As I continued to dig into my father’s life, sometimes assuming the lofty role of interviewer, there was one thing I was discovering. The good stuff, the fascinating information, would invariably come tumbling out at the most unexpected times. Because I became aware of so many highly charged areas of Dad’s life once he was no longer alive, sometimes I could feel myself assuming the role of an impartial biographer, reviewing and writing about a person of historical interest whose time on earth never overlapped with mine. But something would always jolt me out of my removed interviewer persona, leaving me feeling vulnerable and amateurish, and on the verge of saying, “Hey, back up—this is my father you’re talking about!”
I hadn’t expected my interview with Jim Maben, one of Dad’s closest friends when they were flatmates studying at the University of Toronto in the early 1950s, to contain any truly shocking revelations. So much for expectations.
“I’m sorry, Danny, I really should have asked. Did you know your father had been married before?”
Given that this was one aspect of Dad’s life that he refused to discuss with me, I was shocked that he’d talked to Mr. Maben, or anyone in Canada, about it. Still, I covered up as best I could, offering my best nod of reassurance.
Up until that point Jim Maben’s tales of living with my father had been interesting, even entertaining, while reinforcing much of what I already knew about the magnetism of Dad’s personality. I could easily relate to Mr. Maben, along with the other college flatmates, seeing Dad as a guru figure. “He opened our minds to social issues and attitudes that had hardly occurred to us,” had been Mr. Maben’s recollection, after explaining that he and the other students were “sheltered white kids, so skinny and poor that the prostitutes would take pity on us and leave us sandwiches.”
Mr. Maben and his small-town friends, hungry for knowledge of the outside world, were mesmerized by this educated Black American, an atheist son of a Methodist minister, fresh out of the U.S. Army. Mr. Maben described a bunch of guys sitting around in a dark room while Dad “held forth with story after story. No one else spoke. We just sat and listened.”
Admittedly, Mr. Maben’s discovery that Dad could easily go from cult leader status to “one of the boys” caught me off guard a little. “Once, someone made the rare and unfortunate mistake of arguing a point with your father, only to find himself tied up in knots by his commonsense logic.” Finally, realizing he couldn’t defeat Dad in a debate, the flummoxed opponent challenged him to a wrestling match. “He figured that if he couldn’t overcome Dan intellectually, he would do it physically,” Mr. Maben remembered. “So they wrestled. And Dan won that one too.”
And then, perhaps sensing he’d softened me up, Mr. Maben would drop a real shocker on me, likening some of Dad’s academic pursuits to, say, Alfred Kinsey’s landmark study on human sexuality. Dad had become fast chums with a fellow tenant, a Black musician from the States who’d earned a reputation as a wanton womanizer. Mr. Maben had walked into this musician’s room one night without knocking and discovered the landlady of the house being orally gratified by the musician, with Dad standing over the two of them, studiously jotting notes down on a piece of paper, drolly commenting on how he was going to incorporate his latest research into his next sociological thesis, the theme of which was purportedly how long it took this particular woman to achieve orgasm.
Feeling at this point that perhaps I should conclude this interview lest any more undue surprises leave me stuttering, I shut off my tape recorder, said my goodbyes and began gathering up my “biographer tools.” But talking about Dad had triggered something in Mr. Maben, as though he’d time-travelled back to 1951 and didn’t want to return to the present day. Stroking his Santa Claus-like beard and tightly crossing his legs, he began gently rocking his small upper body, his eyes narrowing as though accessing some long-buried memory. And then, motioning for me to turn on my tape recorder, his voice cracking with emotion, he began to tell the story of a painful breakup he’d gone through while rooming with my father.
“I was constantly afraid that I was going to run into her, she lived just around the corner. I was going through misery, real misery. And your dad sat me down one time and told me, ‘I know what you’re going through because this happened to me.’”
Dad had then proceeded to reveal the story of his own disastrous first marriage and how it had crashed and burned, resulting in unspeakable heartbreak and disgrace. Dad’s startling revelation had a deep impact on Mr. Maben: “That was so meaningful, so helpful to me at the time. There was a guy that I really bowed down to and the same thing happened to him and he survived. And I’ve remembered that and loved him for it.”
As had happened so many times before when interviewing people about my father, I was struck by how memories well over half a century old seemed so fresh and raw. Mr. Maben had become so increasingly emotional, telling me about his breakup and Dad’s most generous response, that the story within the story—Dad’s first marriage—didn’t resonate with me till I left his Oakville apartment and began the long drive home. As the miles flew by, the hypnotic effect of the highway’s white lines blurring together became an unlikely video backdrop to the strains of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” as it rattled through my car radio. And for the rest of the drive old family images, intercut with all too candid conversations, tugged at me.
