January 8, 2026 • 60 mins
In his locked study, Dorothy’s father works on his book. For years. And years. And years. But it’s not until after his death that Dorothy uncovers the secrets in between its unfinished pages.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets, the secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. My guest today
is Dorothy Roberts, professor, legal scholar, activist, recipient of a
twenty twenty four MacArthur Genius Grant, and author of the
(00:34):
upcoming book The Mixed Marriage Project, a memoir of love, Race,
and Family. Dorothy's is a story, in a way, about
the stories we tell ourselves, about that most foundational element
of our lives, our own family, and the ways those
stories can radically change over time. It's also the story
(00:56):
of a remarkable daughter who is able to illuminate and
finish what her father never could, and in so doing,
learn more about herself as she deepens what is already
an extraordinary life's work.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
I was born in Chicago, but when I was only
three months old, my parents moved to Liberia. My mother,
she was from Jamaica, but in her twenty she moved
to Liberia and then came to Chicago to attend Roosevelt University,
where my father was teaching. And that's where they met,
(01:33):
and my father was an anthropologist, so they decided to
spend a couple of years in Liberia where he would teach,
and that was a place she was familiar with, having
lived there before meeting him, and so at three months old,
my parents and I moved to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.
(01:54):
This is in the nineteen fifties, and my two sisters,
twins were born a year later in Liberia, West Africa.
So our family itself is a very multi national, multi
racial white father, Black mother, Jamaican mother who was a
Liberian citizen. And then when I was two or three,
(02:18):
we moved back to Chicago, and that's where I grew up.
So I spent my entire childhood in Chicago in a
neighborhood called Kenwood, which is a very integrated, middle class
neighborhood next to Hyde Park where the University of Chicago is.
And I grew up in a big, giant Victorian house
(02:43):
on a beautiful block just a block away from my
elementary school and had a wonderful childhood in the sixties,
the era of the civil rights movement and anti Vietnam
War activism, and I lived there on that same block,
(03:06):
same house, from when I was three until we then
moved to Egypt when I was in eighth grade. At thirteen,
my first two years of high school, my father had
a Fulbright fellowship in Cairo, Egypt, and so my world
(03:26):
became very global once again.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
You described that house on Kenwood Avenue in such beautiful,
magical terms, not just in terms of just the kind
of sprawling nature of it and the beautiful block, but
also you describe a very sort of magical time there
in a lot of ways.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Yes, that is exactly the word I used. Magical. It
was a house.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Built in the eighteen nineties, and it had turrets and
the cylindrical column going up and a big porch with columns,
and I looked like a castle. And inside it just
had so many fabulous features. So there was a grand
(04:17):
hall you walked into with a closet where my sisters
and I would pretend we were putting on plays. My
mother put up a velvet curtain in front of it,
and we could come out in front of this winding staircase,
and our audience of our parents and friends could sit
on the steps and watch us perform.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
And then there was the beautiful living room and dining room,
a big kitchen.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
And one of the most interesting things about the house
was that my parents bought it from a couple who
were African safari enthusiasts, and the wife was an artist,
and she painted several of the walls in our house
with scenes from their African safaris. So my sister's bedroom
(05:08):
had giraffes and elephants.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
Roaming across the wall.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
And they had a big bedroom, so we're talking about
a very large wall. My parents had a dressing room
off of their bedroom that had floor to ceiling mirrors
on the closets and you could open the door. If
you stood in the middle and opened the doors on
either side, you saw your reflection going on endlessly. And
(05:36):
one of those closets had a secret passageway into the hall,
and so you could just imagine the three of us
playing hide and seek. And then on the third floor,
homes had ballrooms on the third floor, and my parents
are probably the prior owners that converted the ballroom into
(05:57):
a big playroom for us. And but there was my
father's study also on the third floor, which he kept
locked up with an old fashioned key, and I would
when he wasn't around, pull a chair and stand on
my tippy toes and reach the key and go inside.
And he had a magnificent library of books, mostly about Africa.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
And India, lining a wall.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
And those are my earliest memories of reading to myself,
sitting on the floor and just pulling down books about
foreign lands that I would read and be mesmerized by.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Why do you think your father kept the door locked?
Speaker 3 (06:43):
So my father was completely obsessed with writing a book
about interracial marriage, and the book really dominated our lives,
my mother's and my sisters and mine growing up.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
He was.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Always up in his office if he wasn't having dinner
with us or going on outings. I have to say
my father spent a lot of time with us. My
mother cooked every single night, and so he had dinner
with us every night. And I also had lots of
discussions with my father, so I was very close to him.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
It was important to him to spend time with us.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
But he also spent a lot of time up in
his study working on this book, and I think he
locked it because he didn't want little kids messing with her.
First of all, it was right across from this playroom.
We would be playing over there, and maybe he didn't
(07:47):
want us to spill over into a study. And maybe
it was also just to have a sense of privacy.
You know, it's funny, Danny, I have a similar habit.
I haven't thought about this before, but I keep the
door to my home study closed. And my husband thinks
it's very strange because his door is always open and
(08:09):
doesn't understand why would need to close it. But I
have this sense that while I'm writing, I want to
feel secluded, and I surround myself with books like my
father did, and piles of papers. And it might look
a little bit messy to some people who are too neat,
(08:31):
but it's just a correct to me now that I
probably got that habit, that sense from my father.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Your father's book very much was like almost its own
member of your family. Yes, and so there was you,
there were your two sisters, there was your mom, and
and there was this book and his relationship with this
book and his struggles, yes, growing up during those years
in that house. What did you think about that book?
(09:01):
And how would you describe each of your parents from
your childhood self.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
So I knew that Daddy had to work on his book,
that it was very important to give him time to
work to not bother him. It was a very important
part of his life, his persona, and our family.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
I could just hear my mother say, you know, be
more quiet.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Your father's working out the book. When we called it
the book, and it just came up. It came up
in dinner conversations. I knew he was interviewing couples for
the book. Many of the couples he interviewed became part
of our family life. So my piano teacher was the
(09:52):
husband of one of the couples, our plumber was his
closest friends were an intervi racial relationships. We would go
over to the homes to visit of interracial couples and
their children.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
And so it.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Wasn't just the writing of the book up in his study,
it was also the people he interviewed became integral parts
of our lives. To me, my mother was she was
her own person. My mother had a very strong personality.
She was very elegant, very smart. My sisters and I
(10:32):
thought she could answer any question. Growing up, I knew
that any question I had about homework or anything about life,
I could go to my mother and she would have
an answer.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
She went to a very selective British school in.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Jamaica that was free of charge, but you had to
qualify to be in this Wolmer's School for girls. Whenever
we came to her with questions or tell her what
we were studying, she'd always say, oh, I learned that
far earlier in my life at Woolmers. She had a
British accent combined with a Jamaican, you know, West Indian
(11:08):
lilt to it, but it was quite British and she
was very proper. So what I remember most about my mother,
other than her helping me with homework, is our shopping sprees.
My mother loved to go into downtown Chicago, into the Loop.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
And go shopping.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
And my mother was very glamorous and she would buy
designer clothes. You know, I feel like I'm giving this
impression that I came from a wealthy fathily, which isn't true.
My father was a professor at Roosevelt University, which is
not a very prestigious university, but one perfect for him
because it was very progressive at the time and very diverse,
(11:51):
and it really fit his interests in what he called
the racial cast system in America, our interracial relationship and
ships and my mother eventually worked. She was a homemaker
in my very young childhood, but she eventually worked for
(12:11):
the Chicago Department of Public Health and then became a
Chicago public school teacher. I'm not sure how she became
so glamorous, but she was, and she could entertain. She
put on fantastic dinner parties for my father's colleagues and
friends and her friends, and she was just a magnificent person.
Speaker 4 (12:36):
So they were both quite a couple.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
They were really the life of the party because my
father loved to talk. He's very friendly, gregarious person, very
put people at ease, and my mother just had this
sparkle about her.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Beneath Dorothy's family life, there is a low, constant thrumming
when is Bob going to finish his book? When is
Bob going to finish his book? It's a question that
never quite goes away. When Dorothy is in eighth grade,
Bob gets a full bright grant and the family moves
to Cairo. They are in the throes of some financial
(13:21):
strain and they need to sell their house before leaving
the country.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I definitely had
this sense when I was in eighth grade and my
father got this full bright fellowship that they were in
financial trouble, and the fellowship was it was almost as
if we were escaping to another country where we wouldn't
(13:47):
have those financial pressures, and my parents decided to sell
the house, I think because of the financial trouble they
were in. The one thing I remember is that my
father had invested have in Occidental Petroleum Corporation. I never
really learned the details of it, but my father would
(14:08):
talk about it. Here I'm talking about Accidental Petroleum and
as if he was going to make a lot of
money in this investment he made, and I know that
something terrible happened and he lost the money.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
And then there was the book.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
He got a contract from Simon and Schuster in nineteen
sixty eight nineteen sixty nine, just before we were moving
to Cairo, and it was for two thousand dollars, which
was a fair amount of money.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
Back then in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
And we were so excited about this that this book
my father had been working on my entire childhood was
finally going to come to fruition and be published by
a major publisher. And I found out later that he
had these aspirations so that it was going to be
made into a motion picture because another answer pologist whose
(15:09):
book had turned into a motion picture, and he'd written
to the to his editor to make sure there was
a clause in the contract about motion picture rights.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
So he was dreaming big. There was dreaming big.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
This was going to be the first major book about
interracial marriage, and at one point he was going to
call it something like Sex and Marriage in America. On
the one head, he had this idea of making it
a trade press book that was going to be a
big bestseller.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
But he also and this is what.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
Really doomed him finishing the book, was that, well, there
were lots of things that doomed it, but one was
he wanted to write a book about the history of
interracial marriage, and he got bogged down in that history.
