“Papa, what am I?”
His initial look of panic gave way, and his laughing blue eyes twinkled mischievously, “Everything but elephant and catfish.”
“No, I’m serious, Grandpa!”
“So am I!”
When I was a child I heard the whispers and the jokes and I noticed things that didn’t always make sense, but I never caught on. I truly was ignorant to the adult “jokes” and comments.
I remember sitting in the living room listening to my parents’ conversation in the dining room. My dad had been to the dentist or doctor and was telling my mom that they told him he had a condition typically “only seen in people of a certain nationality.” He snickered and said, “It must be the BLACKfoot in me!” He really emphasized the Black part of Blackfoot, and they both laughed hysterically until they nearly fell out of their chairs. I didn’t dare correct my dad, but we’d been studying Native American Indians at school, and the Blackfoot didn’t live in the deep South where my dad’s family was from. I didn’t get what was so funny.
My upbringing was peppered with wise anecdotes from “the old Indians,” and household decors often featured artifacts and paintings of Indians. Grandpa was just an Indian; that’s all I ever knew. Sure, a couple of his sisters had nappy hair and I’d never seen an Indian with hair like that, but I hadn’t seen a lot of Indians in my life either. Grandpa looked like the paintings of the beautiful Indian braves that you see advertised in the inserts in the Sunday paper.
My dad couldn’t wait to see my babies as soon as each one was born. Granted, my dad absolutely loved babies and animals. They fascinated him, and he was incredibly tender with them. But, it was always almost as if he was looking for something on my newborns.
When my fourth child was about four years old my dad was playing chase with him in the yard. They circled and ran figure eights, laughing and calling each other Lucy and Claire. Their girl names for each other was their running joke for years. Winded, my dad leaned against the car where I was standing. He grinned watching his grandson continue running in the grass, his curls bouncing as he hollered for his grandpa to chase him. My dad then turned to me and soberly said, “Ya know, every time you or your mom were pregnant I worried the whole time we’d have a throw back, and how would we ever explain that to people?”
I was in my mid 30’s before I knew about my African-American great-grandfather. I finally understood the comments and whispers and jokes and insults I’d heard my whole life.
My maternal grandfather’s mother helped me with my project for a genealogy class I took in junior high. She confirmed, as I had always heard, that her family was descended from poor Irish peasants and she had married a Dutchman. She was very detailed, and I submitted my lovely yellow folder with all of my great grandma’s “facts” to my teacher. I got an A.
In my 20’s I worked with a woman who constantly mocked me. I tried to tell her that I knew my background, and I was not Jewish. She insisted that, having been raised in New York, she had “lived around them” her “whole life,” and she firmly believed that someday I’d find out “there was a Jew in the woodpile somewhere.”
Eventually my mom’s cousin completed her lifelong search for our heritage. She kept running into dead-ends with the information we’d grown up with. However, thanks to the invention of the internet she was able to connect with distant cousins and records that had been impossible to reach before. Once she found those two small key details she was able to track and document both sides of my Grandpa’s family back to the 13th century.
There wasn’t “a Jew in the woodpile.” That’s all the woodpile was! D had been right; I have a Jewish heritage. My Grandpa’s father’s family were German Jews who fled to Holland, hence the “we’re from Holland” half-truth, to escape persecution. When they came to America they chose to lie about their heritage in order to start fresh and not face persecution here. Apparently D wasn’t the only one to recognize it in us though because another of my mom’s cousins remembers being called “dirty Jew names” in school as a child.
Grandpa’s mother’s side was even more interesting. She is descended from French royalty. Our ancestor was apparently a cousin to William the Conqueror. One of our forefathers signed the Magna Carta. Our knighted fathers fought in every single one of the crusades and at one point were supposedly the largest landholders in England. One of our first “fathers” to come to America lied about who he was, even changing his last name. He had earned the nickname “the blade of England,” so was discovered when someone drew him into a sword fight. The story goes that all who witnessed the dual immediately knew his true identity.
True identity.
My identity growing up was that I was Irish, Dutch, Indian, Welsh, and German…….everything but elephant and catfish. My identity growing up was that I was dumb, ugly, skinny with big hips, a little bitch, good for nothing but sex. Almost all of it was lies.
My true identity is that I am American Indian, Jewish, African-American, French, Welsh, German, and Irish. I love those things. I love the richness of who I really am and where I really come from.
It’s been easy to accept the truth of my ethnicity because I’ve seen it in black and white, printed documentation of the past for future generations. It hasn’t been as easy to accept the truth of the rest of my identity and get over the other lies they told me about who I really am. But, I have got to connect those two dots. They lied. If I can embrace the facts about my bloodline that I have learned as an adult, then why am I struggling to embrace the other “truths” people tell me about myself now?
So, I’m not Dutch. Maybe I’m not dumb either. So, Grandpa wasn’t just Indian, maybe I’m not “just a little bitch.” I am descended from royalty and from people groups who have faced extreme persecution and torture and yet survived and thrived. The blood of martyrs and slaves and princesses pulses through my body. Theirs is the blood of strength and resilience and character. And, they gave it to me. I need to reject the lies, all of them, and instead choose to believe in the richness of my real identity.
