Gail Lukasik’s mother had a secret. She was “passing” as White.
Lukasik discovered her mom’s truth after years of questioning some of her behaviors and actions.
As she grew up, Lukasik began to take notice of her mother’s unusual habit of applying light foundation on her face at night, and always wearing a wide-brimmed hat and gloves in the sun—supposedly to help her maintain a lighter, more white complexion.
Lukasik says her mother explained it by telling her, “you never know when you might get sick in the middle of the night and have to go to the hospital. If you look your best, you get better treatment.”
Lukasik’s mom, Alvera Frederic, married her husband Harold Kalina in 1944 after World War II. The couple settled in a working class neighborhood in Ohio. In 1946, Lukasik was born.
Lukasik says her mother seemed to have a selective memory about her father (Lukasik’s grandfather), Azemar Frederic. Lukasik never met him, and never saw any photos of him or anyone else from his side of the family.
In 1995, Lukasik decided to search for her grandfather Azemar. Combing through microfilm, she found an Azemar Frederic in the 1900 Louisiana Census Record with the letter “B” next to his name—which stood for Black.
Author Gail Lukasik’s book blends social history and personal narratives, delving into the psychological trauma of uncovering family secrets and the difficult, sometimes disappointing quest to find a biological parent or parents.
Author Gail Lukasik with her mother Alvera Frederic Kalina.
At first, “I didn’t know what to think,” Lukasik says.
The 1900 Louisiana Census Records designated Azemar and the entire Frederic family as Black, but “technically he was mixed race,” Lukasik says. In the South, during the Jim Crow era, one drop of Black blood made you Black, she explains.
Lukasik then reached out to the state of Louisiana, pretending to be her mother, and claiming that she’d lost her birth certificate. When she received the certificate, it had three letters in parentheses next to her mother’s name: “COL.”
For Colored.
“It confirmed what I already suspected,” Lukasik says. “That my mother was mixed race.”
However, to be absolutely certain of what “COL” meant, Lukasik sent a letter to Louisiana officials and asked them to define it. They answered, “The use of the term “colored” has been ambiguous over time. However, it has become more closely associated with the Black race.”
Lukasik says that when she told her mother that she’d obtained her birth certificate, at first she was indignant. She says her mother told her, “I don’t know what birth certificate you have, but mine says I’m White.’”
Lukasik says she told her mother she had other documents, besides her birth certificate, that she could also show her.
“She became very quiet,” Lukasik says.
Her mother finally admitted the truth.
“She looked at me and she said, ‘You have to promise me you will never tell anyone until after I die,’” Lukasik says. “And then she said, ‘Because how will I hold my head up with my friends if they know?’”
Lukasik says she felt confused.
“My mother had raised my brother and me to be tolerant of all races and ethnicities,” Lukasik says.
“Although I didn’t totally understand why,” she continues, “I did keep her secret.” Even from her brother, her only sibling.
Lukasik says her mother spent her entire adult life pretending to be White, estranging herself from her “non-passing” family members; and hiding her racial identity from her husband Harold, Lukasik’s father.
Author Gail Lukasik’s parents Harold and Alvera Frederic Kalina on their wedding day in October 1944.
“I don’t believe my father ever knew that she was [trying to pass as White],” Lukasik says. “He never questioned her odd habits. He accepted them.”
Alvera died in 2014, 18 years after Harold died in 1996. Lukasik says no one else ever suspected her mother was pretending to be White.
In 2017, three years after her mother died, Lukasik wrote White Like Her: My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing. The book garnered media praise and the attention of others with similar experiences.
Lukasik says she originally continued to identify as White with Black heritage despite learning her mother’s racial identity. But now, she identifies as mixed-race.
She explains, “My choice of a mixed-race identity is my truth—not the truth of how others—whether White or Black or mixed race—see me, or how they think I should identify based on their own racial beliefs.”
And now, Lukasik has written a follow-up, What They Never Told Us: True Stories of Family Secrets and Hidden Identities Revealed. Her new book tells the stories of other ordinary people who’ve discovered life-changing family secrets—secrets that have prompted two fundamental questions: “Who are we?” and “What exactly is family?”
The book blends social history and personal narratives, delving into the psychological trauma of uncovering family secrets and the difficult, sometimes disappointing quest to find a biological parent or parents. The book also explores pre- and post-WWII attitudes toward infertility, adoption, donor conception, race and racial passing, and unmarried pregnant women.
