I tried not to stare when I first saw her. Her gaunt, heavily lined face made her look older than I expected. She wore a dingy pumpkin-orange thrift-store turtleneck that swallowed her 5-foot-7, 98-pound frame. But her ice-blue eyes sparkled like a kid’s on Christmas morning.

“Oh boy! Oh boy,” she said, walking toward me with outstretched arms. “It’s so good to see you!”

That was the first of many visits. Most followed the same script: her astonished joy upon my arrival, my mechanical hug, and then sitting on her couch to talk about her favourite topic, classic torch love songs from the 1950s and early ’60s. 

“Who’s the better singer?” I’d ask. “Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole?”

She’d close her eyes to ponder. “Nat King Cole,” she’d announce, nodding in reverence. 

After about an hour, I’d stand to leave. Her smile would evaporate. Another awkward hug. As I left, she’d call out, “Don’t take any wooden nickels.” 

On the surface, we had nothing in common. She was a white Irish Catholic woman who grew up in a family that freely used the N-word, thought that Black people were lazy, and believed that Black and white people should live apart. I was a young Black man who grew up primarily in foster homes in a Black inner-city neighbourhood where just about everyone — including me — regarded white people with distrust or contempt. 

Yet she was my mother. And, as the years have passed, she’s become something else. She’s the person I find myself turning to when I struggle with the mixture of emotions that so many Americans are experiencing right now. Many of us are exhausted, demoralised, and drained by constant political and racial divisions. Countless Americans have become, as author David Brooks put it in a recent essay, “passive, discouraged. … They’ve lost the confidence to wish for more.”

I’ve been swimming in this grim national mood for years. As a journalist at CNN and elsewhere, I’ve covered virtually every so-called racially transformative event in America during the past 32 years, from the Rodney King riots in 1992 to the George Floyd “racial reckoning.” All of them generated massive hope for transformational change; all were followed by a massive letdown. At my lowest moments, I’ve wondered whether human beings are too susceptible to racism and tribalism to make democracy work. 

But my mother offered another way to look at the future, without ever intending to do so. She was a person who seemed to have no power or reason to hope. Still she, and others like her, gave me the confidence to wish for more. 

***

In the beginning, I thought I’d never know her. When I was born in the mid-1960s, interracial marriage and intimate interracial relationships were illegal in Maryland, as in much of the country. My mother vanished from my life not long after I was born, and so did her family. No one told me why. I didn’t know what she looked like. My father’s name was on my birth certificate, but hers was not. All he told me and my younger brother, Patrick, was this: ”Your mother’s name is Shirley, she’s white, and her family hates Black people.”

Their hatred did not surprise me. I grew up in a West Baltimore neighbourhood that served as the setting for the HBO series “The Wire,” a crime drama that depicted a Black inner-city community ravaged by racism and drug violence. I routinely heard my friends and neighbours refer to white people as “honkies” and “crackers.” I heard white people yell “Nigger!” when I strayed into their neighbourhoods. During my entire time in Baltimore’s public schools — from Head Start to high school graduation — I saw only one white student.  

It wasn’t the time or place to be biracial. There were no biracial public figures like former President Barack Obama or former Vice President Kamala Harris when I grew up in the 1970s and early ’80s. I was too ashamed to tell anyone my mother was white. I marked her race as “Black” on school forms. I became a closeted biracial person.

At 17, though, I discovered that there was one place worse than my neighbourhood: where I first met my mom. There was another reason why I tried not to stare when I first saw her. I was trying to hide my emotions because I was in shock. I was standing in the waiting room of a psychiatric facility called Crownsville Hospital Center in rural Maryland.

My mother had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, a severe mental illness. I didn’t make that discovery until I met her in Crownsville. No one in my family, including my father, had told me — not even on the car ride to the hospital. They didn’t know how. My father had waited until I had graduated from high school to suddenly ask me one day if I wanted to meet my mom. He didn’t think I could handle knowing about her illness until I became a young man. Many people didn’t talk openly about mental illness in their families when I met my mother in the early 1980s. 

For over 30 years, I blocked out most of the memories from that first meeting, but one detail lingered. Before I left, my mother looked at me and made a request.

