by Gail Lukasik
That morning I’d worked on the book, writing the section defining Creole and racial designation in Louisiana from 1970–1983, when the legal standard for Negro was changed from the one-drop rule to the one-thirty-second standard, and I’m a little touchy about the question of “What am I?” Mainly because I’m firm in my belief that race is a social construct, meant to keep nonwhites economically, politically, and socially suppressed. Do I unleash that information on this woman?
“What do you mean what am I?” I don’t like her tone, but I don’t want to appear defensive nor miss a teachable moment. The audience is staring up at me, a plethora of expressions on their faces from anticipation to empathy. I tell myself that this is what can happen when you put your mother’s story out there. You have to be prepared for these types of questions. But I don’t feel prepared. It’s only the second presentation I’ve done since the show was televised.
The woman doesn’t get the subtlety of my response. “Well, I’m looking at you and I can see what you look like. But,” she struggles, “what are you?”
What she doesn’t say, but what is implied, is that I look so white. But I’ve revealed that I’m not 100 percent white. My appearance isn’t to be trusted. That seems to bother her.
The audience shifts in their seats. “Do you mean what my DNA says I am?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
Why isn’t there a HIPAA law for racial identity? What right does she have to ask me this? But by standing here and telling my mother’s story, I’m free game. That’s what I signed up for.
“I’m 7 to 9 percent black and 86 percent white. The majority of my DNA is Scandinavian and British Isles.”
Her hand goes up again. I forge ahead as if I didn’t see it. I reiterate the Louisiana one-drop rule and then talk about the one-thirty-second law. I barrage the woman with facts meant to show her the foolishness of her question. Since she’s already told everyone she’s Jewish, relating a story about Madeline Albright and how she didn’t know she was Jewish, I compare the Nuremberg law with the Louisiana law. “Don’t you get it?” I want to scream at her.
For a moment I think I’ve shut her down, but she raises her hand again. And because no one else is raising their hand, I have to acknowledge her.
“What is your father?” That same blunt tone in her words.
I feel like a pinned insect, not the exotic butterfly with the iridescent green wings but the dung beetle from a third-world country. I refuse to say the word white. “He was Bohemian.” I launch into my Great-Aunt Catherine’s story of how the Kalina family built a boat and sailed from Bohemia to America, landing in Baltimore and then moving to Cleveland where there was a Bohemian community. I joke about the mythology of that story.
The woman’s hand goes up again. “But you don’t know that he’s only that. For all you know he could also be Jewish.”
Now I get it. Now I see she has an agenda. And it has to do with her own Jewishness, with people who don’t know they’re Jewish and may be walking around not knowing, maybe disparaging Jews. If I’d had the presence of mind, I should have said being Jewish doesn’t show up on a DNA test.
Instead I say, “And wouldn’t that be interesting. Like I said before one big gumbo. And I love that.”
This time she doesn’t give me the courtesy of raising her hand as if she and I are having a private conversation. “When you found out about your grandfather and his race what did you feel?”
I let out a deep breath. “I was stunned but welcomed the richness of my heritage. Like I said one big gumbo.”
“That’s all you felt?”
What does she want me to say? I was horrified. I was disgusted.
In desperation I reply, “I judge people by their characters, not by their skin color.”
Many of the audience nod their heads in agreement.
Before the woman can conjure another question, the librarian’s hand bobs up like a lifeline, rescuing me from this strange woman. She asks if I’m writing a book about my mother’s story?
“Yes,” I smile with relief.
After the presentation, the librarian apologizes for the woman and tells me I handled it very well. I’m not convinced.
On the drive home through the summer night, the softening sunset clouds like mountains on the horizon, with the expressway crazies whizzing around me as if their destinations were dire, I mull over the woman’s question. “What are you?”
I sensed even as she was asking her absurd question that it had little to do with me and more to do with her fears about race and racial purity. If I could be other than I appear, then anyone in this country could be other than they appear.
As I exit the expressway and take the sharp curve down the ramp, a shot of anger and dismay courses through me.
How dare that woman ask me what I was? What difference does it make to her? What I am is beside the point. Or maybe what I am is the point. Even I don’t know how to talk about race.
At the bottom of the ramp, I turn right and head home to Libertyville feeling disappointed in myself, in people’s prejudices and biases.
My only consolation is I’m no longer silent. I’m engaging with audiences about my mother’s racial secret. And in turn, I’m attesting to this bizarre dialogue about race.
My mother groomed me too well all those years ago when she told me the story of the old black woman shoved off the banquette by a white man who called her a nigger.
I can almost hear her say, “That’s the kind of story that needs an audience.”
And then there are the inexplicable occurrences. Before a packed room of fifty genealogical society members, as I take questions, one woman jumps up and says, “I have a gift for you. Can I come up there and give it to you?”
How can I turn down a gift?
This is the third time she’s commented on my presentation. Each time the petite Asian American woman has praised my mother’s courage and stressed the importance of this story.
