[5 of 5] Say I'm Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love (2020) by E. Dolores Johnson - Chapters 17 - 21, Epilogue
Author: E. Dolores Johnson
Johnson, E. Dolores. "Shift," "Europe," "Belonging Everywhere," "Flow On," "Leaning Into Brown," "Epilogue," Say I’m Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love, Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago, IL, 2020, pp. 176-224.
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17 SHIFT
Aunt Dorothy's fifteen-page letters, cards, and calls started right away. They were the communiques that helped us grow closer despite the distance. And most important, there were some short, cordial conversations between Dorothy and Daddy, as I remember. Theirs was the one essentially healing connection that would help us understand some of the trickiest parts of our relationship. But the opportunity to put Daddy and the Boehles together was forever lost when Daddy died a few months after Mama went back to Indy, before the Boehles could ever meet him.
While Daddy lay in a coma for weeks, everyone came to the hospital except David. When I tracked him down at a friend's house to go to the hospital with me, David choked up.
"I can't stand to see him wired up to everything but the kitchen radio," he said No, he wouldn't look at the respirator pumping air through a tracheotomy cut in Daddy's throat. No, he couldn't bear to relieve Daddy's scabbed tongue with a glycerin swab. Not his father who'd become his drinking buddy, the father he did the Amos 'n' Andy routine with, the father who came to David's sixth-grade classroom every year with a stalk of sugarcane and a ball of cotton to tell the inner-city have-nots about farming down south. In adulthood, David was more like Daddy and much closer to him than Charles Nathan and I. At the graveside, he was the one who broke down, holding the wide-brimmed white hat he bought over his eyes but unable to hide his sobbing behind it.
The rest of us had had far more complicated feelings about Daddy for a long time. Mama, married to him for thirty-seven years, looked lost, and Charles let out a yelp of what?-anguish, guilt, or love?-over the casket. But even as I mourned him, I still had not come to terms with all the damage his Four Roses whiskey in that pink plastic cup had caused among us. As a teen, I'd childishly tried to stop the drinking by pouring his bottles down the drain. Of course, he had other bottles hidden and a liquor store two blocks away, so his hair-trigger rages continued to turn our home inside out. Before going away to college, I resorted to staying in my room to avoid interactions when my brothers were out and Mama was at work. And as an adult, I only tolerated him.
Yet Daddy handled his business. He was a faithful husband and father who came home every night to preside over dinner. He guided, disciplined, and entertained us kids. He was a solid provider who for decades took three busses across town in Buffalo blizzards to get to his welding job.
Mama did her duty as wife and mother while wringing her hands and urging Daddy to calm down for nearly forty years. Pleading for Daddy to stop raging at all of us, pleading for him to stop hitting us with that welding shop strap with buckles on the ends.
But we were all clear on our unspoken pact-to keep up appearances and keep outsiders in the dark about what went on at home.
In the week after his funeral, Mama and I pulled up in front of a takeout to get some dinner. She put her hand on my forearm, to stop me getting out.
"You had such a hard time with your father," she said.
"What tore me up was what his drinking did to our family."
"You're not the only one," she said. "I disliked Daddy's drinking as much as you. But I was married 'for better or worse,' and did my best even when times were at their worst."
We sat in that hot car in front of the pizza shop, finally confessing our shared misery of living with an alcoholic. Like the canceled plans and cover-up excuses when Daddy was in no shape to go out with Mama. Or the Thanksgiving dinner when he drunkenly passed out in his stuffing and gravy in front of company. Or on Charles Nathan's graduation night when he tried to knock his son out for signing up to join the army. What we didn't know then, but I learned years later in an Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting, was that Daddy's kind of chaos went on in many families and impacted everyone in them. But none of us ever knew to get help.
This was the secret Mama wanted buried with Daddy. It was for this reason she did not call her newfound and loving sister Dorothy to come for her husband's funeral. We all agreed it made no sense to arrange Dorothy's first visit with black people while we were being gutted. Nevertheless, Dorothy showered Mama with flowers, letters, and calls of concern in the months that followed, loving her as only a sister could.
Meanwhile, we Jacksons burrowed in together, to dredge up and weigh the racist assaults that drove Daddy to drink. And as he finally rested in peace, we privately acknowledged that liquor was the only escape he found while defending his white wife, his mixed children, and his own black body during a lifetime when America thought we were an abomination.
__________
Later that summer, Mama and Dorothy wanted to see each other again and insisted I had to be a part of their plans. They both came to visit Luther and me in New Jer-sey, which became their pattern for the next twenty-six years, to vacation together, usually with me. It was broiling hot the week they had their second visit. We wandered a mall worshipping its air-conditioning, then went home at closing time. The house was still intolerably stifling.
With the only air conditioner in our master bedroom, Luther dragged in twin mattresses from the guest room where Mama and Dorothy were staying. Dressed in our thinnest clothes, the elders climbed into our queen bed while Luther and I lay on the floor mattresses. As that old air conditioner, set on blast, chugged on noisily, our German shepherd whined outside the bedroom door.
"He's hot too," Mama said, getting up to let him in. He plopped down near our feet, in the line of cool air.
"Good night, Mama," Luther said.
"Good night, Dorothy," Mama said.
"Good night, Luther," I said.
"Good night, Dolores," Dorothy said
"Good night, Baron," Luther said.
"Good night, John Boy," Aunt Dorothy said, laughing at The Waltons show sign off.
During that visit, I got out the genealogy chart that had triggered my search for Dorothy, hoping we could flesh out more of Mama's family history beyond her parents. Could they trace the line back to my European who came to the States, the equivalent white root to the African Aunt Willie told me about? Finding my African had anchored the family line that was lost when slavers severed those ties. Maybe with a similar white anchor I could also understand the essence of the whiteness in me. There had to be more beyond the current day Boehles and my grandparents Lewis.
Over several days, the sisters set about piecing stories together through fuzzy memories and family lore. It took a lot of sorting and backtracking through the folks best remembered before they decided my family was French and Scotch.
We crafted another genealogy tree. But once it was laid out on paper, we saw Mama was wrong. She was talking about her adoptive grandparents' heritage, not her birth mother Florence's bloodline. In fact, she didn't know anything about Florence's background, except she was nicknamed Ella after her own mother Ella, and both those women had died young. When Florence's mother died, her father (whose background Mama didn't know either) arranged Florence's adoption by George Scott, a paper hanger who immigrated from Scotland, and his wife, Ella Amanda, who had French heritage.
But they were not my bloodline. My only palpable connection on Mama's side was all those Ellas, who gave me my own never-used first name-Ella.
On my grandfather Henry Marshall Lewis's side, both his father, Charles Lewis, and his mother, Minnie Knowlton, were born in Ohio. Where their elders came from was unknown, but the names had origins in Britain, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
Minnie was a member of the Marshall drugstores family, and her dad was a banker.
The story Dorothy and Mama told me about their father's family amounted to this. Minnie died young, and Charles Lewis remarried. He and his second wife, who had more children, had already cut Henry off because he decided to marry Florence, who they thought beneath their station. During summers when Mama was a girl, she went back to Ohio to visit her plain-living grandparents, the Scotts. They would dress her in her best for the occasional dinners she was invited to at grandfather Charles's big three-story house, with the music room, grand circular stairway, and her three aunts and uncles. While once wealthy, the Lewises apparently lived beyond their means for so long they later had to convert second-floor bedrooms into accommodations for four boarders. But they held on to their symbols of better days, and still set the table with china, linens, and the crystal napkin ring that Dorothy pinched the only time Henry's second family was invited to their house. Fifty years later, Dorothy gave that napkin ring to Mama. Now it sits in my dining room hutch, my only other connection to those white forebearers.
I'd only found two generations back on my white side, with some probability of bloodlines near Britain, but had not found my European root. What I did find was that my discovered whiteness, adopted and related, was so much more privileged and freer than I or my black family began with. My maternal grandmother was raised by a striving craftsman who chose to immigrate to America for a better life, plying his trade freely in the late 1800s while my black sharecropper grandmother was being raped by a plantation white man. My paternal grandfather Lewis was a self-made electrician hired to help wire up the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and his grandfather was a banker born in 1852, when my black people were slaves. My grandfather Henry grew up in a fancy home where his parents' status made them think they could look down on other whites while my black father feared Klan violence by all classes of whites. Yet the kind of opportunity privilege my white people had didn't flow to me through my mother. She gave it all up for the love of a black man, and I was raised never knowing what that meant.
