Quote of note:

White Americans are generally surprised when they encounter stories like this — of an African-American with a proud heritage who nevertheless decides to leave blackness behind. But just about every black family in the United States knows of a light-skinned person who decided to avoid the penalties associated with blackness by becoming white. Hundreds of thousands of these people set sail into whiteness — leaving behind black parents, siblings and children — and were never heard from again. The people who abandoned their families were described as "passed" — a euphemism for dead.

Though tragic, Lydia Connolly's passing makes perfect sense given that she was born in the 1880's, when national impulse toward marginalizing black people was gathering virulence with every passing day.

A Secret Father, a Black Literary Treasure and an Old Woman
By BRENT STAPLES

ladys Watt and Lydia Turnage Connolly had been friends for roughly 30 years — a decade of that as next-door neighbors in Greenwich, Conn. — by the time Mrs. Connolly died in 1984 at the venerable age of 99. Mrs. Connolly seemed to have no family; she relied on Mrs. Watt to take her grocery shopping and regularly ate Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners at her best friend's home.

"I never saw a single visitor to her house. Not one," Mrs. Watt told me recently, adding that her friend had been tight-lipped about her origins. When she alluded to her family at all, it was only to say that her father had been "a wonderful man."

Mrs. Watt thought that she knew her friend pretty well. She then stumbled upon a startling secret. Mrs. Connolly had once let the secret slip to strangers but, for most of her life, she had apparently seemed intent on carrying it to the grave.

Mrs. Connolly, who had straight dark hair and swarthy skin, explained her appearance throughout most of her life by describing herself as Portuguese. The disguise began to crumble as she moved into her 90's and became too ill to care for the straight black hair — which turned out to be a wig. When it slipped away, Mrs. Watt recalls, the hair beneath was revealed to be short and coarse to curly. Combined with the darkish skin she had attributed to a Portuguese heritage, it gave her an African-American appearance.

This finally made sense when Mrs. Watt received her friend's meager possessions. They included old photographs, showing Lydia posed with family members. There was also a leather-bound book handwritten by Wallace Turnage, her father. It contained his account of his life as a slave in Alabama.