The House Behind the Cedars

Thomas Murphy greeted me on a warm autumn day in 2005 wearing a baseball cap with a bald eagle staring fiercely across an American flag. He lived twenty-five miles south of Atlanta in an area that was neither country nor city. His house was shrouded by woods yet stood only blocks from a busy commercial strip. It was close enough to the Atlanta Motor Speedway that he could hear the engines revving on NASCAR race days.

Murphy was in his mid-sixties but looked years younger. He had recently retired from his job driving travelers from the Atlanta airport to a rent-a-car lot; soon he would find work baking biscuits for Chick-fil-A. He spoke quickly and was full of ideas. He was buying up property with the help of adjustable-rate mortgages. An enormous pickup truck and towing rig sat in his driveway, part of a plan to start a business hauling cars interstate.

The house that Murphy shared with his roommate was hidden from the road by a copse of cedars and other trees. One could drive past and never guess that it was there. He called it Murphy Manor. It was a spacious contemporary home, although piles of paper and a baroque tangle of computer equipment made it feel cramped inside. A lifelong bachelor, Murphy explained to me that he never married because for the past thirty-five years he had been too busy researching his family’s genealogy, devoting his spare hours to tracing his mother’s roots back to medieval England. In the mid-1990s he established a connection to the royal house of Lancaster. Since then he has called himself Sir Thomas.

Thomas loved his hobby, all the more because it offered a break from an unhappy work environment. At the rent-a-car company, he could not get along with his co-workers, most of whom were black. He challenged them on the way they dressed and talked, and they frequently called him a racist. After years of arguing, he stopped disputing the accusation.

Having finished his mother’s genealogy, Thomas turned to the pedigree of his father, Patrick. Almost immediately he hit a wall. Patrick had died when Thomas was a baby, and his mother had never met anyone from that side of the family. All she seemed to know was that the Murphys came from New York. But after searching birth, death, marriage, census, and probate records, Thomas could not find a single mention of their existence.

Online Thomas found new paths to pursue. He explored some of the dozens of ancestry Web sites that offer searchable databases and connect hundreds of thousands of family-history enthusiasts. He posted inquiries in genealogy chat rooms. He had little luck at first, but then his mother remembered that when she and Patrick first married, he had mentioned a few aliases that he used in case he was ever arrested. About ten years ago Thomas posted this information on the Web. The responses he received changed the way that he looked at himself in the mirror.

A woman in Mississippi wrote in, recognizing the aliases and identifying herself as the granddaughter of one of Patrick’s sisters. The Murphys, she informed him, were not from New York. Nor were they Irish—they were not even known as the Murphys until the 1930s. The family name was Wall. Thomas’s father had changed his first name, too, the woman wrote. She knew him as Uncle Russell, but he was born Roscoe Orin Wall. Roscoe’s grandparents—Thomas’s great-grandparents—were named Amanda and Orindatus Wall. Amanda Wall was an Oberlin graduate and civil rights activist who after the Civil War taught newly freed slaves to read and marched for a woman’s right to vote. Her husband had been born a slave, but when he died in 1891, he was one of the most politically connected African Americans in Washington, D.C. The Walls were buried together in Arlington National Cemetery. If Sir Thomas Murphy’s mother descended from English royalty, his father’s ancestors were late-nineteenth-century “colored aristocrats.”

Thomas Murphy’s story is shared by millions, most of whom do not know it. From the colonial era to the present, people of African ancestry have crossed the color line and faded into the world around them. They have lived among white people, identified themselves as white, and been regarded by others—neighbors, strangers, government officials—as white. On a daily basis, in ways large and small, they asserted their new racial status. On vacation they posed for pictures in front of the “whites only” sign at the beach. At night they told their children and grandchildren tales of the horrors of Sherman’s March to the Sea. Their descendants had no reason to imagine that they were anything but white. Like most Americans, they were taught to believe that the line between white and black is and always has been a natural barrier supported by science and religion and fortified by politics and law. Slavery and freedom, segregation and civil rights, whippings and lynchings, discrimination overt and subtle—the history of race in the United States had little to do with them. But all the while, a different story has been hiding in plain sight.

