We drove back to Dorothy’s house to meet her daughters that afternoon. There was a schedule set up, as Mama requested, so she could meet them one at a time and not be overwhelmed. While Dorothy said her girls were excited to meet us, I wondered if my cousins would be as open to me as they were to Mama. Just because Dorothy and Tony seemed accepting of my blackness didn’t mean their kids would be. Dorothy got her sister back, after all, but those daughters might not have a stake in their black cousin. With a lifelong barrage of white mistreatment behind me, I couldn’t muster the wide-open trust Mama was ready to give them. Instead, I sat up in my guard tower, ready to be pleasant but watchful for any weasel-waffling, to see whether we wanted to be related.
First came Toni-she, as they called Antoinette, to distinguish her from her father Tony. The eldest, she was a thirty-something with a mane of black curls who lived next door. Later, Judy, the vivacious youngest with spiked hair and her husband in tow, came through the door kissing and hugging both Mama and me. They surprised me, because our conversations were easy and open. As if Mama and I were the relatives they had been missing.
“This is the most beautiful moment,” Judy said. “You two have made us so happy.”
Darlene came last, with her two little blonde girls. She was quieter than her sisters and very Midwestern-nice. She gave us an invitation to come see a show at the country-and-western lounge she owned with her husband—an invitation for us to be seen out in public, as her guests. Mama’s eyes sparkled. She was all for a night on the town with the local cowboys. My little hunched-over mother, who called rock ’n’ roll noise, was excited to go to a honky-tonk. Maybe she wanted to relive the heydays she and Dorothy had revealed earlier.
But while the invitation was generously offered, it made me uncomfortable. I never listened to country music, something black people associate with the racist South and rednecks. Weren’t the southern country singers from the states that had never gotten over the Confederacy losing the Civil War? Weren’t they the ones with the Confederate flag on their shirts and porches to signify their love for those good old slavery and Jim Crow days? Indianapolis was the former headquarters of the Klan, and I worried about the leftover haters who I suspected were in plain sight around town. Probably neither Dorothy nor Darlene had thought of that, since race was never a part of their lives. But what would I do if Darlene’s bar was full of those flags and songs about the beauty of pure white girls? That kind of fear had forever kept my radio dial turned away from “country” everything and my feet safely marching away from such places.
However, after all that afternoon’s talk about kids, houses, schools, church, and jobs, I had to admit that none of my white cousins seemed to give a gnat’s eyelash about my race. After the last one left, Mama, Dorothy, and I sat in the living room. While they discussed dinner plans, I pretended to watch TV as I drew inside myself.
The way the whole family tried to make Mama and me comfortable rattled me. I still couldn’t believe that they were opening up their one-hundred-percent white world to me. It couldn’t be that simple, could it? Like our country hadn’t been through race riots and federal troops escorting little black kids into white schools. Like people hadn’t tried to deny me an education or burned a cross on my lawn or tried to consign me to a sort-of, invisible life. I held back, feeling the prejudice I’d carried on my back for thirty years. Careful to respond appropriately to the casual warmth offered, I wasn’t sure if I could let it all go and let them in.
Later in the week, Dorothy and Mama sat on the light blue and mauve sofa watching As the World Turns when they decided to make a surprise visit to their cousin Vivian. They’d been childhood playmates all those years ago, and Mama thought it would be great to see her again. Dorothy and Vivian kept up sometimes, but she hadn’t told her about Mama resurfacing or coming to visit Indy.
After dinner, in the twilight, we drove over to another part of greater Indianapolis to Vivian’s. The sisters chattered about the things they all did together as girls as Dorothy drove. They laughed, wondering excitedly if they’d get away with a fast one or if Vivian would recognize Mama with no prompting.
She lived in a white wood-frame house on a quiet working-class street. A small light was on when we pulled up. Mama and Dorothy arranged themselves side by side in front of the door for maximum impact, and I stood behind them. Dot rang the bell, and they elbowed each other in anticipation.
After ringing twice, Dorothy knocked. We waited on the front porch a little longer. Finally, a woman opened the door a crack and peeped out, her thin lips as hard set as plaster. In her cotton housedress, she studied Dorothy first, who said hello nonchalantly, part of the little ruse. The woman shifted her eyes to Mama, who looked back expectantly. Vivian did a quick double take at the sisters. Then she punched the door open and her eyes popped wide at Mama.
“Ella, where in the hell have you been?”
I watched as the tired-looking woman put a foot forward, her hip slung into the door to hold it open. Before Mama could answer, Dorothy stepped aside and gestured to me with a smile. “This is Ella’s daughter.”
