A black secretary who worked for one of Sheila’s white friends says, “When I first saw Mrs. Masters stop by to see my boss, I immediately assumed she might be black. Even with her white skin and the straight hair, in my eyes, there was nothing else she could be. But then I could tell the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes when I greeted her that something was up. She was always direct with the white secretaries but not with me. She wasn’t mean to me, but it was almost as if she was scared of me. And here she was, this rich, confident lady with all these rich white friends. I guess she was afraid they’d all dump her if they knew she was black.” The secretary paused and shook her head in disgust.
“I hope you enjoy your new scarf,” said the saleswoman as she slid the change across the counter and placed the large Goldsmith’s shopping bag on the counter for Erma Clanton.
“I’m sure I will, thank you.” As Clanton walked back past the silk scarves that she had been perusing, she stopped in front of one of the mirrors to adjust the lapel on her jacket. In the reflection, she caught a glimpse of someone in the background who looked familiar.
Erma turned around and made her way to the next department—ladies’ hats. She looked around her and saw the glass countertops and small racks lined with the latest fashions from New York and abroad. What Erma had always liked about Goldsmith’s was that it brought a big-city, northeastern flair to her hometown of Memphis. A large, sophisticated New York kind of store without the New York hustle and bustle.
“Sadie!” she called out, recognizing the profile that she had only glanced at earlier.
“Oh, my,” responded a woman who was trying on a navy-blue hat with a spray of silk flowers in the back.
Erma had not seen Sadie (not her real name) since they had graduated from Booker T. Washington High School and gone off to college in the early 1950s. Almost a decade had passed, but she would have recognized her friend’s bright-red hair and sharp olive features anywhere.
Sadie smiled faintly as the saleswoman removed the navy-blue hat and replaced it with a brown one. She spun around and rushed over to her friend, stopping Erma short.
“Girl, it is so good to see you.” Erma put down her bag and leaned over to hug her old friend.
“No,” the friend whispered briskly. “Erma, please don’t hug me. Don’t touch me.”
Erma’s outstretched arms froze strangely.
“I’m sorry, Erma. I’ll grab your hands and shake them.” The olive-complexioned hands very tenderly grabbed Erma’s deep-brown wrists and brought them down to Erma’s sides with a whisper, “It’s very nice to see you, Erma, but not here.”
As Erma glanced over Sadie’s shoulder to the arched eyebrows of the white saleswoman, she was confused. Then she glanced up at the price tag that hung from the new hat on Sadie’s head. She suddenly understood what was going on. Sadie was passing for white.
“Yes, Sadie, some other time.”
“It had not occurred to me why Sadie wouldn’t let me hug her until I saw the unpurchased hat on her head,” explains Clanton, who is a retired professor from Memphis State University and who shares this memory with me during a recent visit to my aunt’s home in Memphis. “At that time, blacks were not allowed to try hats on in department stores in Memphis. We had to either buy it or just look at it without touching it. So, when I realized she was trying a hat on with the assistance of the saleswoman, I realized she was passing. And if she’d hugged me, I would have blown her cover.”
Erma shook her head—not with disgust over Sadie’s actions, but more over the fact that she had not immediately recognized the situation.
One of the reasons many blacks have historically allowed their black brothers and sisters to pass without exposing them is either that it caught them off guard or that they were afraid of subjecting these individuals to consequences from the law or the general white public. Others neglected to expose these passing blacks because it sometimes gave them satisfaction to see one of their own outsmart white people and the outrageous Jim Crow treatment of the black community. My father, who is the lightest-complexioned member of my immediate family but by no means light enough to pass, remembers a childhood acquaintance who used to pass whenever she went to the movie theater in Memphis.
“For Charlene, it was a big joke. A group of us would all walk over to the theater together, and about a block away, all the black-looking kids would drop behind and let her go ahead of us. When we got to the theater on Beale Street, we’d all see Charlene standing on line with the white people at the front door. She’d slyly wink at us, and then we’d go around to the side alley door where black patrons had to come in. Up in the balcony where blacks had to sit, we’d all be able to look down and see Charlene fooling the white kids that sat around her. When the show was over, we’d meet up about two blocks away and Charlene would be laughing about her prank.”
The idea of “sticking it to white people” or beating them at their own game of racial segregation and favoritism has been an issue for many generations in the black community. While children might have done it as a prank, many parents and adults, like Sheila Harrison and Sadie, did it before—and continue it today—because of the economic advantages that are afforded to whites in the area of housing, employment, or treatment in public facilities. With the exception of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who had passed as white and dated white girls during his early college years at Colgate University in upstate New York, one rarely finds high-profile blacks attempting to lead double lives, so any advantages being gotten by black people who pass are usually individual and generally affect only the people who are being duped.
