Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

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 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 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.

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, 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.

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, 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 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, 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 became very global once again.

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.

Yes, that is exactly the word I used.

Magical.

It was a house.

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 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.

And then there was the beautiful living room and dining room, a big kitchen.

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 had giraffes and elephants.

Roaming across the wall.

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 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 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.

And India, lining a wall.

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.

Why do you think your father kept the door locked?

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.

He was.

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.

It was important to him to spend time with us.

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 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 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, but it's just a correct to me now that I probably got that habit, that sense from my father.

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?

And how would you describe each of your parents from your childhood self.

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.

I could just hear my mother say, you know, be more quiet.

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 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.

And so it.

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 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.

She went to a very selective British school in.

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 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.

And go shopping.

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, 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 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.

So they were both quite a couple.

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.

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 strain and they need to sell their house before leaving the country.

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 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 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.

And then there was the book.

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.

Back then in the nineteen sixties.

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 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.

So he was dreaming big.

There was dreaming big.

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.

But he also and this is what.

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 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 they probably couldn't have afforded in the first place to.

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.

So I knew, we all knew, The whole family knew when he got.

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.

I'll never forget that.

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 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.

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 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.

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 practical choice her mother doesn't hesitate.

This is Dorothy's dream, and she wants her to take it.

And I overheard my parents arguing, which was very rare.

My mother would fuss at my father all the time, principally about writing the book.

You know, I can hear her.

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.

Curse at all, let alone curse at each other.

My father was very mild mannered.

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.

And they went back and forth, and my mother was.

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 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.

Had been elected to receive it.

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.

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?

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 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 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 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.

Me to choose.

But I always thought of myself as black.

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.

And as I grew old, especially when I read the book.

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.

A black girl.

Then when we went to Egypt, that really intensified.

I think, maybe because I wasn't around black Americans.

So I went to an international school.

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.

Malcolm X, and.

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 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 were of different races and feeling that I represented some kind of hope for.

America, you know, no pressure or anything.

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.

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.

I deliberately hid.

The photo of my.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

Then he get it right, and I.

Said, well, I do have a white grandmother, but I never met her.

She died before I was born, which is true, just not the whole truth.

Not the whole truth.

I left that the part about my father.

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.

Yeah, I think it.

Well.

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 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.

And there was also part of.

It was that I didn't want people to think that I thought I was special because I had a white father, that I.

Was different from them.

I never liked that, you know that.

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.

Bus riding home from school, and my parents.

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.

I was horrified.

I was horrified.

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.

I know, it seems.

Strange when I think of myself, I think of myself.

As looking like her.

So it was partly I'd never heard her described me and my sisters like that before.

I'd never heard her refer to our color before.

Well, and it's almost like a you know, possibly an indication of how she saw you and your sisters.

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 you know.

I just I don't use that term to describe.

Me, and I don't feel that it describes me, even though maybe it does.

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 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.

My sisters and I more recently, when we've talked about our memories, both of them said that.

They knew that's why we never went to hotels.

We always went to motels where we could stay in the car and.

It was just easier to.

Slip into the room without anybody seeing my mother and my sisters and me.

And yeah, we just knew that that was.

Why that there might have been objections to us staying at a motel, and we knew that that happened.

Again, this was the sixties.

Or were places that would say were full if they saw black people trying to.

Rent a room.

Yeah, I mean it's so interesting.

It's like, you know, your ken Would experience was this idyllic bubble.

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.

But at the same time it was also a place.

Where we were very aware of the civil rights movement.

We're very aware of races name in America, and so.

It was a bubble with a lot of social consciousness and awareness.

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.

That's right.

That's right.

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, 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 for the day at Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, which was also very involved in supporting the civil rights and anti war movements.

We learned movement songs.

We had assemblies where the whole school.

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.

When Doctor King was assassinated the.

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.

It was just part of the school.

And I think about how different that was that compared to how some children are being taught today, where all of that is erased.

It's shocking.

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 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, 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 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 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 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 place she can imagine going.

She finds a sublet right around the corner from her childhood home in Kent.

The first moment of revelation, the shock was when I pulled out that very first document from the.

Boxes, and it was.

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.

Seven, and I thought to myself, Okay, this must.

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 father conducted in nineteen thirty seven, and that that was the most shocking discovery, that very first one.

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.

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.

But nineteen thirty.

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 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.

It meant something that she was a black woman.

He was looking to meet.

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 read through all the interviews, to spend time with them, think about what they meant.

For my family, my relationship.

With my parents, what I thought about their marriage, I thought about my own identity.

I did look at some of.

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, and the summer was available, and it was right.

Around the corner from my old house.

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.

The wall, and then I would take out stacks.

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 much from the interviews in each era, you know, the n thirties.

My father.

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.

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 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.

He was doing.

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 was interviewing.

So that's one set of discoveries.

But then I get to the nineteen fifties, and of course I want to find in these interviews, how did Daddy meet mommy?

Where does he talk about that?

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 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, 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.

That's also throws into a new light the you know, Bob, when you're going to finish the.

Book exactly exactly.

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 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.

She gave up her PhD in order to take care of me and my sisters.

She gave up a lot, and not only her.

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.

She very ambitious, my mother.

And it wasn't I realized so much that she was putting.

All her hopes in my father.

It was that she had sacrificed so that he.

Could become this renowned professor, so that he could publish this book.

It was part of her work that did it.

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.

Which is fine.

I mean, Roosevelt was a great.

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.

But she did.

She never said a word, never said a.

Word about her, actually participated interviews exactly.

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 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.

I think so absolutely.

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 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.

I can now hear in it.

You dashed my dreams, and I'm not gonna let you do that to Dorothy too.

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.

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.

That, Yes there was, and we had a very happy family.

We did a lot together.

We went on so many excursions.

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 think she never wanted to degrade my father.

He saw his potential, that's the thing.

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.

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 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.

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.

So I realized.

And by then, after.

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 never spent a whole summer where I practically did nothing but work on the project.

You know, I did go get some groceries or went for a run in the morning, but other than that, I did nothing else.

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.

And it was such.

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 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 of the historical insights that were so so path breaking.

The work my father was doing.

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, 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.

Were related to my own identity.

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.

So where does this leave you in terms of your identity?

Now?

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 where does it sit with you?

Now?

Having finished the book and having really, like almost so deeply communed with both of your parents like you research the research.

I like that term commune.

It was a way of communing with them as I never had before after they both had passed away.

Well, what really got me to.

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 I had written for college, and an essay I had, it seems written for him.

Where I made some I think, very hurtful statement about wanting to hide his.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 a place obviously by writing this metok works.

I don't believe I have the high that my father's white.

I don't think that that takes away from my identity.

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.

Here's Darcy reading a passage from her powerful memoir.

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.

Was growing up.

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, 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.

Part of me.

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 like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.

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