Books : Finding Grace : Excerpts

Prologue

After packing hurriedly in Connecticut, my mother flew into Los Angeles at the end of a cool January in 1998. Early the next evening we drove down to Brea, a small town edged with the suede brown mountains characteristic of Southern California. She began to cry as she entered the building. A professionally somber official ushered us to a pleasantly lit, immaculate area painted in neutral tones.

My mother stood in the quiet, carpeted room looking down at a mirror image of herself in a white coffin. Not exactly a mirror image, since the dead woman, my ninety-five-year-old Aunt Grace, was eight years older than my mother with just a few more wrinkles. Crying steadily but quietly, my mother, now tiny with age, patted her sister's hand, saying over and over again, "We only had six years together. We only had six years together."

Jeff Scott, the dead woman's grandson; Harold, my husband; and I were the only other ones at the viewing at that time. In the end, few of Grace's white extended family were there to say a final good-bye. Most likely because they lived in far distant places. They had drifted apart. They exchanged Christmas cards but otherwise had little time for the details of their separate lives.

It was her black family, the family she had left, the family that she had forgotten, the family that had returned to her, that gathered to mourn. It was the black family that joined her son-in-law and grandchildren in grieving for her. Not exactly the usual suspects. Not exactly a Hollywood ending for a poignant story of high drama.

Like thousands of others who passed for white in America, Grace left her home in Washington, D.C., moved around a lot, settled in Cleveland, and finally retired in Orange County, California to be near her only daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren. There she had lived a shielded life, a life that only she knew was compromised. It was a life that precluded close friends and eliminated questions about her literally dark past.

As we paid our respects, it occurred to me that some might say we were assuming the traditional role of the good black, the noble black, the all-forgiving mammy who, no matter how she had been treated, proudly demonstrated her loyalty at the end.

Was it true? Had we become someone else's balm in Gilead once again? Or had we truly reached across that gulf we call race in America and come together as a family, to do the things that families must do? It was clear to me that nobility had nothing to do with our feelings. My mother had lost her only sister, whom she had so recently found. I had lost the aunt I had so deeply wanted to recover. Ours were the normal feelings of grief.

Families account for their internal dynamics in different ways. Two years before her death, Grace moved into a nursing home after she fell and broke her hip. Although she recovered and was of sound mind, she could not return to her home because she lived alone and it was felt she needed full-time coverage to ensure her safety and best interests. She died of pneumonia in that nursing home. Her death was quick to come.

Around the receiving room at the funeral home, on displays that Jeff had made, my mother saw pictures of herself with Grace during their six-year reconnection. Each carefully constructed collage was a public acknowledgment of their sisterhood, of their coming from the same womb, of their sharing the same DNA.

On the face of it, it was simple, homey proof. Proof that could break your heart. Sweet, visual evidence that black and white were inextricably intertwined. Proof that black was white and white was black. Proof that family need not stop at the color line. Proof that the past is prologue to the present. Proof that dark family secrets have a way of working themselves into the communal light. Proof that the light can be warm and good and right.

The funeral took place the next day in the same facility, a muted, gabled building that looked like a colonial home in New England, my mother's part of the country. The presiding minister, who did not know my aunt, for she had no longer attended church, was intrigued and deeply moved by her life's story -- and her sister's as well -- as related by Jeff.

"Finding Grace" was the title the pastor chose for his eulogy. Its double meaning was profoundly resonant -- and profoundly sad. Jeff, his two sisters, Laura and Lisa, Laura's husband, and my mother sat in the first-row family pew. Aside from my husband and our daughter, Melissa, a few friends of the grandchildren and son-in-law, and a neighbor, there were few other mourners. Perhaps that was as it should be.

Grace died as she had lived in later years, an almost solitary, white life. Her sister, although now too in a convalescent center, continues to live a black life. Race had transformed both their lives. With the publication of their story, an entire new set of life patterns came into play. In unexpected ways, the script changed. Much had to be ad-libbed. For all of us. On both sides.

And so we move on to ask the big questions. What happens in this country when those who thought of themselves as white, if they thought about it at all, learn of their additional genetic information, of their DNA ties to, as my colleague Stephen Carter puts it, "the darker nation"? How are these folk best described -- "formerly white" or "allegedly white" or "still white with black heritage" or "mostly white" or "a little bit black" or "white, I think" or "touched by the brush" or "Heinz 57" or "Euro American and African American" or simply "American"? How did they receive us, and how did we assimilate them?

Inquiring minds have asked, What happened between your mother and her sister? Did they become friends? Did her sister call herself black? Did she ever explain why she chose to pass? Did your mother forgive her? Did you forgive her? How did all of the relatives you "found" react? Did they accept you? Did they accept themselves? Was there any hostility? Did any of them feel uncomfortable? What do they call themselves now? Do you keep in touch, doing the things that "real" family members do? How did the black part of the family react to the situation? Were any of those members angered or dismayed? Did this happen in many other families? Most of these questions will be addressed in the pages to come.