I think he also really liked interviewing people and interacting
with them, and you wanted to keep doing interviews, and
(16:06):
he just couldn't stop and write the book. And so
when he didn't fulfill the contract and had to return
the advance he'd gotten, that just added to the financial disaster.
And so my parents never bought a house again, and
we went from this magnificent house, which they I suppose
(16:30):
they probably couldn't have afforded in the first place to.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Renting a house was when your father had to return
the advance. Was that something that you knew back then
or was that part of the discovery that you later make.
Speaker 4 (16:48):
So I knew, we all knew, The whole family knew
when he got.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
The advance, right, you celebrated, celebrated, but it was not
so much that he had gotten advanced. I don't even
think I knew what that was at the time, what
an advance was. We knew he had a contract to
publish the book with a major publisher, and we went
out to dinner, one of our rare dinner outings, to
Kantiki Ports and the Sheridan Hotel in downtown Chicago.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
I'll never forget that.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
That was the most exciting thing that happened to our
family throughout my entire childhood. You know, I write it
was bigger than when my mother became a US citizen.
I don't remember going out to celebrate that, but we
definitely it was just major jubilation in the house. And
then I also remember when he didn't meet the deadline
(17:36):
for the book, now. I learned later how much he
had gotten and then he had to return it. That
those details I didn't know, but I did know that
it was very disappointing and disastrous that he did not
finish the book.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
We'll be back in a moment with more family seeks.
By Dorothy's senior year of high school, there's a quiet
sense of deflation in the family, an accumulation of compromises
and disappointments that no one quite names, but academically Dorothy
(18:21):
is thriving. The family is living in Evanston, now a
suburb of Chicago, in a rented house, a move her
mother insisted on so Dorothy could attend Evanston Township High School,
one of the best public schools in the area. Private
school was never an option, but this was her mother's
way of opening doors, of positioning her daughter for something bigger.
(18:44):
When Dorothy is accepted to Yale, her first choice, she
is thrilled, but the acceptance exposes a rare and visible
conflict between her parents. Yale means distance and significant expense.
Northwestern just blocked away means living at home and avoiding
the cost of room and board. Her father wants the
(19:05):
practical choice her mother doesn't hesitate. This is Dorothy's dream,
and she wants her to take it.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
And I overheard my parents arguing, which was very rare.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
My mother would fuss at my father all the time,
principally about writing the book.
Speaker 4 (19:24):
You know, I can hear her.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Boom boom, finish the book well, which he never did,
so she would fuss with him. I always thought she
was kind of mean to him. But they didn't argue.
They certainly didn't yell at each other. I never heard
either of my parents.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
Curse at all, let alone curse at each other. My
father was very mild mannered.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
And I heard them arguing, which was so unusual for
them to be arguing back and forth. And I stood
at the top of the stairs. They were on the
first floor, sto at the top of the stairs listening,
and I realized they were arguing about my father not
wanting to pay room and board at Yale.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
And they went back and forth, and my mother was.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
Accusing him of being stingy, and he was trying to
tell her that he just the family couldn't afford it.
And I just will never forget the end of the argument.
My mother said, ooh, you're dashing Dorothy's dreamed that was it.
And what happened was the Evanston Township High School had
(20:35):
an academic scholarship for a senior who excelled, you know,
in courses in leadership and that kind of thing, and
my counselor told me that I.
Speaker 4 (20:47):
Had been elected to receive it.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
I don't remember the exact amount of money, but it
was substantial enough to make a difference, and it was
for each of the four years of college. And so
at that point my father had to give in and
I ended up going to Yale.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
During this time, when you get to Yale, how are
you thinking of yourself as the daughter of a white
father and a black mother at this point in your life?
How are you identifying and how are you experiencing yourself?
Speaker 3 (21:19):
Well, when I was very little, I really adopted my parents'
view that there was something special and important about interracial relationships,
and that the children of interracial relationships were special in
(21:41):
the sense that we were able to navigate different cultures better.
He was trying to contest the dominant view that children
of interracial relationships would, you know, bi racial children would
have some kind of psychological problems or social problems, they
(22:03):
wouldn't fit in to either community, and you know, the
tragic mulatto idea that was still present in the nineteen sixties.
So my father was very determined to challenge that, and
my parents imbued us with this idea that our family
represented the potential for racial harmony in America. And so
(22:28):
at that point, and this would be before I would
say ten years old, you know, I might have answered
I'm human and somebody asked.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
Me to choose. But I always thought of myself as black.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
But the idea that it was more important I was
a human being than my racial classification was the lesson
my parents were teaching me.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
And as I grew old, especially when I read the book.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Black Power in seventh grade, I began to question that view,
especially the idea that interracial intimacy was the answer to
racism in America, and I began to identify more strongly as.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
A black girl.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Then when we went to Egypt, that really intensified. I think,
maybe because I wasn't around black Americans.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
So I went to an international school.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
And I think the only black students there were the
children of the Liberian ambassador. I think I was probably
the only black American student there. So that and reading
the autobiography of.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
Malcolm X, and.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
Just growing up, you know, I began to feel much
more strongly that I identified as black. When I went
to college, I met a group of black students there
who were very very close. We bonded almost immediately. We
(24:11):
hung out together, we studied together. They were really my
closest friendship group and classmates at Yale. And I went
to this period where I didn't want anyone to know
that I had a white father, so I'm brown from
when I was very young, being proud that my parents
(24:31):
were of different races and feeling that I represented some
kind of hope for.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
America, you know, no pressure or anything.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
In college, not wanting anyone to know that my father
was white. I even deliberately hit it. I hid it
to my boyfriend. It was black who I met very
soon after I got to Yale, and ever told him
that I had a white father. Didn't even really come up.
(25:04):
He just assumed that my parents were black. And one
time I had taken some photos with my father over
the winter holidays and brought them back with me to
show my boyfriend. But I only wanted to show him
the photos that my father had taken of me alone.
(25:27):
I deliberately hid.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
The photo of my.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Self with my father, and at one point I realized
that you could see my father in the mirror that
in the dress in his in the bedroom where we
had taken the photos. And as soon as I saw
his image, I breaked out.
Speaker 4 (25:52):
If I can remember the sets I had, my sledging
and my stomach. Oh, my goodness, Bobby is going to
be that my father's white.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
And I immediately snatched the photo from him and put
it down, face down on a table that was there.
And you know, he later told me that when he
did visit my home during spring break, this is now
several months later, when I got you know, I knew
him better. I wasn't so afraid to tell him more
about me. When my father answered the door, he was shocked.
(26:25):
He had no idea that my father was white. And
then there was another situation. My first semester at you know,
I took a sociology course on ethnicity, very basic ethnic
studies type of course, and there was a study group
that I belonged to where one of the assignments was
(26:48):
that we were supposed to guess each other's backgrounds, and
everyone said for me, I was Black American. And there
was one white student who said, I think she has
some white ancestry, and everyone looked at me, though, that
is that?
Speaker 4 (27:07):
Then he get it right, and I.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Said, well, I do have a white grandmother, but I
never met her.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
She died before I was born, which is true, just
not the whole truth.
Speaker 4 (27:19):
Not the whole truth. I left that the part about
my father.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Was it fear of being sort of rejected or was
there some kind of shame just wanting, you know, at
that point in time, wanting things to be simpler, just
wanting the way that you identified to be the way
that it just really was.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
Yeah, I think it.
Speaker 5 (27:41):
Well.
Speaker 3 (27:41):
First of all, even though it was so long ago,
I can still feel viscerally the fear that I had. Now,
what was that fear you're asking me, That's harder to remember.
But I think part of it was that this was
really the first time I was with a group of
(28:05):
people where I identified completely as black, who didn't know
I had a white father, and I didn't want them
to question my identity as a black woman.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
And there was also part of.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
It was that I didn't want people to think that
I thought I was special because I had a white father,
that I.
Speaker 4 (28:37):
Was different from them. I never liked that, you know that.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
I'm thinking also even in high school, when I was
at Evanson Township High School, there was a situation where
my sisters and I were on the.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
Bus riding home from school, and my parents.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Pulled up alongside the bus, and when the bus came
to a stop, my mother knocked on the bus door
and came up on the bus and she said, are
there three light skinned girls on the bus.
Speaker 4 (29:15):
I was horrified. I was horrified.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
I was so embarrassed, and because I didn't want the
other black girls on the bus to think that I
was any different from them. I identify so much with
my mother, who was dark skinned and had very African features.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
I know, it seems.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Strange when I think of myself, I think of myself.
Speaker 4 (29:42):
As looking like her.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
So it was partly I'd never heard her described me
and my sisters like that before.
Speaker 4 (29:54):
I'd never heard her refer to our color before.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
Well, and it's almost like a you know, possibly an
indication of how she saw you and your sisters.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Maybe did it never occurred to me that she saw
us that way. Yeah, it don't recurred to me that
she saws that way. I just have this very strong
revulsion that the idea of black people who have lighter
skin being you know, any better than anybody else, or
(30:27):
you know.
