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| 8-year-old Sula Whitekiller |
Even as a child, my mixed race mother felt herself a dislocated person--she was half Cherokee, half Irish, but looked lily white. Early on, she vowed to remake her world. It would require silence and cunning for the child Sula Whitekiller to resist the hopelessness overtaking Native Americans of the 1920's. She was born on the Cherokee settlement land of her forebearers and wanted nothing more than to be a different person, somewhere else. Her grandmother (my great-grandmother) had managed to get away from the Cherokee settlement by joining up with a Wild West show, but she returned after a dissolute decade of bad acting to make an even worse exit from life, her teeth turned black and her person suffering from tertiary syphilis at the age of 40.
My mom's extended history says something about the mutability of race and caste, poverty and power, and their relation to human will. It also supports an idea I always detested, that everybody is where they are supposed to be at any given time. By extension, that means that you and I may yet have miles to go before ending up to our necks in some predestined mess, either to overcome and triumph or let ourselves get sucked under and die. Worse, it may take a lifetime of horrific accidence to get there.
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| New York! New York! |
As young Sula's pre-adolescent imagination grew, it wandered the wasted hours of her settlement schoolhouse education into original embellishments on her tragic dislocation. No, her white family wasn't the Aubreys. Never heard of them. Her real family was richer, even whiter folks who lived in New York City. Not only was she a New Yorker by birth, she was also very rich, and being cheated out of her inheritance.
It was a possibility.
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| Route 66 |
During the 1920's, East-coast tourists were always driving their shiny coupes through the settlement, stopping to buy trinkets, take pictures, and gorge themselves on hamburgs, moon-pies, and ice-cold Coca-Cola. Sula--how she longed for her real, white name!--had been kidnapped by a crazed Cherokee woman (her mother Oona) from the elegant passenger compartment of a long, shiny limousine, where she lay, a baby sleeping.
The red witch (her mother Oona) had been waiting and watching for an opportunity. When the luxury vehicle stopped, and its passengers disembarked to shop and eat--and then the chauffeur snuck off to pee across the road behind a tree, leaving the car unattended--the crazy lady ducked into the coach with her own baby, switched the two infants' clothing, and left her own pudgy, red Cherokee baby sleeping face-down in place of the rich white one. Then she kidnapped the white princess, took her home, and began calling her Sula, soon making her do all the housework. That was the real story of how white Sula Whitekiller had ended up on these Godforsaken settlement lands!
Sula further confabulated that the impostor child, now age eleven, just like her--and living in a swank Manhattan penthouse, enjoying the civilized amenities of electric lights, running water, her own room, and private, indoor bath; ice buckets filled with cubes of frozen ginger ale and such--that squaw-girl was due to get caught any day now. This was my young mother's fondest hope.
It was gonna be just too bad for her impostor when she got caught, and she would get caught. Sula was absolutely certain the Other had grown into a red-skinned, black-eyed, lank-haired, hook-nosed squaw-girl, conspicuously out of place in a private Manhattan school full of well-behaved, fashionably dressed white children from New York's best families. Meanwhile Sula the kidnapped white American princess languished in bitter lands, forever sunburned, pestered by nasty Indian boys, and ordered around like a slave by the crazy Cherokee woman who claimed to be her mother.
This was mid-1920's America. These things happened every day.
Sula Whitekiller consoled herself each night before falling asleep that it was only a matter of time until the whole business came to light. Somehow, her red-skinned usurper would slip up and reveal herself. Maybe she would begin war whooping in her sleep--like other, normal white children walking and talking in theirs--or maybe she would tomahawk the doorman at the family's elegant apartment house. Although where would a little girl find a real tomahawk in Manhattan?
The rich New York family would summon a Mesmerist doctor. (My 11-year-old mother had recently seen her first talking movie, Svengali.) He would hypnotically regress the whole white family until all at once they realized what had happened. Their long, shiny car would be pulling up any time now--discharging one chubby, miniature squaw woman with ratty hair and moccasins on her feet.
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| Oh, how sorry we are to have left you in this awful place! |
Then kindly, beckoning white voices from inside the coach would call out to their long-lost daughter, finally found: come get in the car. We're going home, darling, home! O, how sorry we are to have left you in this awful place. Here, have a Coca-Cola and some pocket money till we get you to the department store and buy you everything you need and want.
The Cherokee loon formerly known to her as Mother might go to prison, but at least Sula--oh, that name had to go!--would live happily ever after among the rich white society of Manhattan. On second thought, she might see to it that her Cherokee kidnapper and the real, dumpy red Sula wouldn't be punished too harshly. Maybe she could slip them a little piece of her fortune to improve their lives too.
By the age of 12, tweenage Sula had sufficient mental maturity to think fair-mindedly. She developed sympathy for the tragic creature who called herself Mother, realizing that Oona had so wanted a better life for her red baby that she had taken the huge risk of committing the shocking crime of switch-the-baby. It might also have been the Stockholm syndrome.
Either way, she was the one called Sula Whitekiller, enduring in the never-ending sting of the salt wind that pelted their house.
