The clerk in the polyester dress at Vital Records in the Marion County, Indiana, courthouse handed some forms over the counter. “Fill these out, one for each person you’re looking for,” she said without looking up.
I only had five days to find Mama’s family before getting back to New Jersey. Earlier that morning, I’d read through the yellowing pages of annual city directories at the main library, starting with the year Mama left, 1943. My grandparents, Henry and Mildred Lewis, were listed right there, the first place I looked. A tinge of some connection to these relatives was short lived, as Mildred’s name disappeared four years later, and Henry’s in six, in 1949. There was no sister Dorothy listed at all.
Now, I cooled my heels at the Vital Records Office until the clerk said there was no documentation on Mildred. There were only spotty records kept back then, she explained. Mildred must have died of consumption in 1947, like Mama predicted.
But the clerk did have Henry Lewis’s death certificate. My grandfather was dead? But Mama expected him to be alive, and so I had too. In fact, Mama had told me to look him over good and tell her exactly how he was doing. And though I hadn’t considered it, he had died of a heart attack in 1949, thirty years before I got to Indy.
I leaned against a wall. So, I wouldn’t be able to look for familiar features in my grandfather’s face, or search his eyes for the goodness in his soul? I’d never find out what he’d say about Mama’s marriage? Or whether he’d receive me as his own?
The end of the search for my grandparents was over before lunchtime on the first day. Maybe this was a fool’s errand, to think I could find the other half of my family, those whose blood ran in my veins. I never knew them. Now I never would.
The smell of somebody’s menthol cigarette wafted over me. Delicious Kool Filters, like I used to smoke. I inhaled that lovely secondhand smoke for a moment. It was the only comfort available in that moment, so I paused to float there because I didn’t know what to do next.
I went to Mama’s old house at 635 Woodlawn Avenue in the morning. Maybe Dorothy was still there. If not, somebody else might remember the family. Using directions from the hotel desk clerk, the old quiet neighborhood of modest single-family houses was easy to find. I searched Woodlawn Avenue to find number 635, with the front porch where Mama had entertained callers.
There was no such address. Where her house should have been was only broken sidewalks fronting an empty lot and a few unkempt city trees. The neighbor’s house across the street with the four daughters all named Mary was gone like the rest. I’d expected to talk with them, to see what they knew. Up at the end of the street it dead-ended in a cement barrier, and a highway ran nearby. Good old urban planning.
St. Patrick’s, Mama’s Catholic parish, was just a few blocks away. The genealogy class emphasized using the marriage, funeral, and baptism records kept by houses of worship. But the main door, which Mama must have gone through for mass every Sunday, was locked. So was the back. At the adjacent stone rectory, no priest in a cassock or housekeeper in an apron answered the bell either. I called back later and left a message requesting a search for Lewis family records.
The only person left to look for was Dorothy. Figuring she must have married I went down to the basement of the Marion County records office to search for her license. At a small wooden table, I read through handwritten ledgers with every bride’s name from 1943 to 1953. No Dorothy.
Maybe she never did get married. She would have been an old maid by then, at thirty-four. Or maybe she married outside Marion County. How the devil was I supposed to figure out all the marriage records in Indiana, or the whole United States? There was no telling where she could be.
She might still be in town under her maiden name. The next day, using the entire set of phone books borrowed from the front desk, I called every permutation of her name I could think of. Men, women, and children answered, young sounding, country sounding, annoyed sounding people. Some were wrong numbers, disconnected numbers, or answering machines. None of them were my aunt.
On my last night I sat in the chair by my hotel window with the lights turned off, looking out at Indianapolis. Was she out there somewhere? I scanned the horizon dully, out of ideas. My family search had gone nowhere—no grandparents, no aunt, no house, no neighbors, no priest. No family. And I had to get back to New Jersey in the morning. A sob burst out of me. My lungs heaved to refill. In defeat, I cried, much too loudly for a hotel room.
As was my habit, I went to the airport way ahead of time. While waiting at the gate, all the steps of my week’s search ran through my mind. That priest had never called back. What was his deal anyway, when I’d mentioned how important the church records were to me? I decided to call him one more time to see if anything had turned up. Not that he’d answer. In the phone booth across from the gate, I juggled my briefcase and purse on my lap, got a piece of paper and a pen at the ready, then dialed.
