Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  When I talk to friends, relatives, and colleagues who share my social groups and clubs, it is unusual to meet individuals who don’t have some stories or experiences of black family members who have passed. Since neither of my parents were born of light-complexioned parents, I have to look back at least three generations in order to identify family members who might have had such an option.

  Charlotte Schuster Price, the widow of a prominent Washington physician, remembers well the day that one of her older brothers made the decision to stop living as a black man and to enter the world of whites.

  “It was in the 1920s and my family was all in Washington for my brother Ernie’s graduation from medical school at Howard University,” says Price as she recalls the event. “The whole family was proud of him. Then all of a sudden, Ernie turns to my father, hands him the diploma and says, ‘I hope you like this diploma because it’s yours now. I’ll never be able to use it.’ That’s when we finally realized that Ernie was going to start living his life as a white man.”

  The day that Price’s brother decided to walk away from his ties to the predominately black medical school was also the day that he walked away from his family. “That was more than sixty years ago, and that was one of the last times we saw him.” Price pauses for a moment. “Actually, he did come to my father’s funeral, but he kept to himself and avoided telling us about his life. We got the sense he was living somewhere in Westchester, because after the funeral he asked me to drop him off in a parking lot in Westchester—I think it was just off the Cross County Parkway.”

  That her brother felt he could not succeed or be happy as a black man seems ironic to Price, particularly since she ended up marrying a successful black urologist who had also graduated from Howard Medical School and because she raised two successful sons: One of the sons, Kline Price, is a prominent Washington physician; and the other, Hugh Price, is one of the nation’s most important black civil rights leaders in his position as head of the National Urban League.

  An elegant and well-educated woman who served as a Howard University library archivist after receiving degrees from Howard and Catholic University, Price saw the split between certain of her light-skinned black family members who decided to live among a separate race. Of her nine black siblings, three chose to live as whites. So schizophrenic were the racial choices of that generation of her family that Charlotte often distinguishes between them in our conversation by referring to them in terms of their chosen race: “My black sister who lives in Boston… my white brother who moved to Canada… my white sister who married a doctor…”

  A former resident of Connecticut, Price was married in the elite St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem and recalls that her “white” brother, Ernie, once dated Vicky Bishop, the daughter of St. Philip’s aristocratic black rector, Shelton Bishop. “At the time, Ernie was living as a black man,” explains Price. “They eventually broke up when he decided to become white. I remember Vicky coming to our house in this chauffeur-driven limousine, visiting my mother, trying to ask why Ernie wouldn’t see her anymore. It was so sad.” Suddenly Price adds an ironic twist. “Later, the Bishop girl ended up dating my other ‘white’ brother, Gus.”

  Despite the abandonment that families like Charlotte Schuster Price’s have suffered, people like her have a remarkable ability to maintain a sense of humor and a positive black identity. “Gus didn’t keep in touch with us, but Ernie did at least stay in touch with our mother, and I’ll never forget the time I found out that the two of them ended up accidentally putting their daughters in the same New York private school. Both girls were named Barbara, both had the same last name, and both were passing as white children. At the time, I don’t even think they knew each other.”

  Charlotte, who belongs to the Deltas (her husband was an Alpha) and raised her sons in Jack and Jill, has all the credentials, the affluence, and the friendships that qualify her as a grande dame of black society, but she maintains a modesty that is disarming. She even laughs when she refers to the antics of some of her “white” relatives, who work hard to disguise their black identity. “Some of them call me up and want to know all about their black cousins,” she says, “but the minute I ask them questions about their own lives or relationships, they clam up. One of my white nephews whom I have never met is actually coming to visit me this weekend.”

  When I ask her where Ernie and Gus are now, she pauses. “You know, I really couldn’t tell you. They could be dead by now, but I really don’t know.”

  During conversations with many light-complexioned blacks among the elite, one hears a wide range of family secrets and experiences. An Atlanta attorney who was born into a family where many relatives passed shared some conclusions after observing the way he saw black cousins and siblings pass into the white race. Although he used no such label, I have heard a number of “tips” repeated by other light-skinned blacks. For lack of a better term, I call this disturbing litany of tips “The Rules of Passing”:

  1. Passing will be easier if you attempt it while away at college—preferably on a campus that is predominantly white and is located in a small rural town.

  2. Change your last name to one that is not associated with black family names. Avoid such surnames as Jones, Jackson, Johnson, Williams, Thomas, and Brown.

  3. Re-create your family tree by describing yourself as an only child born of parents who died years ago, and who were also only children.

  4. Relocate to a new community that insulates you from interacting with blacks and that is at least a few hundred miles from your family’s home. Avoid cities like New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina, where whites are adept at spotting light-skinned blacks who are passing.

  5. Think of some manner in which to “kill yourself off” in the minds of black people who know you and your family. If your parents or siblings are willing participants in assisting you, they can say that you now live outside the country, that you have entered a cult or religious order, or even that you have died.