But Mama did pass down a certain whiteness to me-her knowledge of what was on the other side of the color line. However incidental to her practical mothe-ring, she gave me her own Standard English and white social manners. She used the entitled sense that one could and should ask for what was important from those who could change things (like getting my fellowship funds transferred to Harvard), something many blacks were reluctant to do. She lived the assumed right to be unapologetic for who you are despite other's opinions (even as blacks tried to hide their ways to accommodate white's expectations, like I did when shape-shifting). Mama gave me insight into the white Catholicism that helped me understand the Boston jobs and political landscape dominated by Irish Catholics while I lived there. And she gave me the understanding that white people could have the decency and respect for other races that she and her sister shared.
Not until I wrote this book did I understand what my half-black, half-white, mixed race meant. My early struggle to rise to my full potential as the black person I knew myself to be was advantaged by my insider's notion of how some whiteness functions in America. That unique mix of determination and insight was its own form of privilege.
At seventy years of age, I picked up the hunt to find more about my makeup by spitting into an AncestryDNA kit. Yet when the test results showed my heritage was 75 percent British Isles and northwestern Europe, I went into orbit. How could I be that much more white than Mama's 50 percent donation? It had to be that old Georgia plantation rapist's blood I never wanted to claim that ran through me still. So, my black half, the half that defined most of my life, is only a quarter of my biology.
American society said I was Negro at birth, and I was raised to understand myself as black.
It was not only Mama's white blood that counted for nothing back then, it was all my white relatives who were erased from my tree.
In this land of the one-drop rule, born of this country's obsession with keeping "white" at 100 percent, my black identity outweighed 75 percent of my biology.
So how should I define race?
Culture or biology?
Nurture or nature?
__________
Luther had a bout of lupus later the year that Aunt Dorothy visited us in New Jersey. It destroyed his kidneys, the first of his vital organs it would attack. He began lifesaving dialysis three times a week that cleaned out accumulated toxins and fluids, wreaking havoc on the benefits of his medications, as they were cleaned out every other day too. During this upheaval, we became pregnant for the first time in our eight-year marriage. The news brought out the most joy Luther had ever expressed.
Jennifer was born in 1981, a child so white looking I couldn't tell which baby was mine among the white ones in the hospital nursery. We thought it was my white heritage that made her that complexion, but a black woman pointed out the brown tops of Jennifer's tiny ears as her natural color. Sure enough, our daughter morphed into a brown child. Jennifer was a precious brown baby born into a different world than we'd known, into an extended white and black family that claimed and loved her from the start.
It had been two years since Mama and Dorothy reunited, so they planned another visit, this time in Buffalo to meet Charles Nathan, David, and their families. While on maternity leave, I would go too, and introduce the baby. But the difference in our black and white worlds drove a debate among us Jacksons about where they should stay.
"They can't stay here at the house," Mama said. "They might be scared in the ghetto around all these black people. What if they act like Angela's sister did that time she came to Buffalo?"
"That woman musta been scared the black would rub off," David said. He thought if Dorothy stayed with us in the 'hood, we'd be sure she was OK with black folks. But Mama said it was too much. I don't know what excuse Mama used for not extending the hospitality of her home, but she booked Dorothy and Antoinette in the Holiday Inn on the white side of Buffalo.
To create just the right setting for the family to all meet, Mama wanted us to all go out to dinner on their first night in town. But our family rarely went out to dinner because of the cost, so nobody knew where to take them. One night at work she talked it over with her white nursing supervisor, who suggested a waterside restaurant with a private dining room.
At the restaurant, the hostess showed Aunt Dorothy, Antoinette, Mama, me, and the baby in her little seat past the lively happy hour to that private room. There we found David and his girlfriend, Clarissa, and Charles and his wife, Gee, dressed up and waiting for us. As Mama introduced each one, Dorothy leaned in and kissed them warmly. The aunt and cousin who had embraced me showed the same love to each one of them. Her "I love you" was so heartfelt, so simply honest, it seemed as if she had always been one of us.
The setting was lovely. We sat around a large wooden table, surrounded by soft white lights strung through lattices and vines. The privacy of the room made for conversation we could all join in, and the opportunity to speak freely. As Mama presided over the union of our black and white family, the most beautiful thing in the room was the blissful glow in her eyes. It was her dream come true, watching them lean in over their plates, getting to know each other and weaving our colors with love into whole cloth.
The next morning, David drove them over to the house for coffee and Mama's cinnamon coffee cake. As we milled around the kitchen fixing our coffee, Mama showed Dorothy her Buffalo Bills football game tickets under a refrigerator magnet. She and David bought them every year along with community bus tickets to the stadium. She loved eating BBQ with the crowd while somebody else did the driving.
Not to be outdone, Antoinette said their Indianapolis Colts would be way out front of the Bills, and Aunt Dorothy rattled off their players' statistics like a sportscas-ter. They had a favorite sports bar where the family went together to watch the Colts over burgers and beer, she said.
Those two old ladies gave tit-for-tat, their version of trash talking about who would be in the playoffs and have a chance at the Super Bowl. Raising the ante, David and Antoinette traded phone numbers so they could rub in insane plays and victories after game time. By the following season, the two of them were traveling to attend Colts-Bills games together, hosting one another in Buffalo or Indianapolis. And on a future visit, Mama and I went to their packed sports bar to see the Colts play on a bewildering number of wide-screen TVs.
When the football talk died down, we sat at Mama's dining room table, which was dressed in the good white tablecloth, special blue glass plates, and a peony bouquet from her garden. As we settled in, Angela arrived, her hair freshly teased into a white bouffant. She was still Mama's best friend from forty years in the Clique Club and was the last of the old gang still in Buffalo. Mama introduced Angela as her other sis-ter, the one she'd been through it all with.
I served slices of that mile-high coffee cake while Angela told how she and Mama had raised us kids like cousins, especially me and her daughter Sandra. It was true. I was godmother to Sandra's son and could hardly remember a special occasion without them.
"Angela was the heart of our fun," Mama said. "Her house was full of parties when the kids were little, and she organized our families for more get-togethers than you could shake a stick at."
They had so much more than fun together. The two of them had made the shower favors by hand when both Sandra and I got married, cooked dinners together for church fundraisers, visited every Christmas, and cried together after their husbands died.
"The whole nine," Mama said.
Dorothy studied the woman who had filled her sisterly shoes the thirty-six years Mama had been missing. "I'm grateful you had each other," she said. "It's a blessing to know you."
Angela reached across the dining room table and took both Mama's hand and Dorothy's. "You two don't know how lucky you are, getting back together," she said. Her eyes were weary when she turned to Dorothy. "My white family doesn't know about my black family. They're so prejudiced, I can never tell them. I have to live a lie, a double life."
This was old news to us Jacksons, and I think Mama must have already said something about it to Dorothy. But Antoinette's lips parted, and her eyes flared mo-mentarily, bearing witness to how little the uninitiated understood mixed-race life.
Those two women would meet again. Some years later, Mama was found in the morning, unconscious in her evening bath, the water turned cold. A neighbor noticed she hadn't taken her morning newspaper in and called David. Mama had had multiple seizures sitting in that water all night long.
Angela and Dorothy sat together in Mama's hospital room. Their mutual devotion to her brought them there faithfully every day until I could fly in. Then they mothered my frightened self and stayed on when I had to go back to work. Sandra, who worked at the hospital, checked in with the staff every day on Mama's care. After Mama came around and Dorothy went back to Indy, our constant Angela never missed a day beside my mother, sitting sentinel until she was released to rehab weeks later.
Five years passed as Jennifer grew, Mama and Dorothy kept up, and Luther tried to make it through work, despite his continual decline from lupus. Then, in May 1987, he was found dead in his hospital bed, his heart destroyed by the unfiltered residues deposited by the dialysis that was only so effective. He was forty-five. I was thirty-nine. Fourteen years after we met, Luther was gone.
After six years of deacons praying over him, new doctors, changing medications, waiting for a transplant and clinical trials, Luther died quietly in his sleep. We had not been able to fix him. I had believed we could.
I took five-year-old Jennifer to the funeral parlor for a private viewing. We stopped in the dim light of the foyer before she saw what she did not expect. She had gone to the hospital with Luther some Saturday nights, their dinner packed, storybook and games in tow. She saw the blood from his body cycle through transparent tubing and back into his vein. She heard the alarms when his or somebody else's blood pressure went haywire. She saw the dialysis chair he was strapped in flipped upside down to keep him from fainting. But she had not understood.
