3

Lonely Only

The following spring, I sat on our back deck with my genealogy chart and a cup of coffee, trying to imagine my ancestors’ lives. All of them had labored at the altar of white people’s profit and convenience but gained little. Generations of my enslaved ancestors had fathered generations of sharecroppers, who fathered sons who sweated in factories, and daughters who kept house (as Grandma did in a brothel) or minded white children instead of their own. According to family lore, those in my line were resilient people who loved their families, worshipped God, and made it with what little they had. It was their honesty and dignity than ran in my veins and anchored me.

Then my eyes fell further down the chart to my own parents. Why, this family search was all about Daddy’s story. Only Daddy’s story. In all that Roots searching, the one person on the whole chart who had as much to do with who I was as Daddy hadn’t been considered. Mama had been taken for granted, almost invisible. She was just my mother, like anybody’s mother. She cooked, cleaned, washed, and gardened, worked the night shift at the hospital, and helped us with whatever we needed. And she never made an issue of anybody’s race, least of all her own. As a result, I never recognized her to be either a black mother or a white mother.

Looking out over our back lawn, I considered how Mama lived in the middle of black culture but had never really been of it. She complained that our soul music was pure noise and we complained the cascading strings on her Montovani LPs were boring. She held us to Standard English, editing out the Black English we picked up outside. “You don’t ‘ax’ somebody, you ‘ask’ them,” and “There’s no such word as ain’t.” Even though David, Daddy, and I were Protestants in a black church, she also had us practice her white people’s Catholicism with no-meat Fridays and candy-free Lent.

Mama was white but didn’t live white. Because she was with us blacks, she was less white, a sort-of white person. She was not white like the racists Daddy railed against. But when an African American neighbor dubbed her “an honorary black woman,” in a nod to her embracing-blacks sort-of whiteness, Mama pshawed the title. “It’s supposed to be a compliment,” she told me, “but I’m white. I have always been white, and nothing different.”

But people didn’t see it like that back in the 1950s. Both black and white strangers treated Mama as less than white, their chance to strip off the white privilege she’d lost by marrying black. Because we had a sort-of white mother, the whole family suffered a double-whammy prejudice, both the standard issue prejudice against blacks and the prejudice against race mixing. Out there on the back deck, I cringed, crediting Mama for the first time for shielding us kids from the intolerance, disdain, and rejection we faced in every store, bus ride, or excursion. Of course, we hadn’t understood as children, but I’d recently read about a 1958 PEW Research study that found 96 percent of Americans were against race mixing. I was born ten years before that. My parents married twenty-five years before the study.

The mixed-race prejudice was in our neighborhood, at what Daddy called the black holy-roller church next door. During Sunday breakfast I strained to be heard over the pulsing beat of music urging the congregation to love God. Yet outside afterward, church members glared at our family. As a little girl I heard a woman in a lovely suit grunt like we’d done something awful by just walking by.

“Would you look at that?” she spit out to her companions.

“What’s wrong, Mama?” I asked.

“Nothing’s wrong,” she said, walking on as if it didn’t concern us.

The mixed-race prejudice was in our extended family. In those early years, Mama had no friends, so we only kept company occasionally with a few members of Daddy’s people. What I’d overheard at Grandma’s made me understand. She urged Mama to go with her to Uncle Butch and Edna’s for meals he made from the animals he hunted or slaughtered, from raccoon and possum to the chitlins from pigs—meals Grandma loved, and Mama hated. She said they stank and weren’t clean, even if Butch did put white potatoes on the lid to cut the odor.

“At least those dinners would be some company for you,” Grandma said. “Ain’t you lonely? Edna likes you, and Butch done got used to you.”

Mama said she knew the other relatives spent time together but didn’t invite us, save to an occasional birthday party with my second cousins or Christmas breakfast.

“The family’s not comfortable with you, Ella,” Grandma said. “I can’t change that. They ain’t never been around your kind.”

