One June weekend my brother, Todd, flew down from Boston to meet me in Baton Rouge to attend a conference about the Louisiana Native Guard. It was held at the actual site of the Battle of Port Hudson, giving us a chance to tour the ground where our great-great-grandfather had fought nearly 150 years before. Even more thrilling to me was the prospect of sharing the experience with my brother.
People tended to ask me, after hearing of my efforts to learn about my African heritage, what Todd made of his lately discovered roots. (The question often struck me as a veiled attempt to gauge how “normal” my own avid interest was.) I usually said that as a history buff, Todd seemed to feel most connected to his black ancestry through reading about African American history. The books piled by his bedside included James M. McPherson’s The Negro’s Civil War and Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s account of leading a black regiment from South Carolina against the Confederacy. What I didn’t mention was the fact that my brother’s love of history started with a misplaced affinity for our father’s jettisoned roots. As a child Todd developed an interest in the Civil War that turned into an obsession with the Confederate army during his adolescence. One year in his yearbook at Fairfield Country Day, a local private boys school in Connecticut, in the category “most likely to be,” he was listed as a “Confederate Rebel.”
When I reminded Todd of this description, he shook his head in wonder and said, “Isn’t that funny.” For the most part, Todd saw his preference for the Confederates as a case of rooting for the underdog. “The South never had a chance against the Yankees,” he said, “which made them seem kind of romantic. Also, the Southern generals and leaders were more colorful. Their victories and battles made better stories.”
For a white boy in Connecticut with only one child of color in his entire school, for a kid whose history books didn’t dwell on the less romantic stories about the slaves, the moral question at the heart of the Civil War—the institution of slavery—had been impossibly remote. I was hoping that this visit to the battle site might leave him feeling more personally connected to our black heritage.
Todd never shied away from disclosing our father’s racial ancestry, but his blond hair, green eyes, and pale skin could make a listener second-guess his story. They certainly never squinted at him, as they sometimes did with me, and said, “Yeah, I can see it.” As Todd said: “As soon as I tell them my father was African American, I have to point out, ‘Well, my mother’s of Nordic descent, of course, and I picked up her coloring.”
Despite Todd’s encouragement of my own interest in our Creole history and his immense pride in my career as a writer, I wondered at times if he viewed my compulsion to figure out my racial identity as perplexing, or even a little distasteful. It wasn’t that I believed he was racist, any more than I was, but I thought that he didn’t quite understand why I was always making such a big deal out of the “black thing.”
For Todd the news of our dad’s ancestry hadn’t altered his sense of himself. As he said, he looked so white that nobody thought to ask him about his racial background. And in his line of business, installing home security alarm systems in wealthy Boston suburbs, the question of what he was never came up. (Although working “in the trades” over the years had brought him into more frequent contact with people whom he generously described as “uneducated”—the type who openly made racist comments.) My brother’s wife, Michèle, came from a Scottish and Polish background: she was equally blond and fair, as were their identical twin daughters. Todd took the view that we came from an interesting family, and our dad’s ancestry was one more thing that made us stand out from everyone else.
However, in my line of business, a writer whose job required that I place myself in the public eye, the question of what I was did come up. In fact even before I published anything about my African ancestry, various editors and producers had already begun deciding my racial identity for me. My first book, My Father, Dancing, a collection of stories that didn’t deal with race at all, was treated on numerous occasions as if written by an African American author. It was reviewed in the African American general-interest magazine Emerge, included in the African American Book Expo in Chicago, and selected for a dramatic reading, also in Chicago, as part of a night celebrating Black History month. My writing shared the bill with work by Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston, and a recording of the reading later aired on Chicago’s public radio station. (I’m definitely black in Chicago, it seems.) Yet if this exposure ever inspired someone to search out a copy of My Father, Dancing, he or she might have been surprised to encounter the image of a blond-haired, pale-skinned girl dancing on its cover and not one black-identified character within its pages. (The characters aren’t necessarily identified as white either.)