The good father answered. He’d found my aunt’s marriage recorded at St. Patrick’s in 1944. Apparently, the marriage license clerk hadn’t recorded everybody’s nuptials downtown. Dorothy Lewis had married a soldier stationed in California during WWII.
“Do you have his name?”
“Name of Anthony Boehle.”
“Can you spell that, please?”
“B-o-e-h-l-e. BO-LEE, I think you’d say. That’s all we’ve got. No address.”
“Thank you so much. This is great.”
“You’re welcome. Good luck finding her. Now, don’t forget to send us a donation.”
I hung up and pulled the directory that hung from a chain beneath the phone up onto the metal counter. Paging under the Bs, I found Anthony Boehle, the only Boehle in the book.
I put change in the phone and dialed immediately. The noise in the busy airport was so loud I cupped my hand over the receiver. The phone rang four times.
A lady answered.
“Is this Mrs. Anthony Bo-lee?”
“Yes,” she answered. Her heavy voice was put-upon, the kind people use for solicitations.
“Well, you don’t know me, but I think we might be related. Would you mind answering some questions to see if you are the person I’m looking for?” I asked.
“Uh, OK, I’ll answer a few.”
“You grew up at 635 Woodlawn Avenue in Indianapolis?”
“Yes.” Her voice became guarded.
“Your family attended St. Patrick’s Catholic Church?”
“Yes, yes we did.”
“Your father was named Henry Lewis?”
“Yes.”
I stood up in the booth, excited now, but trying not to rush, not to scare her off.
“He was an electrician?”
“Yes, he was,” she said slowly.
“He worked on the first lighting system at the Indianapolis 500 Speedway?”
“Yes.”
I paused, to get the next part right.
“You had a sister who disappeared in the early 1940s?”
A chair scraped the floor on her end. Silence, then, “Yes.”
“Her name was Merna Elizabeth.”
“Uh, no. That wasn’t my sister’s name.”
We were both quiet. How to clarify what made no sense? She had to be the one, but what else could I say? I stared across the flow of passengers in the concourse. My fellow travelers were milling about, ready to begin boarding. There wasn’t much time.
I started over with Mrs. Boehle, double-checking the same questions about her father’s name, occupation, address.
She replied yes to all of them over again. “That’s right. Yes, yes.”
“Your name is Dorothy Lewis Boehle, right?”
“It is.” Then I was back to my mother’s name.
“Your sister was called Ella?” I asked her. That was Mama’s nickname, the one I thought Daddy had given her.
“Yes, oh yes, that was my sister. Ella Lewis,” she said.
“Her given name was Merna Elizabeth, right?”
“I don’t know that name. She was always Ella to us. Now tell me. Who are you?” Her anxiety colored every word.
“I am Ella’s daughter.”
“Ella’s daughter? You are Ella’s daughter?”
“Yes, I am your sister’s daughter. I’ve been in Indianapolis for a week looking for you, uh, my family.” I was excited but held my tongue, waiting.
“Oh, my Lord! Ella’s daughter? How can that be? We thought she must be dead.”
“I realize this comes as a shock after so many years, but yes, I can assure you I am Ella Lewis’s daughter, the youngest of her three children.”
“She was married and had three children?”
“Yes, she was.”
“Where has she been all this time?”
“Buffalo. We were raised in Buffalo, New York.”
“Buffalo? We never knew she was in Buffalo. After she left Indy, we never heard from her again.”
“Yes, I know. But I’m reaching out to you now, hoping to meet you if you are willing, after all these years. Are you?”
“Where are you now? Still in Indy?”
“Yes, at the airport, about to catch a flight home.” As I looked over at the gate again, unbelievably, the agent posted a two-hour delay on the departure board. Relief rushed through me. I wouldn’t have to go home only imagining who my white people were. We’d have time to talk, if they didn’t reject my race right off. I just wanted to see what their background was with my own eyes. Because of the way my parents ran to get married, and the fear of trouble if her family knew, I had no expectations beyond just saying hello. “It takes off in two hours,” was all I got out before Dorothy cut in.