In her book Ambiguous Lives, George Washington University history professor Adele Logan Alexander looks at the generations of her family living as free blacks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and points out that of her paternal grandmother’s eight siblings—all of whom were light enough to pass—only one did. And among her father’s siblings, she speculates that only one—a brother—passed, and that after he chose to do so, he created such selective rules about who could not meet his white wife that “the rest of my father’s family simply got fed up with it.”
“Just like my own relatives living during that time and later periods,” says Alexander, “most educated or privileged blacks feel a sense of obligation to acknowledge their own black community and to give back to others who may not have the same advantages. Most are simply not willing to abandon an entire community.”
Unfortunately, there is a high price to be paid by family members—particularly the children of blacks who pass. There are many stories of families who have been polarized on the issue of racial passing. I have at least a half-dozen cousins who are often mistaken for white and could pass if they chose. I feel grateful not to have lost them or other close relatives to the practice, but I can’t help wondering what it must be like to be privy to remarks made by white people on the issue of race when they have no idea who is present.
There have been many blacks who have managed to divorce their parents or fool their friends and colleagues, but the passing blacks create an even more complex situation when they raise children. The passing black who marries a white will sometimes tell the spouse and sometimes not. If the white spouse objects, it’s something that he or she can avoid or dismiss through divorce. But what happens to the child of passing blacks? How are they affected by the lies and by the fact that their racial makeup is permanent and will always be called into question?
“Kids used to think I was adopted when I was in college. They’d see the photo of my parents in my dormitory room and say, ‘Who’s that?’” says Loretta Josephs, a fifty-two-year-old light-brown-complexioned woman who now wears her graying brown hair in small braids, as she tells the story of how she grew up as a dark-skinned child in a family that lived as white people. It took her twenty years to come to terms with the fact that her parents had developed all kinds of lies to avoid confronting the family’s true racial makeup. And when she asks me to disgu
ise her name (and certain identifying characteristics), it becomes obvious that she is still not ready to fully accept her family’s situation in a public way. She admits that her parents went so far as hiring a black nanny who would pose as Loretta’s mother in situations that might prove awkward for the other family members.
“My mother was white and my father was black—but passing—so I was a real problem. My two older brothers came out real light, but I came out dark. I was a throwback child.”
As Josephs opens a large four-ring photo album, her point becomes immediately obvious. She sat peacefully in the dining room of her spacious colonial home while pointing out yellowed family photos taken in the 1940s. One photo showed a white couple on a picnic blanket with two white boys sitting in front of them. The boys, with clean-shaven heads, looked to be no more than four or five years old. They smiled broadly at the camera with complexions as milky-white as their parents’. The baby, dressed in a striped jumper, was also smiling—but she didn’t seem to fit into the scene. She looked strangely out of place, even while being held in her mother’s lap. The baby was black.
“That was me when I was ten months old. And as you can see, I was the darkest thing in that picture.” The woman showed a succession of photos—all family gatherings—from birthday parties to outings at the park, Christmas tree poses, backyard cookouts. And in each one of them, Loretta was immediately identifiable. She was always the only black-looking child in the group. In a few of the photos, there was a black woman in a white uniform standing at the back.
“My parents hoped I would get lighter, because, as you can see from the pictures, we lived in a white world—went to a white church, lived in a white neighborhood. My mother used to scrub me twice a day—hoping that my skin would lighten up. She would make up a bath mixture in the tub using up a quart of milk, two squeezed lemons, and a teaspoon of liquid bleach. When she was done, she’d rub my knees and elbows with the halves of the lemon, all the while saying to me, ‘Now, if you stay off your knees, they’ll lighten up.’”
And there was something else Loretta remembers that was always kept near her bathroom tub.
“And she always kept a jar of Nadinola Bleaching Cream within reach. It was in the bedroom, in the kitchen cabinet, in the glove compartment of our car. Nadinola Cream—for clear complexions. That was a popular thing back then, but I remember you could only find it in the black neighborhoods, so my mother always had our maid get it for her. Of course I had no idea that all kids weren’t scrubbed this way every morning and night. I thought it was normal.”
Like many very young children of color-conscious parents, it was a long time before Loretta even noticed her own color difference. It was a long time before she noticed that she was considerably darker than her parents and brothers. Like other children, she saw size and gender as the primary differences between herself and her brothers and parents. The distinctions her parents drew and the rules they established seemed to be logical and fair when they were issued to her.
“When I was told by my parents not to play with the kids in the neighborhood, I thought it was because I was a girl and they were worried that I’d get hurt. When we went to the beach and they kept me fully clothed with a visored hat pulled tightly over my head and ears, I thought it was because it was unladylike to get tanned. As they held me under umbrellas, protecting me from what Mom called ‘the sun’s harsh rays,’ they offered an innocent explanation for everything. They wouldn’t allow me ever to pick up the telephone because they said little girls didn’t do that. It wasn’t until I was about five years old that I sensed real differences and started to realize there was more behind the special rules and special treatment. One example was when my mother used to hot-comb my hair with a blazing iron comb every morning. Once again, I thought all ladies got their hair hot-combed.”
