[1 of 5] Say I'm Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and love (2020) by E. Dolores Johnson Prologue, Chapters 1-4
Author: E. Dolores Johnson
Johnson, E. Dolores. “Prologue," "Code Switch," "Dress Box," "Lonely Only," "My Whole Self.” Say I’m Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love, Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago, IL, 2020, pp. 2–44.
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For Mama and Jennifer, my fellow travelers
"He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another."
—W. E. B. DuBois,
The Souls of Black FolksParagraph 2 0
Nov 18I choose the quote by -W.E.B DuBois which states, “He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.” and this basically stuck out to me because I felt like this was 100% true. No matter how you live or what you do there will be judgment, basement, and degradation to your every move. It seems impossible to live in this generation and be your actual self, its either code switching, or hiding true emotions or feeling or just blatantly being something you’re not just to fit in. The society promotes being different and being yourself but when your actually living in it and experiencing the harsh reality of life, you start to become less and less of yourself till the point where you as a person are not recognisable no more.
Dec 16Paul A's Question Paul A and/or Excerpt Selector : Overarching Question: How do the authors use narrative techniques to reveal the complexities of social justice and belonging? moreExcerpt Selector with Paul A's edits:Excerpt SelectorSelect text. Create an overarching question.Excerpt from Chapter 2
The middle school my parents sent me to was a public one known for its demanding academic standards. The school attracted a diverse mix of students—African Americans, Chinese Americans, Italian Americans, and others—reflecting the racial and cultural melting pot that our city was. Despite this diversity, there were still strong lines of division when it came to social interactions. It was not just a matter of who sat with whom at lunch; even group projects were predominantly formed along racial lines. My parents, particularly my father, always insisted that I cross these boundaries frequently and purposefully.
Their insistence was not just about getting along with others; it was a political statement in a society that often prefers its racial lines in neat boxes. Each interaction became a cultural negotiation and a learning point, introducing me to a world beyond the convenience of identity-based affiliations. For my father, a man who had navigated racial divides all his life, these lessons were essential. He believed vehemently that my education should extend beyond textbooks to include experiences that would teach me empathy and balance.
There was one after-school event, a debate club meeting, when I realized the power of my own voice. Learning to articulate my point of view not only in class but also in debates where students were challenged to argue both sides of an issue was empowering. Here was a space where what I said could bridge divides, balancing an abstract understanding of justice with real-world implications. It was my first understanding of belonging through dialogue, a fleeting glimpse of social justice in action.
Excerpt from Chapter 3
A story my mother told me stays with me to this day. She would mention, often without prompting, how difficult it was for her to stay silent when she had something important to say. Growing up, my mother always emphasized the power of voice, not just in terms of speaking, but in expressing your thoughts and beliefs with clarity and purpose. This was her way of teaching me about advocacy and action while navigating systems crafted to keep voices like ours marginalized.
My mother worked as a school teacher in West Virginia, during a time when schools were just beginning to integrate. She recounted with vivid clarity the sense of being an outsider, despite doing her level best to fit in and be accepted. Her school needed her because of their requirement to hire more Black teachers in an effort to show progress towards integration. Yet, the positions of power within the school were still firmly held by the old guard who did not take kindly to her presence.
Through perseverance, a few quiet rebellions, and undeniable competence as a teacher, she slowly began to earn respect—if not belonging—among her peers. Her was an unending challenge of upholding social justice in an environment seeped in passive hostility. The pivotal lesson she imparted to me was the significance of persistence over aggression, a way to both maintain her dignity and demand justice at the same time.
Excerpt from Chapter 4
Being a part of an interracial family came with its own set of challenges and adaptations, the depth of which I only began to understand as I aged. Family gatherings were an intricate dance of codeswitching, shifting dialects, and cultural references that required vertiginous leaps across chasms of misunderstanding or miscommunication. The different parts of my family had their own traditions, their own stories, and often, their own grievances—carrying forward legacies that were too heavy to entirely reconcile into a single narrative.
Festive occasions were where I felt it the most. There were my father’s smiling nods of acknowledgement across the dinner table, where small gestures were loaded with unspoken meaning. There was my mother, constantly trying to smooth over any signs of discomfort with humor or strategically shifting the conversation. In those moments, I became acutely aware of the diversity of my own heritage and the space between belonging and being an outsider, even within my own family.
The boundary between social justice and the struggle for belonging seemed blurry at these gatherings. Conversations would sometimes drift to contentious social topics—civil rights, education, economic opportunity—and I began to notice the ways my parents had carefully curated a sense of belonging among people who naturally resisted merging. They never seemed quite settled into any one world, a condition imparted to their offspring, but there was a certain freedom, albeit fragile, in straddling these worlds.
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Nov 15“He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another’ -W.E.B. DuBois The Soul Of Black Folks
In W.E.B. Dubois’s quote, he states that “He must be himself, and not another” but when you look up the rest of the quote he states that “to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem.” and from what I’ve read just now he is saying that if you are wearing a mask or trying to be another than you, yourself want ever attain what you want in this world.
"Everything can't be explained by some general biological phrase."
—Nella Larsen, Passing
PROLOGUE
It was sticky hot at nine o'dock that morning in Greenvile, South Carolina I was in my office, a corporate outpost in a sparsely setted section oftown, sitting on a sleepy two-lane road dotted with intermittent nondescript buildings, a gas station, and thick rows of crops in patchwork fields. I readied files for customer appointments and stuffed them into my briefcase.
As I ran down the outdoor steps to the company car, the sweat on my back stuck my sheath dress to me like a bathing suit. When the car's air-conditioning kicked in, I mopped myself up with a wad of Kleenex and tried to smooth my hair, now rising like a dandelion seed head.
At the gas station across the road where the company had an account, the white gas man sauntered over. With a head bob and a grin, he started the fill-up. While pretending to wash the windshield, he stared through it instead, sizing me up, leaving water streaks across the glass.
It was the mid-1970s, when civil rights gains hadn't sunk in much in the small-town South. I had to ask myself what a black New Yorker like me was doing in that foreign land of rifle racks in pickup trucks, proudly displayed Confederate flags, and a local university that didn't let blacks set foot on campus. I was twenty-six and had moved there with my husband despite my father's warning that I didn't understand the ways of the South, the South his family had escaped in the 1930s during the Great Migration. But I was a love-struck bride, so I went anyway, thinking my husband's better job was our step up.
The gas man replaced the nozzle and came around to the driver's side. As I started the engine, ready to sign the bill, he stuck his head too close to my open window.
"You been comin' in here regular, gal," he said, his stale smoker's breath so strong I turned my head a moment. "I been a-looking at you and a-wondering, what are you anyway? You Spanish?"
"No." I refused to meet his eyes.
"Eye-talian, right? You're Eye-talian."
"No." How I hated it when people started this guessing game about which box my looks fit in.
"Injun?"
"No."
"You ain't a Jew, is you?"
"No."
"Then what? Tell me."
"Black," I said loudly to the windshield. "I'm black."
He whooped and jumped back from the car, then cupped his hands and yelled across the pumps to another attendant. "Hey Joe, come here and lookit this gal. She says she black.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a middle-aged white woman in an old Chevy at the next pump turn, craning to see what he was talking about.
"Get on out of that car so I can take a good look at you," he said, talking to me in a tone I imagined he saved just for blacks, demanding and superior, as though I had to obey. He reached for the driver's door handle to pull it open.
I swung my head around and faced him.
"You better step the hell out of the way if you don't want your foot run over." I hit the gas and fled the station.
But I couldn't flee the nerve he'd struck. I'd pulled up and out from my childhood ghetto, where we lived in a flat with a coal-burning stove, cringing from my black father when he raged about the racists on his job. And yet, people still challenged my identity and tried to place me outside who I knew I was. Because my light skin is beyond their binary understanding of race in the United States.
But blackness was my essence. I reveled in it; loved jive talk, grew up to diligently object to racism, from store clerks following my husband on suspicion of stealing, to corporate foot-dragging on hiring blacks. With black people—my people—I could be myself, safe from harassment or having to filter myself for white people's benefit.
There in that South Carolina gas station, I was black, according to my family, society’s one-drop rule, and my government-issued birth certificate. It was culturally and legally ridiculous to wonder if I wasn’t. Because the biological fact of my birth was completely beside the point and counted for nothing.
My beloved mother is white.
1 CODE SWITCH
My identity has always been tanged up in the fraught definitions of Ameries racism, just asi was a few yers later when I drove onto the world corporate headquarters campus nestled back in low, rolling New Jersey hills, along with thousands of other professionals. Like them, I was suited up and carrying a presentation for the day's mee-tings. Unlike the others, I was black and female.
I shut off Smokey Robinson's sweet crooning and took a minute to shape-shift into my oh-so-heavy white mask and to rehearse the code switching needed to get my ideas across to white colleagues. Then I walked briskly through the maze of corridors to my office.
It was 1977. My job managing part of the national marketing strategy for telephone companies' business communications products was an ever-growing pile of assi-gnments, most labeled URGENT Or VERY URGENT, all due yesterday. That meant hammering out agreements with a team of engineers, lawyers, accountants, sales managers, and factories. The work was intense, but I was up to it. The real challenge was being respected as an equal in one of America's largest companies, dominated by white males. Their normal old boy power was my mountain to climb.
But I was on it, as was my husband, Luther, who had gotten a Department of Defense job here in New Jersey after we fled that hellacious mess down south. At least up north in New Jersey people were more inclined to treat blacks fairly, which was some comfort. That didn't include the police, who routinely made the news profiling men stopped for driving while black. At work the company's legal compliance with affirmative action was an established procedure, though a human resources rep had called me about a form I'd turned in the first day at orientation. She had just one question, about my profile.
"Well, I mean, if it's OK, can you tell me why you checked the racial category black at the bottom?" she asked. "I have to make sure it's accurate for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report, is all. For the government, you know."
"You are asking what race I am, is that it?"
"That's not illegal, is it?"
I told her I marked black because I am black, and the form was correct.
"It's just when I saw you, I didn't think..." In a flurry of awkward thank-yous, she hung up.
At least she asked the gas attendant's "What are you?" question with some respect.
When we started working in New Jersey last year, Luther and I made up our own continuing education program at home, because doing our work and keeping our noses clean was just the ante to get jobs like ours. To earn our seat at the table, we black first-generation college grads had to polish our facades and up our gamesmanship.
We inspected each other's body language in the dining room while practicing presentations, editing out any Black English and mannerisms. During Sunday football Luther related quarterback calls and strategic blocking and tackling to being in the corporate game. "You're dealing with power players. They don't want to talk. They want to win," he said.
We made plans and contingencies for our projects and practiced speaking in headlines. As I stood in the walk-in closet in my panty hose, Luther had me recite the headlines to use at work. "Just say what the problem is and the actions you recommend for fixing it. If they want details, they'll ask. No chitchat."
I read Dress for Success, ditched my Sears wardrobe, and bought tailored Pendleton suits. He taught me chess, poker, and Scrabble, so I understood how to think several moves ahead, not tip my hand, and maximize every play.
We even planned how we would sort the anytime, anywhere offensive race situations into which ones we had to let go and which to take on.
For instance, at an executive meeting atop a British bank tower with the Thames River in view, the client manning the tea trolley asked the man next to me how he liked his. "White and sweet, like we like our women?" He was the customer. I couldn't call him out about race in the middle of making a deal if I wanted my job. But I did have to carry that insult back home in the pit of my stomach.
