The Heritage Month Project: "Pearl's Secret, A Black Man's Search For His White Family" by Neil Henry

Pearl's Secret by Neil Henry is an older book, published in 2001. It's been on my To Be Read Shelf for a number of years. I probably bought it because of the genealogy and history aspect. I didn't know much about it beyond that.

By the time I finally started reading Pearl's Secret, I thought it was going to be a Finding Your Roots thing. That worried me since I stopped watching that show, because I find it so formulaic. ("Your ancestors suffered horribly. How does that make you feel?") Then I thought the book was going to be a memoir of Henry's experience hunting for his white family members, maybe some nerdy stuff about hunting high and low. You do get a little of that. Genealogical research was much more of a chore before the Internet, even if today sites like Ancestry.com are only as accurate as the strangers who are doing the posting there.

But what the book really is is a family history as it relates to race, first through the Black side and then the white side of Henry's family, once he connects with them. I personally think family histories relate to the greater histories families lived through, and Henry's story supports that.

Henry describes his childhood in Seattle as the youngest son of a surgeon and a librarian as being Leave it to Beaverish. It was an idyllic suburban life interrupted by episodes of racism. He's invited by a couple of little white girls in his neighborhood to come over and play only to be chased down the street by their grandfather when he goes to the door. Not at all surprised he remembered that years later. In his family there is talk of the value of having light skin and good hair while at the same time feeling great respect for their Black history and culture. Believe me, no one was talking about French Canadian achievements and listening to French Canadian music when I was growing up. My mother's side of the family didn't know they had any kind of achievements or music, which I suppose can easily happen when your name is Adams.  

Henry's own story of being adrift while attending Princeton and working for Ben Bradlee at The Washington Post tended to drag for me, because I've read about guys going to private schools and having good jobs in journalism before. His grandparents are nice people, but he doesn't talk that much about them. The relatives who are the stars of his family show are his parents, who experienced life under Jim Crow and survived and overcame it. Their stories are riveting, shocking. Seriously, I am shocked by how little I, who have taken a history course or two and read a few history books, have known about the Jim Crow era until recently. I kept talking about these people at the dinner table while I was reading about them. 

Netflix! Where are you? I would watch this mini-series.  

I don't want to say too much about the Beaumonts, Henry's white family, because there's sort of a creative nonfiction thing going on here, with a narrative climax that I don't want to give away. Though I will just say, "boll weevil." Yes, I had heard the name, just as I had heard "Jim Crow." I had no idea the significance, though.

Regarding Peal's secret, itself--That's a bit of a surprise, too. It's not that she was a Black woman hiding her white background or a Black woman passing as white, because she was neither of those things. Her secret is something else. 

Pearl's Secret is a great example of how reading about people you are less familiar with opens up opportunities to see something different, to add to your personal knowledge base. My feelings about this book reminded me of reading Don't Hold Me Back, a picture book memoir written and illustrated by the late artist, Winfred Rembert. Rembert was a few years older than me, but not a lot, and I actually met him. In his book, he writes about growing up in the south at the end of the Jim Crow era. I found it disturbing that someone nearly my contemporary had to pick cotton as a child and saw the bodies of lynched Black men hanging from trees. Now I realize that growing up poorish in rural Vermont when I did, without weekly news magazines or a daily paper coming into the house, was probably a great protector for little Gail in terms of what was going on in the rest of the world.

James Marriott, a columnist with The Times (London), wrote a few days ago that "Our society has been peaceful and healthy for so long that for many people serious disaster has become inconceivable."  It's also inconceivable if we never knew it happened.

 

So What's With "Peace Like A River," Gail?

So, way back on Sunday, I told you about how I stumbled upon Peace Like A River by Leif Enger. You remember--my World Book Night experience.

Okay. Well, liked the book, love how I came to read it, really admire and enjoyed the ending.

Peace Like A River is about Reuben Land's recollections of his twelve-year-old self. He is the son of a devout Christian who is able to perform miracles and the brother of a seventeen-year-old boy who kills two teenagers who have broken into the Land's house intent on physically harming family members. They've already terrorized Reuben's younger sister. Not wanting to give anything away, I will merely say that older brother Davy ends up on the run and Reuben and his sister Swede and father Jeremiah undertake a journey to find him.

It sounds like a downer story, but Reuben has a disparaging wit, Swede has a way with a narrative, and  Jeremiah is a saint, in the good sense of the word, not the grim, oppressive one. I will admit there were a few moments when I felt the story was dragging a bit, but that is a minor complaint.

Reading this book was fascinating because as I was doing so, I felt I had a handle on what the story was about. Davy is the big, dramatic character--what with having killed people and being wanted by the law and all--but the story was about Reuben. It was, I felt, the story of what it's like to be part of that kind of horror show. It was the story of a family member who has to deal with another family's member's crime. Davy's action is the disturbance to Reuben's world that initiates the plot's action. It comes around page 50, which might be a little long to wait, but that's still pretty early on.

Then I got to the end of the book and realized I had been totally wrong. This book was not about Reuben's reaction to Davy's action. This book was about Reuben and his father, the miracle worker. The disturbance to Reuben's world comes in the first two pages when he is born dead, and his father performs his first miracle, giving Reuben life. All the stuff about Davy killing the intruders and the search for him--that's just Reuben's family situation. It could have been some other situation, so long as Reuben and Jeremiah were there.

The book was a good read, so the fact that I didn't realize what it was actually about until the end wasn't a problem for me. If it's true that all books are mysteries, the ending of this one, for me, was the solution to a mystery.

Now, what to do with this copy of a World Book Night book? I will have to think of something special.