The year was 1968. I remember it being cold outside. Dad was away on a six-week tour of human rights conferences that took him to such faraway places as Iran. My mother, my siblings and I were having dinner at the Sharzers’, who were close friends of my parents. Mr. and Mrs. Sharzer were talking to Mom about the usual boring adult stuff, and I was kicking Larry’s foot under the table, just for something to do, when I heard Mom say,” … Dan’s first wife.”
I looked up at Mom from my dinner plate, convinced I’d heard her wrong. Then I looked over at Larry and Karen. Same shocked reaction. Did Mom really just refer to Dad’s “first wife”?
“Don’t give me that deer-in-the-headlights look, Danny. It was no big deal. The marriage barely lasted a year.”
Suddenly it felt like I wasn’t going to be able to hold down the food I’d just eaten. Could this be Mom’s idea of a joke? She’d had a bit to drink, so maybe her sense of humour had taken a left turn. In a not so subtle attempt to change the subject, Mrs. Sharzer asked me a question about songwriting. But Mom, knowing that she’d opened some kind of forbidden door, if only a crack, decided to tear it off its hinges.
“Your father was just a kid in the army. Happened all the time to kids in that situation.”
Mom’s speech was deliberate and slower than usual, a typical effect after two glasses of wine. She didn’t tend to drink as much when Dad was around. The stricken look in Larry’s eyes from across the table made me want to slap him. Didn’t he know better than to let his emotions show so openly? I mumbled something about having to get home to finish off some homework.
“Let me get your coats,” Mrs. Sharzer quickly offered, excusing herself from the table.
I found myself jumping several steps ahead in my mind, plotting how I was going to coax the rest of this story out of Mom. When she’s alone, once Larry and Karen are in bed, and before she’s totally sobered up. That will be my only chance. Once Dad gets home she won’t talk, and there’s no way I would ever risk asking Dad about this.
On the short drive home, Larry, Karen and I chose silence over our usual bickering and jockeying for Mom’s attention.
“Why are you guys so quiet? What’s gotten into the three of you?” Mom asked as we slipped wordlessly out of the car.
Alone in my bedroom, guitar in hand, I tried, unsuccessfully, to make sense of Mom’s latest family news bulletin. Since Dad was never particularly discreet about the transgressions of his friends and associates, I’d foolishly assumed that he was also forthright about his own life, past and present. Even his “secrets” he made a big deal of. “I’m not telling you my salary,” he’d boast, though it had never occurred to me to ask. “Or what your mother and I have saved. But we’re doing extremely well.”
How could Dad be so quick to reveal, with abundant enthusiasm, his childhood misadventures, his backroom battles with politicians, stories of our cousins’ teenaged pregnancies, my mother’s father’s serial adulteries and resulting nasty divorce, and yet never get around to mentioning that he’d been married before? What was next, Mom blathering at the next dinner party about my various half-brothers and half-sisters?
I cornered Mom with my questions later that night, as this was usually the time she seemed a little lonely and welcomed conversation. Dad had never been gone for this long before, and it seemed that with each day, Mom became a little sadder, a little more unstrung.
“Don’t ask me about this, Danny,” she replied wearily, “not now. As it is, I really don’t know that much about your father’s first marriage, it’s not something we waste time talking about.”
But I hammered away at her, knowing that if I didn’t press on, I’d be up all night, wondering, imagining and driving myself crazy. Finally growing weary under the relentless barrage of questions, Mom offered me a snapshot version of Dad’s first marriage. If the reasons for Dad’s marriage didn’t shock me—”He was young and lonely and scared of being shipped to Japan and killed”—her explanation for his divorce certainly did.
“Your father had his parents send her all the money he’d saved up—and he’d saved lots—from his years in the army, plus all he’d earned from his year of welding and shipbuilding before that, so he and his new wife could build a life together once he got out of the army. But she squandered it. Every last penny. And then demanded more. Would you like to know what she needed the extra money for?” Here it comes, my punishment for asking too many questions. “She was fooling around on him.” Mom was on a roll now. “She got syphilis or gonorrhea, and drugs that cured those diseases back then were very expensive.”
Forty-some years later, after interviewing family members and extracting piecemeal details from Dad’s assorted friends and colleagues, the story behind Dad’s first marriage was still spotty, leaving me to return, once more, to my most reliable and vibrant source of information: Dad’s letters from the 1940s. Dad’s announcement of his imminent engagement to Jo was filled with organizational details.