"You know Daddy has been very sick for a long time," I said as we stood in that foyer.
"He is? You didn't tell me."
"He was sick, and, well it got so bad that Daddy died, honey. We came here so you can say good-bye to him."
"He died? Daddy died? That's not fair!" she cried. "Everybody has a daddy, but now I'm not going to have mine?"
Mama didn't ask the Boehles to come to that funeral either. But she was right at my side, the best person to help me. I had been very stressed for some time with Luther's illnesses, my too-demanding executive job, and raising my little one. She knew I could barely cope.
As a single working mother, I spent the next three years just putting one exhausted foot in front of the other. All the house, yard, taxes, bills, teacher conferences, entertainments, and parenting responsibilities I'd shared with Luther were now mine alone. But the hardest part was when Jennifer tried to make sense of her little life. She couldn't remember her father's face, so I put his picture next to her bed. She questioned if the dark circles under my eyes would ever go away, or was I sick like Daddy? She burst out sobbing in the movie when a mother bear was killed. She begged me not to go to work and leave her.
It escaped me then, but functioning independently caused me to grow, to trust my own judgement, and become self-reliant. With the help of a live-in babysitter and Mama's helpful visits, in a few years, I came to live life on my own terms.
18 EUROPE
Ten minutes into my carefully detailed presentation to a German colleague in my vacationing boss's absence, he interrupted me. "May I ask you a personal question?" he said
Confused by what seemed inappropriate, I looked up and said, "What is it?"
"Are you prepared to come to France and work for me?"
"To do what?" I asked.
He swirled his fingers in a circle over the charts I was showing him. They gave an explanation of how our company did its planning for the American market.
"This," he said. He needed somebody in the company office on the Riviera who could do what I did but for the global market. He had just been appointed worldwide VP for the whole business in all countries and was building a new team. Would I join him?
I'd visited a few other countries for pleasure, but living abroad? He promised a raise, a visit to meet the team, and a look at schools and housing before giving my final answer.
Six weeks later, Jennifer and I moved to France, a few miles from the azure blue Mediterranean Sea, between its coastal cities of Cannes and Nice. I rented a mountainside villa on a tiny road with black olive trees and a riot of pink bougainvillea in the garden. In the first few days we enjoyed alfresco dinners and a view of pink-orange sunsets on its large veranda. All that beauty and sunshine began to lift my veil of depression, and this black girl began to dream again.
Jennifer started in the village public school as a French-as-a-second-language student. A former au pair came to live in again, and once the French authorities had Mama's eighty-year-old fingerprints and the police affidavit showing no criminal record, she was approved to come to France with us. And I began as worldwide operations manager for a $2 billion business unit of my tech company.
Mama had never been to Europe, but once she got to work in our flower garden and became familiar, the neighbors and restaurateurs in our village would call, "Bon-jour, Grandma!" She would stay for a month or three before going back and forth to Buffalo.
As Mama grew more adventurous, we went over to tour London Bridge and Bu-ckingham Palace with Jennifer. And on another of her visits to the Cote d'Azur, Mama asked to go to Rome, especially to see the Vatican. She proved a real trooper at her age, riding overnight in a sleeping train car and throwing good luck coins over her shoulder into the Trevi Fountain. At St. Peter's Basilica, she used her most hurried steps to keep up with the tour guide showing us the Vatican Museum jewels and priceless religious tapestries. Finally, she climbed to the Sistine Chapel to admire Christianity's story as Michelangelo painted it on the ceiling.
Naturally, after Mama became more comfortable in France, Aunt Dorothy made her first trip to Europe to vacation together as we had done in the States. She packed Dinty Moore Beef Stew and cans of tuna, so she didn't have to eat unfamiliar food in the gastronomic capital of the world.
I showed them the Riviera's beaches by the sea and the highlights of old town Nice. We drove the twenty-five miles to Monte Carlo to see Princess Grace (Kelly) and Prince Albert's castle. Later in the week we drove over the border into San Remo, Italy, for market day. We strolled by the tables and racks one wasn't supposed to touch until they came to a cheese seller. In a ridiculous charade of sign language and a mixture of French, English, and Italian, we tried to find out what types were offered, the weight in kilograms versus pounds, and the price in lira, francs, and dollars. It took fifteen minutes of laughing to buy a wedge from the hefty lady with a forest growing under her arms. She moved the knife to a much wider slice than we asked for, probably to make the transaction worth her wasted time. Or to take advantage of American tourists, the worldwide sport.
We walked on to find a scenic place for lunch. Once seated, Mama and Aunt Dorothy went to the ladies' room. When they didn't come back for a long time, I went looking for them. They were still closed in their individual stalls, sitting in the dark, laughing.
"What are you two doing in here?" I asked. "I was getting worried."
I punched the light button, which is usually on a timer in Europe to save elec-tricity. Because they were elderly and slow, the lights had timed out before they finished.
"We can't do anything in Europe without you, even go to the bathroom," they howled.
Back at my house, Aunt Dorothy asked if we could go to Paris. The Riviera was nice, but she'd hate to come to France and not see Paris. So, I took nine-year-old Jennifer, my seventy-something aunt, and my eighty-something mother to the City of Lights, serving as tour guide. The supposed four-person hotel room was jammed with a double bed and two roll-out cots. With all of them opened out, there wasn't an inch anywhere to walk to the bathroom. Jennifer crawled over closest to the window, then me, then Aunt Dorothy, then Mama, in order of who could climb over the most people to get to the toilet during the night.
On a Gray Line tour bus around the city, they kept their seats while oohing and ahhing through the window at the Louvre, the Opera House, and the Eiffel Tower. But when the bus stopped by Notre Dame Cathedral, they stood up to collect their things and get off, without any discussion. I followed them as they wobbled inside the sanctuary, humble missionaries come to experience their Catholicism in this most famous place. Other tourists admired the gothic flying buttresses and frightening gargoyles, but my family wanted to get inside to pray. Even though Mama had been excommunicated forty years before for divorcing and remarrying, her face was the picture of devotion.
In that dark medieval sanctuary with its immense stained glass rose window, the crowded mass was celebrated in French. I listened to the hunchback's bells ringing outside in the tower and meditated on the pungent smell of the incense burning, picking out the few words I understood. Afterward, Mama exclaimed, "We knew when to stand, kneel, and sit. It's the same mass as in English. Let's do it again."
"Oh yes, let's do it again," Aunt Dorothy said.
Jennifer, who was learning to speak French quickly in school, translated the sermon for them, pointing out words for God, communion, and prayer so they'd get more out of it the second time through. As we talked between the masses, I noticed that nobody was staring at our mixed group the way people did in America. The French routinely cared less about our race than I did, a phenomenon that had already begun to free me. For the several years we lived in France I was treated like and felt more like a wholly accepted person-more than being the black person perceived by judgmental white Americans ever had. It was this foundational sense of belonging that Jennifer absorbed during her formative years and carried through her later life in America.
Mama and Dorothy seemed transfixed in the sanctity of Notre Dame, where maybe all of us thought God was closer than in our small congregations back home. The four of us held hands during the sermon they now knew the gist of, ushering me into the family devotions they had grown up with. Experiencing their kind of Catholicism together was a naked intimacy for me that brought Mama's roots sharply into focus.
After we moved back to the States, we had constant calls and letters with the Boehles, but the best times were our visits. We traveled to each other in Buffalo, Indianapolis, Florida, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. That constant feeling of belonging together grew into a new life of laughs, support, and unconditional expectation of more.
During those years we talked about our race and cultural differences openly, then blended them into a communal understanding of who we were together. But since Mama had never talked about what being Midwestern meant, it wasn't until twenty years in that I got an insight.
That was when Antoinette took Jennifer and me to the Indianapolis 500. The family wanted us to have the full race-day experience. It started with gifted tickets and breakfast at an in-law's, served on a checkered flag tablecloth with Speedway logo napkins. We learned who set the pole for the race, how to watch pit crews blaze through tire changes and gas ups, and who was favored to win.
The stadium, a structure that seemed to rival Rome's Colosseum in size, seated almost a quarter of a million people around its oval. We got there early enough to see the beehive of pits and crews just inside the track's edge before the green starting flag swooshed down and the cars took off.