I choose the quote by -W.E.B DuBois which states, “He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.” and this basically stuck out to me because I felt like this was 100% true. No matter how you live or what you do there will be judgment, basement, and degradation to your every move. It seems impossible to live in this generation and be your actual self, its either code switching, or hiding true emotions or feeling or just blatantly being something you’re not just to fit in. The society promotes being different and being yourself but when your actually living in it and experiencing the harsh reality of life, you start to become less and less of yourself till the point where you as a person are not recognisable no more.
There was the Atlanta company trainer who said if a customer refused to deal with my kind, even to the point of pushing me out a door as the trainer had done to me, the correct response was to go back to the office and send a white male back. I said I wouldn't; the company had to back me up.
Or another time, a Swiss colleague at an international management dinner for twenty told nigger jokes our Denver coworker taught him. I pushed away my plate and walked out. After human resources got involved, he was made to apologize.
A corporate president was taken aback at the recommendation that more minorities be hired at top levels. "But then, we'd have to have special training so they could keep up," he replied to us senior minorities on the diversity committee, oblivious that he was disparaging us to our faces.
My second job, learning to act like them and field their aggressions, though invisible to whites, was a burden I carried at the same time I did my paid job. In early days, I fought to keep my "acceptable" mask on in front of colleagues, some of whom talked over or ignored me. Later, I grew another persona, with corporate-speak rolling off my tongue, a thicker skin, and a practice of blocking and tackling people privately before my presentations so there was no ignoring me in meetings.
I thought my black executive in a white corporation card was working until a trusted black coworker called from payroll. "Hey," she said. "Is your door closed?"
"Yep." Settling in, I pulled out the bottom desk drawer and put my feet across its top, like a footstool. "What's going on?"
She had some data I might be interested in, only if I agreed she didn't tell me. The annual employee rankings for performance for my job title were in, alongside the new salaries and raises. My performance was ranked pretty high compared to my peers.
It was so great they recognized my contributions. "I'll probably get a good raise," I said.
"Well. Sort of," she said. My pay and upcoming raise were way below those white men I ranked above.
I picked at the cuticle on my left index finger. "By how much?"
"Big money." She couldn't tell me everything, but that man who took two-hour lunches with the blonde secretary was ahead of me by maybe 20 percent. The one who didn't do half the work I did. And wasn't as good.
"What I want to know," she said, "is what are you going to do about it?" There was a long pause. "I'm out, girlfriend. It's your move." She hung up.
I immediately thought about Daddy. How he put on his uniform before dawn every day and caught several buses to work, even in Buffalo blizzards. As soon as he got home, before he took his Lava soap bath, he’d drink a straight Four Roses whiskey. If his bosses had just pulled the same dirty deeds on him that mine were trying to pull now, he drank a second or third Four Roses. That, we knew, meant to watch out.
"I hate that damned job," he'd say before he sat down to eat. After grace, if he pounded the table and hollered, we knew the damned DPs, as he called the European immigrants who owned the ornamental steel company where he welded, had somehow denied the recognition, title, or pay for the work he did, because he was black or because he married a white woman. Or they had used the word nigger, which Daddy said was the first thing they learned when they got off the boat.
That job had turned my father into a man who balled his rage up inside in order to keep working there, then brought it home to drink and go off on us. All he knew was it took his Four Roses to deal. All I knew was to stay out of his way when he drank it, if I didn't want to somehow end up on the receiving end of his strap.
What was I going to do about my pay? Try not to turn into Daddy. It was thirty years later, and I wanted my due. Like everybody else at the office, I worked hard to move up and get paid, and I wanted to be paid fairly. If having my dream meant a continual game of whack-a-mole with white people popping up to stop my every move, I'd get my mallet out.
The day came when my boss came into my office and handed me a paper showing my raise and new salary. Had my friend not tipped me off, the amount might have looked good. But it was nowhere near that other guy's old pay, even though the boss said I was highly rated and had done great work.
I thanked him pleasantly and said it was good he appreciated my work. "But, sorry," I said, "I have to say—I'm not sure this level of pay represents what I contributed here."
It was a big risk, but one Luther and I had agreed on. If the boss got mad, it could mean trouble for me, like intentionally impossible assignments, or being transferred to a dead-end group, or out the door on some false excuse. But where was my dignity if I didn't ask for what should be mine?
My boss looked at me, his eyes dark. "It's a good salary" he said.
"But nowhere near what others in this group make; others rated lower than me, right?"
He asked me how I knew how much others made or where they were ranked.
"Because I know. Look, some people might think this discrepancy is not fair, if you know what I mean." He knew I meant discriminatory. He sat down in my visitor's chair, leaning toward me with his hands on his knees.
He asked me what I was saying.
"I want to be paid fairly, at the same level as the white men here." I leaned in too, using a poker face and speaking slowly. "And paid more than those who don't put out what I do. Can you please address this?" I had recited these exact headlines with Luther three different times in preparation for this moment.
But all the money had been distributed to employees and the payroll adjustments closed, the boss countered. The next raise would be a year from then.
I said the company could still make changes if they wanted to be equitable. "Can you see what can be done, please?" I tried not to look like that angry black woman white people are afraid of, using that layer of cultural camouflage I had learned to put on.
He nodded and went out. I tried to stop my foot patting wildly under the desk.
The next week he came in and handed me a paper stating that I was being given a significantly higher increase. Not as much as I wanted, but nothing to quibble about. I shook his hand and smiled. "Thank you very much. I appreciate what you did." After that he found a number of ways to let me know how valuable I was to the team.
That was the moment I understood there was always room to negotiate, no matter how firmly an offer is stated. Throughout my career and personal transactions, negotiation has been a useful skill, something people from humble backgrounds like mine unfortunately don't know or are afraid to try. But the price I'd paid to earn my place as a successful executive in a white corporation had worn me out. I was sick and tired of all that extra work to level the playing field. Filter. Hesitate. Pretend. Switch vocabu-laries. Point out inequities. Hide my pain and anger. Mask culturally natural responses. Decide which racial slight to let pass. Speak easily in well-modulated pleasantries with heedlessly entitled people.
In becoming a respected member of the team, I hadn't seen how far I'd split myself. My white-coded executive persona switched off and on like a bad romance; on with the white business world, off with black friends and family. It was exhausting. Infuriating. I was losing my center.
I had even begun to meld whiteness with my personal life before I realized it. Following an opera broadcast on TV, Luther and I wanted to hear more of the dramatic melodies of the arias. Just as we went to see Broadway musicals and pop concerts in Manhattan, Luther bought a few Thursday-night performances of live opera at the Met in Lincoln Center.
We sat up in the dress circle, the only two blacks in sight, wearing our dark suits from work. A dozen starburst crystal chandeliers rose above the red seats and into the ceiling, hushing the murmuring audience. What a spectacle the elaborate costumes and sets created on a stage that split and sunk in sections.
When two hefty lovers sang duets in notes too high and too strong to imagine, Luther leaned over. "It's my first time seeing such a big woman in a love story," he whispered. Later I learned big divas often have amazing voices.
Opera was just one way Luther and I took in white culture, stepping outside our personal all-black box. We had plenty of activities with Luther's family and members of our black church, but the older white couple next door became like family and a few colleagues became friends, sharing meals, advice, fix-its, and going to the Macy's parade before a Thanksgiving dinner.
We had a good life. While very few blacks we knew associated with whites in their private life, we became sort of integrated, moving more naturally among whites.
Sort of, because integration was a teeter-totter, bouncing up with the hope that we were accepted like everybody else, then dumped down in the dirt when whites jumped off their end and challenged our right to sit on our own neighborhood beach, or ignored Luther at the paint store counter to go in the back rather than wait on him in the midst of our half-finished dining room project.
The thing was, leaning into white culture had gotten to a point where I wondered if maybe I was selling out. Like fitting in and enjoying the other side diluted the blackness that always defined me. I had to get out of this halfway house and get back to me. But how?
A few months later, Luther and I plopped down on our den sofa to watch Roots, a groundbreaking show about a black American who traced his family to the slave ancestor captured from West Africa. Soon after, magazine articles and TV interviews galore featured all kinds of Americans who searched their roots. Each one swore filling in their family tree had made them sure of who they were.
That was it. My best anchor was to learn about my family too, the southern ones Daddy and Grandma talked about but I had never met. Knowing who I came from and the history that ran through me would plant my feet back on center. Maybe if I went down and spent time with them, I wouldn't feel so lost.
2 DRESS BOX
Our relatives in Georgia and Alabama were only names and stories to me, except for Great-Aunt Willie in Birmingham. When used to sleep over at Grandmas as a girl, she had me write letters to Willie. Daddy said Grandma went to night school for twenty years to learn to read and write, but the only thing she learned was the neighborhood gos-sip. Sitting at her feet, she'd pluck an unanswered letter from her wicker basket and dictate the reply to me.
"Dear Willie. Whatcha got, Dolores?"
"Dear Willie," I'd read.
"Received your letter and was glad to hear from you. Whatcha got?"
"Dear Willie, received your letter and was glad to hear from you."
"We are fine and hope you are too. Whatcha got?"
Most of the opening I'd already written before she dictated it; for years, every letter had had an identical greeting. Then we'd add the Buffalo updates and write similar content to others waiting in that basket. Our teamwork saved Grandma the extravagance of running up some long-distance phone bill she couldn't afford. And all those letters to Willie gave me a sense of kinship. With Grandma's blessing and help, I headed to Alabama.
It was no surprise the visit started with having to talk the reluctant white cabdriver in Birmingham into driving me to the black side of town. It had been fifteen years since their police dogs and maximum strength water hoses blasted demonstrating African American youth and a black Baptist church bombing killed four little girls. Maybe the driver took me because he knew I wasn't a local who would put up with his excuses, or maybe he thought I was white.
When we pulled up, Aunt Willie came down off the porch of her bungalow where she waited for me. As that stately dark woman wrapped me in a warm hug, I caught the scent of pomade in her freshly straightened hair. She was dressed for company in a wrap-around dress, and she fussed over me as only a relative with southern charm could.
"Ooooeee, look at Charles's baby come to see the old folk," she said, and laughed easily. "Come on in, chile, and rest yourself a while. You thirsty?"
We spent Friday evening talking over news of the Buffalo family she hadn't seen in decades. I delivered their messages and the recent photos they wanted her to have.
She got acquainted with my mother and brothers too, none of whom she had ever seen. I, on the other hand, had to admit I didn't know about most of the people she tried to fill me in on. But I promised to take the stories back to Buffalo.
Saturday morning, Willie and I sat out on the porch with our shoes kicked off, gently swinging in her old glider. It sat under the striped awning she kept down all the time against the Alabama heat.
"I heard you went to our colored college up in Washington. Is that right?"
I began telling her about my experience at Howard University, when she stopped me.
"Oh wait, here comes Miz Greene. Mornin', Miz Greene. This is my great-niece come to visit from up north!"
"Well, I declare," Miz Greene said, asking where from, for how long, who in my way back was related to Willie. Would she know them?
By her demeanor, it wasn't clear if this conversation was courtesy or gossip fodder. I answered sweetly with just enough explanation to satisfy. "She's my daddy's aunt from the Georgia side." After further pleasantries, Miz Greene went on her way.
Aunt Willie kept interrupting our conversation to introduce me to the whole community as they passed by, from the postman to neighbors going to and fro. Since it seemed to make Willie proud of my visit, the way she put me on display for people I didn't know, I made small talk with every person who said hey.
