18
Europe
Ten minutes into my carefully detailed presentation to a German colleague in my vacationing boss’s absence, he interrupted me. “May I ask you a personal question?” he said.
Confused by what seemed inappropriate, I looked up and said, “What is it?”
“Are you prepared to come to France and work for me?”
“To do what?” I asked.
He swirled his fingers in a circle over the charts I was showing him. They gave an explanation of how our company did its planning for the American market.
“This,” he said. He needed somebody in the company office on the Riviera who could do what I did but for the global market. He had just been appointed worldwide VP for the whole business in all countries and was building a new team. Would I join him?
I’d visited a few other countries for pleasure, but living abroad? He promised a raise, a visit to meet the team, and a look at schools and housing before giving my final answer.
Six weeks later, Jennifer and I moved to France, a few miles from the azure blue Mediterranean Sea, between its coastal cities of Cannes and Nice. I rented a mountainside villa on a tiny road with black olive trees and a riot of pink bougainvillea in the garden. In the first few days we enjoyed alfresco dinners and a view of pink-orange sunsets on its large veranda. All that beauty and sunshine began to lift my veil of depression, and this black girl began to dream again.
Jennifer started in the village public school as a French-as-a-second-language student. A former au pair came to live in again, and once the French authorities had Mama’s eighty-year-old fingerprints and the police affidavit showing no criminal record, she was approved to come to France with us. And I began as worldwide operations manager for a $2 billion business unit of my tech company.
Mama had never been to Europe, but once she got to work in our flower garden and became familiar, the neighbors and restaurateurs in our village would call, “Bonjour, Grandma!” She would stay for a month or three before going back and forth to Buffalo.
As Mama grew more adventurous, we went over to tour London Bridge and Buckingham Palace with Jennifer. And on another of her visits to the Cote d’Azur, Mama asked to go to Rome, especially to see the Vatican. She proved a real trooper at her age, riding overnight in a sleeping train car and throwing good luck coins over her shoulder into the Trevi Fountain. At St. Peter’s Basilica, she used her most hurried steps to keep up with the tour guide showing us the Vatican Museum jewels and priceless religious tapestries. Finally, she climbed to the Sistine Chapel to admire Christianity’s story as Michelangelo painted it on the ceiling.
Naturally, after Mama became more comfortable in France, Aunt Dorothy made her first trip to Europe to vacation together as we had done in the States. She packed Dinty Moore Beef Stew and cans of tuna, so she didn’t have to eat unfamiliar food in the gastronomic capital of the world.
I showed them the Riviera’s beaches by the sea and the highlights of old town Nice. We drove the twenty-five miles to Monte Carlo to see Princess Grace (Kelly) and Prince Albert’s castle. Later in the week we drove over the border into San Remo, Italy, for market day. We strolled by the tables and racks one wasn’t supposed to touch until they came to a cheese seller. In a ridiculous charade of sign language and a mixture of French, English, and Italian, we tried to find out what types were offered, the weight in kilograms versus pounds, and the price in lira, francs, and dollars. It took fifteen minutes of laughing to buy a wedge from the hefty lady with a forest growing under her arms. She moved the knife to a much wider slice than we asked for, probably to make the transaction worth her wasted time. Or to take advantage of American tourists, the worldwide sport.
We walked on to find a scenic place for lunch. Once seated, Mama and Aunt Dorothy went to the ladies’ room. When they didn’t come back for a long time, I went looking for them. They were still closed in their individual stalls, sitting in the dark, laughing.
“What are you two doing in here?” I asked. “I was getting worried.”
I punched the light button, which is usually on a timer in Europe to save electricity. Because they were elderly and slow, the lights had timed out before they finished.
“We can’t do anything in Europe without you, even go to the bathroom,” they howled.
Back at my house, Aunt Dorothy asked if we could go to Paris. The Riviera was nice, but she’d hate to come to France and not see Paris. So, I took nine-year-old Jennifer, my seventy-something aunt, and my eighty-something mother to the City of Lights, serving as tour guide. The supposed four-person hotel room was jammed with a double bed and two roll-out cots. With all of them opened out, there wasn’t an inch anywhere to walk to the bathroom. Jennifer crawled over closest to the window, then me, then Aunt Dorothy, then Mama, in order of who could climb over the most people to get to the toilet during the night.