The Reporters Inc. recently chatted with Lukasik for a Q&A. (It’s been edited for length and clarity.)
After writing What They Never Told Us, have your thoughts about your mother and her own story with racial passing changed?
Tracing my mother’s paternal family back through time to my 18th century enslaved ancestors, and noting the racial designations that defined my people, gave me a profound insight into race in America from enslavement to present day.
I’m often asked if I was angry with my mother for not telling me that she was passing as White. I was never angry, only sad, for several reasons. I saw the history played out through racism, how these racial designations robbed them of opportunities and human dignity.
So, when my mother decided to create more opportunities for herself and her children, how could I be mad? I was only sad that after I kept her secret, she refused to talk to me about her authentic self. A lost opportunity for true intimacy in our relationship.
Why did she refuse to talk about it after you confronted her?
I wish I knew.
How did your own personal experience inspire you to write What They Never Told Us?
After the publication of my first book, I received an avalanche of emails from around the world—Europe, Australia, South Africa, and Canada, to name a few. Many people wrote to me because they wanted to share their own family secrets.
Although I was a stranger, because they viewed me as a kindred spirit, they felt they could trust me and that I would understand. Having gone public with my mother’s story I was suddenly a part of a growing community of people who have discovered a family secret.
Over the next several years the emails continued to arrive. Often, they began with, “I haven’t told anybody about this…” It became obvious to me that these stories of people who have discovered that they are not quite who they thought they were needed to be heard.
How did you find the people/families you wrote about in your book?
Initially, I reached out to Kara Rubinstein Deyerin, Founder and CEO of Right to Know, an organization that empowers individuals and families impacted by unexpected familial discoveries or Misattributed Parentage Experience (MPE).
I’d learned of Kara and her organization from a genealogy geneticist who asked for my permission to use a quote from White Like Her for her website. The quote was: “We all think we know who we are. We all believe what our parents tell us about our families. Sometimes what they don’t tell us is the real story.”
Little did I know that the quote would be emblematic of the stories in What They Never Told Us.
Kara put me in touch with people who’d made an unexpected familial discovery, often through a commercial DNA test—though not always. Sometimes the individual found out during an emotional outburst from a family member.
One such person, who I call Robin in my book, learned a secret from her mother during an argument when her mom snapped at her, “I don’t know why I bothered to go through all that trouble to be artificially inseminated to have you!”
Robin told me, “That shut me up.
Additionally, the people who were referred to me then told me about other MPEs.
Only one person, who I call Jane in my book, contacted me directly. She messaged me through Facebook. Her opening statement stopped me in my tracks: “This is my sister who decided one day with her husband to be White.”
Below her message was a blurry photo of Jane, her sister, and their children.
The story of “Jane” (left) and her sister (right) are detailed in Author Gail Lukasik’s book. Jane says her sister decided to identify as White even though the family is of mixed race.
Jane’s story is one of the most heartbreaking in the book. It’s also one of the stories that I really connected with. By making the momentous and life-changing decision to pass as White, Jane’s sister and her husband essentially decided to erase their actual mixed-race identity. (Jane identifies as Black and New Orleans Creole.)
After her sister decided to identify as White, Jane never saw her again until their mother was dying in the hospital. Even more shocking, the two sisters lived only 20 minutes apart. Their children never saw each other again, and her sister’s children believe they’re White as well.
The irony is that Jane’s sister’s husband ultimately left her with six kids—to marry a “real” White woman.
Jane’s story allowed me to understand more fully what happens to the family left behind by the “passer.”
In this excerpt from the book, Lukasik details part of her interview with Jane:
“At the very end of my mother’s life I saw my sister once at the hospital and I told her off.”
[Jane] laughs nervously and looks down, clearly distressed.
“I shouldn’t have done that. But I told her off. I said to her, ‘You know, you shouldn’t have done what you did. That’s wrong. You know, being White is not better than being Black. You shouldn’t have been ashamed of who you are. And giving up your family.’”
“What did she say to you?” I ask, understanding how grief overtakes you.
“Nothing.”
She shakes her head with regret.
“When my mom finally passed away, my sister sat by my mom’s bed in the hospital and looked at her. I guess she was crying. Then she just left and didn’t say anything. Afterwards she came to the church with two of her children, went to the graveyard, and then they went home. I never saw her again. I mean it’s so sad.”
“What happened to your sister?” I ask. I need to know how the story ends.
“She died. I wasn’t even told. My cousin called me from Texas and asked if I’d seen the paper. When I said no, she told me to sit down. Then she told me my sister had died.
