The Soul Sister Returns
Grace Halsell was a white woman working as a speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson, when she decided to leave her White House job and darkened her skin to live in segregated Mississippi and Harlem.
"In the late 1960s, I was working as a staff writer in the White House for President Johnson. Walking the corridors of power, I felt myself lucky: I had a high-prestige, high-paying job. But one day I overheard Zephyr White, an African-American woman working in the White House and LBJ's favorite cook, tell her travail driving to and from Texas. Once, when Johnson was a senator, he asked her to take two dogs along. "You have no idea," she told him, "what it is like for a Negro to try and get a decent hotel room--and you are asking me to take two dogs?"
Hearing that story, Grace wondered: what was it like to live as a Negro woman. Halsell, a former Texas and foreign correspondent for 12 southwestern newspapers, was a speechwriter for President Johnson when curiosity got the best of her.
"It was during the passage of historic Civil Rights legislation. I wanted to know first-hand what it was like living as a black," says Halsell.
When Grace told an African-American Washington lawyer that she planned to disguise herself as an African-American woman and go to the South, he warned: "You'll learn to hate your own people."
"I dismissed that possibility, but had reason to remember it time and again in the months that followed," recalls Halsell.
Leaving her White House job, she consulted with leading dermatologists at Yale and Howard universities. They told her about a medication, which, taken in conjunction with exposure of her body to intense tropical sun, would darken her skin. Lying on a Caribbean island, she noticed, day by day, a dramatic change in her color.
"One day I looked in a mirror and saw a 'black' woman looking back at me," says Halsell.
Grace chose to begin her venture in Harlem, believing that the ghetto would supply her with a quick and difficult baptism into the life and times of a black woman in this free and heralded society. Her past experiences, she felt, living in remote areas, sometimes a thousand miles removed from the nearest doctor or telephone armed her for the ghetto. But she was not prepared for the isolation, the separateness of Harlem.
"Let no one think apartheid was a South African monopoly. Legally, yes. But socially, spiritually, psychologically--no. The Berlin Wall was paper mache compared to the barriers that surrounding Harlem. Then I went south," says Halsell.
Grace had disguised herself as Hispanic, Indian, and as an indigent laborer. She had lived on a fishing junk in China, traveled down the Amazon and crossed the Andes. Nothing in all her travels over the past two decades, nothing in her experiences, prepared her for going to the South as a black woman.
"I wanted only to open my mind, my eyes, my pores to the dilemma of race in America, and to share those experiences without making claims to the discovery of fresh truths about ourselves. Nature can kill and maim but lacks the capacity for psychic malice, for scarring the mind and spirit, that humans have. The emotions I harbored belonged to two persons: a black woman and a white woman. I was cast in a twin, paradoxical role of oppressor and oppressed," says Halsell.
"I found all facilities and institutions totally segregated. I rode in the back of segregated buses, stayed in the homes of black families-who knew I was white, passing as black-and who helped me find jobs. Often I stood on a Jackson, Mississippi street corner, waiting for a white housewife who had hired me for the day through an agency. I found no job opportunities other than working as a maid for $5 a day."
Thirty-years ago when she was living in the ghetto, the people felt they were in a trap and that there was no hope, notes Grace. They fought against an enemy that is unseen and calls it, "the System." In the South, it was more man-to-man conflict. One knew the enemy--the Klansman, the racist, the oppressor, the murderer--by name.
"I could never go under cover like this again, because now I know what it cost me, psychologically, to bear for one moment in time what every black American bears all his life: discrimination, segregation, injustice," says Halsell. "My travels showed me how the colonial British lived on the laboring masses in India and Malaysia and Hong Kong; and how the colonial French lorded it over the Algerians and how the Spaniards used slaves to enable a handful of masters to live like monarchs. But the epoch of human degradation is ending. The slaves have found voices and are saying, 'Enough, enough.'"
Yes, Grace can see white people as "her" people, but the Washington lawyer was wrong.
"I can hate them only if I hate myself. At one time, I thought 'my people' were Koreans, another time Mexicans, and still another, Peruvians. I cannot escape the fact that I was born a Southern white. But nothing prevents me from feeling spiritually black--or brown, or yellow, or red for that matter. 'My people' abide in my heart and mind and that is the reality that all people must come to know and recognize. We in America, where our diversity, has made us strong, are still in a testing stage of our great democracy. Democracy assumes that all men and women are created equal, under the law. It assumes that no group--white or black, Christian, Muslim or Jew--should have preferential treatment."
Grace documented her experiences in the 1969 best seller, "Soul Sister." A 30th anniversary edition of the book was just released by Crossroads International Publishing. She has gone undercover like this several times, and some of her 11 other books include "Bessie Yellowhair," the story of her life on a Navajo reservation in Arizona; "The Illegals," based on her experiences among Mexicans who cross the U.S.-Mexico border without papers; and "In Their Shoes," a memoir.
Now, after more than three decades since Soul Sister was published, what has changed? What progress have we made in overcoming the legacy of slavery? Grace feels assured that if she now returned to re-live her Soul Sister experiences, she would not be arrested, as she was back in the 1960s, for stepping from a segregated black section of a bus station into a more commodious white section--asking to use a telephone. With darkened skin, she would be able to sit in "white" hotels; drink from fountains formerly designated for "whites only." And she knows that today, with darkened skin, were she to walk into a white church, the Christians of that church would not--as they did back then--call the police and have her arrested.
Today, on film clips, we see and hear the voices calling for change. We hear Martin Luther King and his "dream" and we remember Rosa Parks, and buy commemorative stamps of Malcolm X. And we remember the leadership of Lyndon Johnson, who reared in a southern atmosphere of racism and discrimination, moved beyond his heritage and prejudices to accomplish more for equal rights than any of our presidents since Abraham Lincoln.
Based largely on the changes that came as an aftermath of the struggles in the 1960s, African- Americans have made significant economic and political progress in the past 30 years. The Klu Klux Klan no longer operates with impunity, but we have a new generation of "white supremacists" fostering racial hatred and using affirmative action as their main target, says Halsell.
"The enemies of civil rights have organized a nationwide effort against affirmative action, redefined to mean racial preferences and quotas. In many parts of the country, there is less mixing among whites and blacks socially today than in the 1960s, when many top government officials enthusiastically embraced 'integration' with a certitude they were prescient and right, says Halsell. "While much has changed politically and economically for African-Americans, not much has advanced in social terms of integration. As we move into a new century, the tragedy and severity of our racial problems remain."
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Editors: You can reach Grace at 202-387-8219 or via e-mail at [email protected]. If you would like copies of her books, please contact Steve Infanti at [email protected] or 814-234-4419.
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