Light-skinned-ed Girl

Mixed Experience History Month 2013: William P. Powell, Civil War Surgeon

Born in 1834, William P. Powell was the son of a free black man and a Native American mother in Bedford, MA. 

Powell, Sr. was a vocal abolitionist and helped house black seamen as well as fugitive slaves.  In 1851, the family moved to England to escape the punitive and rightfully frightening Fugitive Slave laws.  Powell, Jr. grew up in Liverpool where his father ran a boarding house for seamen and newly arrived fugitive slaves.  Powell, Jr. did medical training at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in London.  His family returned to America in 1861 and he began practicing medicine then.

Powell wanted to help in the war effort and applied to the Army to serve as an assistant surgeon.  He was offered a contract and worked at the Contraband Hospital for fugitive slaves and black soldiers.  In 1863, he became the hospital's surgeon-in-chief and served for a year.

He left the Army and went into private practice.  He retired in 1891 in failing health.  He spent the next 24 years petitioning for his government pension. He never received it as he could not prove that he was a commissioned military man rather than a contracted surgeon.

In 1902, he returned to England where his brother was in ill health.  He died there in 1915 in a home for the aged and invalid.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is my effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013. Copyright 2013.

Mixed Experience History Month 2013: Billy Bowlegs III, tribal historian

Billy Bowlegs III was born in 1862. His father was African-American and his mother was Seminole.  He took the name Billy Bowlegs as an adult after the great Seminole chief who led his people through the Seminole Wars. 

Bowlegs befriended a couple of amateur historians who became advocates for the Seminole.  It was with his help they published The Seminole of Florida in 1896.  The couple later advocated on the tribe's behalf to gain a reservation in the Everglades.

He died in 1965.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is my effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013. Copyright 2013.

Mixed Experience History Month 2013: Jim Thorpe, Star Athlete

Jim Thorpe (aka Bright Path) was born May 28, 1888.  His father was of Irish and Sac and Fox Indian descent.  His mother was French and Native American.

Thorpe was raised as Sac and Fox in Oklahoma.  Thorpe--who had a twin brother--landed in an Indian boarding school in Kansas because he kept running away from home. 

In 1904, he continued his education at an Indian school in Pennsylvania where Glenn Scobey Pop Warner coached him and recognized his athletic gifts.  Thorpe became a star athlete in track and field first.  It was in 1911 he drew national attention for his talent as a football player.  In a game against Harvard--a top-rated team--Thorpe scored all of his team's points.  His school won the national championship in 1912 in large part because of his efforts. 

Thorpe became an Olympic athlete competing in the 1912 games where he won gold (among other awards) in the decatholong and set an Olympic record that held for 20 years.  Thorpe was later stripped of his medals when it was discovered that he had been paid as a professional baseball player before the Olympics.  (The medals were reinstated posthumously.)

Thorpe played baseball for the championship winning NY Giants baseball club and several other successful teams through 1919.  He also played football during this time for a series of winning teams. 

From 1921-1923, he helped organize and played for an all-Native American team.  He retired from football at age 41.  After his sports career ended, Thorpe struggled to support his family.  He also dealt with illness and alcoholism.  He died in 1953.  He was inducted in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1963 after his death.

 

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013. Copyright 2013.

 

 

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Mixed Experience History Month 2013: Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Educator & Activist

May is Mixed Experience History Month 2013

Mixed Experience History Month: Hans Massaquoi, Mixed-Race German Raised in Hitler's Germany

Hans Massaquoi--born Jan. 19, 1926--was the German-born son of a white German mother and black Liberian father.  He grew up in Hamburg, Germany during the Nazi rise to power and at one point considered joining the Hitler Youth.

Because of his mixed-race background, he was barred from any professional career.  Instead his mother encouraged him to learn a trade.  Massaquoi was not persecuted but suffered as the target of racism and abuse.  In 1947, he traveled to Liberia where his father lived.  He then emigrated to the U.S.  After serving as an Army paratrooper, Massaquoi earned a degree in journalism.  He wrote for Jet and Ebony where he became managing editor.  In 1999, he published his memoir Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi German.  He died in January 2013.

"I was six years old when I started school in 1932. Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. I was too young then to understand what this would mean for me. I didn’t know that my mother, a nurse, had lost her government job because of me. The teachers who had objections to the new regime were quickly replaced by younger teachers who were openly pro-Nazi. Some of them, including the head teacher, were plainly hostile to me and did their very best to insult me and to make disparaging remarks about my race. One time – I must have been about ten – one of the teachers took me aside and said, 'When we've finished with the Jews, you'll be next.' The most important reason why I survived Hitler and was not killed during the Holocaust was that there wasn’t a large Black community in Germany."

--Hans Massaquoi, in the Anne Frank Journal, 1994

 

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013. Copyright 2013.

Mixed Experience History Month 2013: Augustus Washington, photographer

Augustus Washington was born circa 1820 or 1821 the son of a former slave of African descent and a South Asian mother.

Washington financed his education at Dartmouth by learning how to do daguerrotypes.  However, after a year, he was unable to keep up with the tuition and had to leave the college.  He then moved to Connecticut where he opened a studio to teach daguerrotype making.  In 1853, he moved to Liberia with his wife and two young kids.  He worked as a daguerrotypist in Liberia for a number of years, but later gave up the photographic work and became a farmer and politician serving in the Liberian congress.  He died in 1875 in Liberia.  There are no known images of Washington, but some of the daguerrotypes he created have survived.

"Strange as it may appear, whatever may be a colored man’s natural capacity and literary attainments, I believe that, as soon as he leaves the academic halls to mingle in the only society he can find in the United States, unless he be a minister or lecturer, he must and will retrograde."
–Augustus Washington, letter to the New York Tribune, 1851

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is my effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013. Copyright 2013.