As the famous drivers and flashy cars roared by with a deafening cacophony that hurt my ears, I saw something equally amazing in the stands. Most of the fans swung their heads around with the pack of cars speeding by at over 220 mph, and kept quiet. There was only an occasional gasp or audible crowd reaction when someone crashed or pulled ahead. Fans peered at the board to see what lap the drivers were on and stayed in their seats rather than standing and blocking the view from behind them. The amazing orderliness and civil behavior of their Midwestern manners were the opposite of East Coast fans who screamed vulgar names at athletes or fought each other drunkenly in the stands. Those civilized racegoers reminded me of my even-tempered mother. Her own sensible behavior was all over that stadium.
As I interpret that Midwestern nice, at least in my family, it must have been part of the respect for people and patience for difficult situations that Mama always de-monstrated. It must have influenced her to step out and marry a decent man who happened to be black. It must have been the part of Aunt Dorothy that allowed her to take Mama back without recrimination. It must have enabled Dorothy to see only her sister's needs when she came to David's funeral.
Our shining black prince died of a heart attack at fifty-three, and it took Mama to her knees. I found her crying at the assisted living home, so distraught she couldn't talk. Behind closed doors, she collapsed into me as we cried together. David was the best of our community, a jive-talking inner city teacher who knew everyone in the 'hood and who helped create Buffalo's Juneteenth Freedom Festival. My righteous brother had taken such good care of Mama. He made it abundantly clear that his white mother belonged to the black community and brought his friends to help care for her after she was widowed. That had kept her safe and woven into our old black neighborhood when she lived on her own, the last white person on the block. Now, she had to bury him.
Aunt Dorothy came immediately.
She took up her post next to Mama, to mourn with her and comfort her, as Mama leaned into her like a lost child.
Dorothy stayed for days and days, taking turns with me-listening, holding Mama's silences sacred, and helping her cry.
__________
Our reunited family was the lucky one. We held onto the healing bond others in our mixed-race Clique Club family would not enjoy. When Angela, Mama's Clique Club sister-friend of fifty years died, Mama called me, just as I changed clothes after work. She sounded as torn up as a blown-out tire. "I'm furious," she growled, something I'd never heard in her. "Angela insisted on taking her double life to the grave."
Before Angela passed away, she made her three adult children promise to honor her dying wish. She was to be buried back in Smalltown under her maiden name in the plot with her white family. She told Sandra and her brothers not to come to the funeral and blow the cover off her secret black life.
"Whenever I think about how cruel she was," Mama wrote in a note to me, "to abandon her children, I am so low down... disgusted... disappointed-however low, I'm it."
How could Angela betray her kids after Sandra spent years taking her to the emergency room and a million specialists' visits? How could she, after living in Sandra's house for decades?
What I didn't know, Mama said, was that Angela's white family had worried about her bad health and wanted to look after her back in Smalltown. Angela told them she'd hire live-in help in Buffalo instead. That "help" was her daughter, Sandra. When Smalltown called, Sandra answered her own phone in her own house, posing as a paid Negro caretaker.
I kicked my shoe off so hard it landed in the back of the closet. Sandra was my lifetime friend. My Clique Club cousin. "Did you talk to Sandra? She must be so hurt."
Sandra told Mama, "We had her in life so they can have her in death. I never met those people and don't care to know them." They held their own service for Angela at the parish she attended; Mama and a few friends joined the family.
But Sandra's middle brother let it all hang out. He later told me, "We had her wrapped in a sheet of plastic and shipped her to Smalltown, like she wanted. And we didn't even go to our own mother's funeral," he said.
I didn't know which mixed marriage horror story was worse. Was it Mama's, living in hiding from her family for thirty-six years while they thought she was dead? Or was it Angela's, living a double life, lying to her whites and denying the black family she lived with, even in death? One thing I wasn't about to say out loud was that both Mama and Angela deluded their families in order to have the men they loved. But clearly neither had understood what those unions would do to us mixed-race kids. We had been expected to brush off our parents' unfathomable absurdities like no explanation was needed. I'd fallen right in line, like it made sense, never considering I must have had a white family for thirty-one years. Such was the suffering American society wrought in families that crossed segregated battle lines in the mid-1900s.
Mama and I talked about how all the Clique Club women had to give up their family relations after they married black men. Like Sallie, whose brothers shouted "Fangue!" and declared her dead after she married a black man, despite his elegance and good technical job at Sylvania. As Sicilian immigrants fighting the surge of hate against them trying to be white people in America, they said Sally had drug them back down to the bottom. For her treason, they never acknowledged or spoke to her again. An old neighbor called years later to let her know her mother died. When she tried to join her brothers at the casket to pray, they walked away. There was no seat for her at the family table during the funeral repast.
And what about Marie, whose family pretended her black husband, the band leader at the most successful jazz club in western New York, didn't exist? Family invitations to weddings and parties that came addressed only to Marie and her daughter, Diane, all had to be declined. Marie would not go without Bill.
"None of your friends have the kind of peace you ended up with," I told Mama. "None of the others got the love of both families. Angela's way of dealing with this mess was dreadful. But maybe you can forgive her. Everyone in your family forgave you."
"I'll try," she said limply.
What I can tell you is that we Jacksons and Boehles had twenty-six years together before Dorothy and Mama passed away in the early 2000s. Whether we sat in the yard talking about recipes or attended first Antoinette's wedding and then David's, or walked by the Seine in Paris looking for Dorothy's hamburgers, we knew we belonged together. During that journey our understanding of family ties and values bloomed bigger and brighter than I could have hoped when I went to find the Boehles.
19 BELONGING EVERYWHERE
We moved back to the States where Jeifer fnished eighth grade a the local public middle school. But after the rigors of her private French international school, our public school had fewer classes at her level. She was fluent in French by then, something too valuable to lose. Jennifer had gone to that private school because my company offered to pay for education of expat children in schools where they could keep up their native English. But now that she was going to high school, we had to decide where she would go.
We visited two private high schools recommended by black friends whose children attended them. To send Jennifer to such a white environment would be going against Luther's prior refusal to consider private schools.
He had good reason. At the age of three, she went to a preschool in New Jersey touted for its stimulating program. In a converted old mansion, teachers led educational activities and documented Jennifer's progress in regular written reports. We were well pleased, until the day I dropped by unexpectedly. When I opened the heavy wooden door, loud James Brown music filled the foyer. Several young white teachers had Jennifer and Clarence, the only other black child, dancing as they egged the kids on to wilder movements. The teachers clapped out the rhythm, pointing to the children and laughing at them. No white kids danced in this minstrel show. The white people I paid a fortune to train and protect my child had turned her into a ridiculous darkie to entertain themselves. Yet they were surprised when I demanded they stop, then laid out the headmistress and them. That institutional racism made up Luther's mind. It proved to him that most whites, even if well meaning, self-declared liberals, cannot or will not see or cop to their part in keeping black people down.
Later, when a private elementary school approached us about enrolling Jennifer, Luther refused to consider it. Pulling on his short beard, he said public school had been good enough for us, and it would be good enough for her. She would be comfortable there. He wouldn't risk his baby being mocked or mistreated as the only black kid in a hoity-toity school like that. She'd lose her black culture. Then what black man would marry her, he asked. Because certainly no white one would
It was important that Jennifer knew where she came from, so I worked hard to steep her in black culture and history, even as she lived in white environments and loved her white relatives. We talked about how the civil rights movement won African Americans unprecedented access and opportunities, a point often revisited when we entered hotels, libraries, and restaurants. She celebrated African family and community values during Kwanza. We attended Jack and Jill's curated events for black children raised in white environments, and Jennifer sang in the children's gospel choir at our black Baptist church. On our way to France, we went to Senegal and visited Gorée Island. That scorching white-sand outpost, the largest slave trading center on the West African coast for four hundred years, horrified my nine-year-old Jennifer, and me. It turned our stomachs to see firsthand how our ancestors were held and shipped out in chains to become slaves in the Americas.
Knowing who she was and being able to maneuver in white spaces served her well when faced with discrimination. When a racial slur was slung at her during sleepaway camp, she twisted the boy's arm behind his back until he apologized, while other campers cheered. I cheered too when she told me about it, because Jennifer stood up for herself when confronted with the trouble every black person knows is possible. She just had to work on using words instead of physical assault.
In the end, I thought Jennifer could handle going to a private (read white) secondary school. She was strong academically. She certainly knew how to function in white environments, having lived with white kids in the suburbs and in France all along. She was a beautiful, polished girl with a great transcript and a million-dollar smile. She was bilingual and was also familiar with Ebonics, having grown up with some Buffalo family that spoke it. Jennifer applied to two top schools and got into both.
