The Invisible Line (53 page)

I am grateful to Wendy Strothman and Dan O'Connell at the Strothman Agency for believing in and shepherding the book before a single word had been committed to paper. At The Penguin Press, Vanessa Mobley had the vision to see what this project could become, and Janie Fleming was a careful reader with a keen sense of narrative. Janet Biehl and Bruce Giffords provided elegant and meticulous copyediting and production support. I owe special thanks to my editor, Ginny Smith, whose incisive comments and infectious enthusiasm improved the book in countless ways.

Writing about big families across generations often reminded me of my own loving extended family. My grandparents, Sidney and Beverly Sharfstein and Reuben and Pearl Shiling, loved stories and jokes and ideas and books, but most of all they loved me. I wish they were alive to see this book. I am grateful for the love, support, and friendship of my sister Sarah and Brian and baby Sydney, Yngvild and Sam and Isak, Howard and Jill, David and Claire, my in-laws Curt and Mary Mikkelsen, and Erika and Mike and Katherine. My brother Josh read the entire manuscript in one weekend during a blizzard in Baltimore in December 2009, and as always his comments were spot on, medically sound, and in the public interest. For as long as I can remember, he has been my friend and champion. I thank my father, Steven Sharfstein, not only because there was a copy of
Black Skin, White Masks
in the house when I was growing up, and not only because he told stories about what it was like to meet Martin Luther King Jr. and attend the March on Washington as a young man. My father has shown me how to live a socially engaged life of ideas and action. He has always put family first. And it is always fun to watch baseball with him—even when the Orioles are playing. My mother, Margaret Sharfstein, has the most acute observational skills and best sense of humor of anyone I have ever met. She has kept our family together with the kind of strength and abiding love that has its own gravitational force. I am who I am because of her.

Since I began this project, my immediate family has doubled in size. My two boys, Saul and Abe, make every day wonderful. I see the world with new eyes because of them. That said, any inadvertent mentions in this book of dinosaurs, spiders, robots, spaceships, skeletons, pirates, and dogs that talk are entirely my own.

When there was no end in sight, Ann Mikkelsen's advice and encouragement, patience and unfailing support, kept this project going. She has read every word that I have written many times, and I would be lost without her wise counsel and brilliant editing. Every day for eighteen years we have spent hours talking, and every day I am inspired by her ideas and intellect and empathy, her way of reading the world closely. I understand love and family, truth and beauty, happiness and home, because of her. My gratitude is indescribable. This book is dedicated to her.

American Missionary Association Archives, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans

Mrs. Mason Barrett Collection of the papers of Albert Sidney Johnston and William Preston Johnston, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans

Sayles Jenks Bowen Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

John E. Bruce Papers, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York

Calliopean Society Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut

J.F.H. Claiborne Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson

Anna Julia Cooper Papers, Collection 23-1, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Charles Nunnally Dean Papers, Special Collections, J. D. Williams Library, University of Mississippi, Oxford

District of Columbia Public School Records, Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, Washington, D.C.

Randall Lee Gibson Papers, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge

Randall Lee Gibson Papers, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans

Gibson and Humphreys Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Randall Lee Gibson and Family Archive, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York

Hart Gibson Alumni Records, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Grigsby Collection, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky

Edmund T. Halsey Papers, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky

Oliver Otis Howard Papers, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine

Josiah Stoddard Johnston Papers, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky

John Mercer Langston Papers, Special Collections, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee

Leak and Wall Family Papers, 1785-1897, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Liddell (Moses, St. John R., and Family) Papers, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge

McConnell Family Papers, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans

Whitefield McKinlay Papers, Carter G. Woodson Collection, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Kelly Miller Papers, Manuscripts Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Mrs. William and H. Foster Pettit Family Collection, University of Kentucky Archives, Lexington

Rufus and S. Willard Saxton Papers, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut

Robert H. Terrell Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Washingtoniana Collection, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, D.C.