Mixed Experience History Month 2013: Maria Tallchief, Ballerina

Born January 24, 1925, Maria Tallchief was the daughter of a father who was a member of the Osage tribe and a mother who was of Scottish-Irish descent.

Tallchief took her first ballet lessons at age 3.  In 1933, the family moved from Oklahoma to Los Angeles with the hopes of getting into show business.  At age 12, Tallchief started taking very serious dance lessons with a reknowned choreographer.  Tallchief grew as a dancer and began to perform.  After graduating from high school, she left for New York at age 17. 

Tallchief started performing with Ballet Rousse, an esteemed ballet troupe immediately upon arriving in New York.  She quickly developed an impressive resume and good reviews.  In 1944, George Ballanchine was hired on as choreographer for the Ballet Rousse troupe.  He cast her as the lead  in several of his dances.  In 1946, he asked her to marry him.

Tallchief is considered America's first major prima ballerina.  She enjoyed a long career on stage, and after retiring from ballet, she continued to make TV appearances and became a champion for ballet.  She received a National Medal of the Arts and a Kennedy Center Honor for her lifetime achievements.  She died in April 2013.

Mixed Experience History Month 2013: Solomon Northup, Abolitionist & Author

Solomon Northup was born free circa 1808 to a father who was a freeman of color and a mother who he would describe as a "quadroon".

In 1829, Northup married a mixed-race woman with whom he had three children.  In 1841, while on traveling on business in Washington D.C.--Northup who was a skilled fiddler--was kidnapped and sold into slavery.  He would not regain his freedom until 1853 after his family learned of his situation and was able to enlist the help of New York's governor.  Northup was unable to get restitution from the slave traders because he was not allowed to testify against them.  (Blacks were not allowed to testify against whites in court.)

He published a memoir of his ordeal Twelve Years a Slave and became an active abolitionist who helped others escape slavery on the Underground Railroad.  Historians have not been able to determine when Northup died but he is believed to have died of natural causes.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013. Copyright 2013.

Mixed Experience History Month 2013: Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Educator & Activist

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, also known as Zitkala-Sa or Red Bird, was born in 1876 to a full-blooded Sioux woman and a white man. 

She struggled with her mixed-race heritage as a chid on the reservation as well as off.  She received a scholarship to attend Earlham University where she studied violin.

Her activism began after she took a teaching position at the New England Conservatory where the school's founder's philosophy was "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."

She started writing essays against the movement to make Indian students relinquish their cultural identities.  In 1916, as an officer of the Society of American Indians, she was instrumental in the formation of the Indian Welfare Committee and wrote an investigation into the government's mistreatment of Indian tribes--specifically, the defrauding of American Indians in Oklahoma of their oil-rich lands.  In 1926, she founded the National Council of American Indians, a lobbying group for American Indian legal rights.

Zitkala-Sa's worked as an activist her entire life, but she also kept up her love for music and writing.  In 1938, her opera "Sun Dance" debuted on Broadway.  She died that same year.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013. Copyright 2013.

 

A lovely animated interpretation to The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

I was really impressed by this video I discovered.  I don't know who is behind it but it's so charming I had to share.

 

May is Mixed Experience History Month 2013

It's May and that means it's Mixed Experience History Month, a month-long celebration of people and events that have shaped the Mixed experience.  I founded this celebration in 2007 with the hope of bringing awareness to the long history of racial and cultural connectedness.  I had become frustrated with the idea that my discussions of "mixed-ness" was for a small niche-group and set out to show that the Mixed experience is the American experience--that we're all part of this larger story.

In the last three years as I've traveled across the country with my book, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, I have been most heartened by the fact that my book hasn't just found a foothold in multiracial literature studies or just found an audience with multiracial indviduals and blended families, it has found a place in the mainstream.  People of all stripes and polka dots have related to the story and found a way to articulate, claim and explore their own mixed roots and connections.  I hope that is true for this project too.

Starting next week I will post a new profile of a person or event in the Mixed experience each weekday of the month.  If you have nominations for inclusion, please leave a comment below. 

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013. Copyright 2013.

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Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Jeanne Duval, performer & muse

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: A Recap

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: George Herriman, cartoonist

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Ina Ray Hutton, Band Leader

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On Transformation

"Transformation is not a future event, but a present activity." Jillian Michaels

Happy Birthday Nella Larsen!

On this day in 1891, the amazingly talented writer (and fellow Afro-Viking) Nella Larsen was born.  Thinking of her today and giving thanks for her work and her life.  It changed my life that I was able to honor her by installing a headstone on her grave in 2006.  I hope one day I'll have the honor of seeing her novel Passing on the big screen (I co-wrote an adaptation).  But I am so glad her memory lives on.

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James Baldwin On Being An Artist & Staying True to the Vision

I started this blog seven years ago as a struggling novelist seeking community.  And to a certain degree I came to blogging as a woman who was learning how to trust her own voice.

Today, I am a published novelist--my book was met with great critical and commercial acclaim.  I was dubbed a Power 100 Leader by Ebony Magazine.  I've met so many wonderful readers traveling the country almost non-stop for three years; I've had wonderful opportunities like walking the red carpet for the Image Awards and hanging out with Vanessa Williams at the after-party, appearing on CNN and NPR and the NBC Nightly News, speaking at the Schnitz to an audience of 2500 people who had all read my book.  The dream I had so many years ago came true!  I got my big break -- now what?

I re-read this quote by James Baldwin and thought: he really gets what it means to be an artist--not just a success story.  Words to live by.  Thank you once again, Mr. James Baldwin!

