He shrugged it off. “Hey, that’s what I’m here for.” He smiled and waved back as she went through the gateway.
He wanted to get on that plane with her so badly it almost made him dizzy, but he knew he had to let her go. Gerry thought of nothing but Dena as he drove back to New York.
On the plane home, Dena could think of nothing except a family she never knew she had until yesterday.
A Brief Family History
Washington, D.C.
1913
The neatly dressed young man with the polished shoes and fresh haircut had been waiting in line at the employment office for over two and a half hours, and when his turn finally came he eagerly stepped forward, hat in hand, his blue eyes bright and hopeful, and said, “Good morning!” The woman who sat behind the desk did not bother to look up and responded to his cheerful greeting with the flat, dull, monotone voice of boredom and indifference so prevalent among civil servants, a voice guaranteed to extinguish even the smallest human enthusiasm as effectively as a bucket of cold water.
“Name.”
The boy tried to recover. “Uh … James Alton Le Guarde.”
“Spell it.”
“Oh, J-A-M—”
The woman closed her eyes. “Last name.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Capital L, E. Capital G, U-A-R-D-E.
“U.S. citizen?”
“Yes, ma’am, but I’ve been living in—”
“Place and date of birth.”
“New Orleans, October 11, 1895.”
“Education.”
“High school, but I plan to—”
“Experience.”
The young man shifted his weight and cleared his throat. “None, really—this will be my first job if I get—”
“Race.”
“Pardon?”
The woman repeated the word, somewhat louder, as if he were deaf. “Race … what is your race?”
The young man, confused by the question, was desperately trying to come up with the right answer. “Uh, I’m not quite sure what you mean. Human race, I guess? Is that right?”
The woman looked at the clock. “Negro or white.”
“Oh, can’t you tell by looking?”
She looked at him with tired, dead eyes. “That’s not my job, sir. Negro or white?”
The young man wiped his sweaty palms on his pants. She waited. “Sir, I’m going to repeat it one more time. Negro or white?”
The young man began to flush. “Well, it’s just that I don’t think I’m either one. Can’t you just put down neither one?”
The woman was losing what little patience she had. “Look, there are fifty people behind you. Make up your mind, one or the other.”
She waited.
“Well, I think my grandmother had some Negro blood but—”
“How much?”
“Oh, I don’t know, not much. Just a little, I think.”
“Half, more than half?”
“Maybe half, I’m not sure …”
The woman stamped the letter N by his name. “Any known health problems?”
“Uh, no. But wait a minute. I think that’s not right. I think you need to put down white, I’m more of a white person than anything else—my father is white.”
“I don’t make the laws. I just work here.” She stamped his application again and held it out. “Section D, take a seat and wait for your name to be called.”
She looked around him. “Next.”
“Wait, where do I go?”
“Section D, in the back. Step aside, please.”
James turned to look at the large board that said SECTION D, where ten or twelve Negro men dressed in worn and tattered work clothes were sitting. He felt his body start to break out in a clammy sweat.
“Miss, I think there’s a mistake. I’ve always been a white person. This is—”
She did not look at him. “If you want a job, go wait in Section D; if you don’t, fine. I don’t care one way or the other. It’s up to you. Move on, please.”
“But isn’t there some other place, a place in between where I can wait?”
She pushed his application to the right side of the desk and motioned for the man behind him to move up. “Next! Move up, please!” A spare, older man in a brown suit stepped up and looked at him.
“Name?” she droned.
The young man moved aside and looked down at his application. It had fallen off the desk and was now lying on the floor. After a moment, he bent over and picked the paper up and walked slowly back to Section D and sat down on the wooden bench beside a Negro man who earlier that morning had tipped his hat to him. The man began to grin. “Well, lookie here. Look who’s a nigger just like me. You a dressed-up, white nigger but you a nigger,” he said, for the benefit of the other men sitting there. “Them fancy clothes and them blue eyes didn’t help you none.” He laughed. “You ain’t nothing but a nigger … just like me … nothing but a white nigger.”
A few men nodded and laughed. The young man looked straight ahead and gritted his teeth and tried to hold back the hot tears he felt forming in his eyes.
The set of circumstances that had placed James Le Guarde in Section D had all started on June 17, 1808. His grandmother, a mulatto woman from the West Indies, had fled from Santo Domingo to escape the many political upheavals. She escaped with the family she had been working for and she came into the port of New Orleans carrying all she owned in a cloth bag and carrying the unborn child of the white planter.
Upon entering New Orleans, a free black, she was given the title of femme de colour, which automatically placed her above the black slave population.
Her daughter, Marguerite Delacroix, James’s mother, grew up to become one of the beautiful red-haired quadroons of New Orleans. She in turn married a young Frenchman from Alsace-Lorraine named Philipe Le Guarde, who had met her and fallen in love with her at one of the world-famous quadroon balls held on Bourbon Street.
