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Say I'm Dead

A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Fearful of prison time—or lynching—for violating Indiana's anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's black father and white mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo. Her mother simply vanished, evading an FBI and police search that ended with the declaration to her family that she was the victim of foul play, either dead or a victim of human trafficking. When Johnson was born, social norms and her government-issued birth certificate said she was Negro, nullifying her mother's white blood in her identity. As an African American, she withstood the advice of a high school counselor who said that blacks don't go to college by graduating from Harvard. Then, as a code-switching business executive feeling too far from her black roots, she searched her father's black genealogy. Johnson was amazed to suddenly realize that her mother's whole white side was—and always had been—missing. When confronted, her mother's decades-old secret spilled out. Despite her parents' crippling and well-founded fears of rejection and reprisals, and her black militant brother's accusation that she was a race traitor, Johnson went searching for the white family who did not know she existed. When she found them, it's not just their shock and her mama's shame that have to be overcome, but her own fraught experiences with whites.
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    • Booklist

      Starred review from May 1, 2020
      In the spring of 1943, Ella Lewis fled her white Catholic family in Indianapolis to marry Henry Jackson, who was African American. Recognizing the ingrained racism in a state with an active KKK and laws against miscegenation, Ella decided the only way to protect her white family and the Black man she loved was to disappear, allowing her parents and sister to believe she had died. The ramifications of this decision are explored by Johnson, her daughter, who chronicles her parents' bittersweet love story and her own experiences with racism as she learns to accept her biracial heritage. Johnson powerfully describes the racial tension in mid-twentieth-century Indiana, where the slightest deviation from customary segregation could unleash unspeakable violence against Black men; and the terrifying experience of attempting to integrate a white community in 1970s Baton Rouge, where Johnson's colleagues tell blatantly racist jokes, and police treat a cross-burning with lackadaisical indifference. While Johnson sympathizes with her mother's decision to leave home, she candidly addresses the heartwrenching grief and despair Ella caused her family, especially her father who died mourning for his lost, wonderful girl. Yet as Johnson makes clear to her mother, It's America's disgrace, not yours, that you had to run and hide. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

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