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Say I'm Dead

A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love

ebook
3 of 3 copies available
3 of 3 copies available
"With unflinching honesty, E. Dolores Johnson shares an enthralling story of identity, independence, family, and love. This timely and beautifully written memoir ends on a complicated yet hopeful note, something we need in this time of racial strife." —De'Shawn Charles Winslow, author of In West Mills
Say I'm Dead
is the true story of family secrets, separation, courage, and transformation through five generations of interracial relationships. Fearful of prison time—or lynching—for violating Indiana's antimiscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's Black father and White mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo, New York.
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. Later, as a Harvard-educated business executive feeling too far from her black roots, she searched her father's black genealogy.
But in the process, Johnson suddenly realized that her mother's whole white family was—and always had been—missing. When she began to pry, her mother's 36-year-old secret spilled out.
Her mother had simply vanished from Indiana, evading an FBI and police search that had ended with the conclusion that she had been the victim of foul play.
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    • Booklist

      Starred review from May 1, 2020
      In the spring of 1943, Ella Lewis fled her white Catholic family in Indianapolis to marry Henry Jackson, who was African American. Recognizing the ingrained racism in a state with an active KKK and laws against miscegenation, Ella decided the only way to protect her white family and the Black man she loved was to disappear, allowing her parents and sister to believe she had died. The ramifications of this decision are explored by Johnson, her daughter, who chronicles her parents' bittersweet love story and her own experiences with racism as she learns to accept her biracial heritage. Johnson powerfully describes the racial tension in mid-twentieth-century Indiana, where the slightest deviation from customary segregation could unleash unspeakable violence against Black men; and the terrifying experience of attempting to integrate a white community in 1970s Baton Rouge, where Johnson's colleagues tell blatantly racist jokes, and police treat a cross-burning with lackadaisical indifference. While Johnson sympathizes with her mother's decision to leave home, she candidly addresses the heartwrenching grief and despair Ella caused her family, especially her father who died mourning for his lost, wonderful girl. Yet as Johnson makes clear to her mother, It's America's disgrace, not yours, that you had to run and hide. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

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  • English

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