“Stay there. I’m coming out to you now. I want to meet you too.”
“You do? Good, I’ll wait for you. I’m heavyset, with glasses.”
She hung up without telling me how she looked. Neither of us had thought to say what airline, what flight, or what gate we’d meet at. Stuck to the phone booth seat, I closed my eyes to picture the sweet-faced eighteen-year-old girl in the only photo of Dorothy Mama had. She was slender, standing in their yard in a full-length dress for some occasion.
The first man in line to use the phone knocked on the glass and jerked his head to the side. I moved to a wall across from my gate, to search the faces of older white women. For the next forty-five minutes, none of the swarm of people who flowed by or waited for friends and families were for me. Then I a spotted a gray-haired, stout white woman dressed in pastel pants like Mama would wear. She stumbled toward me from way down the concourse, moving intently toward my crowded gate. With her eyes glued on mine, she staggered up to me.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” She studied my features like a mother with her newborn. “I see my sister in your face,” she said.
That old prickling cold shocked my back, like in all my most anxious moments. When my back froze, I lost the ability to respond in critical situations. And here I couldn’t speak either. She kept peering at me, confident in her identification. Nobody had ever said I looked like Mama. But she saw it. It was her all right. Had to be.
She didn’t share any of Mama’s features, and all resemblance to the photo when she was slim and fresh-faced was gone. She was heavy, while Mama was thin. But they were half sisters, something I had forgotten when imagining her looks. The one thing she did share with Mama and me was height, at around five foot one.
“Yes, I’m Dolores Johnson,” I finally managed. “Ella Lewis’s daughter.” I extended my hand and put a pleasant expression on my face as we shook formally, the way I did business colleagues. “Good to meet you.”
She gestured to her husband, Tony, a short, no-nonsense looking man with gray hair. He stood back from her, watching me. Tony removed the pipe from his mouth and shook my hand.
“Hello,” he said. I’d have some explaining to do to satisfy a man with sharp eyes like his.
Everything in that crowded, noisy airport disappeared except for this unassuming, working-class white aunt and uncle. So, this was who my white family was.
Dorothy talked fast. “You gave me the shock of my life. I left the meal half cooked and rushed straight out here. I had to meet you, but now that we’re here, I hardly know what to say.”
“That’s two of us,” I said. We got a table in the coffee shop where we could talk.
We stirred our coffee, each staring into the steaming dark wells of our confusion in a pregnant silence. I’d been so intent on the search to just find these people I hadn’t given an iota of thought to what to say if I found them.
Dorothy looked up first. “You must know we all thought Ella died in the ’40s. Your showing up is absolutely unbelievable. Why, to think she got married and had a family, and didn’t let us know. What I don’t understand is why would my sister have run away from her family without a word all these years?”
I kept her gaze and just laid it out. “She married a Negro. Somebody you didn’t know. Back then, 1943, was a time when race mixing wasn’t allowed in Indiana.”
I barreled on to get the story out before they said anything. “She thought the family wouldn’t accept it and would suffer for her decision.” They stared at me with incomprehension.
“Like your dad wouldn’t get work, the family might be shunned, even that your marriage prospects would be hurt.”
Tony grunted, watching me closely. Did he believe me? Or maybe he was considering whether he’d have married Dorothy if he’d known her sister was married to a black man.
“See,” I said, “she didn’t want to ruin your lives. She didn’t want to leave you either, but it was dangerous for my dad to be with a white woman in Indiana and illegal for them to intermarry.”
“Illegal?”
Dorothy was apparently as ignorant of the laws when it came to “Negro business” as Mama had been. After what happened in my life, I found it incomprehensible that she was that removed from what we black people had gone through.
“So, as painful as it was,” I said, “my mother thought it best for all of you if you never knew what she did or where she went.”
Dorothy and Tony went back to stirring their coffee again. I braced for them to get up and walk out, scandalized or disgusted with what my mother had done. I half expected them to say something ugly and racist like David had predicted, or to reject me personally. I was ready. Plenty of white folks had already toughened me up.