There was even one woman who came up on the porch to get a real good look at me. She used that southern cover-all for saying anything you want: "Bless your heart, honey." Then she asked what she really wanted to know. "But is v'all really related? You don't look nothing like Willie." That was sure the truth.
I smiled at their curious glances, feeling at once part of the community that came to greet me and an oddity in it. I wondered if Wille had told them I had a white mother, something few Americans accepted, and I doubted few southerners of either race could abide.
Out on that porch is where I found out about Daddy's first marriage. I knew he'd had a first wife, but she was never spoken of. "Weren't she purdy?" Aunt Willie asked me, assuming l already knew what she was saying about Daddy getting married at seventeen. This was fascinating, so I didn't stop her talking. But the bride I wasn't related to was not the connective family story I came to Alabama to get. When I admitted to not ever having seen her, Aunt Wilhe walked me back to her room where she had a picture of their wedding day to nd and show me.
"Look down under the bed for me, hehe, and save these old legs," she said. "Now feel around for a dress box." It wasn't near the foot of the bed, so I scooted over to its side, lay down, and reached way underneath. There it was—a large box of sturdy cardboard. squirming in closer to grab hold, I hooked my index ninger into a pull cord that hung from inside the lid and pulled the box out. That once white box hadn't been moved in years, judging by the gray clumps of dust Wille had to wipe off with a wet rag.
"They're all in there, the family pictures," she said. "Bring the box in the dining room where we can see 'em good."
I set that heavy box on her lace tablecloth and she wiggled the lid off slowly. Inside were hundreds of black-and-white and sepia-toned pictures thrown together jammed to the top. Some were shiny, or with scalloped white edges, or fixed to standing frames under some laminate. Every person pictured was black, very dark black. No wonder the porch people had stared so.
More of my history, identity, and roots were in that box than I'd hoped to find on this visit. And Wille was ready to help me understand what they each had to do with me.
"We have to dig through this to find that wedding picture," Wille said. "It's in there somewhere."
"Good, I want to see that, and will you also show me the other family in here I don't know?"
She started with the photos on top, a lot taken of her and her husband's occasions at church and with friends. After some stories about her life in those shots, I politely asked to just see relatives. She had no children, but for the next hour, she showed some with mostly her husband's people. I thanked her for sharing, then when I finally explained how much I wanted to understand who my own blood relatives were, Willie began sorting pictures in earnest.
In one, Grandma stood wide-legged in an overcoat, squinting into the camera on a sunny day. She was about the same age in the picture as I was at the time, around thirty.
"Ain't you the spitting image of Belia? You both got that white side, see?"
"What white side are you talking about?" I asked.
"Ain't they told you 'bout it?"
Willie said Grandma and her cousin Acle were born to the two Doster sisters that had been raped repeatedly by two white brothers. The men's tamily, named Riley she thought, owned the Georgia farm where the sisters worked, in smithville. They were teenage girls in 1890 when Grandma was born, on the same farm where her ancestors had been slaves.
Great-aunt Acie, who I met at her place on Sugar Hill in Harlem, was pretty white looking but, like me, was unquestionably black. While the connection between her and my grandmother had never been clear to me, I'd just assumed she and Grandma were part of the chalk-to-charcoal spectrum of black people's coloring.
My throat caught as the horror sunk in. That old Massa privilege had been forced on my great-grandmother fifteen years after the Civil War? How had Grandma lived with the pain and humiliation all these years and never talked about her mother? I didn't know what to do with my outrage, sitting with the aunt who reported this as flatly as the weather forecast. That must be why Grandma called leaving Georgia "escaping."
It gave me a new pride in my grandmother, knowing she'd had the gumption to leave. She'd made a plan, probably having to sneak her family out to get away from the Smithville whites who wanted to keep their heels on her neck. I'd never known that old lady now crippled by arthritis had that kind of courage and drive. I'd never known Buffalo was her promised land.
"I guess she didn't tell me about that because she was ashamed," I said.
"Shamed? Naw, everybody knew white men did that whenever they got ready, and there wasn't anything we could do 'bout it. In your great-grandma Frances's time, there still wasn't no getting away from those men. She was ripe, you know, sixteen or so, when she birthed Belia."
"Did Grandma know her father?"
The whole family knew him. Willie could still picture that white man. He'd come around once in a while with a bag of candy and set Grandma on his knee. But they all knew better than to try to claim that open secret beyond the front porch.
So that's what flowed in my veins, a white plantation rape. It was one thing to read about slavery rapes, but the subjugation of my own grandmother and her mother sickened me. Yet I would have to carry that rapist's blood with me always, not in shame but in anger. And though I didn't know it then, finding his stain wouldn't be the last time the discovery of an ancestor would change who I thought I was.
Aunt Willie went back to the box, like Grandma's story was nothing. She went on showing me other relatives whose names I'd heard but relationships I'd never gras-ped. As we talked, I began to lay their pictures out by sibling groups on the lace, filling half the table. I went and got a pad and pen to make notes so important details wouldn't be forgotten. When I got back to the dining room Aunt Willie had poured us her homemade sweet tea, the mark of southern hospitality. We sipped from tall glasses with lots of ice, and she pulled down the shade against the sun that had already heated up the house.
We got right back to it, the old lady as excited to tell the stories as I was to hear them. She showed me the people in Florida who sent us oranges at Christmas, people in Philadelphia, cousins I'd never met in Manhattan, people still in Georgia. Grandma's first husband, Nathan, a slight, dark railroad man who shoveled coal to fuel the engines was in a fading group picture. Willie told me he was killed on the rails in a poker fight and brought home to Grandma by his black coworkers in the back of a mule-drawn cart. Daddy hadn't told us anything about this father, either. But then Charles Nathan was obviously named for him.
I asked if she knew of any African ancestor of ours who was brought to the States. Such an identity-anchoring heritage seemed essential to me after watching Roots.
She nodded. The story of our African forefather had been told to her by her own parents. She said we came from a man who was brought on a slave ship to Virginia and was then sold to a Georgia plantation. Willie never knew his name. But she worked backward in time through the photo genealogy laid on that table to the timeframe when he came. We figured he was probably born about 1840, only two generations before Grandma.
Holy Moses, I am African, I thought. It felt like a lifeline from my belly had been strung through all these generations of people on the table and tied off in his. Many years later, Ancestry DNA testing would confirm his origins in Togo and Benin in West Africa. But back then, in the initial tug of my connections, I was suddenly somebody, much more than just my nuclear family, Grandma, and the Buffalo relatives. Even though I'd never meet these kinfolks, now I had generations behind me. I wrote it all down then to capture their stories.
As I did, Aunt Willie continued to dig around in that dress box. "Looky here," she said, handing me one of those laminated five-by-seven pictures. The sepia-toned photo of Daddy as a very young groom showed him to be trim and serious in a suit. I recognized him, that same strong build and wide nostrils. He stood next to a brown-skin-ned girl with marcel-waved hair in a drop-waist dress.
"Told you she was purty," Aunt Willie said. "Take it. You should keep the picture."
I wondered why Daddy never talked about that marriage. Was it because divorce wasn't accepted back then? And why get married at seventeen? Here were more se-crets, like Grandma's white father and her husband's murder on the train. Grandma and Daddy had kept big parts of their earlier lives from us kids, as if they could erase their Georgia history.
But it wasn't erased anymore. All they lived through had become part of me. From my African beginning, through generations of plantation slavery and the rape of my formerly enslaved great-grandmother, to my father's migration out of the South, I was firmly convicted of my black roots. There were emotional ramifications to sort out, but I could go home and code switch all I wanted, as a proud black woman.
The next morning before I went home, Aunt Willie returned to the pictures we'd left on the table. "You want any more of these to keep?"
I took that one of Grandma standing wide-legged to see later if we really did favor, and a couple of recent ones of Willie to show the Buffalo family.
We put the rest back in the box and I pushed it under her bed.
Before getting into the black cab company's car she'd called for me, I kissed Aunt Willie and hugged her tight, wondering if she had any idea how much she'd given me.
__________
Luther gave over the dining room to me so I could lay out the family history.
A chart was typed on a legal-sized page with rows of siblings and their mates, noting marriage, birth, and death dates.
When the stories were written up, the chart and Willie's photos were added and bound into books.
They were ready in time to pack for our trip to Buffalo for Christmas.
I couldn't wait to see my family's surprise as they unwrapped each of their own keepsake copies.
With everyone gathered for the holiday that morning, Mama's favorite cinnamon rolls, which had risen next to the heat vent overnight, were going fast. When the last bathrobe and bottle of Old Spice were opened and the wrapping paper thrown out, I said there was one more present, a special surprise. That was Luther's cue to get the family history books down from our bedroom.
"Remember when I went to see Aunt Willie last spring?" I said. "All the family history she gave me has been written down in these books. Here's a copy for each of you."
"Wow, Dolores," David said, sticking his hair pick into his outsized Afro.
"Our African forefather is in there," I said. "Like in Roots."
"For real? You found our African," David said. "Too cool, my sistah."
Charles Nathan looked his over like it was an ugly Christmas tie. He was the most disengaged from the family, so I should have known he wouldn't make much of our history. Why had I thought he would care?
Daddy pulled out the genealogy chart, which was folded to fit in the 8½-by-11 binding, got out his magnifying glass, and studied the information, penciling in a few more details.
"What the hell is this?" he said, looking at the picture of himself as a seventeen-year-old groom. "I can't believe you'd show this to your mother." I said nothing, having triggered him to pour the first Four Roses of the day into his coffee and grumble about not wanting to see "that woman."
Mama said never mind, that marriage was ancient history that we kids always knew on some level. But her long-standing rule still stood: "I don't want any talk about her in my house, Dolores."
I should have thought of her feelings, and so said I was sorry. But they were missing the historical point. The picture was meant to show off our handsome young father, not his ex. We'd never seen his younger years.
David came over to where I was standing to save me. He put his arm around me. "I always wanted to know about the whole family, my beautiful black history. Thank you," he said "Now, come on, Daddy, you know we all wanted to see how dapper you were as a young lady-killer." David could say anything to Daddy because those two had a special bond. They'd been a pair of soul brothers since way back when they fell into that stupid old Amos 'n' Andy routine.
"Just tear off the ugly half of the picture if you and Mama don't want to see it," David said, and laughed as he mimicked the slow rip up the middle of a picture.
Charles Nathan hadn't said anything. As his white wife thumbed the pages, he looked on with a weak pretense of interest. Maybe he thought it was just another of my bookish tangents, a project nobody else in the family would see the point of doing. Or maybe he was quiet because he was never much of a talker.
Later, over Mama's delicious feast, Daddy had warmed up to the notion of talking about his life and started telling family stories. About his brother and wife from New York who passed through town with a woman in tow who was sawed in half in a magic act. About all the raccoon, possum, rabbit, and sparrow dinners our country relatives could fix six ways to Sunday. About how one of Grandma's white laundry customers in Smithville trained him as a gentleman's valet for her husband. That was where he learned etiquette, polite company language, professional grooming, and attire. It was delightful to laugh and learn together about the brighter sides of the father we'd seen beaten down by racism in his later years.
I was happy that Christmas because I'd made it back to center, authenticated by my multigenerational African American family. Unfortunately, that steadiness only lasted until spring.
Then I was another kind of lost.
