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--- Begin Message ---The article below from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by [EMAIL PROTECTED]/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\ THE CLEARING - IN THEATERS JULY 2 - WATCH THE TRAILER NOW An official selection of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, THE CLEARING stars ROBERT REDFORD and HELEN MIRREN as Wayne and Eileen Hayes - a husband and wife living the American Dream. Together they've raised two children and struggled to build a successful business from the ground up. But there have been sacrifices along the way. When Wayne is kidnapped by an ordinary man, Arnold Mack (WILLEM DAFOE), and held for ransom in a remote forest, the couple's world is turned inside out. Watch the trailer at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/theclearing/index_nyt.html \----------------------------------------------------------/ A Secret Father, a Black Literary Treasure and an Old Woman June 28, 2004 By BRENT STAPLES Gladys Watt and Lydia Turnage Connolly had been friends for roughly 30 years - a decade of that as next-door neighbors in Greenwich, Conn. - by the time Mrs. Connolly died in 1984 at the venerable age of 99. Mrs. Connolly seemed to have no family; she relied on Mrs. Watt to take her grocery shopping and regularly ate Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners at her best friend's home. "I never saw a single visitor to her house. Not one," Mrs. Watt told me recently, adding that her friend had been tight-lipped about her origins. When she alluded to her family at all, it was only to say that her father had been "a wonderful man." Mrs. Watt thought that she knew her friend pretty well. She then stumbled upon a startling secret. Mrs. Connolly had once let the secret slip to strangers but, for most of her life, she had apparently seemed intent on carrying it to the grave. Mrs. Connolly, who had straight dark hair and swarthy skin, explained her appearance throughout most of her life by describing herself as Portuguese. The disguise began to crumble as she moved into her 90's and became too ill to care for the straight black hair - which turned out to be a wig. When it slipped away, Mrs. Watt recalls, the hair beneath was revealed to be short and coarse to curly. Combined with the darkish skin she had attributed to a Portuguese heritage, it gave her an African-American appearance. This finally made sense when Mrs. Watt received her friend's meager possessions. They included old photographs, showing Lydia posed with family members. There was also a leather-bound book handwritten by Wallace Turnage, her father. It contained his account of his life as a slave in Alabama. In the book, Mr. Turnage recounted his life at the hands of brutal owners, his attempts to escape and finally a daring break for liberty. After running away several times, he found a small boat and weathered a storm. He was rescued by Union soldiers and realized that he had obtained the freedom he had wanted for so long. Mrs. Watt held onto the book for nearly 20 years until she saw a public television program on the importance of slave narratives. Two years ago, she took Wallace Turnage's story to the Historical Society of Greenwich - where the Yale slavery historian David Blight encountered it and made plans to use it in a forthcoming book. Historians describe it as a remarkable find - particularly because first-person narratives by slaves who managed to liberate themselves are so rare. White Americans are generally surprised when they encounter stories like this - of an African-American with a proud heritage who nevertheless decides to leave blackness behind. But just about every black family in the United States knows of a light-skinned person who decided to avoid the penalties associated with blackness by becoming white. Hundreds of thousands of these people set sail into whiteness - leaving behind black parents, siblings and children - and were never heard from again. The people who abandoned their families were described as "passed" - a euphemism for dead. Though tragic, Lydia Connolly's passing makes perfect sense given that she was born in the 1880's, when national impulse toward marginalizing black people was gathering virulence with every passing day. In 1896, the Supreme Court made segregation legal in Plessy v. Ferguson. By the mid-1920's, black Americans everywhere were glued to a sensational, yearlong divorce trial involving a black woman named Alice Jones and Leonard Rhinelander, scion of one of New York's richest families. The Rhinelanders believed Alice had hidden her racial background to get at the family fortune. Alice was forced to disrobe in court, so that the jury could see the skin beneath her clothing. Too dark to pose plausibly as northern European, black people of Mrs. Connolly's color passed as Italian, Greek, Spanish or Portuguese - anything to escape segregation and the penalties associated with blackness. No one knows when she decided to leave blackness behind, or whether her white husband knew her secret. Mrs. Connolly appears to have been listed under a false name in the Greenwich directory for several years. Her real name, Lydia T. Connolly, appears in the directory only in the late 60's after the rise of the civil rights movement and a few years after her husband's death. Her secrecy and isolation fit the pattern for passing people in the early 20th century - as does the fact that she remained childless. Passing people often feigned infertility out of fear that the baby might be born visibly black - genetically unlikely, but nonetheless a stubborn part of the black folklore. The passers left a huge chasm in history. They hid or destroyed important records and suppressed family stories that would give them away. Historians of slavery are relieved that Mrs. Connolly preserved her father's remarkable memoir and grateful to Mrs. Watt for snatching it back from the verge of oblivion. Mrs. Watt found that her friend had mentioned her father, in passing, to the couple to whom she sold her home during the 1960's. Mrs. Connolly was about 80 by then, and may have been reconsidering the path she had chosen. For her part, Mrs. Watt is delighted to have served as an instrument of history, but speaks sadly of her friend's hidden life. "I'm not the kind of person to pry," she said recently, "but I wish that we'd had a chance to talk about it." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/28/opinion/28MON3.html?ex=1089453243&ei=1&en=1f84eb0d8fe976a4 --------------------------------- Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. 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