Writing Memoir: In Conversation with E. Dolores Johnson

by Elizabeth Solar

Note: This is the second of a three-part interview with E. Dolores Johnson’s author of ‘Say I’m Dead’ a multi-generational memoir about growing up in a multiracial family after her black father and white mother fled Indiana’s severe anti-interracial marriage laws in the 1940’s. Her book was published this past June.  

AoR: Last week we spoke about race as it relates your book, and this moment in the United States. Let’s talk about the story itself. When did you know that you wanted to write this as memoir?

 EDJ: I began my writing attempts after I concluded my corporate career.  Having written so much material as an executive, I sat down and just wrote this in the same manner that I had always written.

AoR: How did that go?

EDJ: My work material, which is everything is due yesterday, so this got to be, you know, tight and not verbose. I gave it to a writing teacher who gave it back to me and said, ‘You know, what you have here is not a story. It's a business report. So, you need to learn how to write creative writing because you don't know anything about it.’

I initially took classes in Novel Writing, but I didn't want to exaggerate the characters in the way that fiction usually demands that you do. Because I wanted to tell the truth and I didn't want to offend my family and I switched to a memoir, because I thought that was the best way to tell the story.

AoR: Were there any relatives or other people close to you, perhaps your mother who discouraged you not to write the book?  Was there opposition to it?

 EDJ: Well, my mom and I talked about the material in this book for years, and she knew I was going to try to write it.  We had been over all the emotional ground in prior discussions when I start writing, but the one person who I was quite concerned about was someone I grew up with, [whose mother was ] in a club that my mom and some lady friends had started to call the ‘Clique Club’. That was a group of white women in Buffalo that were all married to black men. Most of the women were Italian, married to black jazz men,  and they were all Catholics. My mother met them by taking my oldest brother to enroll in Catholic school where she ran into another white woman with a brown child.

 AoR: What ejection did that friend’s family have?

 EDJ:  One of the members of that club lead a double life. She was married to a black man, but she told her family back in Ohio that she had a very hectic job in Buffalo.  She, you know, needed to stay in Buffalo, but she would come home for visits, and she often went back to Ohio for Easter and birthday parties and Fourth of July cookouts and the like. Always hiding the fact that she had a black husband and three black children.

I went and talked to that family having included their story in the book because I wanted to show the extremes that people had to go to in order to marry across the race line.

 The daughter of that family who's my age was very reluctant. And she didn't really want that story told, but she had two older brothers who said that they thought I should write it. And they voted…The brothers prevailed. So that story went in.

AoR: Now that the book’s been published, what is that family’s reaction?

EDJ: … [the daughter of] ­ that woman has called me and praise the book to high heaven and said she's so glad that I wrote it. So, ­­ she was not offended, even though at first it was touch and go. And this woman's mother went to the grave with that secret.

AoR: Your mother’s friend never told her white family about her husband and children?

 EDJ: When she became ill at the end of her life, she was living in her daughter's house. And her people in Ohio were worried about her and wanted her to move home, so they could take care of her. She invented this story that she was going to get a caretaker to live in with her. That was her own daughter in her own house, who had to answer the phone as if she was a caretaker, passing information back and forth. And this woman called her three kids together, and she said, ‘I don't have long left. What I want you to do, these are my final wishes, is send my body back to Ohio and let me be buried with my white family. In my maiden name, and you are not to come to the funeral, I don't want the secret exposed.’ And then she took it [the secret of her family] to the grave.

AoR: That takes my breath away. It must have been so emotionally painful. As you continued to investigate your family’s background, what type of emotions came up for you?  

 EDJ: I cried a lot over the keyboard. I'll confess that upfront, because even though I had come to terms with much of what happened in my family, there's layers to that. And when you're writing you want to channel other people's feelings and actions, try to understand them and portray them truthfully, empathetically.

You have to dig, so very deep. You really have to isolate, to write that deeply. And so there was a lot of clenching in my stomach. There were times when I was angry times, and I had to come to terms with forgiveness. This is a very emotional ride. 

AoR:  We all tell stories about our lives, whether they are published or not.  And we tell those stories from our own point of view. Sometimes depending on where we are in life, that often changes how we frame things.  You had two brothers. If they had the chance, how do you think either one of them would have written this memoir or told the story?

 EDJ:  I had two older brothers, David and Charles Nathan, who were quite different. I would explain their personalities as fight versus flight. David was a black militant. He wore dashikis all the time. He chaired the Juneteenth festival decades ago, [before it was more widely recognized by the mainstream] and he was very outspoken.  He spent his life in service to inner city kids as a sixth- grade teacher. And he cared about those children deeply. And so, you know, he was a person who would stand up and speak about racism, and American history and really invest in the success of inner-city children. David would have probably written a different memoir, which was the glowing history of inner city black people.

 Whereas my oldest brother, we suspected at times, passed for white.  He was the whitest- looking among us. He married a white woman. They lived on the white side of town. It wasn't that we didn't see him. But it seemed that he never volunteered his racial history.  When he died, the only black people at his funeral were my daughter and I, and a couple of other black people that I asked to come.  I don't think my oldest brother would have written anything, because he was a person who wanted to stay out of the fray.  As he told me, ‘I just want people to leave me alone.’

AoR: So, you all had very different experiences. Sounds on par with what happens in most families. Let’s shift to your research. And this will blow a lot of people’s minds, especially younger people. You didn't have a lot of information to work with to find your mother's family. Tell us how you tracked them down.

EDJ:  In my 30s, I actually had a light bulb go off that my mother was my white family all by herself. She had nobody else in her genealogy chart [that I drew up]. And that wasn't right. She had to be from somebody, somewhere. 

She had been missing for 36 years, [from her home state of Indiana] so I had no information to start looking for her family. [My mother] and my dad gave me enough information, and I took this class at a community college, which was on how to trace your family history. So, I took a week off from work and went to Indiana. And it was all shoe leather and paper and pencil work to try and find her family. I searched vital records. I searched city directories. I made phone calls to people in the county whose names are possible match. I read all the marriage licenses for 10 years to try and find my aunt and had nothing except my grandfather's death certificate. [to go by]

But it was the church that actually gave me the connection. I'd been trying to reach the parish where I know her family worshipped, thinking that there'd be birth and death and marriage and baptism records that might give me a lead and I couldn't find the priests. I couldn't get any information. I left numerous messages and as I was leaving Indianapolis with just that death certificate of my grandfather, and the assumption that [my] grandmother had also died because there was very poor record-keeping back in those days. I called the priest from the airport in a phone booth. [as I was leaving]. [He answered] and he said I found your aunt's marriage record.

[My aunt] was married here at the church. She had married a GI during World War Two in California. So, I'm thinking ‘how I am supposed to find somebody in California now?’ But I looked in the [telephone]directory.  That's when we had paper directories hanging off chains in phone booth. And there was the man's [her uncle’s] name. And that was the connection that helped me find that family.

AoR: So, [you successfully researched] without the benefit of the Internet, and ancestry.com and all these other electronic ways that we have to dig up information instantly. 

EDJ: After I had taken that [genealogy] course, and I had gotten enough information for my parents to know what I was looking for,  I went out [to Indiana], and it was in the course of that week that I actually made the connection to the priest and got the name of my aunt's husband.

AoR: An incredible odyssey, Dolores. It speaks volumes about your commitment to finding, and telling your story, not to mention your devotion to your mother.

Next week, we’ll cover what it’s like to publish that memoir in the midst of Covid. Till then, Dolores, thanks again for talking to Acts of Revision.