That mixed-race prejudice was out in public everywhere we went. People on the bus stared hard at us long enough to be sure the disgust in their eyes had time to pierce. One white saleswoman waited on everyone, even those behind us, before ringing up our purchase.

Once as we rode a ferry to Crystal Beach Amusement Park on the Canadian side of Buffalo’s harbor, a white mother encircled her white children and pushed them into a corner to keep them from brushing against us. All the while she glared at us, like we had cooties or something.

At a summer picnic in a county park, Charles Nathan, then ten years old and white looking, got stung by bees. He flailed his arms and rolled on the ground in a full-on meltdown while Mama tried to pull the stingers out with her fingernails. Another white woman on her way from the restrooms heard the ruckus and came over to help.

“You need mudpacks,” she told Mama, stooping down to a puddle of water, mixing dirt in it to make a thick paste. When Mama packed the mud around the stingers they slid out as easily as candles from a birthday cake. She thanked the woman, who was happy to help. But when Daddy came over from the shed and hugged Charles Nathan, the woman studied first one face, then another, her smile fading.

“Won’t you have some lunch?” Mama offered, motioning to the grilled food already on our table. The woman didn’t seem to understand what was going on with the people she saw. Until her hand flew up to cover her mouth. I remembered how she ran away, fast, as if she was the one stung by bees.

That mixed-race prejudice came right into our living room around 1956. Mama found out she could earn twenty-five whole dollars giving room and board to some Negroes coming to a national conference in Buffalo. She could pay some bills and save at least five dollars if she handled it well. The visitors needed to stay in private homes since the white hotels and restaurants wouldn’t accept them. Once listed, our flat on Hickory Street was snapped up because it sat on the direct bus line serving the conference site.

Mama scrubbed corners and washed the best sheets while Daddy shopped for good quality food for them, not the spoiled vegetables we often cut around, nor what passed for our protein, a chunk of fat back with a thin strip of lean meat we plucked hairs off before boiling it to death.

Mama and Daddy moved their clothes into the boys’ closet and dresser so the visitors could use their double bed and be next to the bathroom. My brothers would sleep at Grandma’s, and since I stayed home, I waited in the kitchen as instructed when the visitors arrived around dinnertime.

The skinny man in a suit shook hands with Daddy in the living room. Once sure he had the right place, the two men went outside for his wife and their suitcases. As that enormous woman in a pink feathered church hat lumbered into our living room, she told Daddy how she loved the Lord. He said we had a good Christian home.

“Hallelujah, hallelujah,” she said.

Daddy set down their brown cardboard suitcase in the living room and called for Mama to come out of the kitchen. The minute she did the church woman’s face creased with shock. She stepped back from Mama’s outreached hand as if she’d catch leprosy.

“Who is this?” she asked Daddy.

“This is my wife, Ella.”

“Your wife? This woman is your wife?” She put both fists on her hips. “Somebody shoulda tolt us ’bout this,” she barked, shaking her head back and forth hard enough to twist it off.

“Now hold on, Miss,” Daddy said, stepping in front of Mama. “Hold on. My wife’s a good lady and she worked hard to fix up nice for you here.”

“Oh no,” the woman told her husband. “We ain’t staying here with this white woman.”

She turned to him, pointed at the suitcase, and headed to the door. “Come on here,” she said. “We ain’t ruining our vacation lookin’ at this nigger and his white trash cracker all week.” The husband hurried out into the heat of the summer afternoon behind his wife, who was already across our cement patch and headed toward the alley.

“Some Christians you are,” Daddy called down our alleyway. “Equal opportunity prejudice at work,” he said to Mama. “Black people trying to out-hate white ones.” He got out the bottle of Four Roses he’d hidden from them and poured both himself and Mama a drink. I’d never seen Mama drink whiskey, but she reached for the pink plastic cup and took a swallow right away. I was sent down the block to bring Grandma and the boys back.

