Passing

My grandmother often said that she could pass for white. The first time I heard her say this was when my sisters and I were making a lot of noise in our house in Fort Lauderdale and she was remarking how the neighbors could hear us. Since this was in a predominantly white neighborhood, it was extra bad because she could pass for white and we couldn’t. Apparently the yelling would feed into some kind of stereotype.

My sisters and I laughed at this comment behind her back; to her face, we shrugged and said nothing. This was during the late ‘70s and such notions as “passing” barely registered.  

Not that grandmother ever intentionally tried to pass; but apparently she felt better knowing that she could. Sort of like if you were walking down a dark alley, it was better to have a gun and know how to use it. Growing up in Jamaica, an island blessedly free of Jim Crow and legalized apartheid, she hadn’t needed to pass. Her mother was a light-skinned black woman. Her father had been a Scot who provided her with 14 brothers and sisters.

In the 1920s, a number of her siblings decamped to the southern United States of America in search of better economic opportunities. And a few of them decided to cross over the color line. I often wondered about that moment, when they made that decision.  Was it upon arriving, when they saw the “white only” signs? Or was this sown much earlier as a member of a very light-skinned, poor family in a small place, possessing only what used to be called “nature’s passport” and using it to their advantage?

I heard that one of them married the governor of Kentucky…or possibly it was his son. I don’t remember. But the thought boggles the mind as to what would have happened if this secret had come out at that time.

Another sibling went to Miami and invited a niece, one of my grandmother’s children, to spend the summer. There was just one question: was she light enough to pass like the rest of them? She wasn’t—and my grandmother was so insulted that her sister even asked, she cancelled the visit.

A third of the “passing” generation had a son, who, as often happens in racially mixed families, was a “throwback”—much darker than either parent. So, he had to be kept inside as much as possible and hidden from the world. He was so tormented by this rejection, he later committed suicide as a young man.

Did these relatives ever get together and discuss the mental toll this passing for white had taken? I doubt it. Perhaps they found many positive elements to their “good fortune.” We only heard stories about the bad ones, because how could there be anything positive about denying your identity?

It was different in my generation. My family too had taken the migratory journey from Jamaica to Florida in the 1970s. I thought I knew who I was—someone who had black blood and white blood in them, but considered herself black by American standards. Because back then, you had to check one box or the other. Many of the blacks and whites I met at school kept asking me what I was—because I didn’t look black to them—or “act” it either. The interesting thing was that when I finally moved to Atlanta a few years ago, I saw so many blacks who looked like me I began to think that Florida must have had a monopoly on ignorance.

My grandma continued to live in Jamaica until she died.  She raised seven children, became a successful businesswoman and was always the first to help someone in need.  But on the point of race, she never wavered.  Once she made a comment about a “white man’s brain and black man’s brawn.” I took her on about it and she wailed, “Leave me alone. I’m too old to change!”

During the late ‘80s, I was on a visit home to Jamaica and she casually announced that a couple of the descendents of one of these “passers” was coming by. To see their roots, I suppose. If they knew how to find her, that must have meant the ties were never completely broken. I wondered what they would look like and what they would say.  

Like many overly anticipated meetings, nothing of great import happened. I was shocked by how…well, white they looked. Almost Scandanavian in their fairness.  Never in a million years would you guess they had ancestors with black blood.  Perhaps they asked my grandma discreet questions when the rest of us were not around. But in the group, they were pleasant, polite and not particularly interesting. As far as I know, that was their only visit home.

Grandmother gave it no great attention. I never heard her talk about it after they left. She was just being hospitable to some long-lost relatives, doing what she always did. She lived to see her grandchildren marry men of all hues, from white, to brown, to the deepest chocolate. She got used to being scolded about her outdated opinions and respected and loved for being a great role model as a mother, wife and humanitarian.  And despite all the mutterings and what she believed, she never tried to pass for white.

~Kathryn Whitbourne

Kathryn Whitbourne is an editor at pink, a magazine for professional women, and lives in Atlanta.