Shirlee grew to adulthood moving easily between the black world and the white, but with an unfulfilled dream of discovering what had become of her mother's family.
As Margaret approached eighty, her daughter determined to realize that dream. What she unearthed in dusty archives, letters, journals, and other records, is a tale of journeys - physical, emotional, racial, and social - that continues even today.
Across the boundaries of race and time, the story spans six generations of both sides of Shirlee's family, ranging form Ireland, North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D. There, with the help of a private detective, Shirlee tracked down her mother's only surviving sibling and reunited two sisters - one who called herself white and the other who called herself blackafter seventy-six years.
She also uncovered a history of desertion, redemption, and betrayal set in motions by the charged, complicated meaning that color has carried in our society.
The different choices the members of her multihued family made, and the different lives each of them led as a result, raise questions of identity and allegiance common to us all. Language eng. Extent pages, [16] pages of plates. Isbn Washington D. United States Washington D. Ask a Librarian! Library Locations Map Details. In this eloquent, moving, and eagerly awaited continuation of her story, Haizlip pushes further into the fascinating terrain of family, race, and racial passing.
Just over ten years ago, Haizlip's African American mother was reunited with her sister, who had spent her whole life passing for white; both women were in their eighties and had not seen or heard anything about each other since early childhood. Now Haizlip answers the many questions that linger from the previous book: What happened between these long-separated sisters after their reunion? What did they learn about each other, and about themselves?
Is it possible to heal the wounds caused by such a rift? In rich, elegant prose, Haizlip contrasts her mother's fulfilling adult life with her aunt's solitary white existence. They lived on opposite sides of the race line, but both women, says Haizlip, were plagued by "America's twin demons: a paranoia about purity and an anxiety about authenticity. Haizlip deftly, fluidly conveys the complexities of this story -- the sadness, comedy, danger, anger, confusion, shame, fear, longing, excitement, and joy of her family's rupture and reunion.
We learn how Haizlip's mother's abandonment by members of her immediate family affected her daily life; we learn about the lives of relatives who left her behind, and of the members of succeeding generations who knew of the rift, and of those who did not. Haizlip's readers, too, appear here -- after The Sweeter the Juice, Haizlip was flooded by letters in which people shared similar family stories of bi-racial heritage, passing, and the eventual revelation of an extended racial makeup.
She includes some of these letters here, affirming that her own seemingly unusual tale is actually a very familiar, very American story: of the tumultuous, complicated interactions between black and white communities and individuals -- interactions marked by fear and distrust, but also by camaraderie, ardor, and love. In sharing her own and her readers' stories, Haizlip forges a new picture of America's hidden racial past and its multihued future.
Passionate, indomitable, and always generous toward her subjects, Haizlip explores what happens when the race divide exists within one family, and the effect of secret racial histories and their revelation on individuals and America at large. And as such, it is a quintessentially American story.
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