African Americans began to migrate from black to white as soon as slaves arrived on American shores. In seventeenth-century Virginia, social distinctions such as class and race were fluid, but the consequences of being black or white were enormous. It often meant the difference between slavery and freedom, poverty and prosperity, persecution and power. Even so, dozens of European women had children by African men, and together they established the first free black communities in the colonies. With every incentive to become white—it would give them better land and jobs, lower taxes, and less risk of being enslaved—many free blacks assimilated into white communities over time. In response, colonial lawmakers attempted to fix and regulate the status of slaves and free people of color. In 1705 the Virginia legislature defined a person of color as anyone with more than one-eighth African ancestry—a black great-grandparent. Eighty years later the rule was relaxed to one-fourth. Such fractions were a crude proxy for people with recognizably dark skin. To insist on a stricter rule would have been dangerous to the social order, as it would have risked reclassifying an unsettling number of people. The lawmakers were too late—the line between black and white was already porous and would remain so.

The American experience of race continued to oscillate between moments flush with the prospect of racial equality and crackdowns that reaffirmed the categories of black and white, but the migration from black to white never stopped. In the Revolution’s wake, nearly all Northern states outlawed slavery, and many Southerners freed their slaves. But during the first half of the nineteenth century, states north and south enacted strict Black Codes, and the common justifications for treating blacks and whites differently began to assume recognizably modern forms. After the Civil War, a decade of Reconstruction promised full citizenship for African Americans. By 1900, however, white supremacy and racial purity had become articles of civic faith, and Southern states were enacting Jim Crow laws that attempted to create entirely separate worlds for blacks and whites, from the maternity ward to the cemetery. Whether the political climate favored or disfavored blacks, the color line did not hold firm. People continued to walk the path from black to white. If anything, rigid rules about race only increased the number of people making the move.

This centuries-long migration fundamentally challenges how Americans have understood and experienced race, yet it is a history that is largely forgotten. According to just about anyone who has considered the question, the migration is impossible to reconstruct. Historians have told us that “passing for white” entailed a radical change of identity, forcing people to abandon their families, alter their names, move far from home, and live in constant fear that their secret would be betrayed. Implicit to this narrative is the assumption that any evidence of passing would always be destroyed.

But traces of the migration have survived. Some of the evidence is relatively well known to those who have gone looking. For centuries African Americans circulated rumors of whites with black ancestry. Occasional news items described moments when the color line bent and broke: a nosy spouse jimmied open a drawer, only to find photographs of a dark-skinned family; an army recruit cut his throat after military doctors assigned him to a colored unit. Memoirs recounted family members who crossed the color line—an aunt who became Italian, a father who was French until he revealed his true origins on his deathbed. During slavery and segregation, judges and juries regularly puzzled over the boundary between black and white. Plaintiffs in freedom suits alleged that they were whites mistakenly held as slaves. Individuals challenged being assigned to black schools and railroad cars. Husbands sought annulments by arguing they had unwittingly married black women. At best, such evidence is scattered across local archives and county courthouses, in library stacks and microfilm reels. Beyond the isolated anecdotes, there seems to be only silence. The assumption that racial passing always entailed secrecy and denial has inspired dozens of novels, plays, and movies over the last two hundred years. But the idea that becoming white required a tragic masquerade has pushed the subject to the margins of history.

In recent years, how ever, long-buried stories of migration and assimilation across the color line have begun to surface. Thanks to technological advances of the past decade, extraordinary amounts of genealogical material have been digitized, and companies have marketed DNA tests to determine a person’s racial background. Millions of Americans are swabbing their cheeks, watching television shows about celebrity genealogies, posting family trees on popular ancestry Web sites—and stumbling across family secrets. The abundant historical resources on the Internet have enabled people to learn names of long-dead ancestors and bare genealogical facts— age, place of residence, occupation, a designation of “mulatto” in the 1850 Census. They have also found clues for understanding how individuals and communities lived, thought, and acted. With every personal account that is recovered, a much bigger story—a new history of what it means to be American—is being revealed.

The Invisible Line tells the stories of three families that made the journey from black to white at different points in American history. The first family, the Gibsons, were sugar planters in Louisiana and horse breeders in the bluegrass region of central Kentucky. They descended from some of the leading families of the South, yet from generation to generation they also passed down vague stories to explain why some of them had dark skin. Avid genealogists, they traced the family line to a wealthy landowner in colonial South Carolina. But unknown to them, this man hailed from a free family of color that had moved from Virginia in the early 1700s, assimilated into a Welsh and Scots-Irish farming community, and prospered. After the Revolution a branch of the family headed south and west. Becoming white was an early step in their rise to new levels of wealth, power, and influence that enabled the Gibsons to play key roles in shaping how Americans thought about race.