At the first parents' weekend at St. Paul's School, she took me to see the other black students who competed with her for scholarships and introduced me to others. Some of those black girls from another scholarship program later called Jennifer an Oreo-black on the outside, white on the inside. Probably the real rub was some jealousy about her friendship with a boy from the 'hood, over which a few of the girls threatened to beat Jennifer up. But Jennifer was different from them. As I saw it, her time living on the Riviera, her white friends, her spot in the ballet company and King's English weren't black enough for some of them.
They were girls like I had been; diamonds in the rough whose academic success had won them a place in an elite institution. They clung to community among their own, just as I had at Harvard, because I didn't fit in the mainstream, and wasn't sure I wanted to. For me, black friends were essential to survive, and I think that was so for these girls too. You had to line up with the all-black-all-the-time or be deemed a sellout. Sadly, those same girls Jennifer introduced me to at parent's weekend later crossed the street rather than speak to her. If my father was still alive, he might have called that another instance of "equal opportunity racism," blacks hating on their own for not staying in their prescribed box.
Jennifer went on to Brown University, where she embraced everything that was in her and reached for so much more. She studied history and did musical theater. In concert with the Africana Studies Department she stomped out African dances to urgent drums in a tattered slave dress, then tap danced in a production of A Chorus Line. Fascinated with other cultures, she did a semester abroad at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco. And from that experience she went on to Princeton, did research in Algeria, and earned her PhD. While there she worked alongside a dean to prepare minority candidates to make their PhD applications as strong as possible.
I taught my African American daughter that she was entitled to try everything, that she belonged everywhere she chose to go despite anyone who said differently. That's what personal power looked like to me, building on the hard-fought gains and experiences of her black and white family, to reach for whatever she chose.
Jennifer made me proud, the way she embraced these ideas. Yet her approach to the world of privilege was nothing like mine had been. I had clung to other blacks while trying to survive the foreign world of Harvard's power and whiteness. Instead, Jennifer went through the Ivy League assuming her place with friends from all races, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Unlike the carefully crafted public masks I had put on in white environments at her age, Jennifer is her same self with everyone. It had never occurred to me, all those years I tried to give her the best of the striver's ambitions Harvard had imprinted on me, that she would become so much more facile at navigating such an advantaged worldview.
After graduating from Princeton, Jennifer taught African history to a largely first-generation college student body at City University of New York (CUNY) in the Bronx and Harlem. It was the same university her father, a first-generation student from Harlem, graduated from with an engineering degree.
When she started that position, Jennifer found out why she had been selected over other candidates from Ivy League colleges. During an interview, she had mentioned a summer college job she had picking produce on a farm in Norway with a migrant worker from Central Europe. In a turn away from professional internships, she wanted a completely different experience and place.
Jennifer loved being outside by the glistening fjord backed by green mountains. But that migrant farming proved to be hard work. She slept on a cot in a barracks and squatted until her knees ached picking strawberries in long low rows or climbed ladders and reached until her shoulders were sore picking cherries off trees. For ten hours a day, in brutal sun and pouring rain, and under the night lights if the crop was too ripe, she did her business in the fields because there were no toilets. When she got back, her main advice for me was to always wash produce carefully.
Two generations before, her black grandparents had worked southern cotton and tobacco fields for a living. When I told my elderly mother-in-law in North Carolina what Jennifer was doing, she replied, "You said what? She pickin'? I thought you were sending her to those fancy schools up north so she wouldn't have to."
And yet, that subsistence life experience had influenced the CUNY faculty to choose her for the professor position. Some thought she would better relate to the hardships of the nontraditional, largely first-generation student body at CUNY.
Jennifer knows how most African Americans struggle regularly with job and wage discrimination, inadequate and unaffordable housing, health disparities, police harassment and shootings, food injustice, racially motivated misconduct, in-sensitivity, and inhumanity.
While she has not had to face such strife in her own life, she knows her many privileges were won through our own family struggling against that very list of inequities.
Like all our country's non-white minorities, we both know that simply having brown skin can not only block any opportunity but also bring about grave harm.
__________
I taught Jennifer she belonged everywhere because that was my own belief and goal. In addition to holding onto my beloved black community, I went for jobs, friend-ships, and residences that spoke to my broadest interests and opportunities, sometimes where few other blacks were to be found. For years, certain black friends have wondered how and why I wasn't living in the 'hood and socializing exclusively in the black community. Some of them never socialize with whites.
"Why you wanna live over there in that white neighborhood?" a black professional friend asked me. Without waiting to hear how I loved access to the subway, banks, jobs, and ready amenities available around the corner that are harder to find in the 'hood, he told me nothing could beat living among his own, where he was fully accepted. He wouldn't dream of putting up with trying to get along with white people in his private life, even though there had been multiple homicides in his neighborhood, one a block from his house. There, he didn't have to edit his cultural tendencies, see people cross the street in fear as his son approached, or be ignored by neighbors who acted like he didn't exist.
Another friend said it like this: "A white man in my bed? Not gonna happen. I need the comfort of brown skin next to me. Somebody who knows and loves my culture like I do."
The black skepticism about the way Jennifer and I live no doubt comes in part from racist hardships they know about, the ones we all know are possible, as well as having no loving relationships with whites. While Jennifer and I are surely African American, being shaped by my mother and her white family's example that race should not matter has stretched our view. It's a dream, we know, but the one we hold out for, no matter that I won't see it in my lifetime.
20 FLOW ON
Mama sat in her robe at my faux wood-block kitchen table, her folded up walker resting against its side. It was 2003; she was in her early nineties and still coming to visit me in Cambridge on my frequent flyer miles. She sipped morning coffee loaded with cream, our lollygagging way when we visited. A pleasant breeze floated through the open back screen door that summer day, along with a too-close condo neighbor's inept, one-phrase flute practice.
The homemade rhubarb jam on the table was Mama's favorite, although you couldn't give it to me. She'd stood over my hot stove cooking it the night before, her un-wigged hair thinning to bald on top, the rest frizzled. Specialty fruits were nowhere on the salt-free, fat-free, sugar-free, taste-free diet at the assisted living home where she lived. So, Mama was in her glory, sculpting rhubarb onto her breakfast toast one crunchy-tart bite at a time, with the intention of a jeweler.
She closed her eyes, savoring the last piece. After swallowing, Mama kept still, a bit too long. Then she cast a sideways glance at me, opened her mouth as if to speak, then closed it again.
She finally spoke, saying she had a lot of time in that home to think back over her life. "I've got something to say, and I want you to hear me out." She listed toward me and clam shelled my face in her hands. "It's about how I ran away from my family."
We'd been a normal extended family with the Boehles, at least in our own integrated eyes, for almost twenty-five years. What was left to say after we'd already dissected that story six ways to Sunday?
"I need to make peace with it before I go. It haunts me, in here," she said, patting her heart. "What I mean is, maybe I should never have run off with your father."
Good Lord. This was the first time Mama had expressed such second thoughts. And she was doing it with me. I kept my face neutral, wondering what she was saying. Did she mean she should have accepted spinsterhood and being shunned? That she thought her life was all wrong after nearly forty years of marriage? That her life was a mistake and mine was too?
"What do you mean?" I asked gently.
She clutched a handful of the yellow-and-blue tablecloth we'd bought together in Paris. And as she often did to announce the difficulty of asserting herself, she cleared her throat.
"While I was with your father, I never thought how being mixed could confuse you kids. And even though I knew my family would be hurt by my leaving, I figured they would just get over it. People all around me suffered because of what I did. So maybe I should've never married your father." She was quiet, bunching and releasing small wads of tablecloth.
I took her in. She was one wobbly, near-deaf ancient lady who wore custom-made tan orthotic shoes of two different sizes to hold misshapen bones from falls. My four-foot-eight mother, with sagging skin like a rooster's wattle, the one who could turn her walker like a slow-motion ninja, had a heart as fragile as a robin's egg. I wouldn't hurt her for the world, and here she wanted me to be her truth-teller. Or did she want my absolution? I took a sip of my cold coffee.
"Why now, Mama?"
She said she didn't have much time left. There had been a cancer on her nose, even though the surgeon said he got it all. "We both know I could go any day now."
"You did what you thought was best."
"Maybe your father's drinking was my fault too. He might not have drunk so much and taken it out on you kids if he didn't have to defend our marriage every day." She cleared her throat. "Well?"
I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes to buy time. She was always saying she wouldn't be on this earth much longer, that every visit might be our last time toge-ther. Was Mama making her deathbed confession to me in advance? The one it had taken her a lifetime to say out loud? My mother was asking me—me!-to wash her soul before it was too late. I shut the back door to block out that awful flute playing so I could think straight.