“Will you send me a St. Jude prayer book?” she asked.

“Ah, yeah, I will,” I said, not knowing at the time that St. Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes. 

Outwardly, I didn’t skip a beat after that meeting. I attended and graduated from Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C., where Kamala Harris was a classmate. I became a journalist at several newspapers before joining CNN. But I had stepped out of one closet into another. Now, I was ashamed that my mother had a mental illness. I didn’t even tell my closest friends. It took two years to tell the woman I would date and marry about my mom’s illness — and another two into our marriage before allowing them to meet. 

In the life I hid from others, I tried to build a relationship with my mom. I wrote her a flood of letters, telling her about myself, my dreams and my hope that we could get to know each other. There would be no reply for months, and then a letter would finally arrive. I’d tear it open to find a single sheet from a yellow legal pad, with large cursive letters spilling over the margins: “Dear John! I could use some money and to see you in person. Could you send a picture of yourself and Pat for Mother’s Day? I need another St. Jude prayer book. Love, Shirley.” 

Personal visits were no better. She would drift away in the middle of conversations. She’d forget what we talked about two minutes earlier. Her lips would tremble, and she’d lapse into silence if I asked too many questions about her past. At times, she’d sense my frustration, turn to me and say with a rueful smile, “Don’t mind me. I’m crazy.”

Each visit left me more depressed. My mother had been a mystery when I had no contact with her — and even more so once she was in my life. Her mental illness was like a thick fog; I didn’t know how to navigate around it to see her. All I could see was schizophrenia. 

In my 30s, I gave up. I stopped writing her letters and trying to reach her through conversations. I kept visiting her and mailing her St. Jude trinkets, but I was just checking a box. Our visits were filled with awkward silences. I didn’t expect our relationship to change. 

One day, when my wife, Terry, asked me why I didn’t talk more about my mother, I cut her off.

“All I do is send her money,” I said with a heavy sigh. “I can’t really communicate with her. There’s nothing left to tell.”

***

But there was so much to her story that had not been told. One night, when I was about 19, my father reached into a Ziploc bag and pulled out a sepia-stained black-and-white photo. In the photo, a young white woman with a beehive hairdo looked at the camera with a wide, dimpled smile. She was holding a cigarette in her right hand and looked like she was about to burst into laughter. She looked confident, and her eyes sparkled with intelligence and mischief. It was my mother. The photo was taken when she was 20, the same year she gave birth to me. I couldn’t stop staring at the photo. It bore little resemblance to the fragile woman I knew. 

I set out to learn about the woman in that photo. I pressed relatives to talk about my parents’ relationship. I knew the outline: They met in 1963 at a hospital in downtown Baltimore. My mother was a nurse’s assistant, and my father, Clifton Sr., was in the Merchant Marines. Their first date was a disaster. My father couldn’t persuade a Black cabdriver to take him to my mom’s house because she lived in a white working-class neighbourhood where no Blacks dared venture. When my father finally did knock on her door, her father answered. He tried to shove my father off the doorstep and called the police. “This nigger is trying to see my daughter,” my mother’s father told the arriving officers. They arrested my father for disturbing the peace.

My mother decided that she would visit my father instead. She started taking walks toward my father’s house in West Baltimore, which was the central meeting place for my father’s extended family. My relatives described her as “quick-witted,” “chatty” and driven to help people in need. She sat on my father’s front steps, smoking Marlboro cigarettes with my uncles, and hung out in the kitchen to watch my paternal grandmother, Daisy, sing Negro spirituals while baking sweet potato pies. 

My father’s family didn’t know what to make of her. In the early 1960s, white politicians routinely warned against the evils of “race-mixing.” Psychiatrists declared in scholarly journals that whites who married or “mated” with Blacks had a death wish or sought an outlet for “deviant” sexual urges. Baltimore passed the nation’s first racially restrictive housing law in 1910, which banned Black people from buying homes in white neighbourhoods and vice versa, and was heavily segregated when my parents met. My father’s relatives chuckled as they recalled a 20-year-old white woman walking alone into an all-Black neighbourhood to see a Black man.