The second family, the Spencers, settled in a community of subsistence farmers in the Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky about a decade before the Civil War. In the hills a person could live a long life without ever meeting anyone who identified himself as a person of color. Given the daily struggle to survive and the overriding value of good neighbors in what amounted to a permanent frontier, caring about race was more trouble than it was worth. It was much easier to embrace the idea that everyone was white, and if some of the local white people happened to have dark skin, few seemed to give it a second thought. The Spencers remained poor and lived in the shadow of the color line for decades. Being white was the most valuable thing they had.

The third family, the Walls, established themselves as white in Washington, D.C., between 1890 and 1910, the decades when Jim Crow took root. As Thomas Murphy would discover in the course of his genealogical research, his great-grandparents journeyed from slavery to freedom and from North Carolina to Ohio and eventually to the District of Columbia. After years of fighting for their rights as citizens, they traded a tradition of activism for an insistence on being white. It was a downwardly mobile move, a willing exile from the heights of African American achievement to anonymous lives as whites on the bare edge of the middle class.

The Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls reflect the diversity of Southern life: they were aristocratic planters, hardscrabble farmers, and educated professionals. They lived in colonnaded mansions and in log cabins sealed with mud—in bayou country, steep mountain hollows, and big cities. Taken together, they tell a singularly American story. They were pioneers settling the wilderness, first along the coast and then inland. They endured revolution, fought in the Civil War, and crossed paths with central figures in American history. As the nation cycled through boom times and depression, they earned and lost and recouped their fortunes. They witnessed and participated in the rise of the plantation economy, the coming of the railroad and industry, and the country’s transformation into a modern, urban society. And they experienced America’s wrenching transition from slavery to freedom to segregation.

As the nineteenth century progressed, the three families viewed the color line from different vantage points. The Gibsons regarded themselves as white with little sense that they could be anything else. The Spencers had a foot on each side of the line. And the Walls cultivated a strong black identity. Their migration stories speak to the development of American ideas about race. Crossing the color line provided occasions for articulating what it meant to be black and what it meant to be white. Before making the journey, many people spent their days insisting that they were black despite appearances to the contrary. After crossing over, they asserted themselves as white so their new status would go unquestioned. They continued to do so even as—or precisely because—memories of an ambiguous racial past had a tendency to linger. Americans have felt compelled to talk and write about race—and act on their beliefs—in part because its meaning has been so mutable. Racial migration was not just the province of the small group of people of African descent who could make the physical claim to be white. It touched the lives of men and women and entire communities who made every effort to epitomize what black and white were supposed to be.

With time the families gained distance from their roots, but they did not escape the nation’s collective belief in a line separating black from white. The frontiers the families confronted were never just physical, and their stories draw a tight connection between the evolution of American society and the shifting dynamics of race. In the process, their stories reveal cruel ironies at the heart of American history. On the broadest level, they show the vexed connection between liberty and equality. The Revolution and the Civil War were crucibles of freedom, but they both forged new inequalities, as the palpable prospect of black emancipation yielded to insistent beliefs in the permanent inferiority of people of color. For African Americans, each advance toward full citizenship seemed to create more struggle, a new degree of racial hostility, and a persistently elusive goal.

On a more intimate level, the stories of the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls suggest a paradoxical relationship between tolerance and intolerance in American life. The conventional understanding of racial passing as masquerade does not begin to approach the broad range of individuals’ experiences as they migrated from black to white. They were not invariably forced to leave home and cover their tracks. There were entirely different ways of becoming white. Often Southern communities knew that certain of their members had ambiguous ancestry but still accepted them, even at times of great racial polarization and violence. These communities repeatedly displayed a wealth of humanity and pragmatism with respect to race, but they remained committed to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy. So did their newest members—for racial migrants, and for the communities who accepted them, one of the surest ways to deflect outside scrutiny was to hate black people. White Southerners were amply capable of being tolerant in their daily lives but chose intolerance as a guiding ideology.