I’d only wanted to see them. Find out if they existed. Know what type of people they were. Mission accomplished. I studied both their downturned faces, trying to read their reaction.
After what seemed like forever, Dorothy said, “She was probably right. Mother especially. She would turn in her grave.”
Tony kept his head bowed.
I opened my wallet to the family photo I carried. They held it up close to see the five of us together, taken on the day Charles Nathan graduated high school in his black gown and I graduated eighth grade in my white crinoline dress. I pointed out Mama, Daddy, my brothers, and myself, giving our ages.
“Well, I’ll be.” Dorothy leaned into her husband. “That’s my sister. That is Ella.” She looked into Tony’s eyes, and he nodded. “Look how beautiful she is here with her family.” Her eyes flashed and she scooted closer to me. “Where is my sister now?”
I put on as sincere a face as I could before saying Mama had passed away. My back tingled as the bald-faced lie slipped through my lips. Here I was trying to relate to people I’d gone to all this trouble to meet and was ruining my chances with Mama’s deception. But what else could I do? A waitress bumped the back of my chair as she hoisted a tray of drinks, breaking into my dithering conscience. My loyalty was to my mother, and she’d made me promise. I rationalized that I didn’t even know this lady.
“Dead?” Dorothy cried. “Ella’s dead? How did she die?”
I hadn’t thought ahead about any explanations. I searched for more lies to make this trusting soul believe. My tingles turned to ice.
“Well, she had a sudden heart attack,” I mumbled, “and died on the spot.”
“When, when did my sister die?”
“Two years ago. She’s buried in Buffalo,” I said, wondering if it sounded true.
“To think we missed all those years of being together,” she said. “Only to find out too late she’s already gone.” Her shoulders slumped. She spoke so softly I could hardly hear her amid all the conversation at tables around us. “What I would have given to see her again.”
Was she saying she was OK with Mama marrying a black man? That she loved Mama even now? That had to be her meaning, if she wanted to see Mama again. My mind was blown; I couldn’t put an answer together.
She said the last communication from Ella was a postcard from New York the week after she left to visit a friend in Massachusetts. When they didn’t hear from her, they got worried.
“Dad scraped together the money and went to New York to search in the last place she was ever heard from. The police opened a missing person’s case and they searched ever’ where, in Indianapolis and New York. But they couldn’t find any trace of her, and her body was never found. The police declared her a victim of foul play.”
“How awful for all of you,” I said, thinking how Mama would cry to know they suffered so trying to find her.
“It surely was. Dad never got over it. She was his favorite, you know.”
I’d expected to defend myself against a racist, but instead here I was teary eyed over these people’s pain, my own relative’s pain. Everybody had suffered, in both Indiana and Buffalo. I’d been so shortsighted about stirring this pot I hadn’t imagined how it could burn those involved. Dorothy was as stunned now as Mama had been when I said I wanted to search for her family. So now I was responsible for Dorothy’s feelings too, even as I told her one lie after another. Why hadn’t I thought this through?
Dorothy brought out a photo of her four daughters, born in the same time as my brothers and me. All of them were in Indianapolis except one who lived in Florida with her family. Dorothy confirmed that her dad died in 1949 and her mother in 1947 from consumption.
We talked about how both the sisters had been nurses’ aides, just as I had, how Daddy was a welder and Tony had worked at a GM factory. How the sisters had lived similar blue-collar, middle-class lives and raised families in the same years without ever knowing it.
As I readied to board the plane, I asked if they wanted to exchange contact information. We did, and agreed to talk again, although neither of us suggested a specific plan. We shook hands good-bye. It wasn’t jubilant and it wasn’t hostile. We were daunted, two shocked parties, newly related but not knowing what to do about it.
When Luther picked me up at Newark Airport, he’d only heard the blow-by-blow each night on the phone, not what happened that final day. He hugged me and said, “I’m so sorry it didn’t work out after all the hopes and work you put into it.”
I pushed back a bit from him and laughed.
“What?”
“It did work out. Today, I met my aunt at the Indianapolis airport.” The day’s events tumbled out of me on the drive home, Luther whistling and grunting with every reveal.