On a Gray Line tour bus around the city, they kept their seats while oohing and ahhing through the window at the Louvre, the Opera House, and the Eiffel Tower. But when the bus stopped by Notre Dame Cathedral, they stood up to collect their things and get off, without any discussion. I followed them as they wobbled inside the sanctuary, humble missionaries come to experience their Catholicism in this most famous place. Other tourists admired the gothic flying buttresses and frightening gargoyles, but my family wanted to get inside to pray. Even though Mama had been excommunicated forty years before for divorcing and remarrying, her face was the picture of devotion.
In that dark medieval sanctuary with its immense stained glass rose window, the crowded mass was celebrated in French. I listened to the hunchback’s bells ringing outside in the tower and meditated on the pungent smell of the incense burning, picking out the few words I understood. Afterward, Mama exclaimed, “We knew when to stand, kneel, and sit. It’s the same mass as in English. Let’s do it again.”
“Oh yes, let’s do it again,” Aunt Dorothy said.
Jennifer, who was learning to speak French quickly in school, translated the sermon for them, pointing out words for God, communion, and prayer so they’d get more out of it the second time through. As we talked between the masses, I noticed that nobody was staring at our mixed group the way people did in America. The French routinely cared less about our race than I did, a phenomenon that had already begun to free me. For the several years we lived in France I was treated like and felt more like a wholly accepted person—more than being the black person perceived by judgmental white Americans ever had. It was this foundational sense of belonging that Jennifer absorbed during her formative years and carried through her later life in America.
Mama and Dorothy seemed transfixed in the sanctity of Notre Dame, where maybe all of us thought God was closer than in our small congregations back home. The four of us held hands during the sermon they now knew the gist of, ushering me into the family devotions they had grown up with. Experiencing their kind of Catholicism together was a naked intimacy for me that brought Mama’s roots sharply into focus.
After we moved back to the States, we had constant calls and letters with the Boehles, but the best times were our visits. We traveled to each other in Buffalo, Indianapolis, Florida, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. That constant feeling of belonging together grew into a new life of laughs, support, and unconditional expectation of more.
Mama (left) and Dorothy tell their story of loss and redemption.
Mama (left), Dorothy, Dolores, and cousin Judy in Florida.
During those years we talked about our race and cultural differences openly, then blended them into a communal understanding of who we were together. But since Mama had never talked about what being Midwestern meant, it wasn’t until twenty years in that I got an insight.
That was when Antoinette took Jennifer and me to the Indianapolis 500. The family wanted us to have the full race-day experience. It started with gifted tickets and breakfast at an in-law’s, served on a checkered flag tablecloth with Speedway logo napkins. We learned who set the pole for the race, how to watch pit crews blaze through tire changes and gas ups, and who was favored to win.
The stadium, a structure that seemed to rival Rome’s Colosseum in size, seated almost a quarter of a million people around its oval. We got there early enough to see the beehive of pits and crews just inside the track’s edge before the green starting flag swooshed down and the cars took off.
As the famous drivers and flashy cars roared by with a deafening cacophony that hurt my ears, I saw something equally amazing in the stands. Most of the fans swung their heads around with the pack of cars speeding by at over 220 mph, and kept quiet. There was only an occasional gasp or audible crowd reaction when someone crashed or pulled ahead. Fans peered at the board to see what lap the drivers were on and stayed in their seats rather than standing and blocking the view from behind them. The amazing orderliness and civil behavior of their Midwestern manners were the opposite of East Coast fans who screamed vulgar names at athletes or fought each other drunkenly in the stands. Those civilized racegoers reminded me of my even-tempered mother. Her own sensible behavior was all over that stadium.
As I interpret that Midwestern nice, at least in my family, it must have been part of the respect for people and patience for difficult situations that Mama always demonstrated. It must have influenced her to step out and marry a decent man who happened to be black. It must have been the part of Aunt Dorothy that allowed her to take Mama back without recrimination. It must have enabled Dorothy to see only her sister’s needs when she came to David’s funeral.
Our shining black prince died of a heart attack at fifty-three, and it took Mama to her knees. I found her crying at the assisted living home, so distraught she couldn’t talk. Behind closed doors, she collapsed into me as we cried together. David was the best of our community, a jive-talking inner city teacher who knew everyone in the ’hood and who helped create Buffalo’s Juneteenth Freedom Festival. My righteous brother had taken such good care of Mama. He made it abundantly clear that his white mother belonged to the black community and brought his friends to help care for her after she was widowed. That had kept her safe and woven into our old black neighborhood when she lived on her own, the last white person on the block. Now, she had to bury him.
