In a dramatic, moving work of historical reporting and personal discovery, Mark Whitaker, award-winning journalist, sets out to trace the story of what happened to his parents, a fascinating but star-crossed interracial couple, and arrives at a new understanding of the family dramas that shaped their lives—and his own.
In a dramatic, moving work of historical reporting and personal discovery, Mark Whitaker, award-winning journalist, sets out to trace the story of what happened to his parents, a fascinating but star-crossed interracial couple, and arrives at a new understanding of the family dramas that shaped their lives—and his own.
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Overview
In a dramatic, moving work of historical reporting and personal discovery, Mark Whitaker, award-winning journalist, sets out to trace the story of what happened to his parents, a fascinating but star-crossed interracial couple, and arrives at a new understanding of the family dramas that shaped their lives—and his own.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781451627558 |
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Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
Publication date: | 01/29/2013 |
Pages: | 357 |
Sales rank: | 1,068,981 |
Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1
Growing up, I always took it for granted that it was my mother who was first attracted to my father. After all, he was the exotic one, the gregarious one, the charm machine. She was the shy one, the one who stuttered so badly as a child that her parents sent her away to be treated by doctors in Paris and who still got self-conscious when she couldn’t get her words out quickly. But when I went back and investigated, it turned out that it was the other way around: He became obsessed with her.
She had noticed him around campus, of course. As one of the few black students at Swarthmore College in the mid-1950s, he was hard to miss. She had heard him perform once or twice: He played the guitar and sang folk songs. For a while, he earned pocket money by recording radio commercials, and later she would hear one of his jingles playing on the air and feel a shiver of pride when the announcer said that if the young man with that voice ever turned professional he would give him a contract. But that was news to me too, since I have no memories of my father singing.
They met in his junior year, thanks to a play. Jeanne Theis was a French instructor in her fourth year of teaching at Swarthmore. She was also the faculty adviser for the French Club and she decided that it would be fun to help the students put on a production in the original. She chose a satirical one-act play by Jean Giraudoux called Supplément au voyage de Cook that recounts the fanciful story of Captain Cook’s arrival in the tropics. To direct, she enlisted Michael DeLaszlo, a junior from England who had taken one of her classes as a freshman. They cast most of the parts but didn’t have anyone to play Chief Outourou, the tribal leader who greets the explorers. DeLaszlo said he knew someone who had the perfect look for the part: his roommate, Syl Whitaker.
The only hitch was that he didn’t speak French. When he agreed to take on the role, she had to coach him so he could learn his lines and speak with a convincing accent. They met before rehearsals and several times in her apartment, in a dorm called Roberts, where she oversaw “French Hall,” a suite of rooms for students who wanted to speak the language and attend her weekly teas. She was impressed by how quickly he learned and by what a good mimic he was. They laughed at the part where the chief, to show hospitality, offers his daughters to the flustered, repressed Englishmen. She noticed how his cheeks dimpled when he smiled and how the worry lines in his forehead creased when he was making a serious point. In all, there was no mistaking how handsome he was, particularly when he put on his grass-skirt costume for rehearsals and bared his dark, muscular chest.
But she was startled the night of the wrap party, which she threw at Roberts, when they were talking in a corner of her crowded apartment and all of a sudden he kissed her.
She pulled back, looking confused.
“I thought you wanted me to do that,” he said. “The other day, when you touched my arm, I thought it was a signal.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s just something I have the habit of doing when I’m talking to people.”
He must have seen her blushing, since her skin was fair and freckled and framed by black hair that she wore, Jean Seberg–style, in a short bob. But her diffidence didn’t deter him. In fact, it may have been part of the allure when he had fantasized about wooing her, as he must have done, since in 1955 a black student would hardly have dared to kiss his white teacher on the lips simply on a spur-of-the-moment whim.
“Would you mind if I visited you here again?” he asked.
“I suppose that would be all right,” she replied.
He started to come by Roberts every few days, for an hour or so at a time. They would listen to music, and he brought his favorite 45s and introduced her to black jazz singers like the infectious Nellie Lutcher and Eartha kitt, with her seductive purr. Sometimes he would kiss her or hold her hand, and she would primly consent, but mostly they talked.
He told her about growing up in Pittsburgh, about his parents the morticians and what it was like to live above a funeral parlor. When his mother came to visit friends in Philadelphia, he arranged for them to meet. My mother was instantly impressed by Grandmother Edith’s light-skinned beauty and her elegant manner and entertaining way of speaking. He rarely mentioned C.S., the man he was named for, except to say that they didn’t get along and that his parents were divorced. He confessed that his father had beaten him as a child. Eventually they discovered what was for him a humiliating coincidence: My mother had gone to graduate school at Bryn Mawr with a girl who came from Harrisburg and whose family had employed Granddad as a butler after he lost his business.
She told him about her parents, about how they met as Protestant missionaries in Africa, where she was born and spent much of her childhood before they moved to France. She described how she came to America on a boat with five of her little sisters when she was fourteen and went to live with the family of Dr. Enders, the Swarthmore biology professor, which was how she came to attend college there and later return to join the French Department. And she explained the reason her parents had sent her away, the dangerous work that caused Pastor Theis to be watched and arrested by the Vichy police. She told him how much she loved and admired her father and how sad she thought it was that he disliked his own so much.
They reminisced about student work camps. After the war, she had returned to France for several summers to attend the work camps at the boarding school that her father had founded in the mountains of central France, joining young people who came from across the country and as far away as Britain and America to build classrooms and dorm barracks. In high school, he had started going to summer work camps run by the Quakers. His Bible school teacher at Bethany Baptist, his family’s church in Pittsburgh, had first told him about a Friends camp in Ithaca when he was fifteen. He decided to go there after some local Quakers offered to pay his way, although for the life of him he couldn’t understand why well- to- do white kids from places like New York and Boston and Chicago would spend good money to do manual labor in the hot summer sun.