As the depressed 1930's progressed, she also learned to dread. The poor whites of Crudestruck had nothing better to do than harass settlement Cherokees, calling them heathen red devils, killers, drunkards and thievin' redskins, right to their faces. In her case (had they known), she would have been a half-breed bastard whore. Lawmen of the depressed 30's were disinclined to prosecute the town’s rope-muscled, mean white boys for rape, and the young brutes overpowered with impunity the prettier Cherokee girls, often impregnating them with a new generation of half-breed bastards. The occasional revenge murder by a red brother provided the only real disincentive.
Sula never once went to town in the company of her mother, who was wise in such matters. When the people of Crudestruck began to see my teenage mother regularly, by herself, they mistook her for white and treated her accordingly.
My mother realized there and then that, golly gee yes, it was to the white world that she truly belonged: the world of Life Magazine's glossy new Packards and Kenmore washing machines; its glamorous aproned white ladies drinking Maxwell House coffee in their clean, modern kitchens--using Betty Crocker cake mixes and improving on nature with plucked facial hair and fashionably thin, penciled-in eyebrows.
For her first sixteen years of life, my mother had to answer to the alarming name of Sula Whitekiller. The first thing to be done when she seized her emancipation was to silence those syllables and invent some new ones--less hair-raising than Sula Whitekiller. As soon she developed the necessary carnal knowledge, the sixteen-year-old Cherokee half-breed destined to become my proper, lily-white mother hitchhiked north as far as Detroit. Shortly after her arrival, she wrote "Sula Whitekiller" on a rock, and dropped the weight of a detested former name into the Detroit River from the center of the Belle Isle bridge. Thereafter, she was known to herself and the world as Hope Anne Elizabeth, white person.
She got a job, purchased a brass lamp with her first pay, and within a few years had become as white and proper as Eleanor Roosevelt--at least in her own mind--despite the occasional lapse. For young Hope Elizabeth did enjoy a cocktail. During her periodic tumbles from white gentility, she would go on binges and wake up to find that she had overdone it and committed an act of white turpitude, fornicating with some handsome, sweet, off-Anglo romeo named Tammuz, Ricardo or Geraldo; Juanito, Abdullah or Ziam. Once sober, she would stay boiling mad at herself for days about the un-Americanism of her ways! People of color mixing it up with whites like herself!
The past gave her nightmares. Never again! she invariably vowed, and after just a few more slip-ups, she succeeded in developing the self-restraint necessary for a proper young lady to get ahead in the white world. Her life became the prophetic fulfillment of her mother's words spoken on the bitter buggy ride back from Crudestruck to her settlement home. The white God recompensed the young woman for the lost society of her father's people by restoring seven-fold wealth and luck to the daughter of the rejected Cherokee phenotype Oona. Sula's mother had been denied full humanity by a pinch-faced old white man who forbade his son Charles to love her because of her skin tone. It was this salty old cracker that drove my mother north to white society, wealth, and accomplishment.
On one occasion many years after my mother had migrated north and undertaken her self-transformation, miserable Richard Aubrey traced her down, sent for her, and they met for an afternoon in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That single meeting of father and daughter began well, my mom said--he was sweet and sentimental for a while--but as he grew increasingly plastered, he deteriorated into utter incoherence and had to be taken home by friends. It was their only meeting. Richard Aubrey died a drunkard fallen into uselessness, a man who regarded the social conventions with an impotent hatred since his miserable days had long been supported by the wealth generated by such conventions. He was caught in it, but was not of it, and silenced his conflicted psyche the only way he knew, to remain fatuously and infamously inebriated.
Hope Elizabeth and Richard Aubrey Pose for a Picture at their Sole Meeting in Tulsa, 1940
When first she chose her new name of Hope Ann Elizabeth, my mother had given no thought to extending its length, but before long the accelerating spirit of the times began to require add-ons--for purposes of a birth certificate, payroll protocol, World War II security clearance, and then the legitimization of all her children (none of whom she wished to stigmatize by having a mother with a different surname). It took my mother three marriages to find my father. Surname-by-surname, her identity bloomed. For purposes of a birth certificate, she had to become Hope Anne Elizabeth Aubrey-White, and with each new marriage came another name, until by the time of her passing, she wielded the impressive moniker of Hope Ann Elizabeth Aubrey-White Prill Hollenbeck Tassikoff.
I didn't learn of my own Native American heritage until I was in my forties. Mom had settled down by then and chilled out a bit about race, as had the nation-at-large by 1995. Until that time, I had believed every word of the lineage my mother had invented for me. Her methodical but factitious genealogical research informed me that I was a direct descendant of heroic Lord Byron on one side, and Alexander the Great on the other! She'd laid it on a bit thick, she confessed in those memorable moments of cocktail-induced candor, hoping it would prove a confidence-builder.
I guess her little white lies were all for the best in their time and place. She had struggled to rewrite her own history, worked doggedly to make it work, and managed to finesse her way into the impregnable white fortress of a God-fearing nation, the mighty St. Formosus Parish—America’s most desirable address in the year 1954, as pictorialized in a Life Magazine cover story of that year.
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