“Then you make—oh, fifteen years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces, God knows how many broken friendships and an exile of one kind or another—some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are . . . [Y]ou make your first breakthrough [as an artist], people have heard your name—and here comes the world again.  The world you first encountered when you were fifteen.  The world which has starved you, despised you.  Here it comes again.  This time it is bearing gifts.  The phone didn’t ring before—if you had a phone.  Now it never stops ringing.  Instead of people saying, ‘What do you do?’ they say,’Won’t you do this?’ And you become, or you could become a Very Important Person.  And then—and this is a confession—you find yourself in the position of a woman I don’t know who sings a certain song in a certain choir and the song begins: ‘I said I wasn’t gonna tell nobody but I couldn’t keep it to myself.’  You’ve come full circle.  Here you are again, with it all to do all over again, and you must decide all over again whether you want to be famous or whether you want to write. And the two things, in spite of all the evidence, have nothing whatever in common.”

--James Baldwin, "The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity"

Camp NanoWriMo & More Words

I've always wanted to do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) held each November, but I've never been able to keep up with the word count or put in the necessary hours writing.  November is particularly difficult because of the holidays and holiday get-togethers and travel.  So I was excited to learn that the good folks at NaNoWriMo put together a chance to do the novel writing marathon in April.  So here I am a week and a half into the work--not too far behind on the word count.  There's some good stuff in the pages I have and then a lot of bleh and some terrible stuff too.  If nothing else, I am purging the bad novel to be able to make room for the good in later drafts.  The best bit of advice that's keeping me going is from one of my favorite poets, William Stafford.  He once said: “There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.”  I'm aiming really low, and I'm enjoying the work!

On Mindfulness & Now

You Reading This, Be Ready

by William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

           William Stafford

27 Authors, 27 Books to Win!

27 authors have banded together to put together a year’s worth of reading for 2 lucky winners. Here are the rules:

Sign-up for the contest by leaving your name and email address below. Every entrant will have a chance to win 27 books.

In order to win as many books as possible, you must add each book to your Goodreads shelf through the links provided below. Click the link and then click the WANT TO READ button below the book’s image.  If you add all 27 books and you win, then you’ll get 27 books. If you only add 2, then you only get 2, etc.  (Note: if all you have done is “enter”, and you are chosen, you will win one book of your choice among the 27.)

The original contest will be for 2 winners; for each 500 entry milestone we will add another winner with a maximum of 5 winners. So when we get to 500 entries, there will be 3 winners. 1000 will be 4 winners, 1500 and over will be 5 winners. The winners will be chosen by random number generation and will be contacted through the email address they provided. US and Canada only.  Runs March 15-22, 2013. (Note: some books may not be available until their publication dates.)

1. Click here to add HIDDEN by Catherine McKenzie to your Goodreads shelf
2. Click here to add SEDUCTION by MJ Rose to your Goodreads shelf
3. Click here to add THE UNFINISHED WORK OF ELIZABETH D by Nichole Bernier
4. Click here to add THE COMFORT OF LIES by Randy Susan Myers to your Goodreads shelf
5. Click here to add IN NEED OF A GOOD WIFE by Kelly O’Connor McNees to your Goodreads shelf
6. Click here to add ORPHAN TRAIN by Christina Baker Kline to your Goodreads shelf
7. Click here to add GLOW by Jessica Maria Tuccelli to your Goodreads shelf
8. Click here to add BY FIRE BY WATER by Mitchell James Kaplan to your Goodreads shelf
9. Click here to add THE WEDNESDAY DAUGHTERS by Meg Waite Clayton to your Goodreads shelf
10. Click here to add MURDER BELOW MONT PARNASSE by Cara Black to your Goodreads shelf
11. Click here to add THE LAST WILL OF MOIRA LEAHY by Therese Walsh to your Goodreads shelf
12. Click here to add THE HOUSE OF VELVET AND GLASS by Katherine Howe to your Goodreads shelf
13. Click here to add AFTER YOU by Julie Buxbaum to your Goodreads shelf
14. Click here to add A SIMPLE THING by Kathleen McCleary to your Goodreads shelf
15. Click here to add KITCHEN CHINESE by Ann Mah to your Goodreads shelf
16. Click here to add THE DOCTOR AND THE DIVA by Adrienne McDonnell to your Goodreads shelf
17. Click here to add WHY CAN’T I BE YOU by Allie Larkin to your Goodreads shelf
18. Click here to add NO ONE YOU KNOW by Michelle Richmond
19. Click here to add THE SHORTEST WAY HOME by Juliette Fay to your Goodreads shelf
20. Click here to add STUDIO SAINT-EX by Ania Szado to your Goodreads shelf
21. Click here to add HOUR OF THE RAT by Lisa Brackmann to your Goodreads shelf
22. Click here to add THE SEARCH ANGEL by Tish Cohen to your Goodreads shelf
23. Click here to add THE BIRD SISTERS by Rebecca Rasmussen to your Goodreads shelf
24. Click here to add THE HEADMASTER’S WAGER by Vincent Lam to your Goodreads shelf
25. Click here to add DEATH IN THE FLOATING CITY by Tasha Alexander to your Goodreads shelf
26. Click here to add THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY by Heidi Durrow to your Goodreads shelf
27. Click here to add THE PAINTED GIRLS by Cathy Marie Buchanan to your Goodreads shelf

 

The Real Story that Inspired The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

I am often asked about the real story that inspired The Girl Who Fell From the Sky.  I will never tell.

First, I feel incredibly protective of the real girl.  Yes, there is a real girl out there somewhere.  She deserves to live her life without a reminder of that horrible day, that horrible tragedy.  And it's not entirely clear that she even would remember what happened.  It's very likely that she suffered traumatic amnesia.  And then beyond that--the story that I have written is not her story--I did try to do that initially but it didn't work.  I didn't know enough about her.  So I wrote about what I knew: I wrote about growing up black and Danish and feeling like America's ideas of race and culture divorced me from my mom because people couldn't see her in me.

I write this today because I woke up to read the horrifying story about the Harlem mother who jumped from an eight-story building with her baby in her arms and the child survived.  I received a ton of messages from readers about the story.  It was as if they wanted a moment to grieve with me because I understood what that meant because of my book.  I'm not sure.  But I was glad to get their messages and not feel so alone in the sadness I felt about another woman feeling so unsure that she could protect and take care of her child she thought it best to take him out of the world too.