Grandma, who everybody was scared of, stormed down the block, my brothers trailing behind. Her thin house dress was hitched up six inches higher in the back than the front because of her considerable backside, her lips were poked out, and her plaited hair flopped in time to her hurried steps. We also knew to stay out of Grandma’s way when she got mad. Her temper was every bit as bad as Daddy’s, with no liquor needed to ignite it. When she burst through our door, I stood way back.

“You should’ve called me,” she told Daddy, her age-spotted hand jerking up over her head like a band leader. “I’d a slapped her silly.”

“I know you would, Mom.” Daddy shook his head and took another swallow of Four Roses. I waited in my corner for his outburst, but he did not holler. Instead his voice was firm and steady. “Nobody else we don’t know and can’t trust is coming in our house again. Never.”

The calm in his voice said this would be law.

Mama spread the table with the hot fried chicken and mashed potatoes prepared for the conventioneers. Before eating, Daddy lifted his glass.

“To hell with that heifer and her weasel husband.”

“Fuck ’em,” Grandma said, intently scooping up her potatoes.

The weight of all those abusive memories had me slumped over the picnic table on my back deck. Considering the whole of them now, without the hard-shell you-can’t-hurt-me façade I put on for current-day perpetrators, the quicksand of low self-esteem and of not belonging that had pulled at all my family could not be denied.

But there was more. Maybe the worst of the mixed-race prejudice was that cloudless afternoon when my Sunday-sharp Daddy put on his wide-brimmed hat and said he had a big surprise for us. We followed him out of the alley from our flat to the street, where he opened the passenger door to a green 1940-something secondhand sedan. With an amused bow to Mama, he helped her into our first car, while we three kids shrieked in excitement and jumped in back. I felt as grand as a TV star as we started off on what Mama called a leisurely ride. Daddy drove beyond downtown and up onto a bridge in a part of town I’d never been to. Smiling over his shoulder, he said we’d see a part of the bridge he built, some work he did on his job.

“Where, Daddy? What part did you make?” David asked.

He slowed way down at the center of the bridge, pointing out seams in the gray metal where he’d welded parts together with a blow torch. As he continued past it, we kept looking out the back window, imprinting the amazement of Daddy’s own bridge. A bridge he said wouldn’t fall, no matter how many cars and trucks were on it.

In a low voice, Daddy told Mama to look left, at the police car driving up alongside. Two white officers leaned over, eyeing both my parents menacingly. Daddy stopped at the red light at the foot of the bridge, just as their blue lights began flashing.

“Please, Charles, don’t say anything,” Mama pleaded, patting his leg. “Don’t argue with them.” Daddy shifted his weight and sat up straight. A policeman built like a wrestler in the arena shows we went to came to Daddy’s window.

“What do we have here?” he said. “A nigger and a white woman. With their three little mongrels in the back. Speeding, too.”

When he went to write down our license plate number, Mama warned Daddy again. “Put your hands down where he can see them and don’t talk back. Please.”

The officer shoved a ticket through the window at Daddy. “Go back where you came from, nigger, and don’t you dare be caught driving over here again, where you don’t belong. I’ll be watching for you, and this woman.”

I wanted so badly for Daddy to explain. To tell the policeman we were looking at his bridge. But he didn’t. The father who always lectured and shouted at us, that we were afraid would spank us, sat mute and stared into his lap. Both officers stood in the street considering him, like a dare. One spit on the ground by our car before they went back to the squad car, lights still flashing. Daddy started our engine and made a U-turn, heading back over the bridge at a crawl, while the police stood by their car and watched us with revulsion.

Once back over the bridge and out of earshot, Daddy exploded. “Sons-a-bitches,” he roared. “Motherfucking rotten sons-a-bitches.” Seeing his face turned as hard as those steel beams he’d made, we children cowered in the back seat and kept our mouths shut.

“OK, Charles,” Mama said. “We’ll pay the fine and you can go home in one piece. They might’ve beaten you up or taken you in if you gave them any reason. You did the right thing.”