3 LONELY ONLY
The following spring, I sat on our back deck with my genealogy chart and a cup of coffee, trying to imagine my ancestors' lives. All of them had labored at the altar of white people's profit and convenience but gained little. Generations of my enslaved ancestors had fathered generations of sharecroppers, who fathered sons who sweated in factories, and daughters who kept house (as Grandma did in a brothel) or minded white children instead of their own. According to family lore, those in my line were resilient people who loved their families, worshipped God, and made it with what little they had. It was their honesty and dignity than ran in my veins and anchored me.
Then my eyes fell further down the chart to my own parents. Why, this family search was all about Daddy's story. Only Daddy's story. In all that Roots searching, the one person on the whole chart who had as much to do with who I was as Daddy hadn't been considered. Mama had been taken for granted, almost invisible. She was just my mother, like anybody's mother. She cooked, cleaned, washed, and gardened, worked the night shift at the hospital, and helped us with whatever we needed. And she never made an issue of anybody's race, least of all her own. As a result, I never recognized her to be either a black mother or a white mother.
Looking out over our back lawn, I considered how Mama lived in the middle of black culture but had never really been of it. She complained that our soul music was pure noise and we complained the cascading strings on her Mon-tovani LPs were boring. She held us to Standard English, editing out the Black English we picked up outside. "You don't 'ax' somebody, you 'ask' them," and "There's no such word as ain't." Even though David, Daddy, and I were Protestants in a black church, she also had us practice her white people's Catholicism with no-meat Fridays and candy-free Lent.
Mama was white but didn't live white. Because she was with us blacks, she was less white, a sort-of white person. She was not white like the racists Daddy railed against. But when an African American neighbor dubbed her "an honorary black woman," in a nod to her embracing-blacks sort-of whiteness, Mama pshawed the title. "It's supposed to be a compliment," she told me, "but I'm white. I have always been white, and nothing different."
But people didn't see it like that back in the 1950s. Both black and white strangers treated Mama as less than white, their chance to strip off the white privilege she'd lost by marrying black. Because we had a sort-of white mother, the whole family suffered a double-whammy prejudice, both the standard issue prejudice against blacks and the prejudice against race mixing. Out there on the back deck, I cringed, crediting Mama for the first time for shielding us kids from the intolerance, disdain, and rejection we faced in every store, bus ride, or excursion. Of course, we hadn't understood as children, but I'd recently read about a 1958 PEW Research study that found 96 percent of Americans were against race mixing. I was born ten years before that. My parents married twenty-five years before the study.
The mixed-race prejudice was in our neighborhood, at what Daddy called the black holy-roller church next door. During Sunday breakfast I strained to be heard over the pulsing beat of music urging the congregation to love God. Yet outside afterward, church members glared at our family. As a little girl I heard a woman in a lovely suit grunt like we'd done something awful by just walking by.
"Would you look at that?" she spit out to her companions.
"What's wrong, Mama?" I asked.
"Nothing's wrong," she said, walking on as if it didn't concern us.
The mixed-race prejudice was in our extended family. In those early years, Mama had no friends, so we only kept company occasionally with a few members of Daddy's people. What I'd overheard at Grandma's made me understand. She urged Mama to go with her to Uncle Butch and Edna's for meals he made from the animals he hunted or slaughtered, from raccoon and possum to the chitlins from pigs-meals Grandma loved, and Mama hated. She said they stank and weren't clean, even if Butch did put white potatoes on the lid to cut the odor.
"At least those dinners would be some company for you," Grandma said. "Ain't you lonely? Edna likes you, and Butch done got used to you."
Mama said she knew the other relatives spent time together but didn't invite us, save to an occasional birthday party with my second cousins or Christmas breakfast.
"The family's not comfortable with you, Ella," Grandma said. "I can't change that. They ain't never been around your kind."
That mixed-race prejudice was out in public everywhere we went. People on the bus stared hard at us long enough to be sure the disgust in their eyes had time to pierce. One white saleswoman waited on everyone, even those behind us, before ringing up our purchase.
Once as we rode a ferry to Crystal Beach Amusement Park on the Canadian side of Buffalo's harbor, a white mother encircled her white children and pushed them into a corner to keep them from brushing against us. All the while she glared at us, like we had cooties or something.
At a summer picnic in a county park, Charles Nathan, then ten years old and white looking, got stung by bees. He flailed his arms and rolled on the ground in a full-on meltdown while Mama tried to pull the stingers out with her finger-nails. Another white woman on her way from the restrooms heard the ruckus and came over to help.
"You need mudpacks," she told Mama, stooping down to a puddle of water, mixing dirt in it to make a thick paste. When Mama packed the mud around the stingers they slid out as easily as candles from a birthday cake. She thanked the woman, who was happy to help. But when Daddy came over from the shed and hugged Charles Nathan, the woman studied first one face, then another, her smile fading
"Won't you have some lunch?" Mama offered, motioning to the grilled food already on our table. The woman didn't seem to understand what was going on with the people she saw. Until her hand flew up to cover her mouth. I remembered how she ran away, fast, as if she was the one stung by bees.
That mixed-race prejudice came right into our living room around 1956. Mama found out she could earn twenty-five whole dollars giving room and board to some Negroes coming to a national conference in Buffalo. She could pay some bills and save at least five dollars if she handled it well. The visitors needed to stay in private homes since the white hotels and restaurants wouldn't accept them. Once listed, our flat on Hickory Street was snapped up because it sat on the direct bus line serving the conference site.
Mama scrubbed corners and washed the best sheets while Daddy shopped for good quality food for them, not the spoiled vegetables we often cut around, nor what passed for our protein, a chunk of fat back with a thin strip of lean meat we plucked hairs off before boiling it to death.
Mama and Daddy moved their clothes into the boys' closet and dresser so the visitors could use their double bed and be next to the bathroom. My brothers would sleep at Grandma's, and since I stayed home, I waited in the kitchen as instructed when the visitors arrived around dinnertime.
The skinny man in a suit shook hands with Daddy in the living room. Once sure he had the right place, the two men went outside for his wife and their suitcases. As that enormous woman in a pink feathered church hat lumbered into our living room, she told Daddy how she loved the Lord. He said we had a good Christian home.
"Hallelujah, hallelujah," she said.
Daddy set down their brown cardboard suitcase in the living room and called for Mama to come out of the kitchen. The minute she did the church woman's face creased with shock. She stepped back from Mama's outreached hand as if she'd catch leprosy.
"Who is this?" she asked Daddy.
"This is my wife, Ella."
"Your wife? This woman is your wife?" She put both fists on her hips. "So-mebody shoulda tolt us 'bout this," she barked, shaking her head back and forth hard enough to twist it off.
"Now hold on, Miss," Daddy said, stepping in front of Mama. "Hold on. My wife's a good lady and she worked hard to fix up nice for you here."
"Oh no," the woman told her husband. "We ain't staying here with this white woman."
She turned to him, pointed at the suitcase, and headed to the door. "Come on here," she said. "We ain't ruining our vacation lookin' at this nigger and his white trash cracker all week." The husband hurried out into the heat of the summer afternoon behind his wife, who was already across our cement patch and headed toward the alley.
"Some Christians you are," Daddy called down our alleyway. "Equal opportunity prejudice at work," he said to Mama. "Black people trying to out-hate white ones." He got out the bottle of Four Roses he'd hidden from them and poured both himself and Mama a drink. I'd never seen Mama drink whiskey, but she reached for the pink plastic cup and took a swallow right away. I was sent down the block to bring Grandma and the boys back.
Grandma, who everybody was scared of, stormed down the block, my brothers trailing behind. Her thin house dress was hitched up six inches higher in the back than the front because of her considerable backside, her lips were poked out, and her plaited hair flopped in time to her hurried steps. We also knew to stay out of Grandma's way when she got mad. Her temper was every bit as bad as Daddy's, with no liquor needed to ignite it. When she burst through our door, I stood way back.
"You should've called me," she told Daddy, her age-spotted hand jerking up over her head like a band leader. "I'd a slapped her silly."
"I know you would, Mom." Daddy shook his head and took another swallow of Four Roses. I waited in my corner for his outburst, but he did not holler. Instead his voice was firm and steady. "Nobody else we don't know and can't trust is coming in our house again. Never."
The calm in his voice said this would be law.
Mama spread the table with the hot fried chicken and mashed potatoes prepared for the conventioneers. Before eating, Daddy lifted his glass.
"To hell with that heifer and her weasel husband."
"Fuck'em," Grandma said, intently scooping up her potatoes.
The weight of all those abusive memories had me slumped over the picnic table on my back deck. Considering the whole of them now, without the hard-shell you-can't-hurt-me façade I put on for current-day perpetrators, the quicksand of low self-esteem and of not belonging that had pulled at all my family could not be denied.
But there was more. Maybe the worst of the mixed-race prejudice was that cloudless afternoon when my Sunday-sharp Daddy put on his wide-brimmed hat and said he had a big surprise for us. We followed him out of the alley from our flat to the street, where he opened the passenger door to a green 1940-so-mething secondhand sedan. With an amused bow to Mama, he helped her into our first car, while we three kids shrieked in excitement and jumped in back. I felt as grand as a TV star as we started off on what Mama called a leisurely ride. Daddy drove beyond downtown and up onto a bridge in a part of town I'd never been to. Smiling over his shoulder, he said we'd see a part of the bridge he built, some work he did on his job.
"Where, Daddy? What part did you make?" David asked.
He slowed way down at the center of the bridge, pointing out seams in the gray metal where he'd welded parts together with a blow torch. As he continued past it, we kept looking out the back window, imprinting the amazement of Daddy's own bridge. A bridge he said wouldn't fall, no matter how many cars and trucks were on it.
In a low voice, Daddy told Mama to look left, at the police car driving up alongside. Two white officers leaned over, eyeing both my parents menacingly. Daddy stopped at the red light at the foot of the bridge, just as their blue lights began flashing.
"Please, Charles, don't say anything," Mama pleaded, patting his leg. "Don't argue with them." Daddy shifted his weight and sat up straight. A policeman built like a wrestler in the arena shows we went to came to Daddy's window.
"What do we have here?" he said. "A nigger and a white woman. With their three little mongrels in the back. Speeding, too."
When he went to write down our license plate number, Mama warned Daddy again. "Put your hands down where he can see them and don't talk back. Please."
The officer shoved a ticket through the window at Daddy. "Go back where you came from, nigger, and don't you dare be caught driving over here again, where you don't belong. I'll be watching for you, and this woman."
I wanted so badly for Daddy to explain. To tell the policeman we were looking at his bridge. But he didn't. The father who always lectured and shouted at us, that we were afraid would spank us, sat mute and stared into his lap. Both officers stood in the street considering him, like a dare. One spit on the ground by our car before they went back to the squad car, lights still flashing. Daddy started our engine and made a U-turn, heading back over the bridge at a crawl, while the police stood by their car and watched us with revulsion.
Once back over the bridge and out of earshot, Daddy exploded. "Sons-a-bitches," he roared. "Motherfucking rotten sons-a-bitches." Seeing his face turned as hard as those steel beams he'd made, we children cowered in the back seat and kept our mouths shut.
"OK, Charles," Mama said. "We'll pay the fine and you can go home in one piece. They might've beaten you up or taken you in if you gave them any rea-son. You did the right thing."
I lay down on my deck bench, crying. The police had rendered my powerful father a timid subservient in front of us, because he had a white woman. They disrespected Mama for having a black man, skipping any normal courtesies given white women. Because she was only a sort-of white woman.