“They didn’t put any of our names in the paper. They didn’t use her maiden name. It just said mother of six children, grandmother of three. Nothing about us. Loving daughter of, you know. The obituary was in the paper two weeks after she was buried. They made sure we couldn’t go to the funeral.”
“What are you feeling toward your sister now?” I ask.
“I wish we could do it all over again. I wish I could tell her. Sometimes I feel bad that I never talked to her and tried to find out why she wouldn’t come back to us, to the family when her husband left her.”
Were there any personal narratives in your book that stood out to you?
Brad Ewell, a Texas cop, had a DNA surprise that is the stuff of Hollywood movies. At 48, not only did he learn that he was adopted, but that his biological father was serving a life sentence in Angola Prison in Louisiana for murder.
When he confronted his adoptive dad about why he wasn’t told, his dad said that they’d been trying to find a way to tell him.
Brad scoffed at his dad’s explanation. “They’ve been trying to tell me for 48 years. That was the new lie.”
He believes they would have taken the secret to their graves.
At first, Brad wasn’t going to contact his biological father, but eventually he did. He explained that he was struggling with his identity and needed to lay eyes on someone who was directly responsible for his existence.
The upshot of Brad and his father Jimmie Ray Graves’s burgeoning relationship was as surprising as it was ironic. Brad decided to fight for Jimmie’s release. Jimmie had been locked up for 50 years for murder and was one of the longest-serving prisoners in Angola.
Brad admitted that he wouldn’t have done it if Jimmie wasn’t his biological father. But it wasn’t just that. He thought Jimmie had gotten an unfair deal. His original sentence was life with the possibility of parole. Without Jimmie’s knowledge, Brad says the state of Louisiana changed his sentence to life without the possibility of parole.
Although Brad acknowledges that his biological father was a man who very much needed to be imprisoned for what he did, he doesn’t believe he’s the same man any longer. On behalf of his biological father, Brad went before the Louisiana House and Senate committees and pleaded for his release—and succeeded.
Brad Ewell with his biological father, Jimmie Graves, on the steps of the Amon Carter Art Museum in Fort Worth Texas, December 2022. “Brad took him to see things he hadn’t had the opportunity to see,” Lukasik writes.
In 2022, Jimmie Graves was given his freedom. He’s now residing in Texas, not far from where Brad and his family live.
Shortly before Brad’s adoptive father died, he told Brad that he was glad he had gotten to meet his natural father. That acceptance was important to Brad.
Unfortunately, Brad also learned that his biological mother (who had given him up for adoption) was deceased, but that he had two biological half-siblings. (His mother later remarried.)
In this excerpt from the book, Lukasik explains how Brad learned just how much his biological mother mourned giving him up for adoption:
From Brad’s maternal aunt, he learned that she was the only [biological] family member who knew of his existence. At the time of his birth mother’s pregnancy, she was living with her sister [Brad’s biological aunt]. Fearing retribution from her father directed at Brad’s biological father [Jimmie Graves], his birth mother hid her pregnancy from her parents.
But her secrecy didn’t stop there. After she married, she never told her husband of 30 years or her two children that she’d had another child.
To my surprise, Brad says, “The only person’s decision-making I never questioned in this whole thing was my bio mom giving me up for adoption.”
It’s not what I expected to hear. In Brad’s mind his birth mother giving him up made sense to him. But his adoptive parents’ secret-keeping didn’t.
“I don’t see any way out of this that worked well for her,” Brad says of his birth mother.
At 18, with no husband and no means of support, his biological mom relinquished him two days after he was born. It wasn’t until he talked to his half-sister…did he fully understand how his relinquishment affected his birth mom.
Though she never told anyone about him, she never forgot him.
“My (half) sister’s father was in the military. And the Fourth of July was a big deal in their family. But every Fourth my birth mom would turn into a recluse. She wouldn’t go out for a week. She told her family, “You all go camping. Do what you want to do. I just need a little time.’”
“You see, my birthday is July 8th,” Brad explains. “She did this every year. She mourned me until the day she died.”
Brad’s biological mom died in 2002 at 49, 19 years before his discovery.
“My aunt said the day after I was born she left the hospital, and I left the hospital. I was just not spoken of again…She took a lot of guilt to her grave,” Brad says.
While transcribing Brad’s interview, I stopped the video and jotted a note to myself, which shows how moved I was by his story: “I’m finding it hard listening to his story again, the way people’s lives spin out, and the collateral damage it causes.”