This post is a bit of ramble--written in the heat of grief and bewilderment--but there is one message I want to be very clear: to any sleuthing readers who want to find the "real girl" who was the inspiration of the book.  STOP!  DON'T!  Give her that gift of peace and of grace.  Know simply that her story of survival inspired the survivor in me and maybe in you too.

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The Inspiration for My Work-in-Progress Gets a Shout out in NY Times

I have been researching the life of Miss Lala for years and am working on a novel that fictionalizes her life.  Who knew that she was on everyone's mind?  Check out this story in the NY Times about the exhibition that opened this week at the Morgan Library in New York.  I know a lot more than the curators about her life -- in fact, I found a new photograph of her recently that's never been published.  It was like looking into her soul.  So wish me words as I continue working on the book--ETA unknown, but it's definitely in the works!

Roots, Race, and My Dad: My Newest Huffington Post Essay

I've done a lot of writing about my dad over the last 20 years since he died, but have kept much of it private.  I wrote this essay for a news organization but ultimately it didn't fit the series.  But I was happy with the balance in the piece, as well as the small measure of peace I found in writing it.  I hope you will take a read over at the Huffington Post: My Father's Silence, A Kind of Grace.

Additional 2013 Appearances

I've added a few speaking and appearance dates for 2013: Western Oregon University MLK Commemoration, Sterling Bank's Bella Voce Book Club Author Luncheon, California Lutheran University, and the Richard Ellman Lectures in Modern Literature. You can find the details on the appearances page of my website.  I'm looking forward to all of these talks and appearances, but the Richard Ellman Lectures opportunity is one I couldn't have imagined.  The Richard Ellman Lectures is the biennial event held at Emory University, to celebrate literature. This year the speaker is Paul Simon. Yes, that Paul Simon and as a committee member I will introduce him for his mini-concert on Feb. 12 at Emerson Concert Hall, Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. Needless to say, I'm over the moon! For more information visit the website.

On Loneliness

"Loneliness is something you'll have plenty of without trying to induce it. You can count on it. As a matter of fact, you don't have to be neurotic to discover that the world can be a frightening place."

-William Stafford

Remembering Wendy Weil, literary titan and beloved uber-agent

Last week I learned that my agent, Wendy Weil, had died suddenly of a heart attack.  The loss came as an incredible shock--even though she was 72, she was healthy and vibrant.  She seemed much much younger than her years. 

Wendy took me on as her client in 2005 with only part of what would become The Girl Who Fell From the Sky complete.  The day she said she wanted to represent me I jublilated over a fancy dinner with my mentor and friend Michael Pettit who had made the introduction.  And of course, I called my mom and said: "I have an agent, Mor! And she is Alice Walker's original agent!  She doesn't even need new clients!"  I was certain that I would be signing a contract for 6-figures just because she repped me.

Over the course of the next 2.5 years Wendy sent the manuscript to close to three dozen publishing houses--all of them rejected the manuscript.  But she never stopped believing in me and the work.  She said to me once: "It doesn't matter how many rejections we get, we just need to find the one gatekeeper to say yes.  We just haven't found the gatekeeper yet."

I think Wendy was happier than I was when I won the Bellwether Prize and the book contract.  And I know she was incredibly proud of the final product that was published and elated about the amazing critical and commercial success that the book received.

The last time I saw Wendy was at the Book Expo in June.  She was beaming from the front row as I shared the stage with Barbara Kingsolver, Hillary Jordan and the new Bellwether winner Susan Nussbaum.  It was a wonderful moment and I felt so happy that she could share it with me.

Wendy was a literary titan, and a smart, and gentle and beautiful soul.  I will miss her, my champion, greatly.  You can read about her amazingly accomplished life and all the love that her clients and colleagues had for her in this lovely article.

2nd Annual What Are You? Presentation, Brooklyn Historical Society 10/4 7PM

Join me for this great panel discussion: 2nd Annual: What Are You?  Let’s talk about race and ethnicity, and where we’re from (or where we’re from from); how we express our own multicultural identities, and how others perceive us. Panelists will start the conversation and we hope you’ll join in. We’ll discuss big questions like: How does our cultural background shape us? Can we see race? Is identity fixed or fluid? #CBBGwhatru Featuring: Jen Chau, founder of Swirl Erica Chito Childs, author of Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture, Heidi Durrow, a host of Mixed Chicks Chat and author of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, Ken Tanabe, founder of Loving Day, Angela Tucker, director of Black Folk Don't. Co-sponsored by Swirl, a multi-ethnic, anti-racist organization that promotes cross-cultural dialogue. Brooklyn Brewery beer and light refreshments will be served. RSVP: http://cbbgwhatru.eventbrite.com/

The Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street at Clinton Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201

I Got In!: Artist Residency Bliss

I am so incredibly grateful that I've been invited to return to Djerassi, a wonderful artist residence in Northern California.  I spent four weeks at Djerassi in 2005 and had a wonderfully productive month.  It was there I started plotting out the research I needed to do for the new book I'm working on now.  Djerassi is located on a stunning piece of land that overlooks the Pacific Ocean.  I look forward to the long afternoon walks on the trails.  I look forward to the gift of time.

The news came just when I needed that affirmation from the universe of the new work.  And then guess what?  A couple of days later I found more information about my subject Miss Lala; a couple of days after that I revised the first pages (again) and think I finally have it right! 

Alas, the residency isn't until 2013.  But what a wonderful lifeline to get the invitation now!

Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival June 15-17, 2012 FREE

If you're in Southern California, this weekend I hope you'll come to the 5th Annual Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival--June 15-17, 2012.  I co-founded this Festival in 2008.  It has grown incredibly over the years.  Last year, the Festival was featured in the New York Times, Ebony magazine and on National Public Radio.

