Chapter Twelve


Blackness

After John and I returned home from our St. Louis trip, I wrote up a chronicle of our research for my diary, emailed a copy of Aunt Sarah's picture to everyone in the family, and returned to the rest of my life. I was in the middle of preparing for a concert with my jazz group while at the same time writing a textbook on singing. Although I was still curious to find out about my grandfather's resignation from the Labor Department, I was just too busy to pursue my research any further.

I wasn't the only busy one in the family. My youngest brother, Timothy, was negotiating a billion-dollar deal for his New York law firm. My middle brother, Stephen, was organizing a new sports program for Chicago's public elementary schools. And my brother David, a professor at Harvard Law School, was becoming involved in politics.

While I was channel surfing one night, a familiar sight caught my eye. Displayed on the screen behind an attractive young anchorwoman, my brother David's house was clearly visible. “One of the most watched political candidates in the country sneaked into the Hub for a second time on Tuesday. . . . The senator was in town for one thing and one thing only,” the Fox News reporter gushed, “campaign cash.” As the reporter continued to describe Barack Obama's fund-raising hopes for the evening, the candidate is shown walking up the sidewalk to my brother's house. David stands near the door to usher Obama inside, firmly closing the door on the camera's prying eye.1

Long before Barack Obama became a household name, the Wilkins family had established a friendship with the charismatic senator. For one thing, Obama was a Chicago resident, whose Hyde Park home was located less than a mile from where we had grown up. Obama sent his children to the same private school my brothers and I had attended as kids. And like my father, two of my brothers, and my Uncle John, Barack Obama attended Harvard Law School. When my brother David became a professor there, the candidate's future wife, Michelle, was one of David's favorite students.

If Obama were attacked, the Wilkins family took it personally. In the summer of 2007, the harsh punishment meted out to six black students convicted of fighting with white students in Jena, Louisiana, sparked national outrage. When Obama did not clear his schedule to attend a march supporting the Jena Six, black civil rights icon Jesse Jackson criticized the senator for “acting like he's white.” Though Jackson, who had run a losing presidential campaign in 1988, later claimed he did not remember making the remark, the incident received a great deal of media attention.2

Jesse Jackson is a political fixture in Chicago, and my brothers and I all voted for him in 1988. But his comments disparaging Obama did not play well with the Wilkins family.

“The man is outrageous,” my mother fumed. “Who made him God? He's just trying to drag Barack down in the mud.”

David had his own take on Jackson's remarks. “When Jesse Jackson ran, there was no chance at all for a black man to become President. But things are different now. And Barack is different. He's going to make it—just wait and see.”

For me, the attack on Obama's “black authenticity” resonated strongly at a personal level. For as long as I could remember I have had to prove my black bona fides to skeptics on both sides of the color line. When I was in high school, some of the other black students accused me of “talking like a white girl.” After this incident, I carefully developed two separate vocabularies, one for dealing with white teachers and schoolmates and another that (hopefully) would enable me to be “down with the brothers.” Although I loved my high school, I never told black friends from the neighborhood that I went to a private school for fear of being called an “Oreo,” that is, someone who is black on the outside but white on the inside. Despite these evasive maneuvers, I was frequently criticized by other blacks for being too “bougie,” that is, too at ease with white folks and white culture. When I first arrived at college, many of my soul brothers and sisters did not return my greetings for the first few weeks until they figured out that despite my light skin, I was indeed, one of them.

At the same time, many of the whites I was meeting also did not realize that I was black. While driving me home from a music gig late one night, the older Italian saxophone player who had hired me to play began ranting about the “jungle bunnies” moving into his neighborhood. When I pointed out to him that I was, in fact, a “jungle bunny” myself, he turned beet red. Although he spent the rest of the drive back to my house that night apologizing profusely, an unwritten boundary between us had been crossed. The man never hired me to work with him again.