When their son, James, was five, they had moved to France. A bright boy, by the time he was eighteen he was determined to go back to the land of his birth and become a great doctor, make his parents proud. He had read of all the wonders of America and had stars in his eyes and the hope of a great future before him. He went on scholarship, and when he arrived at the school he did not have much money and was told that there might be a small job on campus for him. All he had to do was to register with the employment office and get a work permit.
He hadn’t even thought about race. In France, he had not been a Negro. His mother had barely mentioned it.
Two days later he was called into the admissions office. A man sat with a copy of his work permit before him.
“Mr. Le Guarde,” he said somewhat apologetically. “I’m afraid there is a problem. I have looked over your records that were sent and there was no mention of you being a Negro.”
“No, sir, that’s wrong, I’m not. I tried to tell that lady that my grandmother had a little Negro blood but not me. She made a mistake. I tried to explain it to her but she wouldn’t listen.”
The man looked at the young boy. He hated this part of his job. This sort of thing had happened before and it was never pleasant.
“Mr. Le Guarde, I’m sorry but we don’t accept Negroes here. That’s our policy. But I’ll tell you what I will do. I will write a letter to my friend at Howard College and see if they won’t be able to take you.”
James was baffled. He had just come from France, educated like his father before him in the strictest of Catholic schools, and had been trained to believe that to lie was a sin against God. He had not been told what the letter N beside your name meant, how it would become the most important fact about you. He didn’t understand that in America, one sixteenth of Negro blood canceled out all your white blood and made you a Negro under the law. How could anyone understand that? “But I was accepted here, I wanted to study here.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s all I can do for you. Howard is a fine school and I think you’ll
find that you are happier with your own people. Your grades are excellent and I know you will be a credit to your race one day.”
James walked out the door with his records, a letter of recommendation, and the words “a credit to your race” ringing in his ears. He did not know what to do. He did not have the money to return to France. A few weeks later, he entered Howard College and found there were a few light-skinned, blue-eyed Negroes there and he eventually accepted his fate as God’s will and made the best of it.
After graduation James applied to study with a doctor in Vienna whose papers he had admired, and was elated when he was chosen out of a field of over a hundred young men. On his application, the word race was missing. They did not ask, and James did not volunteer; after all, Europe was not America. He trained in Vienna for two years, working under his mentor, Dr. Theodore Karl Lueger. When he was not at the General Hospital of Vienna, he was often a guest at Dr. Lueger’s home. Sometimes on Saturdays he would join the Luegers’ daughter, Gisele, and a group of her friends to take the streetcar around the Ringstrasse and ride the giant Ferris wheel and see all of Vienna. It was a splendid city, a splendid time to be young, and they fell in love. Gisele was madly in love with the young American doctor and wanted to marry him. James had not meant to have this happen because he knew he did not want to take her home to a segregated America. He tried to explain the problems they might have. But Gisele, who had black hair and dark eyes and skin darker than his, laughed when he told her. He could not be a Negro. He had blue eyes and light, honey-colored straight hair. He could not make her understand. When he tried to explain to her father that because of his race, he would not be able to work in a white hospital or live in a white neighborhood. Dr. Lueger sat and listened, and after James had finished he slowly took off his glasses and wiped them with his handkerchief and said in a quiet voice, “Dr. Le Guarde, if you do not wish to marry my daughter, be a man and tell her so, but do not subject her to such a fantastic falsehood.”
James was miserable, guilty about letting it get this far with Gisele. It was too late to turn back without breaking both their hearts. He walked the streets of Vienna all night, agonizing over what to do. Along the Danube, he stared at the bright stars reflected in the dark water, despondent and confused. But by the time the sun came up over the city, he had made a decision. He knew what he was going to do. After all, he had told them he was a Negro, hadn’t he? He had been honest. But he would not take Gisele home to America. No, he loved her too much. He would not subject her to that. He would marry her, and they would stay in Vienna and raise their children there, where they would be safe from prejudice. But James had not counted on Adolf Hitler.
When Dr. Le Guarde returned to Washington to take over as chief of staff at Freeman Hospital, he immediately found himself listed among what W. E. B. Du Bois named the “talented tenth.” He soon belonged to the Urban League, the NAACP, the Columbian Education Association, the Music and Literary Society, Boule, all the clubs and organizations of elite black society. He was certainly thought of as one of the leading black aristocrats of Washington, who vacationed in the exclusive holiday spots—Sarasota Springs, Highland Beach, Maryland. They moved in rarefied air.
But his wife and children had not been happy. Over the years Dr. Le Guarde had come to believe that he had a duty to try to be a credit to his race, to help his people; his children held no such beliefs.
Dr. Le Guarde often thought about that morning when the letter N had been stamped on his work permit. It had only taken a second, but that one second, that one letter, had changed the course of his life, and of his children’s lives. And even today, as he sat in his office so many years later, he still wondered if he had done the right thing by telling the truth. Having seen his wife die an unhappy, misplaced woman, and his children so tormented, he wondered if he had the chance to go back and lie, would he?
He was a deeply religious man, but he still did not know. All he knew was that he had lost his beloved son. His beloved Theo was gone, and now he might be losing his daughter, Marguerite, as well. He could feel her slipping away, withdrawing.
