Jeanne, who died in 2005, told me (in 2000, when I was researching Black Berry, Sweet Juice) that she ended up being baptized in a black Catholic church in Philadelphia, but that the incident left her mother disenchanted with Catholicism. May eventually left the Catholic Church entirely. According to Jeanne, the Protestant churches in the early 1900s were just as racist. Nonetheless, Jeanne attended the Catholic Church until 1985, when she finally moved over to the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
On the day of our interview in her home in Brooklyn, Jeanne was full of stories of family secrets. She had reached the age of eighty-one and seemed to have lost any sense of urgency about keeping the secrets locked away. She said that her grandmother Marie Coakley was born after Jeanne’s great-grandmother Maria Coakley was raped while working as a maid in the White House in 1875, during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. With a grin on her face, Jeanne said, “There was involuntary mixing in the White House.” Jeanne said that Maria Coakley neither named nor accused her rapist. Maria gave birth to Marie on February 21, 1876, and the baby Marie was raised as one of the children of her grandparents, Jenny and Gabriel Coakley. Jeanne recalled that Marie’s “siblings” and “parents” were considerably darker than she was.
My Aunt Jeanne said she did not hear of this story until she was twenty-one years old and happened to be visiting with her grandmother Marie and with her great-aunt Gertrude. Marie happened to insult Gertrude. Gertrude shot back that Marie was a bastard, and taunted her about being conceived as a result of rape in the White House.
I have no way of verifying the story. I will never know, for sure, if my great-great-grandmother was raped in the White House. I have no way of knowing if one of my ancestors on my father’s side was a White House employee or a visitor, and white to boot. I asked my Aunt Jeanne for her opinion on this family story, which is a secret no more. “It is probably true,” Jeanne said. “Things like that happened all the time.” I know a few secrets about my family, but I do not know them all.
Our blood contains many secrets. These secrets may have to do with an identity — racial, religious, or other — that we have chosen to shed, hide, or alter. They may have to do with crimes we have committed. Children we have fathered, or mothered. People to whom we are related, or not. Blood also has the potential to yield up secrets — and even resolve disputes — about our most distant ancestry. Blood can be the most intimate reflection of our being, and it can offer details that are either abhorred or welcomed. Since blood and race have come to be so intimately acquainted, I will spend a good part of this chapter assessing that relationship. However, I also want to touch down on blood and crime, blood and forensic investigation, and how the science of genetics may be altering or challenging long-held assumptions about the meaning of our blood and the nature of our identities.
IT SO HAPPENS THAT BLOOD is one of the hardest stains to remove. Apparently, this is because hemoglobin binds with fibres, rather than just sitting on top of them (as, say, mud might do). You don’t necessarily want your house guests to know that you have spilled blood on bedsheets or towels. Blood, in these cases, is something you want to keep secret.
For years, skilled laundresses have had all sorts of household tricks to remove bloodstains from fabrics. The first lesson is to avoid the use of hot water. No need for a washing machine, either, although time is of the essence. If you have spilled blood, you don’t sit back and contemplate your fate. You act right away, sopping it up with something absorbent and using cold water. On the Web, you can find endless suggestions about how to deal with the problem. In fact, the website Mrs. Clean offers specific tips: cold water, soap, and hydrogen peroxide. Failing that, you may also use your own saliva or reach for toothpaste, meat tenderizer, or ammonia.
The strange thing about blood on sheets is how exposed it makes us feel if others see it. Saliva on a pillowcase, semen on a bedsheet, blueberry stains on a blanket — none of these things bring about quite the self-consciousness one feels about leaving blood on the sheets in the house of an old friend who has just given you dinner and put you up for the night. In most cases, we take steps to clean up after ourselves so nobody will see the signs of blood in our beds. But there is one situation in which the very opposite approach is required.
In chapter one, I mentioned that men don’t have to think about monthly bleeding. Another thing that men don’t have to worry about is proving their virginity by producing a bloodstained bedsheet after the wedding night — a ritual so ancient that it’s difficult to trace its exact origins. The blood on the sheet is intended to come from the breaking of the hymen, a thin membrane that covers the opening of the vagina until it is broken during intercourse. Therefore, the thinking and the tradition go, blood on the wedding sheets proves the virginity and thus the purity of the bride, and should be hung out the following day to prove to the family and community that the groom got a good deal. Blood, in this case, is meant to put to rest any suspicions that the newly married woman has a secret sexual past.
There are several problems with this way of thinking. First of all, not all women are born with a hymen. Then there is the fact that the hymen can be broken by tampon use and physical activity. And there is the larger problem of judging chastity as such an essential asset for a woman that the absence of its proof can threaten the legality of the marriage and possibly put her in mortal danger.
Though the tradition of the wedding sheet is ancient, the value placed on virginity, and the presence of an intact hymen, persists today. And it has modern solutions. Hymen reconstruction surgery, in which a broken hymen is sutured or a piece of the vagina is used to create a new hymen, is available in many parts of the world. Some patients opt to create the illusion of chastity by having a capsule of coloured gelatin inserted into the vagina, so that it will break on the wedding night and create the desired “blood” stain.
