White Like Her

by Gail Lukasik

  The two women share their own family stories about lighter-skinned relatives and darker-skinned relatives with straight hair, the complexity and fluidity of mixed race manifested in the flesh. The ebony-skinned woman, who related the story of her grandmother being shot for passing, explains that her father had straight hair and light skin. She has a delightful gap between her two front teeth.

  I nod and listen. I’m grateful to them for their trust in me.

  All the way home as my husband and I drive the swift expressways, I think of those two women and what a gift they and the audience gave me. Never once did anyone ask me what I was. They understood. They got it.

  The following day on NPR an African American author discusses segregation in American cities, how blacks are confined geographically, economically, socially, and educationally. As she supports her point, I reflect on the woman who asked what passing is and her comment that it’s not happening anymore in America. I can hear that African American woman say, “Oh, it’s still happening.”

  Two nights later I dream I’m at a party attended by mixed-race people. A small black child, a girl, runs toward me, her arms outstretched. I pick her up and hold her, glancing around the room to see if anyone objects, if anyone thinks holding the child is the wrong thing to do. After all I am a white woman and a stranger.

  The child puts her small arms around my neck, hugs me tightly, and nestles her head into my shoulder. I hug her back. We stand together holding each other in this lovely embrace.

  When I wake, the room is still lost in shadowy light but the dream lingers full of portent.

  The day before, I emailed the La Porte librarian and asked her to find out who the lady was that told the story of her grandmother’s passing and if she will talk to me about her grandmother. The librarian gets back to me the same day. The woman’s name is Versie Jeffries. She would be happy to speak to me.

  “My mom talked to us about her history,” Versie Jeffries explains. “We’d sit out on the porch. This was when we lived in Arkansas. That’s where I grew up, in Arkansas, after the family left Mississippi.”

  How different from my mother whose family stories were edited and secretive in what they revealed and hid. Of course Versie’s mother wasn’t passing for white. She was what she appeared to be, a black woman.

  “My mom was dark-skinned, but she had people in her family passing.”

  Versie’s mom had eleven children, six of whom lived. After the family left Mississippi, they were sharecroppers in Arkansas.

  Before she tells me the story of her grandmother’s murder, I sense she wants me to know who she is and who her people are. And I want to know that as well. Her family tree is hued with many shades of color from light-skinned relatives to dark-skinned relatives and in between.

  “My dad was light skinned with straight hair. When he worked outside, his face would turn dark. But under his shirt he was light,” she laughs. I remember her telling me after my presentation about her dad’s skin color.

  “I was the first one to graduate from high school.” I can hear the pride in her voice. “My brothers had to pick and chop cotton. They supported me. We made three dollars a day.”

  I ask her when she was born, thinking she was younger than me. “1944,” she says. She’s two years older than me but her life experience seems caught in another time.

  There’s an effervescence about Versie, as if she’s bubbling over with a need to be heard and understood. She lives in Kingsford Heights, Indiana, which is nine miles south of La Porte. I find myself writing quickly, using my high school shorthand to capture her words. Sometimes I have to ask her to repeat something she’s said because I can’t get it all down on paper.

  All her energy is poured into her volunteer work, which includes serving as president of the American Legion Auxiliary and being a member of the Democratic Committee. She also is an ardent reader. She has two children, a son and a daughter, both of whom served in the military. She also raised two of her nephews.

  “Tell me about what happened to your grandmother who was trying to pass for white,” I circle back to what initiated the interview.

  “She looked white. She had long black hair and was light skinned. She played both sides,” she explains. “You know, she would go out with white men and black men. She was doing that for years.”

  Her grandmother lived in Walls, Mississippi, in the 1930s when Jim Crow was at its height. Though Versie never knew her grandmother, she’d heard the story and has seen photographs of her grandmother, Daisy Mae Green.

  “My dad was a teenager when his mother was shot. After that, he was raised by a cousin.”

  I guide her back to her grandmother’s story. “So what happened? Who shot her?”

  “These white guys found out what she was doing, and they shot her.”

  “Did the police go after them? Find out who killed her?”

  “Nah. They didn’t even try to catch them.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “You know how it was back then. I had an unbelievable mother. She’d tell us, ‘People will be people regardless. You should show people respect.’ Because we were sharecroppers we worked side by side with whites in the fields. When I moved to Indiana we were the first black family in our neighborhood. There was no problem. Everyone treated us the same.”

  There’s one more question on my list that I want to ask her. “How do you feel about people who pass for white like my mother did?”

  “Back in that time I could understand. How they treated blacks. I have no ill feelings. She was doing what she had to do to survive.”

  Neither of us comments on how her grandmother’s decision to pass for white cost her her life. Nor how my mother carried her secret north with her away from the potential danger of being found out in New Orleans. If Versie’s grandmother had turned her back on her community and gone north, maybe she would have survived as well. With the hindsight of time, there’s no way to know.