He opened his desk drawer and pulled out the only thing he had left of Theo and reread it, as he had almost every day for the past five years.
Dear Daddy,
Please forgive me but I can no longer be your son. I have tried to feel the way you do but I am not like you, I feel no kinship with the Negro race and to champion a cause I do not feel in my heart would do them no good and would clearly destroy me. Let others who feel strongly and have deeper convictions speak out and set examples. I must have a chance to prove myself on my own and not be forced to carry an entire race on my back.
Don’t you see, Daddy, I would not be just a man who plays the violin, but a colored man who plays the violin. A curiosity, my every move a political cause. Music does not judge who plays it, but people do. You tell me it is a sin to lie but, Daddy, my whole life is a lie. I am caught between two lies. I am not a Negro, I am not a white man, I am nothing, a thing in between, fitting in nowhere. I tell one lie only to stop the other lie, but I lie no matter what I say. You say God’s will be done but I do not believe in a God that says I must sacrifice my chance in this life because of some man-made law. It is not you I leave, it is the Negro race, who has never done anything but resent my white skin and cause you nothing but heartache. These are not my people, Daddy. They do not own my talent. It is mine and mine alone. I am going where I can be free. Please do not look for me. Forget about me. I will love you forever.
Theo
Tears came to the old man’s eyes. Poor Theo. As if he could just forget about the boy he loved, the boy he had held as a baby. He folded the worn page.
It was not an unusual story. Thousands of people had buckled under the pressures of segregation and had quietly slipped into the white world, but it was not an easy life, either.
Dena Nordstrom, Girl Reporter
Elmwood Springs, Missouri
1978
The minute Dena walked in the door, she called Dr. Diggers and told her about her mother.
Diggers sounded as surprised as Dena had been. “Well, I must say of all the things I suspected, this was not one of them, and I should have guessed. Me of all people! When I first started in practice, half of my patients were passing. Oh, yes, unfortunately I know all about it and I tell you, it was a bitch. I don’t care if you were a Jew passing for Gentile or black passing for white, it was a tricky business no matter how you slice it. The point is: How do you feel about it?”
“Betrayed, I guess. Confused. Lost, like I never really knew my mother.”
“Sweetie pie, there was a big part of her you didn’t know. But at least now we have a pretty good explanation of why she seemed so remote. No wonder you felt she wasn’t there for you. She was probably worried to death twenty-four hours a day. Passing is a complicated issue, with a lot of serious problems that go along with it. Guilt, confused identity, feelings of isolation, deception, abandonment. It’s very stressful; I’ve seen it drive people right out of their minds.”
“I understand all that, but I just can’t understand why she didn’t tell me. I could have helped her.”
“I can’t be sure of the exact reason, but I can tell you it wasn’t because she didn’t trust you; it was just plain fear. When you live a lie like that, people tend to start to get paranoid. She probably was afraid to trust anybody.”
“But I wasn’t anybody. I was her daughter.”
“Yes, but don’t forget you were the closest thing to her. She might have been afraid of losing you, afraid if you knew, you wouldn’t love her. I’ve seen it happen before. People push away the very ones they don’t want to lose trying to hold them. Listen, I’m not saying what your mother did was right, but in her defense, she had good reason to be afraid. You have to understand how things were back then; when she was a girl, there was no such thing as integration. Black and white were still two very different worlds.”
“I know, but
it was 1959—couldn’t she see things were changing? New laws were being passed?”
“No, I don’t think so. From what you’ve told me about your mother, I suspect she was not able to see much of anything going on around her. People who are passing are too busy looking over their own shoulders, trying to cover their tracks, to notice much else. She was probably stuck in the same old fear, with the same old tape running around in her head, and couldn’t see past it.”
“Do you think it had anything to do with her just disappearing like that?”
“Maybe. People who have disappeared from one life often do it again.”
“But why then? Why at Christmas? Why couldn’t she have waited?”
“Oh, sweetie, it could have been one of a hundred different reasons. She may have met someone or she may have just reached a breaking point, living with that much stress every day. You know, everybody handles stress differently. But a good possibility is that it just built up over the years and she couldn’t take the pressure any longer and one day she had some sort of psychic break, lost touch with reality. In plain English, one day she may have just snapped and took off. You hear about it all the time. People leave for the store and never come back home, just disappearing off the face of the earth.”
“Is that what you think happened?”
“Well, that would be my guess, based on what we know. But the important thing is for you to finally come to terms with the fact that her problems had nothing to do with the way she felt about you. She gave you all the love she was capable of giving under the circumstances. It wasn’t as much as you needed but there it is; it’s unfair and it’s lousy but that’s life, and at least now we know the basic cause of your problems. The next thing for us to do is to try and get beyond them and get on with your life. All right, now, when are you coming back to New York?”
“I’m not sure, I haven’t thought about it yet.”
“No, you are probably still in a state of shock. Do me a favor and take some time before you make any decisions about anything, OK?”