By the time I was growing up in the 1960s, many of the most overt forms of legal discrimination against African Americans were becoming a thing of the past. It was good to be “black and proud,” and it was difficult to imagine why anyone would want to pretend to be white when they weren't. But in J. Ernest's time, anyone with an African American background was guaranteed a lifetime of receiving treatment as a second-class citizen. Black people were routinely barred from many schools, neighborhoods, and professions. In some parts of the country they were denied the right to vote or even to use the same public toilet as a white person. But if one were sufficiently light-skinned, one could avoid the most blatant forms of racial discrimination by pretending to be white. In the black community, this behavior is known as “passing.”

Years ago my mother told me that when her aunt Mary Sweeney died in Cincinnati, a number of the “whitest black folks you ever saw” came to the funeral from across the river in Kentucky. Apparently, these people were Sweeneys too, but from “another branch of the family.” During the ceremony they kept themselves apart from the other mourners; after the funeral the mysterious relatives crossed back over the Ohio River and into their other lives. Mom assumed these other Sweeneys were “passing” and had stopped by just long enough to pay Aunt Mary their respects. She figured they were related to Aunt Mary somehow, but she felt it best not to ask too many questions. Quite a few African American families have a family member somewhere who is passing for white. It's something that even as a young child you learn not to talk about.

Back in the days when black people were routinely turned down for most jobs, many folks “passed” if they could get away with it so they could get a better job or move into a nicer neighborhood. The problem was that in order to “pass” as white, you had to cut all ties to your life as a black person. Once installed in a new job at a white company or in a new house in a segregated neighborhood, people who passed had to live an inauthentic life, always afraid of being unmasked. Once their true identity was discovered, the folks who were passing would lose any advantages they had gained through this painful masquerade. The decision to “pass” could not be made lightly and, once taken, was difficult to undo.

J. Ernest's eldest son, J. Ernest Jr., was a light-skinned man with hazel eyes. Looking at him, you would never assume that he was black. A brilliant physicist, my Uncle Ernest married Gloria Stewart, a fair-skinned beauty from Chicago's black elite. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when many white suburbs were still off-limits to black people, Uncle Ernest lived in a string of then all-white neighborhoods, such as White Plains, New York; La Jolla, California; and Burr Oaks, Illinois.

While never denying his black identity, J. Ernest Jr. didn't exactly shout it from the rooftops either. Visits by Aunt Marjory or any of the darker members of the family were quietly discouraged. Living in those all-white areas, my uncle didn't want to raise any eyebrows or have to answer any unwelcome questions. My mother recalls with a glint in her eye that J. Ernest Jr. “had an apoplectic fit” when a group of his black fraternity brothers gathered on the lawn of his suburban California home to offer him a housewarming serenade. At the same time, Mom was quick to point out that, because Uncle Ernest did not broadcast his black identity, his children received a free education at a series of excellent suburban schools in nice neighborhoods where blacks would not have been welcomed.3

The saddest story I heard about J. Ernest Jr.'s racial ambivalence came from James Montgomery, a fellow Kappa fraternity brother and prominent Chicago attorney. Montgomery is actively involved in the History Keepers, a group that seeks to preserve the stories of African American pioneers. Montgomery had been trying to get Uncle Ernest to participate in the project, to tell his story of what it was like to be one of the first blacks to achieve prominence in physics. But Uncle Ernest refused. He said he wasn't comfortable defining himself as an African American.⁴

Montgomery remembers that when Ernest was teaching at Clark University, a historically black college, many of his students did not believe he was a black man. Only when Ernest told them that he was a Kappa did his students accept him as African American. Montgomery felt Ernest might have been afraid that perhaps, even in the History Keepers, he would not be accepted as black.⁵

Yet, for all that he chose to live in white areas and downplay his African American heritage, Uncle Ernest chose his three wives and his closest friends from the circle of elite African Americans he had known as a child in Chicago. Several years ago, when I asked him about his grandmother Susie Douthit, Uncle Ernest told me he remembered going to visit her in Farmington as a child. When I asked him what Susie looked like, Ernest responded, “Oh, she was a brown-skinned woman.” Uncle Ernest then told me that he imagines he would be considered “African American, Negro, whatever you want to call it,” too. But Ernest was quick to point out that race is an artificial concept anyway, and we both agreed that maybe someday one's race would no longer carry the importance that it does today.⁶

John Bird Wilkins, my great-grandfather, was a fair-skinned man with wavy hair. As far as I could tell from my research, he always lived in black neighborhoods and was referred to in the press as a “race man,” meaning a man who was concerned not just with his own success but with bettering the conditions for the race as a whole. Although he was probably the son of a white man, John Bird lived and died firmly in the bosom of the black community.