When he arrived in upstate New York and was first introduced to Quaker ideas about nonviolence, “I told them that I had never heard anything more preposterous,” he would later tell the author of a book about the Friends. But before long he found himself drawn to the faith’s teachings about simplicity and pacifism and the subtle power of silent prayer, so different from the raucous call-and-response of the black church services he was used to. Around the campfire at night, the work campers sang folk and protest songs, and when he returned to Pittsburgh he told his mother that he intended to worship as a Quaker and to teach himself how to play the guitar.
He recounted the harrowing time he had at a work camp the next summer, in the backwoods of Harlan County, kentucky. A Pittsburgh Quaker named Spahr Hull, who later became my godfather, told him that the Friends were looking for a black student to integrate Pine Mountain, their first camp in the Deep South. Locating a Time magazine article about “Bloody Harlan,” my father learned that there had been a murder indictment in the county every month for 132 years. Still, he agreed to go, confident that the force of his goodwill and winning personality would see him through.
On his second night there, a dozen hillbilly kids came to the camp for a square dance. Seeing one of the local white girls sitting alone on the other side of the camp’s lodge, my father worked up the courage to ask her to do-si-do. She nodded and he took her hand, but she never looked him in the eye, and her damp fingers and the red tips of her ears betrayed how nervous she was. Afterward he discovered that the night watchman, who was called Old Martin, had complained to a nurse at the infirmary. “I can’t stand to see a nigger touch a white woman like that!” the guard said. “They’ll soon run that nigger out of here, and I won’t do a thing to stop them!”
Before long, a group of hillbilly boys started lurking on the outskirts of Pine Mountain day and night, asking where my father slept and once hanging a white rope over a tree. “Hey, which of you gals wrang that nigger’s neck until it got black?” they called out to a group of girls as they passed by with a female counselor.
One day the work campers went on an overnight trip and had to search for hours to find a spot that wasn’t marked “White” and “Colored” to set up their tents. In the middle of the night, four cars pulled up with headlights flashing. A dozen drunken men got out, announcing that they had come to get “that nigger.” The camp director, a local Kentucky minister named Sandy Sandborne, grabbed a flashlight and went out to the road to talk to them. He calmly insisted that the person they were looking for wasn’t there, and eventually the drunks got back in the cars and left, giving the campers a terrible scare but also an object lesson, as my father described it to my mother, in the power of nonviolent resistance.
He told her about another terrifying incident that happened later that summer. Toward the end of the eight-week camp, the brother of the girl he had asked to square-dance came back to town and joined the loitering pack of local white boys. All of a sudden, they started to be suspiciously nice to my father. They shouted out to invite him to join them on a hike, then on a rifle-shoot. The other campers told him to ignore them, especially a white Jewish girl from New York with whom he had been taking long walks. What if they were trying to lure him into an “accident”? she warned. But he replied that the whole point of work camping was to teach people from different backgrounds to get to know and respect each other. If he didn’t go, he would always wonder what was really in their hearts. So when the local boys arrived in a car to pick him up, he climbed into the backseat.
They drove to a clearing in the woods with a big tree stump at the end. Shotguns were handed out and everyone took turns firing at cans placed on top of the wooden nub. Once all the cans were knocked down, one boy at a time would walk across the clearing and set them up again. When it was my father’s turn, he set off slowly toward the stump, his back to the other boys.
He said that he never experienced so powerfully the physical effects of fear. Every muscle in his body tightened up, and he felt like he was going to vomit. After setting up the cans, he turned around and faced what looked like a hillbilly firing squad: six local boys with long scraggly hair, dressed in tattered overalls, holding shotguns. His breathing stopped and he almost fainted as he walked back toward them. But no one fired, and from then on the white boys treated him like one of them, as though he had passed a tribal test of manhood. On the last week of camp, the family of the girl at the square dance invited all the work campers to a chicken dinner. After that, he told my mother, he felt he really understood what the Quaker belief in searching for the Light in every human being was all about.
As they talked, visit after visit, my mother found herself falling in love. It was partly a physical condition, with all the usual symptoms: She couldn’t stop thinking about him when they were apart, and she longed for their next rendezvous. As she walked across campus, she found herself humming a Nellie Lutcher tune: “He’s got a fine brown frame, I wonder what could be his name. He looks good to me, and all I can see is his fine brown frame…”
But for her, it was an intellectual process as well. She fell in love with the idea of him. He was handsome in a way that particularly appealed to her, perhaps because she had spent her early childhood in Africa. She respected his bravery in coming to a virtually all- white school like Swarthmore and good-naturedly confronting the racism he had encountered in his life. And she was moved that he took his faith so seriously, that coming from such different backgrounds they shared the same commitment to battling the world’s evils by turning the other cheek rather than demanding an eye for an eye.
She was taken with his charisma and the almost chemical effect he had on other people. From the time he arrived at Swarthmore, he had “displaced a lot of water,” as one of his friends described it. He told her the story of how, as a freshman, he had gone into the little barbershop in town for a trim and the barber had refused to serve him. Word spread across campus and soon scores of students joined a boycott. One Greek-American student from Massachusetts named Michael Dukakis even began offering haircuts in his dorm room, a story that decades later the Dukakis campaign would tout in his presidential run.
She saw that Syl Whitaker knew how to enjoy himself, when he would arrive with stories of sneaking off with Michael DeLaszlo in his roommate’s car to go to a jazz club in Philadelphia or to get their favorite hoagie sandwiches at a delicatessen called Stacky’s in Chester. (She didn’t hear the story of how his roommates had once been shooting the bull late at night and played a game of How Would You Like to Die? “In an airplane crash while making love!” my father proclaimed, impressing them all with his bravado and the implicit implication that he had made love before.)