Oh, but I was grateful Mama had not belabored those prejudices in my impressionable years. She carried herself as a decent person and helped us see ourselves the same way, despite how others acted toward us. We never had the woe-is-me talk about mixed-race prejudice. Instead, she modeled how to let such "foolishness" roll off our backs as best we could.
__________
I came in from the deck to the kitchen and put some chicken on to boil, making a stock for soup.
There had to be something to show for my morning when Luther came back from his tennis game.
As I chopped carrots, onions, and celery for the broth, I thought of how Mama gave us something perhaps even more valuable, an environment where we could live free of those prejudices, accepted and loved just as we were.
When it was time for my oldest brother, Charles Nathan, to go to school, Mama enrolled him in the neighborhood Catholic school, St. Columbus, to give him the same education and religion she had as a girl. On the first day, she was amazed to see another white woman with a caramel-colored little girl. She had never met another white woman in a mixed marriage, and she wanted desperately to meet this one. Mama caught her eye and smiled intentionally. The woman smiled back brightly and moved across the room to say hello. Marie was a vivacious pixie with a mane of curly dark hair, who commented knowingly that their children had something in common. As the nun settled the children into class, Mama and Marie stepped outside and kept talking. Marie grew up in Buffalo and was part of a big community. And she lived so close, only ten minutes away.
"Come on over to my place for coffee some morning after the kids are in school," Marie said.
"Love to," Mama said. "Thank you so much." It was the end of her drought, her first Buffalo invitation outside of Daddy's family. An invitation from not just any woman, but a woman who, like herself, married a black man. It would finally be her chance to have a girlfriend of her own, someone who also lived the mixed-race life.
Marie said if it was OK, she had two other close friends to invite to coffee with them. Angela and Sally were other white women in mixed marriages with kids at St. Columbus too.
"Can't wait to meet them," Mama said.
At Marie's, the three women greeted her warmly. Sally, dressed to the nines, was of Sicilian descent and olive complexioned, something like a light-skinned Negro. Angela, who seemed the heart of the group, had eyes that had seen it all. The coffee was ready, so they filled their cups and gathered around the kitchen table to introduce themselves.
"Where have you been hiding?" Marie asked, surprised Mama had lived just a few blocks away for six or seven years and they hadn't met. "After all, we do stick out."
Marie's mother, an Italian immigrant who lived in the flat downstairs, came up with a plate of homemade pizelles and said a brief hello in Italish. Marie and Sally had grown up together in Buffalo's Little Italy, and they'd known Angela a long time. They were as familiar as family and they included Mama like she was one of them. They had so much in common to talk about-black husbands, children of similar ages, favorite soap operas, their Catholic parish, and the neighborhood.
When it was time to go, Angela told Mama they had a larger circle of friends she should meet. Many of them were in show business, as were Marie, a cabaret singer, and both Marie's and Angela's husbands, who played in a jazz band together.
"Our friends stick together.
We help each other and make our own fun in the privacy of our own homes," Angela said.
"There's couples and kids, singles, blacks and whites; all kinds.
We're people like you, who don't give a diddly squat about race."
__________
That band of maybe thirty people became more than our family.
They were the affirming community who made our mixed-race lives normal.
The kids were our constant playmates turned cousins, the women like Mama's sisters, and the men hardworking friends.
There were birthday parties and holidays, white first communion dresses, dance recitals, picnics, and all the belly laughs Mama needed when those women got to wisecracking on nuns and bosses.
In time, the ladies formalized that cocoon, naming themselves the Clique Club, and setting out a full calendar of activities.
The thing I loved best about the Clique Club was the annual summer picnic at Chestnut Ridge Park, when we escaped the city cement to run free in fresh air. Out there were the just-me-and-Mama moments when we'd cuddle up on a bench and she'd teach me to appreciate nature. She pointed out how clouds floated by in an open sky and the wind sang through the pines that we never noticed in the city. I remember her closing her eyes in that park to listen to the birds and dreaming aloud of moving one day to a neighborhood where we could see beauty like that anytime.
In the park's biggest shed, which was reserved well in advance, were ample tables under the roof, alongside grills, playground equipment, and enough open space for the whole group and many other friends to get loose.
In that secluded place, our bunch of kids in every skin shade could play together outside without the usual public judgement. We always had a hike led by the oldest boys; we ran off into the woods, climbing over fallen logs in ravines, shouting echoes in the forest, and getting filthy catching frogs and bugs to take home in jars.
Our black fathers could finally relax out there. Somebody would bring horseshoes and prepare the pits, where a bunch of men would strip to their undershirts and trash talk every pitch. Others played marathon poker, all of them drinking their favorites "tastes."
The black radio station played in the background and the sepia swing revue dancers from Buffalo's Club Moonglo, the western New York hotspot where some of the fathers played jazz, showed new dance moves, everybody snapping their fingers and hooting.
Out there the affection between black men and white women was open and natural, sweet and beautiful. That rarely seen thing was captured in a 1952 photo I still have. George Williams wore a broad-brimmed straw hat over his dark face. He sat wide legged on the back fender of his 1940s sedan hugging his alabaster Angela. She wore shorts and a halter top and had one arm around his shoulders, the other on his chest; his arm hugged her right hip. Our cloistered world out in the woods made this kind of love instinctive, even as it was a love America could not imagine for another fifteen years, when mixed-race marriage would become legal everywhere.
The thing Mama loved best about the Clique Club was when her friends got together monthly for Pokeno parties. I remembered a night when Mama hosted, back when I was about eleven. Several ladies piled through the door, including Sally, Marie, and Angela. By then, Angela was the one who called most often and had lots of play dates for her daughter Sandra and me while she and Mama visited.
"Hey, you baby cakes, we're gonna have some fun tonight," Sally said.
I'd planted myself at the top of the stairs out of sight, where I could hear everything. Part of the cousins' pact was to report back from the parties what we were getting for Christmas and what the parents were fighting about.
Mama's buttery pineapple upside-down cake and dainty flowered coffee cups sat next to a new bottle of Mogan David wine waiting on the dining room sideboard. They caught up a bit, laughing at their stories a while, then passed out the Pokeno boards and started calling cards. I half listened, reading Reader's Digest on the steps while waiting for something interesting to happen.
"There's more money in this pot than you can make on a busy corner Saturday night, capisce?" Sally said, winning the final pot in their game. The bowlful of coins clinked as they tumbled out on top of each other and she scooped them up.
Later, the dessert was served, and the juicy talk I waited for started. First was the show business talk. Count Basie was coming to the Black Musicians' Club to jam before a big appearance in Buffalo. Betty James would be dancing in the new Moonglo floor show, which meant nothing to me at the time. Decades later, I realized that was where her son, Rick James, the Grammy-winning "Super Freak" funk master, got his chops.
Marie said her parents were keeping Diane at their place most of the time, getting her to and from school. It helped, so she and Bill could do more shows; her singing soft jazz at white clubs on one side of town and him leading the band at the black Club Moonglo on the other. The problem was, while Diane was with her white grandparents they tried to make the girl believe she was Italian, not black. They were proud of the old country and said it hurt their feelings that Diane didn't claim it.
"Diane asked me which side was better," Marie said, "her Italian side or her black side. I told her no side was better, but in America, half black may as well be full black."
"You got that right," Sally said.
Diane had always been black just like the rest of us. And now she wasn't? How could a black girl be an Italian girl? I felt sorry for Diane, glad I didn't have to worry about taking sides. We didn't have any other side in my house.
But the thing that really got me was when Angela said she was going out of state to Smalltown to visit her other family. It had been a couple of months since she was home.
What? What other family was she talking about, I wondered.
Sally offered to see about the kids while she was gone, but Angela said that wasn't necessary, that the kids could take care of themselves. Her oldest was a teenager who would be in charge. She'd leave them sandwiches and cereal and be back Sunday night. George would be in and out because he was working hard on new trumpet riffs.
Angela made that scenario seem like it was normal, but I knew Mama would never leave us like that. Who would help Sandra fix her thick, hard-to-comb hair? And what about hot dinners?
Marie told Angela she'd never understood how Angela's white family in Smalltown hadn't known about her black Buffalo family all these years. How had she gone to all those birthday parties, showers, even holidays for almost twenty years and still kept them from knowing she had a black husband and three black kids? Either they were the dumbest damned people, or they had an idea about her double life and didn't want to face it.
The room went quiet.
"I've told them so many lies for so many years," Angela said. "That's how come they don't know." For such an opinionated woman, this once Angela sounded as numb as a victim standing by the smoldering ruins of her house fire. “That tale I keep feeding them about me being a single career woman is such a spaghetti tangle I couldn't undo it if my parents suddenly forgot to be racists. The lie is to protect George, you know. They'd kill him if they knew we were together, just like they said way back when they had our marriage annulled and ran him out of town."
Run out of town? Like with threats and guns? And what did annul mean?
Sally asked Angela why in the world she kept going back to them then.
"I'll never give them up. I've got to have my Buffalo family and my Smalltown family." Angela went on about how much fun they had at the Smalltown family parties and holidays, how they laughed their heads off the whole time with their jokes.
"They told nigger jokes," Sally told me years later, although Angela's daughter doesn't remember hearing anything about that.
In those days, black people told nigger jokes all the time. But white people weren't supposed to. Back then in the 1950s, black people like Daddy and Grandma, neighbors, people in the supermarket or barber-shop, David's friends called each other nigger. My nigger! Nigger, please. See those niggers over there? How's a nigger like you going to get a girl like that? He's the HNIC (head nigger in charge). You niggers want to come over and play some records? You little niggers line up if you want to see Santa. Nigger, nigger, nigger was just like saying "Hey man." But if a white person said it, we knew it was a slur. So why wouldn't Angela tell her white relatives to stop? How could somebody who welcomed all kinds of black people in her house, and loved her three brown children as much as any mother did, put up with that?
Later that night I woke up when the house was quiet and dark, troubled. I went to my parents’ bedroom door and knocked until a light came on and Daddy opened the door.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“I want to talk,” I said.
He let me in and got back under the covers, patting the bed for me to sit down.
“Why does Angela keep her kids and husband a secret from her other family?” I asked.
Mama cleared her throat. Daddy held his palm up at me like a traffic cop.
"Listen, now," he said. "This is grown-folks' business."
I went on anyway, because I'd tried but could not understand why she would pretend to anybody that my "cousin" Sandra wasn't her daughter. She was her mother. And then deny her husband too?
"I want to know," I said, "if you pretend we're not your kids too? Trick people about me and David and Charles Nathan, like we don't belong to you?"
"Dolores, you woke us up to ask a fool thing like that?" Daddy said. "You're our kids and everybody knows it. What Angela does is her busi-ness, and I don't want you to ask any more about it."
It was only on that spring day, as my adult-self dumped vegetables and seasonings in with the boiled chicken in my stock pot that I saw how our Clique Club cocoon had bred its own mixed-race confusion. The club could not make it safe out in the real world, not even among our extended fami-lies, black or white. I didn't understand it back then but being in a mixed community meant living in a world of secrets, lies, and rejections. Once the party hats and Pokeno boards were put away, the gashes left by our mothers' sort-of whiteness and our black fathers' defenses of their wives to their own black families festered. Those white women had subordinated their own cultures, acquiescing to the blackness of their husbands. I realized all the white women in the club had troubled relationships with their white families. Except Mama. Because her white family didn't exist.