  6. Realize that blacks—and not whites—are the ones who can threaten your security as a black person living a lie. Avoid any meaningful interaction with black people. Affluent blacks who understand the “passing” phenomenon and may try to “out” you are particularly dangerous.

  7. Develop associations with organizations and institutions that will buttress your new white résumé. Convert to the Presbyterian Church or the Republican Party. Contribute to charities like the Junior League or the Daughters of the American Revolution.

  8. Recognize the physical features that can undermine your new identity. Avoid getting tanned at the beach. If your hair is not straight, keep it short, wear a hairpiece, or maintain weekly touchups.

  9. Enhance those physical features that can support your new identity. Lightening your hair color, narrowing your nose, thinning your lips, and adopting a more conservative style in clothing and speech are all simple steps that can aid your transition.

  10. Realize that no one in your life (including a spouse) should be trusted with your secret, except for your adult-aged child, who, presumably, will maintain secrecy because of his or her own self-interest in living as a white person.

  11. Avoid applying for high-profile positions or admission into selective clubs or lineage-obsessed institutions like secret societies or prestigious co-op boards, so that you will not be subjected to probing questions and searches.

  12. Avoid the appearance of being secretive about your racial identity. If your physical appearance makes it possible, claim to be of white European background. If you have a darker complexion, claim to be a mixture that includes a white European background (e.g., Irish, Dutch, German, Polish) and a darker European or Middle Eastern background (e.g., Greek, Cuban, Lebanese, Portuguese). Never claim any ethnic group from continental Africa or Mexico or Central America.

  13. Avoid sitting with or being photographed with black people because if you have any vaguely black features, those characteristics will be exaggerated and
suddenly make you seem quite similar to “real blacks” standing near you. The similarities will quickly become obvious to all.

  14. If the members of the black family you have “divorced” are willing to support your efforts to “pass,” always meet them on neutral territory where neither you nor they live, work, or socialize. Never meet them at your home, and never meet them in settings that are predominately white or that are places your white acquaintances might frequent.

  15. If the black relatives you have “divorced” are unwilling to support your efforts, make a complete break from them, because they can too easily undo the facade you have created in your new community and new life.

  16. To avoid the risk of giving birth to a “throwback child” with black features, consider adopting a white child.

  17. If having your own child is a priority to you, you will be better able to explain your child’s dark features if your spouse is a member of a dark-skinned ethnic group. Southern Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Brazilians, and Cubans are among the groups that fit this category.

  “The Rules of Passing” have pretty much remained unchanged for families today, even though they were first established by northern and southern families who were avoiding the harsh discriminatory practices in existence during the slavery and early postslavery periods.

  “Mother, I’m moving to Los Angeles and I will stay in touch, but I don’t want you and Daddy to visit me there.”

  “Sheila, don’t do this. Don’t do this. It’s a terrible life.” Mrs. Harrison sat at her makeup table with the phone to her ear.

  As her husband sat on a chair, he buried his head in his hands.

  “Mother, I’m sorry, but I’ve made my mind up.”

  “But, Sheila, sweetheart, just come home and let’s talk about this. We can figure it out; we can help you.”

  As she tells me the story of how she “lost” her child, Varnelle Harrison recalls how she attempted to talk her daughter out of passing. As she stares at the black-and-white photo of Sheila and her two other daughters standing in front of a summer beach cottage, she clenches a tissue in her left hand. Angry and somewhat embarrassed by her daughter’s choice, she asks me not to use her or her daughter’s real name (or identifying characteristics), even though she knows that her daughter has long since found a new identity.

  “We had sort of expected that this call might come one day,” says Harrison, a woman who, ironically, has strong ties to her black sorority, which she joined more than sixty years ago. “Some people don’t understand why a black person who was born with a good background of educated and well-to-do parents would want to pass, but I think it’s more likely that we would try to pass rather than a poor black person because we actually get to see what the most privileged white person has in life. We have the same education, the same money, and the same potential. In a way, we get so close that it becomes an awful temptation.” For that reason, she wasn’t terribly surprised that Sheila, a smart and ambitious child, would one day fall prey to that temptation.

  Varnelle says it started becoming obvious when Sheila spent four years in college with only three visits to her parents’ home. “She came home Christmas of freshman and sophomore year—and the summer in between,” says Harrison as she recalls. “She told my husband and me that she was doubling up on coursework in order to graduate in three years, so she was working through vacations and doing research with professors during the summers.”

  It was all a lie, and Varnelle and her now-deceased husband, Roger, had an inkling of what was going on, particularly when Sheila had planned two visits with them and insisted that they stay at an inn that was forty-five minutes from campus.

  When Sheila went away to college in the early 1950s, she picked a small women’s college in the Northeast against the advice of her parents, who had both attended a black southern college.

