For many years my father had a recurrent dream that he was on trial for a crime that he may or may not have committed. He would never learn the nature of the accusations against him, but each time he elected to defend himself, making a speech “so moving that I could feel myself tingling with it.” When the jury foreman rose to deliver the verdict, my father would feel certain of his acquittal, but he always woke before learning of his fate.
At the end of his life, my father interpreted this dream in light of his illness: “Now cancer is the crime I may or may not have committed, and the eloquence of being alive, the fervor of the survivor, is my best defense.” But he never shared any prior readings, so I must draw my own conclusions about what it meant and where it came from. Of course I wonder if the guilt manifested by the dream was connected to my father’s racial background. Did he feel remorseful about living among whites after being raised in a black community? Was his crime that he dared to treat his racial identity as if it were elective? Or was the accusation against him blackness itself? These racial interpretations gain currency when considered alongside the dream’s parallels to Kafka’s The Trial. The novel, which my father recognized as a great influence in his life, first appeared in English around the same time that he paid his visit to the social security office.
The Trial relates the story of Joseph K., a bank clerk who on his thirtieth birthday is charged with a crime whose nature he never learns. Joseph K.’s attempts to mount his defense keep failing amid the vast enigmatic procedures of the court, the inaccessibility of the judges, and the unknowability of his crime. He learns that “in fact, defense is not really allowed under the law, it’s only tolerated, and there is even some dispute about whether the relevant parts of the law imply even that.” Joseph K. can never complete his plea “because to meet an unknown accusation, not to mention other charges arising out of it, the whole of one’s life would have to be passed in review, down to the smallest actions and accidents, clearly formulated and examined from every angle.” At the novel’s end, Joseph K. learns that he’s been sentenced to death. He reflects: “The logic cannot be refuted, but someone who wants to live will not resist it. Where was the judge he’d never seen? Where was the high court he’d never reached?” He is stabbed in the heart and dies.
The mysterious enforcers behind the one-drop rule were not so unlike Kafka’s invisible authorities. While a verdict of blackness in 1930s America certainly wasn’t death, it could significantly diminish someone’s life. And there was little chance of a person’s individual merit mitigating his sentence. But the parallels between my father’s situation and The Trial weren’t just metaphorical. His racial identity was also a matter of law, the jurisprudence of which was as murky and irrational as anything that Kafka might have dreamed up.
On the day that my father was submitting his social security application, neither the U.S. government nor his birth state of Louisiana had a law on their books that defined my father as colored, according to his one-quarter of black blood (give or take an ancestor or two).
Legal definitions of blackness (which also defined whiteness by default) began appearing in southern states during the latter half of the nineteenth century as a part of their passage of antimiscegenation and segregation statutes. Equations of how much “black blood” made a person black ranged from “one drop” in North Carolina to 50 percent or more in Ohio, with the most common definition among the states being one-eighth.
Louisiana legislators passed their share of laws barring blacks and whites from marrying or sitting next to each other, but they were reluctant to define exactly what a Negro was. A 1908 act forbidding “concubinage between a person of the Caucasian or white race and a person of the Negro or black race” originally contained a clause defining a person of the “Negro race” as someone “who is as much as one thirty-second part Negro,” but it was struck out at the last minute. Two years later a legal case landed in Louisiana’s supreme court that hinged on the question of whether an “octoroon”—someone with one-eighth African ancestry—was a “person of the Negro or black race.”
After an exhaustive survey of newspapers, encyclopedias, literary sources, and the jurisprudence of states across the country in which not one definition of Negro could be found that contained “octoroon,” the court encouraged the general assembly to be more specific. Their amended act forbade concubinage between whites and a “person of the colored or black race,” which didn’t exactly clear up the confusion. Presumably the state’s history of race-mixing explains the white lawmakers’ unwillingness to specify a percentage, lest their own pedigrees not pass muster.
In the absence of any legal definition, a person’s race was left in the hands of the registrars who issued the birth certificates, marriage licenses, and death certificates that determined the school a person could go to, whom he could marry, and the cemetery where he could be buried. Without any guidance from the courts, these deputies exercised an even more anarchical rule than successors such as Miss Neff in Bayou Lacombe and Naomi Drake in New Orleans, who were—so they claimed—trying to carry out the law that was eventually passed.
In my father’s case, his old French name along with the facts that his family lived in a colored Creole neighborhood and that so many of their relatives were already “colored” on various records made the designation “col” on my father’s birth certificate a foregone conclusion. But it wasn’t until November 1938, eight months after my father’s visit to the social security office, that Louisiana’s supreme court finally ruled on the question of how much black blood made a person black, in a trial that involved my father’s own second cousin.