Beyond needing to address this presumption of my African American identity, I felt compelled to resolve the question about how to define myself because of what I’d learned about our family’s history. Unlike my brother, I found this knowledge had altered my sense of myself. I’d begun to feel the stirrings of the “double-consciousness” described by W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois wrote: “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body.” Entire books have been devoted to interpreting Du Bois’s concept, but at its most basic, I understood double consciousness to mean the sense of otherness felt by African Americans—the result of being viewed as different by whites as well as viewing the world differently from them. Because I didn’t look black, I didn’t have the experience of my “difference” being mirrored back to me the way that visibly black people did. But over the course of learning the history of my father’s family, I’d begun to feel a shift in my worldview, away from the “white” one I’d grown up with.
African Americans, according to Du Bois, lived behind a racial veil that gave them a “second sight” to observe the world more clearly by remaining themselves unseen. Ironically, the invisibility of my own African ancestry had given me a uniquely suited vantage point from which to view the current status of Du Bois’s veil. I had a chance to hear how white people talked when they thought they were alone—sometimes making overtly racist comments, more often unwittingly sharing observations that indicated a subtle belief in African Americans’ inferiority. I’d been privy to the kind of conversations that black people had among themselves—passing remarks that told of the degree of separateness they felt from whites, how far they still remained inside the veil. And while it seemed for African Americans that the day-to-day reminders of otherness—on the job, in a store, with friends—were less frequent and pronounced, I noticed a recurring gulf between white and black perspectives on race matters.
Case in point: During an evening at an interracial artists salon that I’d organized in New York with a friend, I read from this book the chapter about the racial attitudes that I had grown up with in Connecticut, including the passage about my telling racist jokes in my high school cafeteria. There were about thirty writers and artists in the audience, almost evenly mixed between whites and people of color. As I’d hoped, the reading sparked conversation among the group, including this one between my white friend N. and my African American friend J.:
N. [to me]: It’s interesting how you’ve got these two secrets: about your father’s racial identity and also the secret of racism.
J.: Racism isn’t a secret. We’ve always known it was there.
N.: Yes, but I mean, it’s been kept secret. It’s not really acknowledged and people don’t talk about it.
J.: We talk about it all the time, every day when it happens.
N.: But I’m saying, it’s not discussed openly in the world.
J.: Depends on whose world you’re talking about.
N. [exasperated]: You know what I mean!
When N. and J. walked away, I’m guessing, they were more entrenched in their own positions and less willing to engage in this kind of conversation again. For my part, I realized that I no longer had a set position. In learning about the country’s history from the African American vantage point, I’d begun to peer over the racial veil. I was hoping that Todd’s own love for history would similarly lure him away from his familiar perspective. After all, who could better understand than my own brother my particular difficulty in answering the question What are you? In a world of “us” and “them,” perhaps he and I might join together to form a “we.”
About sixty people showed up for the conference on the Louisiana Native Guard. Outside the Port Hudson State Park headquarters, two African American Civil War reenactors, wearing full period garb and carrying antique muskets, replayed the history of the first officially sanctioned black regiment in the U.S. Army. To a rapt audience, they described the colored troops’ doomed charge on the ridge.
In between lectures about the free people of color community and archaeological excavations at the battleground site, Todd and I chatted with the two reenactors. One of them, Murray Dorty, had traveled around the world telling the story of black troops in the Civil War. He recalled for us the first time he participated in a full-scale battle reenactment. He’d been standing on the line, waiting to go in, when he started to cry. Dorty found that he couldn’t stop himself, and then he looked down the line and saw other men crying too. “The guy next to me tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘It’s okay. It’s their spirit you’re feeling,’” Dorty recalled. “In that moment, I understood the significance of [the soldiers’] struggle and their sacrifice.”