We sat together on our brown Naugahyde couch in the den that evening, talking through my highs and lows in Indy. We drank white wine late into that night until I ran out of steam.
Luther asked, “So now, tell me, does all this help you know better who you are?”
The triumph was I got to see Mama’s family. But what he asked was bigger: did that clear up the questions about my own identity? How did finding out my white half had lots of people hanging on my tree change my being black? I realized that was as murky as before.
“Honestly, I don’t know what this means.”
“What now?” Luther asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just been a few hours. Maybe I’ll get back in touch with them someday.”
“But how can you, when you’ve said your mother is dead?”
“Huh?”
“You think they’ll trust you when they find out she’s not? Those lies cannot stand, and you know it.” Luther got into bed, telling me to straighten that out with Mama. “Com’ on now, gimme that wing, and let’s get some sleep” he said, turning onto his side.
I climbed in with him, wondering if I’d found and then lost Mama’s family in a single day by telling that lie. He just might be right.
The next morning, I called Mama to report, with both Daddy and Luther on their respective extensions.
“What happened?” she said with a hint of ready tears. “Did you find them?”
She took the news of Mildred’s death with a soft, “Oh, no,” then finally said, “None of us thought she would live long back then. Her consumption was bad.” All four of us fell quiet while she digested this.
“What about Dad? Did you see him?” Her voice was so anxious.
“No, no. I didn’t. I’m so sorry to tell you he died in 1949, thirty years ago.”
“Dad’s dead? Been dead all those years? Are you sure?” She acted like she’d seen him yesterday and here I was calling to say her father dropped dead last night. She burst out crying.
I read the death certificate in front of me, which listed a heart attack as the cause.
She wanted to know if he’d been sick a long time, and if he suffered. I wished I could tell her more.
“I’m an orphan now,” Mama said, her voice like glass shattering.
Children could be orphaned, but hearing a senior citizen say that was puzzling. Apparently, Mama had buried her loving attachment to the younger father she left behind, and now when death suddenly stole him from her, she responded like a child.
Daddy tried to comfort her from his bedroom extension, but then went downstairs and stayed beside her in the kitchen. The whole rest of the call, I could hear him in the background asking her, “What’s she saying now, Ella?” Mama would stop talking to me to tell details to him, and then his reactions back to me.
“What about Dorothy?” Mama asked.
“I found her, Mama. I met her.”
“Charles, oh, Charles.” She was offline again, telling him, “She met her,” repeating herself, crying.
Once she quieted, I described having coffee with Dorothy and her husband, Tony, for about an hour, and how they were nice to me. She wanted to know everything.
I explained we were all in shock, sitting at one of those plastic airport tables, trying to understand who each other was. It had been cautious; a polite feeling out of a stranger you had to reveal a life-changing secret to. With each explanation about Dorothy’s daughters and her parents’ deaths, Mama sifted through the details as if panning for gold.
“Now,” Mama asked, “what did you tell Dorothy about me?”
“They know you married a black man. And why you didn’t get in touch. They seemed to have understood it some.”
“What did she say?”
I said once it sunk in, what her staying in Indy with Daddy would have done to the family, that Dorothy said Mama was probably right. And how Dorothy was sad and disappointed, but not mad. Not mad at all.
“Dorothy wanted to know where you are now,” I said.
“Did you say what we agreed on?”
“Yes, I said you were dead, like you told me to. And they believed me.”
“So, I don’t have to face her?”
“No, you don’t. Dorothy thinks you’re dead.” Then I took my chance and suggested we had to decide what to do next.
“What do you mean, next? You found them, like you said you wanted to. That’s IT.”
Luther came in the kitchen, sweeping his index finger across his throat.
“I felt bad saying you were dead, telling lies to someone who regretted missing all those years you were alive.”
Mama said there wasn’t going to be any next step. She was angry, a feeling she so rarely expressed, I didn’t reply. She was my mother, after all.
“Look, Dolores, finding Dorothy was a blessing,” she whispered. “Something I’ll always be grateful to you for. But we agreed you’d say I was dead. I expect you to stick to your word.”
“OK, Mama, OK.” I hung up, knowing that was the end of it.