It seemed ridiculous then. We Jackson children internalized the erasure of her unspoken background from the beginning. We lived without ever asking or saying anything about her white family and had zero knowledge of or interaction with Mama's family. I grabbed that genealogy chart off the back deck and saw she was the lonely, only white person on that filled-up legal-sized paper. Suddenly, her being alone, all by her white self in this black family was shocking.
"My God," I cried. Her whole white family was missing. She didn't have a single branch on that tree of her own. For the first time I realized she was my whole white family all by herself. Who Mama was had never once been questioned. What happened to her people, and why hadn't I ever heard about or seen them? It didn't make a scintilla of sense, my never once thinking she must have white relatives. I was an idiot.
A fuzzy memory came back to me from when I was a little girl. Our family was walking down Hickory Street going to Fred Perry's ice cream shop. The boys led the way, talking about the flavors they might get, while I walked between Daddy and Mama.
"Look at old man Henry Lewis walking," Daddy said, pointing at the way David walked. Mama laughed and nodded in agreement.
"Who's Henry Lewis?" I asked.
"He was your mother's father," Daddy said. "But never mind that." I think that's what he said, but he sent me ahead to tell Grandma to come get a treat with us. While I ran the half block to knock on Grandma's door, Mama's father had melted away and was gone, like ice cream on my tongue. My Mama had come from some family.
Then who did that make us Jacksons? Black, white, sort-of white, sort-of black? We'd been in a racial petri dish all along, shape-shifting across membranes without acknowledging it. Charles Nathan wasn't exactly white passing, though he didn't volunteer his blackness often, while David decided to be blacker than Daddy. Mama was sort-of white and here I was, wobbling worse than ever, first black, then leaning too close to white corporate America, then anchored in slave ancestors, and now captive to a phantom white family.
Luther drove into the garage and came slowly up to the kitchen, clearly having overdone it again. He poured a tall glass of ice water, pulled off his tennis whites, and got in the shower. I hid my family chart under my place setting, hardly able to wait for him to come to the table. When he did, I spooned up the soup and spread the genealogy chart across his bowl.
"My mother's family is missing," I said, pointing to her box. "There are no more white people on here. No parents. No grandparents. See, no white family. Where is my white family?"
He looked at me expectantly.
"I have a whole white half, but Mama raised me to be all black. Of course, there is no acceptance in America to be equally white and black, but I want to know what it means to me, if anything. Because now I'm not sure what that means or who I am."
"Oh my Lord," he said. "Again?"
"How can anybody know who they are without understanding both their mother's and father's background? I need to know about all of the people in me, just like you know the hundreds of people in your North Carolina roots."
His eyelashes fluttered in exasperation. "I'm too tired now to deal with this. But let me say, if your mother has a family and hasn't told you about them, there's a reason. If you want to know about them, you're going to have to ask her. My question is whether this so-called 'knowing who you are' will be worth the trouble it's going to start."
His warning didn't change my mind. I had a right to know about my family. Maybe they were all dead from some accident. Maybe they'd been against her marrying Daddy. That would be painful for Mama to tell me, but she and Daddy had been married thirty-six years. With that much time gone by, did it matter now?
If her dad's name was Henry Lewis, that would make Mama a Lewis too. Merna Elizabeth Lewis. I checked but found no trace of them in Buffalo. I didn't know where to look for her vanished people, any more than I could locate evaporating steam. Back then, in 1979, I was in pre-Internet, pre-Ancestry.com days, so I studied up on the best sources to find "lost" family and got some ideas of what facts would help. I needed a plan to get the information out of Mama for me to find out who I was.
I wasn't going to pussyfoot about it either.
4 MY WHOLE SELF
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A fluffy snow fell that Friday night a slid into a seat at our old Formica kitchen table.
I took my place between my militant brother David in his dashiki and Afro the size of a pumpkin and my sometimes suspected of white-passing brother Charles Nathan, with his straight hair and granite eyes.
My elderly little white mother and black father, now subdued by his pacemaker, gladly presided over a favorite meatloaf meal, pleased to have all their grown children back under one roof.
They all thought I was back in Buffalo just for a visit, not suspecting I had an agenda.
When I took the conversation away from the Buffalo Bills and said I had something important on my heart to talk to them about, Mama gave me a curious smile.
I mentioned the family history books they received at Christmas and said how comforting it was they had supported my Roots project and my motivation to get regrounded in the black identity that sustained me. David gave me his usual side eye, signaling everyone hadn't cared like I did.
Now, I told them, there was something else. Something bigger.
We still didn't know who we were because a big piece of our history was missing. Daddy looked up, puzzled. I couldn't see Mama's face the way she was bent over to slice more meat.
"What's missing?" David said.
I got up and put my arm around Mama's shoulders and saw she didn't understand where this was going.
"Mama's side of the family is missing. Our entire white family is missing."
Mama jerked her head back and pulled away from me with the little power of the hunched-over lady she was. Her forehead creased deeply with worry grooves. This was going to be as messy as Luther predicted when he begged off coming.
Dishes and silverware clattered. Everybody stopped eating to look at me like I didn't have good sense. Mama pushed up so straight in her chair, her rarely seen knees were exposed under her house dress.
"What do you mean?" she said.
"Growing up, it never mattered we didn't know about your people," I said. "I didn't think about it, or even care, just like you didn't care."
"I didn't care? The I-dea. The very I-dea." That was as close to cussing as Mama came. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"Mama, I'm sorry. But I'm having a big problem here, trying to figure out who I am. All of me, including my white side. You never told us about your family, like they didn't exist. It's making me crazy, like the black person I always knew I was isn't my whole self. I can't live with that."
Daddy snapped his suspenders and shouted, "Aw, shit." Thankfully he hadn't had too much to drink yet, and his unfiltered temper was still at bay. I held my ground in silence, watching them watch me. David rolled his eyes knowingly at Daddy. There she goes again, the gesture said. Off on another of her tangents.
"You want to know what I've never told you?" Mama said. "Don't you understand I didn't want to talk about it?" she said, her voice rising. "Why are you doing this? What for?"
"So I can get a whole sense of myself. I want to know what that whiteness means in me. Is there something in my blank half that will mean something to who I am? Until I know about the blood running through me, I can't rest. I don't want to hurt or upset you."
She looked frail then, a sixty-nine-year-old retiree, afraid of ghosts.
"My identity is always being poked at," I went on. "As if my looks make my life out of order. People look at me like I'm some kind of freak. A white coworker asked why I'd call myself black when I could pass for white. A black one told me I wasn't better than him just because I was light. I'm tired of it."
Charles Nathan laid his napkin on the plate and shoved it away. "Uh-huh," he said. "Like that boy that busted my head open on Hickory Street when I was ten."
He'd been crawling around in the vacant lot at the end of the block looking for pennies. Some boy picked up a length of wood with a nail sticking out and slammed it into my brother's head, sending him to the hospital for stitches. The boy said he did it because Charles Nathan looked white.
Mama's eyelids drooped wearily. "I know."
"I guess you want to secede from the race now," David blared. He hammered his thumb back over his shoulder, an umpire calling me out.
"Stop it," I said. "It scares me that black people could think I'm disloyal or a misguided fool talking about my white blood. It's always been Afrocentric everything for me, and I don't want to risk not fitting in where I've always belonged. But I didn't expect you to be the first one to start this."
"Oh yeah, people are gonna talk bad about you," he said. "Guaran-dam-ned-teed."
"Don't you get it, man? There's no permission in America to be half white. But we are! And I won't be satisfied until I know what half white means-for me." I turned to my mother, the only one whose agreement mattered. "Will you help me? Please?"
She looked at Daddy questioningly. After a very pregnant moment, he took her upstairs to talk. We were to clean up the kitchen like we did as kids and wait until they came back.
We heard their murmuring voices in the bedroom above us. Daddy's rose and fell; Mama cried and cried. I couldn't tell what they said over David's jabbering about how he didn't need to know about Mama's white people.
"I've kinda wondered too," Charles Nathan said, grabbing a dish towel. "Not about Mama's family, but what it would have been like to have two parents the same race. My life would have been so much simpler."
He'd grown up being excluded or ejected from black parties because he looked too white. Black boys spilled out of a dance and into the street to run him off the last time he tried to go where he'd been invited. What really set him apart was his lack of street culture. David and I honed our bravado on the tough-talking public school playgrounds.
Our light skin seemed irrelevant because we were street-smart, slang-talking, Motown-dancing machines that would crack on you to shut you up. But Charles Nathan was a quiet Catholic school kid who didn't know the neighborhood crowd well, couldn't dance, and wouldn't tell people where to get off. But his leaning into the white world hadn't been easy either.
When he decided to marry his white wife, Gee, in the early 1970s, his new in-laws were so upset that he was "part black," they decided on a small family wedding and private dinner instead of a larger affair. David, offended at the notion that our wider black circle wouldn't be included, complained at home, but he stood in as best man for his brother's sake. With all that drama in play, I begged off attending, using the excuse that couldn't get back to Buffalo because of grad school commitments.
David and I left Charles Nathan to his own version of limbo, a whiteish man who lived on the white side of town with his white wife and friends. Our family still had Christmas together, and I later learned that Charles Nathan played cards with black family members during the years I didn't live in Buffalo. However much passing he did elsewhere, if it's fair to call it that, we were still connected. His blond kids identified as "part black" and, like Charles Nathan, took white partners.
As we did the dishes and waited for our parents to come back downs-tairs, Charles Nathan told me, "I get what you mean, about not knowing who you are, Dolores." He set the plate he was drying down. "People won't take me for who I am either. It's made me a loner, so I stick to the few people who accept me." He and his wife, Gee, dressed alike in loose shirt-tails, nodded at each other.
David got out the bourbon and poured himself one, then motioned the tip of the bottle toward us.
"I definitely need one," I said, holding out one of the pink cups Daddy drank his bourbon from for as long as I could remember.
"The price of you trying to be cute," he said.
It was nearly an hour later when our parents came down. They stood side by side in the living room. Stiff, like for some official hearing.
Mama raised her chin defiantly. "I left my family," she announced "I didn't mean for them to ever find me. And they never have, in over thirty-five years. And you, Dolores, are not to interfere with that."
"You left them?" I said. "But why?"
"For your father. I ran away with your father." She pulled the Kleenex from her sleeve and wiped her nose. "You kids have no idea what went on in 1943 when we decided to marry. Why, mixed marriage was unthinkable then. The whole country was against it."
"We couldn't stay where we were in Indiana," Daddy said. "It was as dangerous to be together there as it would have been down south. And just as illegal for us to get married."
"Dangerous? What kind of dangerous?" I asked.
"We didn't want you kids to know we could have gone to prison for being together," Mama said, coming over to sit down next to me. "We were afraid Daddy would get hurt, so we left." They decided before we were born not to scare us with the ugly truth, not to raise us knowing that kind of fear and hate.
Daddy said they had given us a family—a black family and raised us black because that was the only choice there was. "You sure couldn't have your white family in the 1940s. We did what we had to do. Now here you come wanting to change everything. After all we went through."
"But in all this time, you have never told us what you went through," I said. "Our full story has been kept from us all these years and here we are adults. But now, I just want to find out about my white side, like how I traced your family back to the African. I've even been thinking about going to look for our white family."
