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Frederick, MD

Joie de VIVre

Spirituality, God, my husband and sons, writing, history, chocolate, LOVE, friends, hope, believing and believing and believing.

VIV Moment

I’d been researching my family’s history for some time. There were a lot of dead ends. I focused on my mother’s side because her family had been in the United States for generations. It was the start of a long look into a backwards mirror.

My mother’s family had lived, died, and been reborn in Louisiana. There were whispers, and I knew a lot of the story hadn’t been told. Yet.

I asked questions, and got only a few answers. I searched family photo albums, looked for old letters and cards, and scoured libraries. The real mystery seemed to settle around my great-grandmother. We called her “Dear,” a shortened version of “Dear Mother.” She never wanted to be reminded that she was old enough to be a grandmother. I was six years old when she passed away, and a cousin and I, of the same age, were the only grandchildren in the growing family with any direct knowledge of her.

I remember Dear at the dinner table, picking at my fish so there would be no bones … I ended up in the emergency room because she missed one. I recall her stern, never-smiling face, her silver hair and deep black eyes. Her not-quite-white but not-quite-grayish skin color. And her nose. I remember her nose — broad at the base, seeming to cover much of the middle of her cheekbones.

Yes, I was only a young child, but I remember Dear. When I got serious about uncovering my heritage, I held those images in my head and started digging. When I finally got to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., armed with a notepad, a pen, instructions on how to use the microfiche and sheer determination, I was excited. Microfiche after microfiche passed by my eyes. I searched and searched. It wasn’t until I decided to try and follow Dear’s name that I came upon the prize.

I knew she was born in the 1880s. She’d told everyone she was “born in Washington, on the grounds where the White House sits.” I’d already spent a great deal of time trying to follow that track, only to realize that by the general time of her birth, the White House was already standing in D.C. If she had been born on the grounds, that would mean she had to have been born in the White House, and that wasn’t likely.

I eventually searched New Orleans instead, because of my family’s history there. Dear told people her name was Carrie Rowe. That name was printed on my grandmother’s birth certificate, so why would we argue? I searched the entire state of Louisiana’s records from 1880 to 1900. It took quite some time to go through the census listings of an entire state, and this task required more than one visit to the Archives. But there was no Carrie Rowe anywhere in Louisiana that even loosely fit my family’s criteria.

Eventually, I came upon a Clara Rowe, a name that might fit if one took into consideration the heavy, unusual accent of the bayou part of Louisiana. She wasn’t in New Orleans, though, where I would’ve expected to find her, but in a small town deep in the Louisiana bayou, a town called, surprisingly, Washington. Yes, Clara Rowe, a months-old baby, lived in Washington, LA in 1880 with her parents and one sibling. Clara Rowe, whose father was Robert Rowe — the exact name of my great-grandmother’s father — and whose mother was Allecia. My great-grandmother’s mother’s name was Alice.

Things were beginning to fit. But I was in for a shock, a shock that would change the entire fabric of my family’s known history. People were specifically defined by race in the 1880 census; not just “white” or “colored,” but also “mulatto.” Only the first letter of the word was listed, and next to my great-grandmother, her mother, Alice, and her other child, was the identifier, “M.” Next to her father’s name was the tell-tale “W.” What did this mean? Dear, my great-grandmother, the stern woman who looked not so much like the rest of the family … was of mixed race. It all began to make sense.

After I picked myself up off the floor, I started intensive research and the pieces of a mysterious life began to fall into place. I learned that Dear was born to a mulatto woman whose mother had been a freed slave. Dear had lived her early life as a mixed-race woman in bayou country, eventually moving to New Orleans. People knew her as such and in turn-of-the-century Louisiana, that was a difficult world. She ultimately took the chance to get out of an existence that saw her as neither white nor black, yet the escape exacted a heavy toll, requiring her to pick a side and never look back.

Logically, considering how the world treated people of color, she chose to be white. She left behind her past and never, ever told the rest of her family about it. Her parents died, her siblings scattered — we never knew she had more than two siblings until I discovered there had been 12 children in the family. She was light-skinned enough, and married a white man. Her children were raised as white, and no one was ever the wiser — until I discovered the truth.

Dear has been dead for many, many years. She was dead when I learned of her past. The discovery, for me, was indeed my “VIV Moment,” a discovery that helped me learn of my history, so I could enrich my experience and join in on the experience of so many others.

I believe we can’t know where we’re going until we discover the direction from which we came. How sad it must have been for Dear to divorce herself from half of her heritage, her world, her family, for the privilege to live as a free woman.

Learning of her history helped me to understand and appreciate her; to be grateful for the life I have been given. She was a sad woman, not an angry one. She was lonely within herself, not mean-spirited.

Today, I do presentations on mixed race genealogy and speak out every chance I get on the ignorance of racism. It’s all at the point of a “color line,” and as my talks, “Bridging The Color Line” attest, I intend to make that very clear. My discoveries have deepened my knowledge of my family history, located descendants of many of Dear’s siblings and brought together the family heritage, scattered over 100 years ago. The knowledge not only changed my life for that moment but for the rest of my years. I have found myself in a way that would never have been possible without making that trip to the National Archives.

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