Pull up a chair, sit on the floor and let your feet hang.
I want to tell you a story about a conflicted woman who lived in strange times. This woman made a lot of mistakes and lots of enemies, and although nearly 90, she may never understand how and where she lost her way.
I call her Mama.
I tell people she is a white woman who married a black man and had two daughters. According to American conventions of racial determination, that’s not exactly the truth -- but it’s not a lie either.
My mother looks white and thinks white a lot of the time. She worked in “Whites Only” places of employment during all of my formative years following my birth in late 1944.
According to American racial convention, however, my mother is a quadroon.
As I described at length in a post about the history of my home town, my mother’s paternal grandparents moved from Ohio to what was then a vast expanse of fertile Illinois farm land in the mid-to-late 1890s. It was about 18 miles west of downtown Chicago.
Grandma Eva Harris* was white and her roots were in Surrey, England or thereabouts. Grandpa Iva Harris, my mother would always say, was as black as the Ace of Spades. His roots were also in Europe because was a descendant of Moors.
My mother’s family is now known as the first black family to live in that suburb -– yes, even though my great-mother was just as white as the woman on the next homestead. Thus it was so: the one drop rule of race applied not just to the progeny of American slaves, but to any person with so-called Negroid features and skin color.
The 19th century Harrises had seven children. There was one for every color on the skin-tone spectrum. They youngest son, Royal, was one of the two sons who came out looking like their mother. Most people assumed they were Jews because of their prominent noses and wavy hair.
Young Royal married a very young Mabel Dade. Grandma Mabel Harris had been abandoned by her Czech mother, who was born in Prague, and her full-blooded Native American father, whose excuse for that abandonment was never explained. Grandma Mabel inherited all her looks from her mother and was raised as a white woman. She was beautiful. Her hazel eyes changed from green to blue-green to gray and almost amber. Her light brown hair hung to the base of her spine in two braids – unless she was going to work at the factory or out shopping, when she would create a coronet from the braids on the top of her lovely head.
My mother entered their world in October 1924. It was clear from the start she was to be a beauty. Her thick black hair was naturally wavy, her skin the color of milk. Eighteen months later, a little brother with blonde curls and green eyes made his debut. And that’s what started the story of my own life.
Recently, my mother admitted how she had resented that baby brother for looking the way he did. I doubt she fully understands how relevant that has been to the course her life took, but I know it was.
It must have been so confusing for that little girl with the spindly legs who would grow to be 5’8 1/2 '” as an adult. She looked as white as any of the children at her school did. And yet, because of her ebony-colored grandfather, with whom they lived for several of their early years, she was restricted in the same ways that other black children were going to be as their families found their ways into Maywood.
The public schools soon became segregated. One grammar school was designated for the children residing in the few square blocks allotted as suitable for colored people. There was no choice involved – my lily white mother went to the colored grammar school where she was instantly despised. But she was a smart little thing and soon became a favorite among the teachers.
My mother’s statuesque beauty blossomed just in time for high school. The high school served a collection of surrounding towns, so the student body was naturally integrated. There were WASPs from the Lutheran School, Italians from the town just southwest of Maywood, lots of Irish from the two Catholic Schools in the area and assorted other, mostly European representatives. My mother’s exotic beauty was not lost on any of those white teenage boys, but she was not allowed to respond to their attention.
When the time came for dating, she could only accept the invitations of black boys. That made the black girls despise her even more. The understandable identity crisis my mother suffered created conflict in the family. She was jealous of her brother’s closeness with their mother. Her father, whom she adored, was too often more interested in finding the bottom of a wine bottle than in her growing pains.
So, when a handsome and extremely smart black man from the West Side of Chicago asked for her hand in marriage when she was only 17, she jumped at the chance. Love? What’s love got to do with it? This bronze-colored black man was her ticket out of hell – or so she thought. This champion swimmer who excelled in the technical courses he had taken at Chicago Vocational School was the man who became my birth father.
Sunday’s coming Father’s Day has been heavy on my mind. None of them are still living, but I wound up having four of them. They were all black. They were all decent men, although one struggled with alcoholism, just like my Grandpa. That was the one who molested me.
But none of them could please my mother for very long, because the most surprising thing of all was that she had become a racist. Yes, that’s what I said – she was and still is to some extent a racist who resents black people.
Because my mother’s marriage habit kept leaving us fatherless, she had no choice but to work. Fortunately, she had studied typing and stenography in high school and attended a couple of years of college, so it was easy for her to find work in the Chicago Loop as a legal secretary. It was easy as long as she allowed her bosses and co-workers to believe she was white.
My mother’s struggles as a quadroon (this term is no longer used in common conversation) resulted in some lifelong scars, not just on her, but on my sister and me as well. We weren’t allowed to visit her offices downtown because that would blow her “cover.” Is there any wonder I believed she was ashamed of us, that there was something inherently wrong with our personhood? Intellectually, I know she did what she had to do; she didn’t have much choice. But emotionally? It stung and sadly continues to do so.
When I was old enough to date, things had changed a bit. The same racial rules applied – I was black because I didn’t look white – so I too was expected to turn down the advances of white boys. It was the timing in the history of American race relations that made what I did necessary, in my mind. I dated boys who asked me out. It didn’t matter to me what color their skin was. It most certainly did matter to their parents, though. More often than not, our childish plans were shot down from incoming parenting.
I noticed, however, that my mother seemed far happier about the attention I got from white boys than from black boys. By this time I had built up a head of resentment toward my mother that pervaded my existence. The darker the boys skin was, the less she’d approve of them (although she never admitted that was the reason,) so I started deliberately befriending very dark and not so attractive boys, just to get under my mother’s alabaster skin!
Over the years, I have never stopped pointing out her hypocrisy to her – sometimes loudly and disrespectfully. However, I have also come to understand how she could have turned out the way she did, so I try harder to tolerate her lapses in racial judgment. In fact, I thought I had trained her pretty well to at least try to hide her prejudice…
…until I learned recently what she had said to my son about 15 years ago when he took his gorgeous Haitian/Italian girlfriend to visit his grandmother. He told me she pulled him aside and told him he was doing great in the girlfriend department. “Don’t be bringing any darkies home.”
My son hasn’t had much to say to his grandmother since that day. He was shocked and more than a little outraged. He doesn’t understand how a woman who married four black men, who raised two black daughters and whose grandfather was “as black as the Ace of Spades” could say such a thing.
Neither do I, but she did. That’s my Mama.
*The surname has been changed to protect my mother’s privacy.
