White Like Her

by Gail Lukasik

  Death of an Apache Dancer

  In her long thirties when death was a coffin shut

  with music, Grandmother sold her body

  to the scientist for $50. A sure thing—

  the medical school a block from the race track.

  She doubled her money that Fat Tuesday,

  strutted home down Fortin Street

  balancing whiskey and milk, a party jazzing inside her,

  to tango with her second husband, Mr. Arthur.

  He died in his sleep—a breeze.

  Strength gone into drumming a rhythm

  on Grandmother’s flesh, the metronome

  of their cabaret life.

  Cancer waltzes with her now

  moving deeper inside her

  than any man. Hungry

  with a gnawing step

  making her hips a sliver of space,

  her spine a trickle of nerve.

  She sways in her bed

  weighing the strength to sustain

  movement. Washes her hair

  avoids the soft spots that thump

  between her fingers,

  her skull—a baby’s head

  stretching to release her.

  Outside the scientists wait

  With their two left feet.

  A letter from my grandmother has been sequestered in the secret compartment of my girlhood jewelry box since 1977. I suspect I’ve kept it because it is her last letter to me. As early as 1977 I was searching for answers about my mother’s family. My grandmother’s response to my query about her family tree is a masterful blend of truth and evasion.

  Dear Gail,

  To tell the truth I wouldn’t know where to start. My grandmother was born in some country place where they didn’t even have a courthouse. They used to write their birth dates in the family bible. My grandfather was born somewhere in England. Now if my mother or grandmother were living I could find all that out from them.”

  Then she reminisced. “I often think of the fun we had when you were young dressing up in all those old clothes.

  Did we do that? I don’t remember.

  She conveniently left out her father’s birthplace, which was Mississippi, choosing instead to concentrate on her white British grandfather. And she had to know just by looking at her maternal grandmother Mary Brown Williams that she was a black woman. That fact is also missing from her sparse family details.

  Though I’d never seen Mary Brown Williams, the woman who raised my mother and her sister, I later learned from my mother’s first cousin Ula Moret that she was very dark. Adding that she wasn’t black, she was Choctaw. Another half-truth passed down through the family.

  Perhaps my grandmother’s letter to me was her motherly gift to her daughter, atoning for her failures as a mother by keeping her daughter’s secret of being mixed race from me and by extension from my father and his family. To the end, she remained complicit in my mother’s deception. It was the least she could do for the daughter she abandoned.

  What my grandmother’s own experiences were as a mixed-race person in New Orleans who could pass as white, it’s impossible to know. Her white appearance allowed her to pass out of the racial constraints and segregation of the Jim Crow South. And she was a passable relative who my mother could invite for visits. Even so, Camille chose to live within her own racially defined community and married mixed-race husbands.

  The 1940 Louisiana census that Genealogy Roadshow used to confirm my mother’s mixed-race heritage (Neg/Negro) was the last time my mother was designated as a person of color on a census record. It was also the last time she and her sister Shirley were listed as living in the same household. Working as maids in a teashop, a typical job for a woman of color, and taken in by yet another relative, their choices for a better life in 1940 were limited.

  In two years when the United States entered World War II and the first recruits to be trained at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, arrived, the sisters, who both could pass for white, are presented with opportunities to reinvent themselves if they are audacious enough to cross over the color line.

  Shirley chose to remain within her racial group. In 1944, she married Alfred Coignet, a mixed-race man from New Orleans. She seemed to have put her unstable childhood behind her, escaping New Orleans, and embarking on an adventurous life while staying true to her racial heritage. Designated as black on his enlistment record, Alfred Coignet rose to the rank of colonel in the Air Force, no small feat.

  Perhaps it was the transient nature of her marriage to a career soldier or the pressure of having three children without any family support or the unresolved trauma of her childhood, but sometime during her marriage, according to my mother, Shirley became addicted to prescription drugs. After her divorce she returned to New Orleans by then heavily addicted to drugs. Eventually she was committed to a mental hospital where she died in 1980 at the age of fifty-seven. When my grandmother went to collect her body, she found her bruised and beaten. My grandmother wasn’t able to get a satisfactory answer about the cause of her daughter’s death or why she was beaten. It was as if Shirley had to fight her way out of life.

  My mother made a different choice that I try to understand in all its nuances and consequences. Posed on the brink of womanhood, loosely rooted, barely defined by familial relationships, my mother must have reasoned she had little family to lose if she crossed over to the white side.

  Allyson Hobbs posits that the loss of kinship from passing was just as acutely felt by dysfunctional families as it was stable ones. The core issue of passing is not becoming what you pass for, but losing what you pass away from. For Hobbs passing is about loss.1

  For my mother whose childhood had been rife with familial loss, I suspect she took a different view of the loss passing entailed. Abandoned at an early age, unaware of her father’s fight to gain custody of her and her siblings, finding no stable home with her mother and her second husband, eventually living with a cousin, my mother probably thought that losing family was a small price to pay in comparison to what she would gain.

