but without needing to commit to hiring an actual Black, female lawyer.
The Netflix series diverges wildly from this: Jolene in this version is a paralegal at a law firm, and director Scott Frank has her mouth words that sound like they flew straight out of a middlingly eager paper for a Gender and Women’s Studies class: “The world is fucked up, and if I’m gon’ change it, I can’t spend all my time teaching white girls how to hold a badminton racket. I’m gonna be a radical.” And, because Frank and his team at Netflix, like the culture at large, clearly can’t conceive of a Black woman making her way up without using her sexuality, the series has Jolene hooked up with a married white lawyer at the firm, happy to enjoy the perks of the relationship which will be the major source of her comfort in life: her move upwards is defined by it. We might recall that Beth’s first encounter with Jolene was hearing her scream “Cocksucker!” In the book, it wasn’t even Jolene who screamed but a boy in the Boy’s Ward. But having Jolene be defined in so many different sexualised ways allows the show to pretend that she is a brave new figure in a brave new world of representation while in fact keeping her confined as The Sassy Black Friend.
In contrast, in the show, Beth’s explorations of sexuality are shown as liberated and interesting, and have nothing to do with her ascent upwards. She fucks men with little need to be attached to them, and this is presented as exploratory and a mark of her liberation (which, to be fair, it is). Jolene’s sexuality is presented as typical of Black women: in essence, the show gets away with portraying Beth as sexually free precisely because it reduces Jolene to a sexual and racial stereotype: showing up literally quite magically to save Beth, possessed of nothing more than her sexuality with which to create social mobility for herself.
That leaves us with the masturbation scene in the book, which is left out of the show. There’s a complexity to that encounter that cannot, at least in our current time, ever be allowed in film or cinema, unless creators want to be censured and doomed to perdition. It’s certainly a violation, but where contemporary film and television—or even, really, any novel written today—would feel compelled to either censure Jolene in some way, perhaps by visiting retribution upon her, or have us witness a tedious moment where she and Beth talk about it and engage in a moment of forgiveness, Tevis’s book leaves it where it is. And where it is is a moment in an environment where people are forced to seek what they can and deal with the consequences and move on. Might Jolene have done this to other children, either in the past or while Beth was still there? The ease with which she initiates the encounter and explains what she wants and what Beth might want during it, in sexual terms, tells us that this might be the case. But that the two go on to being friends, and that Beth loves her, deeply, also indicates that this is not something that broke the white girl. It is, of course, entirely possible, that it could have traumatised some other eight-year-old, but that did not happen in this case: that is not the novel that has been written. That doesn’t make it right or desirable, but what Tevis does is to say: this happened, and this is what happened after between them.
Walter Tevis was also the writer of, among other books, The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and The Colour of Money. All three were made into successful movies, each one only a couple of years after the publication of the novel form. But Queen’s Gambit took over two decades to find its place on the screen, and then notably as a series rather than a standalone film. At one point, Heath Ledger was interested in turning it into a film, but his death in 2008 stalled the process until it found a home at Netflix, which saw the potential for creating a faux-feminist classic. Part of the issue may well have been that it’s hard to make a film or series based on a book that is so much about the mental workings of a chess genius. The novel is spare and concise, much like Beth’s contemplations on chess, and that’s hard to represent. Netflix’s big budget solution is to dramatise the hair, makeup, and interiors to grand scale. Midcentury modern as a style became particularly popular in the wake of Mad Men (dashing the hopes of those of us who relished finding lovely furniture from the period around dumpsters), and Queen’s Gambit furthered that public interest. Netflix took an inward-driven narrative and turned it into a costume drama laced with #MeToo feminism.
The Netflix version of Queen’s Gambit exists in a time of Black Lives Matter and a larger, more widespread concern for and consideration of Black history and what representations of Blackness should look like. Mainstream film and television have barely begun to emerge from a century of terrible and often demeaning stereotypes, but at this current moment in time we’re stuck in a groove of overcompensation. For every brilliant Get Out, there’s a Black Panther so filled with what the industry would consider positive representations that viewing becomes tiresome and boring. And then there’s the very real problem that the entertainment industry is still controlled by white directors, producers, and writers. I suspect that part of the difficulty for mostly white writers and directors seeking to dramatise the novel was to understand the relationship between Jolene and Beth which must have, to put it plainly, freaked them out given that early sexual encounter.
