In her letters to my father, my mother discloses that his pals have been taking good care of her in his absence. One woman in particular—an ex-girlfriend of my dad’s named Sue Freeman—had been particularly friendly, inviting my mother to dinner, planning outings to the beach. Then my mother writes that she’s had an interesting conversation with Sue the night before—mostly about my father—but she wants to think about it more before saying anything else.
In fact Ernest van den Haag had roped Sue into telling my mother that her fiancé was a Negro. In 1961 a black man marrying a white woman was still shocking—the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t outlaw state miscegenation laws until Loving v. Virginia in 1967—and Ernest had convinced Sue that my mother had a right to know. Sue only realized later that he was trying to break up Anatole’s engagement. “I think Ernest was as in love with your father as I was,” she tells me. “But frankly, I didn’t want to lose him either.”
During her conversation with Sue, my mother brushed off the revelation as gossip, but she couldn’t quite put it out of her mind. Sue had mentioned that my father’s daughter from his previous marriage was quite dark; Ernest claimed to have seen her picture. (In fact, my half sister doesn’t look discernibly black.) My mother asked herself whether she was prepared to have a black baby, and the answer was no.
Before she met my father, my mother had dated a South American man who was very dark-skinned. This man came from a wealthy family and took her to the kinds of places that would meet with her brother and sister’s approval. One night they were riding home in a taxi after another elegant dinner when the driver, realizing that they were a couple, made up an excuse to pull over and asked them to leave his cab. “My date had incredibly good manners, but I think he was profoundly embarrassed,” my mother says. “I never went out with him again.” She began to worry that having a black child would feel like being back in that taxicab.
My mother wonders now whether having a supportive family behind her would have given her the courage to withstand the hostility and isolation that mixed-race couples could face. When she was growing up, her father, who worked in international banking, had an African business associate from Liberia who frequently visited their home with his French wife. Based on their warm reception of this couple, my mother guesses that her parents might not have objected to her marrying a black man, depending on his education level and the kind of work he did. But her parents were dead, and Brook and Barbara definitely weren’t in favor of her fiancé, for reasons that had nothing to do with race.
While my father was away, my mother was charged with the responsibility of planning their wedding, which they hoped to hold a few weeks after his return. Since they hadn’t discussed the arrangements, she tried to work out the particulars by mail. But when she suggested holding the ceremony at her sister and brother-in-law’s house in Westchester, my father vetoed it, saying that he was unwilling to get married surrounded by strangers in a hostile house. He was adamant that just as her family had been unwelcoming to him, he wasn’t prepared to welcome Brook and Barbara into their lives. “The more I surround my marrying you with ties, obligations, compromises, false politeness and artificial responses, the less I’m going to like it. You must remember that I’ve been an independent, undomesticated animal for 37 years.” (Actually, my father had just turned forty-one.)
But my mother wasn’t willing to get married by a justice of the peace in some anonymous city hall without any friends or family around. She was too old-fashioned for that, which was part of her attraction for my father. He used to say when I was growing up that he’d married my mother because she was the last woman left who really believed in marriage; she had enough belief for the both of them. Yet he was making it virtually impossible to plan a traditional ceremony.
The matter of the invitations was particularly awkward. My mother hadn’t met anyone in my father’s family. In a letter my mother points out: “It would be very strange for a mother to receive an invitation to her own son’s wedding to a girl she’s never met from that girl.” She suggests that perhaps she could arrange a meeting with his mother while he’s away. But my father nixes this idea too.
As far as your meeting my mother and sister, I might as well tell you that I really don’t want you to meet them at all. For my mother’s sake, I suppose I’ll have to give in on this, but I don’t want to. I really don’t see what they have to do with it. The only part of our lives we’ve ever shared is our history—and that’s one of things I want to climb out of in marrying you. Although I love my family pretty much as other people do, they’ve never been anything but an embarrassment to me. It’s as though I’m forced to love a completely incongruous person or persons just because we grew up together. They’re really very nice, my mother and sister, but they connote to me all the misery of my childhood, and I don’t see any reason to store those ghosts in our attic.
It was the middle of September 1961, and my father was due home in less than ten days. After a month and a half apart, it wasn’t as easy for my mother to feel the strong certainty of their love. Alone in the apartment, unable to sleep, muzzy-headed from the cycle of sleeping pills and beer she sometimes drank in trying to feel drowsy, she began to have doubts. She realized that she’d never asked for God’s sanction of their marriage and felt ashamed.
My mother decided to seek out the rector at Grace Church down the street. She’d gone to the services there once before and been impressed by his sermon. Seated in his office, she presented her problem: she’d recently learned that the man she was due to marry in a few weeks might be a Negro, although he was very light-skinned, and she was concerned about the possibility of having a dark baby. The rector smiled, laid a hand on her arm, and told her not to worry. It wasn’t possible for her to bear a child any darker in color than the darker one of the two of them. Recounting this later, my mother laughs and shakes her head. “I think that rector was a little out of his league.” But she left his office feeling greatly relieved.