Standing beside me, she addresses the audience as if I’ve handed over my presentation to her. “Actually it’s a gift for everyone,” she says, swinging her arms wildly. “Please everyone join in.”
In a wavery soprano voice she bursts into song. I’m flabbergasted. The song is about love and God. I’ve never heard it before. Nor has the audience because no one is singing with her. As she sings, I see the president of the genealogical society pop up from her seat and hurry to the front of the room to stand by my other side.
Something is clearly wrong.
My mind is whirling, not sure what to do. Looking askance at the singing woman, I spot a fanny pack around her waist, the zippered pouch in front for easy access. Is she dangerous? Does she have something in her pack, another gift for me?
What if she keeps singing? I call on all my experiences teaching in the city—the unruly students, the substance abusers, and the hostile students. I have to get control back from her.
As soon as she finishes, before she can launch into another song or zip open her bulging fanny pack, I quickly say, “Thank you. And there’s one more thing I forgot to say.”
There’s nothing I forgot to say. But it works. The woman walks back to her seat.
Afterwards the president explains to me that the woman has mental problems, which makes me wonder what in my talk sparked her instability to bloom into the gift of song.
After the event, as I’m exiting the building, heading for the parking lot, I realize, too late, that the singing woman is following me. She’s frantically telling me how much she enjoyed my talk. The parking lot is poorly lit, and the woman keeps talking and walking with me. To my dismay no one else is in the parking lot. I quicken my pace though hampered by the rolling suitcase of books I brought to the event.
Before reaching my car, I say, nonchalantly, “What’s the best way out of the lot if I want to get back on the highway?”
Somehow the practicality of my question cuts through her chatter. “Just go out over there.” She
points to an exit.
“Thanks.” I scurry into my car, throwing the suitcase in the back seat and locking my car door. I’m so shaken up that I make a wrong turn and drive for ten minutes before I realize I’m heading in the wrong direction.
Winding down the dark country road, I question if it was only her mental instability that inspired the Asian American woman to sing? Or did my mother’s story of racial oppression strike a chord with her, igniting passions she could no longer contain that had to find expression in song.
After the first few talks, I decide to end my presentations with my mom’s picture, a studio photograph of her in her early twenties, when she was living in New Orleans. Her image remains on the screen as I take audience questions: her serene smile, the white delicate flowers in contrast to her dark tightly curled hair, a slender gold crucifix around her neck, her makeup cleverly applied—as if her image defies my presentation.
Some audience members seem to think she looks Cuban. The power of suggestion, I surmise, because I revealed Roxelane Arnoux, my fourth great-grandmother was born in Cuba. What is this need to label when the visual markers don’t support a racial reality?
In two separate presentations, two audience members ask me what my DNA is. The first time I’m asked that question, I’m a little taken aback by the woman’s boldness as if she were asking for my medical records. The second time I’m prepared.
“Depending on which test, I’m either 7 or 9 percent African and 86 or 90 percent European.” I don’t add any explanation.
My answer seems to baffle the two different women as well as the audiences. I see the bewilderment on their faces as they try to come to terms with my white skin and my mixed ancestry. As if everything about a person can be known by looking at them.
One woman says, “I thought it would be more.” The other woman says, “I thought it would be less.”
There’s no escaping my feeling of being dissected, objectified racially. What are they seeing in me that I’m either lacking in blackness or have too much blackness? And again why does it matter? What is this need to take me apart racially? Isn’t the point of my mother’s story that we have to stop doing this to people?
If I hadn’t stood in front of them telling them my mother’s story of passing, telling them about the mixing of races that reaches back in our family to the eighteenth century and beyond, they would never know I carried 7–9 percent African ancestry. I would just be another middle-aged white woman they would barely notice.
At a genealogical society meeting, an older white woman who doesn’t seem to understand the implications of the one-drop rule asks me why they just couldn’t do blood tests back then.
The question throws me. Before I can answer, another white woman calls the woman out. “You’re just showing your own views about this, your own ignorance.”
It’s an uncomfortable moment. I’m relieved the outspoken woman squashed the other’s woman question, but I have a spark of sympathy for the older woman that I can’t explain. She lowers her head in embarrassment.
It’s the twenty-first century and still no one knows how to talk about race in America. The stain of slavery seems to lie under everyone’s skin like a latent disease there’s no cure for. Even scratching the surface seems to cause the disease to breakout in the most unpredictable way.
31
What We Talk About When We Talk About Passing
La Porte, Indiana, 2015
THE BRILLIANT OCTOBER sun glares through the car window as we pull into the Salvation Army parking lot in La Porte, Indiana. My husband, Jerry, has driven the two plus hours from our house to La Porte. The lot is almost full, but Jerry reminds me that it’s a community center and there may be other events scheduled for the afternoon. Secretly I hope I’m the only event.
I’m the guest speaker for the La Porte library system’s biannual Book Club Luncheon. Butterflies dance in my stomach as I walk inside the building and see the crowded room. A woman named Susan, who introduces herself as the public relations person for the La Porte libraries, escorts me to a far table at the back of the room, takes my memory stick containing the slides for the presentation, and tells me to wait until the announcements are over.