Speaker 4 (30:27):
I just I don't use that term to describe.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
Me, and I don't feel that it describes me, even
though maybe it does.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
There are other moments too, when Darcy is aware that
her father's whiteness comes into play outside their idyllic neighborhood
of Kenwood, moments that remain unspoken. A tacit agreement made
(31:04):
with outwards. When the family would take road trips, they
stayed in motels, not hotels, places where Drothy's mother and
the girls would remain in the car while their father
checked them in.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
My sisters and I more recently, when we've talked about
our memories, both of them said that.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
They knew that's why we never went to hotels.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
We always went to motels where we could stay in
the car and.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
It was just easier to.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Slip into the room without anybody seeing my mother and
my sisters and me.
Speaker 4 (31:42):
And yeah, we just knew that that was.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
Why that there might have been objections to us staying
at a motel, and we knew that that happened.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
Again, this was the sixties.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
Or were places that would say were full if they
saw black people trying to.
Speaker 4 (31:59):
Rent a room.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yeah, I mean it's so interesting. It's like, you know,
your ken Would experience was this idyllic bubble.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because it was a bubble and
the sense that there was a lot of diversity and
integration and interracial relationships in Hyde Park, Kenwood.
Speaker 4 (32:23):
But at the same time it was also a place.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
Where we were very aware of the civil rights movement.
Speaker 4 (32:30):
We're very aware of races name in America, and so.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
It was a bubble with a lot of social consciousness
and awareness.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Yeah, that it was this very special place where there
was at one point you write something like apathy was
not an option. There wasn't a sense of any kind
of being separate from what was going on in the world.
Speaker 4 (32:55):
That's right. That's right.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
We were expected to keep up with the civil rights movement,
the anti war movement, to support it, and to feel
that we had to be engaged in some way with
social justice movements, and most of the parents were, and
our school was so I went to Beulah Shusmith Elementary School,
(33:20):
and that school was dedicated to teaching us lessons about
our common humanity, about the importance of social justice, the
civil rights movement, we participated in it. There was a
school boycott while I was in elementary school, and Shoe
Smith closed down, and we went to an alternative school
(33:43):
for the day at Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, which was
also very involved in supporting the civil rights and anti
war movements.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
We learned movement songs. We had assemblies where the whole school.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Would sing if I had a and I fell, this
land is your lab, and those kinds of things. We
had assemblies where civil rights leaders would come and talk
to us.
Speaker 4 (34:12):
When Doctor King was assassinated the.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
School, all the students were expected to write poems to
missus King to express our condolences and our love for
doctor King and our concern for her and her family.
Speaker 4 (34:27):
It was just part of the school.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
And I think about how different that was that compared
to how some children are being taught today, where all
of that is erased.
Speaker 4 (34:37):
It's shocking.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Dorothy's mother has advised her, in no uncertain terms, that
she must get an advanced degree before marrying, and so
Dorothy does. She goes to Harvard Law and receives a jd.
As an attorney. She practices for eight years, but what
she really wants to do, what really lights her up,
is teaching and research. So she returns to academia and
(35:07):
becomes a professor of law at Northwestern University. By now,
having heeded her mother's advice, Dorothy's married and has a daughter.
Dorothy's father dies in two thousand and two and her
mother passes away in two thousand and nine. Dorothy and
her sisters are all well into adulthood, now with busy,
(35:28):
jam packed lives. After their mother's death, their father's research,
comprised of many many boxes, assumedly all the work on
the book he never published, are sent to Dorothy, as
she is the one with a most storage space. There
they sit for years. What is it about boxes? It's
(35:50):
a bit of a motif on this podcast. The fear
about what they might contain or reveal, the resistance to
opening them. In twenty twelve, Dorothy accepts a new professorship
at the University of Pennsylvania, and the unopened boxes travel
with her. The thing about sealed boxes is that they
(36:10):
also continue to taunt to whisper. At some point, Dorothy
cracks the first one open, and it's here that she
realizes that there's so much about her father that she's
been flat out wrong about that she just doesn't know.
These boxes are a whole world that Dorothy needs time
(36:32):
and space to go through, painstakingly, using all her research
skills as an academic and all her daughter's love for
both her mother and her father. Dorothy's life is exciting
and successful and rich, but she needs to go away
by herself to do this work. There is only one
(36:52):
place she can imagine going. She finds a sublet right
around the corner from her childhood home in Kent.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
The first moment of revelation, the shock was when I
pulled out that very first document from the.
Speaker 4 (37:12):
Boxes, and it was.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
This yellowed crumbling the edges were literally crumbling. At Rusty
stapled several pages and I looked at the top of
it and it said February nineteenth, nineteen thirty.
Speaker 4 (37:31):
Seven, and I thought to myself, Okay, this must.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
Be when this couple was married. I could see that
it was a transcript of an interview. I had my
father's name on it. It had part of an address on it,
and as I saw that other interview transcripts also had
nineteen thirty seven, I realized that these were interviews my
(37:58):
father conducted in nineteen thirty seven, and that that was
the most shocking discovery, that very first one.
Speaker 5 (38:08):
Because it completely upended the way I viewed my father's
research on interracial marriage and my parents' relationship, because I
always thought that he had become.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
Interested and so obsessed with interracial marriage when he met
my mother, and that falling in love with her and
marrying her sparked this fascination with interracial marriage and then
he decided he was going to study it.
Speaker 4 (38:49):
But nineteen thirty.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
Seven was when he was only twenty one years old,
a graduate student at University of Chicago, and that meant
that he first was interested in interracial marriage, had that
married my mother, which is a very different story. And
as I read the interviews, I discovered it he was
(39:12):
very interested in dating black women from when he was
very young, and so, you know, it wasn't that he
happened to fall in love with my mother.
Speaker 4 (39:22):
It meant something that she was a black woman. He
was looking to meet.
Speaker 3 (39:27):
Black women in his funnies, you know, that just it turns,
you know, at three sixty degrees, the way that I
thought about the relationship between their marriage and their love
for each other, and my father's interest in interracial marriage.
And that's when I realized that I really needed to
(39:53):
read through all the interviews, to spend time with them,
think about what they meant.
Speaker 4 (40:01):
For my family, my relationship.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
With my parents, what I thought about their marriage, I
thought about my own identity.
Speaker 4 (40:10):
I did look at some of.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
The interviews, but I didn't sit down and really immerse
myself in them until I found this apartment that was
owned by a couple who lived in Eastern Europe and
rented their place over the summer and over the academic year,
(40:34):
and the summer was available, and it was right.
Speaker 4 (40:37):
Around the corner from my old house.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
I could see Shusmith Elementary School from the living room window.
It was just amazing. And I set up a whole procedure.
I put the six boxes of interviews nineteen thirties, nineteen fifties,
nineteen sixties against.
Speaker 4 (40:58):
The wall, and then I would take out stacks.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Lay them on the dining room table, and carrie a
stack every day into the study that they had kind
of like my father's study. It was lined with books,
and so as I went through the transcripts and read them, well,
there were just so many discoveries because I learned so
(41:25):
much from the interviews in each era, you know, the
n thirties.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
My father.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
Had interviewed almost one hundred couples in the nineteen thirties,
and twenty five of them were married in the eighteen hundreds.
I just don't know of any other source of information
about interracial marriage in a northern city, especially in that era.
(41:53):
And there is a book, I should say, there is
a book written by my father's close colleague, Saint Clair
Drake Black Metropolis, where he has a chapter based on
my father's interviews lest sy though they're not he doesn't
discuss all of the interviews, and it's not the same
(42:16):
as reading my father's notes as he met with these
black white couples in Chicago. So it wasn't just what
the couple said, it was all the notes my father
made about how he found the couples and the questions
he asked them and what else.
Speaker 4 (42:36):
He was doing.
Speaker 3 (42:38):
One other discovery is that the interviews became so much
part of his personal life, to the extent that I
could hardly tell the difference between whether he was writing
a diary entry and whether he was writing his notes
on an interview, because he's friends with these people he
(42:58):
was interviewing.
Speaker 4 (43:00):
So that's one set of discoveries.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
But then I get to the nineteen fifties, and of
course I want to find in these interviews, how did
Daddy meet mommy?
Speaker 4 (43:12):
Where does he talk about that?
Speaker 3 (43:14):
And the first place I see my mother mention this
is after discovering him mentioning other black women he's dating,
which you know, I not can real figure out we're
not my mother. My mother first appears as someone interviewing
one of the couples, and I discovered that my mother
(43:38):
had become co investigator with him. She was more than
a research assistant. She was finding couples with him. She
was interviewing the wives while he interviewed the husbands. And
I find in the nineteen fifties and even into the
nineteen sixties transcripts that she records and notes that she made,
(44:01):
and I see this completely different side of my mother
where she's an ethnographer and she's writing notes that sound
like a novel. I never knew that who was Daddy's project,
and now I discover it was mommy's too.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
That's also throws into a new light the you know, Bob,
when you're going to finish the.
Speaker 4 (44:27):
Book exactly exactly.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
I realized Mommy wasn't being mean to Daddy when she
would nag him constantly about finishing the book. She had
put her own blood, sweat, and tears into this book.
And this is something I think so often career husbands
don't realize that their wives are helping their career, even
(44:51):
if they're not involved in the actual work of the career.
She was taken care of my father children. You know,
he was involved, but he wasn't combing our hair. He
wasn't getting his dressed in the morning. He wasn't making
sure that we were well behaved. That was all my
mother's doing. My mother was cooking his meals every night.
(45:13):
She gave up her PhD in order to take care
of me and my sisters.
Speaker 4 (45:20):
She gave up a lot, and not only her.
