September 12, 1999
Other Children's Books Reviewed This Month
Moses and the Angels by Ileene Smith Sobel. Illustrated by Mark Podwal.
I Once Was a Monkey by Jeanne M. Lee.
Journeys With Elijah by Barbara Diamond Goldin. Illustrated Jerry Pinkney.
Jane on Her Own by Ursula K. Le Guin. Illustrated by S. D. Schindler.
Bookshelf: Children's Books in Brief
Collected Children's Books Reviews
By BRENT STAPLES
he American obsession with interracial intimacy began in 1619, when the first slave ship sailed into the harbor at Jamestown, Va., with African women already pregnant by the ship's crew. Within a decade, white citizens were being flogged in the town square for defiling their bodies by lying with Negroes -- who were viewed by both church and law as superior to animals but lower than human beings. State legislatures passed law after law forbidding interracial marriage -- and sometimes even the sex act itself -- but failed to stem the tide. Hundreds of distinguished white Southerners had offspring with slaves, among them Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law, who fathered the mulatto beauty Sally Hemings, and Jefferson himself, who is now known to have fathered at least one child -- and possibly several -- with ''Dashing Sally.''
The legal battling was not resolved until 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that laws against interracial union violated the Constitution of the United States. It seems incredible when put this way, but it took 350 years for interracial couples to win perhaps the most basic freedom of all, the liberty to love and live with the person one chooses.
This history lies at the heart of who we are as a race-obsessed country. But as the historian Gary B. Nash tells young-adult readers in ''Forbidden Love: The Secret History of Mixed-Race America,'' most textbooks and popular histories for adults, let alone teen-agers, have treated this as a peripheral or even nonexistent subject. Nash, who teaches at U.C.L.A., attempts to fill the gap with a readable if overly formal history of mixed-race Americans from the colonial era to the present, ending with the golfer Tiger Woods, the son of an African-American father and a Thai mother. ''Forbidden Love'' deals with the rise of racialist sentiment that led to Jim Crow and the anti-intermarriage laws and shows how the detestation once directed toward blacks and Indians extended to Asians and other nonwhites. Nash shows clearly that mixed-race people have been with us always, using cross-cultural skills to great advantage in art, diplomacy and civic leadership. An extensive bibliography makes this a valuable guide to further reading.
But the title ''Forbidden Love'' is misleading, especially for adolescent readers, for a book that dwells more on broad social themes than on the intimate details of individual lives. Nash writes, for example, that Americans who chose mates across racial and cultural lines ''defied the way society defined them'' and dreamed of a mixed-race nation -- as though these people saw their love lives as a forum for a sociological experiment. In truth, intimate contact among white settlers, blacks and Indians was a matter of simple, fleshly desire between individuals thrown together by circumstance. Lust came first; the sociological categories came much later.
''Forbidden Love'' would have benefited greatly from a little more research into the lives of Nash's more famous subjects, especially Walter White, who was executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. in the late 1940's. White, a fair-skinned, blue-eyed man who was frequently mistaken for a European-American, is described here only in terms of his marriage to a white journalist. But White's interracial heritage was a source of trauma and confusion. His father was struck by a car in Atlanta and mistakenly delivered to the section of a hospital that was reserved for whites only. When a brown-skinned relative showed up, the attendants pulled White's father from the examination table and dragged him to the filthy, crowded colored ward, where he later died. Walter White remained vexed by issues of skin color for the remainder of his life. He published an article in Look magazine in the late 40's arguing that the race problem would disappear if black people used a corrosive new chemical to remove the melanin from their skins -- essentially turning themselves white -- and submitted to surgery to thin their lips and noses. He was made a laughingstock in the Negro press and was widely viewed as the epitome of the self-hating black man. His reputation never recovered.
The 80 subjects interviewed by the journalist Pearl Fuyo Gaskins for ''What Are You? Voices of Mixed-Race Young People'' are far more comfortable with their bicultural identities than were their predecessors in Walter White's time. The title comes from the question that mixed-race people are often asked by those who find it necessary to place everyone in a discrete ethnic box. They respond with an impressive courage and self-awareness. Fifteen-year-old Derek Salmond is the son of a white mother and a black father. When people ask, ''So what are you, anyway?'' Derek responds: ''I'm a human being. . . . What are you?'' He embraces his biracial identity and refuses to be categorized as one thing or the other. Fourteen-year-old Chela Delgado tells of being called a ''zebra'' and a ''half-breed'' but says she grew steadily more self-reliant, turning her biculturalism into a source of strength and pride. ''I love being biracial just because I love proving people wrong,'' she says. ''When someone has a certain stereotype about a black person being this or a white person being that, I blow them out of the water. . . . I love being able to say, 'I don't fit that stereotype -- that's wrong.' ''Saladin Ali Ahmed (born to a white mother and an Arab-American father) takes a similarly aggressive tack. He revels in his mixed heritage and sometimes wears Middle Eastern garb, even though Americans find it upsetting. He sees being mixed as both difficult and strengthening: ''You have more stuff to learn about yourself than other people do, but that's a good thing.'' And you have more to teach people. A young woman who is half African-American and half Japanese told Gaskins that she was happy with the mix: ''I am Blackanese. . . . I have taken aspects of both worlds to create my own worldview and identity.'' These young voices are refreshingly optimistic and free of bitterness. They offer hope that we may yet be delivered from the ugly racialism that has poisoned the country from the beginning.
Brent Staples writes editorials about politics and culture for The New York Times and is the author of the memoir ''Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White.''
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