My mother grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in Springfield, Illinois. It was the capital city at the center of a state at the center of the country. But Springfield was also a center of insidious institutional racism. In 1908, a white woman was allegedly raped by a Black man (the same accusation leveled against my father and countless other innocent Black men), which ignited a three-day riot by white citizens in which two Black men were lynched and four white men were shot to death by Black businessmen protecting their property. In the 1920s, when my mother’s mother was coming of age, the Ku Klux Klan had a strong presence in the city and the city government, holding several key positions and setting the moral compass for the community. Springfield was a city openly cloaked in hate.
One of the few stories my mother told of her childhood was of being in kindergarten and sharing her mat with a Black boy at naptime. For this, the nuns at her Catholic school publicly shamed her. Obviously there was a rancid repertoire of slurs for Black people in my mother’s youth, but she also told me of the odd slurs and degrading names they had for Italians, Jewish people, and all “others” when no one else was around. She made me privy to the hierarchy of racism in their white community. Ironically, even among her beloved Irish there was a social caste system that divided the “lace curtain Irish” from the “shanty Irish.” The lace curtain Irish were “pure,” well off, respectable, and “properly placed” in society (think of the Kennedys), while the shanty Irish were characterized as dirty, poor, and ignorant. There was a critical and pitiful need, in this system, to have a host of others to look down on. To my mother’s mother, all “others” were below the Irish. But Black? Black people were always at the absolute bottom of the order. Nothing was below Black.
My mother not only ignored the moral code of her hometown, she rebelled against it, later becoming active in the civil rights movement. By the standards of her environment and family, she was a liberal eccentric. She was interested in life outside of their tiny, tight, white world. She was intellectually curious and drawn to culture, especially to classical music. She recalls that one day, while listening to a classical music station on the radio, she heard an aria. It was the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard, and she was determined to chase it, inside herself and out in the world. She decided to start her quest in New York City, which seemed a million miles away from her family and the small-minded place they inhabited.
Young Patricia had big dreams—many of which she realized. She was extremely gifted and driven. Winning a scholarship to the prestigious Juilliard School for music, she would go on to sing with the New York City Opera, making her debut at Lincoln Center. My mother built an exciting, artsy, bohemian life in New York City. She was in the downtown scene and dated a diverse cast of men by whom her mother would have been mortified. Her pure Irish Catholic mother wouldn’t approve of her dating anyone who wasn’t lily-white. (Of course, in turn, the white supremacists of Illinois weren’t crazy about the Irish or Catholics—the WASPs [White Anglo-Saxon Protestants], as they were referred to at that time, always needed a fresh supply of people to have beneath them.) An Italian guy would have been a problem, a Jewish man, a tragedy. My grandmother would’ve come completely undone if she knew my mother had had a steamy affair with a rich, older Lebanese man named François, right before she fell in love with, and married, a man her mother could not even conceive of. My father. A beautiful, complicated Black man. This, to my grandmother (and her community) was the worst thing her daughter could do to her and to the family lineage. Talking to a Black man was considered a shame; befriending one, an outrage; carrying on with one, a major scandal, but marrying one?
That was an abomination.
It was the ultimate humiliation. My mother’s marriage to my father was beyond betrayal to her mother; it was a high crime against her white heritage, punishable by excommunication.
To her mother, who grew up in a time and place where the KKK openly held mass rallies and were active in government, marrying a Black man carried a burden of shame she could not fathom. Her mother was raised not to drink from the same fountain as Black people, not to sit in the same seat as Black people or swim in the same pool. She was taught, and believed, that Black people were dirty and that Blackness could rub off. After all, the United States is the birthplace of the “one-drop rule,” the racial classification system that asserts that any person with an ancestor possessing even one drop of Black blood is considered Black.
In my grandmother’s view, my mother loving my father made her a bottom-feeder, procreating with the lowest human group and making mulatto mongrels—me and my siblings. Needless to say, my grandmother completely disowned her daughter. She told no one else in the family her daughter was married to a Black man (and pregnant with a son). Save for a few sporadic, secret phone calls, my mother became almost entirely disconnected from her mother. She wouldn’t go back to her