I lay down on my deck bench, crying. The police had rendered my powerful father a timid subservient in front of us, because he had a white woman. They disrespected Mama for having a black man, skipping any normal courtesies given white women. Because she was only a sort-of white woman.

Oh, but I was grateful Mama had not belabored those prejudices in my impressionable years. She carried herself as a decent person and helped us see ourselves the same way, despite how others acted toward us. We never had the woe-is-me talk about mixed-race prejudice. Instead, she modeled how to let such “foolishness” roll off our backs as best we could.

The Jackson family in the 1950s. Front (left to right): David, Dolores, Charles Nathan. Back row: Charles and Ella.

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I came in from the deck to the kitchen and put some chicken on to boil, making a stock for soup. There had to be something to show for my morning when Luther came back from his tennis game. As I chopped carrots, onions, and celery for the broth, I thought of how Mama gave us something perhaps even more valuable, an environment where we could live free of those prejudices, accepted and loved just as we were.

When it was time for my oldest brother, Charles Nathan, to go to school, Mama enrolled him in the neighborhood Catholic school, St. Columbus, to give him the same education and religion she had as a girl. On the first day, she was amazed to see another white woman with a caramel-colored little girl. She had never met another white woman in a mixed marriage, and she wanted desperately to meet this one. Mama caught her eye and smiled intentionally. The woman smiled back brightly and moved across the room to say hello. Marie was a vivacious pixie with a mane of curly dark hair, who commented knowingly that their children had something in common. As the nun settled the children into class, Mama and Marie stepped outside and kept talking. Marie grew up in Buffalo and was part of a big community. And she lived so close, only ten minutes away.

“Come on over to my place for coffee some morning after the kids are in school,” Marie said.

“Love to,” Mama said. “Thank you so much.” It was the end of her drought, her first Buffalo invitation outside of Daddy’s family. An invitation from not just any woman, but a woman who, like herself, married a black man. It would finally be her chance to have a girlfriend of her own, someone who also lived the mixed-race life.

Marie said if it was OK, she had two other close friends to invite to coffee with them. Angela and Sally were other white women in mixed marriages with kids at St. Columbus too.

“Can’t wait to meet them,” Mama said.

At Marie’s, the three women greeted her warmly. Sally, dressed to the nines, was of Sicilian descent and olive complexioned, something like a light-skinned Negro. Angela, who seemed the heart of the group, had eyes that had seen it all. The coffee was ready, so they filled their cups and gathered around the kitchen table to introduce themselves.

“Where have you been hiding?” Marie asked, surprised Mama had lived just a few blocks away for six or seven years and they hadn’t met. “After all, we do stick out.”

Marie’s mother, an Italian immigrant who lived in the flat downstairs, came up with a plate of homemade pizelles and said a brief hello in Italish. Marie and Sally had grown up together in Buffalo’s Little Italy, and they’d known Angela a long time. They were as familiar as family and they included Mama like she was one of them. They had so much in common to talk about—black husbands, children of similar ages, favorite soap operas, their Catholic parish, and the neighborhood.

When it was time to go, Angela told Mama they had a larger circle of friends she should meet. Many of them were in show business, as were Marie, a cabaret singer, and both Marie’s and Angela’s husbands, who played in a jazz band together.

“Our friends stick together. We help each other and make our own fun in the privacy of our own homes,” Angela said. “There’s couples and kids, singles, blacks and whites; all kinds. We’re people like you, who don’t give a diddly squat about race.”

---

That band of maybe thirty people became more than our family. They were the affirming community who made our mixed-race lives normal. The kids were our constant playmates turned cousins, the women like Mama’s sisters, and the men hardworking friends. There were birthday parties and holidays, white first communion dresses, dance recitals, picnics, and all the belly laughs Mama needed when those women got to wisecracking on nuns and bosses. In time, the ladies formalized that cocoon, naming themselves the Clique Club, and setting out a full calendar of activities.