As we listened I fantasized that Todd would decide to participate in an African American Civil War reenactment to better understand the struggle of our great-great-grandfather Henry. Todd’s best friend, who was also a Civil War buff, had taken part in a few living history events—always as a white Union soldier—and Todd had said that he might like to try it himself. But as the day wore on, I noticed that Todd seemed more interested in talking about the reenactors’ contemporary lives than the lives of the dead soldiers they’d been resurrecting for us.
We had dinner that evening with some other conference attendees—nearly all of them black. Some were veterans themselves and others were the descendants of Civil War or World War II veterans. Many were involved in trying to establish a special memorial for African American war veterans in Washington, DC, and the dinner conversation ranged from stories about injustices against blacks in the military, to the politics of building memorials in our nation’s capital, to the challenges of fund-raising. I was impressed with the men’s determination to commemorate their ancestors’ largely overlooked contribution. That a large group of the U.S. population had been willing to die for a country that had treated them for much of its history as second-class citizens (or worse) struck me as an act of patriotism certainly worthy of recognition.
On the car ride back to our hotel, when I asked Todd what he’d thought of everyone, he said that he’d found the men impressive too. He started talking about this fellow or that one—but nearly all the identifying details he mentioned were concerned with the men’s occupations and lifestyles. One guy was a big union lawyer in DC; another guy had appeared in Hollywood movies; this one lived in a wealthy suburb near someone Todd knew; that one went to the same college as his buddy.
As I listened, I realized that for Todd, the class line, not the color line, was the relevant problem of the twenty-first century. It made sense that he would think this way. During his twenties my brother had struggled to support himself—knocking on doors of businesses in Boston to sell industrial cleaning supplies on commission, losing a leased car to a repossession for failure to make the payments. The double consciousness he had gleaned from our upbringing was the veil between the haves and the have-nots of the world. On the racial question, though, I was on my own.
Luckily I met other people in New Orleans who could join me in my search; they hadn’t grown up aware of their African ancestry either, despite being descended from some very illustrious forebears. Michelle Olinger, a blue-eyed blonde who ran an asphalt company in California, was the great-great-great-great-grandniece of Henriette Delille, a free woman of color who started a black order of nuns in New Orleans in 1842 and was currently being considered by the Roman Catholic Church for canonization. Should Delille’s cause be successful, she would become the world’s first African American saint. Steve Lanusse-Siegel, a blues musician from Oregon who once thought of himself as an Italian Jew, was the great-great-grandson of the colored Creole intellectual Armand Lanusse. Pat Schexnayder, from Slidell, Louisiana, and her daughter Kara Chenevert, from North Carolina, descended from Antoine Dubuclet, the longest-serving African American elected official during Reconstruction and the richest person of color in Louisiana at the time. My fellow researchers marveled that they had never heard about these people or learned their stories.
In my family too, no one—not even my relatives who stayed in the black community—had any inkling that my great-grandfather Paul had been involved in politics. He was a Republican Party boss in the late nineteenth century, a period when white Democrats began systematically reversing all the civil and political rights won by blacks in the wake of the Civil War. Paul fought against resegregation of schools and public accommodations, the disenfranchisement of blacks, and the reinstitution of the ban against interracial marriages. My aunt Shirley, who spent her life, along with her husband, trying to undo the legacy of Jim Crow, knew nothing of her grandfather’s precedent.
One woman I met was an exception to the rule. Ever since she was a child, Julie Hilla, who grew up white in Los Angeles, had heard about her grandfather Arnold Bertonneau, who had met with President Lincoln during the Civil War to ask for the Negro’s right to vote. Julie’s grandfather died before she was born, but Julie’s mother had talked about him often, clearly proud of her father’s early civil rights activism. It wasn’t until Julie was in her late seventies, though, when she visited New Orleans for the first time, that she learned the rest of the story.
In a bookstore in the French Quarter, Julie decided to look for her grandfather’s name in the indexes of some local history books. She was tickled to find an entry describing Arnold Bertonneau’s trip to visit Lincoln, but what she read next made her pause. Her grandfather was described as a man of color. Julie showed her husband the reference, commenting that the author had to be mistaken. “My grandfather was white,” she said. “Like the rest of us.”
