The Invisible Line (3 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

 

 

 

 

 

G
IDEON GIBSON RODE ALONE through the perpetual twilight of the woods on a Sunday. In the thick forests of the South Carolina backcountry, light hit the ground scattered and split, filtered through leaves and pine needles as through a cathedral's stained glass. Sunbeams swirled with dust and gnats in the torpid August air. When Gibson reached his destination, one man was waiting for him, as agreed. In the open they would have taken shots at each other. But here they could meet quietly and alone, as equals and gentlemen.
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The shadows obscured profound differences between the men. At age fifty-five, George Gabriel Powell was ten years Gibson's elder, one of the most powerful figures in the colony. He held a seat in the colonial Assembly and owned a sprawling plantation called Weymouth at the mouth of the Great Pee Dee River above Georgetown. King George III had given him command of the Pee Dee Militia, which provided protection from Indians and from the threat of rebellion by slaves, who far outnumbered free colonists along the coast. Gideon Gibson, by contrast, was arguably the most dangerous man in South Carolina. He was a leader of a group of backcountry farmers—they called themselves “Regulators”—who in the name of law and order had repudiated the authority of Assembly and Crown. In addition to his treason and violence, what made Gibson a particular menace was the color of his skin—too dark to be white.
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For Powell, just meeting Gibson face-to-face was a significant feat. In July 1768 news of Gibson's treachery had hit the distant capital, then called Charlestown, like an inland hurricane. Deluged with accounts of an army of “outcast Mullatoes, Mustee, free Negroes, all Horse-Thieves, &c.,” the Assembly tasked George Gabriel Powell with saving South Carolina from Gideon Gibson. His hundred-mile trek from Charlestown was a journey between worlds. There were no roads in the backcountry. Travelers could wander for days through thicket and forest and “deep miry Swamp,” along barely marked, overgrown, tick-infested paths. Although it had been settled for nearly forty years, the area was still a frontier, sparsely populated and with almost no political representation. Far from authority and convention, many backcountry colonists appeared utterly alien to recent arrivals from England. An Anglican minister riding circuit in the 1760s described men and women in “dirty smoaky Cabbin[s]” who walked around barefoot and “continually drunk,” “swopp[ed] their Wives as Cattel,” and ate “[n]o Eggs, Butter, Flour, Milk, or anything, but fat rusty Bacon, and fair Water, with Indian Corn Bread” alongside “exceedingly filthy, and most execrable” meats unknown in Europe. “They delight in their present low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish Life, and seem not desirous of changing it,” the minister reported. “How would the Polite People of London stare.”
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