If my father didn’t know his cousin Verna Cassagne directly, he certainly knew about her family. Verna was three years older; her people also had ties to Bayou Lacombe, the town across Lake Pontchartrain where my father’s grandmother Rosa was born and where his grandparents had a country home that he visited as a child. There, among my father’s playmates, was a big group of cousins from his grandmother’s side that included Verna and her younger brother. Like my dad, these children were also the great-grandchildren of Anatole Cousin, but they came from his second family—the one Anatole had with Margaret Ducré, daughter of an emancipated slave. That Verna’s great-great-grandmother had been a slave would come back to haunt her.
After growing up in Lacombe, Verna’s mother moved to a white neighborhood in New Orleans, married an Italian man, and raised her daughter and son as white. During her senior year in high school, Verna met an Italian boy named Cyril at a dance. The next day, when Verna got out of class, Cyril was waiting for her in his brother’s yellow roadster. After dating for six months, the couple eloped to a neighboring parish and got married.
Verna and Cyril moved into an apartment on the second floor of Verna’s mother’s house and soon started fighting. Verna claimed that Cyril wanted to engage in “unnatural acts” and that when she refused, he beat her. Cyril claimed that his wife was a tramp. After about a year, Cyril was either kicked out or moved out—depending on who was telling the story—and Verna went to juvenile court to force him to pay alimony. After falling behind in his payments, Cyril was hauled back into court and slapped with a hefty fine. He responded by filing a countersuit to annul his marriage on the grounds that his wife was a “person of color, having a traceable amount of Negro blood.” In the ensuing trial, it came out that someone had told Cyril that his wife was colored on her mother’s side, and he’d gone up to Lacombe and found some people who knew her family to confirm it. In which case their marriage had never been lawful and Cyril didn’t owe Verna one dime.
The legal battle between the young couple dragged on for four years. The case rested upon the racial identity of Verna’s great-great-grandmother Fanny. That she’d once been a slave wasn’t in contention—her emancipation papers proved that her owner (after he “took her for a wife”) freed her in 1837. But Verna’s lawyer argued that being a slave didn’t necessarily mean that Fanny was a Negro. During Louisiana’s colonial period, Indians had been enslaved too.
Fanny had died at least fifty years prior to the trial, but Cyril’s lawyer managed to round up nearly two dozen residents of Lacombe—most of them mixed-race or black and in their seventies and eighties—who remembered her. They dutifully made the trip across Lake Pontchartrain to the New Orleans courthouse, but getting them to provide admissible testimony about Fanny’s “real” racial identity was another story. Despite the rather bullying efforts of the lawyers and court to treat black and white as distinct and apparent, the trial’s transcript makes clear the difficulty, and absurdity, of trying to retroactively sort people into categories that hadn’t formerly existed.
One witness, in trying to answer a question about what Fanny was, replied that she’d been a midwife. Another witness ventured that Fanny’s daughter was from “up country” when asked about her race. The lawyers ran into more confusion when trying to determine Fanny’s appearance. Some witnesses remembered her hair as kinky. Others recalled that she had “tolerable fair hair hanging down on her head.” Her color was described alternately as yellow, as black as the hat on a spectator’s head, and “like an Indian.”
Apparently no photos of Fanny could be dug up to let the court judge for itself, but the defense supplied a picture of her daughter and two granddaughters, who, it was admitted in the record, looked like white people. Cyril’s attorney produced records from the health department to remind the court that in Louisiana a person’s looks can be deceiving. Copies of Verna’s birth certificate and the marriage licenses of two of her aunts indicated that they were colored. Although the racial designations on these documents had originally been white, the registrar’s office amended them after coming across evidence of their slave ancestor Fanny. The court noted that while this practice of altering the certificates was illegal, it was persuaded by the evidence that had caused the change to be made in the first place.
In his opinion, the trial judge declared that if Verna’s great-great-grandmother was an emancipated slave, she must have been “a full-blooded Negro.” Ruling in favor of Cyril, he stated that although Fanny might make the defendant only one-sixteenth black, “there is nothing in our law which permits of the intermarriage of people of the white race and people with any appreciable degree of Negro blood.” After two unsuccessful appeals, Louisiana’s supreme court upheld the lower court’s decision. Verna’s marriage was annulled, she lost her right to collect alimony, and she had to pay the court expenses too. More damaging perhaps was the public nature of the trial, which meant that Verna and her mother could no longer live as white in New Orleans.