"You don't mean you regret marrying Daddy? Or do you?"
"No," she whispered. "I guess not, but I regret the pain I caused just the same." She looked up, her eyes red.
Who was I to say what she should have done with her life? Buck the antimisce-genation laws to have love and marriage, or accept spinsterhood by staying with her white family? I wasn't about to judge. She'd paid enough, a tiny Atlas with scant shoulders holding up our mixed-race piece of sky. The one who'd kept all of us from being crushed by Daddy's drinking and the country that thought we were an affront to nature and decency.
She deserved the peace her eyes begged for. I told her she should not second-guess what she did. I squeezed her shoulder softly and said she had the same right to the love of a husband and children as the next person. That Daddy loved her more than what he feared he was up against, even when he knew the dangers of marrying a white woman in the 1940s. She pulled her shoulder up and started to say something, but I didn't let her.
"Daddy's drinking was the only way he could cope with the haters. And that was his choice. It wasn't your fault. And you saved the Boehles from a miserable life of ostracism if people in Indianapolis had known who you married."
She scraped up toast crumbs on the tablecloth with her knife, not looking up when its hill of crumbs reached the edge. "You don't think what I did was wrong?"
Everybody makes life-changing decisions and has to live with the consequences. Like the rest of us, Mama needed to be OK with the face in the mirror.
"No, you were not wrong," I said. "You were a good wife. You made it right with Dorothy and you showed us kids how to deal with prejudice. All of us love you so. Anyway, it's America's disgrace, not yours, that you had to run and hide."
She let out a squeak of relief and leaned back. "Thank you."
"Things have changed, Mama," I said. "People see mixed-race differently now. Most would understand your choice. They would fault the racist system in Indiana for what you had to do, not you."
She wanted to talk about how things have changed. "Do you know how many more mixed couples there are now?" I asked. "It's a thing, you know." In her old age and her very small world of assisted living, not only computers and cell phones had passed her by, but Mama had missed the growing acceptance of biracial identities in the aughts. She didn't know people were marrying those of other races in record numbers throughout America, especially on the West Coast and northeast corridor where I live.
I told her the name calling has died down. Bullies used to call me mongrel halfbreed Oreo high-yellow blue-veined mulatto quadroon redbone confused nigger sell-out, although some still seem to think that last one applies. We talked about how the mixed-race "look" has become more recognized, so that fewer and fewer strangers try to place me into more traditional identities. Fewer people now ask me if I am black, white, Hispanic, or Mediterranean. However, I told her, when random race tourists still try to examine my skin like a public exhibit and ask some version of "What are you?" I just smile and say I'm from Madagascar.
She fell out laughing. I was using her old response to those who treated us like pariah when we were kids. Back then, she'd smile brightly at their disapproving scowls and say something pleasant like we were all being cordial.
"Do you know what you and Daddy started back when you got married?" I asked. "You guys were the grandparents of America's mixed-race evolution." We talked about how the Lovings were considered the parents of mixed-race because theirs was the marriage that the Supreme Court used to overturn antimiscegenation laws in
1967. But my parents married twenty-four years before the Lovings did it. They were old enough to be the Lovings' parents.
I told Mama what that meant in today's terms. For the first time, the 2000 Census offered an option for the mixed-race demographic to self-identify from among scores of races. That allowed me to acknowledge for the first time, legally and honorably, both the black and the white sides of my heritage.
It had been so emotional for me, that after more than two hundred years of counting, the Census no longer dictated that I was black but asked me to define my-self. It felt as if my country could finally see me, as did the other 7 percent of mixed-race Americans. Later, between the 2000 and 2010 counts, mixed births would grow three times as fast as single race births, a trend accelerating with more speed than expected. Mama had little idea.
It was late morning, so we got cleaned up and dressed. We were going out into "civilization," her word for mixing with the rest of the world outside the home. She wanted to "gallivant" to the neighborhood seafood restaurant for lunch—the one that was awkwardly located on the second floor of a building with no elevator.
When we arrived outside the Blue Dolphin, I got behind her on the stairs that her rickety little legs couldn't easily manage. Using our perfected stair maneuver, I pushed up under her bottom and propelled her one stair at a time while she held the railing with both hands. She got her daily belly laugh during that clown show. It worked for us, if not for some onlookers.
We sat at a back table, Mama enjoying her fried fish and coleslaw, using all the salt her heart desired. I couldn't tell which she enjoyed most, her greasy fish and fries or breaking the assisted living contraband rules. She would have what she wanted, even if it meant hiding a saltshaker in the pouch on her walker during the home's meals. She still had that stripe of spunk that made her.
It was a lazy summer afternoon, so after lunch we decided to go to Charles River Park to sit by the river. She had always loved the outdoors, so she relished the chance to sit in the fresh air and enjoy the greenery. I chose that spot where she could also watch the mixed-race world go by.
Mama wheeled her walker around sprawling tree roots and too many goose drop-pings, passing Harvard students biking and families whose little kids splashed under the wading pool's blue duck fountain. We found a bench to sit on as the gentle pulse of the river flowed by.
There were some older whites sitting together on benches across the walk. When a charcoal-colored girl in a peach skirt strolled by, hand-in-hand with her white boyfriend, I pointed out that none of the elders turned around to give the dirty looks I'd seen too much of all my life. I suggested to Mama that race mixing had become so common that even the old people no longer seemed to notice or care.
Over in the wading pool, we saw children laugh as they conquered the tiny red water slide. A Spanish-accented Big Brother type had several white and black Little Brothers calling to catch the ball. Amerasian sisters in floral swimsuits delicately splashed each other. A white mother toweled off her mixed daughter who had the same kinky-curly hair as mine.
As people enjoyed their summer sun with people from every other tribe, Mama agreed this part of the world was moving on. Nobody out there seemed to care a whit about the diversity of their loves and friendships. "It's beautiful," she said.
A flock of ducks floated near us. They flipped their butts in the air and dunked their heads under water, then came upright again for air. "That's how my work life has been," I told Mama. I spent decades flipping between a more white-like behavior with the corporate types who paid me, then flipping back in private to my black identity where I could breathe easier. It had taken decades to discover and own all of my mixed-race self, to understand it required no label, explanation, or code switching, before I stopped flipping and dipping.
I realized in that moment that was exactly what she had modeled for me.
She had presented herself as the white woman she was, not some code switcher.
She respected everyone else's humanity and believed that she and her mixed family, just as they were, deserved everyone else's humanity in return.
__________
Mama and I boarded our last flight to Indianapolis in 2005, for her ninety-fifth birthday party at Dorothy's house. It was to be her only celebration with her family of origin in more than sixty years, and Dorothy had made plans with all the Indianapolis family.
Just the two of us went. Daddy, David, and Luther had passed away; Jennifer was studying overseas; and Charles Nathan opted out.
Mama laughed lightheartedly as she angled her walker down the plane aisle like an Olympic Ancient-Walker Champion. Unlike our first trip to Indy, now she was mellow up in the air. No Jack Daniels was needed as she browsed magazines and wondered aloud which in-laws would be at her party.
How much alike we'd become. We'd gone for what we wanted when nobody around us understood. She'd gotten divorced when nobody did, and I left home to go to college when nobody had. We'd both moved hundreds of miles away from family. She moved to get married and I moved to pursue professional advancement. We'd both chosen to cross over into foreign cultures. She lived in the Negro culture, and I lived in the French culture and white corporate America. We had both refused to follow accepted race norms. She married a black man, and I went to find our secret white family. And while our lives had swung between thrills and heartbreaks, both of us had done what we felt we had to. I felt proud of being cut from the same cloth, and filled that our shared journey had led us to this celebration of her.
We landed in Indy and went straight to Aunt Dorothy's downsized two-bedroom duplex in Greenwood in good time to go out to eat. We chose a place for Mama, who was on the hunt for BBQ pork ribs and strawberry pie to fill her cast iron stomach, still able to digest anything.
The next day, August 21, all the relatives in Indy came to Aunt Dorothy's for the potluck party. Except for Uncle Tony, who was recuperating in the hospital but insisted we go on without him. The occasion was too significant to put off, he said. It was special enough to have the Boehles' in-laws and stepchildren we'd shared times with through the years come over, as well as my three cousins who lived there with their own families.
One of Mama's great nephews held her chair at the dining room table for her, and one of my cousins brought her punch. She admired the festive balloons, napkins that read "95th Birthday," and beautifully wrapped gifts that made the room festive. As each person arrived, they added their home cooking to the feast spread out in the kit-chen. Antoinette's specialty, corn pudding, was so good I took the recipe for my own parties.
