We treasure family photos not only because they illuminate the past, but also because they can offer up an alternative narrative to the stories we tell - and retell - about our identities.
The Secret Album is part of HP’s original documentary project, History of Memory, which celebrates the power of printed photos. The Secret Album reveals how a powerful truth changed a family foreverĪ novelist learns about her mother’s long-held secret by search for what’s missing from her family photo albums. Chesnutt, Cleveland, Cool Cleveland, Gail Lukasik, New Orleans, OhioĬomments Off on BOOK REVIEW: “White Like Her” by Gail Lukasik, Reviewed By C. Many of the stories take place in Cleveland which he fictionalized to be Groveland, Ohio… Chesnutt, a black man who could have easily passed for white, wrote a significant number of stories about black people passing for white around the turn of the 20th century. People of color living as white have been the theme for many literary works in the late 19th and 20th century. Stories of passing - a term used to define the process of abandoning one’s cultural identity and adopting another - are traditionally associated with a light-skinned black person who assumes a white identity. For 17 years, until her mother’s death, Lukasik continued her research but did not reveal her findings outside her immediate family.
She begged her daughter not to reveal her secret. In her mind, her life as a black person was over when she married and left New Orleans, the city of her birth. When confronted with such concrete evidence, Alvera refused to admit her mixed-race heritage. Her mother’s birth certificate and that of her grandfather and other relatives ,along with census records, showed that her mother and other relatives were black. With that move, she abandoned her black family and racial heritage and in her mind, became white like the man she married.Īlvera hid her secret from the world until her daughter made the discovery when she was tracing her family tree. Subtitled My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing, Lukasik tells the story of her mother, Alvera Frederic Kalina, who changed her racial identity from black to white when she married in 1944 and moved to Cleveland. Ellen Connallyįormer Clevelander and author Gail Lukasik named her recently published memoir White Like Her. The census helped me tell my family story.īOOK REVIEW: “White Like Her” by Gail Lukasik, Reviewed By C. Tags: Alvera Frederic Kalina, Gail Lukasik, Genealogy Roadshow, New Orleans, Ohio, The Washington Post, Washington PostĬomments Off on I thought I was White until I learned my mother’s secret. Then 18 years later, I found my mother’s lost family, thanks to my appearance on PBS’s “ Genealogy Roadshow.”… I’d told the audience about my journey of finding my mother’s birth certificate and discovering her racial secret when I was 49, confronting her - and her swearing me to secrecy until her death. Looking back, there were small clues, like she always wore face makeup, even to bed. How she and her New Orleans family were designated as “Negro” during the Jim Crow era, how she moved north to Ohio, married my White, bigoted father, and hid her mixed race from him and eventually us. I’d just related my mother’s story of racial passing. The first time I was grilled about my racial identity, I’d just given a talk to an all-White audience at a suburban Chicago library. Kalina was born into a Black family in New Orleans but spent her life passing as White. Gail Lukasik Gail Lukasik’s mother, Alvera Frederic Kalina, in New Orleans circa 1942. The census helped me tell my family story. I thought I was White until I learned my mother’s secret.
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