But she also saw him as possessing a maturity and talent for leadership beyond his years. That impression only deepened when, in the months they were meeting secretly, he was selected to run the Swarthmore Folk Festival. The three-day event had started in the mid-1940s, when she was an undergraduate, and by the time she came back to teach in the early 1950s it was the biggest thing on campus. Singers like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly had all come to perform, and each year hundreds of young people from up and down the East Coast descended on the college, filling the walkways with their cars and littering the dorm rooms with their sleeping bags. To headline the 1955 festival, my father booked Josh White, one of my mother’s favorites, and the black protest singer got the crowd stomping and clapping and singing along to his renditions of “Lonesome Road” and “On Top of Old Smokey.”
Yet as soon as it was over, Swarthmore’s president, Courtney Smith, sent word through his deans that the festival had become too big and disruptive. My father was chosen to mediate and he spent days crafting a proposal for new rules that would have limited the number of outside visitors and required registration in advance. But Smith rejected the compromise and eventually canceled the 1956 concert. My father concluded that the WASP-ish president, who had once decreed to the student body that he would tolerate “no ostentatious displays of affection,” was simply a prude. He didn’t like the fact that students held hands during the festival and wore blue jeans. The jeans issue rankled my father so much that he decided to visit Smith in his office in Parish Hall to discuss the matter. He pointed out that as a financially strapped student on a full scholarship, he wore jeans to cut down on his cleaning bills, but Smith was unimpressed and curtly dismissed him after a short conversation.
By the end of the school year, my mother had decided that her feelings for my father were strong enough that she needed to confide in someone. She chose Hal March, an older colleague in the French Department who had become somewhat of a professional father figure. March wasn’t shocked or scandalized, but he expressed concern about what the consequences would be for her reputation if she were seen to have been in a frivolous affair with a student, especially one who happened to be black. So he summoned my father to a meeting in his office.
“Do you intend to marry her?” he asked.
My parents had never discussed the idea, and at that point it may well have never occurred to my father. But from the white professor’s stern tone, he must have grasped that he had started something that could only be made respectable in the eyes of the college and the broader society of mid- 1950s America by giving it the sanctity of an engagement.
“Yes, I would like to marry her,” he answered.
The next time my parents met, my father recounted the discussion with Professor March and reiterated his matrimonial intentions. He didn’t exactly propose, and my mother didn’t exactly accept. It was as though they were at a Quaker Meeting and had reached consensus that they would eventually get married.
“I guess I just assumed everything would work out,” my mother told me as she looked back. She hardly thought of herself as a spinster, but she was already twenty-eight. Some of her younger sisters were already married, and she always assumed that one day she would be too. She was in love with my father, as she understood it. She never stopped to think what marrying a black man might mean for his career or for any children they might have. And at the time, she didn’t see what was so wrong with a teacher being involved with a student—male professors did it all the time—particularly if they waited until after he graduated for the wedding.
She also confessed that the engagement relieved her of another anxiety: what to do about sex. For someone of her religious upbringing, it wasn’t something you did with a mere boyfriend. But now it could happen, and by the end of the semester it did.
What was my father thinking when they decided to get married? “he probably saw it as a big adventure that would impress his Quaker friends,” my mother said. But I’m sure that it was more complicated than that. He must have believed that he was in love too, but at age twenty what did that mean? After all their long talks, did he think that he had found a soul mate, or was he still in the grip of infatuation? Had his summer in Pine Mountain stirred not only an attraction to white women but an appetite for risk? How noteworthy was it that she was an older, professional woman, someone like his mother, although as different from Grandmother Edith as she could be in outward appearance and personality? And how driven was he by his ambition and competitive insecurities, by the prospect that she could help him with advice and inside information on where he stood in relation to all the brainy white students of Swarthmore?
When classes were over, he returned to Pittsburgh to earn a few weeks’ pay working in the post office, while she stayed in Swarthmore to grade exams. One night his roommates invited her for a drink at Sam’s bar, a place that students went to in the nearby village of Media, because Swarthmore was a dry town. After a glass of whiskey, she momentarily forgot that not all of them were in on the secret.
“So you’re the one who is going to work in East Harlem this summer!” she said when she was introduced to Knowles Dougherty, an all- American type with a big grin.
“How did you know that?” he asked.
“Uh, Syl told me,” she said, recognizing her gaffe but not wanting to tell a lie.
Later in the conversation she recommended that they all read Anti-Semite and Jew, by Jean-Paul Sartre.
“Yes, Syl is reading it,” said Paul Berry, a senior who was one of two roommates, along with Michael DeLaszlo, who knew about the romance.
This time she knew enough not to comment on the connection.
My father and his group lived in a dorm called Mary Lyons, and my mother had arranged to take a faculty apartment there in the fall so they could be closer together. But when she told Bob Cross, another professor who resided in the dorm, he asked teasingly: “What kind of immoral behavior are you planning to indulge in down there?” She didn’t think he knew, but the remark disturbed her and made her realize how careful they had to be. Hoping it would please him, she wrote my father to tell him how the graduating se niors he knew had done in their final honors exams. But then she made the mistake of revealing details of a faculty meeting about the ju nior honors exams that he and members of his class had just taken. She told him that he had received an “adequate” on one test and that the chair of the history Department had joked that she was going to write him a letter urging him to drop the honors track in political science in favor of history.
That night, he called her from Pittsburgh in a huff. What did “adequate” mean? he asked indignantly. Nothing bad, she comforted him; it was the standard grade for all tests except those deemed worthy of highest honors. And was the history chair suggesting that he couldn’t cut it in poli-sci? he wanted to know. No, she replied; it was meant as a compliment, that surely the History Department just wanted to claim him because he was bound to have such impressive final results.