I moved forward and took Vivian’s limp dishcloth hand. It was hard to tell if she wasn’t used to shaking hands, as some women weren’t, or if her response was something uninviting. I suspected the latter, since she didn’t say anything to me.
Vivian remained listless, said she couldn’t invite us in because her husband had gone to bed early and she didn’t want to wake him. It was late for her, too, and she was about to go to bed. Mama smiled weakly. Without ever offering her missing-person story, which Vivian obviously had no interest in, she was the first to say good-bye and head down the stairs. I heard the door close before we got to the bottom.
“No more surprises, Dot,” Mama said, holding up her finger in a warning.
Dorothy and Tony took us to a cafeteria across town for dinner later that week. As we waited our turn to be served, the all-white clientele lined up: men in open collars and hands in their slacks pockets, a man in overalls with his family, a teased-up blonde flashing her prom queen smile at a man speaking with a twang. The servers called me ma’am, the way people had in Louisiana. I got back in my guard tower, ready to defend my out-of-place self in this rural white world. I clenched my hand and released it over and over, waiting for that racial comment or gesture made just for me, the only black in sight.
We put crispy fried fish and steaming chicken potpies on our plastic trays and went through the crowd to an empty table with a checkered tablecloth in the middle of the dining room. We bought one of their huge strawberry shortcakes, with its suspect red goo holding the berries together over a sugared biscuit, like Mama made. After the hot food, we scooted up to the table with our four forks to dig into it together.
Our interracial family sat together, right out in the open, talking over Jimmy Carter, gas shortages, and when the summer corn would be ready. We sipped coffee and scraped red goo until it hit me that there was nothing awkward between us. I was having a good time, without the undercurrent that always ran through me around white people I didn’t know or trust. What we cared about at our table was our own fun and nobody else. Out in that restaurant crowded with customers, not one person looked at us, or cared who we were or what was going on at our table. Surprised as I was not to be treated as an outsider, I couldn’t explain how that could be true. But it was clear I needed to understand it.
When we got back to the house in Greenwood, as everyone was taking off jackets, I just said it straight out. “Can we sit down and talk? It’s about something I hope won’t spoil our reunion.”
“OK,” they agreed, automatically heading to their places at the kitchen table. Dorothy looked quizzically at Mama as she turned on the light and removed the plastic place mats. Mama shrugged her shoulders when she thought I couldn’t see her, signaling Dorothy that she didn’t know what I was going to say. Mama wasn’t going to like it, but if I didn’t speak up now, I’d go home without knowing if we fit as a family.
They sat waiting for me to speak while the round wall clock seemed to tick-tick-tick too doggone loud. With the taste of fear on my tongue, I broached what had, and maybe still would, separate us.
“Can we talk about race? None of us can afford to ignore white and black issues after what happened to this family.”
“OK,” Dorothy said. “Maybe it’s time we did.”
I intentionally didn’t look at Mama, whose disapproving eyes I’d already caught a glimpse of. We hadn’t discussed me dumping my life’s baggage in the middle of her redemption week, but Mama had such a different take on race than mine. She took it in stride and approached it in common sense terms, without the emotional outrage Daddy, David, and I did. Like how she said people were just people, and all that racist foolishness was ridiculous. Like how she never talked with us about pride in our mixed heritage. Like how she said the civil rights movement was black people’s business, even as she had a black family sitting right in front of her. Like how she’d let her own white blood be nullified by the black-only box my brothers and I occupied.
But race was my business. Ever since I was transformed by my Howard experience of black power, it always had been.
I sat on the edge of my swivel chair, so my feet touched the floor. “See, I’ve been discriminated against by white people all along. So, it’s important that we be open about race. In fact, I came out here with questions about you, relative to who I am.”
Mama cleared her throat. I kept looking at Dorothy, whose eyes were calm and kind.
“What kind of questions do you have?” she asked. She folded her hands, resting them on the table.
“Well, how do you feel about black people in general?” I asked.
Dorothy hardly knew any. Both she and Tony had worked alongside a few blacks, her as a nurses’ aide and him at the GM factory. They were decent people. But after work, they went to their black families and neighborhoods, and whites went to theirs. They didn’t socialize outside of work, but they all got along and got the work done.
The idea was foreign to me, them living their whole lives without any black relationships. They’d just stayed in their white world, physically and emotionally detached from the continual struggles black people, including me, had lived in. Could they ever understand what we had been through? Would they ever really see us for who we were?
“But you live in this state where the law used to forbid intermarriage,” I said. “Where my parents had to run from. How do you and the family feel about that kind of thinking?”
