Wes, Phyllis, and race in America

A personal story

If this one is a bit personal, I hope you’ll bear with me. This is a true story about two people. Wes and his sister Phyllis. Wes lived in Marblehead Massachusetts - a beautiful old seafaring community north of Boston. Phyllis lives in California. They were raised in the tiny, quaint town of ‘The Village of Arden’ Delaware.  A quarter of a square mile in area with a current population of 435.

Wes and Phyllis are Black. Well, by ethnicity, if not by skin tone. Both parents were Black as well. But again by ethnicity, not skin tone. The Dad was dark with typical Black American features. Mom was white. Almost alabaster white. White skin. White features. Long, soft, dark, flowing ‘White’ hair. All a result of recessive slave owner genes from back when sexual assault was as common as three squares a day is today. If it was good for Thomas Jefferson it was good for every slave owner.

Wes and Phyllis got what their parents passed on to them. Wes looked like his Dad - tall, dark, and handsome. Phyllis was beautiful and took after the Mom. If the Mom looked White, Phyllis looked like a White runway model.

Sometime after college, Phyllis, the older of the two siblings, moved to CA and became a real estate agent. Two years later Wes got his undergraduate degree and then moved to Boston to get his law degree from Boston University. He went to work for a legal aid society in Cambridge; then the  Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination; the Environmental Protection Agency; and finally settled into a long career as a nationally prominent environmental lawyer.

Phyllis was neither the first nor the last Black American to ‘pass’. Most humans take steps to make life easier and sometimes those steps hurt others. It’s undeniably easier to be White in America than Black. She’d visit her parents occasionally and she allowed her White-looking Mom to visit her in California. But not her Dad. And not Wes. Neither her husband nor her step kids ever met their step-mom’s father or brother or even saw a picture of them. I’ve wondered what pain Phyllis suffered growing up in a White, former slave-owning state with her brother’s presence giving away her ethnicity. And I can kinda sorta relate. My older brother didn’t look Black. I do. He made sure to keep his distance from me at school and was the first person ever to hurl a racial epithet my way.  

Wes was as easy-going a person as you’d ever meet. He could and often did make an entire room of people split their sides with his dry wit while himself never cracking a smile. Kinda the old Johnny Carson technique - only funnier. It was impossible to rattle Wes and it was hard to find him without a look of bemused glee. If you were laughing, Wes was happy. And if you were around Wes, you were laughing. Whatever the pain, Wes was blessed with an ability to laugh it off. But his sister’s deep, un-loving insult hurt and angered him. He eventually shut her out of his life.

Wes was my cousin - his Mom was my Mom’s sister - and although we were both horrible at staying in touch - me in the wilds of Colorado; Wes in the wealthy sophisticates of Boston’s North Shore - we both loved each other. Wes died last year at a relatively young and healthy seventy-eight while I was enroute to Florida with a buddy to kayak the Everglades. But here’s the real kicker: A lot of people have a fear of looking at their own death. I’m guessing that Wes was one of those people because Wes, an attorney, died intestate. He had an estate valued at well over a million dollars, no will, no spouse, and one sibling. Phyllis.

The laws of intestate succession being what they are, Phyllis inherited his estate. Lock, stock, bonds, cash, and barrel. Being the passively aggressive mean and selfish sort that she was, Phyllis refused to share even a memento with people who, unlike Phyllis,  loved Wes. Not even a unique personalized license plate mimicking Steve Martin’s famous, “EXCUUSE ME”! She just threw it in the trash rather than give it to the loving friend who asked for it. Phyllis wrote the obituary herself but purposely included no picture of Wes lest her White friends 3,000 miles away come across it.

I haven’t spoken with Phyllis in decades. But clearly somewhere along the way race had played a painful role in her life. After Wes died and made her wealthy I dropped her a note telling her about The Civil Conversations Project - an organization conceived to fight the monster that had hurt her and her family. I suggested that she might make a meaningful donation that Wes would have gladly given. I got what I expected from Phyllis. Silence.

Phyllis is 80, so in a year or two Wes’ estate will end up in the hands of people who have no idea who he was or what a kind and gentle man he was. White people.

I think about Wes and Phyllis pretty frequently and I wonder what pain race caused Phyllis and molded her into the person she became. And I think about how deeply race slices into the soul of America. America’s Thing With Race…

I try to do a couple of things here in this space all under the heading, Make America A Better Place. I hope to help Americans understand that although as a country we’re pretty far from the founding ideals that we find in the Declaration of Independence as well as the Preamble to the Constitution - we can still get there. I hope to help Americans understand how harmful America’s Race Thing is to all of us…how it’s the foundation that so much American ill will is built on. How overpowering it is. I liken it to a wet, moldy wool blanket that covers the entire country. Heavy, uncomfortable, and smelly, it even restricts our movements. But after hundreds of years, we’re so completely used to it that we  don’t notice it anymore.  Many folks even deny the blanket exists….that some people are using its phony existence as an excuse to not have grasped that American brass ring. I try to pass on information and education so that you can have less ignorant and more productive conversations that serve to move the race relations needle forward.