We should be able to become engaged now. If I don’t run into any difficulty, I should draw enough money to get the ring. All I need is two months and we can lay what plans that are necessary for anything in the future. This will enable me to go back to New York and talk to her Dad … She has been helping me to lay my plans to complete my education under the G.I. bill of rights. If she can finish her work in chemistry, take some graduate work, save money and plan, then she will be in a position to help me finish my studies in Sociology. The government will send me to school, pay for my books and give me $75.00 a month for subsistence if I’m married.
By early 1945, however, Dad was unable to contain his euphoria any longer and went on at length about his fiancée’s many attributes, before ending his letter on a note of foreboding:
I was counting on this payday in April to buy the ring… I had written to her father for his consent. I met him at her home in Brooklyn last January… She has been acclaimed by students and papers alike as one of the most beautiful girls on the campus. Her constant companionship, intelligence and love for me have kept me out of trouble many times… Whatever I do and wherever I go, she has given me the stimulus and the will to make it and come out on top … I did not want to tell you about these things until we announced our engagement … Circumstances and coming events make it necessary for my family to know the innermost secrets of my heart.
Two months later, Dad wrote to inform his parents that he was now a married man, making no mention as to why they weren’t invited to the ceremony. (Quite possibly, Dad, knowing that his parents eloped, may have wanted to repeat family history.) He requested that his parents send him all the money and bonds he’d saved up as a soldier, announcing that he was going to merge all his savings with Jo’s account in Brooklyn. Dad mentioned Jo in only two more letters, revealing as much in what he chose not to share as in the murky details he disclosed:
December, 1945
When you didn’t hear from me for such a long time, you surmised that something was wrong. It looks as if you were right. I was ankle deep in trouble at the time… “Jo” has had to go through some fairly rugged ordeals and I haven’t been able to be by her side and help like I should. Out of a condition like this it is only natural that other problems should arise. Conflict in thinking, in ideas and ideals had to be ironed out to our mutual satisfaction … There is a great deal more that I would like to tell you … [when] I put an appearance in Washington D.C. I will be able to talk to you, Father and son.
January, 1946
Don’t be disappointed if Jo and I don’t come to Washington to school… many factors enter in that would not make the adventure suitable to all concerned. We plan to rent a room and kitchenette in Brooklyn, N.Y. until we can do better. We have both agreed conclusively to live away from all our relatives.
Reading between the lines, I have to assume that Dad sensed that the end of his marriage was fast approaching (it may well have already been over at this point). This, coming right on the heels of his stunning army failures, must’ve been almost too much to bear.
True to form, Dad’s parents came to his rescue, taking him on a two-week driving trip through New England, gently boosting his morale and shoring up his confidence. Granddad had, among other degrees, a master’s in counselling, and his extraordinary ability to offer comfort and strength in the face of calamity was practised on his children to wonderful effect, as much as it had been on his congregations.
Dad never mentioned his first wife to his children for the same reason she was never again referred to in any of his letters. That way Jo, and by extension, his first marriage, had never really existed.
The closest Dad and I came to discussing his first marriage was immediately following his return home from Iran. Still smarting from Mom’s explanation, the last thing I wanted to do was talk to anyone about this ever again, especially to Dad. He waited till everyone else in the house was sound asleep before coming into my room.
“Son, you are never to ask your mother about my first marriage. That’s none of your business. That’s no one’s business. You’ve upset your mother a great deal with all your questions. At your age, after all your mother was going through, you should know better than that.”
He was gone before I had a chance to say anything, leaving me to feel like some peeping Tom caught sneaking glances into people’s private lives. Dad’s implication that my nosiness might land Mom back in the hospital produced the desired effect, leaving me so overwrought about upsetting her that I stopped thinking about Dad’s secret marriage. It had been my responsibility, with Dad away for so long, to keep the household humming along perfectly. Not so much to ask, really, of the eldest child. Especially given that the worst part of discovering Dad’s secret marriage had little to do with the marriage itself. The worst part was how, and why, it had been revealed. Mom’s little bombshell wasn’t about Dad at all. It was about Mom beginning to unravel again. While it would be stretching things to say I was happy Dad had finally returned home, I certainly was relieved. Dad was the glue Mom needed. He was the only person capable of keeping her various fractious selves from splintering into a million pieces. He could put her back together again. And he did. But I couldn’t help but think that, as usual, I had failed where Dad had succeeded. He had stepped up, as the man of the house, where I had badly stumbled. There was still a lot I needed to learn from Dad, much as I hated to admit it.