The thing I loved best about the Clique Club was the annual summer picnic at Chestnut Ridge Park, when we escaped the city cement to run free in fresh air. Out there were the just-me-and-Mama moments when we’d cuddle up on a bench and she’d teach me to appreciate nature. She pointed out how clouds floated by in an open sky and the wind sang through the pines that we never noticed in the city. I remember her closing her eyes in that park to listen to the birds and dreaming aloud of moving one day to a neighborhood where we could see beauty like that anytime.

In the park’s biggest shed, which was reserved well in advance, were ample tables under the roof, alongside grills, playground equipment, and enough open space for the whole group and many other friends to get loose.

In that secluded place, our bunch of kids in every skin shade could play together outside without the usual public judgement. We always had a hike led by the oldest boys; we ran off into the woods, climbing over fallen logs in ravines, shouting echoes in the forest, and getting filthy catching frogs and bugs to take home in jars.

Our black fathers could finally relax out there. Somebody would bring horseshoes and prepare the pits, where a bunch of men would strip to their undershirts and trash talk every pitch. Others played marathon poker, all of them drinking their favorites “tastes.”

The black radio station played in the background and the sepia swing revue dancers from Buffalo’s Club Moonglo, the western New York hotspot where some of the fathers played jazz, showed new dance moves, everybody snapping their fingers and hooting.

Out there the affection between black men and white women was open and natural, sweet and beautiful. That rarely seen thing was captured in a 1952 photo I still have. George Williams wore a broad-brimmed straw hat over his dark face. He sat wide legged on the back fender of his 1940s sedan hugging his alabaster Angela. She wore shorts and a halter top and had one arm around his shoulders, the other on his chest; his arm hugged her right hip. Our cloistered world out in the woods made this kind of love instinctive, even as it was a love America could not imagine for another fifteen years, when mixed-race marriage would become legal everywhere.

The thing Mama loved best about the Clique Club was when her friends got together monthly for Pokeno parties. I remembered a night when Mama hosted, back when I was about eleven. Several ladies piled through the door, including Sally, Marie, and Angela. By then, Angela was the one who called most often and had lots of play dates for her daughter Sandra and me while she and Mama visited.

“Hey, you baby cakes, we’re gonna have some fun tonight,” Sally said.

I’d planted myself at the top of the stairs out of sight, where I could hear everything. Part of the cousins’ pact was to report back from the parties what we were getting for Christmas and what the parents were fighting about.

Mama’s buttery pineapple upside-down cake and dainty flowered coffee cups sat next to a new bottle of Mogan David wine waiting on the dining room sideboard. They caught up a bit, laughing at their stories a while, then passed out the Pokeno boards and started calling cards. I half listened, reading Reader’s Digest on the steps while waiting for something interesting to happen.

“There’s more money in this pot than you can make on a busy corner Saturday night, capisce?” Sally said, winning the final pot in their game. The bowlful of coins clinked as they tumbled out on top of each other and she scooped them up.

Later, the dessert was served, and the juicy talk I waited for started. First was the show business talk. Count Basie was coming to the Black Musicians’ Club to jam before a big appearance in Buffalo. Betty James would be dancing in the new Moonglo floor show, which meant nothing to me at the time. Decades later, I realized that was where her son, Rick James, the Grammy-winning “Super Freak” funk master, got his chops.

Clique Club girlfriends at the Moonglo nightclub. Mama is third from left. One face obscured by request.

Marie said her parents were keeping Diane at their place most of the time, getting her to and from school. It helped, so she and Bill could do more shows; her singing soft jazz at white clubs on one side of town and him leading the band at the black Club Moonglo on the other. The problem was, while Diane was with her white grandparents they tried to make the girl believe she was Italian, not black. They were proud of the old country and said it hurt their feelings that Diane didn’t claim it.

“Diane asked me which side was better,” Marie said, “her Italian side or her black side. I told her no side was better, but in America, half black may as well be full black.”

“You got that right,” Sally said.

Diane had always been black just like the rest of us. And now she wasn’t? How could a black girl be an Italian girl? I felt sorry for Diane, glad I didn’t have to worry about taking sides. We didn’t have any other side in my house.