Walking home she headed back down Tenth Street, one of the prettiest streets in the entire Village, with its charmingly crooked skyline of pastel-colored brownstones, tall brick apartment buildings, and squat wooden town houses. All the brightly painted doors sparkled in the sun, the glossy black window shutters lay open to the morning light, and the late-blooming flowers spilled from window boxes. How beautiful the world could be! How full of life and possibility!
Crossing Fifth Avenue, she reached 39 West Tenth Street...Anatole’s apartment...their apartment. She thought back to when she first started visiting him there. She’d round the last of the five flights to find him sitting on the top step waiting for her, and as she ran up those last few stairs, he would stand to catch her. Flying into his strong arms, she’d think to herself, “I’m home.”
She had written my father that when he got back, their home would be “very warm & very beautiful—just like everything else is going to be from now on.” More than ever she was convinced that getting married was the solution. The fog of anxiety and sadness that had been hanging over her would lift. She would finally be able to get some sleep.
Two weeks after my father returned, my parents were married in a friend’s apartment on another beautiful street in Greenwich Village. It was a small wedding, just forty people. My mother’s friend made deviled eggs, and my mother splurged on a $32 wedding cake from a local bakery. My father’s mother and his sister Lorraine attended; Shirley and Frank were out in California, for which my father must have been privately grateful.
My mother’s siblings, however, missed the ceremony. Brook’s boat had suddenly sprung a leak, and they had to stop off at the country club to prevent it from sinking. Among the pictures that eventually ended up in our family album, there are none of the traditional portraits that mark the union of two families. Instead my parents’ relatives appear in the background of candid shots, as if their photos had to be taken when they weren’t looking. If the gathering has a slightly grim and perfunctory air—as i
f the people there have been herded together against their will—there is also a resoluteness to their appearances, for they all know the unlikelihood of this particular group’s ever being assembled again. My parents were setting off for a new world, united by their great hope in the future and their desire not to look back.
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Two years after they were married, my parents moved from New York to southeastern Connecticut, where they bought and sold a series of antique farmhouses over the next twenty-five years. The house where my parents were living when I was born had been a tavern during the American Revolution—the curved wooden bar still stood in the front room—and George Washington was supposed to have stopped there for a drink. All of these houses had a central “keeping room” with an oversize stone fireplace that provided heat, light, and fire for cooking. Over the years my mother acquired the hearth and kitchen accoutrements that a colonial family would have used: a big black cast-iron pot, a row of wrought iron spoons and forks, bellows, a butter churn, and a long wooden paddle to remove the bread from the beehive oven. When I was little, I would pretend to cook in the fireplace and imagine that we were Pilgrims trying to make our way in a foreign land.
Indeed my parents had come to Connecticut as hopeful settlers, looking to secure for their children a contemporary version of the American dream. When my mother was pregnant with my brother, they bought a ten-room house with a pool and a tennis court in a rural neighborhood, miles from any friends or family. The exceptions were Robert Pack, a Barnard professor and Wallace Stevens scholar who played in my father’s weekly volleyball game, and his wife, Patty. My parents’ social life consisted of having dinner with this couple every Wednesday night at alternate houses.
But then in July 1964, Todd was born, providing reason for their self-imposed isolation. By this point my mother had asked my father about his racial background. He’d mostly evaded the question, saying something vague about “island influences.” But my mother had gotten to know Lorraine—the three of them traveled together in Europe for three months the previous summer—so she didn’t have reason to feel that my father was hiding his family. If either of my parents had any lingering apprehension about how a baby would come out, my brother’s appearance must have put them at ease. Towheaded, blue-eyed, and pale-skinned, he looked like a pre-Raphaelite angel. Two years later, I arrived, with more of my father’s darker coloring, but not so much to make anyone wonder about my ancestry.
My father may not have thought of the move to Connecticut as a conscious decision to pass as white, but it did settle the question of which side of the color line his children would be raised on. While the fact that he was mixed race was common knowledge in New York, the rumors didn’t follow him outside the city. In Greenwich Village he had never seemed bothered, or even aware, that people were gossiping about his background, but once my brother and I were born, the stakes were higher. Part of Connecticut’s appeal might have been the unlikelihood that we’d accidentally discover the truth. It was also, in my parents’ opinion, a wonderful place to raise a family.
My father had been greatly looking forward to having children—fueled perhaps by regrets over his neglect of his first daughter—but he was unprepared for the depth of his feelings for my brother and me. He told a friend: “You think you’ve been in love in your life, and then you have children, and you realize that you’ve never really been in love before.” Like any parent he wanted us to be happy. And it seemed, from what he said to my mother and various friends over the years, that he thought living in Connecticut and living as white were our best shot. With rigorous schools that combined high expectations and mollycoddling to coax forward our best selves, wide-open spaces in which to exercise our growing bodies and exhaust our youthful spirits, and neighbors whose friendships could one day prove beneficial, our exurban life offered all the advantages that my dad’s upbringing had lacked. Yet my father still indulged a predilection for viewing our childhood as marked by narrow escapes.