  If she decided to pass as white, she could be anyone she chose to be, and all the privileges that accompanied being white were hers for the taking. The influx of recruits from across the United States into the New Orleans area gave her racial anonymity, allowing her to date white men with impunity. The external markers of her skin and features defined her as white. Her only fear was if someone from her community outed her.

  Still, knowing my mother as I did, she must have sensed, even if she couldn’t or wouldn’t admit it to herself, that turning away from her family would leave a psychic wound.

  A generation earlier a member of her family had gone north to pass. She was well aware of the toll he and the family he left behind had paid. And yet she was willing to take that chance.

  12

  Random Acts of Passing

  January 2015

  Although it is impossible to determine the frequency of passing . . . the two most prevalent forms have been described as part-time or discontinuous passing, e.g., passing white at work, and continuous passing or “crossing over” the racial divide into a new life with a new racial identity.

  —Arthé A. Anthony, “Lost Boundaries”

  THE USE OF the word passing to signify a mixed-race person being accepted as white first surfaced in the American lexicon around the nineteenth century. In Louisiana the French term passé blanc was used to describe a person of black heritage who passes for white, and literally means “passing white.” The word pass comes from Middle English (1275–1325) and is derived from the Old French word passer, to cross over, and is derivative of the Latin word passus meaning “a step.”

  In studying the various meanings of the words pass and passing, I’m struck by how these definitions illuminate the emotional and psychological effects inherent in passing for white. Many of these definitions are associated with death and explain why the term passing was used to denote a mixed-race person being accepted as white.
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  To pass on or pass away is to die. Passing out is a kind of temporary death. There’s an irony in my mother begging me not to reveal her racial secret until she passed away. She’d passed out of or passed away from her mixed-race identity. She’d experienced a kind of death.

  Then there are the other definitions associated with the word pass that suggest reasons for passing. To pass someone is to go ahead of them. A passing grade means satisfying certain criteria, indicating an achievement. And the list of definitions and uses goes on and on.

  The act of passing for white blossomed into other expressions that also connote death and impermanence. To cross over to the other side means to die. It also means to pass into whiteness. There is no stability in the word. Passing by its very definition is transitory.

  And when one passes for white, aren’t they in a state of instability, having to keep up the pace, to keep moving? Lest someone discovers they’ve passed over, by passing themselves off as something they’re not—which is white.

  And when a person passes, crosses over to the other side, when a part of them dies, who do they become?

  Two weeks before our segment of the St. Louis Genealogy Roadshow airs, I write a letter to my mother’s first cousin Ula Moret who lives in Walnut Creek, California. In her eighties she’s the youngest of my mother’s female first cousins on her maternal side and the only one still living. Her mother Mildred “Mickey” Kilbourne and my grandmother Camille were sisters. I’ve never met Ula nor have I ever talked to her. She’s the last female link to my mother’s family.

  I’m not sure why I wrote the letter. Maybe to reach out to my mother’s remaining family; maybe to get support for my decision to publically reveal my mother’s racial secret. I’m still uncomfortable about what I’ve done, anxious about our segment being viewed by so many strangers. No matter how many times I tell myself my mother would have approved of my going public with her story, that my vow had been fulfilled, I still see her fear and shame when I confronted her with the truth. To me it was as if she felt somehow responsible, had colluded in her mixed race. I couldn’t fathom her fear or her shame. It stunk of original sin.

  And then there’s my own trepidation about backlash. Though it’s 2015, I question whether we are living in a post-racial world. News stories abound concerning racial strife. Only days before the Roadshow shot our segment in St. Louis, there were protests and civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, over the police shooting of Michael Brown.

  As an author, I’m easily found through my website. Will I be accused of betraying my mother, of betraying the white race by “coming out” with the truth of my racial heritage? Will blacks see me as disingenuous? Was my mother right in keeping her secret? Am I a disloyal daughter, after all?

  A few days before the show airs, Ula calls me. The candor of her conversation surprises and pleases me. As she shares her history as a mixed-race person, I keep thinking why couldn’t my mother have been this honest and open with me. But Ula’s mixed-race story is vastly different from my mother’s.

  “I never hid my mixed race,” she tells me. “But when I married my husband Roy, who is darker than me, we decided to move to California. There were more opportunities for us in California. I didn’t want to be judged by my race.”

  I recall a photograph of Ula my mother placed on my girlhood dresser after I left home. She looked as white as me. But I don’t pursue my observation of skin color with Ula. I feel uneasy. I don’t know her yet. The race issue makes me self-conscious and unsure of myself. What experience can I draw on having lived my life as a white woman?

  I ask an innocuous question about the racial makeup of the neighborhood where my mother was born.

  “I lived on the same street as your mother but in the next block. White people lived across from your mother’s house. When those white people moved out, colored people moved in. I call them ‘colored people.’ I know some people say black. But I always said colored.”