But the thing that really got me was when Angela said she was going out of state to Smalltown to visit her other family. It had been a couple of months since she was home.

What? What other family was she talking about, I wondered.

Sally offered to see about the kids while she was gone, but Angela said that wasn’t necessary, that the kids could take care of themselves. Her oldest was a teenager who would be in charge. She’d leave them sandwiches and cereal and be back Sunday night. George would be in and out because he was working hard on new trumpet riffs.

Angela made that scenario seem like it was normal, but I knew Mama would never leave us like that. Who would help Sandra fix her thick, hard-to-comb hair? And what about hot dinners?

Marie told Angela she’d never understood how Angela’s white family in Smalltown hadn’t known about her black Buffalo family all these years. How had she gone to all those birthday parties, showers, even holidays for almost twenty years and still kept them from knowing she had a black husband and three black kids? Either they were the dumbest damned people, or they had an idea about her double life and didn’t want to face it.

The room went quiet.

“I’ve told them so many lies for so many years,” Angela said. “That’s how come they don’t know.” For such an opinionated woman, this once Angela sounded as numb as a victim standing by the smoldering ruins of her house fire. “That tale I keep feeding them about me being a single career woman is such a spaghetti tangle I couldn’t undo it if my parents suddenly forgot to be racists. The lie is to protect George, you know. They’d kill him if they knew we were together, just like they said way back when they had our marriage annulled and ran him out of town.”

Run out of town? Like with threats and guns? And what did annul mean?

Sally asked Angela why in the world she kept going back to them then.

“I’ll never give them up. I’ve got to have my Buffalo family and my Smalltown family.” Angela went on about how much fun they had at the Smalltown family parties and holidays, how they laughed their heads off the whole time with their jokes.

“They told nigger jokes,” Sally told me years later, although Angela’s daughter doesn’t remember hearing anything about that.

In those days, black people told nigger jokes all the time. But white people weren’t supposed to. Back then in the 1950s, black people like Daddy and Grandma, neighbors, people in the supermarket or barbershop, David’s friends called each other nigger. My nigger! Nigger, please. See those niggers over there? How’s a nigger like you going to get a girl like that? He’s the HNIC (head nigger in charge). You niggers want to come over and play some records? You little niggers line up if you want to see Santa. Nigger, nigger, nigger was just like saying “Hey man.” But if a white person said it, we knew it was a slur. So why wouldn’t Angela tell her white relatives to stop? How could somebody who welcomed all kinds of black people in her house, and loved her three brown children as much as any mother did, put up with that?

Later that night I woke up when the house was quiet and dark, troubled. I went to my parents’ bedroom door and knocked until a light came on and Daddy opened the door.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“I want to talk,” I said.

He let me in and got back under the covers, patting the bed for me to sit down.

“Why does Angela keep her kids and husband a secret from her other family?” I asked.

Mama cleared her throat. Daddy held his palm up at me like a traffic cop.

“Listen, now,” he said. “This is grown-folks’ business.”

I went on anyway, because I’d tried but could not understand why she would pretend to anybody that my “cousin” Sandra wasn’t her daughter. She was her mother. And then deny her husband too?

“I want to know,” I said, “if you pretend we’re not your kids too? Trick people about me and David and Charles Nathan, like we don’t belong to you?”

“Dolores, you woke us up to ask a fool thing like that?” Daddy said. “You’re our kids and everybody knows it. What Angela does is her business, and I don’t want you to ask any more about it.”

It was only on that spring day, as my adult-self dumped vegetables and seasonings in with the boiled chicken in my stock pot that I saw how our Clique Club cocoon had bred its own mixed-race confusion. The club could not make it safe out in the real world, not even among our extended families, black or white. I didn’t understand it back then but being in a mixed community meant living in a world of secrets, lies, and rejections. Once the party hats and Pokeno boards were put away, the gashes left by our mothers’ sort-of whiteness and our black fathers’ defenses of their wives to their own black families festered. Those white women had subordinated their own cultures, acquiescing to the blackness of their husbands. I realized all the white women in the club had troubled relationships with their white families. Except Mama. Because her white family didn’t exist.