This age-old blood revelation is meant to prove a woman’s worthiness. It is a hideous way to evaluate a woman, exposing her to the judgement and condemnation of family and of the wider community. It is just one of the many ways in which society has used blood to expose our secrets, and it has led to fatal consequences for those who failed to satisfy their examiners.
LITERAL BLOODSTAINS HAVE SOME prominence in the mind, but the blood of the imagination can be far more powerful — it prevents us from hiding from ourselves the secrets of our crimes. Consider the emotional torture of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. In one of the most memorable meditations on blood in Western literature, Macbeth muses that an entire ocean couldn’t rinse clean his bloody hands after he and Lady Macbeth conspired to murder King Duncan. And later, as Lady Macbeth wanders her castle, half mad, a doctor and a gentlewoman wonder why she has been rubbing and washing her hands incessantly. As they eavesdrop on her wild musings, Lady Macbeth incriminates herself with her own haunting memories of the murder. Referring to the victim, she says: “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” She is completely unable to rid her mind of the blood she has spilled. “Out, damn’d spot!” she cries. “Out, I say!” And a few lines later: “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” She even fixates on the scent of her victim’s blood, as evidence that refuses to go away: “Here’s the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”
Lady Macbeth cannot turn her mind away from blood, because more than anything else, it symbolizes the life she has just stolen from Duncan. She has blood on her hands, and she can never forget it.
Another powerful image of blood spilled on literary pages comes from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, in which the impoverished young man Raskolnikov murders a pawnbroker and her stepsister and then, in a state of mind similar to that of Lady Macbeth, virtually drives himself crazy with the memory of what he has done.
Let me share a few lines about Raskolnikov right after he commits the double murder:
His hands were
sticky with blood. He dropped the axe with the blade in the water, snatched a piece of soap that lay in a broken saucer on the window, and began washing his hands in the bucket. When they were clean, he took out the axe, washed the blade and spent a long time, about three minutes, washing the wood where there were spots of blood, rubbing them with soap. Then he wiped it all with some linen that was hanging to dry on a line in the kitchen and then he was a long while attentively examining the axe at the window. There was no trace left on it, only the wood was still damp. He carefully hung the axe in the noose under his coat. Then as far as was possible, in the dim light in the kitchen, he looked over his overcoat, his trousers and his boots. At the first glance there seemed to be nothing but stains on the boots. He wetted the rag and rubbed the boots. But he knew he was not looking thoroughly, that there might be something quite noticeable that he was overlooking.
Like Lady Macbeth, Raskolnikov is never quite able to get past the sensation that the blood on his hands has, metaphorically, not washed away; hence his grisly act will haunt him ceaselessly. Macbeth and Crime and Punishment have endured in the collective imagination for their eerie portrayal of those who have carried out violent crime. We imagine the characters will never be able to wash from their minds the memory of blood spilled — on the floor, on bodies, on their own hands.
Blood is so red, and it stains with such unrelenting diligence — as liquid manifestation, and as enduring metaphor — that when we spill it criminally, we are forever stained. Maybe our blood knows this. Maybe we are filled with red blood for a reason. Maybe the nature, colour, and undeniability of our blood serve to help preserve mankind.
WHILE LADY MACBETH AND RASKOLNIKOV were unable to shake their minds free of the crimes they’d committed, today’s criminals not only have to contend with their conscience (we imagine) but they must also deal with the new science of forensic examination. Blood spatter analysis can reconstruct the details of a crime to a forensic investigator. Did the blood drip slowly after a crime took place? Did it travel from the victim at medium velocity as the result of a blunt blow from, say, a bat or a fist? Did it leave the victim’s body at high velocity, as the result of a bullet? If a bullet passed through a body, spatter analysis can reveal the blood that left the entry point and the blood that left the exit point. Investigating detectives will also look for voids in (or sudden absences of) bloodstains at a crime scene. Perhaps, when the blood sprayed, the assailant got some blood on himself (or herself). Perhaps the absence of blood in a certain spot suggests that a witness or an accomplice was at the scene of a crime.
Police officers who are interested in detective work will study bloodstain pattern analysis. By studying blood on a surface, it is possible, using trigonometry, to ascertain the angle at which the blood travelled and where it came from. Forensic examination can also reveal if a victim was shot at very close range: in that case, some of the victim’s blood might even have been sucked back into the muzzle of the gun.
So evolved is the field of bloodstain analysis that there is even an organization called the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts. Thanks to modern science, we can tell if a bloodstain comes from a human or an animal. We can tell the blood type of the person who left the stain. The criminal may have washed clean the crime scene, but investigators can find traces of blood that are unapparent to the naked eye or are out of sight. Forensic analysis may well give the police many clues about who you are, what you used, and where you stood when you fired that gun or used that knife. And if they get a look at your own blood, they can extract information you may have kept secret: what you drank, what drugs you took, who your children and parents are, and what diseases lie hidden in your veins.