You can see the whole line-up on the Festival website.  And best of all it's all FREE!  I

Coming Full Circle and Sharing a Stage with Barbara Kingsolver

Last week, I felt like I had come full circle with this wonderful experience I've had becoming a published novelist.  I shared the stage with my dear friend Hillary Jordan (Mudbound, When She Woke) and Barbara Kingsolver.  Barbara announced and introduced the new Bellwether Winner Susan Nussbaum (congrats!)--Her book should be published some time next Spring: Good Kings, Bad Kings.

I remember the first time I met Barbara a few months before my book was released.  I was so nervous, and this time I was nervous all over again.  But she's just so lovely and put me at ease.  And she said to me: "It's important to me that you write this next book."  Those words spoke to my soul!  I am looking forward to the coming months--no engagements or other duties--just me and the writing.  Wish me words.

 

"When something starts to feel like hurt . . ."

“What happens when people open their hearts?"...
"They get better.”

-Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

On Seeking & Being Free From Suffering

I've been on a concentrated quest in the last few weeks and really for the last many months of trying to find some way of finding more balance and a sense of peace.  I've been trolling bookstore shelves for self-help books, and meditation manuals.  I've amped up my exercise regiment so that at least I can fall asleep at night even though I will likely wake long before dawn and toss and turn all night.  I've sought out podcasts and video talks to bolster my days.  I have listened to this particular episode of the On Being podcast with Sylvia Boorstein three times now and hope some of the lessons sink in.  Maybe you're feeling the same way?  Maybe this will help you too? 

At the end of the episode she reads this Pablo Neruda poem.  It's the poem I just need right now.

"Keeping Quiet" by Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

—from Extravagaria (translated by Alastair Reid, pp. 27-29, 1974)

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: A Recap

It has been a long month for me--not just the number of weekdays I needed to post for Mixed Experience History Month, but also the amount of time I needed to spend researching and writing each post.

Each year, I find it more and more difficult to learn enough about the biographies of the historical figures to have it make sense to include them.  This year, I was disappointed with the lack of diversity of the profiled figures' ancestral roots.  Many of the profiled figures have some African-American or African ancestry--as strange as it is to say: I found it easiest to learn more about their origins and their relationship to the Mixed experience.

I also found it interesting to profile someone like architect Louis Metoyer who was also a slave owner.  Do I want him as part of the history I own ultimately?  What I decided is that stories and particularly history is complicated.  I claimed him too.

But what a thrill it was to claim writer Audre Lorde whose mother was mixed race and who had a number of interracial relationships.  I have felt a kinship to Audre Lorde since I first read her words about claiming one's complicated identity.  She spoke specifically about her own identity of being a black lesbian, but she was also speaking about mine as an Afro-Viking.  And to claim Etta James too?  Well, I had to.  I miss her!

I would really like to write a longer, more well-researched piece at some point about the ways in which light-skinned privilege helped these figures become who they were--and how that privilege might have factored into their own psychological imagining of themselves and their possibilities.

And finally, for next year's celebration I hope that I will be able to uncover more about what the profiled figures think about their position in the "Mixed experience"--what, if anything, did it mean to them?  And what was it allowed to mean to them.

I hope you've enjoyed the posts.  I will go back to my regular blogging about my mixed thoughts on a mixed up world, the creative life, books, and travel!  I hope you'll stay tuned.

BTW: The lady in this year's Mixed Experience History badge (designed by the wonderful Zerflin) is my literary mother, Nella Larsen

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011. Copyright 2012.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Audre Lorde, writer & activist

Born in 1934 in New York City, Audre Lorde was the daughter of Carribbean immigrants.  Her mother, of mixed-race ancestry, found pride in that she was fair enough to pass for white.  Lorde's father had a browner complexion.

Lorde was nearsighted to the point of being legally blind.  Still, she excelled in school.  After graduating from high school, Lorde became estranged from her family.  She went on to study at Hunter College. 

In 1954, during a pivotal year abroad in Mexico, Lorde came out as a lesbian poet.

After graduating from college, Lorde earned a master's in Library Science in 1961 from Columbia.

Soon thereafter she married a lawyer with whom she had two children.  The marriage ended in divorce in 1970.  During this time, Lorde worked as a librarian and was actively publishing her poetry and working for civil rights causes.  She was also an educator.

She published her first volume of poems in 1968: First Cities.  She published several more collections including: From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), Coal (1976), The Black Unicorn (1978), and Our Dead Behind Us (1986). She also published two memoirs: The Cancer Journals (1980) and A Burst of Light (1988). In 1982, Lorde's published her novel Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.

Lorde's work and writing focused on the necessity of claiming all of one's complicated identity, and brought new voice to issues of race, sexuality and culture. She once wrote: “If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

She received many awards during her lifetime including a nomination for a National Book Award in 1974 for From a Land Where Other People Live, Broadside Poets Award, Detroit, 1975, Borough of Manhattan President's Award for literary excellence, 1987, and the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit, poet laureate of New York, 1991 among others.

Lorde died in 1992 of cancer.  She chronicled her bout with the disease in her writing in The Cancer Journals.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011. Copyright 2012.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Louis Metoyer, architect

 

Louis Metoyer owned one of the largest plantations owned by free people of color in the United States.  Born in 1770, to a formerly enslaved woman of color and a wealthy white businessman, Metoyer studied architecture in Paris and designed the Melrose House in Isle Breville, LA on his plantation.

Along with his brother, Augustine, Metoyer ran the plantation as a thriving enterprise that grew cotton, tobacco, and indigo and was attended to by enslaved people of color.

It was Louis Metoyer's son who oversaw the completion of Melrose House.

Metoyer died in 1832.

 

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Elmer Imes, physicist & husband of Nella Larsen

Elmer Imes was born in 1883 and became the second person of African-American descent to receive a PhD in physics.