As I wait, I scan the room, counting about fifty people in attendance, mostly women, mostly white, though to my surprise and delight there are two African American women sitting together at one of the tables. This is the first time I’ll be telling my mother’s story to a racially mixed audience.
Once I begin, I find myself occasionally glancing at the two African American women, gauging their reactions, wondering if they are taking offense to what I say. Are they judging my mother harshly for passing as white, for turning her back on her family in the process? Are they seeing her as a traitor to her race?
I can’t get a read from their expressions. And it makes me nervous. I realize I’m having an inner dialogue with myself as I talk to the audience, making it more difficult to concentrate, sometimes pressing the remote too hard, skipping a slide, having to go back, losing the rhythm of the sequence of the slides and the topics.
When I reach the last part of my talk where I read the email from that young woman who describes what it’s like to be a mixed-race person who doesn’t seem to fit anywhere because of how she looks, a wave of anxiety shoots through me. She criticizes blacks for not accepting her.
I consider editing her comments about the black community, afraid the African American women might be offended. I realize it’s impossible to do that without losing the poignancy of her sentiments. And should I do that? To not read her email and end my talk now would be too abrupt and cowardly.
I take a deep breath and start to read. “Most of my life people have asked me, ‘What are you?’ especially black people.”
I keep going. “Looking the way I do I have personally never been accepted by the black community, for the most part, a concept called colorism.”
Quickly I look at the two African American women. Their faces tell me nothing.
“Kids teased me and called me white though I don’t look white to most white people I don’t think, but by black standards definitely not black enough.”
I’m relieved when I reach the final paragraph that talks about her reaction to the price my mother paid to pass. “It’s sooo complicated.”
The audience applauds, realizing it’s the end of my talk though I haven’t signaled them as I usually do by saying, “Thank You.” The two African American women are still seated, haven’t left. I open the presentation to questions.
As usual the questions are a blend of questions and comments about people’s experience with race, reflective of the audience’s own interests. When will the book be published? Do you have a title? Do you know your DNA? This is my sixth presentation. I’ve been asked about my DNA so often I now expect the question. Something odd or poignant always happens when I talk about my mother, when I talk about race.
Then the questions get more personal, closer to the bone of racial issues.
“Did any family members who passed have dark children?” Is the woman thinking of the well-known Kate Chopin short story, “Désirée’s Baby”? After all this is an audience of readers, of book lovers.
“Not that I’m aware of,” I answer, recalling my great-great-grandmother Mary Williams’s dark skin and how in her case the opposite happened. Her daughter Ada McNicholls was very fair-skinned. How to explain these genetic skin variations, when I don’t understand them.
Then a woman sitting at a back table asks me what passing is. What does it mean to pass? I’m surprised that she doesn’t know the concept. I make a mental note that the next time I speak I need to explain racial passing, to use the two words together.
I give some historical background about segregation in the South, separate areas for whites and blacks. I relate Uncle Eddie and Aunt Laura’s passing story, how they couldn’t go home again after they passed.
One of the African American women shakes her head in
understanding. We’re reaching the heart of racism.
“But that’s no longer happening?” the white woman says, confirming her own belief about race today in America.
“Well, there are no separate areas designated by color any longer,” I respond.
One of the black women raises her hand and starts to talk. “Oh, it’s still happening,” she says in an agitated voice. “My grandmother was trying to pass for white in the South. When they found out, they shot her dead.”
We’re silenced by her revelation and the strength of her emotion.
“When did this happen?” I ask.
“In the 1930s, sometime.”
I’m shocked by her grandmother’s story and say so.
After my talk, while I sit at the author table as people shuffle past, some buying books, some expressing how they enjoyed my presentation, I notice the African American women are lagging behind.
I’m hoping they’ll stop at my table so I can speak to them and get a sense of their feelings about my presentation and to learn more about the woman’s grandmother who was shot for passing for white.
A middle-aged white woman tells me she enjoyed my talk. “But you know if it was a generation ago your children wouldn’t want anyone to know. Nor would you.”
Am I being subtly chastised? “Yes, I know,” I answer, thinking that’s the point of my story.
Another woman wants to tell me that slavery has been around for over two thousand years.
How do I respond to that? “Does that make it right?” “Why are you telling me that?” She leaves before I can drudge up a response that isn’t defensive or angry. Perhaps she just wanted to share her knowledge of slavery, that it wasn’t just an American institution.
Finally, only the staff and the African American women remain. To my delight, they do stop at my table. The taller woman with the short-cropped hair and honey-colored skin holds out her hand to me. I take her hand in my two hands. There’s a connection with her I can’t explain, as if it wasn’t me holding her hand, but my mother holding her hand through me, as if I’m the conduit. Our touch reaches back in time to distant ancestors only she can understand fully. Because of the way I look, because of my experience, I can only witness and record. Then go out and tell my mother’s story, the story of mixed-race people in America. She lives it.