Finding Grace: Two Sisters and the Search for Meaning Beyond the Color Line

Finding Grace: Two Sisters and the Search for Meaning Beyond the Color Line by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780743200530.

In her memoir, The Sweeter the Juice, Shirlee Taylor Haizlip asked us to redefine our concepts of race and family by examining her biracial heritage - how different gradations of dark and light skin led to a split in her mothers nuclear family, and how various relatives have been reunited many years later, some of them previously unaware of their layered racial makeup. In this continuation of her story, Haizlip pushes further into the terrain of family, race, and racial passing. Just over ten years ago, Haizlips African American mother was reunited with her sister, who had spent her whole life passing for white; both women were in their eighties and had not seen or heard anything about each other since early childhood. Now Haizlip answers the many questions that linger from the previous book: What happened between these long-separated sisters after their reunion? What did they learn about each other, and about themselves? Is it possible to heal the wounds caused by such a rift? Haizlip contrasts her mothers fulfilling adult life with her aunts solitary white existence. They lived on opposite sides of the race line, but both women, says Haizlip, were plagued by "Americas twin demons: a paranoia about purity and an anxiety about authenticity." These women and other members of the authors extended family come to life in these pages, turning this astute cultural investigation into a highly personal narrative. We learn how Haizlips mothers abandonment by members of her immediate family affected her daily life; we learn about the lives of relatives who left her behind, and of the members of succeeding generations who knew of the rift, and of those who did not. After The Sweeter the Juice, Haizlip was flooded by letters in which people shared similar family stories of biracial heritage, passing, and the eventual revelation of an extended racial makeup. She includes some of these letters here, affirming that her own seemingly unusual tale is actually a very familiar, very American story: of the tumultuous, complicated interactions between black and white communities and individuals - interactions marked by fear and distrust, but also by camaraderie, ardor, and love.