Three days later, my mother's family found me. PBS's Genealogy Roadshow was looking for family mysteries related to New Orleans. In what can only be called serendipity, I was presented with an opportunity to solve the uncertainly of my racial heritage. That she was hinting at her hidden self or maybe preparing me to accept the part of her she'd left behind in New Orleans and her reason for doing that.Īfter my mother's death in 2014 I was freed of my vow.

Now I understood the clues concealed in that story. “But that's how it was in New Orleans back then.” He shoved her aside like so much trash and called her the n-word. As a child I listened with rapt attention to the story of the old black woman on Canal Street burdened with packages who didn't move off the sidewalk for a white man. A gifted storyteller, she related stories of New Orleans and the bigotry she witnessed. If a mixed-race person is white enough to pass, how does that person deal with the trappings of a racist culture where you're forced to choose a side?Īs if in self-defence or maybe retaliation for my father's racism, she imbued me with a moral imperative to respect all people regardless of their colour. Du Bois called “two-ness,” the ambivalence of people of mixed European and African ancestry. Its ugly face could now be shared with her, a “white” woman who would understand and possibly agree.Įvery day she had to live with the paradox of what W.E.B. The irony was that in gaining white privilege, in passing for white, the onslaught of racism was splayed open to her. In escaping the Jim Crow south, coming north and marrying my white father, she must have thought gaining white privilege was worth the price of losing family ties and her authentic self. Was she afraid of bringing too much attention to the race issue? Did his racist remarks beat on her like a hard, cold rain? Or had she convinced herself that she deserved it for the lie that sat at the heart of their marriage? My mother reprimanded him with little vigour.

Alvera frederic