My Mom’s Disappearance Was A Mystery. Then I Saw An Old Photo That Left Me Shaken.

I didn’t appreciate the depth of her defiance until I was in my mid-50s, when I did something that I had never done: I traveled to her childhood home in Baltimore.

On an overcast summer morning, I drove to Mill Hill, my mother’s childhood community. She lived on Wilkins Avenue, on a quintessential Baltimore block of gleaming marble steps, neat row houses and a still-stately St. Benedict Church, where my mom was confirmed. I parked my rental car and walked to the spot where my father had been assaulted and arrested for trying to date my mother over 50 years ago. I scanned the street to see white, Black and brown neighbors talking to one another from their front steps and hanging out together at a corner tavern.  

I was surprised by something other than the racial mix. When I looked at my smartphone’s app, I was stunned to discover that my father’s former home was only 4.1 miles away. I had no idea that my estranged white and Black relatives had lived so close to one another. Racial segregation was so entrenched when my parents met that their families might as well have lived in separate solar systems. Baltimore’s segregation wasn’t just racial; it was also ethnic. Jews, Italians and Poles kept to their neighborhoods. Outsiders, particularly those who had the “wrong” color, risked getting hurt walking into the wrong area.

As I stood in front of my mom’s childhood home, I imagined for the first time what it must have been like for her. The contemporary Wilkins Avenue landscape dissolved, and the circa early 1960s Wilkins Avenue appeared. I saw her — a thin, young white woman with a beehive hairdo — close the front door and walk toward a neighborhood to meet people her family and community had told her to hate.

I paused outside my car and shook my head in admiration, and confusion.

Damn, I thought. Why would she take such a risk?

I’m still not quite sure. Was my mother’s relationship with my father driven by youthful rebellion, the allure of a taboo relationship, or was it an early symptom of the illness that would engulf her? Or was it truly love? I learned through others that my parents remained close after she was institutionalized. My father routinely visited my mother and continued to take care of her even when his health began to fail late in his life. 

What I do know is that she did something that remains so important: She refused to accept the status quo. My mother was part of a vanguard of Black, brown and white people who would smash a taboo against interracial relationships that had been enshrined as law for centuries. They didn’t wait for the Supreme Court or politicians to tell them whom to love. I was born four years before the Loving decision. 

Like most big changes, it started small, with countless acts of invisible courage from everyday people. My mother’s decision to walk from Wilkins Avenue to my father’s house “sent forth a tiny ripple of hope.” That ripple fed into another, emboldening others to do the same. Those ripples eventually turned into a tsunami that gave us the Loving decision and a New America — one where a brown girl in a pink pantsuit could look at a biracial woman making a credible run for the White House or another brown woman at the White House today and think, “That could be me one day.” This was the same dynamic that gave us marriage equality. Everyday people acted first, coming out to their parents, friends and co-workers; the politicians and courts followed later. 

As I returned to my car and drove away from Wilkins Avenue, I smiled. I felt a warm sensation well up in my chest, and something else that I’d never felt before about my mom: pride. Pride that I was her son. She was no hopeless cause. She was more powerful than she realized. She, and others like her, helped make Usha Vance and Kamala Harris possible. 

The historian and activist Howard Zinn said there is a tendency among people “to think that what we see in the present moment will continue.” He said people often forget how often throughout history people have been astonished by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, and “by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.”

He said that if people only look at the worst in the past and present, it destroys their capacity to act. 

“And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future,” Zinn wrote. “The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

***

After Wilkins Avenue, my visits to my mom changed. I painted her fingernails. I asked her to sing “Que Sera Sera.” I asked her to show me some dance moves. And I laughed along with her as she did a little shimmy of her hips. I stopped dwelling on what I had lost; I became grateful for what remained. My wife noticed. 

“You used to hug your mom like she was an eggshell and get frustrated when you couldn’t talk to her the way you wanted,” Terry told me one night.

“And now?” I asked her.

“You hug her tighter now, and you’re not afraid of the silence when you talk to her.”

During one of my last visits with my mom, Terry took a photo that I treasure. We stopped by my mother’s group home in Baltimore on a luminous summer day with oak trees in full bloom. That visit followed the same script: a ring of the doorbell, the scurrying of footsteps behind the front door, and my mom gleefully shouting, “Oh my Lord, Oh my Lord!” 

Terry’s smartphone camera snapped what happened after the front door swung open. I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around my mother as she pillowed her face on my shoulder, a contented smile on her face.