Aunt Dorothy came immediately. She took up her post next to Mama, to mourn with her and comfort her, as Mama leaned into her like a lost child. Dorothy stayed for days and days, taking turns with me—listening, holding Mama’s silences sacred, and helping her cry.
Our reunited family was the lucky one. We held onto the healing bond others in our mixed-race Clique Club family would not enjoy. When Angela, Mama’s Clique Club sister-friend of fifty years died, Mama called me, just as I changed clothes after work. She sounded as torn up as a blown-out tire. “I’m furious,” she growled, something I’d never heard in her. “Angela insisted on taking her double life to the grave.”
Before Angela passed away, she made her three adult children promise to honor her dying wish. She was to be buried back in Smalltown under her maiden name in the plot with her white family. She told Sandra and her brothers not to come to the funeral and blow the cover off her secret black life.
“Whenever I think about how cruel she was,” Mama wrote in a note to me, “to abandon her children, I am so low down . . . disgusted . . . disappointed—however low, I’m it.”
How could Angela betray her kids after Sandra spent years taking her to the emergency room and a million specialists’ visits? How could she, after living in Sandra’s house for decades?
What I didn’t know, Mama said, was that Angela’s white family had worried about her bad health and wanted to look after her back in Smalltown. Angela told them she’d hire live-in help in Buffalo instead. That “help” was her daughter, Sandra. When Smalltown called, Sandra answered her own phone in her own house, posing as a paid Negro caretaker.
I kicked my shoe off so hard it landed in the back of the closet. Sandra was my lifetime friend. My Clique Club cousin. “Did you talk to Sandra? She must be so hurt.”
Sandra told Mama, “We had her in life so they can have her in death. I never met those people and don’t care to know them.” They held their own service for Angela at the parish she attended; Mama and a few friends joined the family.
But Sandra’s middle brother let it all hang out. He later told me, “We had her wrapped in a sheet of plastic and shipped her to Smalltown, like she wanted. And we didn’t even go to our own mother’s funeral,” he said.
I didn’t know which mixed marriage horror story was worse. Was it Mama’s, living in hiding from her family for thirty-six years while they thought she was dead? Or was it Angela’s, living a double life, lying to her whites and denying the black family she lived with, even in death? One thing I wasn’t about to say out loud was that both Mama and Angela deluded their families in order to have the men they loved. But clearly neither had understood what those unions would do to us mixed-race kids. We had been expected to brush off our parents’ unfathomable absurdities like no explanation was needed. I’d fallen right in line, like it made sense, never considering I must have had a white family for thirty-one years. Such was the suffering American society wrought in families that crossed segregated battle lines in the mid-1900s.
Mama and I talked about how all the Clique Club women had to give up their family relations after they married black men. Like Sallie, whose brothers shouted “Fangue!” and declared her dead after she married a black man, despite his elegance and good technical job at Sylvania. As Sicilian immigrants fighting the surge of hate against them trying to be white people in America, they said Sally had drug them back down to the bottom. For her treason, they never acknowledged or spoke to her again. An old neighbor called years later to let her know her mother died. When she tried to join her brothers at the casket to pray, they walked away. There was no seat for her at the family table during the funeral repast.
And what about Marie, whose family pretended her black husband, the band leader at the most successful jazz club in western New York, didn’t exist? Family invitations to weddings and parties that came addressed only to Marie and her daughter, Diane, all had to be declined. Marie would not go without Bill.
“None of your friends have the kind of peace you ended up with,” I told Mama. “None of the others got the love of both families. Angela’s way of dealing with this mess was dreadful. But maybe you can forgive her. Everyone in your family forgave you.”
“I’ll try,” she said limply.
What I can tell you is that we Jacksons and Boehles had twenty-six years together before Dorothy and Mama passed away in the early 2000s. Whether we sat in the yard talking about recipes or attended first Antoinette’s wedding and then David’s, or walked by the Seine in Paris looking for Dorothy’s hamburgers, we knew we belonged together. During that journey our understanding of family ties and values bloomed bigger and brighter than I could have hoped when I went to find the Boehles.