As a boy, I never knew where my mother was from—where she was born, who her parents were. When I asked she’d say, “God made me.” When I asked if she was white, she’d say, “I’m light-skinned,” and change the subject. She raised twelve black children and sent us all to college and in most cases graduate school. Her children became doctors, professors, chemists, teachers—yet none of us even knew her maiden name until we were grown. It took me fourteen years to unearth her remarkable story—the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, she married a black man in 1942—and she revealed it more as a favor
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