Fresh out of the army and a bad marriage, Dad’s overzealous social life picked up where he’d left it. Only now he had learned the art of balancing work and play. He finished his undergraduate degree at Howard University (on the American G.I. Bill) and graduated with high enough marks to earn a scholarship to study at the University of Oslo in Norway for a year in 1948.
Dad found Norway to be a refreshingly gentle and engaging country. There were no buses belching exhaust in his face as they rumbled by carrying only white soldiers. All restaurants and hotels welcomed him; Norwegian children would run up and touch his skin, exclaiming delightedly, “Brun Norska, Brun Norska” (brown Norwegian). He didn’t mind feeling like “the only Negro in Oslo,” as he put it, so long as he didn’t feel judged by the colour of his skin. After completing his courses in international government in Oslo, Dad returned to America, where he lived in Ann Arbor, immersing himself in graduate studies at the University of Michigan.
In a letter home Dad showed that while his interest in race relations remained as keen as ever, his perspective had become more analytical and measured. He realized that the racial divisions polarizing America needed to be addressed and eradicated by working within rather than outside of the system: “The Negro Under-grad students seem to isolate themselves from the inter-racial organizations on this campus. They follow a pattern of self-segregation that nauseates me. This pattern, exhibited by the so called Future Negro intellectuals, is surely detrimental to integration on the part of the two groups.”
Within a year, Dad, running low on savings, took a brief break from school, getting a government job in a Detroit social welfare agency. The applicants were predominantly Black, poor and unemployed. However much Dad wanted to assist the applicants most in need, he found that his hands were tied. Essentially, his role in the welfare agency was to clog up the system by throwing up as much bureaucratic red tape as was necessary to delay, interminably, any kind of government assistance. When an indigent family with sixteen kids was deemed eligible for welfare money, Dad’s supervisor, determined to forestall payment indefinitely (sixteen children represented a lot of government money), kept sending Dad back to visit the family. Each visit meant more forms—many unnecessary and redundant—for the household to fill out. Predictably, the illiterate parents, ground down by the weight of all the endless bureaucratic paperwork, and discouraged and humiliated, gave up their claim. Realizing that his job amounted to little more than window dressing, Dad’s frustration gave way to despondency. Dan II, intuiting his son’s despair once again, immediately drove to Detroit to see him.
“You are not blessed with the temperament to live in the U.S.,” his father warned. “Get out before this country destroys you.”
Taking his father’s advice, Dad mailed off applications to the University of Mexico and the University of Toronto, vowing to attend whichever university responded first. Within weeks the U of T sent back its notice of acceptance. And so, barely a month after his father recommended that he leave America, Dad moved to Toronto to begin his master’s degree at U of T.
Like many immigrants, my father saw Canada as a blank slate, a new world on which he could project all his ambitions and dreams of glory, without any of the baggage that defined his country of origin. Canada also meant that he could be within striking distance of home, and yet far enough away to be out of the ever-watchful eye of family. Dad’s first letter to his parents, in 1951, offers a telling distinction between American and Canadian discrimination: “There is one great difference between Toronto and an American city of comparable size and that is, that discrimination can be fought and the battle won in Toronto with greater facility. All of the things that I’m seeing and feeling now will enable me to write a better doctoral thesis and to give a more objective opinion of this city.”
In 1952, after receiving his master’s degree in sociology at the University of Toronto, Dad, running low on cash, returned to Washington, D.C., for a year. He lived with his parents and taught sociology at Morgan State College in Baltimore, a Black, liberal arts school. His salary—three thousand dollars for a whopping five courses—was half that of a typical professor for double the course load. But at least he was following his pledge to stay clear of manual labour.
While teaching at Morgan State, Dad went to visit a woman on campus whom he’d befriended in Norway, where she’d been studying on a similar scholarship program. Sitting beside this woman on the front steps of her co-op was one of her roommates—my mom.
“His gaze fell upon me” is how Mom always puts it, her voice dropping slightly over those five words. Then, as if catching herself before sounding too maudlin, she quickly adds, “Especially the bottle of rum I was sharing, which I’d just brought back from a holiday in Puerto Rico.”