My grandfather J. Ernest was also light-skinned. Many newspaper articles written about him made a point of describing him as “a Negro,” because, from a photo alone, the reader might not have been able to tell. But J. Ernest lived his whole life as a black man in a rigidly segregated world. He cared deeply about the state of race relations in America and in his own way worked hard to make a difference.

His wife, Lucile, on the other hand seems to have played on both sides of the fence. After receiving her bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1923, my grandmother returned to the University of Chicago in 1929 to work on her master's degree. Over the next ten years, between taking care of her husband, teaching full-time in the Chicago public schools, and raising three sons, Lucile continued to take courses and earned a master's degree in education from the University of Chicago in the summer of 1939. When the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church disbanded and joined the previously all-white United Methodist denomination, my grandmother became the first black woman to serve as Women's Division recording secretary for the Methodist Board of Missions.

My mother tells me that Lucile was extremely color conscious and very proud of her fair skin and blue-green eyes. At the fancy all-white resorts where high-level Methodist conferences were held, Lucile was often the only person of color present who was not part of the help. Mom tells me that in these situations my grandmother would not necessarily call attention to her African American racial identity. If people assumed she was white and treated her accordingly, that was just fine with her.7

When I interviewed Rocco Siciliano, a friend and colleague of my grandfather's in the Labor Department, about J. Ernest, Siciliano told me a revealing story about how my grandparents handled the issue of race at a dinner party he gave some time in the mid 1950s. Apparently, among Siciliano's dinner guests that evening was a gentleman who used to work for the Herbert Hoover administration. The man's wife, whom Siciliano described as a “stylish, white haired woman,” kept making comments about “darkies” every time the black maid who was helping to serve the meal left the room. Concerned that the woman's comments might be making J. Ernest and Lucile uncomfortable, Siciliano began to get “very nervous.” But the woman “wanted to be the center of attention or something,” so she continued making her racist remarks.

Finally Siciliano told her, “I don't know if you realize it, but the gentleman next to you [J. Ernest] considers himself colored.”

Siciliano remembers that the woman challenged him, saying,“I don't believe it. I'm going to ask him.”

Siciliano, now really in a panic and afraid the incident would turn ugly, urged her, “Please don't.” Siciliano recalls that the woman's “face fell” when she realized that he had been telling the truth. She really had been sitting next to a black man the entire night.

As I listened to Siciliano's story, that old familiar knot in my stomach began to tighten. Being mistaken for white seems to have been our family's curse. For just a moment as Siciliano talked, I was eighteen again, trying to convince a group of white girls that I really was a black person. As Yogi Berra used to say, “déjà vu all over again.” But during the 1950s, when people mistook J. Ernest for white, there would have been considerably more at stake.

“What did my grandfather do?” I asked Mr. Siciliano. “Did he challenge the woman or comment about the incident later?”

“No,” Siciliano told me. Neither of my grandparents made any comment on the incident to him, either as it was unfolding or later. My grandparents, he said, were “extremely astute in these matters,” and perhaps this wasn't the first time they had experienced such an incident. Mr. Siciliano also told me that he knew at the time that Lucile often passed for white, describing her as a “passover.” To this day, he says, he remembers how blue her eyes were.

I had never heard this story before, but it did seem to fit the pattern of what I had learned about my grandmother's obsession with skin color. As a child growing up, Lucile had teased and tormented her younger sister, Marjory, for having dark skin. Years later, as Aunt Marj lay dying on her hospital bed, she replayed those horrible scenes from her childhood over and over in her mind, screaming out, “Lucile, I'm black. Please love me! I am not a nigger,” over and over, until the nurses came to tranquilize her.