It seemed ridiculous then. We Jackson children internalized the erasure of her unspoken background from the beginning. We lived without ever asking or saying anything about her white family and had zero knowledge of or interaction with Mama’s family. I grabbed that genealogy chart off the back deck and saw she was the lonely, only white person on that filled-up legal-sized paper. Suddenly, her being alone, all by her white self in this black family was shocking.

“My God,” I cried. Her whole white family was missing. She didn’t have a single branch on that tree of her own. For the first time I realized she was my whole white family all by herself. Who Mama was had never once been questioned. What happened to her people, and why hadn’t I ever heard about or seen them? It didn’t make a scintilla of sense, my never once thinking she must have white relatives. I was an idiot.

A fuzzy memory came back to me from when I was a little girl. Our family was walking down Hickory Street going to Fred Perry’s ice cream shop. The boys led the way, talking about the flavors they might get, while I walked between Daddy and Mama.

“Look at old man Henry Lewis walking,” Daddy said, pointing at the way David walked. Mama laughed and nodded in agreement.

“Who’s Henry Lewis?” I asked.

“He was your mother’s father,” Daddy said. “But never mind that.” I think that’s what he said, but he sent me ahead to tell Grandma to come get a treat with us. While I ran the half block to knock on Grandma’s door, Mama’s father had melted away and was gone, like ice cream on my tongue. My Mama had come from some family.

Then who did that make us Jacksons? Black, white, sort-of white, sort-of black? We’d been in a racial petri dish all along, shape-shifting across membranes without acknowledging it. Charles Nathan wasn’t exactly white passing, though he didn’t volunteer his blackness often, while David decided to be blacker than Daddy. Mama was sort-of white and here I was, wobbling worse than ever, first black, then leaning too close to white corporate America, then anchored in slave ancestors, and now captive to a phantom white family.

Luther drove into the garage and came slowly up to the kitchen, clearly having overdone it again. He poured a tall glass of ice water, pulled off his tennis whites, and got in the shower. I hid my family chart under my place setting, hardly able to wait for him to come to the table. When he did, I spooned up the soup and spread the genealogy chart across his bowl.

“My mother’s family is missing,” I said, pointing to her box. “There are no more white people on here. No parents. No grandparents. See, no white family. Where is my white family?”

He looked at me expectantly.

“I have a whole white half, but Mama raised me to be all black. Of course, there is no acceptance in America to be equally white and black, but I want to know what it means to me, if anything. Because now I’m not sure what that means or who I am.”

“Oh my Lord,” he said. “Again?”

“How can anybody know who they are without understanding both their mother’s and father’s background? I need to know about all of the people in me, just like you know the hundreds of people in your North Carolina roots.”

His eyelashes fluttered in exasperation. “I’m too tired now to deal with this. But let me say, if your mother has a family and hasn’t told you about them, there’s a reason. If you want to know about them, you’re going to have to ask her. My question is whether this so-called ‘knowing who you are’ will be worth the trouble it’s going to start.”

His warning didn’t change my mind. I had a right to know about my family. Maybe they were all dead from some accident. Maybe they’d been against her marrying Daddy. That would be painful for Mama to tell me, but she and Daddy had been married thirty-six years. With that much time gone by, did it matter now?

If her dad’s name was Henry Lewis, that would make Mama a Lewis too. Merna Elizabeth Lewis. I checked but found no trace of them in Buffalo. I didn’t know where to look for her vanished people, any more than I could locate evaporating steam. Back then, in 1979, I was in pre-Internet, pre-Ancestry.com days, so I studied up on the best sources to find “lost” family and got some ideas of what facts would help. I needed a plan to get the information out of Mama for me to find out who I was.

I wasn’t going to pussyfoot about it either.