The phone conversation must have rattled her, because the next day she put off grading her comp and diction papers and sat down to write a letter that went on four pages in her tiny, tightly packed handwriting and took her six hours to finish. “Darling, please don’t feel deflated,” she wrote, “or I shall never again report what the faculty says in its curious, superficially supercilious language… Heck, you’re in a very strong position, don’t be ultra-sensitive. I don’t worry about you for a minute, except because you are so sensitive.”
Then she talked about hearing an Eartha Kitt song and thinking about him. “Syl, I miss you so much,” she wrote. “I can waste so much time just wishing I were with you, dammit. I shouldn’t feel this way because it’ll be so long before we can be together much. If I can’t be more sensible I’ll begin thinking loving you is unrealistic and wrong.”
But his defensiveness must have hit a nerve with her too, because halfway through the letter she started venting some of her own resentments. She complained about the “clever self-protectiveness” that was “rampant” among her colleagues on the Swarthmore faculty. “I do mind eventually this too-too faddish and witty atmosphere among the faculty here,” she wrote. “It finally amounts to conformism of a would-be superior kind… Dismissing every problem with a joke becomes tiresome… I also greatly minded a few comments I heard last night about Christianity not having a place in the modern world.”
Then she said some things that suggested that her own earnest beliefs had started to become a source of friction between the two of them. “I realize that the feeling that this is God’s world is essential to me…” she wrote. “I’ve also been thinking quite a bit about what the implications would be for the way we love each other under God, so to speak. I don’t mean to be theological, or use high-sounding language. But it is very important—please understand… Syl, honest, I love you very much—but I don’t love you more than I love God. This sentence sounds almost indecent, I know—but you understand what I mean. You think your most fundamental beliefs are important too. As a matter of fact, I think our fundamental beliefs are the same. But we’ve got to learn to talk about them without getting irritated by each other’s language.”
The moment of touchiness appears to have passed, and several weeks later she joined him in Pittsburgh and they set out on a trip to Mexico City. He was headed for a Quaker work camp in El Salvador, and she had decided to accompany him part of the way. Because Michael DeLaszlo had a car, he offered to drive them along with another of their roommates, David Steinmuller. His vehicle was a 1947 Town and Country that Michael’s wealthy father had purchased from a used car salesman in Detroit but had smashed up in a minor accident almost as soon as it was off the lot. In a rush to get to freshman week at Swarthmore, they had bought the first replacement parts they could find: a red hood and blue fins. So it was a wagon of many colors that carried the interracial band toward the Texas border, on a route that stretched through the Jim Crow South.
Although my father had a driver’s license, he didn’t dare take the wheel for fear that the Dixie cops would pull him over. DeLaszlo and Steinmuller took turns driving, while my father and mother sat on the red-leather seats in the back. To avoid having to use separate “White” and “Colored” eating areas and bathrooms, they ordered takeout dishes from roadside restaurants and ate the food in the car. When my father needed to relieve himself, the station wagon pulled over to the side of the road.
Once they reached Mexico, my mother returned to Pittsburgh while he went on to a work camp near San Salvador. There, young Friends were called “Amigos,” and a year later, when one of his Swarthmore classmates visited the village where he stayed, the locals were still talking about how charming he had been. “There was a young man called Agripino Flores who is now teaching in the escuela segundaria in Xochimilco,” she wrote him. “He too was with the Amigos last summer and remembers you. He said what a buen amigo you had been, and muy sociable and how well you got on with the children playing basketball.”
My mother returned to Pittsburgh to wait until he returned, riding a Greyhound bus that was crowded with women reading True Romance and Confidential and talkative soldiers on leave. As the bus retraced their car route, she counted the segregated rest stops all the way to St. Louis. Once she reached the funeral home that his mother ran then, at 616 Belmont Street in Belzhoover, she passed the time sewing dresses on an old foot-pedal machine and enjoying the salty soul food served up by Grandmother Edith and her mother, whom everyone called Gram. The two of them and my father’s sisters, Gertrude, Della, and Cleo, all treated her like family, but she was still sometimes overcome by shyness and realized how much she was coming to depend on him to help her engage with the world. “You leave a big hole, you know,” she wrote him wistfully.
When they got back to the college in the fall, he persuaded her to buy a car, even though she didn’t drive, so they could spend time together away from prying eyes on campus. She dipped into her meager savings to purchase a used blue Kaiser coupe from a freshman for $250. They took the car to movies in Philadelphia and made two more trips across the state to Pittsburgh. Occasionally she accompanied him to Bryn Mawr, her graduate school alma mater, where he cross-registered in an anthropology course so as to have another excuse to leave Swarthmore.
One day as they drove along the Main Line, a white policeman pulled them over and asked where they were going. My father politely answered his questions, and the cop allowed them to move on. But once they were moving again, he exploded with rage. He hadn’t been speeding or violating any traffic regulations! The only reason the cop had stopped them was that he was a black man in a car with a white woman! But then he shook his head and said that a black man could never “get lippy” with a police officer, a warning that he would pass on to me decades later.
By now my mother was all too aware of my father’s brooding about his academic standing, but she still admired how hard he worked in Swarthmore’s honors program. Juniors and seniors who were admitted into this select group met in small seminars, often in the homes of their professors. Rather than passively receiving instruction, they learned from each other, spending hours debating papers that a couple of students in each class were assigned to spark discussion. Before graduating, they sat for written and oral exams by visiting professors. Come spring, my father impressed the outside examiners enough to be awarded high honors. Yet privately, he fumed that he hadn’t attained highest honors like his friend Norman Rush, an older student from San Francisco who had done jail time as a conscientious objector and would later become a novelist.