Netflix’s solution there was to erase that initial sexual moment and turn Jolene into the kind of Black BFF who could be relied upon to magically solve every problem and then conveniently disappear. Combine that with the toxicity of social media and it’s likely that no matter what, any representation of the book’s relationship between Jolene and Beth where the former was not represented as a predator and the latter as a broken victim would have been met with a vicious backlash against the network. It’s also likely that Jolene’s initial violation of Beth would immediately have been angrily described as yet another stereotype of Black women as rapacious sexual predators (examples of which unfortunately abound). For these reasons, in one sense, Magical Negro was the only alternative left to Netflix and the series was written by a white man apparently incapable of conceiving a Black character outside of a familiar trope. But what if a more nuanced portrayal of their relationship, one that acknowledged that initial shock, existed?
I write, perhaps longingly, about this because the friendship between the two in the book is so stirring and humane and complex. In Tevis’s novel, Jolene is Beth’s lodestar. When she leaves Methuen with the Wheatleys, she wishes Jolene were alongside her:
If only Jolene could see it. For a moment, she felt like crying for Jolene, she wanted Jolene to be there, going around the room with her while they looked at all the furniture and then hung Beth’s clothes in the closet.
In the car, Mrs. Wheatley had said how glad they were to have an older child. Then why not adopt Jolene? Beth had thought. But she said nothing. She looked at Mr. Wheatley with his grim-set jaw and his two pale hands on the steering wheel and then at Mrs. Wheatley and she knew they would never have adopted Jolene.
Tevis here alludes to race without being heavy-handed about it: the book’s observations about Beth and the world and people are around her have this kind of brevity that, in today’s world of message-laden fiction would not do well with readers who tend to want more ponderous reflections rather than such glancing yet revelatory and quick passages. But in that excerpt above we see a multitude of complex realities: that Beth loves Jolene, and that Beth also understands Jolene’s situation as well as the contempt, at the very least, that could beset her (“his grim-set jaw and his two pale hands on the steering wheel”).
The book and the show end with Beth in Moscow, and we’re left to imagine where her life might go next. In the world of the novel, we are left to imagine that her friendship with Jolene might continue to grow as she understands her own capacity for risk: it took a lot for an orphan girl left without the security of gaining reciprocity in feelings to reach out to someone from so long ago, to feel it was okay to have kept loving her. What is friendship if not the feeling that someone is a home to which we can return? In the world of the series, Jolene is reduced to a version of the perennial mammy figure, there to provide a bosom when Beth needs to cry and to whom she hands over her life savings. The show erases Jolene, while the novel gives us hope for relationships sustained over and against the complexities of ugly beginnings and the ugliness of racism itself. In the world that the show Queen’s Gambit gives us, Blackness can only exist in the service of whiteness and so Jolene is not allowed to be anything but a maternal yet highly sexualised cipher. In the novel by Tevis, Jolene emerges as a knowing, fully rendered figure who can code-switch with alacrity, speaks French, is brilliant enough to be enrolled in two academic programs, and has an amused disdain for white people’s eagerness to accommodate Black people only so long as they remain tokens for display. The brief sexual encounter with Beth doesn’t end their relationship: the child’s resistance and their initial expressed hostility towards each other allow them to move on to a deep friendship. With Netflix’s erasure of Jolene, we gain a showy period piece with style and fashion, but we lose a world where Blackness exists in all its complexity without having to defer to whiteness.
****
*Many thanks to Trevor Beaulieu of Champagne Sharks for reminding me of this point.
My thanks to Liz Baudler and Matt Simonette for taking the time to read this and shape it into what it is (any problems remaining are mine alone, not theirs). And I especially thank Liz for having persuaded me, persistently, to read the book, despite my reluctance. The experience made for an infinitely richer and more complex piece than the one I started out to write.
Image: Olympia by Édouard Manet, 1863.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