Speaker 3 (45:25):
Contributions, but she expected that by marrying my father. At
the time, he was a junior professor, but he was
working on a book that she helped. She thought he
was going to publish the book and become a renowned
anthropologist and leave Roosevelt University and go like his friend
Saint Clair Drake to Stanford or Yale or Harford or something.
(45:49):
She very ambitious, my mother. And it wasn't I realized
so much that she was putting.
Speaker 4 (45:55):
All her hopes in my father. It was that she
had sacrificed so that he.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
Could become this renowned professor, so that he could publish
this book.
Speaker 4 (46:08):
It was part of her work that did it.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
And so when he fans to publish the book and
he has no interest in climbing the academic ladder, you know,
it was perfectly satisfied.
Speaker 4 (46:20):
Which is fine. I mean, Roosevelt was a great.
Speaker 3 (46:22):
University, became chair of the sociology anthropology department, He wrote
articles and published them. But he didn't achieve what my
mother expected him to achieve. And it would be one
thing is she hadn't contriuted to it.
Speaker 4 (46:40):
But she did.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
She never said a word, never said a.
Speaker 3 (46:43):
Word about her, actually participated interviews exactly.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
It's interesting because they stayed together the whole of their
shared lives. And the word that keeps on coming to
my mind in all the different ways that you described
her as your mother was very disciplined, yeah, yes, and
your father maybe not so much. And she wanted this
certain kind of well, the same thing that she wanted
for you girls, right, yeah, And I mean fascinating that
(47:11):
she said to you, do not get married before you
have your advanced degree, because she was protecting you. Whether
she was aware of this or not, she was protecting
you from her own fate.
Speaker 4 (47:21):
I think so absolutely.
Speaker 3 (47:24):
Maybe she didn't say it in so many words, but
we got the idea that she was disappointed in my
father's failure to write and publish the book, and she
didn't want anything like that to happen to us. She
had given up a lot to support his career, and
(47:44):
she wanted to make sure that we never did anything
like that. That we got our advanced degrees, we stood
on our own two feet, We had our own careers,
and we didn't rely on a husband to do that
or to let a husband interfere with it. When my
mother said to my father, you're dashing Dorothy's dreams.
Speaker 4 (48:08):
I can now hear in it.
Speaker 3 (48:10):
You dashed my dreams, and I'm not gonna let you
do that to Dorothy too.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
And at the same time, she also is protective of
him by never saying anything to the three of you
about you know, really how disappointed she was and how
she perceived his failure to wrangle that book into what
she and he believes that it could have been. It
was a kindness to him, right and to your family.
(48:37):
When we think about the things that we say and
the things that we don't say, you know that that
was maybe she just wanted to keep things because there
was a lot of There was a lot of beauty
in all.
Speaker 3 (48:47):
That, Yes there was, and we had a very happy family.
Speaker 4 (48:52):
We did a lot together. We went on so many excursions.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
Together, road trips and travel and going to the Field
Museum on Saturdays to watch movies about people's adventures and
all sorts of interesting escapades we went on together. We
went camping together. So our family was very harmonious. I
(49:19):
think she never wanted to degrade my father.
Speaker 4 (49:22):
He saw his potential, that's the thing.
Speaker 3 (49:25):
She didn't think that he was incompetent or anything like that.
She thought he wasn't living up to the potential she
saw in him, and he was not as ambitious as
she was.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
So Dorothy, what was it like for you being holed
up in this apartment? And your childhood neighborhood, you know,
like breathing the air, walking the street, seeing your old house,
seeing your old elementary school. Being alone with this history
and this research and these realizations. I don't know what
it must have taken. At one point, you write, when
(49:58):
you get to the nineteen fifties part of his research,
you write that you were filled with part curiosity, part trepidation,
And he wrote, I knew what I was stepping into.
Speaker 3 (50:07):
Yeah, because even though I was constantly surprised, I still
knew that when I was growing up, my father was
working on this book that he never finished, and I
knew that it had a big influence on my childhood.
Speaker 4 (50:29):
So I realized. And by then, after.
Speaker 3 (50:34):
Discovering the nineteen thirties interviews, I realized that even though
I was very familiar with his project, there were going
to be surprises as well. I've never spent this kind
of intense time, really steeped in the research. That I've
(50:55):
never spent a whole summer where I practically did nothing
but work on the project.
Speaker 4 (51:01):
You know, I did go get some groceries or went
for a run in the morning, but other than that,
I did nothing else.
Speaker 3 (51:10):
I just got up in the morning and made by
tea and yogurt and ran around the block, but then
spent hours upon hours all day reading and taking notes
about my reactions to the interviews.
Speaker 4 (51:30):
And it was such.
Speaker 3 (51:31):
A almost indescribable experience because of this combination of the
history that I uncovered in the interviews the couples my
father interviewed and my mother later also interviewed, were just
totally fascinating. But then there was also the personal aspect
(51:53):
of it, of learning about this part of my father's
life I know about at all, it was completely new
to me, and then discovering my mother's voice as well,
which was unaware of. And so there was that combination
(52:14):
of the historical insights that were so so path breaking.
Speaker 4 (52:25):
The work my father was doing.
Speaker 3 (52:26):
The fact that he was a twenty one year old
white graduate student going into the Black belts to interview
couples about this personal and taboo aspect of their lives,
you know, that alone was so fascinating, But then to
learn these details about his life that I wasn't aware of,
(52:49):
and my mother's life as well, just added another aspect
to it. And on top of that that it had
to do with my own discovery about myself. Everything I
was reading not only taught me new revelations about my parents,
but those revelations.
Speaker 4 (53:10):
Were related to my own identity.
Speaker 3 (53:13):
So I'm learning about myself as much as I'm learning
about them as I'm reading it. That that just all
those layers were mind boggling, but also just very very satisfying,
very gratifying to be able to dig so deeply into
my family history but also my own identity.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
So where does this leave you in terms of your identity?
Speaker 4 (53:42):
Now?
Speaker 2 (53:42):
You know so much more, You have so much more
information about your parents, and you've interrogated so deeply the
complexities of coming from a biracial couple and the privilege
of your father's whiteness, which is something that you hadn't
really interrogated before, and the wanting to reject that, but
you know you can't. It is what it is. So
(54:04):
where does it sit with you?
Speaker 4 (54:06):
Now?
Speaker 2 (54:07):
Having finished the book and having really, like almost so
deeply communed with both of your parents like you research
the research.
Speaker 4 (54:15):
I like that term commune.
Speaker 3 (54:17):
It was a way of communing with them as I
never had before after they both had passed away.
Speaker 4 (54:24):
Well, what really got me to.
Speaker 3 (54:27):
Grapple with the meaning of their research, their relationship and
my identity was what I discovered the file number two
to four on me that my father and I read
these a letter from him to me and an essay
(54:49):
I had written for college, and an essay I had,
it seems written for him.
Speaker 4 (54:56):
Where I made some I think, very hurtful statement about
wanting to hide his.
Speaker 3 (55:03):
Identity, hide him from other people, and deny that he
was part of me. And that really forced me to
grapple deeply with what it means for me to identify
as a black woman with a white father, and to
realize that even though we disagreed about the role that
(55:29):
interracial marriage could have in ending racism in America, that
the main lesson he taught me was about our common
humanity and how much that influence the work that I
do and how I view my role my commitment to
ending racial injustice in America. I came to really appreciate
(55:55):
that the fact that he's white doesn't mean that he
could not contribute to my identity as a black woman
and the way I think about my life and about
society and what I think that my mission in life
should be. Also, even though I still believe that interracial
(56:23):
intimacy and mariage alone cannot be the answer to racism.
They cannot dismantle racism. One thing that comes out from
the interviews he conducted was how much racism governed the
lives of these interracial couples, and though they were courageous
(56:44):
enough to cross Chicago's color line, they were very much
constricted by Chicago's color line. But I became more open
to thinking about how love is an important part of
our struggle against racial and other forms of injustice, and
(57:07):
we need to really wrestle with how our personal relationships
relate to the social injustices that constrain us, and that
there were couples I read about, like my parents, whose
love had a kind of transformative capacity. Even though it
(57:34):
could not end the racist structures that constrained it, it
still could potentially contribute to that struggle. And so I
felt reconciled, even though I didn't feel I had all
the answers at the end. But I've definitely come to
(57:56):
a place obviously by writing this metok works.
Speaker 4 (57:59):
I don't believe I have the high that my father's white.
I don't think that that takes away from my identity.
Speaker 3 (58:05):
I want to embrace every aspect of my identity, and
I don't think that that means that I'm any less
a black woman because I have a white father.
Speaker 2 (58:23):
Here's Darcy reading a passage from her powerful memoir.
Speaker 3 (58:31):
I feel a weight of sadness thinking about all those
years my father poured into writing his book. I can
imagine the mounting disappointment was each missed deadline and canceled contract.
And yet that sadness is outweighed by the extraordinary adventure
my parents' research gave our family while I.
Speaker 4 (58:48):
Was growing up.
Speaker 3 (58:50):
I wonder if, in the end, my father felt that
the joy he found in interviewing couples over half his
life was worth letting the book go unwritten. The world
was deprived of the text he worked so long to finish.
But I've had the gift of reading the stories he gathered,
and of caring with me the lessons they talk about, love, race,
(59:10):
and family. As I placed the folder filled with contracts
and letters back into its box, my heart is full
of gratitude for the mixed marriage project, which shaped who
I am and is still a defining.
Speaker 4 (59:23):
Part of me.