David Weeks and Family Papers, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge

1
Thomas L. Murphy, interview by author, October 28, 2005, Hampton, Ga.

2
See Willard B. Gatewood,
Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 166-67, 176, 178.

3
For nearly a century, sociologists and others have attempted to estimate the percentage of whites in the United States who have some recent African ancestry; speculation ranges from 1 to 20 percent. See, e.g., Hornell M. Hart,
Selective Migration as a Factor in Child Welfare in the United States, With Special Reference to Iowa
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1921); Caroline Bond Day,
A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932); John H. Burma, “The Measurement of Negro Passing,”
American Journal of Sociology
52 (1946), p. 18; E. W. Eckard, “How Many Negroes ‘Pass'?”
American Journal of Sociology
52 (1947), p. 498; Roi Ottley, “Five Million White Negroes,”
Ebony
, March 1948, pp. 22-28; Robert P. Stuckert, “African Ancestry of the White American Population,”
Ohio Journal of Science
58 (1958), pp. 155, 160 (“Over twenty-eight million white persons are descendants of persons of African origin”); James Ernest Conyers, “Selected Aspects of the Phenomenon of Negro Passing” (unpublished Ph.D. diss., Washington State University, 1962), pp. 23-27, summarizing and critiquing sociological studies; Werner Sollors,
Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 280-84; and Brent Staples, “A Hemings Family Turns from Black, to White, to Black,”
New York Times,
December 17, 2001, p. A20. On assertions of newly white status, see Linda J. Alexander's account of discovering her family's origins as free people of color in Louisiana, “The ‘White' House,”
Sunday Advocate Magazine
(Baton Rouge), April 30, 2000, p. 18, online at
http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?AuthorID=9014&id=5920
.

4
See generally Winthrop D. Jordan,
White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); and Kathleen M. Brown,
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). On migration as a central theme of African American history, see Ira Berlin,
The Making of African America: Four Great Migrations
(New York: Viking Press, 2010). The journey from black to white arguably constitutes a fifth migration.

5
See generally Ira Berlin,
Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South
(New York: Random House, 1974); Leon F. Litwack,
North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); and Leon F. Litwack,
Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow
(New York: Knopf, 1998).

6
“The problem of evidence is insurmountable,” observes Winthrop Jordan. “The success of the passing mechanism depended upon its operating in silence.” See Jordan,
White Over Black,
p. 174. Nevertheless, historians have punctuated their accounts of the evolution of race in the United States and the prevalence of interracial sex with anecdotes in which African Americans refashioned themselves as white. See, e.g., Joel Williamson,
New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States
(New York: Free Press, 1980), pp. 100-106; Berlin,
Slaves Without Masters,
pp. 160-64; James Hugo Johnston,
Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South, 1776-1860
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), pp. 191-216; Martha Hodes,
White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 96-122; Joshua D. Rothman,
Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 212-15; and Annette Gordon-Reed,
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), p. 601. For reverse-passing stories, in which whites chose to live with and as blacks, see, e.g., Martha Hodes,
The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); and Martha Sandweiss,
Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
(New York: Penguin, 2009). On conventional passing narratives, see Sollors,
Neither Black Nor White Yet Both,
pp. 246-84.

7
See, e.g., “Desdemona After a Divorce,”
New York Times
, December 23, 1883, p. 6; “Drafted Man, Classed as Colored, Commits Suicide in an Ohio Camp,”
Washington Post
, September 29, 1917, p. 4; “Colored Girl at Vassar,”
New York Times
, August 16, 1897, p. 1; “Negro Passing as White Reveals Ole Miss Career,”
Washington Post
, September 26, 1962, p. A4; Mitchell Owens, “Surprises in the Family Tree,”
New York Times
, January 8, 2004, p. F1; Pauli Murray,
The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), pp. 34-35; Shirlee Taylor Haizlip,
The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Gregory Howard Williams,
Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black
(New York: Penguin, 1996); Adele Logan Alexander,
Homelands and Waterways : The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846-1926
(New York: Vintage, 2000); Bliss Broyard,
One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets
(Boston: Little, Brown, 2008); Ariela J. Gross,
What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

8
See generally George M. Fredrickson,
The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914
(New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Berlin,
Slaves Without Masters
; Leon F. Litwack,
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
(New York: Knopf, 1979).

9
On the strong link between race and the law, see, e.g., Peggy Pascoe,
What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Gross,
What Blood Won't Tell
. The vision of law as a continuous struggle over meaning has been given powerful expression by, among others, Sally Falk Moore,
Law as Process: An Anthropological Approach
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Hendrik Hartog, “Pigs and Positivism,”
Wisconsin Law Review
(1985), p. 899; and Robert W. Gordon, “Critical Legal Histories,”
Stanford Law Review
36 (1984), p. 57.

10
For a thorough introduction to “racial identity trials,” see Gross,
What Blood Won't Tell
. For evidentiary rulings that required proof of “pure African blood,” see, e.g.,
Ferrall v. Ferrall,
69 S.E. 60, 61-62 (N.C. 1910); and Daniel J. Sharfstein, “The Secret History of Race in the United States,”
Yale Law Journal
112 (2003), pp. 1473, 1502-3, 1506.

11
See Robert M. Cover, “Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,”
Harvard Law Review
97 (1983), p. 4.