In 1920, he married Harlem Renaissance novelist (and fellow Afro-Viking) Nella Larsen.

Imes found it difficult to find a university teaching position and became a physics consultant and researcher working for several different companies between 1920 and 1930.

His work resulted in four patents for instruments which were used for measuring magnetic and electric properties.

In 1930, he became chair of the Fisk physics department.  In 1933, his marriage to Larsen ended in divorce.

He died in 1941.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: James Monroe Trotter, soldier & music historian

James Monroe Trotter was born into slavery in 1842, the son of an enslaved black woman and her white master.

Trotter escaped with his mother and siblings on the Underground Railroad to Ohio where he was educated as a teacher.

In 1863, Trotter enlisted in the Union Army.  He became the first man of color to achieve the rank of 2nd Lieutenant.

In 1868, he married and moved to Boston where he became the first man of color to work at the US Post Office.  (He is the father of the father of civil-rights leader William Monroe Trotter.)

In 1878, he published Music and Some Highly Musical People, the first comprehensive study of music ever written in the United States.

In 1887, President Grover Cleveland appointed Trotter to a position in the Recorder of Deeds Office, making Trotter one of the earliest African Americans to hold a position in this office along with Frederick Douglass.

Trotter died on February 26, 1892.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: James Alan Bland, composer

James Alan Bland was born in 1854 to parents who were free people of color.

Bland learned how to play his first banjo at age 12.  He was a self-taught musician and after graduating from college pursued a career in the popular entertainment of the time: minstrelsy.

His first big break came in 1875 when he landed a job with the Original Black Diamonds of Boston.  In 1881 he traveled to London with Haverly’s Genuine Colored Minstrels.  There he gained immense success and played for the queen.  He stayed for two decades.

He became best known as the composer of the great minstrel show tunes, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny”, “In the Evening By the Moonlight”, “De Golden Wedding” and “Oh Dem Golden Slippers.”

In 1901, he returned to the United States almost penniless.  The popular entertainment had become vaudeville and Bland struggled to find a foothold in that world.

Bland died in 1911 largely forgotten.  His grave went unmarked until 1939 when the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) located his burial spot and erected a headstone there to commemorate his life.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Merle Oberon, actress

Born in Bombay in 1911 as Estelle Merle Thompson or Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson, the story of her parentage has been listed as of Eurasian and/or Maori or Chinese descent.

A 2002 documentary The Trouble with Merle chronicles the conflicting stories of her origins.

Oberon grew up in poverty when the man listed as her father on her birth certificate died when she was young.  In 1917, her family moved to Calcutta into better circumstances where she began her theater training.

She started dating a former actor named Colonel Ben Finney at Firpo's in 1929 who promised to help her with her acting career until he realized that she was mixed-race and abandoned the relationship.

Her first big break came in England when she played Anne Boleyn opposite Charles Laughton.  The role led to major film roles.

She married Alexander Korda.  She earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role in The Dark Angel (1935).

 After a terrible car accident, Oberon was seriously scarred.  She would cover the scarring with make-up and went on to star in her biggest film Wuthering Heights opposite Laurence Olivier and many others through the mid 1950s.

 She died at age 68 after a stroke.  She now has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Peter Jennings, White House manservant

Paul Jennings was the author of the first White House memoir: A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison.

He was born into slavery at Montpelier in 1799 the son of a white Englishman and a mother of African and Indian ancestry.

In 1809, Jennings was one of the enslaved persons that Madison took with him to the White House where Jennings became a footman to the new President. He served all eight years of Madison’s presidency.  Afterwards, he returned to Montpelier as Madison's personal assistant for almost 20 years.

"Today, he is perhaps best-known for helping save Gilbert Stuart’s giant painting of George Washington when British troops seized Washington during the War of 1812. Jennings held the ladder when the canvas, at Dolley Madison’s direction, was freed from its frame; loaded onto a cart and taken to a barn in Maryland for safekeeping. Soon after, British troops arrived, ate the supper Jennings had set for the Madisons, then torched the house," according to sources.

Although Dolley Madison had promised to free Jennings upon her death, she started selling all of the enslaved people she owned upon her husband's death.  Jennings went on the market for $200.

Jennings enlisted  the helpf of U.S. Sen. Daniel Webster to gain his freedom. Webster bought Jennings, who agreed to work in Webster’s household in exchange for his liberty. Jennings paid  $8 a month toward his purchase price of $120.

Jennings went on to work in a government job for many years and published his memoir in 1865.  He died in 1874.

 

For more information read: Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, author of A Slave in the White House.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Sally Miller, "Lost German Slave," a cause celebre

Sally Miller was enslaved woman who brought a freedom suit claiming that she was a German immigrant who had been unlawfully indentured. 

After serving a German immigrant one day in New Orleans, Salome (nee Sally) was identified as the lost daughter of the woman's German immigrant hometown friend, Daniel Muller.

Thereafter a protracted legal battle began to gain her freedom as well as her children's. 

In 1845, the Louisianna State Supreme Court ruled for her freedom stating that: "That on the law of slavery in the case of a person visibly appearing to be a white man, or an Indian, the presumption is he is free, and it is necessary for his adversity to show that he is a slave."  The following year the Louisiana State Constitutional Convention abolished the Louisiana Supreme Court.  John Bailey who has written the definitive account of the story concluded in The Lost German Slave Girl (2003) that Sally Miller was probably not Salome Muller, but an enslaved woman who "... seized the one chance of liberty that was ever likely to come her way, and she hung on to that chance with a tenacity I could only marvel at."

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

 

Is This an Interracial Relationship?

A brief interruption of Mixed Experience History Month.  (I hope you're continuing to enjoy the posts!)