Finally, on a sunny day in June, Syl Whitaker donned his black commencement gown and cap and became one of only a handful of black students ever to receive a Swarthmore diploma. In the 1956 Halycon, the college yearbook, his dark visage stands out among pages of white faces. The accompanying paragraph captures the many sides of his personality: a nickname, “The Whit,” conveying his joviality: his favorite expression, “hmmm…,” suggesting his thoughtfulness; and a final note whose irony jolted me when I read it: “Always a breath of sobriety.”
Two months later, on August 18, my parents married on a rainy day in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the little mountain village in France where my grandfather was the assistant pastor and ran his secondary school. All six of my mother’s sisters who lived in France were there, along with Michael DeLaszlo and a college friend of my mother’s named Cushing Dolbeare and her husband. My father wore a light gray tie and a dark suit over his slender frame, and my mother looked radiant in a stylish white wedding dress that she had sewn herself. According to French custom, they went first to the mayor’s office to sign an official marriage certificate, then they made their way under an umbrella down the slippery cobblestone streets to the small Protestant temple at the bottom of the village. A friend of Pastor Theis presided over an austere religious ceremony, and as he paused for a moment of silent prayer, a thunderclap cracked the sky outside and shook the windows of the church.
For their honeymoon, they visited one of my mother’s college friends, Janet Nyholm, who had married a Danish artist and moved to Denmark. They spent several days under cloudy skies in Copenhagen and saw a flea circus that they thought was particularly hilarious.
They had kept their year-and-a-half courtship so quiet that most faculty and students at Swarthmore were stunned when they heard the news. But it didn’t come as a surprise to school president Courtney Smith. Earlier in the year, my father had gone to Parish Hall to inform him of their intentions. It wasn’t just the skirmishes over the folk festival and the blue jeans that had made him wary of how Smith would respond. It was also how unsympathetic the stiff-necked president had been toward another interracial couple on campus. When a Jewish senior named Edgar Cahn and a black junior named Jean Camper had begun dating, they had received an anonymous death threat, and one day someone had burned a cross outside her dorm room. Cahn had appealed to Smith to do something about it, but the president had refused, sniffily implying that they had only themselves to blame. One of his deans had even started calling Cahn’s parents whenever the two lovebirds were seen together, in a ham-handed attempt to break them up.
Sure enough, President Smith confirmed my father’s worst suspicions. Although my mother was coming up for tenure and had her department’s support, he waffled about her prospects. My father was irate, and so were the friends he confided in. “Of course, going to Courtney was a basic error,” his former roommate Paul Berry wrote from graduate school in Stanford. Then he added sarcastically: “I hereby propose that he be awarded the title of Courtney Craig Smith, R.Q., for Reluctant Quaker, an even more dangerous form than the Confused Quaker.”
When my parents returned from their honeymoon in late August, they heard that Smith was whispering word of his disapproval. A friend and classmate named Annie Guerin wrote my father urging him not to do anything rash. “Don’t get too angry at President Smith,” she advised, teasing him that she wanted to see “faculty reactions to your highly reprehensible marriage!”
But my father wasn’t about to take the situation lying down. He complained angrily about my mother’s predicament to civil rights leaders whom he had met through Quaker circles.
One day the phone rang at my parents’ apartment and my father picked up the receiver.
“Hello?” he said.
“Syyylvester!” a loud voice boomed at the other end of the line. “Bayaaard Rustin here!”
It took a second for it to sink in that one of America’s foremost civil rights leaders, Bayard Rustin, the man who would organize Martin Luther king Jr.’s march on Washington seven years later, was on the line.
“I hear you’re having some trouble there in Swarthmore!” Rustin said in his stentorian baritone.
Rustin’s advice was to go over Smith’s head to Swarthmore’s board of directors. He reached out to other civil rights leaders who wrote letters on my parents’ behalf, reminding them of the college’s long history of championing racial equality. My father’s Quaker mentors sent testimonials to his religious faith and work camp experience. In the end, the board told Smith to back off, and my mother received tenure after all.
That fall, my parents moved into one of the faculty apartments at 317 North Chester Road, in one of the big Dutch colonial revival houses that had been built in Swarthmore’s West Hills at the turn of the century. My father started commuting in the Kaiser coupe to Princeton, where he had been admitted as the first black doctoral student in the history of its prestigious Department of Politics. Living on my mother’s meager salary of just over $3,000 a year, they were poor enough that they drove to working-class Chester to buy groceries, and my father kept going home at Christmas to work in the Pittsburgh post office. But now at least they could be public about their relationship, and they found that most of the Swarthmore community was supportive. My mother’s faculty friends told her how much they liked Syl and how much they admired their courage.
But there was one exception. Bob Enders, the biology professor whose family had taken my mother in during the war, was suspicious of my father. He thought he was a perfectly bright student and had no feelings of racial animus toward him, but when my mother told him about their engagement, he disapproved. As someone who was used to writing recommendations for medical school and sizing up which students would make good doctors, he prided himself on his judgments about character, and he wasn’t sure about Syl Whitaker. He believed that he took advantage of my mother, as he had in pressuring her to buy the big blue car for his use as much as theirs. And he thought my father had a chip on his shoulder. Once, when they were visiting the Enders house for tea, he complained about how hard his father, C.S., had pushed him as a child, and Dr. Enders was alarmed to see how enraged he became. Uncle Bob, as she called him, was too fond of my mother to try to warn her off the marriage, but he expressed his concerns to his wife, Abbie.
“Angry men don’t make good husbands,” he said.