Dorothy said a blessing, then the crowd caught up with each other over dinner. As we talked about Tony coming home soon, one of the boy's plans to join the military, and Jennifer's PhD studies in Africa, it felt as if we'd always been together. Twenty-five years after I first met the Boehles, we were as settled into our blended-race family as any other extended family might be.
"Tell the kids the story of how Mom and Aunt Ella got back together," Judy said to me. Everybody knew the details, including the kids, but it was what brought us all together to celebrate Mama. As I went over the story, people said the way it had changed their lives because the story belonged to everyone there.
"Why did you come looking for us? Judy asked.
Because I needed to know who my family was, I said. So I could find out who all of me was. Because I didn't want race to keep Mama from her people.
Jim, my cousin Darlene's husband, was a man from the heartland who didn't waste words. I'd met him a few times but didn't know him well. "That's how it's supposed to be," he said, touching me deeply. The quiet unassuming man who hadn't commented on our journey all this time, crossed out any complicated angst we'd endured and blessed us by simply saying what we did was right.
After the presents and cake, we went out to the side yard for a group photo. In the bright sunshine we sat the dog between Mama and Dorothy's feet, held up the "95th Birthday" napkins, and shot the picture of a united family that still graces the foyer of my house.
After the guests had gone, we went to check on Tony and take him some cake. "Sorry I missed it, Ella," he said. "This was the kind of party you don't hear about every day, and I was glad for you to have it."
Mama and I shared the guest room that night, like always. We crawled into our twin beds under sweetly embroidered new yellow quilts. She turned off the hearing aid that squealed when she touched it and put her false teeth in the blue plastic cup of Efferdent to soak overnight. I reached over and turned off the lamp.
"Today I got my family back," she declared, her speech slushy without teeth to help form the words. "Finally, at ninety-five. And you gave that to me."
Without her hearing aids, she probably couldn't hear me when I said thank you. But Mama had to know telling me that was an equally precious gift.
Just months later, Mama and I spent Christmas week gallivanting through Buffalo wheelchair style to visit still-living friends, eat buttered popcorn before she slept through a movie, and sit in the car watching boys challenge each other in a skatepark bowl.
When I kissed her good-bye on Sunday afternoon, she said it was the best Christmas in years. Then the home called Tuesday morning to tell me a massive stroke during the night had left her unresponsive.
I got to the hospital when there was still time enough for the Catholic priest, who didn't need to know she was excommunicated, to administer the Last Rites. My beloved mother's soul deserved that final blessing from the church her heart had never left, so I gave it to her. Judy came with Dorothy, just a few years before my aunt's death, to help bury Mama.
Mama was laid to rest beside Daddy, under their rose-colored double headstone. She'd chosen it when he died to resemble her own parents' double headstone, the one we prayed over together with Dorothy on that long-ago reunion trip in Indianapolis.
21 LEANING INTO BROWN
Jennifer's Skype call rang one night from St John's island where she was vacationing with her white boyfriend. They came up on the screen together, looking quite pleased, a festive ocean view restaurant in the background. Noticing her glam earrings, I said, "You're so dressed up for a beach trip."
"Because we got married today!" They grinned at each other, holding their ring fingers up to the camera. Craig panned Jennifer's white dress and tropical bouquet. "Island Mike officiated, here on Trunk Bay. The weather was gorgeous."
"What? What? What?" I said. "You got married?" I paused a minute, trying to get it through my head. "Wow. Well, congratulations." What else could the mother of a thirty-six-year-old college professor say? So, yeah, they were mature enough, compa-tible, and in love, and had been together for a couple of years. The joy on their faces was everything a parent could hope for.
"We've saved you the price of a big wedding," Jennifer said, laughing. "We didn't want all that. Anyway, the random swimmers and sunbathers out there cheered for us." They'd secretly planned it all—a photographer, a hairdresser, the license in St. Thomas, and the officiant with the best wedding website.
After their continued honeymoon, I arranged a reception in Boston. Craig's parents flew in for the party and Jennifer's new father-in-law gave the toast while white and black guests from several generations wished them happiness. Like the 66 percent of Americans who told AARP it was OK for family to marry another race, they were happy for their son.
It was all good until we parents posed for the family picture with the couple. It hurt that none of my family who should have been at such an occasion were there, because they were already gone. Daddy died in 1980, lupus took Luther in 1987; then David, Aunt Dorothy, and Charles Nathan had all died in turn.
But it was Mama I missed most. How I wished the one who had helped raise Jennifer was still alive to see how free her granddaughter was to marry another race. If only Mama could have lived to see that Jennifer did not have to say she was dead and go in hiding for fear of violence against her husband, like Mama did in 1943. There Jennifer stood, her champagne glass aloft as her white father-in-law gave his blessing, crisscrossing the boundary of her white grandmother's foray over the race line. And like her grandmother, Jennifer says her mixed marriage doesn't change her blackness, just the way Mama said her mixed marriage didn't change her whiteness.
I wished Mama could see how alike we three generations had turned out. We were all women who chose to cross over and embrace other cultures, following in her footsteps to sidestep race norms for the lives we wanted.
These days Jennifer and her husband are my window into the millennials who reject race boundaries. Like their mixed peers, they are people who had jobs, educations, or social circles that put them in contact with each other. Like any other couple, their bonds are based on common values, interests, and shared experiences. I know how true that is listening to the animated academic conversations between my daughter and her fellow professor husband in their own language-pedagogy, publishing, and syllabi. And like my mother, their focus is having a loving family.
Some mixed millennials I've spoken with ask, "What is the big deal?," perhaps not understanding the price paid by couples decades ago. Like the black bride who was surprised to learn that my parents couldn't be seen together in public back in 1942 Indiana nor the risks attached if they were.
Black adult children of my friends who chose white spouses have been supported by their parents. Most had "the talk" before the wedding. Do you know what you are getting into? What does his/her family think? Are you sure? Even the parents who secretly acknowledge that they hoped their children would marry black spouses who understood their culture and understood how to maneuver in the white world have stepped over the race barriers with them. They want their children to have happy marriages. They understand times are changing.
It was evident how things were changing when I went to my local community center for a Loving Day party. The hall was full of mixed-race families at the event marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision legalizing interracial marriage across America. So, like the Irish do on St. Patrick's Day, I went to celebrate my own heritage(s).
A woman with skin colored just like mine welcomed me warmly. Somebody asked later if she was my daughter. I wandered about slowly, taking in the Asian, black, Hispanic, Native, and white adults with their blended children of every combination. The variety of skin tones, hair textures, and eye shapes were as familiar as the old Clique Club gang and my own face, like we were all somehow related. It felt good to be surrounded with the normalcy of mixed race when the public had made an issue of it all my life.
It reminded me of what I'd seen on an excursion in Cuba. Dianelys, the Havana tour guide with cream-colored skin, told our group of African American travelers we had a lot in common. She said, like all Cubans, she was mestizaje-mixed with African blood. Their 1959 revolution, so the official explanation went, was a racial democracy, where everyone is equally Cuban first and race mixing a part of who they are. That dream, though not completely true, sucked at me like undertow, pulling me to the place I'd never been able to articulate I wanted to see in America.
The same woman who welcomed me to the Loving party had a video camera hoisted on her shoulder, capturing people's family stories on film. When she approached me, I gave the thumbnail of Mama's disappearance and reunion with her family. Others standing nearby smiled. nodding acceptance. Like they knew exactly what my life had been about. Like their own lives were somehow parallels. No questions were necessary about why Mama ran, or how my parents struggled as a mixed couple, the questions whites always ask me. These people already knew. It was my turn to smile, to not feel like a freak with some abnormal life. I relaxed into what I came for, a sense of belonging in my own tribe.
Party organizers began their remarks by announcing that Loving Day was being celebrated that day in cities across the United States. There were family parties like ours going on at much bigger Mixed Remixed Festivals and street happenings in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. There interracial people are so common the press has called them havens. There were also parties in many unexpected places, like Griffin, Georgia, and Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The speakers painted the picture of America's rising interracialism.
First, they cited the 2000 Census, which listed sixty-some race categories that could be mixed for the first time.
Before that, I would have fallen into mulatto or quadroon mixed-race Census categories, which were on the forms from 1850 to 1920.
Those were designations slave holders and Jim Crow politicians used for decades, lest anyone with black blood pass over into whiteness.