Mom had moved to Washington, D.C., to work for Democratic senator Herbert Lehman. She was twenty-four, Dad, twenty-nine. In pictures and in old family movies from that period, they look impossibly beautiful, their striking appearance magnified all the more by their compelling physical contrasts. Dad’s trademark smile displayed a pure and absolute delight for life—like he was on to something great and vaguely wicked that the rest of us could only guess at. Mom was tiny and fiery, her whiter-than-white skin giving her an almost translucent glow. But beyond her incandescent allure loomed a not-so-distant ferocity. “Judge me at your peril,” her eyes always seemed to say.
My parents first dated in January 1953, and Mom, while enormously attracted to my father, was well aware of his reputation as a ladies’ man.
“At the beginning, our relationship wasn’t really defined,” Mom used to tell us. (We never tired of hearing this story.) “But when your father discovered I’d had a date with someone else, he became upset and started to take me a lot more seriously.” Mom’s definition of serious left little to the imagination. Announcing their engagement that March, they prepared for a June wedding.
Now came the tough part: Mom had to inform her family. Mom assumed her father, George Bender, the more reactionary of her parents, would completely disown her but that her mother, Ruby, divorced and single since 1948, would support her decision. Her father responded first, in a letter in April 1953:
My Dear Donna:
Well—we can always count on Donna to do something original! While your announcement came as a surprise—since you made no mention of the matter when I was down there—I can’t say I was wholly unprepared for it—as I have been aware of the possibility of such an interest developing, for some time. While I may as well admit that it isn’t exactly what I would have wished for you—I quit trying to run your life when you were 18—and I shan’t try to now … I would like to have an opportunity to talk to you about your marriage, and your future; and to meet, if possible, Dan. Also, I’d like to meet his father if that can be arranged… I think you know there won’t be any scenes … There is one point that I want to make clear—you are my daughter, and I shall welcome your husband as I have other kin by marriage; and my house will be open to you and your husband and future family at any time.
Within weeks, Dan II played the perfect host to Mom’s father, grandly escorting him around the Howard campus, where he was now associate dean of theology. Mom’s father, suitably impressed, wrote letters to his three other children defending Mom’s decision to marry Dad.
While relieved to have her father’s blessing, Mom believed that his support was influenced by the fact that she was the first of the Bender tribe to accept his new and significantly younger wife. But Mom’s brothers, Frank and Bob, owed their little sister no such favour. Frank’s letter, coming right on the heels of her father’s, warned her that she and Dad would be shunned by both the Black and white races. And what about their children? Should they be so reckless as to start a family, they would surely live to see their sons and daughters grow up to hate them. For no child could withstand the pressures of having two parents of two different races.
Not surprisingly, Mom’s relationship with her brothers went from remote to nonexistent once she married Dad. There were rumours, fuelled by Dad, that they wanted Mom locked up in an asylum, a scenario that Dad found curiously amusing, as if this kind of family backlash somehow gave Mom an almost heroic status. While Mom’s twin sister, Dottie, liked my dad, she too worried about the public reception of their marriage. Assuming that Mom and her husband could never live in the States, she said, “What are you going to do next? Move to Sweden?”
Mom’s mother, Ruby, was badly shaken by the news of her daughter’s upcoming marriage to a Black man. Since her divorce, Ruby had been inconsolably lonely and desperately looking to remarry—and she thought she’d finally found a likely candidate. Believing that nothing would kibosh the chance of her own marriage faster than the news of her daughter marrying a Negro, Ruby begged my mom to put off her wedding. Mom refused, and as predicted, Ruby’s relationship ended the moment she revealed the news to her male friend that her daughter was about to marry “outside of her race.”
The reaction to their marriage from Dad’s side of the family was significantly less dramatic. As far as Dad’s parents were concerned, marrying a white woman was tame in comparison to his drinking and carousing. That Mom’s family was Congregationalist, a religion fairly close to Methodism, combined with her graduating from Oberlin College—the first U.S. college to admit Blacks—were huge points in her favour. Further boosting Mom’s pedigree was her long employment history with the Cleveland Civil Rights Coalition, as well as her present volunteer work with the Congress of Racial Equality.
While it’s likely that Grandma May was surreptitiously thrilled at acquiring a Caucasian daughter-in-law—for the same culturally ingrained reasons her parents had been upset that she’d married a darker-skinned Negro—Mom regarded this kind of racial theorizing as offensive.
“Your dad’s parents would have been thrilled if my skin was purple,” she’d snap. “What mattered to them was that your dad was finally settling down.” Mom would wait for her stern correction to sink in before adding, most firmly, “Your father wasn’t marrying me because of, but in spite of, being white.”
My mom, not one for gushing outpourings of sentiment, was saying in her typically hardboiled style that she and Dad married for precisely one reason. Love.