© 2011 Mark Whitaker
What People are Saying About This
"Like Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father, Whitaker's memoir is in many ways an iconic story of the post civil rights era, one in which transcending racial barriers liberates people to succeed and fail in their own peculiar ways." -Publishers Weekly Starred Review
Reading Group Guide
This reading group guide for My Long Trip Home includes an introduction, discuss Mark Whitaker Chris Cleave. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
In My Long Trip Home, Mark Whitaker, a renowned journalist and editor with over thirty years of experience reporting on the world around him, turns his eagle eye inward. My Long Trip Home traces the fascinating paths of Mark’s parents and grandparents, from the French countryside during World War II to segregated, wartime Pittsburgh, before settling in with his own personal story. Mark’s father, Syl, struggled mightily with alcoholism and anger issues; Mark’s mother, Jeanne, wrestled with depression and financial hardship raising two young sons on her own; and Mark spent much of his childhood angry at his parents for separating, and confused by their bitter divorce. But after years of emotional turmoil, Mark began to make peace with his family’s past, doing so in time to have one last meaningful visit with his father before his death. In this family memoir, Mark explores and retreads the many paths that converged to create his own life, and discovers the healing power of forgiveness and compassion along the way.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
Topics & Questions for Discussion 1. Mark Whitaker is a journalist by profession. In what ways did his journalistic instincts come through in My Long Trip Home?
2. How was the narrative in My Long Trip Home enhanced by first exploring the family history of both of Mark’s parents? How would the story have been different if Whitaker had only written about his own life?
3. Why do you think Whitaker wrote this memoir?
4. How did the photos affect your experience of reading My Long Trip Home? Did you feel differently toward people described in the book after seeing their photos?
5. My Long Trip Home is, in many ways, a story of American history as well as familial history. How did important movements and events in American history alter the trajectory of the Whitaker and Theis families?
6. Syl was a great charmer and a wonderful conversationalist. What were the hidden downsides of these outwardly positive traits?
7. Whitaker doesn’t express much self-pity, but by all accounts he had a difficult childhood and adolescence. What coping mechanisms did he use to get through the hard parts of his life?
8. How did Whitaker’s understanding of race, and of his racial identity, shift as he grew up? What role did his father play in shaping his racial identity? His mother? Reflect on your own adolescence. How did your racial identity shape you as a person?
9. How did racism—both subtle and overt—shape and influence C.S., Edith, Syl, and Mark’s careers? Have you ever been confronted with racism in your personal or professional life?
10. How did Whitaker express his anger throughout the years? How did his feelings towards his father evolve as he grew older?
11. Syl once told his son: “Human nature is to abuse power…most people who abuse power don’t think they are doing it. They’ve justified it based on their own view of the world.” (p. 285) Do you think Syl abused power? In what ways? What was Syl’s own view of the world that enabled him to justify the abuses?
12. Geraldine Owen Delaney, the head of Alina Lodge, said that “of all the ways alcoholics fooled themselves, the greatest delusion was control.” (p. 219) How did this delusion of control manifest itself in Syl’s life? Why do you think Syl finally stopped drinking?
13. How did feminism and the women’s movement impact Whitaker’s mother? If you were alive during the feminist movement in the 1970s, were you reminded of anything from your own personal experiences? How do you define feminism?
14. Both the Whitaker and Theis families have legacies of heroism and strength in the face of adversity. In what ways did Jeanne, Syl, and Mark carry on those legacies?
15. What factors—emotional, familial, genetic, situational—do you think contributed to Whitaker’s success in life? What forces and people helped him as a person?
16. In describing his motivation for leaving Swarthmore, Whitaker writes: “Just as I had been at George School, I was driven by a desire to find something—I didn’t know exactly what—that I thought I was missing.” (p. 182) What do you think he was missing? Did he ever find it?
17. Is there a hero or heroine in My Long Trip Home? Why or why not? If yes, who do you think it is?
18. When Mark’s parents learned that he wanted to write a book about their family, his mother expressed concerns that “the story would make me look very weak,” and his father said, “I don’t want to be the villain of the piece.” (p. 335) Do you think Mark successfully honored each of their wishes? Why or why not? Do you think his parents would feel that they were accurately depicted?
19. How different would the Whitaker family story play out if Whitaker’s parents met as young adults today? Consider the effects of the civil rights and women’s rights movements on our current culture and society.
20. Whitaker writes, of his time spent in France as a teenager: “I was learning something even more important that year: that not all families are destined to be unhappy.” (p. 276) Do you think families are destined to be happy or unhappy? How can you choose happiness as a family?
21. According to Whitaker, during Syl’s tenure at Princeton, he would focus discussions and dissuade distractions in meetings by asking, “But what is the noble purpose?” (p. 169) What do you think is the “noble purpose” of My Long Trip Home?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. My Long Trip Home is, among many things, an exercise in meticulous genealogical research. Take a moment to reflect on a family story or memory that makes you smile, and do a bit of digging. Who are the characters in this memory? Do you tell this story often? If you have access, look through old photographs, letters, postcards, or journals for supporting evidence, and bring your finds to book club. If you’re able to speak with an older relative, ask them about their favorite family stories as well. Did you uncover anything surprising about your past? What qualities or traits in your family history do you most admire? For reference, consult the author’s own suggestions for genealogical research (www.cnn.com/2011/10/17/opinion/whitaker-family-story/index) and the National Archives’ genealogical research tools and tips (www.archives.gov/research/genealogy/index).
2. Mark Whitaker has had a long and distinguished career as a journalist and editor. Get a behind-the-scenes look at the journalism industry by scheduling a newsroom tour with your local TV news affiliate. How did the tour change your perception of journalism and TV news? What types of people do you think thrive in that environment? Do you feel differently about Whitaker after learning more about his profession?
3. Mark’s family has strong French and African ties. Explore both cultures in the most delicious way possible: Food! Host an international potluck for your book club by preparing dishes from France and Nigeria, as well as any other countries you have a personal connection to. Consult www.epicurious.com/recipesmenus/global/recipes for more recipe and dish ideas.
4. Both Syl and Mark benefited from scholarships during their college years. Get into the spirit of supporting education, and volunteer to read to children at a local school or through a charity near you. Visit www.reachoutandread.org for more information.