Barbara Backer-Gray said:
There you go, you have practically the whole world in your blood, as ultimately we all do. If you are interested in what happened in the Netherlands during WWII, including Jewish persecution, I have a whole series of posts about that, based on a presentation I did for my son’s 9th grade history class, starting here: http://aresidentalien.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/american-teens-and-wwii-netherlands/. One of the posts is about friends of my parents in Australia, who were a Dutch resistance guy and a Jewish woman from Germany who had fled to Holland with her two children.
P.S. It’s Welsh, not Welch. Your ancestor came from Wales, not grapes. 😉
anewfreelife said:
LOL! And, I know that……I ALWAYS proof read my posts. I did NOT this time because I had to get the little two to swim lessons. Oh, I will not rush again! How embarrassing! I don’t know though…..everything but elephant and catfish, including grapes?! Ha ha!
I am very interested! I will read those with my kids! Thank you!
Barbara Backer-Gray said:
Maybe not with your younger kids.
anewfreelife said:
I was thinking the 16 and 12 year olds. Would it be too much for a 12 year old?
anewfreelife said:
Ack! I did it not once, but twice! Geez!
Melanie said:
If you are included to read an old book, you might enjoy “Black No More” by George Schulyer (1932). Your post reminds me of the lessons of the novel (a machine is invented that can turn black people white…I’ll leave it at that).
anewfreelife said:
Yes, I LOVE old books! Was trying to talk my 16 year old out of his thesaurus today. It’s a Roget’s from 1933 with a facsimile in the front of it of the first page of the MS classified catalogue of words completed in 1805!
Bethany said:
WOW tell him to keep that thing safe!! I had a Webster’s dictionary from 1910. It was passed down to my by my grandfather and was destroyed by my husband.
anewfreelife said:
Oh, I am so sorry! Gosh, the things we’ve lost to those wretched men! If only……
Melanie said:
Ok. Now I’m going to try to talk your 16 year old out of his thesaurus. That’s a real treasure.
anewfreelife said:
The first book I ever owned I received as a gift when I was three. It was Mis’ Beauty, a beautiful little lavender book from 1910. I hid it a few years ago when my husband was making me sell all of my stuff to keep us afloat so he didn’t have to actually go to work each day. Now, I can’t figure out where I hid it! But, this conversation has got me obsessed. I HAVE to find my little book!
anewfreelife said:
Okay, as soon as I can, I am ordering that book. Reviews called it “delicious!”
Melanie said:
It’s one of those books that has never lost its social relevance. I hope you enjoy!
Bethany said:
I have light hair, pail skin, and turn red at a pin drop. Everything about my looks says Irish. My younger sister has beautiful bronze skin, dark hair, and dark eyes. Everything about her looks says Native American. We are both and German, Scottish, French, and African. My Grandpa’s Grandmother was full blooded Cherokee but her marriage certificate says that she was French because if he was Indian she would not have been aloud to married a White man. My Grandma will never admit that there is African blood in our veins but with a last name like mine it is impossible to deny 🙂
I grew up in a VERY small southern town in the foothills of the Ozarks. There was actually a law on the books at the court house that said “A black man can not spend the night within city limits”. Members of my family were (and are) in the KKK and my best friend from high school never knew her older sister or her two nieces because her sister married a black man and was disowned. It is amazing the bigotries people will hold on too and the things that people are willing to lie about. You are 100% right when you say if they lied to you about that and you accept that, that is a lie then you can accept that they lied to you about everything else as well. Intellectually we know this. It is getting our hearts to believe it that will be the trick.
anewfreelife said:
Those horrible types of laws and social attitudes make it very understandable as to why certain family members were afraid of anyone knowing the truth. I don’t fault them for being scared and hiding. Though I certainly still have a lot of hard feelings for dead family members who were racist to their dying day.
Exactly….amen! I’ve got to get my heart on board with my mind. Whether they lied because they were scared or because they were mean or because that’s what they’d been taught, it doesn’t matter. They lied. Their opinions and words cannot be trusted.
Barbara Roberts said:
You seem to be giving yourself great therapy here. Joining the dots, tossing out the lies, recalibrating, letting the healthy neuron pathways get stronger and the harmful pathways atrophy and die off. Good healing stuff!
anewfreelife said:
Thank you; I do feel like I’m making more headway quicker with this “therapy” than I did with bimonthly meetings with a “real” counselor. It feels good! : D
Lee said:
FYI: Genetic research shows that about 30% of white Americans (over 50 million) have at least one black ancestor. This stat is from a fascinating article:
“How White Are Blacks? How Black Are Whites?”
http://www.isteve.com/2002_How_White_Are_Blacks.htm
anewfreelife said:
Thank you! For some reason I actually thought it was higher. I LOVED the article you linked to here. Fascinating. I did up a Family Life class for my kids (I homeschool) a few years ago. Since I have never let my kids use the word race (I believe we are all the race of “man” and so it is more appropriate to refer to the
variations as language group or tribe) to define people groups I incorporated that ideology into my class. For that segment I had them read One Blood. I’m going to add the the above article to my notebook for that class. Good stuff!
My kids always liken it to the identity crisis Marty, in the cartoon Madagascar, undergoes when he questions, “Am I black with white stripes, or am I white with black stripes?” I like to say I’m calico, as in a calico cat. : D