“Biggest damned fool law I ever heard of,” Tony said. He tapped his pipe on the table edge, struck a match, and puffed the tobacco in its bowl. They had never even known about that law. Probably because nobody they knew ever fraternized across races. Or because no black news ever appeared in the mainstream newspapers they read. But yes, Tony said, Indiana did have prejudiced people back then and yes, now too. Of course he’d heard about the Klan and some of what they were capable of. Tony looked me in the eye. “But that wasn’t ever part of our life. That’s not what we believe in.”
“So then, how do you feel about my mixed race?” I asked. “My real question is whether I am seen here the same way as Mama. Because I’m not white.”
Mama folded a napkin into smaller and smaller triangles, fussing to ensure all the edges aligned. She didn’t look up.
“Oh, Dolores,” Dorothy said, leaning toward me. She opened her hands. “Your race is not important. You are our niece, period. We love you every bit as much as your mother.”
“We don’t care about any of that,” Tony said. “What we do care about is family. We have always wanted to have everybody together, including the girls’ in-laws and their families, distant cousins, and now you.”
“Even though I consider myself black?”
Dorothy said she could see why I wanted to clear this up, and maybe they didn’t understand race the way I did, but she did not want race to make any difference among us. “We’d love you if you were polka dot,” she said.
That was the answer I hoped to hear, of course. But as sincere as they seemed, I could only hope they wouldn’t hurt me, even if unintentionally. Confusion wormed through me. Would my wholehearted embrace of this white family be selling out my race, or be complicit in taking my light-skin privilege to a higher level? This was all new ground. Being half white in this sense was something neither American society nor I understood in 1979.
“Well that is great,” I said, with a smile on my face and a softer tone. “But what about my father and Luther? They’re darker, not light like me and my brothers. Do you accept them too?” I didn’t ask but wondered if they were willing to be seen in public with obviously black men.
Mama abandoned the napkin that was beyond further folding and rubbed her temples with her fingertips.
“Yes, of course we accept them,” Dorothy said. “Because they are your loved ones and are part of the family too. That’s why you’re here. There’s nothing more important than your being part of the family, all of you.”
She told us the story about when she was twelve and Mother told her Ella was her half sister, because they had different mothers. She was devastated, thinking that separated them somehow.
“I cried all day, because I wanted Ella to be my whole sister, just like I want all of you to be my whole family. Now I know that halves and steps and blacks and whites don’t count in this family.” She came around to me, and I stood up to hug her. We had been strong enough to look into each other’s worlds and speak honestly. And now we had arrived at a meaningful understanding. I went off to bed relieved, with a genuine affection for them.
In our twin bedroom, Mama sat in the armchair unlacing her orthotic shoes and rolling down her knee-high stockings. As she rubbed her hammer toes, bent up at the joint, she looked up over the tops of her square glasses at me. “I didn’t like you bringing that race stuff up, Dolores. The way you were questioning them as if they’re not sincere. I was wondering if you have forgotten that racism goes both ways? Or if you saw that you were part of that.”
I asked her what she meant.
“Black people were mean to me because I’m white, too, you know. But we can’t lay the misdeeds of some at the feet of everybody else, and you know it. Why would you question the Boehles like that after they’ve opened their hearts and home to us?”
“Let me explain.”
She kept right on talking. “Remember the black conventioneers who refused to stay with us because I’m white?”
I did remember that hateful hallelujah woman in the pink feathered church hat that had a hissy fit about Mama.
“It still hurts me to remember her insulting me in my own home, simply because of my race. I don’t want even a whiff of that here. You’re not to press Dorothy and Tony any further about race. How could you do that in their own home? Here they are making a way out of no way and you question their integrity. The very i-dea.”
Mama tugged her nightgown over her head, wiggling her stiff shoulders to get it on. “Even though some black people mistreated me, I don’t go around suspecting black people who are kind to me.” Her voice quaked. “I expect you to be bigger than that. She invited you here.”
“I didn’t mean it like that, Mama. I’m sorry if I handled it wrong, but you don’t know how worried I’ve been about this. I didn’t want to set myself up and get hurt later.”
I felt lower than dirt. For all my degrees, I hadn’t known how to determine the humanity of my relatives in some better way. Being dressed down by Mama was like being seven years old again, facing the kitchen corner for talking back. “Nice girls are polite,” she’d told me so many times.
