Finding Grace; Two Sisters and the Search for Meaning Beyond the Color Line

by Shirlee Haizlip

• ISBN13: 9780743200530
• ISBN10: 0743200535
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-01-06
• Publisher: Free Press

Summary

In her widely acclaimed, bestselling memoir, The Sweeter the Juice, Shirlee Taylor Haizlip asked us to redefine our concepts of race and family by examining her biracial heritage -- how different gradations of dark and light skin led to a split in her mother's nuclear family, and how various relatives have been reunited many years later, some of them previously unaware of their layered racial makeup. In this eloquent, moving, and eagerly awaited continuation of her story, Haizlip pushes further into the fascinating terrain of family, race, and racial passing. Just over ten years ago, Haizlip's African American mother was reunited with her sister, who had spent her whole life passing for white; both women were in their eighties and had not seen or heard anything about each other since early childhood. Now Haizlip answers the many questions that linger from the previous book: What happened between these long-separated sisters after their reunion? What did they learn about each other, and about themselves? Is it possible to heal the wounds caused by such a rift?In rich, elegant prose, Haizlip contrasts her mother's fulfilling adult life with her aunt's solitary white existence. They lived on opposite sides of the race line, but both women, says Haizlip, were plagued by "America's twin demons: a paranoia about purity and an anxiety about authenticity." These women and other members of the author's extended family come vividly, achingly to life in these pages, turning this astute cultural investigation into a poignant, delightful, and highly personal narrative. Haizlip deftly, fluidly conveys the complexities of this story -- the sadness, comedy, danger, anger, confusion, shame, fear, longing, excitement, and joy of her family's rupture and reunion. We learn how Haizlip's mother's abandonment by members of her immediate family affected her daily life; we learn about the lives of relatives who left her behind, and of the members of succeeding generations who knew of the rift, and of those who did not.Haizlip's readers, too, appear here -- after The Sweeter the Juice, Haizlip was flooded by letters in which people shared similar family stories of bi-racial heritage, passing, and the eventual revelation of an extended racial makeup. She includes some of these letters here, affirming that her own seemingly unusual tale is actually a very familiar, very American story: of the tumultuous, complicated interactions between black and white communities and individuals -- interactions marked by fear and distrust, but also by camaraderie, ardor, and love. In sharing her own and her readers' stories, Haizlip forges a new picture of America's hidden racial past and its multihued future. Passionate, indomitable, and always generous toward her subjects, Haizlip explores what happens when the race divide exists within one family, and the effect of secret racial histories and their revelation on individuals and America at large.

Table of Contents

Contents Part I When the Rainbow Is Not EnoughPrologue1 A Twice-Told Tale2 The Gift3 The Etiology of Passing4 Visible and Invisible5 Passport to Privilege6 A Place Beyond Loss7 Creating a New Vocabulary8 In the Best of Families9 A Whiter Shade of White10 The Indian Who Wasn't11 Tracking Will12 Life Review13 Eyes Other than Our Own14 Unexpected Encounters of Kith and KinPart II Relativity15 In Their Own VoicesPart III The Color of Letters16 Open Hearts, Open Minds17 The Last WordEpilogue

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