“One day, my brother Jimmy came in the room and asked, ‘Why do you do that to Retty’s hair?’ My oldest brother, Sammy—who was eight or nine then said, ‘Because she’s got nigger hair when she wakes up every day.’”
“Even though Sammy didn’t speak the words in a mean tone—and though I wasn’t quite sure what ‘nigger hair’ was, I could immediately tell it got my mother mad. That night, my brothers and I heard my mother tell my father, ‘You know, Sam, Retty’s going to be a problem for us when she starts school in September.’ All we could hear then was my father say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then we heard mom start crying.”
“About a month later, to our complete surprise,” explained Josephs, “my mother announced that she and Dad had hired a maid.”
“‘Your father and I decided that with Retty starting school in two months,’ my mother said gaily, ‘I will need more help around the house. You boys are old enough to do your own things and get yourselves ready for school. But Retty will need extra help, since she’s young. So the new maid will be helping Retty with her things.’”
“‘So the maid will really be Retty’s maid,’ my father added—picking up almost exactly where mother had left off—as if with a script. ‘She will walk Retty to school at St. Catherine’s, take her to the playground on Saturdays, bring Retty to the doctor, and so forth.’”
“‘St. Catherine’s?’ Jimmy asked. ‘Isn’t she going to our school?’”
“‘No, Retty will not be going to public school. As a girl, it’s better for her in a nice Catholic school.’”
Loretta then remembers her father interrupting the discussion to explain how she and her brothers were to address the new maid. “‘You are each to call her Mam when she gets here.’”
“‘Mam?’ my younger brother asked. ‘What’s her name?’”
“‘Mam—that’s her name and that’s what you will call her.’ My parents then got up from the dining-room table with their plates and went into the kitchen.”
Loretta remembers her brother staring at her. A new school, a new maid, and new rules were all elicited by her coming of age. She admits she was confused. “All three of us were surprised. But my surprise soon turned into a feeling of superiority. My brothers glared at me and left the table.”
The following month, when “Mam” joined her family and moved into a bedroom over the garage, Loretta was moved into a bedroom that allowed her to share Mam’s bathroom. As her mother walked her brothers to school, Mam took Loretta by bus to an integrated Catholic school that was just on the other side of her town’s border.
“By the time I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I realized a lot of things. I realized that neighbors were whispering things about me being a Negro, or that I was a half-breed, or that I was Mam’s child. I realized also that my parents had kept me from answering the phone because people had been calling and saying racist things into the phone. But most devastating of all for me was when I realized that the reason why Mam was hired as ‘my maid’ was that she was, in a sense, acting as my ‘mother’ for the people who were watching from the outside world.”
By the time Loretta was sent away to boarding school at age twelve while her brothers remained at home, she had stopped believing all of her parents’ special rules about what young ladies were supposed to do. She realized that she was standing in the way of her family’s ability to live as a white family in a white world. Today, living very obviously as a black woman, she says that her parents are deceased and that she has little contact with her brothers. Married to a black attorney who collects African art, she has no white friends and fully embraces her black identity. “I intentionally wear my hair in cornrows and get black in the sun,” Josephs says with a slight chuckle that is belied by more than a few tears in her eyes. “I feel that I’ve got to make up for the years of blackness that my parents stole from me.”
The phenomenon of passing is among the least-discussed issues within the community of the black elite. It is a source of great shame and annoyance, even among those people who recognize its necessity and its benefits from an economic perspective. Although I have known a few people who pass in order to gain short-term a
dvantages such as better professional connections in business networking organizations or in order to purchase a co-op in a particular apartment building, most accomplish this by simply omitting information about themselves rather than actively lying about their family identity. The issue has less relevance in today’s black community, because while most affluent blacks in America had historically also been light-skinned, today there are large numbers of blacks who are able to gain admission to top academic institutions, as well as to top employers, regardless of the shade of their Negroid complexion. As more and more opportunities open for blacks in housing and employment, the primary remaining reasons that certain blacks will choose to pass are those that determine their ability to maintain close intimate relationships with people who would otherwise not embrace them.
AFTERWORD
The issue of class has always been a difficult and polarizing subject among blacks in America. Some have argued that the mere discussion of class differences within the black community serves to undermine the possibility of unifying a race that has long faced other serious challenges. Many others would insist that to disregard class differences among black Americans would be to treat the population as a monolith—a group with only one experience and only one perspective.
Just as we have acknowledged and studied the class distinctions among white immigrants of European backgrounds—the Irish, the German Jews, the Italians—I believe it is necessary to examine all of the socioeconomic classes among African Americans. A complete review of American history demands that we understand the contributions that have been made by the black elite because they are as authentically “American” as the Irish elite and the Jewish elite, and because they are also as authentically “black” as the urban working class blacks that historians and sociologists so consistently research.
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