The sound Mama made was like wind forcing through a door crack. "OK, Daddy and I have agreed to tell you some things about my family. But if that's not enough to suit you, if you would go so far as to go find my family—" she said softly, "Why, I could never face them again, not after disappearing without a word." Her lips quivered. "They would hate me for what I did."
"You didn't tell them you were leaving, Mama? You just left?" I said.
"They don't know I'm alive," she said, looking me straight in the eye. My own plain-living mother was a runaway, hiding like some underground criminal.
"Your family thinks you're dead?" David said.
"They loved me back then, but now? I couldn't stand it, seeing them turn on me." She said that part of her life had been done with for so long, it would kill her.
"I would never let them hurt you, Mama, even if they tried. Tell us, what did they do to you and Daddy?"
"Nothing," Mama said. "They never knew about Daddy."
Could I go ahead with my plan and risk all she'd hidden for so long? Or should I drop what I wanted most, what I'd prepared for, what I needed to settle down?
I just couldn't give up and accept a life of confusion.
"I'm sorry you had to lose your family, Mama, and sorry you had to face that all over again today," I said. "But what if I could come up with a way for me to find out enough about the white family that would clear up who I was and still protect your secret?"
I asked the boys what they thought about me going out to Indiana.
Charles Nathan hunched his shoulders. "It's up to Mama."
"And you, David?"
"You already know who you are, Sapphire," he said, calling me the battle-axe on Amos 'n' Andy. "A pure black woman since the day you were born. After all this fighting The Man for our rights, I ain't got no questions about who I am." He pulled out the white handkerchief he always carried, swabbing his brow. David sweated even when he wasn't doing anything.
"I don't have any questions," Mama corrected him.
"I don't have any questions," David recited. "But Dolores, what are you going to get out of finding those so-called white relatives you want to meet so bad? If they wouldn't accept Daddy, don't you know they're going to slam the door in your face?"
"How do you know what they're going to do?"
He left leaning against the door frame to get in my face. "Cause the last thing those people want to know is that their daughter married a black man, and now they got a nigger relative on the porch."
I didn't care what David said. I could take it and was willing to risk whatever they dished out. All I wanted was to see what they looked like, what type of place they lived in, and get some sense of the stock running through me. If they ordered me off their property, then I'd be able to forget this whole white blood business. I could turn my back on them too, like Mama did, and go on being my black self. If they acted like that, all my questions would be answered. I wouldn't want any of them in me.
"Your mother means we broke the law," Daddy said, trying to make us understand there could be jail time if the authorities came after him or even Mama like they could have done in the 1940s. "I'm not busting any rocks for this stuff you're talking about."
"Nobody's going to jail in 1979 for something you did forty years ago," I said.
Daddy held up his finger. "Racism is still alive and well in America, girl You just remember that, and don't bring no trouble to your mother and me. You hear?"
"Yes, Daddy. But Mama, are your family racists? Will they shut the door on me?"
"They're simple, decent people, but they wouldn't have accepted our marriage. It would have devastated them to know what I did."
"How about this," I said. "I go to Indianapolis by myself to find out about your mom and dad. I get to see who they are and nobody in Buffalo has to face them or get in trouble. Is that OK, Mama?"
She didn't answer.
"Listen here," David said. "You better not mess this up. You do, and I'm gonna put a hurt on you." He was all bluster whenever his dander was up, so I knew not to get in it with him. Instead, I turned back to Mama.
"If I found anybody in your family who'd talk to me, Mama, what do you want me to say about you, to protect you. Just tell me what you want me to do and I'll do it. Then we both get what we need."
She wrung her wrinkled hands together, as she always did when things got out of control, her distended blue veins rolling back and forth across their backs. It seemed she would speak several times, but then she sighed and wrestled with herself some more.
"I'm so ashamed. After the way they loved me." Tears dripped down her cheeks as she rubbed the loose skin around her eyes. "But I still think what your father and I did was right. I won't have any part in this, Dolores. You want to do this for yourself, and I understand that, to a point. But please, do you promise to leave me out of it entirely?"
"OK, yes, Mama. I promise. But what am I supposed to tell them about you?"
"You'll have to…" She put her hand on her cheek, where her pinky finger shook. "You'll have to say ….. say I'm ... dead."
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Excerpt 1
“PROLOGUE
It was sticky hot at nine o’clock that morning in Greenville, South Carolina. I was in my office, a corporate outpost in a sparsely settled section of town, sitting on a sleepy two-lane road dotted with intermittent nondescript buildings, a gas station, and thick rows of crops in patchwork fields. I readied files for customer appointments and stuffed them into my briefcase.
As I ran down the outdoor steps to the company car, the sweat on my back stuck my sheath dress to me like a bathing suit. When the car’s air-conditioning kicked in, I mopped myself up with a wad of Kleenex and tried to smooth my hair, now rising like a dandelion seed head.
At the gas station across the road where the company had an account, the white gas man sauntered over. With a head bob and a grin, he started the fill-up. While pretending to wash the windshield, he stared through it instead, sizing me up, leaving water streaks across the glass.
It was the mid-1970s, when civil rights gains hadn’t sunk in much in the small-town South. I had to ask myself what a black New Yorker like me was doing in that foreign land of rifle racks in pickup trucks, proudly displayed Confederate flags, and a local university that didn’t let blacks set foot on campus. I was twenty-six and had moved there with my husband despite my father’s warning that I didn’t understand the ways of the South, the South his family had escaped in the 1930s during the Great Migration. But I was a love-struck bride, so I went anyway, thinking my husband’s better job was our step up.
The gas man replaced the nozzle and came around to the driver’s side. As I started the engine, ready to sign the bill, he stuck his head too close to my open window.
‘You been comin’ in here regular, gal,’ he said, his stale smoker’s breath so strong I turned my head a moment. ‘I been a-looking at you and a-wondering, what are you anyway? You Spanish?’
‘No.’ I refused to meet his eyes.
‘Eye-talian, right? You’re Eye-talian.’
‘No.’ How I hated it when people started this guessing game about which box my looks fit in.
‘Injun?’
‘No.’
‘You ain’t a Jew, is you?’
‘No.’
‘Then what? Tell me.’
‘Black,’ I said loudly to the windshield. ’I’m black.’
He whooped and jumped back from the car, then cupped his hands and yelled across the pumps to another attendant. ‘Hey Joe, come here and lookit this gal. She says she’s black.’"
(Chapter: Prologue)
Excerpt 2
“CODE SWITCH
My identity has always been tangled up in the fraught definitions of America’s racism, just as it was a few years later when I drove onto the world corporate headquarters campus nestled back in low, rolling New Jersey hills, along with thousands of other professionals. Like them, I was suited up and carrying a presentation for the day’s meetings. Unlike the others, I was black and female.
I shut off Smokey Robinson’s sweet crooning and took a minute to shape-shift into my oh-so-heavy white mask and to rehearse the code-switching needed to get my ideas across to white colleagues. Then I walked briskly through the maze of corridors to my office.
It was 1977. My job managing part of the national marketing strategy for telephone companies’ business communications products was an ever-growing pile of assignments, most labeled URGENT or VERY URGENT, all due yesterday. That meant hammering out agreements with a team of engineers, lawyers, accountants, sales managers, and factories. The work was intense, but I was up to it. The real challenge was being respected as an equal in one of America’s largest companies, dominated by white males. Their normal old boy power was my mountain to climb.
But I was on it, as was my husband, Luther, who had gotten a Department of Defense job here in New Jersey after we fled that hellacious mess down south. At least up north in New Jersey people were more inclined to treat blacks fairly, which was some comfort. That didn’t include the police, who routinely made the news profiling men stopped for driving while black. At work, the company’s legal compliance with affirmative action was an established procedure, though a human resources rep had called me about a form I’d turned in the first day at orientation. She had just one question, about my profile.
‘Well, I mean, if it’s OK, can you tell me why you checked the racial category black at the bottom?’ she asked. ‘I have to make sure it’s accurate for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report, is all. For the government, you know.’
‘You are asking what race I am, is that it?’
’That’s not illegal, is it?’
I told her I marked black because I am black, and the form was correct.
’It’s just when I saw you, I didn’t think…’ In a flurry of awkward thank-yous, she hung up.
At least she asked the gas attendant’s ‘What are you?’ question with some respect.
When we started working in New Jersey last year, Luther and I made up our own continuing education program at home, because doing our work and keeping our noses clean was just the ante to get jobs like ours. To earn our seat at the table, we black first-generation college grads had to polish our facades and up our gamesmanship.
We inspected each other’s body language in the dining room while practicing presentations, editing out any Black English and mannerisms. During Sunday football, Luther related quarterback calls and strategic blocking and tackling to being in the corporate game. ’You’re dealing with power players. They don’t want to talk. They want to win,’ he said."
(Chapter 1: Code Switch)
Excerpt 3
“DRESS BOX
Our relatives in Georgia and Alabama were only names and stories to me, except for Great-Aunt Willie in Birmingham. When used to sleep over at Grandmas as a girl, she had me write letters to Willie. Daddy said Grandma went to night school for twenty years to learn to read and write, but the only thing she learned was the neighborhood gossip. Sitting at her feet, she’d pluck an unanswered letter from her wicker basket and dictate the reply to me.
‘Dear Willie. Whatcha got, Dolores?’
‘Dear Willie,’ I’d read.
‘Received your letter and was glad to hear from you. Whatcha got?’
‘Dear Willie, received your letter and was glad to hear from you.’
‘We are fine and hope you are too. Whatcha got?’
Most of the opening I’d already written before she dictated it; for years, every letter had had an identical greeting. Then we’d add the Buffalo updates and write similar content to others waiting in that basket. Our teamwork saved Grandma the extravagance of running up some long-distance phone bill she couldn’t afford. And all those letters to Willie gave me a sense of kinship. With Grandma’s blessing and help, I headed to Alabama.
It was no surprise the visit started with having to talk the reluctant white cabdriver in Birmingham into driving me to the black side of town. It had been fifteen years since their police dogs and maximum strength water hoses blasted demonstrating African American youth and a black Baptist church bombing killed four little girls. Maybe the driver took me because he knew I wasn’t a local who would put up with his excuses, or maybe he thought I was white.
When we pulled up, Aunt Willie came down off the porch of her bungalow where she waited for me. As that stately dark woman wrapped me in a warm hug, I caught the scent of pomade in her freshly straightened hair. She was dressed for company in a wrap-around dress, and she fussed over me as only a relative with southern charm could.
‘Ooooeee, look at Charles’s baby come to see the old folk,’ she said, and laughed easily. ‘Come on in, chile, and rest yourself a while. You thirsty?’
We spent Friday evening talking over news of the Buffalo family she hadn’t seen in decades. I delivered their messages and the recent photos they wanted her to have.
She got acquainted with my mother and brothers too, none of whom she had ever seen. I, on the other hand, had to admit I didn’t know about most of the people she tried to fill me in on. But I promised to take the stories back to Buffalo.
Saturday morning, Willie and I sat out on the porch with our shoes kicked off, gently swinging in her old glider. It sat under the striped awning she kept down all the time against the Alabama heat.
‘I heard you went to our colored college up in Washington. Is that right?’
I began telling her about my experience at Howard University, when she stopped me.
‘Oh wait, here comes Miz Greene. Mornin’, Miz Greene. This is my great-niece come to visit from up north!’
‘Well, I declare,’ Miz Greene said, asking where from, for how long, who in my way back was related to Willie. Would she know them?