When we were young, he would entertain vainglorious fantasies of rescuing us. The scenarios he concocted were usually far-fetched: he’d yank us at the last minute from the path of a Bengal tiger or snatch us out of the surf, away from an incoming tidal wave. He seemed to view the role of father as a kind of homespun Superman.
He reveled in the physicality of the job. My brother was a colicky baby who required constant motion to keep him from fussing. My dad happily rocked him for hours on end, even playing tennis in the afternoons with his racket in one hand and Todd’s carriage in the other. He delighted in parading me through the house after my bath, seated naked on his large palm, perfectly balanced, like a waiter with a tray.
The games he played with us involved small, exhilarating risks. We would toboggan down a rarely used country lane that led into a busy intersection. Near the end of the ride, my father would leap out of the sleigh and stop it before it ventured too close to traffic. Or we would run down a blanket chest that he’d placed like a diving board at the foot of my parents’ bed and fling ourselves torpedolike at our father, who sat against a barricade of pillows piled against the far wall. Every time he would catch us in midair.
By saving us, could he begin to save himself? By appearing heroic in our eyes, could he feel more like a hero? I suspect so. Just as he’d managed to divert the outward signs of his black ancestry with the infusion of my mother’s Nordic blood, he could deflect the inward turmoil he’d felt growing up through providing us with a childhood of “ideal experiences.”
What my father didn’t seem to realize was that the world was changing. Being black or mixed race when my brother and I were growing up wouldn’t have marked us with social inferiority the way that it did in the 1930s. But out in Connecticut, snug in our antique farmhouse, the clocks might as well have been turned back a generation or two. The evolution in civil rights that was rocking the country didn’t upset life along our country lane. Given that blacks made up less than 5 percent of the population in Fairfield County in the 1960s (and most of them lived in Bridgeport), it was almost possible to put African Americans out of one’s mind entirely if it weren’t for the nightly news.
In 1963, the year that my parents left the city, image after image from the civil rights movement scrolled across the television screen every evening: water hoses and attack dogs turned on black teenagers in Birmingham, Alabama; Martin Luther King Jr. leading hundreds of thousands of men and women in the March on Washington; four little girls killed by a bomb in a church basement. The following summer the focus moved closer to home, with riots sweeping through Harlem and Bed-Stuy following the fatal shooting of a black boy by a white police officer. If my father tuned in to these events, he didn’t talk about them, and despite the fact that some of it was taking place on the streets where he grew up and his mother still lived, he never gave any indication of relating them to his own life.
Martin Luther King, lunch counter sit-ins, protests and marches—my father didn’t like any of it. He was opposed to turning race into a movement that collapsed affiliation and identity, requiring adherence to a group platform rather than to one’s “essential spirit.” While many African Americans would argue that the civil rights movement was a bid for recognition of the Negro’s humanity—after all, one of the most popular picket signs was “I am a man”—my dad only saw the ways that such collective action could become an avenue of flight, distorting a person’s sense of self.
In the late sixties, Michael Vincent Miller began to notice an edge in my father’s attitude about race that hadn’t been there before. My dad started regularly using terms like “spade” and “jigaboo” and making derogatory comments about black people. Another friend from that era and his future colleague at the Book Review, the novelist Charles Simmons, later hypothesized that this stance was ironical on my father’s part—almost a way to test the listener’s own racial attitudes. But in hindsight Mike understands it more as a reaction against the rise of black nationalism.
Black pride ce
rtainly complicated my father’s already fraught relationship to his racial identity. On the one hand, it made his ambivalence about his background seem misplaced and embarrassing, leaving him the lonely defender of a debunked position. On the other hand, the movement narrowed the acceptable ways that my father could be black, if he had been encouraged by the advancement of civil rights to head in that direction. Anything short of growing an Afro and donning a dashiki might not have measured up.
Mike suggests that my father found the African American identity that emerged during the Black Power movement sentimental and false. After all, for his entire life, he’d been against their basic principles—that blacks were and should be different and separate from whites. “He wasn’t racist as much as he was opposed to a certain liberal embracing of an idea of blackness that struck him as inauthentic,” Mike observes.
Indeed my dad was particularly put off by the way white liberals had taken up race as their cause. Kit Blackwood, who dated my father in the late fifties, remembers telling him how bad she felt about the state of affairs for black people in New York and that she wanted to find a way to help them. Growing up in Texas, she’d been mostly raised by her family’s black housekeeper, which had sensitized her to racial injustice. Since she and my dad had talked openly about his background—he’d even introduced her to Lorraine—Kit expected him to encourage her impulse, but in fact he’d come down hard on her. “He said, in essence, that white people don’t understand and they should stay out of it,” she recalls.
Luckily for my father, people didn’t tend to move to Cheever country to proselytize for progressive causes. They came to wrap themselves in the safety and comfort of bourgeois trappings. Of course this good life required money.
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