Day of the Inn Dweller, 47th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Castor): Hi. White guy here. I don't have the energy today to write another long post about my African American ancestors or how five generations can transform a Black man into a White person - trust me, those posts each took a lot more research and time than you might imagine. Instead, before getting to the next generation (Eli and Henrietta's son, Silas), I wanted to clarify a bit more about me.

My grandfather, Silas Jr., died in 1959. I was five years old. I have no first-hand memories of him, and I can't conjure up any images of him in my mind. My father never spoke to me about him, and on the few occasions when my childlike curiosity caused me to ask about him, Dad just curtly told me he had an unhappy childhood and didn't want to talk about it. Both my Dad and my Mom would just shut me down and end any conversation on the topic almost immediately. 

"You want to know what an unhappy childhood is like?," Dad would ask, rhetorically. "I'll give you an unhappy childhood, starting with a week grounded in your room." That shut me up pretty quick and besides, children are only so curious about the lives of their parents before they were born, so that was pretty much the end of it.

Many years later, adolescence, I started leafing through some books Dad had from his father's library. There was a three-volume Webster's Dictionary with numerous newspaper clippings from the 1940s and '50s and other documents inserted between the pages, all scrapbooked by my grandfather. James Joyce's Ulysses and Karl Marx' Capital. Les Miserables and Ben Hur. I got curious again and once more started asking questions. 

Finally, one day in the early 1970s, my mother finally opened up to me and told me that Dad didn't want to talk about my grandfather because "he married a Black woman." She said it with contempt in her voice - how dare he? -  and didn't offer any more explanation. 

Frankly, I thought that was cool - pretty progressive for the 1950s or whenever. But I could understand my father, that product of a 1940's upbringing and education, being teased by friends and classmates ("your Dad married a . . .") and being embarrassed by the family secret. My parents were garden-variety, mainstream Democrats and I was raised to condemn racism - Martin Luther King, Jr. was good and George Wallace was bad. Our house was pro-civil rights, but not that we did very much about it. I was raised in lily-white, suburban Long Island towns and didn't have a non-white classmates in school until the eighth grade, and then it was like just a few Black students and a handful of Asians. My world was the whitest of whites. and Black people was something I'd only see on t.v., usually the news, or from the seat of my school bus during field trips to the Big City.

And that would have been the end of the story. Could have been. Other than some interesting books and a family anecdote about a grandfather who ran off to marry a Black woman, that would have been the extent of my knowledge. But during the pandemic, as many other people did, I cast about looking for new hobbies and pastimes to fill the lockdown days. Rather than taking up sourdough baking or learning a new language, I bought a three-month membership to ancestry.com and started researching my roots.  

As I went through marriage certificates and dates, I learned that my grandfather, Silas Jr., didn't remarry after leaving my grandfather. In fact, they never split at all - they're together still, to this day, buried side by side in a graveyard on Long Island. But he had married a Black woman, twice as a matter of fact, not after but before marrying my grandmother, his third wife. And then I learned what should have been the most obvious thing in the world but was completely outside my expectations, and that was that the previous marriages weren't progressive acts of racial equanimity at all, but Grandfather himself was Black.

Google yielded a newspaper article about him headlined "Negro WW I Vet to Bring Voting Rights Case to Florida Supreme Court" (he was an attorney). It took a lot of confirmation to convince me the WW I vet in question was indeed my grandfather and not someone else with the same name. And then I found his draft registration and Army induction papers through ancestry, and sure enough, on the line asking for race, the entry was "Negro." The date and place of birth confirmed he was the same man buried next to my grandmother.

I found correspondence between him and W.E.B. DuBois and with Father Divine.

I had lived a lie, although my parents may not have literally lied to me. They never once said, "you're White" or "your grandfather wasn't Black," but who says obvious, self-evident things like that? However, they raised me in an overwhelmingly, almost suffocating, world of whiteness and never once even hinted that my heritage was far more interesting and diverse than I had imagined it to be. By the time of my Covid-era discovery, Dad had already passed away (impermanence is swift) and Mom was becoming increasingly senile, and I could get no explanation or further information from her. She's since passed on as well (impermanence is swift), as had any aunts or uncles who might have some more first-hand information. I'm left to trace the breadcrumbs of Census records, birth, death, and marriage certificates, and random newspaper articles to piece it all together.

I'm angry at my parents for withholding the truth. But in their defense, I don't think it was racism, or at least not explicit racism, that kept them from sharing. My Dad, who grew up through the Great Depression and WWII, probably did have an unhappy childhood, and I'm sure his Dad, Silas Jr., experienced discrimination and bigotry, some of which directly contributed to my father's bad fortunes. I can easily imagine that in those Jim Crow, segregated times, the world of blackness seemed bleak, impoverished, and miserable to Dad, while the world of whiteness seemed bright, affluent, and happy. 

Like any parent, he wanted the best for his children, and so tried to shield, to protect, us from the world of blackness. Wrong-headed and prejudiced? You betcha. But based on racial animosity? Not in its ugliest, most virulent form. I know that's setting the bar pretty low - he wasn't Lester Maddux-racist - but Kennedy Democrats that they were, they taught me to sympathize and respect civil-rights protesters, to never engage in ethnic stereotyping, and that racism, in a word, was bad. 

Blackness was fine, but just, you know, not in our house. So I was taught. 

Fuck that.