I was still awake long after Mama fell asleep. Each of her open-mouthed snores rattled loudly at the back of her nasal cavity, making sleep impossible. Worse, my twin-sized bed was not next to a wall I could lean against. It made me nervous I’d fall out in my sleep like I’d done at other people’s houses. So, I bundled all the bed covers around me in a nest on the floor. That’s where you got the best sleep, according to Daddy, who often slept like a baby in the middle of the living room floor after too much beer and baseball.
Laying on my back in the dark, I turned over what I knew about family love. In Buffalo, Grandma was the only family member who loved us without reservation. My little family of five had long accepted the fact that many other black relatives excluded us from their daily lives and celebrations. The close extended family experience these Boehles seemed to live was only somewhat replicated by our made-up, mixed-race Clique Club family. There our unacceptability was accepted. Because they, like us, were people with poor or no relations with their blood families based on their unthinkable black and white family makeup. The Boehle family’s open acceptance and bloodline loyalty existed on a different plane from the fragmented, conditional, catch-as-catch-can family relationships I knew.
How could I live my white people’s offer to love one another when even my nuclear family had such a long a history of running away instead of fostering kinship? Mama ran off with Daddy, leaving her family to think she was sold into white slavery or some such evil. Charles Nathan secretly joined the army and ran away to serve the morning after high school graduation; when he came back from Korea, he ran to a white wife on the other side of town. I ran off to college and far-flung cities for jobs without a thought of going home. And Daddy ran into his Four Roses bottle so he wouldn’t be present when he was.
There on that bedroom floor, I considered whether I even knew how to connect, let alone with my white family. And, to be honest, could I release my all-black identity and give my white half a real life? Was that what my roots search boiled down to?
Headlights from a passing car shone in the window and Mama snored on. I sat on that guest room floor and saw a familiar figure in the room. My boogeyman lurked on the opposite wall. The one I’d given my life over to so long ago. The one whose warning burned like a Klansman’s cross every time racism blocked my path. He’d taught me that whites could not be trusted. That I had to be ready for whatever grief they might gin up for black people, because they always did. He was not only my truth, but every African American’s protector and boogeyman. The one who kept us on alert and saved us from being surprised when whites hurt us.
We sat there together in my white people’s bedroom. I’d held that boogeyman’s hand ever since that white cab company wouldn’t come to take my four-year-old self, burned on the potbellied stove, to the hospital. I’d let him run my life ever since.
And now with a white family who believed race had no part in the love we could share, I had to decide whether to let them in. It meant putting my boogeyman out.
As I tried to tuck the tangled blanket under my cold feet, finally, it came clear. My identity and what life to live was my own choice, not society’s or the government’s or my boogeyman’s. I could choose to expand my identity to fully embrace my white heritage and love my white family or let my own prejudice keep me in an all-black box.
I looked over at Mama, asleep in her bed next to me, and saw the exemplar of knowing who she was while loving both races.
Our last night in town, Dorothy, Tony, Mama, and I went to Darlene and Wayne’s country-and-western nightclub, The Outside Inn. They met us at the front door and showed us to a reserved table with the best view, situated away from the stage where revved-up partiers were rocking to a live band.
Waitresses hustled drinks to a good crowd, some wearing cowboy boots and bandanas at the neck. We ordered beer all around, and Mama was laughing it up after a few sips. The all-white crowd danced steps I didn’t know to the band’s somebody-done-somebody-wrong songs. I felt like a certified shape-shifter being in such a place. If it wasn’t for the family invitation, I wouldn’t be caught dead in a country bar for fear of rednecks. But Mama and I were special guests in a club where people were simply enjoying themselves. My boogeyman and I looked the place over closely while Mama and Dorothy talked, but we didn’t find a single Confederate flag. Nobody called for “Dixie” to be played; there were no good ole boys looking for trouble. When Darlene came by to check on us, Mama and I complimented the successful business she had.
When a familiar slow tune started, I caught myself easing up. My white family brought us out for fun, so I clapped along as they did. A couple danced romantically around the perimeter of the dance floor, the young woman’s face resting on the broad chest of her partner. Mama gave me a soft smile. I was glad she couldn’t see inside me, the narrow-minded one who had stereotyped this place and these people without reason.
With the romancing couple in front of me and the loving family beside me, I climbed down out of my guard tower. These relatives had no problem with my blackness. They had done everything to show me love, and I’d be a fool not to accept them. When I smiled into Dorothy’s happy face, the tension in my muscles released. I did have room inside for my white heritage. I did have room for the family love offered. There would be plenty good room for all of us to mix and meld.
I smiled back at Mama, who had joined the crowd in singing that familiar song. Now that she had drunk her rare half glass of beer, she raised her arm in the air and shouted, “Yee-ha!”