5. In My Long Trip Home retraces history and shares family stories from earlier generations. Look forward and imagine your descendants want to write about your life. What personal story would you want to pass down to them? Share your story with your book club. Do any common themes emerge?
A Conversation with Mark Whitaker
You explained in an interview that, though you were initially ashamed by the unpleasant aspects of your family history, “Once I’d embarked on the book, I found that coming to it as a reporter gave me a kind of detachment that I needed.” Did you ever try to write this memoir with more of a visceral, emotional connection? What made you decide to approach your family’s story with a reporter’s detachment?
I started writing the story from memory, because that’s what I thought you did as a memoirist. But I quickly realized that there were many things about my family’s story that I didn’t know, or thought I knew but wasn’t sure if I had right. That’s when I began approaching the story as a reporter—interviewing sources, collecting documents, verifying details. Because that’s what I’ve been trained to do, it made the project much easier and more enjoyable for me. But I think it also made it easier for people to talk to me, particularly in revisiting the painful episodes, because they could see that I wasn’t trying to judge anyone but to search for the truth.
You did an enormous amount of research for this memoir. What discoveries most surprised and thrilled you? What information did you find most disappointing or frustrating?
My most pleasant discoveries were about my grandparents and my grandfathers in particular. I learned that my father’s father, who I knew as a stroke victim late in his life, was an incredibly dynamic man who had born on a tenant farm in Texas, the eleventh child of a former slave, and risen by force of will and personality to became one of Pittsburgh’s first black undertakers. I also learned more about the heroism of my mother’s father, a French Protestant pastor who helped hide Jews from the Nazis during World War II. My saddest discoveries were about my father—not just the extent of his alcoholism, in the years when I didn’t see him much, but how needlessly unforgiving he was to so many people in his life.
In any memoir that requires detailed recounting of the past, the author’s memory (and that of his subjects) is truly put to the test. How much, if any, of your story came from assumptions, rather than concrete evidence? Do you feel your journalistic instinct for a fact-based narrative altered your writing style in any way?
In many ways, the narrative voice of the book comes from that disparity between what I remembered or assumed and what I discovered in the course of my reporting. It’s there in the first paragraph of the first chapter—“Growing up, I always took it for granted that it was my mother who was first attracted to my father… But when I went back and investigated, it turned out that it was the other way around....” And that interweaving of memory and reporting continues throughout the book.
You mentioned in an interview on “The Colbert Report” that you wrote this book without an advance or any publisher’s commitment. Was your final goal to always publish this memoir, or did you initially write the manuscript for your own satisfaction?
I started writing a year to the day after my father died, after waking up in the middle of the night with an epiphany that I wanted to tell his story. At first I just wanted to see what came out, and I wasn’t sure if it would add up to a book that anyone else would find interesting. Once I had written 200 pages, I sent it to a literary agent friend, and she suggested that I finish a first draft before submitting it to publishers. So I didn’t know for sure that it would be published until that first draft was finished, at which point I rewrote the whole thing twice to make sure that it would also be a satisfying experience for readers who didn’t know me.
What was it like to share My Long Trip Home with your family for the first time? What do you think your father would say about this book?
I interviewed all the surviving members of my family at length for the book: my mother and my brother and my father’s older sister, among others. So none of them were surprised about what I said about them, although they all learned other family details they had never known before. They were all very supportive, although my mother in particular was a stickler for accuracy. What would my father have thought? I hope he would have understood that ultimately the book is meant as a tribute to him and to my mother, and that he would have been proud to have a record of all of us for posterity. But he could be very thin-skinned and argumentative, so I’m sure there are many details with which he would have quibbled.
Why do you think you suddenly felt ready to write this book when you did, a year to the day after your father died? What kept you from writing it earlier?
For many years, I told myself that I was too busy with my career to write a book. But the truth is that I was also ashamed. I thought that the only part worthy of a book was the romantic part—the interracial romance, the talks of black Pittsburgh and the French Resistance. Yet I also thought it would be dishonest to leave out the painful part after my parents divorced. Of course, now that it’s done I see that it’s the pain and recovery and reconciliation that most people relate to, and that makes the story universal.
What traits or qualities are you most proud of in your mother and father? What important lessons did they give to you that you hope to pass on to your children?
Ultimately, the book is about what I got from both of my parents, not just what I didn’t get. From both of them, I inherited a reverence for learning, and love of language and writing. From my father, I learned a wry skepticism about human nature and institutions and some of the positive as well as negative virtues of social charisma and charm. From my mother, I inherited a basic survival instinct and a faith in myself that started with her faith in me. Of all those gifts, that last one is the one I have most wanted to pass on to my own children.
If you could go back in time and visit your younger self, what would you say to your 10-year-old self?
I would have told my ten-year old self: it’s not always going to be this bad! You won’t always be fat. You’ll get to see your father again, and he will eventually have a place in your life. Your horizons won’t be limited to this little town where you’re living now. Your mother will get happier. You won’t always fight with your brother. In fact, you have a lot to look forward to! You are going to have a very rich and full life and a happy family of your own some day. And that all turned out to be true, although I’m not sure I would have believed it at the time.
You said in an interview with Reuters, “I wanted to prove myself on my own, both vis-à-vis my parents and my race.” Do you think your children feel the same way?
Absolutely, and my wife and I encourage that. We thought it was important for our two children to learn about their black and Jewish heritage, because they are both by birthright. But we also made it clear that as adults, they would be free to forge their own identities, and to associate with the friends and mates and communities they choose for themselves. And so far I think they’ve made very sound choices in that regard. But I also think that children of interracial and interreligious backgrounds are a lot more common and accepted than they were in the past, and that’s a good thing.
What advice do you have for people struggling to overcome a turbulent childhood or a difficult family situation? Was writing and researching a form of therapy for you?