Speaker 2 (59:40):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Z Acur
is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
(01:00:05):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (01:00:32):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets, the secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. My guest today
is Dorothy Roberts, professor, legal scholar, activist, recipient of a
twenty twenty four MacArthur Genius Grant, and author of the
(00:34):
upcoming book The Mixed Marriage Project, a memoir of love, Race,
and Family. Dorothy's is a story, in a way, about
the stories we tell ourselves, about that most foundational element
of our lives, our own family, and the ways those
stories can radically change over time. It's also the story
(00:56):
of a remarkable daughter who is able to illuminate and
finish what her father never could, and in so doing,
learn more about herself as she deepens what is already
an extraordinary life's work.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
I was born in Chicago, but when I was only
three months old, my parents moved to Liberia. My mother,
she was from Jamaica, but in her twenty she moved
to Liberia and then came to Chicago to attend Roosevelt University,
where my father was teaching. And that's where they met,
(01:33):
and my father was an anthropologist, so they decided to
spend a couple of years in Liberia where he would teach,
and that was a place she was familiar with, having
lived there before meeting him, and so at three months old,
my parents and I moved to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.
(01:54):
This is in the nineteen fifties, and my two sisters,
twins were born a year later in Liberia, West Africa.
So our family itself is a very multi national, multi
racial white father, Black mother, Jamaican mother who was a
Liberian citizen. And then when I was two or three,
(02:18):
we moved back to Chicago, and that's where I grew up.
So I spent my entire childhood in Chicago in a
neighborhood called Kenwood, which is a very integrated, middle class
neighborhood next to Hyde Park where the University of Chicago is.
And I grew up in a big, giant Victorian house
(02:43):
on a beautiful block just a block away from my
elementary school and had a wonderful childhood in the sixties,
the era of the civil rights movement and anti Vietnam
War activism, and I lived there on that same block,
(03:06):
same house, from when I was three until we then
moved to Egypt when I was in eighth grade. At thirteen,
my first two years of high school, my father had
a Fulbright fellowship in Cairo, Egypt, and so my world
(03:26):
became very global once again.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
You described that house on Kenwood Avenue in such beautiful,
magical terms, not just in terms of just the kind
of sprawling nature of it and the beautiful block, but
also you describe a very sort of magical time there
in a lot of ways.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Yes, that is exactly the word I used. Magical. It
was a house.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Built in the eighteen nineties, and it had turrets and
the cylindrical column going up and a big porch with columns,
and I looked like a castle. And inside it just
had so many fabulous features. So there was a grand
(04:17):
hall you walked into with a closet where my sisters
and I would pretend we were putting on plays. My
mother put up a velvet curtain in front of it,
and we could come out in front of this winding staircase,
and our audience of our parents and friends could sit
on the steps and watch us perform.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
And then there was the beautiful living room and dining room,
a big kitchen.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
And one of the most interesting things about the house
was that my parents bought it from a couple who
were African safari enthusiasts, and the wife was an artist,
and she painted several of the walls in our house
with scenes from their African safaris. So my sister's bedroom
(05:08):
had giraffes and elephants.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
Roaming across the wall.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
And they had a big bedroom, so we're talking about
a very large wall. My parents had a dressing room
off of their bedroom that had floor to ceiling mirrors
on the closets and you could open the door. If
you stood in the middle and opened the doors on
either side, you saw your reflection going on endlessly. And
(05:36):
one of those closets had a secret passageway into the hall,
and so you could just imagine the three of us
playing hide and seek. And then on the third floor,
homes had ballrooms on the third floor, and my parents
are probably the prior owners that converted the ballroom into
(05:57):
a big playroom for us. And but there was my
father's study also on the third floor, which he kept
locked up with an old fashioned key, and I would
when he wasn't around, pull a chair and stand on
my tippy toes and reach the key and go inside.
And he had a magnificent library of books, mostly about Africa.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
And India, lining a wall.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
And those are my earliest memories of reading to myself,
sitting on the floor and just pulling down books about
foreign lands that I would read and be mesmerized by.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Why do you think your father kept the door locked?
Speaker 3 (06:43):
So my father was completely obsessed with writing a book
about interracial marriage, and the book really dominated our lives,
my mother's and my sisters and mine growing up.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
He was.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Always up in his office if he wasn't having dinner
with us or going on outings. I have to say
my father spent a lot of time with us. My
mother cooked every single night, and so he had dinner
with us every night. And I also had lots of
discussions with my father, so I was very close to him.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
It was important to him to spend time with us.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
But he also spent a lot of time up in
his study working on this book, and I think he
locked it because he didn't want little kids messing with her.
First of all, it was right across from this playroom.
We would be playing over there, and maybe he didn't
(07:47):
want us to spill over into a study. And maybe
it was also just to have a sense of privacy.
You know, it's funny, Danny, I have a similar habit.
I haven't thought about this before, but I keep the
door to my home study closed. And my husband thinks
it's very strange because his door is always open and
(08:09):
doesn't understand why would need to close it. But I
have this sense that while I'm writing, I want to
feel secluded, and I surround myself with books like my
father did, and piles of papers. And it might look
a little bit messy to some people who are too neat,
(08:31):
but it's just a correct to me now that I
probably got that habit, that sense from my father.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Your father's book very much was like almost its own
member of your family. Yes, and so there was you,
there were your two sisters, there was your mom, and
and there was this book and his relationship with this
book and his struggles, yes, growing up during those years
in that house. What did you think about that book?
(09:01):
And how would you describe each of your parents from
your childhood self.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
So I knew that Daddy had to work on his book,
that it was very important to give him time to
work to not bother him. It was a very important
part of his life, his persona, and our family.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
I could just hear my mother say, you know, be
more quiet.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Your father's working out the book. When we called it
the book, and it just came up. It came up
in dinner conversations. I knew he was interviewing couples for
the book. Many of the couples he interviewed became part
of our family life. So my piano teacher was the
(09:52):
husband of one of the couples, our plumber was his
closest friends were an intervi racial relationships. We would go
over to the homes to visit of interracial couples and
their children.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
And so it.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Wasn't just the writing of the book up in his study,
it was also the people he interviewed became integral parts
of our lives. To me, my mother was she was
her own person. My mother had a very strong personality.
She was very elegant, very smart. My sisters and I
(10:32):
thought she could answer any question. Growing up, I knew
that any question I had about homework or anything about life,
I could go to my mother and she would have
an answer.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
She went to a very selective British school in.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Jamaica that was free of charge, but you had to
qualify to be in this Wolmer's School for girls. Whenever
we came to her with questions or tell her what
we were studying, she'd always say, oh, I learned that
far earlier in my life at Woolmers. She had a
British accent combined with a Jamaican, you know, West Indian
(11:08):
lilt to it, but it was quite British and she
was very proper. So what I remember most about my mother,
other than her helping me with homework, is our shopping sprees.
My mother loved to go into downtown Chicago, into the Loop.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
And go shopping.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
And my mother was very glamorous and she would buy
designer clothes. You know, I feel like I'm giving this
impression that I came from a wealthy fathily, which isn't true.
My father was a professor at Roosevelt University, which is
not a very prestigious university, but one perfect for him
because it was very progressive at the time and very diverse,
(11:51):
and it really fit his interests in what he called
the racial cast system in America, our interracial relationship and
ships and my mother eventually worked. She was a homemaker
in my very young childhood, but she eventually worked for
(12:11):
the Chicago Department of Public Health and then became a
Chicago public school teacher. I'm not sure how she became
so glamorous, but she was, and she could entertain. She
put on fantastic dinner parties for my father's colleagues and
friends and her friends, and she was just a magnificent person.
Speaker 4 (12:36):
So they were both quite a couple.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
They were really the life of the party because my
father loved to talk. He's very friendly, gregarious person, very
put people at ease, and my mother just had this
sparkle about her.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Beneath Dorothy's family life, there is a low, constant thrumming
when is Bob going to finish his book? When is
Bob going to finish his book? It's a question that
never quite goes away. When Dorothy is in eighth grade,
Bob gets a full bright grant and the family moves
to Cairo. They are in the throes of some financial
(13:21):
strain and they need to sell their house before leaving
the country.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I definitely had
this sense when I was in eighth grade and my
father got this full bright fellowship that they were in
financial trouble, and the fellowship was it was almost as
if we were escaping to another country where we wouldn't
(13:47):
have those financial pressures, and my parents decided to sell
the house, I think because of the financial trouble they
were in. The one thing I remember is that my
father had invested have in Occidental Petroleum Corporation. I never
really learned the details of it, but my father would
(14:08):
talk about it. Here I'm talking about Accidental Petroleum and
as if he was going to make a lot of
money in this investment he made, and I know that
something terrible happened and he lost the money.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
And then there was the book.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
He got a contract from Simon and Schuster in nineteen
sixty eight nineteen sixty nine, just before we were moving
to Cairo, and it was for two thousand dollars, which
was a fair amount of money.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
Back then in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
And we were so excited about this that this book
my father had been working on my entire childhood was
finally going to come to fruition and be published by
a major publisher. And I found out later that he
had these aspirations so that it was going to be
made into a motion picture because another answer pologist whose
(15:09):
book had turned into a motion picture, and he'd written
to the to his editor to make sure there was
a clause in the contract about motion picture rights.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
So he was dreaming big. There was dreaming big.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
This was going to be the first major book about
interracial marriage, and at one point he was going to
call it something like Sex and Marriage in America. On
the one head, he had this idea of making it
a trade press book that was going to be a
big bestseller.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
But he also and this is what.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
Really doomed him finishing the book, was that, well, there
were lots of things that doomed it, but one was
he wanted to write a book about the history of
interracial marriage, and he got bogged down in that history.
