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Intro
On New Year’s Eve in 1933, Max Disher and his friend Bunny Brown go to the popular Honky Tonk Club in New York City. Max tries to ask a beautiful blonde girl from Atlanta to dance, but she cruelly rebuffs him because he is Black. The next day, Bunny tells him about an old friend of theirs, Dr. Crookman, who has discovered a treatment to turn Black Americans white. The treatment, called “Black-No-More,” changes a Black person’s skin, hair, and features in three days to make them indistinguishable from white people—though it will not change the features of any babies the person might have. Max resolves to be one of the first people to get the treatment, particularly because he can then go seek out the beautiful blonde woman.
After undergoing the treatment, Max is excited by his newfound freedom and assurance as a white man, though he soon realizes that white society is quite dull. But with thousands of people lining up for the treatment, society is changing. Black businesses are starting to worry about losing customers, and people are leaving Harlem in droves now that they no longer face housing discrimination like they did when they were Black. Max tells Bunny that he’s going back to Atlanta to find the blonde girl and tells Bunny to meet him there.
Meanwhile, Black and white elites are both trying to shut down Black-No-More: white people are trying to maintain what they consider to be their racial purity and white supremacy. Black activists preach racial solidarity, and they are also worried about losing support for the Back-to-Africa movement or the money white people donate to their organizations when Black people face discrimination or violence. At the same time, Black-No-More has made Crookman and his associates, Charles Foster and Hank Johnson, incredibly wealthy, and they bribe politicians to prevent them from passing any legislation that would close their sanitariums.
Max Disher (who has now changed his name to Matthew Fisher), arrives in Atlanta but can’t find the blonde girl. Recognizing white people’s growing alarm at African Americans joining their ranks, Matthew realizes he can profit off of this hatred. He gets involved with a white supremacist group called the Knights of Nordica, founded by the Reverend Henry Givens, by convincing Givens that he is an anthropologist from New York and by giving impassioned speeches on white people’s biological superiority. He quickly earns Givens’s trust and becomes his second-in-command, growing their membership and their treasury. Matthew also learns that Givens’s daughter, Helen, is the beautiful blonde girl from the Honky Tonk, and Matthew quickly courts and marries her.
A few weeks after the wedding, Bunny arrives in Atlanta and finds Matthew—Bunny has recently become white, too. Matthew immediately hires Bunny as his assistant, and they conspire to stop political progress in either direction. The longer they can draw out a fight between those in favor of and those against Black-No-More, the more members the Knights of Nordica can gain—and the more money Matthew can make.
Soon, white women start having Black babies because either they or their husbands used to be Black, unbeknownst to their partners. As a result, Crookman opens lying-in hospitals (i.e., maternity hospitals) where women can give birth and then turn the infant white immediately after birth. As a result, alarm spreads throughout the country and people pour into Knights of Nordica meetings, aiming to preserve racial purity.
Soon after, Matthew faces a new challenge: now that white workers (many of whom are Knights) do not fear companies firing them in favor of hiring cheaper Black laborers, they start to organize. Matthew uses this to his advantage, taking bribes from factory managers to stop white workers from organizing. Matthew then starts rumors among the workers that there are Black people among them, leading to infighting that prevents them from unionizing and raising their wages.
A presidential election looms. Because so many of the formerly Black people have better access to voting as white people, the conservative Democrats worry that the Republicans might carry the South and win in a landslide. Matthew comes up with a plan to prevent this, teaming up with the wealthy Anglo-Saxon Association (headed by Arthur Snobbcraft) to raise funds for the campaign while the Knights of Nordica bring in the votes. After some political maneuvering, Matthew convinces the delegates at the Democratic National Convention to nominate Rev. Givens for president and Snobbcraft for vice president; they run on a platform of using genealogical tests to determine who can vote. Meanwhile, the Republicans re-nominate the current president, Harold Goosie.
The political campaign is long and bitter: on the Democratic side are “pure” white people, while Republican supporters are those who either suspect or know for sure that they are “impure.” Snobbcraft comes up with a plan to help sway people to their side, asking statistician Samuel Buggerie to make a report on people’s ancestry that would be so shocking that people would have to vote for the Democrats to adopt their plank of using genealogical examinations to determine the right to vote. Buggerie aims to release the report just a few days before the election. Meanwhile, Crookman and his men donate money to the Republican cause.
About a month before the election, Matthew reveals to Bunny that Helen is pregnant and due in three weeks, and he doesn’t know what to do because she wants to have the baby at home—but it will almost certainly be Black. Bunny counsels him to get a plane and some money ready and to tell Helen the truth—if she doesn’t take it well, Matthew can flee, and if she does, then all is well.
Soon the Knights of Nordica grow violent, setting fire to one of Crookman’s lying-in hospitals and killing 12 babies. Many of the women who flee the burning hospital are socially prominent, and this fact scandalizes the nation, prompting even more support for the Democrats. Desperate for a plan of attack, the Republicans learn about Buggerie’s ancestry project and plan to steal the research so that he can’t publish it. But two days before the election, Buggerie reveals to Snobbcraft that his research shows many of the most prominent politicians have Black ancestry—including Givens and Snobbcraft themselves. Heading to the vault where they are keeping the research, Snobbcraft and Buggerie soon discover that someone has stolen Buggerie’s research and his summary showing the list of politicians that have Black ancestry.
The day before the election, Helen gives birth to a Black baby. But before Matthew can explain himself, Givens comes in with a paper, which has published a story about his and Snobbcraft’s ancestry. He tells them that an angry mob chased him home and that they are all in danger. Helen begs Matthew to stick by her, thinking that her ancestry is the reason the baby is Black, and Matthew forgives her. He reveals that he was formerly Black and that he is actually the reason for their baby’s skin color. He is relieved to tell the truth, and he, Helen, Bunny, and Givens all resolve to take his plane out of the country.
Meanwhile, Snobbcraft and Buggerie attempt to do the same thing, hiring a man to fly them to Mexico to avoid an angry mob. But the plane doesn’t have enough gas and crashes in Mississippi, and Snobbcraft and Buggerie decide that their best course of action is to use shoe polish to blacken their faces and arms so that people don’t recognize them from the newspapers.
However, the first town they come upon, Happy Hill, Mississippi, is notorious for lynching, and a pastor named Alex McPhule has taken over the town and convinced the townspeople that God is going to send them a sign on Election Day. On that day, when Snobbcraft and Buggerie approach the town, the townspeople (thinking they are Black) attack the two men until they pull off the men’s clothes and see that they are actually white. However, after Snobbcraft and Buggerie clean up, the townspeople recognize them from the papers and because they have Black ancestry, the people brutally mutilate them, shoot them, and burn them alive.
The Republicans are elected in a landslide. Soon after, Crookman publishes a paper explaining that his treatment actually turned African Americans a few shades whiter than “pure” white people. As a result, makeup products spring up to darken people’s complexion to prove that they are white, a trend which now makes most people look Black. In the book’s final scene, Crookman sees a picture of the Givens and Fisher family vacationing in Cannes—all of them looking as dark as Matthew Fisher Jr.