I wanted to share my most recent Huffington Post piece on the new Census numbers that show interracial marriages are at an all-time high.  Here's the beginning:

I'm used to checking "other" to describe myself. As the daughter of an African-American Air Force serviceman and a white Danish immigrant, I have yet to find a form with an Afro-Viking box.

Still, imagine my surprise -- not at the recent headline that interracial marriages are at an all-time high -- but that my marriage is included among them.

Read the rest of the piece here.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Willie "the Lion" Smith, jazz pianist

Willie "the Lion" Smith was born William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholoff Smith in 1893 to a woman of color of "Spanish, Negro, and Mohawk Indian blood" and a white Jewish father.

After Smith's father died, John Smith became his step-father.  Smith worked with his stepfather in a slaughterhouse when he was young.

When he was six-years-old, Smith started playing the organ.  As a young man, he won a piano in a department store contest and dedicated himself to playing it.  By 1910, he was playing in clubs throughout New York and New Jersey.

He was briefly married to Blanche Merrill who was white.  He also served in World War I.

After the war, he returned to playing in clubs as a soloist and also accompanying blues singers like Mamie Smith.  Though he never attained great fame, Smith was a great influence on Duke Ellington who wrote the songs "Portrait of the Lion"and "Second Portrait of the Lion" in honor of him.

Smith died in 1973.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Bessie Coleman, aviator

Bessie Coleman was born in 1892 to sharecropper parents of color.  Her father was African-American and  Cherokee.

In 1901, her father abandoned the family to return to Cherokee territory.  Life was difficult for the family but Coleman focused on her studies.  At 18, she used all of her savings to enroll in college.  After one term, she was forced to withdraw because she didn't have enough money to continue.

She moved to Chicago to find work.  As a manucurist in a barber shop, she heard the stories of many returning soldiers of World War I.  That was when Coleman's dream to become a pilot was born. 

Unable to train in the United States because of laws discriminating against her race, Coleman trained to become an aviator in France with the financial help of funding from a local banker.  The story of her journey was followed closely by The Defender newspaper.

She became the first female of African-American descent to become a pilot.  She was also the first person of African-American descent that earned an international pilot license.

In order to make a living as an aviator, Coleman became a barnstorming stunt flier. She became known as "Queen Bess" and was a huge crowd-pleaser.

Coleman died in April 1926 when she was thrown from a plane in a nose dive caused by a plane malfunction.  She was mourned by 5000 funeral-goers and many more around the world.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrowcelebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

 

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Paschal Beverly Randolph, Spiritualist & Sex Magician

Paschal Beverly Randolph was born in 1825 to a wealthy white Virginia man (who abandoned him) and a woman of color named Flora.

His mother died when he was six or seven and Randolph ended up homeless.  A half-sister took him in but didn't care for him, and let him beg on the street for the cost of his upkeep.

At 15, he started working on ships to support himself and traveled widely throughout Europe and as far as Persia.  It is believed that he was introduced to occultists in England and Paris, France.

He returned to America when he was in his twenties and started to make his living as a speaker and writer.  He wrote more than 50 books on medicine, magic and spiritualism.

As a spiritualist, he spoke out against slavery and after the war he worked for literacy for the formerly enslaved.  He is credited for being the first to promote a system of occult beliefs and practices (the magic mirror, hashish use and sexual magic) that had been unfamiliar to Americans.

Randolph eventually founded the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, the oldest Rosicrucian organization in the United States.

Randolph died at 49 under mysterious circumstances.  Did Randolph die from a self-inflicted wound to the head as a contemporary news story reported or had he been killed by a fellow Fraternitas member accidentally? 

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrowcelebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

 

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Etta James, singer extraordinaire

Born Jamesetta Hawkins in 1938, Etta James was the daughter of an African-American single teenage mother.  Her biological father was rumored to be Caucasian.  James believed her father to be a pool player of Swiss descent named Rudolf Wanderone.  James was raised in foster families.

James began singing at an early age.  When she was five-years-old, she began singing at church and wowed audiences.

When she was 12, her foster mother died and James moved with her mother to San Francisco.  There she formed a girl group called The Creolettes.  The group soon had the attention of musician Johnny Otis.  He helped the group sign a record deal.  The song "Dance with Me, Henry" hit the top of the charts and earned the group the gig to open for Little Richard on his national tour.

James signed with Chess records in 1960 as a solo artist and became the Chicago label's biggest female star with hits like “All I Could Do Was Cry,” “Trust in Me”and "At Last."

James continued to record many more hits over the years, but also battled her own personal demon of addiction.  She found re-newed success in the 1990s with the popularity of her jazz standard albums.

During her career, the singer won six Grammys and countless other awards and was honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

She died in January 2012 after a long illness.

On a personal note, James had a huge impact on me when I first saw her perform in 1994.  She became one of my all-time favorite singers and I saw her in concert another dozen times.  She became a figure in my novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, as well.  I only wish I had sent her a copy of the book--so she could know about that tribute.

“A lot of people think the blues is depressing, but that’s not the blues I’m singing. When I’m singing blues, I’m singing life. People that can’t stand to listen to the blues, they’ve got to be phonies.” -Etta James

 

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrowcelebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Cyrus Bustill, baker/educator/activist

Cyrus Bustill, the son of a white slavemaster and an enslaved woman of color, was born in 1732.  He was sold to a Quaker named Thomas Prior who taught Bustill the bread-making trade.

In 1769, Prior freed Bustill who went on to become a successful baker on his own.  During the Revolutionary War, he was commended for supplying American troops with baked goods at the Burlington docks, and reportedly given a silver piece by General Washington.  In 1787, Bustill became one of the founders of Philadelphia’s Free African Society.  He was also actively involved in the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia.

