It Isn't Easy

Black History Month is almost over and I have been struggling with this post all month. I am honestly wondering why I made Gloria Doran, AKA Sunshine, one of the two main characters of the Sunshine novels, biracial. 

Let me explain. I write into the dark. I start writing a story with only a vague idea about what’s going to happen. I do have some characters that I’ve thought about a lot, and I have some settings that are familiar to the point they’re second nature to me. I thought knew Gloria well when the story started. But I did not learn that Gloria’s father was a light-skinned black man while her mother was a blond Nordic woman until I was more than two-thirds of the way through Purple Sunshine. 

It surprised me, but it shocked Gloria who finds out shortly after her sixteenth birthday that she’s not white. Now I’ve met a few people who I thought were white and later learned were black. And it always fascinated me. I’m sure whole idea was lodged somewhere deep in my brain. When someone is biracial and partly black, they are always perceived as black. Barack Obama had a white mother and a black father, but he is seen only as black, despite the fact that he was largely raised by his white mother and grandmother. We don’t do that with any other bi- or multiracial people except those who are part black.

By the way, this whole thing isn’t a spoiler. The Sunshine novels are supposed to be adventure stories, not explorations of racial identity issues. So why am I telling you this? Maybe it’s because how we thought about race in the 1960s, when these stories are set, was different than how we think about it today. How we think about race has been changing as long as America has existed. Okay, now I am getting into that exploration that I tried to avoid in the novels.

The slave trade in the Americas began in the early 1500s. It was present in all 13 colonies. It was present in Michigan where much of the Sunshine novels take place.

Some white masters treated slaves with kindness. A wealthy Boston merchant, John Wheatley, purchased a young girl in 1761 to be a servant for his wife. The slave, named Phillis Wheatley, was seven or eight at the time, and the Wheatleys, recognizing her intelligence, provided her with a far better education than almost any women of those times received. She wrote her first poem at age 14 and in 1773, her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published. You can still find her works on Amazon today. Her book brought her considerable fame in both America and England. She was widely praised by many, including George Washington. Okay, she’d buttered him up by writing a poem about him.

The Wheatleys emancipated Phillis Wheatley shortly after the publication of her book. Then the Wheatley’s died and Phillis Wheatley’s life went downhill after she was freed. She married a poor grocer, lost three children and died in poverty and obscurity at the age of 31. But like I said, you can still find her poetry on Amazon. She sells more books than me!      

Slavery was the single the most contentious issue in the founding of the United State of America. Of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, 41 were slave owners. On the other hand, King George III, the “tyrant” against whom Americans rebelled was opposed to slavery and not really much of a tyrant.

One of those founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, not only owned hundreds of slaves but also had a slave concubine, Sally Hemings. Jefferson inherited Hemings’ mother and her children, when his father-in-law died. Jefferson’s father-in-law was also Sally Hemings’ father making Sally Hemings Jefferson’s late wife’s half sister. 

It was not unusual for wealthy planters like Jefferson or his father-in-law to have relations with female slaves. Because so many women died in childbirth, men were far more likely to be widowers then than they are today. That was the case with both Jefferson and his father-in-law. Of course, slaves were property and their owners could do what they wanted with them. And there was also an economic incentive. By law, any baby born to a slave mother was automatically a slave, and slaves were valuable. Slaves with lighter skin were even more valuable. By today’s moral codes, the actions of these men, no matter how consensual, was rape.

Jefferson fathered four children who lived to adulthood with Hemings. While there are still some who contend that another male Jefferson relative was the culprit, almost all historians today accept the historical validity of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship.

Sally Hemings’ story comes up in Sunshine Blues. A black friend of Gloria’s father warns her. “Finding out your father’s black had to be hard. I’d be careful who you tell about it,” he says. “Didn’t matter how white Sally Hemings and her kids were. They were still slaves.” Most of Jefferson’s children with Sally Hemings eventually melted into the population and lived as whites. But when Sally Hemings died in 1835, she was still a slave. 

I don’t know why Gloria is biracial. It was never a conscious decision on my part. All I wanted to do was write an adventure story that would snag a few readers. But I ended up struggling with issues of race.

I wish I could be as facile with words as Jefferson, who wrote, “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Jefferson meant it, except maybe for the “all” part. And we’ve built a nation on those ideals. 

Incidentally, Jefferson did not care for Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, writing, “compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”

Working on the third novel in this series, I’m stuck with my biracial character, Gloria. She makes writing the novel difficult. It is sort of like our country, which is still a work in progress. We are still struggling with the imperfections, the biggest of which is race.

It isn’t easy.