  Ula’s forthrightness seems so contrary to my mother’s secretiveness.

  “Well, I had a good friend named Leora who had red hair and freckles. You would have never guessed she was colored.” She stops for a moment and reflects. “You know it’s a mentality as much as a look. People who were brown didn’t want to go as colored. And those who were white looking went as black. Some left New Orleans and went on the other side.”

  She doesn’t add “like your mother.” But I’m intrigued by why a person who has a choice identifies either as black or white.

  “You know about the one-drop rule?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I answer, letting her elaborate on her own experience of that archaic rule.

  “Well, that’s how it was in the Southern culture. You only had to have one drop of colored blood. That’s the word I use, colored.”

  Her firm tone reveals her strong character. Her insistence on using colored instead of black says, “This is who I am. Deal with it. This is what one-drop means to me: colored, not black.” There’s a rightness in her insistence. One drop of black blood doesn’t make you black, she is saying. But even so, it still makes you colored.

  She changes the subject as if there is nothing left to say about the word colored. “I worked for a group of lawyers in New Orleans.” I can tell she’s leading up to a story about race.

  “They never knew I was mixed. I’d get on the streetcar and sit in the white section. There was this screen separating the white section from the colored section. But I had to be careful when I got off that streetcar. I had a friend who had to sit in the colored section. I made it a point to talk to him. ‘How are you doing today,’ I’d say. You see I was afraid if I wasn’t nice, he’d out me.”

  I’m anxious to push her for more personal details of what it was like being a mixed-race person in New Orleans, but I hold back and we talk instead about our deceased relatives, about Mary Williams, my mother’s great-grandmother who raised her and her daughter Ada Kilbourne Daste.

  “She was very dark,” Ula explains. “But her daughter Ada was very fair.”

  The way her tongue curls around the r’s, these traces of her New Orleans accent are like a balm to me as if it could conjure my mother back. And in some ways it does conjure her back.

  “We called her Mama, and Ada was mama, and mother was mother.” She pronounced Mama stressing the second syllable.

  I edge forward carefully. “So was Mama black?”

  “Oh, no, she was Choctaw Indian.”

  I want to question her more about Mama being a Choctaw Indian since I know that blacks often claimed Native American ancestry. But I don’t.

  Before we hang up she invites me to visit her and her family in Walnut Creek, California.

  “Did your mother ever teach you how to cook red beans and rice?”

  I tell her no.

  Then she gives me her recipe, which I write down.

  “Now I’m going to ask your husband if it was good.”

  “He knows what to say.” I joke.

  After our conversation I comb through the Dawes Rolls—the final lists of people accepted between 1898 and 1914 by the Dawes Commission as members of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole Indian Tribes—looking for Mary Williams, who I’ll discover through her marriage license was Mary Brown. I find no Mary Williams or Mary Brown matching the birth date and birthplace of my great-great-grandmother Mary Brown Williams, of the dark complexion and high cheekbones.

  Over the next few months Ula and I will talk more about race and passing and New Orleans. And with each conversation Ula will be more candid, more forthcoming. Or perhaps I’m more at ease asking her the hard questions. Each of her stories lifts the veil on my mother’s decision to pass and is another piece of the puzzle.

  With some pride, she relates to me how her father Ulysse Duffaut refused to send her and her siblings to a colored public school. And because they were white enough to pass, he was able to send them to the white public school.

  Although she sat in the white
section on the streetcar, she grew up socializing with the black community. It was a conscious choice on her part.

  “My life would have been different if I hadn’t done that,” she explains ruefully. Then she launches into a bittersweet story of a hard choice she made as a young woman who looked white enough to pass. A story that goes to the heart of the dilemma mixed-race people who looked white faced in the Jim Crow South.

  “When I was sixteen and in secretarial school a white lawyer came to my school and selected two girls for his firm of lawyers. Ethel was the other girl. She was seventeen and Jewish. Can you imagine us two girls running a law firm?”

  I say, “I can’t imagine that.” And I can’t. Though what I really can’t imagine is her audacity in working for a white law firm as a white woman. In that era specific occupations and job sites were defined by race. It was not uncommon to see an employment ad in the newspaper that said, “Colored need not apply.”

  “While I was working for the lawyers, one of the wives who was a psychologist gave me and Ethel a test. The lawyer’s name was George Dryfus. I did so well, George offered to send me to college and pay my tuition and all expenses. He thought I was white. I couldn’t do it. I’d have to give up my colored life, my friends and family. I would have loved to go to college.”

  “Do you regret your decision?”

  “I regret the circumstances, not my decision. I would have had to live totally as white.”

  For her, community was more important than advancement. To permanently pass as white, to leave her family and friends was unthinkable.

  “I hated to be segregated. That’s why I left New Orleans. I didn’t like that I had to sit in a certain section of a restaurant.”

  “Did you always sit in the colored section?” I use her word.

  She chuckles. “Depends on who I was with which side I sat on.”