Miscegenation. The word is humpbacked, ugly, portending a monstrous outcome: like antebellum or octoroon, it
evokes images of another era, a distant world of horsewhips and flames, dead magnolias and crumbling porticos. And
yet it wasn't until 1967-the year I celebrated my sixth birthday and Jimi Hendrix performed at Monterey, three years
after Dr. King received the Nobel Peace Prize, a time when America had already begun to weary of black demands for
equality, the problem of discrimination presumably solved-that the Supreme Court of the United States would get
around to telling the state of Virginia that its ban on interracial marriages violated the Constitution. In 1960, the year
that my parents were married, miscegenation still described a felony in over half the states in the Union. In many parts
of the South, my father could have been strung up from a tree for merely looking at my mother the wrong way; in the
most sophisticated of northern cities, the hostile stares, the whispers, might have driven a woman in my mother's
predicament into a back-alley abortion-or at the very least to a distant convent that could arrange for adoption. Their
very image together would have been considered lurid and perverse, a handy retort to the handful of softheaded liberals
who supported a civil rights agenda.
Sure-but would you let your daughter marry one?
The fact that my grandparents had answered yes to this question, no matter how grudgingly, remains an enduring
puzzle to me. There was nothing in their background to predict such a response, no New England transcendentalists or
wild-eyed socialists in their family tree. True, Kansas had fought on the Union side of the Civil War; Gramps liked to
remind me that various strands of the family contained ardent abolitionists. If asked, Toot would turn her head in
profile to show off her beaked nose, which, along with a pair of jet-black eyes, was offered as proof of Cherokee blood.
But an old, sepia-toned photograph on the bookshelf spoke most eloquently of their roots. It showed Toot's
grandparents, of Scottish and English stock, standing in front of a ramshackle homestead, unsmiling and dressed in
coarse wool, their eyes squinting at the sun-baked, flinty life that stretched out before them. Theirs were the faces of
American Gothic, the WASP bloodline's poorer cousins, and in their eyes one could see truths that I would have to
learn later as facts: that Kansas had entered the Union free only after a violent precursor to the Civil War, the battle in
which John Brown's sword tasted first blood; that while one of my great-great-grandfathers, Christopher Columbus
Clark, had been a decorated Union soldier, his wife's mother was rumored to have been a second cousin of Jefferson
Davis, president of the Confederacy; that although another distant ancestor had indeed been a full-blooded Cherokee,
such lineage was a source of considerable shame to Toot's mother, who blanched whenever someone mentioned the
subject and hoped to carry the secret to her grave.
evokes images of another era, a distant world of horsewhips and flames, dead magnolias and crumbling porticos. And
yet it wasn't until 1967-the year I celebrated my sixth birthday and Jimi Hendrix performed at Monterey, three years
after Dr. King received the Nobel Peace Prize, a time when America had already begun to weary of black demands for
equality, the problem of discrimination presumably solved-that the Supreme Court of the United States would get
around to telling the state of Virginia that its ban on interracial marriages violated the Constitution. In 1960, the year
that my parents were married, miscegenation still described a felony in over half the states in the Union. In many parts
of the South, my father could have been strung up from a tree for merely looking at my mother the wrong way; in the
most sophisticated of northern cities, the hostile stares, the whispers, might have driven a woman in my mother's
predicament into a back-alley abortion-or at the very least to a distant convent that could arrange for adoption. Their
very image together would have been considered lurid and perverse, a handy retort to the handful of softheaded liberals
who supported a civil rights agenda.
Sure-but would you let your daughter marry one?
The fact that my grandparents had answered yes to this question, no matter how grudgingly, remains an enduring
puzzle to me. There was nothing in their background to predict such a response, no New England transcendentalists or
wild-eyed socialists in their family tree. True, Kansas had fought on the Union side of the Civil War; Gramps liked to
remind me that various strands of the family contained ardent abolitionists. If asked, Toot would turn her head in
profile to show off her beaked nose, which, along with a pair of jet-black eyes, was offered as proof of Cherokee blood.
But an old, sepia-toned photograph on the bookshelf spoke most eloquently of their roots. It showed Toot's
grandparents, of Scottish and English stock, standing in front of a ramshackle homestead, unsmiling and dressed in
coarse wool, their eyes squinting at the sun-baked, flinty life that stretched out before them. Theirs were the faces of
American Gothic, the WASP bloodline's poorer cousins, and in their eyes one could see truths that I would have to
learn later as facts: that Kansas had entered the Union free only after a violent precursor to the Civil War, the battle in
which John Brown's sword tasted first blood; that while one of my great-great-grandfathers, Christopher Columbus
Clark, had been a decorated Union soldier, his wife's mother was rumored to have been a second cousin of Jefferson
Davis, president of the Confederacy; that although another distant ancestor had indeed been a full-blooded Cherokee,
such lineage was a source of considerable shame to Toot's mother, who blanched whenever someone mentioned the
subject and hoped to carry the secret to her grave.