I think he also really liked interviewing people and interacting
with them, and you wanted to keep doing interviews, and
(16:06):
he just couldn't stop and write the book. And so
when he didn't fulfill the contract and had to return
the advance he'd gotten, that just added to the financial disaster.
And so my parents never bought a house again, and
we went from this magnificent house, which they I suppose
(16:30):
they probably couldn't have afforded in the first place to.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Renting a house was when your father had to return
the advance. Was that something that you knew back then
or was that part of the discovery that you later make.
Speaker 4 (16:48):
So I knew, we all knew, The whole family knew
when he got.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
The advance, right, you celebrated, celebrated, but it was not
so much that he had gotten advanced. I don't even
think I knew what that was at the time, what
an advance was. We knew he had a contract to
publish the book with a major publisher, and we went
out to dinner, one of our rare dinner outings, to
Kantiki Ports and the Sheridan Hotel in downtown Chicago.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
I'll never forget that.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
That was the most exciting thing that happened to our
family throughout my entire childhood. You know, I write it
was bigger than when my mother became a US citizen.
I don't remember going out to celebrate that, but we
definitely it was just major jubilation in the house. And
then I also remember when he didn't meet the deadline
(17:36):
for the book, now. I learned later how much he
had gotten and then he had to return it. That
those details I didn't know, but I did know that
it was very disappointing and disastrous that he did not
finish the book.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
We'll be back in a moment with more family seeks.
By Dorothy's senior year of high school, there's a quiet
sense of deflation in the family, an accumulation of compromises
and disappointments that no one quite names, but academically Dorothy
(18:21):
is thriving. The family is living in Evanston, now a
suburb of Chicago, in a rented house, a move her
mother insisted on so Dorothy could attend Evanston Township High School,
one of the best public schools in the area. Private
school was never an option, but this was her mother's
way of opening doors, of positioning her daughter for something bigger.
(18:44):
When Dorothy is accepted to Yale, her first choice, she
is thrilled, but the acceptance exposes a rare and visible
conflict between her parents. Yale means distance and significant expense.
Northwestern just blocked away means living at home and avoiding
the cost of room and board. Her father wants the
(19:05):
practical choice her mother doesn't hesitate. This is Dorothy's dream,
and she wants her to take it.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
And I overheard my parents arguing, which was very rare.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
My mother would fuss at my father all the time,
principally about writing the book.
Speaker 4 (19:24):
You know, I can hear her.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Boom boom, finish the book well, which he never did,
so she would fuss with him. I always thought she
was kind of mean to him. But they didn't argue.
They certainly didn't yell at each other. I never heard
either of my parents.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
Curse at all, let alone curse at each other. My
father was very mild mannered.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
And I heard them arguing, which was so unusual for
them to be arguing back and forth. And I stood
at the top of the stairs. They were on the
first floor, sto at the top of the stairs listening,
and I realized they were arguing about my father not
wanting to pay room and board at Yale.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
And they went back and forth, and my mother was.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
Accusing him of being stingy, and he was trying to
tell her that he just the family couldn't afford it.
And I just will never forget the end of the argument.
My mother said, ooh, you're dashing Dorothy's dreamed that was it.
And what happened was the Evanston Township High School had
(20:35):
an academic scholarship for a senior who excelled, you know,
in courses in leadership and that kind of thing, and
my counselor told me that I.
Speaker 4 (20:47):
Had been elected to receive it.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
I don't remember the exact amount of money, but it
was substantial enough to make a difference, and it was
for each of the four years of college. And so
at that point my father had to give in and
I ended up going to Yale.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
During this time, when you get to Yale, how are
you thinking of yourself as the daughter of a white
father and a black mother at this point in your life?
How are you identifying and how are you experiencing yourself?
Speaker 3 (21:19):
Well, when I was very little, I really adopted my parents'
view that there was something special and important about interracial relationships,
and that the children of interracial relationships were special in
(21:41):
the sense that we were able to navigate different cultures better.
He was trying to contest the dominant view that children
of interracial relationships would, you know, bi racial children would
have some kind of psychological problems or social problems, they
(22:03):
wouldn't fit in to either community, and you know, the
tragic mulatto idea that was still present in the nineteen sixties.
So my father was very determined to challenge that, and
my parents imbued us with this idea that our family
represented the potential for racial harmony in America. And so
(22:28):
at that point, and this would be before I would
say ten years old, you know, I might have answered
I'm human and somebody asked.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
Me to choose. But I always thought of myself as black.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
But the idea that it was more important I was
a human being than my racial classification was the lesson
my parents were teaching me.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
And as I grew old, especially when I read the book.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Black Power in seventh grade, I began to question that view,
especially the idea that interracial intimacy was the answer to
racism in America, and I began to identify more strongly as.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
A black girl.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Then when we went to Egypt, that really intensified. I think,
maybe because I wasn't around black Americans.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
So I went to an international school.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
And I think the only black students there were the
children of the Liberian ambassador. I think I was probably
the only black American student there. So that and reading
the autobiography of.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
Malcolm X, and.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
Just growing up, you know, I began to feel much
more strongly that I identified as black. When I went
to college, I met a group of black students there
who were very very close. We bonded almost immediately. We
(24:11):
hung out together, we studied together. They were really my
closest friendship group and classmates at Yale. And I went
to this period where I didn't want anyone to know
that I had a white father, so I'm brown from
when I was very young, being proud that my parents
(24:31):
were of different races and feeling that I represented some
kind of hope for.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
America, you know, no pressure or anything.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
In college, not wanting anyone to know that my father
was white. I even deliberately hit it. I hid it
to my boyfriend. It was black who I met very
soon after I got to Yale, and ever told him
that I had a white father. Didn't even really come up.
(25:04):
He just assumed that my parents were black. And one
time I had taken some photos with my father over
the winter holidays and brought them back with me to
show my boyfriend. But I only wanted to show him
the photos that my father had taken of me alone.
(25:27):
I deliberately hid.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
The photo of my.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Self with my father, and at one point I realized
that you could see my father in the mirror that
in the dress in his in the bedroom where we
had taken the photos. And as soon as I saw
his image, I breaked out.
Speaker 4 (25:52):
If I can remember the sets I had, my sledging
and my stomach. Oh, my goodness, Bobby is going to
be that my father's white.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
And I immediately snatched the photo from him and put
it down, face down on a table that was there.
And you know, he later told me that when he
did visit my home during spring break, this is now
several months later, when I got you know, I knew
him better. I wasn't so afraid to tell him more
about me. When my father answered the door, he was shocked.
(26:25):
He had no idea that my father was white. And
then there was another situation. My first semester at you know,
I took a sociology course on ethnicity, very basic ethnic
studies type of course, and there was a study group
that I belonged to where one of the assignments was
(26:48):
that we were supposed to guess each other's backgrounds, and
everyone said for me, I was Black American. And there
was one white student who said, I think she has
some white ancestry, and everyone looked at me, though, that
is that?
Speaker 4 (27:07):
Then he get it right, and I.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Said, well, I do have a white grandmother, but I
never met her.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
She died before I was born, which is true, just
not the whole truth.
Speaker 4 (27:19):
Not the whole truth. I left that the part about
my father.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Was it fear of being sort of rejected or was
there some kind of shame just wanting, you know, at
that point in time, wanting things to be simpler, just
wanting the way that you identified to be the way
that it just really was.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
Yeah, I think it.
Speaker 5 (27:41):
Well.
Speaker 3 (27:41):
First of all, even though it was so long ago,
I can still feel viscerally the fear that I had. Now,
what was that fear you're asking me, That's harder to remember.
But I think part of it was that this was
really the first time I was with a group of
(28:05):
people where I identified completely as black, who didn't know
I had a white father, and I didn't want them
to question my identity as a black woman.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
And there was also part of.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
It was that I didn't want people to think that
I thought I was special because I had a white father,
that I.
Speaker 4 (28:37):
Was different from them. I never liked that, you know that.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
I'm thinking also even in high school, when I was
at Evanson Township High School, there was a situation where
my sisters and I were on the.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
Bus riding home from school, and my parents.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Pulled up alongside the bus, and when the bus came
to a stop, my mother knocked on the bus door
and came up on the bus and she said, are
there three light skinned girls on the bus.
Speaker 4 (29:15):
I was horrified. I was horrified.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
I was so embarrassed, and because I didn't want the
other black girls on the bus to think that I
was any different from them. I identify so much with
my mother, who was dark skinned and had very African features.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
I know, it seems.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Strange when I think of myself, I think of myself.
Speaker 4 (29:42):
As looking like her.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
So it was partly I'd never heard her described me
and my sisters like that before.
Speaker 4 (29:54):
I'd never heard her refer to our color before.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
Well, and it's almost like a you know, possibly an
indication of how she saw you and your sisters.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Maybe did it never occurred to me that she saw
us that way. Yeah, it don't recurred to me that
she saws that way. I just have this very strong
revulsion that the idea of black people who have lighter
skin being you know, any better than anybody else, or
(30:27):
you know.