What the DNA analysis of blood tells us about a crime, however, is far from straightforward, or foolproof. It is open to interpretation. When O. J. Simpson stood trial for the 1994 murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, disputes about the reliability of DNA evidence extracted from blood samples came to be known as the “DNA Wars.” Simpson’s lawyers, arguing that the police had handled the blood evidence carelessly, succeeded in winning his acquittal in court. (Two years later, however, a civil court in California found Simpson liable for the death of Goldman and the battery of Brown Simpson.)
In the end, it appears that the results of DNA testing of blood are similar to other forms of evidence introduced in criminal or civil courts: they may be used to acquit or convict. And the higher the stakes, the more likely the blood will be subject to competing analyses. Blood adds to the picture, and it complicates it, but it does not lessen the need for other forms of evidence.
BLOOD CAN CONTAIN MANY SECRETS. Some may never be revealed, and others may be exposed after lying dormant for decades or centuries. Given the endless obsession with separating people into artificially defined racial (or blood) groups, as outlined in chapter three, it is no wonder that thousands of individuals have attempted to “pass” into safer, unpersecuted groups.
In his memoir, The Color of Water, American essayist and saxophonist James McBride describes growing up black in the housing projects of Brooklyn, never having met his biological father, and having been raised with eleven siblings by a mother who he had always assumed was a light-skinned black woman. It was not until his adulthood that McBride discovered his mother had been born into an Orthodox Jewish family. After taking up with a black man, she had hidden the fact that she was Jewish and allowed neighbours, friends, and her own children to believe that she was a light-skinned black woman.
McBride recalls asking his mother whether God was black or white. He did not yet know his mother’s family history, but had noticed her skin was lighter than his. She prevaricated brilliantly:
“God’s not black. He’s not white. He’s a spirit.”
“Does he like black or white people better?”
“He loves all people. He’s a spirit . . .”
“What color is God’s spirit?”
“It doesn’t have a color,” she said. “God is the color of water. Water doesn’t have a color.”
Does this mean that James McBride’s mother was indeed not black, during all those years that people assumed she was? What made her white or black, or Jewish, for that matter? We now know her secret, but for the longest time her fictional identity was “real” for the children who must have thought they knew her best.
It is possible — indeed, not at all rare — for a person to suppress or hide one identity and to offer another to the world. Sometimes, one does so as a matter of personal choice, as in the case of James McBride’s mother. In other cases, passing out of one race or religion and into another can be a matter of life and death.
Just as those responsible for repressing and killing Jews and Muslims during the time of the Inquisition were fixated on the purity of Catholic blood, the same notions emerged during the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, which spews religious and racial hatred for nearly seven hundred pages, linked his so-called “Jewish menace” to what he considered to be the impurity of Jewish blood, the nobility of so-called Aryan blood, and the polluting dangers of miscegenation (procreation between people of different races). In the chapter entitled “Nation and Race,” Hitler wrote: “Historical experience . . . shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples, the result was the end of the cultured people.” Hitler’s own words remind us how deeply genocide can be linked, in the mind of the perpetrator, to notions of blood.
It is no wonder that during the Holocaust, some Jews attempted to escape extermination — and some even succeeded — by adopting Christian identities. In 1999, Edith Hahn Beer published her memoir, The Nazi Officer’s Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust, which recounts how she grew up in a non-observant Jewish family in Austria but passed for a Christian to avoid being killed during the Holocaust. She married a Nazi party member named Werner Vet
ter, who became a wartime officer. He knew that she was Jewish, and when she was pregnant he often told her “that the Jewish race was stronger, that Jewish blood always dominated,” but that he still looked forward to the arrival of the baby.
Hahn Beer kept her true identity hidden until the war’s end. But she recounts a 1943 meeting with a Nazi official to obtain a marriage licence. For this, she had to prove that she was “German blooded.” She had some false papers, but not all that she needed. When the official interrogated her about her maternal grandmother, Hahn Beer lied and said that she was unable to obtain her grandmother’s racial papers. The official scrutinized her, said it was obvious from looking at her that she “could not possibly be anything but a pure-blooded Aryan,” and stamped a form asserting that she was “German blooded.”
When Hahn Beer gave birth to her daughter, she refused sedatives in order to stay alert and avoid making any accidental reference to her Jewish identity. After the war, she had her daughter baptized as a Christian to satisfy her husband and ensure he would accept his daughter. But he said the baptism had no effect on him because it was the child’s “Jewish blood” that counted, and they soon divorced. Later, Hahn Beer moved to England, where she married a fellow Jewish Austrian. They lived together for nearly thirty years. After he died, Hahn Beer moved to Israel.
What if the Holocaust and World War II had continued well beyond 1945? What if Edith Hahn Beer had remained a Christian to virtually all those who knew her, until she died naturally? How would people who knew nothing of her identity have identified her religion? In a world where being seen as a Jew was a death sentence, would being perceived, treated, and even buried as a Christian have made her a Christian? As long as her secret remained intact, she would have remained a Christian to everyone except herself.
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