For the most part, [McPherson has been] able to look beneath skin color and clichés of attitude into the hearts of his characters…. This is a fairly rare ability in American fiction where even the most telling kind of perception seldom seems able to pass an invisible color line. Black writers—with the exception of Ralph Ellison—too often see white characters as some configuration of externals, and white writers, perhaps even more grossly, have done the same with blacks.

In McPherson's title story [from his second collection of short stories, "Elbow Room"] Virginia is the wife in an interracial marriage that has proved to be a ruinous struggle for a kind of psychological synthesis. With bitter humor she says: "When times get tough, anybody can pass for white. Niggers been doing that for centuries…. But wouldn't it of been something to be a nigger that could...