Editor’s name: The name of this writer was held to protect her identity.

“Colored Woman.”
She insisted on referring to herself that way, much to my dismay. Not Negro, not Black and never Afro-American, “that nappy-looking hair so popular with you young people.”
But Colored Woman described her best. This loving granddaughter wouldn’t – and couldn’t – know the painful memories even those two simple words evoked. Memories of a secret past that might have died with her, except secrets always manage to escape. Years after her death, her secret has escaped, revealing an ugly and sad truth that still haunts her family.
“Passing.”
Passing for white. Until last summer, I’d believed it to be an outdated term used to describe people who lamented their Blackness and longed for the inherent benefits of having white skin in America. In my urban Midwestern experience, “passing” had no significance. Until the day my mother gave me an early inheritance and shared grandmother’s secret.
One of my mother’s most precious gifts to me as I grow older is sharing her secrets and her stories with me, like carefully guarded recipes, to ensure their survival.
Secret: your father had a child – a son by another woman – and we never told you.
This is disturbing news after 50 years, but it’s not uncommon. Talk shows reunite separated siblings every year.
Secret: your grandmother wasn’t Black. Her father was white and her mother was Indian.
This shock was softened, though, by the peace of finally understanding why she always seemed displaced in our neighborhood and her own family. Strangely, what lay behind Door Number Three was the most shocking.
Secret:  your cousins in ____ are passing for white.
Say what? Who?
Mother didn’t give them up easily. My insistence that we visit them forced her hand. When I demanded to know why she kept making excuses not to see them, grandmother’s secret finally escaped. “Because they’re passing for White, that’s why. We can’t visit them and they won’t come to us!”
My shock quickly turned to amusement before settling into disbelief and disgust. It disgusted me that my relatives were rare living legacies of America’s ugliest past. But in sharing my story with close friends, I learned that my cousins are hardly rare, as similar stories were shared.
But this is 2006, I protested. Black, brown and red folks have arrived; multi-cultural families are “in” now. America loves Oprah and everybody wants to “be like Mike.”
“And your point is?” they smiled.
Foolishly, I’d assumed that yesterday’s “Passing Pauls” and “Paulines” came out of the closet when the Klan went in. Realistically though, how can you ever un-ring that bell?  How do you undo years of denial and lies?  When do you tell your children, and their children’s children, the true colors of families they’ve never met?  What would you say to them?  How could you explain abandoning your family and denying your history?
I have no answers for them. But I do have hope. Occasionally my mother speaks to one of her cousins and, perhaps, that cousin has shared the family secret with her daughter too. My hope is that one day she and I—as family—will meet.