This defining contradiction of American life illuminates how Southerners integrated codes of racial conduct into their daily lives. Their attitudes and actions compel us to consider race in a new light. Race is fundamentally a series of rules with different—and sometimes competing—sources of authority. Some of these rules are formally enacted by legislatures. Others are devised by judges or determined by jury verdicts. Many more are developed informally over the course of each day. African American history is infused with the dual knowledge that the Constitution and the courts were both a pathway and an impediment to freedom and equality—justice could be blind, but legal processes and decision making often reinforced society’s pervasive unfairness. Throughout American history, formal and informal rules have insinuated themselves into the way people thought about, acted on, and experienced race. The existence of this legal consciousness does not simply mean that people knew what the law was and followed or broke it accordingly. Rather, individuals and communities have always played an active role in interpreting these rules for themselves and pushing hard against opposing interpretations.

The law’s language could be confident with respect to race, but reality was more complex. A statute might draw a “bright line”—defining, as many state legislatures eventually did, anyone with any African ancestry as black. In practice, however, such laws were never crystal clear. Enforcing a color line to its logical extreme was impossible—it would classify as black people who by all appearances were white. In most of the South there were no reliable birth records until the twentieth century. Drawing the line with the strictness that slavery, segregation, and white supremacy seemed to demand would have left very few people free of the fear that someone or some agency of the state could attempt to reclassify them. As a result, individuals and communities drew lines for themselves and for their neighbors in ways that suited them best, often allowing racially ambiguous people to become white.

While racial line-drawing was mostly local and informal, dozens of disputes found their way into court. Interpreting the statutory definitions of the color line, judges often showed independence from the unforgiving politics of racial purity. Courts repeatedly classified people as white even when there was ample evidence that they had black ancestry. For example, when the governing law mandated that one-eighth African ancestry made a person legally black, some courts required that a great-grandparent be “a negro of pure African blood”—a formalism that was almost impossible to satisfy with the evidence available in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What mattered to these courts was whether the people at issue had been accepted by their communities as white.

Impossible standards of proof and a host of other rules allowed courts to defer to a community’s judgment. They reflected the courts’ fundamental conservatism, a tendency to preserve existing social relationships and discourage overzealous policing of the color line. Such rulings allowed the color line to remain porous and at the same time kept people who were living as white secure in their racial status. In fact, white Southerners were secure enough that they could support racial politics and policies that grew increasingly extreme as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth— politics and policies that might have had a natural stopping point if they had adversely affected established members of white communities. Judicial tolerance of racial ambiguity existed alongside and even enabled an insistence on absolute racial purity and the belief that blacks carried inferiority in their blood.

Regardless of what courts decided, trials provided occasions for public airings of community gossip that had otherwise never risen above a whisper. Neighbors had to testify that they knew or suspected that families were part black, and local juries had to weigh the evidence and reach verdicts. In effect, the legal process itself had the potential to accomplish what judges were reluctant to do—reclassify whites as black. But individuals and communities listened to trial testimony and understood jury verdicts in the same way that they thought about statutes. They interpreted the evidence for themselves, contested what they did not agree with, and reached accommodations that could seem far afield from the language of a judicial mandate. Damaging testimony and unfavorable verdicts did not make the color line any more concrete. After all, the people who were held to be black were the same as they had been before their trials. They were still light enough to become white and remained able to do so. After a trial, racial knowledge that had been uttered aloud for the world to hear could once again become a matter of winks and nods and stories purposely forgotten.

As the lives of the Gibson, Spencer, and Wall families unfold over the course of the book, they show that race is not just a set of rules. It is also a set of stories that people have told themselves and one another over and over again. Some are rooted in day-to-day living and hard-won experience, while others derive from fear and fantasy, hope and despair. Some of these stories are built into more formal legal rules. Others attempt to work around legal enactments and decisions. Some gain the authority of law over time.

The Invisible Line proceeds with the conviction that we cannot understand the tragic ironies of race in American history without paying sustained attention to individual stories. If it were possible to catalog everyone who had ever migrated from black to white, the aggregate picture might demolish the idea that the races are separate and distinct and that the line between black and white has been impregnable. But it would fail to grasp the ultimate significance of becoming white: what such migrations meant to the men and women who made the journey, the communities they left behind, and the communities they joined; how people perceived an invisible line that was repeatedly crossed; and how, living with such ambiguity, they continued to believe in racial difference and order their worlds around it. The histories of the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls help make sense of liberty and equality, tolerance and intolerance, and race and racism in the United States. And they provide a new set of stories for Americans to tell, retell, and understand as their own.