The “traceable amount” standard remained in force until 1970, when the Louisiana General Assembly amended it to one thirty-second percentage of black ancestry. Then in 1983, after a sensational trial splashed this equation (and the fact that Louisiana was the only state that continued to measure percentages of blood) across the national news, the assembly did away with definitions altogether. In the case, a woman who insisted that she’d been raised as white—and who looked white—was legally determined to be black because of an ancestor who lived 222 years earlier.
When my father read the headline LOUISIANA REPEALS BLACK BLOOD LAW in his New York Times over breakfast, he must have felt satisfied to see the denunciation of such draconian thinking about race. But he had reason to feel angry too. He was sixty-three by that time. The one-drop rule that was codified into law had decided his racial identity long ago, and he’d spent the majority of his life protesting the answer—an effort that had indelibly shaped him.
I often wonder how my father would have explained the way he negotiated his racial identity. His recurrent dream about being on trial suggests that he anticipated, if not feared, being called upon to offer a defense. My father could imagine no worse fate than Joseph K.’s silence at the end of The Trial. Encountering the two “unspeaking, uncomprehending men” who have come to execute him, Joseph K. thinks to himself that he is grateful “that it’s been left up to me to say what’s necessary.” But when the moment comes, he can only utter, “Like a dog,” to describe his fate. If my father’s time ever came, he intended to be ready with a “speech so moving” that he could be sure of his acquittal.
Justifications, however, would come later. In the beginning my father’s decision was rooted in practical concerns. Some months after getting his social security card, my dad went out looking for a job. There was no question that he would present himself as white. Not only was there his parents’ example, but Lorraine had recently been hired at a dentist’s office by passing as white. Shirley, on the other hand, had been told by the clerk of the state employment office when applying for a summer position, “Sorry, no jobs for colored girls.”
My father was hired as an office clerk by a syrup manufacturer in downtown Manhattan. Between this job and his classes at Brooklyn College, my father spent more and more time among people who didn’t know about his racial background. The corresponding shifts required in his behavior—subtle changes in the way he spoke; an evasiveness about his home life; indifference to racist comments—turned him into a kind of impostor, whether he felt like one or not. Was there anyplace where my father could feel authentically himself? Would it be among the middle-class blacks of Bedford-Stuyvesant? With the swashbuckling French Creoles of his mythical New Orleans? Or the Jewish intellectuals at Brooklyn College?
When he headed back to school in the fall of 1939, this question took on a greater urgency. Hitler’s forces marched into Poland on September 1, and France and England declared war on Germany. It seemed only a matter of time before the United States got involved too. Significantly, the Third Reich’s Nuremberg Laws, which defined full Jews as anyone with three or more “racially” Jewish grandparents and mixed Jews as anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, mirrored the United States’ attempts to measure blackness by fractions of blood.
In the college cafeteria, the conversation was always the same: blitzkriegs and nonaggression pacts, peace rallies and the possibility of a draft. But one day at the lunch table, a fellow named Chester Kallman changed the subject. He told the rest of them about hanging out in Greenwich Village with his new friend Wystan. Those who’d heard the rumors knew that Chester meant the poet W. H. Auden, with whom he’d recently become lovers.
Chester shared stories about drinking and arguing aesthetics with the likes of Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and the editors of the Partisan Review, the magazine that served as literary manifesto for my father and his friends. In the Village bars and cafés, men traded lines of poetry in verbal duels, sometimes coming to actual blows, defending the honor of their favorite writers. There were midnight jaunts up to Harlem to hear jazz, secret nightclubs where you had to know a password to get in, parties where men and women who had just met retired to a bedroom to get better acquainted.
Although Chester’s audience was made up of aspiring writers, it didn’t occur to most of them that they might lead this life too. The New York intellectual Norman Podhoretz, who grew up in Brownsville in the 1930s, began his memoir Making It by observing that “one of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan.” How could these young men and women forgo the tidy lives that their parents had planned for them? How could they leave behind their neighborhoods and families, especially now when their counterparts in Europe were coming under siege? They seemed doomed to experience Chester’s life the same way that they gained so many life experiences—vicariously, through stories.
But from one end of the table, my father spoke up. He’d been listening to Chester the most closely of them all—asking questions, planning strategies, making calculations. Now he told his friends that he’d made a decision. In a voice whose timbre took the full measure of his being, he announced that he was going to move to Greenwich Village.