Many African Americans from Aunt Marj's generation were scarred by a deep sense of self-hatred stemming from their skin color. In a world where black skin was despised by the dominant society, having the “proper” skin color was literally a matter of life and death. As the old folks used to say: “If you're white, you're all right. If you're brown, stick around. If you're black, get back.”

When Lucile and Aunt Marjory were children, the unequivocal message they received from the dominant society was that being black was a bad thing. Black people were shiftless, ignorant, shuffling morons, fit only for the most menial of positions. Black people were denigrated in popular songs, newspapers, and on the stage. With the advent of cinema, derogatory images of African Americans were soon omnipresent on the silver screen. Birth of a Nation, W. B. Griffith's racist paean to the Ku Klux Klan, was the box office smash of 1912. President Woodrow Wilson even held a private screening of the movie in the White House and is supposed to have commented that seeing the film was “like writing history with lightning.” Far from questioning the film's blatant racism, Wilson's “only regret” was that its story was “all so terribly true.”8 This color consciousness shaped the world in which J. Ernest rose to prominence. Though light-skinned, he was a black man by birth, breeding, and culture.

As Barack Obama's presidential race picked up steam, the issue of race always lurking under the surface of the American experience took its place at center stage. Everywhere one looked, people were discussing whether this country would be able to consider a black man as a serious presidential candidate. For many on both sides of the racial divide, Obama represented a new kind of black man. Not only was he highly educated and unapologetically articulate, he was equally comfortable around blacks and whites. As the mostly white TV and radio pundits continued to debate the issue, I wondered what my grandfather would have made of all the hubbub. Fifty years ago when J. Ernest walked the halls of power in Washington, he was frequently the only black man not only at the conference table but in the building. What would my grandfather have thought of Obama's candidacy?

After all the hours of research I'd put in, I still had not satisfied my curiosity on the matter of J. Ernest's resignation. I had traced his flamboyant father through three marriages and seventeen children. I had traveled to his birthplace and learned a bit about his strengths and weaknesses as a person. But I still had not found out why my grandfather really left his position at the Labor Department. Other than a few bland profiles from biographical dictionaries, I had little idea of what my grandfather had done or what he had gone through during his five years in Washington. I could almost hear Aunt Marjory's voice whispering in my ear: “You said you were going to preserve the history of the Wilkins family. How can you do that if you don't even know what it is?”

It was time to go back to work. After spending several hours on the Internet, I was able to identify which books about President Eisenhower also mentioned my grandfather. A quick check on WorldCat, a computerized database of library catalogues from around the country, showed me that all of the books I was looking for could be found less than two miles from my house, at Harvard's Widener Library, one of the most visited libraries in the world.

Walking up the wide stone steps to the main building, I passed a group of foreign tourists posing for snapshots. Years ago, one could simply walk into the library, show some ID, and be allowed limited access to their collection. In recent years the growing number of prospective visitors and the increased need for campus security has complicated the procedure for gaining access. After paying a fee, I was photographed and given a visitor's ID card good for no more than six visits within the next year. Once I swiped my new ID card at the security desk, I was escorted up a marble staircase to the Phillips Reading Room for visiting scholars where any material I wished to see would be brought to me. Good thing I already had an idea of the specific books I wanted. There would be no random browsing of the stacks here at Harvard.

Once installed at the comfy oak reading table, I settled in to spend the day. The room was quite large, and a domed skylight flooded the room with natural light. The hush was absolute. Although there were easily thirty people studying in there, you could have heard a pin drop. If I became bored during my research trip, I could always go upstairs and check out the Gutenberg Bible on exhibit under glass in the foyer.

It had taken a fair amount of effort to get myself in here, but I could tell it was going to be worth it. As I waited for my books to be delivered, I checked out the state of the art computers the library had available for in-house reference work. A mega-database of historical newspapers, including all the major black papers from the turn of the last century, was available to Harvard Library users at the click of a mouse. Heaving a quiet sigh of contentment, I began to read.