Speaker 4 (30:27):
I just I don't use that term to describe.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
Me, and I don't feel that it describes me, even
though maybe it does.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
There are other moments too, when Darcy is aware that
her father's whiteness comes into play outside their idyllic neighborhood
of Kenwood, moments that remain unspoken. A tacit agreement made
(31:04):
with outwards. When the family would take road trips, they
stayed in motels, not hotels, places where Drothy's mother and
the girls would remain in the car while their father
checked them in.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
My sisters and I more recently, when we've talked about
our memories, both of them said that.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
They knew that's why we never went to hotels.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
We always went to motels where we could stay in
the car and.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
It was just easier to.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Slip into the room without anybody seeing my mother and
my sisters and me.
Speaker 4 (31:42):
And yeah, we just knew that that was.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
Why that there might have been objections to us staying
at a motel, and we knew that that happened.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
Again, this was the sixties.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
Or were places that would say were full if they
saw black people trying to.
Speaker 4 (31:59):
Rent a room.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yeah, I mean it's so interesting. It's like, you know,
your ken Would experience was this idyllic bubble.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because it was a bubble and
the sense that there was a lot of diversity and
integration and interracial relationships in Hyde Park, Kenwood.
Speaker 4 (32:23):
But at the same time it was also a place.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
Where we were very aware of the civil rights movement.
Speaker 4 (32:30):
We're very aware of races name in America, and so.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
It was a bubble with a lot of social consciousness
and awareness.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Yeah, that it was this very special place where there
was at one point you write something like apathy was
not an option. There wasn't a sense of any kind
of being separate from what was going on in the world.
Speaker 4 (32:55):
That's right. That's right.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
We were expected to keep up with the civil rights movement,
the anti war movement, to support it, and to feel
that we had to be engaged in some way with
social justice movements, and most of the parents were, and
our school was so I went to Beulah Shusmith Elementary School,
(33:20):
and that school was dedicated to teaching us lessons about
our common humanity, about the importance of social justice, the
civil rights movement, we participated in it. There was a
school boycott while I was in elementary school, and Shoe
Smith closed down, and we went to an alternative school
(33:43):
for the day at Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, which was
also very involved in supporting the civil rights and anti
war movements.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
We learned movement songs. We had assemblies where the whole school.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Would sing if I had a and I fell, this
land is your lab, and those kinds of things. We
had assemblies where civil rights leaders would come and talk
to us.
Speaker 4 (34:12):
When Doctor King was assassinated the.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
School, all the students were expected to write poems to
missus King to express our condolences and our love for
doctor King and our concern for her and her family.
Speaker 4 (34:27):
It was just part of the school.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
And I think about how different that was that compared
to how some children are being taught today, where all
of that is erased.
Speaker 4 (34:37):
It's shocking.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Dorothy's mother has advised her, in no uncertain terms, that
she must get an advanced degree before marrying, and so
Dorothy does. She goes to Harvard Law and receives a jd.
As an attorney. She practices for eight years, but what
she really wants to do, what really lights her up,
is teaching and research. So she returns to academia and
(35:07):
becomes a professor of law at Northwestern University. By now,
having heeded her mother's advice, Dorothy's married and has a daughter.
Dorothy's father dies in two thousand and two and her
mother passes away in two thousand and nine. Dorothy and
her sisters are all well into adulthood, now with busy,
(35:28):
jam packed lives. After their mother's death, their father's research,
comprised of many many boxes, assumedly all the work on
the book he never published, are sent to Dorothy, as
she is the one with a most storage space. There
they sit for years. What is it about boxes? It's
(35:50):
a bit of a motif on this podcast. The fear
about what they might contain or reveal, the resistance to
opening them. In twenty twelve, Dorothy accepts a new professorship
at the University of Pennsylvania, and the unopened boxes travel
with her. The thing about sealed boxes is that they
(36:10):
also continue to taunt to whisper. At some point, Dorothy
cracks the first one open, and it's here that she
realizes that there's so much about her father that she's
been flat out wrong about that she just doesn't know.
These boxes are a whole world that Dorothy needs time
(36:32):
and space to go through, painstakingly, using all her research
skills as an academic and all her daughter's love for
both her mother and her father. Dorothy's life is exciting
and successful and rich, but she needs to go away
by herself to do this work. There is only one
(36:52):
place she can imagine going. She finds a sublet right
around the corner from her childhood home in Kent.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
The first moment of revelation, the shock was when I
pulled out that very first document from the.
Speaker 4 (37:12):
Boxes, and it was.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
This yellowed crumbling the edges were literally crumbling. At Rusty
stapled several pages and I looked at the top of
it and it said February nineteenth, nineteen thirty.
Speaker 4 (37:31):
Seven, and I thought to myself, Okay, this must.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
Be when this couple was married. I could see that
it was a transcript of an interview. I had my
father's name on it. It had part of an address on it,
and as I saw that other interview transcripts also had
nineteen thirty seven, I realized that these were interviews my
(37:58):
father conducted in nineteen thirty seven, and that that was
the most shocking discovery, that very first one.
Speaker 5 (38:08):
Because it completely upended the way I viewed my father's
research on interracial marriage and my parents' relationship, because I
always thought that he had become.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
Interested and so obsessed with interracial marriage when he met
my mother, and that falling in love with her and
marrying her sparked this fascination with interracial marriage and then
he decided he was going to study it.
Speaker 4 (38:49):
But nineteen thirty.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
Seven was when he was only twenty one years old,
a graduate student at University of Chicago, and that meant
that he first was interested in interracial marriage, had that
married my mother, which is a very different story. And
as I read the interviews, I discovered it he was
(39:12):
very interested in dating black women from when he was
very young, and so, you know, it wasn't that he
happened to fall in love with my mother.
Speaker 4 (39:22):
It meant something that she was a black woman. He
was looking to meet.
Speaker 3 (39:27):
Black women in his funnies, you know, that just it turns,
you know, at three sixty degrees, the way that I
thought about the relationship between their marriage and their love
for each other, and my father's interest in interracial marriage.
And that's when I realized that I really needed to
(39:53):
read through all the interviews, to spend time with them,
think about what they meant.
Speaker 4 (40:01):
For my family, my relationship.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
With my parents, what I thought about their marriage, I
thought about my own identity.
Speaker 4 (40:10):
I did look at some of.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
The interviews, but I didn't sit down and really immerse
myself in them until I found this apartment that was
owned by a couple who lived in Eastern Europe and
rented their place over the summer and over the academic year,
(40:34):
and the summer was available, and it was right.
Speaker 4 (40:37):
Around the corner from my old house.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
I could see Shusmith Elementary School from the living room window.
It was just amazing. And I set up a whole procedure.
I put the six boxes of interviews nineteen thirties, nineteen fifties,
nineteen sixties against.
Speaker 4 (40:58):
The wall, and then I would take out stacks.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Lay them on the dining room table, and carrie a
stack every day into the study that they had kind
of like my father's study. It was lined with books,
and so as I went through the transcripts and read them, well,
there were just so many discoveries because I learned so
(41:25):
much from the interviews in each era, you know, the
n thirties.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
My father.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
Had interviewed almost one hundred couples in the nineteen thirties,
and twenty five of them were married in the eighteen hundreds.
I just don't know of any other source of information
about interracial marriage in a northern city, especially in that era.
(41:53):
And there is a book, I should say, there is
a book written by my father's close colleague, Saint Clair
Drake Black Metropolis, where he has a chapter based on
my father's interviews lest sy though they're not he doesn't
discuss all of the interviews, and it's not the same
(42:16):
as reading my father's notes as he met with these
black white couples in Chicago. So it wasn't just what
the couple said, it was all the notes my father
made about how he found the couples and the questions
he asked them and what else.
Speaker 4 (42:36):
He was doing.
Speaker 3 (42:38):
One other discovery is that the interviews became so much
part of his personal life, to the extent that I
could hardly tell the difference between whether he was writing
a diary entry and whether he was writing his notes
on an interview, because he's friends with these people he
(42:58):
was interviewing.
Speaker 4 (43:00):
So that's one set of discoveries.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
But then I get to the nineteen fifties, and of
course I want to find in these interviews, how did
Daddy meet mommy?
Speaker 4 (43:12):
Where does he talk about that?
Speaker 3 (43:14):
And the first place I see my mother mention this
is after discovering him mentioning other black women he's dating,
which you know, I not can real figure out we're
not my mother. My mother first appears as someone interviewing
one of the couples, and I discovered that my mother
(43:38):
had become co investigator with him. She was more than
a research assistant. She was finding couples with him. She
was interviewing the wives while he interviewed the husbands. And
I find in the nineteen fifties and even into the
nineteen sixties transcripts that she records and notes that she made,
(44:01):
and I see this completely different side of my mother
where she's an ethnographer and she's writing notes that sound
like a novel. I never knew that who was Daddy's project,
and now I discover it was mommy's too.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
That's also throws into a new light the you know, Bob,
when you're going to finish the.
Speaker 4 (44:27):
Book exactly exactly.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
I realized Mommy wasn't being mean to Daddy when she
would nag him constantly about finishing the book. She had
put her own blood, sweat, and tears into this book.
And this is something I think so often career husbands
don't realize that their wives are helping their career, even
(44:51):
if they're not involved in the actual work of the career.
She was taken care of my father children. You know,
he was involved, but he wasn't combing our hair. He
wasn't getting his dressed in the morning. He wasn't making
sure that we were well behaved. That was all my
mother's doing. My mother was cooking his meals every night.
(45:13):
She gave up her PhD in order to take care
of me and my sisters.
Speaker 4 (45:20):
She gave up a lot, and not only her.