Bustill retired in 1797 and then built and opened a school for African American children in 1803.  He died in 1804.  His descendants include actor/activist Paul Robeson (great-great grandson) and grandson David Bustill Bowser was an abolitionist and an artist best known for his portraits of Abraham Lincoln and John Brown.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrowcelebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

 

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Orindatus Wall, soldier & activist

Orindatus Simon Bolivar Wall was the son of a white planter and an enslaved black woman.  Born in the 1820s, he became the first regular commissioned African American captain in the U.S. Army during the Civil War.

Wall--who would eventually go by O.S.B.--was freed by his father In 1838, and sent to southern Ohio.  There he was raised and educated by Quaker abolitionists.

Wall cycled through many identities in his lifetime.  He was an accomplished bootmaker, an outspoken abolitionist in 1850s, and military recruiter.  According to author of The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White Daniel Sharfstein: "In 1865, he became the first African-American to be regularly commissioned a captain in the Union Army."

Wall was active in integrating a church, and recruiting for Howard University after the war.  He continued his work in service of the people of D.C. in various positions such as a police magistrate, justice of the peace, legislative representative.  He died in 1891 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Although Wall and his wife had five children, he was largely lost to history until Daniel Sharfstein's scholarship was published.  His subsequent generations eventually chose to break ties with the black community.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrowcelebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

 

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Julien Hudson, painter

Born in 1811, Julien Hudson was the son of a British ship chandler and a free woman of color from New Orleans.

Hudson studied painting with Antoine Meucci for a couple of years before continuing his training in Paris with Alexandre Abel de Pujol.  In 1831, he returned to New Orleans and opened his own studio.  Not much more is known of his life.  He died in 1844.

 

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrowcelebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Abbie Mitchell, soprano

Abriea "Abbie" Mitchell was born in 1884 to an African-American woman and German-Jewish man.  Raised by her maternal aunt, Mitchell was educated in a convent school.

In 1897, she started taking voice lessons.  Just a year later, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Will Marion Cook cast her in a show called Clorindy which was considered at the time the most important musical featuring an all-black cast.  Mitchell married Cook a year later and continued to appear in the shows Cook composed.  They had two children together.

In 1903, Mitchell appeared in In Dahomey in London which garnered her international acclaim.  Mitchell sang “Brownskin Baby Mine” which became one of the most popular songs of the era. She was invited to and did perform for the King and Queen of England at Buckingham Palace.

Mitchell continued performing into the 1930s and also taught at the Tuskegee Institute.  She died in 1960.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrowcelebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

 

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Helen Pitts, suffragist & abolitionist

Helen Pitts was born in 1838, the descendant of immigrants who sailed to America on the Mayflower.  She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1859 and after the war became a teacher at Hampton Institute.

In 1882, Pitts moved to Washington D.C. and wrote for a periodical that advocated for women's rights.  That same year, Pitts became a clerk in the office of the Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia headed by Frederick Douglass who was writing his autobiography.

Pitts and Douglass married in January 1884.  (Douglass's first wife had died two years prior.)  Pitts reportedly said of her marriage to Douglass: "Love came to me, and I was not afraid to marry the man I loved because of his color."

But the couple faced opposition from family and friends to their union which was illegal in many states.

In 1895, Douglass died and Pitts took up the torch to create the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association.  She died in 1903 and was buried next to her husband.  With the help of the National Association of Colored Women, led by Mary Talbert, the Frederick Douglass Memorial Home opened in 1916 to visitors.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Jeanne Duval, performer & muse

Jeanne Duval was born in Haiti in 1820.  She was of mixed-race heritage including black African and mixed French ancestry.

In 1842, Duval traveled to France where she met the French poet Charles Baudelaire.  She would become his lover and serve as his muse for the next twenty years.

Many of Baudelaire's poems are about Duval or dedicated to her including the Black Venus cycle of poems in Les Fleurs du Mal.

Edouard Manet painted a portrait of Duval in 1862 called Baudelaire's Mistress, Reclining.  She died sometime thereafter possibly of syphillis: historical records are unclear.

Writer Angela Carter presents Duval with agency in her short story, Black Venus.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Ina Ray Hutton, Band Leader

Ina Ray Hutton--born Odessa Cowen in 1916 in Chicago--was a mixed-race African-American but would go on to pass as white during her musical career as a successful performer and bandleader.

Hutton made her Broadway debut at 14.  At 17, she joined the Ziegfield Follies.

In 1934, Hutton became the bandleader to a group of female musicians: Ina Ray Hutton and Her Melodears.

As the bandleader, Hutton became known as the “Blonde Bombshell of Rhythm."  She was the first female bandleader to be recorded and filmed. In the 1940s, she led an all-male band as a brunette.

In 1951, she created the Ina Hutton Show, a tv show that featured an all-female band and ran for four years.

Hutton died in 1984 in California.  It was only after her death that her racial and ethnic identity were revealed by a reporter, Phyllis Fletcher
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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: George Herriman, cartoonist

Born in 1880 in New Orleans, Herriman was the son of Creole African-Americans who were identified as mulatto on the 1880 Census.

He grew up in Los Angeles and started working as an illustrator for a newspaper by age 17.  Herriman drew several comic strips (Gooseberry Sprig, The Dingbat Family, Baron Bean) before creating his super popular series Krazy Kat.

Krazy Kat featured a complicated love-hate triangle between Ignatz, a mouse; Krazy, a "kat"; and Offissa, a dog/cop.

President Woodrow Wilson and writers T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst were among Herriman's fans.  In the classic text  The 7 Lively Arts, Herriman was mentioned as the "greatest comic artist of all time."  In 1922, the strip was adapted to a Broadway stage show.  Although the 1920s was the height of the strip's popularity, the strip ran continuously in Hearst papers from 1913 to 1944.

Herriman's ethnic identity was shrouded in mystery during his lifetime--he never publicly stated his racial or cultural background.  On his death certificate, he is listed as "Caucasian."  But his work has been interpreted as a statement on the complexities of shifting identities.

Herriman died in 1944 in his sleep.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.