The author’s mother, Alvera Fredric, was born into a black family in New Orleans but spent her life passing as white. Discovering her secret changed my view of race - and myself. My mother spent her life passing as white. Tags: Alvera Frederic Kalina, Alvera Fredric, Gail Lukasik, Hewlett-Packard, HP, New Orleans, Ohio, Patrick Rodgers, photography, The GarageĬomments Off on The Secret Album reveals how a powerful truth changed a family forever Read the entire article and watch the video here. “She said, ‘Promise me you won’t tell anyone until after I die.’”… “I had never seen her so afraid,” says Lukasik, who tells the story in her memoir, White Like Her: My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing. …It took Lukasik two years to confront her mother, and the encounter didn’t go well. “When I used to ask her about that she’d say, ‘Oh I just don’t have any,’ which I thought was strange.” Her mother’s guardedness about her own family’s origins were yet another layer to their already complex relationship… “I felt very close to my mother, but she had a certain mystery,” she says. In the stack of family photo albums, there were only a handful of black-and-white prints of relatives from New Orleans, where her mother, Alvera (Frederic) Kalina, had lived in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Growing up in suburban Ohio, Lukasik puzzled over why there were so few pictures of her mother’s side of the family. This is true for author Gail Lukasik, who was just as captivated by what was left out of her parents’ snapshots as by the faces and stories they portrayed. We treasure family photos not only because they illuminate the past, but also because they can offer up an alternative narrative to the stories we tell - and retell - about our identities. The Secret Album is part of HP’s original documentary project, History of Memory, which celebrates the power of printed photos. The Secret Album reveals how a powerful truth changed a family foreverĪ novelist learns about her mother’s long-held secret by search for what’s missing from her family photo albums.
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