Say I'm Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love
E. Dolores Johnson
Jun 2020 · Lawrence Hill Books
Ebook
240
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About this ebook
Fearful of prison time—or lynching—for violating Indiana's anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's black father and white mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo. Her mother simply vanished, evading an FBI and police search that ended with the declaration to her family that she was the victim of foul play, either dead or a victim of human trafficking. When Johnson was born, social norms and her government-issued birth certificate said she was Negro, nullifying her mother's white blood in her identity. As an African American, she withstood the advice of a high school counselor who said that blacks don't go to college by graduating from Harvard. Then, as a code-switching business executive feeling too far from her black roots, she searched her father's black genealogy. Johnson was amazed to suddenly realize that her mother's whole white side was—and always had been—missing. When confronted, her mother's decades-old secret spilled out. Despite her parents' crippling and well-founded fears of rejection and reprisals, and her black militant brother's accusation that she was a race traitor, Johnson went searching for the white family who did not know she existed. When she found them, it's not just their shock and her mama's shame that have to be overcome, but her own fraught experiences with whites.
Fearful of prison time—or lynching—for violating Indiana's anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's black father and white mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo. Her mother simply vanished, evading an FBI and police search that ended with the declaration to her f...
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About the author
E. Dolores Johnson's writing focuses on the evolution of attitudes on interracial relationships through American history, with an eye to the accelerating browning of America's future. She has written for Narratively, Buffalo News, Lunch Ticket, The Writer of Color Anthology: Boundaries and Borders and Pangyrus, among others. Johnson has consulted on diversity for universities, major corporations, and nonprofits and has served as a panelist for the Harvard Faculty Seminar on Inter-racialism.
E. Dolores Johnson's writing focuses on the evolution of attitudes on interracial relationships through American history, with an eye to the accelerating browning of America's future. She has written for Narratively, Buffalo News, Lunch Ticket, The Writer of Color Anthology: Boundaries and Border...
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