  Versie continues relating how the current generation in her family has mixed with whites and Hispanics, blending the family tree. She knows all about the possibilities and struggles of multiculturalism and multiracialism.

  “I don’t see color,” she states. And I believe her.

  But something still nags at me about her opinion about my mother’s decision to pass. I probe deeper. What did she think about my mother turning her back on her family?

  “It must have ate her alive.”

  32

  Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

  DNA Cousins, 2015

  “HOW COME WE don’t have a big photo album like other families?” Paula Danners wondered growing up in northern Wisconsin.

  I shake my head in agreement as I listen to her tell her racial discovery story.

  We found each other via Ancestry.com, more specifically she found me. Our DNA is a very high probable cousin match, 96 percent. It’s taken me a year to respond to her Ancestry.com emails. In all the upheaval of my mother’s death and Genealogy Roadshow, I just wasn’t ready. Her fourth request piqued my interest: “I would love to figure out our connection. My grandparents were from New Orleans and moved to Wisconsin in the 1920s.”

  A gemologist for thirty years, Paula’s been doing genealogical research for ten years and tells me that nothing in her family has ever been easy. “Many secrets unfortunately.”

  Her Ancestry.com family tree is lush and luxuriant, spreading outward and upward like an old oak. Most of the branches on the tree bear fruit, photographs of her family members. It’s almost frenetic in its expansiveness, illustrating her passionate need for family. She’s invited me to view her tree on Ancestry.com, and I sent her the same invitation. We want to see if any of our ancestors’ surnames match.

  “I always suspected something wasn’t right about our family, something was off. But I never knew what it was,” Paula explains.

  There’s lightness to her tone that tells me she has come to terms with her own racial identity and her famil
y’s secrecy. Her feeling of betrayal, if not gone, then processed, no longer able to sting. Now it’s just an interesting story.

  Paula’s curiosity about her family sprung from the same absence as my own—no visible proof of our people. No photographs to stare at and compare our face to their faces, looking for similarities that bind and comfort.

  “Growing up it was only my grandparents and a handful of their siblings, my mom and sister, and my uncle who lived out in California. I didn’t even know my uncle’s children, my cousins, until I started researching and found some of them in California.”

  Her grandmother and grandfather raised her until she was twelve and were strangely silent about their respective families. “My grandfather would eat weird food like gumbo and grits and creole food. I was the only kid in my neighborhood who grew up on grits.”

  Food sometimes is its own clue, I think. We laugh over our fondness for grits as Northern “white” girls.

  When her neighborhood changed and became more racially mixed, one of the African American children commented on her skin color. “You have yellow skin. Are you mixed?”

  Confused by what the girl said about her skin, Paula went to her grandmother. “Am I yellow? Is my skin yellow?”

  Her grandmother deflected the question, acknowledging her yellow skin tone but giving a misleading answer, an answer a child would accept. “That’s because you eat so many carrots.”

  “I accepted that but still I wondered about my skin. I knew we looked Spanish and Indian. That I did know. I’d ask my grandmother questions about our family and she’d say, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’”

  My mother’s strategy of deception was different than Paula’s grandmother’s strategy. My mother told me half-truths. But both strategies had the same result for us. They fueled our sense that something was being hidden, some secret we were determined to know. Secrets sparked our curiosity.

  The clues to Paula’s real racial heritage were like seeds scattered here and there throughout her life. Clues that she had no way of piecing together. And then her first child, a daughter, was born in 1993, and all the pieces of her puzzle finally came together in a disturbing way.

  “I was a new mom and I’d just brought my daughter Lauren home and the hospital called me. They told me that my daughter had sickle cell anemia.

  “‘That’s impossible.’ I said. ‘It must be a mistake. You’ve made an error. She may have a trait for sickle cell, but she doesn’t have the disease.’

  “When we went to the hospital to be tested they asked for my husband’s and my ethnic backgrounds. My husband’s family emigrated from Germany around 1910 and were 100 percent German. The test eliminated him as a carrier. So it had to be me. I thought, ‘Okay, it’s the Mediterranean kind,’ and had further tests done.”

  The gene for beta thalassemia, the Mediterranean form of sickle cell anemia, is relatively common among people of Italian and Greek origin because at one time parts of Italy and Greece were rampant with malaria. The presence of thalassemia minor protected against malaria and thus thrived.1

  I hear the disbelief in her voice even now after all these years and I relive my own disbelief looking at the 1900 census, nowhere as earth shattering as finding out you and your child have a serious disease but shocking nonetheless, tilting your sense of self, how you see yourself in the world.

  “It wasn’t the Mediterranean kind. It was the African kind,” Paula continues. “I carry about 46 percent of the sickle-cell trait in my blood. My daughter carries about 52 percent. I was taken aback.”

  According to the National Institute of Health about one in thirteen African American babies are born with the sickle-cell trait. About one in 365 black children are born with the sickle cell disease. Paula and her daughter have the sickle-cell trait.