  “I told her she should be going to Howard, where she could meet some nice friends from good families,” explains Varnelle, who is now almost ninety and has had limited contact with her daughter since that phone call. “But she came up with this college in New England that none of us had ever heard of. I remember asking her why she would ever want to go to a school in a place like that. And the minute I asked it, I knew the answer. It was devastating to my husband. And I think I just got angry.”

  Although she had been raised in a black neighborhood with an entire circle of well-to-do sophisticated black friends, Sheila had intentionally picked a white college in a rural community. Such an environment would allow her an easy transition out of a black culture. Her mother now concludes that it was Sheila’s testing ground to see if she could live a life of passing.

  “It was like she killed herself off as a black person, and then reemerged with an entirely new identity,” says a childhood friend who knew Sheila as a black kid in their southern hometown.

  “She almost never came home for summers during college—always telling her parents that she was doing extra papers and research with the hope of graduating early,” says the childhood playmate. “Around her junior year, we started to hear rumors that she had suffered a breakdown and was institutionalized. Somebody else said she’d left the country and settled in India somewhere. And a couple others—friends of Sheila’s parents—told my parents that she’d killed herself. All these crazy stories to explain her disappearance. It was just a nontopic for Sheila’s parents. They just never discussed her anymore.”

  According to a white classmate who claims to have known Sheila only as a white person, Sheila got married, unbeknownst to her parents, during the late part of her junior year to a local white high school graduate. “I think his last name was Masters,” says the classmate. According to the former classmate, Masters was a quiet, rather simple, unsophisticated man who worked in a grocery store. Presumably, he was somebody that she knew would care little about her background and would be suitably impressed by the fact that she was a college student.

  “I later got the sense,” says Varnelle, who says it was years before she ever heard about a marriage—and to this day, she is not certain it took place—“that she told this boy that we were deceased and that she was an only child with no other family. I never met him or saw him, but he probably wasn’t too concerned about her background. After all, unless you’re in places like certain parts of South Carolina or Virginia, whites don’t think about blacks passing that much. It’s foreign to most white people.”

  Evidently, according to a former friend of Harrison’s daughter, Masters was also somebody Sheila would not stay married to. Making the calculated decision that her husband’s value was only in his name and white family heritage, she made no efforts to meet his friends or to build a life together. One black childhood friend learned that Sheila had taken off the next year from college and guessed that her intent was to gain a different graduation year—further altering her original school records. With a new last name, he concluded, her plan was to graduate and enter the real world with a new name and a new identity. When Mrs. Harrison hears this pieced together, she says, “Before my husband died, we pretty much figured out what she’d done, but I long ago stopped trying to understand the convoluted decisions our daughter made. I’m not even sure she married this man. She may have just taken his name. It’s like trying to figure one of those murder mystery novels.”

  At age twenty-two, only months before graduation, Sheila evidently parted from the white man who was believed to be her husband. Soon after graduating, she left town for Los Angeles with a completely new name and identity.

  Today, Sheila has two different identities for two different communities. The black community in her hometown knew a Sheila Harrison, a black woman, who they believe, for the most part, is either dead, institutionalized, or living in some other country. The white community in her adoptive city and surrounding environs know a Sheila Masters, a white socialite, whose Vermont doctor father and Greek mother died when Sheila was a child.

  “I knew Sheila as a black person,
” says an elderly black physician who belonged to the same fraternity as her father. “And what’s so amazing is that none of us have interacted with her since she re-created herself as a white woman. I have a pretty good idea of where she lives, what she does, and what she looks like. I had the opportunity to meet a white colleague who had actually been to Sheila’s new home fifteen years ago. My colleague knows her only as a white person. From what I understand, when people ask her about her background, she says that her maiden name is Sheila Masters and that she is part Greek.”

  It seems that Sheila never mentions her former husband, but on the rare occasion when someone learns that she has previously been married, she will quite matter-of-factly offer the incredible story that “my name was originally Masters, but I ended up marrying a very distant cousin—also named Masters.” With the dexterity of a double agent, Sheila has developed a clever way to guard her true identity and steer even the most curious genealogist directly into a white family tree. Of course, it was her former husband’s family tree, but by claiming him as a distant cousin, she suddenly made it her family history too.

  “I tried to rekindle my friendship with her,” says a retired college professor who had grown up with Sheila and had been a friend of her father’s. “I ran into her and confronted her in an airport several years ago, but the lies were so outrageous and so well-rehearsed that I couldn’t get through to her. It was so ridiculous to be keeping that story going now that she was successful and living a great life. It’s not as if this was still the 1950s or 1960s anymore. She kept insisting that I was mistaking her for somebody else. Here she was with the same face, the same voice, and the same first name—and she’s telling me that I’m confusing her with somebody else. It absolutely amazes me that white people can’t see the black in her. She even has a southern black twang. But I guess the whites she socializes with have absolutely no ties to black people. If she’s gone through that much trouble to live in the white race, all I can say is good riddance. They can have her.”