But back at home in Palm Springs, where she was living, Julie couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d found. She was more curious than anything—her grandfather’s civil rights legacy helped to ensure that she’d been raised to believe that everyone was created equal. She decided to call up Mary Gehman, the author of The Free People of Color of New Orleans, another book that described Arnold Bertonneau as a colored man. After a long phone conversation during which Julie learned that her grandfather had also served as a captain in a black regiment, she became convinced that her mother and her mother’s family had been keeping a secret from her all these years. She decided to return to New Orleans to learn more, with her husband and two grown children accompanying her.
When Julie and I happened to meet a few nights after she arrived, I knew nothing of her recent discoveries. We were at a gathering of people in town for the conference about the Louisiana Native Guard, and I figured the petite older white woman with the short grayish blond hair and bright blue eyes was a professional genealogist or an academic interested in the history of free people of color. But when I told her that my great-great-grandfather had fought with the colored troops, Julie surprised me by clapping her hands and saying, “So you’re mixed too!”
We traded our stories. As Julie talked, she chuckled over some of her relatives’ responses: one cousin had confessed that decades earlier she had found her mother’s birth certificate, with the label “colored,” and ripped it up. I remarked on Julie’s own enthusiasm for her black ancestry, given that she had lived as white for nearly eight decades, much of it during a time of widespread discrimination in America.
Julie paused a moment before answering. “I sometimes wonder if my grandfather hadn’t been so active in civil rights, if he’d been just an ordinary person, whether I would feel any different.” She shook her head. “I just don’t know.” But Julie was so proud of her grandfather Arnold already that a bit of colored blood wasn’t going to change her opinion. “In fact I feel even more proud of him,” she explained.
For every person like Julie I met in New Orleans, I heard stories about dozens more who turned away from their newfound African ancestry. In my own family, my cousin Gloria’s grandparents—who had been living as white for more than sixty years—stopped speaking to their granddaughter because of her insistence on digging up the past. There were also those who simply closed their eyes, hoping that this evidence of Africa in their background would magically disappear.
Yet with the increasing popularity of genealogy facilitated by the Internet and the growing availability of records online, the discovery of a black ancestor can be just a few keystrokes away for people who have gone through life thinking they were entirely white. Generally, the longer someone’s family has been in America, the more likely his or her chances of having some African or Native American ancestry, given all the race-mixing throughout the country’s history. Since I’ve started my own genealogical search, three different white friends have discovered racial passing in their own family trees.
In 1958 Robert Stuckert, a sociologist and anthropologist at Ohio State University, published his findings about the frequency of black-to-white passing in the Ohio Journal of Science. After analyzing decades of census records and fertility data, he estimated that by 1950 one in five Americans who identified themselves as white had some African ancestry. And he predicted that the percentage of white people with black ancestry would increase as these individuals went on to have children.
Even before Stuckert’s study appeared, passing had become a popular topic in American culture. Movies like Imitation of Life (1934, remade in 1959) and Pinky (1949) and novels such as Passing (1929), by black author Nella Larsen, and Kingsblood Royal (1947), by white author Sinclair Lewis, stoked curiosity and paranoia about the preponderance of “hidden white Negroes.” Folklore beliefs for detecting invisible blackness advised examining a person’s fingernails for a bluish tinge to the half-moon. A more “scientific” approach early in the twentieth century involved measuring hair texture and skull size. Nowadays geneticists can analyze a person’s DNA to identify the geographic origins of their ancestors. Dr. Mark Shriver, a scientist who grew up white and whose research helped to make such genetic testing possible, only learned when analyzing his own DNA that 11 percent of his ancestors traced back to Africa.
As white people continue to discover their own black roots, the question becomes more pressing: What drove so many individuals to reject their black ancestry in the first place? In the wake of the Civil War, black Americans felt hopeful about their future. When and how did the scales tip so that this hopefulness became outweighed by despair?