  As soon as Paula found out, she called her mother. When she describes her mother’s reaction she uses the words, “flipped out.”

  “The geneticist is a liar,” her mother yelled at her. “They don’t know what they’re talking about. This same thing happened to a distant cousin and it was a mistake.”

  “I hung up. I was mad at her for her behavior. I’m a new mom with a sick daughter and all she can do is yell at me. That was my reaction.”

  She waited a few weeks to call her mother back. She wanted to simmer down. “I had to get the truth. This was for my Lauren and me.”

  “I told her it had to be her side of the family because my father was Spanish. As I explained why it had to be her side, I realized that she didn’t know. She didn’t know her own parents were Creole, mixed race. Her parents hadn’t told her.”

  Paula outlines the seriousness of their disease. “We can become more anemic than the average person. We cannot live in high altitude places such as Colorado because our blood doesn’t get the proper oxygen and can cause anemia. If we mate with another carrier, the child would have full blown sickle cell anemia.”

  She says what I’m thinking. “People need to know their heritage for health reasons. The sickle-cell trait can mutate. You think you know your heritage but you don’t know, not really. I guess that’s why I’m so impassioned about my research.” She takes in a deep breath. “This may sound corny. But I really believe that most people don’t realize they are a mixture of a lot of wonderful nationalities, maybe races. We really need to embrace all that we are and know as a human race. We are all in it together!”

  After she learned of her mixed heritage, she became dogged in her search for family. One family member she found related her grandfather’s passing story, one that seems as if it came from a spy novel, with literal, not just metaphoric, crossings.

  “Around 1902, the Dugas family left New Orleans, moved to Florida, then to New York, where my grandfather was born, and then to Canada. When the family returned to the United States and settled in Wisconsin, my grandfather gave his race as white, which wasn’t true. This family member thought moving to Canada was a way for the family to pass for white.”

  I think of Uncle Eddie and Aunt Laura leaving their family behind to pass for white in Toledo, Ohio, and never returning home again. I think of my mother marrying my father and moving north to Cleveland, Ohio, also passing for white. I think of the Virginia Race Act predicated on the fear that “white Negroes” would slip over the color line and marry white people. I think of what it means to be a “white Negro,” which is another way to say a person carries African blood, even the smallest drop tainting them. I think of the lengths my ancestors and Paula’s ancestors have gone, the dissolution of families, the secrecy, the loss, and I feel immense sadness for the shame and oppression my people felt.

  As if she can read my thoughts, Paula adds, “I also know that my grandparents and their parents did what they needed to do to survive during trying times in our country, but they always kept in touch with their family members that did not pass over the color line via phone or letters. I really hope that my grandparents would be happy that I am trying to piece the family back together again.”

  The ardent wish and worry of the person who steps out of the secrecy and reveals the truth. Are we being disloyal?

  “I’d like to include your story in my mother’s book,” I pause, unsure of her reaction. “If you want, I can use another name. You don’t have to use your real name.”

  Her voice becomes steely with determination. “I’m done with the hiding. You can use my real name. If you want photos to use, I’ll give you them for the book. All I ask is that when the book comes out, you give me a signed copy.”

  “I can do that,” I tell her, savoring the fierceness of her words. The daughters will no longer hide the truth of their mixed race. The daughters stand together in their own truth. We are no longer willing to let sleeping dogs lie.

  As our conversation winds down, we try to find where our families intersect, why our cousin DNA is a 96 percent match. But we share only one ancestral name, Williams, too common, with little other evidence to be our missing link.

 
What we do find is another kind of connection. Paula’s Fauria family owned an awning company in New Orleans in the first part of the twentieth century, Fauria Awnings. My maternal grandmother Camille, the gifted seamstress, worked for an awning company, making cloth awnings. Fauria Awnings was the only awning company in New Orleans at that time, so it’s certain my grandmother worked for Paula’s family’s business.

  Before we end our conversation, Paula talks about her grandmother’s death. “When my mother, sister, and I went to clean out her house, they asked me what I wanted. ‘I’m taking the photo albums.’ No one objected.” She hesitates. “My family seems like they can just walk away from family.”

  And isn’t that what passing is about, walking away from family, not looking back, walking into the skin of another but underneath still carrying your true skin?

  33

  Lost Family Found

  January 23, 2015

  THREE DAYS AFTER the show airs, on a crisp January morning, when I open my email I receive a shock. There’s an email from Stephanie Frederic. For a moment, I resist reading her email knowing that once I do my life will be altered, will change in ways I can’t predict. Then I plunge forward, ignoring the wild thumping of my heart.

  I’m Azemar A. Frederic Jr.’s daughter who lives in Los Angeles. A friend saw you on Genealogy Roadshow and sent pictures and info about you.

  We are very excited to meet you. My father lives in Alexandria, Louisiana, now. He’s from New Orleans. His father was Azemar Frederic and his mother is Modesta Messmer.