This is easier said than done, but I would say that you may not be able to change the past, but can choose what to make of it. Since I believe in “show, don’t tell,” what I tried to show in the book was that you can take responsibility for your own life, and try to understand your parents on their own terms and not just in terms of what they did to you. And for me, that was a very therapeutic exercise: to see them almost as characters in a novel, shaped by their own family dramas, their own experience or lack of experience, and the historical places and periods they inhabited.
Do you think happiness is a destiny or a choice? How do you strive for happiness in your own family?
I’m not Pollyanna, so I don’t believe you can choose to feel happy all the time. But I do think you can make choices that will make your life happier over time. I consciously chose a career that I enjoyed, rather than just one that would be lucrative. I married a woman who made me laugh and could cheer me up when I was down. I made spending time with my children a high priority despite my busy job because that brought me pleasure. I’ve been very lucky along the way, both professionally and personally, but I believe that you can help make your own luck if you know what you’re looking for and are grateful when you find it.
Interviews
5 Questions for Mark Whitaker
Given today's shifting racial demographics, did you realize how American your story is even though it spans three continents?
While this is very much a personal story, I hope that one thing it illustrates is how much America has changed during my lifetime. You see how, as a child born in the 1950's to a black American father and a white, French mother, I felt very foreign for much of my boyhood. But as I mature into adulthood, you see me grow out of my childhood suffering over my parent's divorce and teenage search for identity as the country grows up tooto the point that in the final chapters America elects a black president, and I am able to become the Editor of Newsweek and move on to other high-level jobs in television that a generation ago would never have been attainable by an African-American.
There's a scene in the book, when I am in college in the 1970's, where a professor of mine says that he thinks it's too bad I don't have a clear ethnic identity and that he hopes the future won't have too many more people like me. I respond that the future will have more people like me, whether he likes it or not. As you note, our shifting demographics have borne that out, and more and more American families are as mixed and complex as mine.
How long did it take you to examine the relationship with your father?
It was a life-long journeyhence one meaning of the memoir's title, My Long Trip Home. My father was an extremely brilliant and charismatic man who was also very narcissistic and self-destructive, with an addictive personality that caused him to be fired from some very impressive academic jobs and which he never fully outgrew even after he stopped drinking. I worshiped him as a young child, was depressed for years after I was separated from him, then fought with him repeatedly as a teenager and eventually cut off contact with him myself when I went to college. Only once I had my own family and career did we achieve a reconciliation that was at first tentative, and finally loving.
Yet while the book tells the story of how our relationship evolved over the years, the process of writing the book after he died caused me to gain even more insight into the roots of his demons and our difficultiesparticularly his relationship with my Granddad, a driven, prickly man whose own father was born a slave and who rose from a tenant farm in Texas to become one of Pittsburgh's first black undertakers. My father hated his father yet became a lot like him, in his philandering and self-sabotaging and pitiless nature. Another message I hope people take from the book is that you're far more likely to repeat the sins of your parents if you don't try to understand and forgive them.
What is a lesson you learned from each of your parents?
In the book, I tell the story about how on the day of my college graduation, when I was full of myself for having graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and talking about the possibility of running Newsweek some day, my father told me: "Beware of what you want, because you might get it." It was a classic thing from my Dad to sayhe was political scientist with a skeptical view of human behavior and lots of clever one-liners to convey it. But it also turned out to be prescient, as you find out later in the story.
My mother struggled financially for years after my parents divorced, and in the book I note that she always told my brother and me that when you're poor, it's better to look for things of high quality that will last than to fall for things that are cheap but won't last as long. In many ways, I have followed that advice throughout my adult lifenot only in how I spend money, now that I am lucky enough to earn a good living, but also how I chose my spouse and my friends and my career opportunities.
In what ways do your family struggles echo your personal growth?
They say that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and I definitely think that is true in my case. Growing up with so much emotional and financial stress wasn't a picnic at the time, but it made me resilient and self-reliantand also taught me to be a wary observer of events and forces that could upset my world yet again, a trait that has been very useful in my life as a journalist. It has also made me appreciate what I have and realize that no matter what goes wrong, "Things could be worse!"the caption on a cartoon that I have kept on every office desk I have had for twenty-five years.
Yet as I did the reporting for the book, I realized how many stories of survival there have been in my family, despite all the dysfunction. As little girls, my mother and her sisters came to America by themselves to survive the Nazis. While they were away, my French grandfather helped thousands of Jews survive the Holocaust by hiding them in the little mountain village where he was a Protestant pastor. My black Granddad survived the Texas floods as a baby and the racism of the steel plants of Pittsburgh and later the loss of his funeral home, and my Grandmother "kept on keeping on," as she would say, despite divorce and financial hardship and crippling arthritis. My mother survived the breakup of her marriage and years of depression and professional insecurity, and my father eventually mustered the will to stop drinking and salvage what was left of his once meteoric academic career. For much of my life, I saw all this drama as something as something I was running away from, but as I reconstructed the stories I found much to admire.
Who have you discovered lately?
I just finished reading In the Garden of Beasts," Erik Larson's book about another family story, of the U.S. ambassador to Germany in the 1930's and his flamboyant daughter and how they both gradually came to understand just how evil and dangerous Hitler and regime were. The book had a lot of resonance for me, given the experience that my mother and her family had with the Nazis. And I was fascinated to see how Larson, who also trained as a reporter, used documentary research and interviews and eye-witness travel not just to reconstruct events but to conjure up a world worthy of a novel, with powerful characters and plot and a vivid sense of place. Working on my memoir, I discovered that that is the difference between most daily and weekly journalism and a satisfying book, and I have even more admiration now for non-fiction authors who can do it well.
I'm also looking forward to reading Toure's new book, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? for obvious personal and journalistic reasons.