By her demeanor, it wasn’t clear if this conversation was courtesy or gossip fodder. I answered sweetly with just enough explanation to satisfy. ’She’s my daddy’s aunt from the Georgia side.’ After further pleasantries, Miz Greene went on her way.
Aunt Willie kept interrupting our conversation to introduce me to the whole community as they passed by, from the postman to neighbors going to and fro. Since it seemed to make Willie proud of my visit, the way she put me on display for people I didn’t know, I made small talk with every person who said hey.
There was even one woman who came up on the porch to get a real good look at me. She used that southern cover-all for saying anything you want: ‘Bless your heart, honey.’ Then she asked what she really wanted to know. ‘But is y’all really related? You don’t look nothing like Willie.’ That was sure the truth.
I smiled at their curious glances, feeling at once part of the community that came to greet me and an oddity in it. I wondered if Wille had told them I had a white mother, something few Americans accepted, and I doubted few southerners of either race could abide.
Out on that porch is where I found out about Daddy’s first marriage. I knew he’d had a first wife, but she was never spoken of. ’Weren’t she purdy?’ Aunt Willie asked me, assuming l already knew what she was saying about Daddy getting married at seventeen. This was fascinating, so I didn’t stop her talking. But the bride I wasn’t related to was not the connective family story I came to Alabama to get. When I admitted to not ever having seen her, Aunt Willie walked me back to her room where she had a picture of their wedding day to find and show me.
‘Look down under the bed for me, hehehe, and save these old legs,’ she said. ‘Now feel around for a dress box.’ It wasn’t near the foot of the bed, so I scooted over to its side, lay down, and reached way underneath. There it was—a large box of sturdy cardboard. Squirming in closer to grab hold, I hooked my index finger into a pull cord that hung from inside the lid and pulled the box out. That once white box hadn’t been moved in years, judging by the gray clumps of dust Willie had to wipe off with a wet rag.
’They’re all in there, the family pictures,’ she said. ‘Bring the box in the dining room where we can see ’em good.’
I set that heavy box on her lace tablecloth and she wiggled the lid off slowly. Inside were hundreds of black-and-white and sepia-toned pictures thrown together jammed to the top. Some were shiny, or with scalloped white edges, or fixed to standing frames under some laminate. Every person pictured was black, very dark black. No wonder the porch people had stared so.
More of my history, identity, and roots were in that box than I’d hoped to find on this visit. And Willie was ready to help me understand what they each had to do with me."
(Chapter 2: Dress Box)
Excerpt 1 – Prologue
It was sticky hot at nine o’dock that morning in Greenvile, South Carolina I was in my office, a corporate outpost in a sparsely setted section oftown, sitting on a sleepy two-lane road dotted with intermittent nondescript buildings, a gas station, and thick rows of crops in patchwork fields. I readied files for customer appointments and stuffed them into my briefcase.
As I ran down the outdoor steps to the company car, the sweat on my back stuck my sheath dress to me like a bathing suit. When the car’s air-conditioning kicked in, I mopped myself up with a wad of Kleenex and tried to smooth my hair, now rising like a dandelion seed head.
At the gas station across the road where the company had an account, the white gas man sauntered over. With a head bob and a grin, he started the fill-up. While pretending to wash the windshield, he stared through it instead, sizing me up, leaving water streaks across the glass.
It was the mid-1970s, when civil rights gains hadn’t sunk in much in the small-town South. I had to ask myself what a black New Yorker like me was doing in that foreign land of rifle racks in pickup trucks, proudly displayed Confederate flags, and a local university that didn’t let blacks set foot on campus. I was twenty-six and had moved there with my husband despite my father’s warning that I didn’t understand the ways of the South, the South his family had escaped in the 1930s during the Great Migration. But I was a love-struck bride, so I went anyway, thinking my husband’s better job was our step up.
The gas man replaced the nozzle and came around to the driver’s side. As I started the engine, ready to sign the bill, he stuck his head too close to my open window.
“You been comin’ in here regular, gal,” he said, his stale smoker’s breath so strong I turned my head a moment. “I been a-looking at you and a-wondering, what are you anyway? You Spanish?”
“No.” I refused to meet his eyes.
“Eye-talian, right? You’re Eye-talian.”
“No.” How I hated it when people started this guessing game about which box my looks fit in.
“Injun?”
“No.”
“You ain’t a Jew, is you?”
“No.”
“Then what? Tell me.”
“Black,” I said loudly to the windshield. “I’m black.”
Excerpt 2 – Chapter 1: Code Switch
My identity has always been tanged up in the fraught definitions of Ameries racism, just asi was a few yers later when I drove onto the world corporate headquarters campus nestled back in low, rolling New Jersey hills, along with thousands of other professionals. Like them, I was suited up and carrying a presentation for the day’s mee-tings. Unlike the others, I was black and female.
I shut off Smokey Robinson’s sweet crooning and took a minute to shape-shift into my oh-so-heavy white mask and to rehearse the code switching needed to get my ideas across to white colleagues. Then I walked briskly through the maze of corridors to my office.
It was 1977. My job managing part of the national marketing strategy for telephone companies’ business communications products was an ever-growing pile of assi-gnments, most labeled URGENT Or VERY URGENT, all due yesterday. That meant hammering out agreements with a team of engineers, lawyers, accountants, sales managers, and factories. The work was intense, but I was up to it. The real challenge was being respected as an equal in one of America’s largest companies, dominated by white males. Their normal old boy power was my mountain to climb.
But I was on it, as was my husband, Luther, who had gotten a Department of Defense job here in New Jersey after we fled that hellacious mess down south. At least up north in New Jersey people were more inclined to treat blacks fairly, which was some comfort. That didn’t include the police, who routinely made the news profiling men stopped for driving while black. At work the company’s legal compliance with affirmative action was an established procedure, though a human resources rep had called me about a form I’d turned in the first day at orientation. She had just one question, about my profile.
“Well, I mean, if it’s OK, can you tell me why you checked the racial category black at the bottom?” she asked. “I have to make sure it’s accurate for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report, is all. For the government, you know.”
“You are asking what race I am, is that it?”
“That’s not illegal, is it?”
I told her I marked black because I am black, and the form was correct.
“It’s just when I saw you, I didn’t think…” In a flurry of awkward thank-yous, she hung up.
At least she asked the gas attendant’s “What are you?” question with some respect.
When we started working in New Jersey last year, Luther and I made up our own continuing education program at home, because doing our work and keeping our noses clean was just the ante to get jobs like ours. To earn our seat at the table, we black first-generation college grads had to polish our facades and up our gamesmanship.
We inspected each other’s body language in the dining room while practicing presentations, editing out any Black English and mannerisms. During Sunday football Luther related quarterback calls and strategic blocking and tackling to being in the corporate game. “You’re dealing with power players. They don’t want to talk. They want to win,” he said.
Excerpt 3 – Chapter 2: Dress Box
Our relatives in Georgia and Alabama were only names and stories to me, except for Great-Aunt Willie in Birmingham. When used to sleep over at Grandmas as a girl, she had me write letters to Willie. Daddy said Grandma went to night school for twenty years to learn to read and write, but the only thing she learned was the neighborhood gos-sip. Sitting at her feet, she’d pluck an unanswered letter from her wicker basket and dictate the reply to me.
“Dear Willie. Whatcha got, Dolores?”
“Dear Willie,” I’d read.
“Received your letter and was glad to hear from you. Whatcha got?”
“Dear Willie, received your letter and was glad to hear from you.”
“We are fine and hope you are too. Whatcha got?”
Most of the opening I’d already written before she dictated it; for years, every letter had had an identical greeting. Then we’d add the Buffalo updates and write similar content to others waiting in that basket. Our teamwork saved Grandma the extravagance of running up some long-distance phone bill she couldn’t afford. And all those letters to Willie gave me a sense of kinship. With Grandma’s blessing and help, I headed to Alabama.
It was no surprise the visit started with having to talk the reluctant white cabdriver in Birmingham into driving me to the black side of town. It had been fifteen years since their police dogs and maximum strength water hoses blasted demonstrating African American youth and a black Baptist church bombing killed four little girls. Maybe the driver took me because he knew I wasn’t a local who would put up with his excuses, or maybe he thought I was white.
When we pulled up, Aunt Willie came down off the porch of her bungalow where she waited for me. As that stately dark woman wrapped me in a warm hug, I caught the scent of pomade in her freshly straightened hair. She was dressed for company in a wrap-around dress, and she fussed over me as only a relative with southern charm could.
“Ooooeee, look at Charles’s baby come to see the old folk,” she said, and laughed easily. “Come on in, chile, and rest yourself a while. You thirsty?”
We spent Friday evening talking over news of the Buffalo family she hadn’t seen in decades. I delivered their messages and the recent photos they wanted her to have.
She got acquainted with my mother and brothers too, none of whom she had ever seen. I, on the other hand, had to admit I didn’t know about most of the people she tried to fill me in on. But I promised to take the stories back to Buffalo.
Saturday morning, Willie and I sat out on the porch with our shoes kicked off, gently swinging in her old glider. It sat under the striped awning she kept down all the time against the Alabama heat.
“I heard you went to our colored college up in Washington. Is that right?”
I began telling her about my experience at Howard University, when she stopped me.
“Oh wait, here comes Miz Greene. Mornin’, Miz Greene. This is my great-niece come to visit from up north!”
Excerpt 1
My identity has always been tangled up in the fraught definitions of America’s racism, just as it was a few years later when I drove onto the world corporate headquarters campus nestled back in low, rolling New Jersey hills, along with thousands of other professionals. Like them, I was suited up and carrying a presentation for the day’s meetings. Unlike the others, I was black and female.
I shut off Smokey Robinson’s sweet crooning and took a minute to shape-shift into my oh-so-heavy white mask and to rehearse the code-switching needed to get my ideas across to white colleagues. Then I walked briskly through the maze of corridors to my office.
It was 1977. My job managing part of the national marketing strategy for telephone companies’ business communications products was an ever-growing pile of assignments, most labeled URGENT Or VERY URGENT, all due yesterday. That meant hammering out agreements with a team of engineers, lawyers, accountants, sales managers, and factories. The work was intense, but I was up to it. The real challenge was being respected as an equal in one of America’s largest companies, dominated by white males. Their normal old boy power was my mountain to climb.
Excerpt 2
There was the Atlanta company trainer who said if a customer refused to deal with my kind, even to the point of pushing me out a door as the trainer had done to me, the correct response was to go back to the office and send a white male back. I said I wouldn’t; the company had to back me up.
Or another time, a Swiss colleague at an international management dinner for twenty told nigger jokes our Denver coworker taught him. I pushed away my plate and walked out. After human resources got involved, he was made to apologize.
A corporate president was taken aback at the recommendation that more minorities be hired at top levels. “But then, we’d have to have special training so they could keep up,” he replied to us senior minorities on the diversity committee, oblivious that he was disparaging us to our faces.
Excerpt 3
Our relatives in Georgia and Alabama were only names and stories to me, except for Great-Aunt Willie in Birmingham. When used to sleep over at Grandma’s as a girl, she had me write letters to Willie. Daddy said Grandma went to night school for twenty years to learn to read and write, but the only thing she learned was the neighborhood gossip. Sitting at her feet, she’d pluck an unanswered letter from her wicker basket and dictate the reply to me.
“Dear Willie. Whatcha got, Dolores?”
“Dear Willie,” I’d read.
These excerpts are sourced from chapter 4 of the provided text.
on the uploaded document.
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