Were there any other surprising facts you learned about adoption?
By the mid-20th century, most adoptions in the U.S. were closed and the records sealed to protect all parties involved, especially the child from being labeled a “bastard.” In certain states, new birth certificates were issued, which listed the adoptive parents as the birth parents—another barrier preventing the adoptee from finding his or her birth parents.
Verda Byrd, one of the people featured in the book, was issued a birth certificate that listed her adoptive parents—who were Black—as her birth parents. Though she knew she was adopted, she never questioned that she was Black.
After her adoptive mother’s death, Verda found among her adoptive mother’s records, a birth certificate for a Jeanette Beagle. She had no idea who Jeanette Beagle was. After hiring a researcher, she discovered that Jeanette Beagle was her birth name, and even more surprising—that her birth parents were White.
Her shock was so extreme that she considered shredding the papers. But because she considers adoption a major influence in one’s life, she didn’t shred them.
Referring sarcastically to her two birth certificates, Verda said, “I’ve yet to understand how two women can carry the same baby for nine months.”
Verda refused to share her DNA tests with me. When I pressed her about how she identifies, she said, “Mondays and Tuesdays are my White days. The rest of the days of the week, and the rest of my life have been Black.”
I was aware that unmarried pregnant women were shunned during this time period and many were coerced to relinquish their child. But I had no idea of the number of babies that were relinquished between the late 1940s to approximately 1972, a period known as the “The Baby Scoop Era.”
Approximately 4 million mothers in the U.S. surrendered newborn babies to adoption, 2 million during the 1960s alone. Many of these relinquished children would never know they were adopted.
Has writing this book changed your perspective on “identity”?
I don’t know if it changed my perspective on identity as much as deepened it. Personally, I never thought about my identity until I discovered that my mother was passing as White. Having to re-see my identity and redefine myself racially, I had a new insight into what constitutes our identities.
From my research, I understood that many factors shape who we are: genetics, upbringing, culture, social mores, and whether we want to acknowledge it or not—skin color.
One of the factors contributing to identity that was missing for some people in the book was genetic mirroring, which is being able to see yourself in your family that surrounds you because of your shared DNA, providing a basis of familiarity to your cultural, racial and ethnic roots.
Author Gail Lukasik
How did public opinion after your first book, White like Her: My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing, was published influence your own identity?
After White Like Her, I was repeatedly asked how I identified racially now that I knew my racial heritage.
Initially I decided to identify as a White woman with Black ancestors. My reasoning was I looked White; I’d never experienced racism and thus, what right did I have to claim a Black identity?
However, when I gave that answer during a national TV interview, 10 days later a Black woman made a post saying that Black people shouldn’t read my book, because I wasn’t properly honoring my Black ancestors.
If she had read the book, she would have seen that I did honor them. But her harsh comment made me rethink my answer regarding my racial identity. Also, it became clear to me that no matter what answer I gave, someone would be unhappy with me.
It took me several years before I was able to comfortably redefine my racial identity. The catalyst was my appearance on a podcast when the host defined me as a “racial ambassador,” and that I was “explaining Blackness to White people, opening a dialogue where they can talk to you about Blackness.” She said to me, “You’re an in-between person.”
Suddenly all the pieces of my racial identity came together.
I decided that I would no longer identify as a White woman with Black ancestry. Based on my DNA (7-9 percent African, 2 percent Native American), my ancestors’ history of subjugation, my mother’s choice to pass as White, and my public platform, I decided that mixed race is the identity that best defines me.
However, just recently, someone took me to task for identifying as mixed race, berating me because I looked White and should identify as such, inferring that I shouldn’t be ashamed of being White. Obviously, she had her own agenda. And she failed to understand that I was embracing my entire racial identity.
In the new book, you write that you were trying to answer two fundamental questions; “Who are we?” and “What exactly is family?” Did you find answers to these questions?
Not definitively. Our identities are an amalgam of the culture and values of our parents and society, and possibly our genetic roots.
The stories in What They Never Told Us demonstrate the difficulty in defining family.
Everyone I interviewed who discovered that one or both of their parents weren’t their biological parent or parents really struggled with integrating their genetic roots into the notion of family. It’s impossible to ignore your genetic roots, whether you develop a relationship with your genetic family or not.
Click here for more information about Gail Lukasik. What They Never Told Us: True Stories of Family Secrets and Hidden Identities Revealed is available for purchase on Amazon, among other retailers.
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