Speaker 3 (45:25):
Contributions, but she expected that by marrying my father. At
the time, he was a junior professor, but he was
working on a book that she helped. She thought he
was going to publish the book and become a renowned
anthropologist and leave Roosevelt University and go like his friend
Saint Clair Drake to Stanford or Yale or Harford or something.
(45:49):
She very ambitious, my mother. And it wasn't I realized
so much that she was putting.
Speaker 4 (45:55):
All her hopes in my father. It was that she
had sacrificed so that he.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
Could become this renowned professor, so that he could publish
this book.
Speaker 4 (46:08):
It was part of her work that did it.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
And so when he fans to publish the book and
he has no interest in climbing the academic ladder, you know,
it was perfectly satisfied.
Speaker 4 (46:20):
Which is fine. I mean, Roosevelt was a great.
Speaker 3 (46:22):
University, became chair of the sociology anthropology department, He wrote
articles and published them. But he didn't achieve what my
mother expected him to achieve. And it would be one
thing is she hadn't contriuted to it.
Speaker 4 (46:40):
But she did.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
She never said a word, never said a.
Speaker 3 (46:43):
Word about her, actually participated interviews exactly.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
It's interesting because they stayed together the whole of their
shared lives. And the word that keeps on coming to
my mind in all the different ways that you described
her as your mother was very disciplined, yeah, yes, and
your father maybe not so much. And she wanted this
certain kind of well, the same thing that she wanted
for you girls, right, yeah, And I mean fascinating that
(47:11):
she said to you, do not get married before you
have your advanced degree, because she was protecting you. Whether
she was aware of this or not, she was protecting
you from her own fate.
Speaker 4 (47:21):
I think so absolutely.
Speaker 3 (47:24):
Maybe she didn't say it in so many words, but
we got the idea that she was disappointed in my
father's failure to write and publish the book, and she
didn't want anything like that to happen to us. She
had given up a lot to support his career, and
(47:44):
she wanted to make sure that we never did anything
like that. That we got our advanced degrees, we stood
on our own two feet, We had our own careers,
and we didn't rely on a husband to do that
or to let a husband interfere with it. When my
mother said to my father, you're dashing Dorothy's dreams.
Speaker 4 (48:08):
I can now hear in it.
Speaker 3 (48:10):
You dashed my dreams, and I'm not gonna let you
do that to Dorothy too.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
And at the same time, she also is protective of
him by never saying anything to the three of you
about you know, really how disappointed she was and how
she perceived his failure to wrangle that book into what
she and he believes that it could have been. It
was a kindness to him, right and to your family.
(48:37):
When we think about the things that we say and
the things that we don't say, you know that that
was maybe she just wanted to keep things because there
was a lot of There was a lot of beauty
in all.
Speaker 3 (48:47):
That, Yes there was, and we had a very happy family.
Speaker 4 (48:52):
We did a lot together. We went on so many excursions.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
Together, road trips and travel and going to the Field
Museum on Saturdays to watch movies about people's adventures and
all sorts of interesting escapades we went on together. We
went camping together. So our family was very harmonious. I
(49:19):
think she never wanted to degrade my father.
Speaker 4 (49:22):
He saw his potential, that's the thing.
Speaker 3 (49:25):
She didn't think that he was incompetent or anything like that.
She thought he wasn't living up to the potential she
saw in him, and he was not as ambitious as
she was.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
So Dorothy, what was it like for you being holed
up in this apartment? And your childhood neighborhood, you know,
like breathing the air, walking the street, seeing your old house,
seeing your old elementary school. Being alone with this history
and this research and these realizations. I don't know what
it must have taken. At one point, you write, when
(49:58):
you get to the nineteen fifties part of his research,
you write that you were filled with part curiosity, part trepidation,
And he wrote, I knew what I was stepping into.
Speaker 3 (50:07):
Yeah, because even though I was constantly surprised, I still
knew that when I was growing up, my father was
working on this book that he never finished, and I
knew that it had a big influence on my childhood.
Speaker 4 (50:29):
So I realized. And by then, after.
Speaker 3 (50:34):
Discovering the nineteen thirties interviews, I realized that even though
I was very familiar with his project, there were going
to be surprises as well. I've never spent this kind
of intense time, really steeped in the research. That I've
(50:55):
never spent a whole summer where I practically did nothing
but work on the project.
Speaker 4 (51:01):
You know, I did go get some groceries or went
for a run in the morning, but other than that,
I did nothing else.
Speaker 3 (51:10):
I just got up in the morning and made by
tea and yogurt and ran around the block, but then
spent hours upon hours all day reading and taking notes
about my reactions to the interviews.
Speaker 4 (51:30):
And it was such.
Speaker 3 (51:31):
A almost indescribable experience because of this combination of the
history that I uncovered in the interviews the couples my
father interviewed and my mother later also interviewed, were just
totally fascinating. But then there was also the personal aspect
(51:53):
of it, of learning about this part of my father's
life I know about at all, it was completely new
to me, and then discovering my mother's voice as well,
which was unaware of. And so there was that combination
(52:14):
of the historical insights that were so so path breaking.
Speaker 4 (52:25):
The work my father was doing.
Speaker 3 (52:26):
The fact that he was a twenty one year old
white graduate student going into the Black belts to interview
couples about this personal and taboo aspect of their lives,
you know, that alone was so fascinating, But then to
learn these details about his life that I wasn't aware of,
(52:49):
and my mother's life as well, just added another aspect
to it. And on top of that that it had
to do with my own discovery about myself. Everything I
was reading not only taught me new revelations about my parents,
but those revelations.
Speaker 4 (53:10):
Were related to my own identity.
Speaker 3 (53:13):
So I'm learning about myself as much as I'm learning
about them as I'm reading it. That that just all
those layers were mind boggling, but also just very very satisfying,
very gratifying to be able to dig so deeply into
my family history but also my own identity.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
So where does this leave you in terms of your identity?
Speaker 4 (53:42):
Now?
Speaker 2 (53:42):
You know so much more, You have so much more
information about your parents, and you've interrogated so deeply the
complexities of coming from a biracial couple and the privilege
of your father's whiteness, which is something that you hadn't
really interrogated before, and the wanting to reject that, but
you know you can't. It is what it is. So
(54:04):
where does it sit with you?
Speaker 4 (54:06):
Now?
Speaker 2 (54:07):
Having finished the book and having really, like almost so
deeply communed with both of your parents like you research
the research.
Speaker 4 (54:15):
I like that term commune.
Speaker 3 (54:17):
It was a way of communing with them as I
never had before after they both had passed away.
Speaker 4 (54:24):
Well, what really got me to.
Speaker 3 (54:27):
Grapple with the meaning of their research, their relationship and
my identity was what I discovered the file number two
to four on me that my father and I read
these a letter from him to me and an essay
(54:49):
I had written for college, and an essay I had,
it seems written for him.
Speaker 4 (54:56):
Where I made some I think, very hurtful statement about
wanting to hide his.
Speaker 3 (55:03):
Identity, hide him from other people, and deny that he
was part of me. And that really forced me to
grapple deeply with what it means for me to identify
as a black woman with a white father, and to
realize that even though we disagreed about the role that
(55:29):
interracial marriage could have in ending racism in America, that
the main lesson he taught me was about our common
humanity and how much that influence the work that I
do and how I view my role my commitment to
ending racial injustice in America. I came to really appreciate
(55:55):
that the fact that he's white doesn't mean that he
could not contribute to my identity as a black woman
and the way I think about my life and about
society and what I think that my mission in life
should be. Also, even though I still believe that interracial
(56:23):
intimacy and mariage alone cannot be the answer to racism.
They cannot dismantle racism. One thing that comes out from
the interviews he conducted was how much racism governed the
lives of these interracial couples, and though they were courageous
(56:44):
enough to cross Chicago's color line, they were very much
constricted by Chicago's color line. But I became more open
to thinking about how love is an important part of
our struggle against racial and other forms of injustice, and
(57:07):
we need to really wrestle with how our personal relationships
relate to the social injustices that constrain us, and that
there were couples I read about, like my parents, whose
love had a kind of transformative capacity. Even though it
(57:34):
could not end the racist structures that constrained it, it
still could potentially contribute to that struggle. And so I
felt reconciled, even though I didn't feel I had all
the answers at the end. But I've definitely come to
(57:56):
a place obviously by writing this metok works.
Speaker 4 (57:59):
I don't believe I have the high that my father's white.
I don't think that that takes away from my identity.
Speaker 3 (58:05):
I want to embrace every aspect of my identity, and
I don't think that that means that I'm any less
a black woman because I have a white father.
Speaker 2 (58:23):
Here's Darcy reading a passage from her powerful memoir.
Speaker 3 (58:31):
I feel a weight of sadness thinking about all those
years my father poured into writing his book. I can
imagine the mounting disappointment was each missed deadline and canceled contract.
And yet that sadness is outweighed by the extraordinary adventure
my parents' research gave our family while I.
Speaker 4 (58:48):
Was growing up.
Speaker 3 (58:50):
I wonder if, in the end, my father felt that
the joy he found in interviewing couples over half his
life was worth letting the book go unwritten. The world
was deprived of the text he worked so long to finish.
But I've had the gift of reading the stories he gathered,
and of caring with me the lessons they talk about, love, race,
(59:10):
and family. As I placed the folder filled with contracts
and letters back into its box, my heart is full
of gratitude for the mixed marriage project, which shaped who
I am and is still a defining.
Speaker 4 (59:23):
Part of me.
Speaker 2 (59:40):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Z Acur
is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
(01:00:05):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (01:00:32):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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