In 2000 I had filled in my own Census form by checking both the black and white races, excited that my country had really seen and affirmed me.
I was no longer restricted to marking just the box for blacks, in denial of Mama.
__________
I'm in my seventies now, wondering if the United States will ever move past its racial strife and resulting fears about race mixing. It's just so ingrained.
Yet I have seen the perception of race mixing move from illegal and dangerous to a growing demographic today exceeding seventeen million Americans.
My interracial kind can now be found in high places. While enjoying a certain acceptance and even popularity, the mixed-race love my parents helped pioneer in the 1940s has not been fully embraced. Barack Obama was chosen president twice, then rebuked by the election of a racist named Trump. Meghan Markle married into Britain's royal family but faced media backlash, including a family photo portraying their baby as a monkey. Advertising implies the use of mixed-race actors imbue their products and us with some greater common humanity. As if antimiscegenation was never a thing. But, as America would have it, this normalization message is not shown in regions where it might aggravate viewers.
In my family, Jennifer and her husband expect to live their interracial life in peace, because they live in an area where it is not much of an issue. But they are clear-eyed about the fact that brown skin can bring trouble. At one of our Sunday lunches, they agreed to prepare their little mixed-race son for the systematic and interpersonal conflicts he will face.
They plan to teach him how to be safe in this time of police brutality and white terror because mixed people are still black in America. And, like the four generations of my family before him, my grandson will have to face people trying to stop him from naming himself and defining his own place in society.
I have hope because my family, black people and white people together, have embraced love across the color line for the last seventy years. So have the growing millions of other Americans who have discovered that love triumphs over race. While that trend will accelerate, I don't know how far America will move in this direction.
But what I do know is this:
The American identity is in flux, leaning into brown. A significant portion of our citizens will push past the barriers of family racial separation the way Mama, Aunt Dorothy, Jennifer, and I have. Continually growing numbers will look beyond color to marry the partner they love, raise the children they want, and unite with family branches of different races.
And yet, racial strife still dominates American life. I can't see the United States ever adopting the theory of racial democracy the way Cuba espouses, where mixed race is a popular notion. Our intrinsically white supremacist culture, which wants to keep their race pure and in power, makes that clear every day. Because of them, all us mixed, black, and brown families will necessarily protect ourselves by remaining vigilant and fighting everything from microaggressions to police shooting unarmed minorities.
Meanwhile, when my family is together, color is not our focus. Me and mine, and the millions of others who choose mixed-race families, are going to keep on loving.
EPILOGUE
Mama's ninety-fifth birthday party in 2005 made news in her hometown. The Indianapolis Star covered her nearly sixty-five years of crossing racial barriers with a front-page story:
LOVE DIVIDED, REUNITED
Woman who gave up family to marry a black man rejoices in reconnecting with sister she left behind
The article sidebar cited the 2000 US Census report that one in fifteen marriages were then interracial (counting all mixtures, not just black and white), up 65 percent from the prior decade.
Response to the article, the reporter told me, was mixed. There were people who connected to the loving family who looked beyond race, but there were also those still against race mixing who complained about running such a story. The response was a true snapshot of where the country stands— this change in America is happe-ning, though it is still unacceptable to some.
Since my parents threw out the norms and laws to marry in 1943, mixed-race marriage in 2015 was estimated to be at least one of every ten marriages, and according to a PEW Research study, two-thirds of Americans say it "would be fine" with them if a family member married someone of another race.
Now the pace of interracial growth is accelerating. That means this group will get bigger faster. The Census reported that multiracial people grew three times as fast as single-race people between their last two counts. As that trend continues, as new statistics project, mixed-race people will become a notable slice of the American pie when the nation becomes "minority white" in 2045, according to a Brookings Institution study.
If the currently estimated seventeen million mixed-race people were added to seven million so-called white Americans who would be classified as Negroes under the one-drop rule, that would make twenty-five million Americans. So, keep your calculators out. The 2020 Census is predicted to show another significant increase in this growing demographic.
The Loving train is running throughout our country. It's no longer the steam engine my mother fled Indiana on twenty-four years before the Supreme Court overturned antimiscegenation, but a much faster transport heading toward a browner America.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The source material for this book came from face-to-face interviews, some audio taped, videotaped, or handwritten. I am grateful for the heartrending conversations with my family, including my mother and father, Ella and Charles Jackson; my hus-band, Luther Johnson; Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Tony Boehle and their children.
My brothers Charles Nathan and David spent many hours reconstructing memories and impressions of our mixed-race lives, individually and collectively. There was soul-searching at every turn. I thank them for telling the truth, however painful, in support of this work.
The Clique Club women Sally McCullough (and her husband, Bill) and Marie Crump were an important part of my growing up, and their daughters Valorie Braziel and Diane Crump Richmond generously fleshed out their stories by talking with me for days. Angela Williams; her children, Sandra, Rick, and Robert; her husband, George; her grandson; and her original hometown are all changed names. During lengthy conversations, that family agreed to include their story if they were disguised in some way. That request honors their mother's dying wish not to reveal her double-life secret. These families have been my family and I tried to represent them fairly and truthfully on these pages. I am deeply indebted to all of them for their openness and honesty. I love you all and I feel you.
Say I'm Dead is recreated from collective memories, recounted by those involved or present, and family stories told to us. They have been checked among these par-ties, their husbands, children, and siblings wherever possible. People in this book do not remember everything, nor do they all remember it exactly the same way. But I did my best to tell what I learned from extensive talks over a decade to capture their experiences in their own words before writing it. Thank you to my mother, "Ella" Jackson, whose work on this project was fundamental in making the story whole. I wish she, my father, my brothers Charles Nathan and David, my husband Luther, Aunt Dorothy, and "Angela" had lived to read it.
Thank you to my agent, Jessica Papin, who believed in my story from the day we met and continued to encourage me. Thank you to my editor, Jerry Pohlen, and all the staff at Chicago Review Press who worked with me to bring this book into the world.
Many thanks to those who helped me put this memoir on the page. Instructors and writing groups at GrubStreet in Boston were instrumental. Special thanks go to Alex Marzano Lesnevich who taught me to write memoir, and those who read the manuscript front to back and offered valuable suggestions: Jonathan Escoffery, Jessamyn Hope, Cindy Layton, Mary C. Curtis, Deborah Schifter, and Priscilla Bour-goine. Thank you to those who started me on my writing path, including my classmates and supportive friends in the WWWA writing group and Memoir Incubator Program.
Much of writing, structure, and editing of Say I'm Dead was done during writing residencies that provided the time, space, and solitude to work undisturbed in their studios and nurturing environments. Thank you to Djerassi, Ragdale, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and Wellspring House for those especially productive opportunities.
Thank you to the many personal cheerleaders, too many to name, who encouraged me in this project for years. Chief among them is my daughter, Jennifer E. Johnson, a constant inspiration. Her belief in my work and willing ear throughout the process sustained me through years of work.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
- Understanding one's identity is a major theme of this book. Ella, Dolores, and Jennifer each chose to shape their own identities rather than go along with public norms or perceptions. How do their actions make you feel about them?
- Dolores found the stranger's question "What are you?" off-putting. Did you ever have that question about someone else? Why is that important to know? Or, has your own identity ever been questioned? Has it shifted based on class, education, immi-gration, or other reasons? How did it make you feel?
- Ella breaks Catholic doctrine to remarry and is excommunicated. Yet she continues to turn to God and participate in Catholic practices all her life. What do you think of her actions?
- Do you think Ella did the right thing running away to marry Charles? Which family was more important, in your opinion, her parents and sister or her husband and children? Why?
- Did Dolores's need to understand her full racial identity justify the family upset caused by her search for family?
- How did race pressures affect the life-changing decisions made by Charles, Ella, Dolores, Dorothy, and Jennifer? How were they different for the black, mixed, or white people?
- Ella's family welcomed her back after a thirty-six-year disappearance. What was it that defined the Boehles' ability to offer such forgiveness?
- Was Ella right not to make an issue of her mixed marriage with her children? What insights to her character did her actions provide?
- The term equal opportunity racism is used in the book to describe how both blacks and whites acted on racist beliefs. Does this bring to light any prejudices you hold or face?
- The 1950s TV show Amos 'n' Andy was detrimental to blacks' self-image and reinforced whites' negative black stereotypes. While today's media has moved on from such blatant portrayals, are damaging media stereotypes still influencing the public?
- Is it possible not to let race dictate one's life? Is that possibility different for white people versus for people of color? Why or why not?
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