“It was like a breakthrough,” my cousin Reese recalled. “She was a white woman on the block, not scared, not worried about being attacked, not looking over her shoulder. She didn’t seem to be conscious of her colour. She was like one of the family.”

I then heard stories that filled a hole in my heart that I didn’t even know was there. Unprompted, relatives recounted memories of a doting young mom who took her two children on walks in the park, rubbed her nose against their bellies while they giggled and sang Patsy Cline and Tony Bennett songs to them. My mom loved to sing one song in particular to me, Doris Day’s “Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).” Try as I might, though, I have no memories of those moments.

Mercifully, I also have no memory of what happened next. My mother’s illness became apparent after she gave birth to Patrick, nine months after I was born. She started drifting away during conversations, chain-smoking and disappearing for long solitary walks. She couldn’t keep a job. When my parents moved into an apartment together, she’d leave with the gas stove on or the front door ajar. My parents never married.

“She tried, but she didn’t have the capacity to do normal things,” my father told me. “She wanted to be accepted like normal people.”

And then one day, my relatives said, she disappeared. Years later, Patrick accidentally discovered the reason why while consulting her Social Security records. Her father had placed her in a psychiatric facility, a not uncommon fate in the 1950s and early 1960s for white women in interracial relationships. 

Hearing how my parents’ relationship ended left me emotionally numb. I no longer wanted to know more about my mother — every story seemed to end in tragedy. I thought I would never meet any semblance of the vibrant woman in that old photograph. 

But there was another side to those stories about my mom that I had overlooked. It was her “marvellous victory.”

***

Part of that victory can be seen in a viral photograph from last year that is now forgotten because the news cycle has moved on. It’s a snapshot of Kamala Harris taken last summer during her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was shot from the point of view of a brown biracial girl in a pink pantsuit and pigtails, transfixed as she gazes upward at Harris from the front row at the United Center in Chicago. The girl is Amara, Harris’ great-niece, age 8.

It’s easy to see why the photo went viral. It was a sneak preview of a Brown New America. The U.S. is projected to become a majority-minority country (the majority of citizens will be non-white) by 2044. The number of people who identify as multiracial increased by 276% over the past decade. Advertisements today routinely depict interracial couples, straight and gay, along with their children. And some of our most prominent public figures — Obama, Harris, film director Jordan Peele and NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes — are biracial.

The acceptance of interracial marriage cuts across racial and partisan lines. Harris and Doug Emhoff, her Jewish husband, were the first interracial couple to reach the highest levels of the executive branch, but they were immediately followed by another interracial couple, GOP Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants. Some white supremacists objected to Usha Vance’s race but even within the MAGA universe there is widespread acceptance of the Vances’ interracial marriage.

Someday, perhaps soon, an interracial couple will occupy the White House.

It’s easy to miss, but Usha Vance’s ascension and Harris’ groundbreaking run for the White House represents one of the greatest victories of the Civil Rights Movement: the normalization of interracial marriage and biracial people throughout America. When Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice in 2022, few if any news stories dwelled on the fact that her husband is white.

The casual acceptance of interracial couples at even the highest echelon of American life demonstrates something that’s so important to remember today: how quickly people’s attitudes on seemingly intractable issues can shift. When a Gallup poll asked Americans about their views on marriage between Black and white people in 1958, only 4% approved. Gallup asked the same question in 2021, and 94% approved — an all-time high. Public opinion about one of the most entrenched racial taboos in American history went from near-universal disapproval to virtual universal approval within a lifetime. 

How did this happen? The quick answer is that in June 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down “anti-miscegenation” laws in the Loving v. Virginia case. But something else also made it happen. It was a choice that certain people made and a type of courage they all displayed. One of them was my mom.

I only saw my mom as this fragile flower, but my brother, Patrick, was the first to notice another side to her. One morning, he took her to a hair salon that served women in a group home where our mom lived. She had been transferred to the home with other women with severe mental illnesses after Crownsville was shut down, in part, for mistreating patients. While they were waiting, our mom watched a hairdresser berate and throw hair products at a woman sitting in her chair.

“She’s a bitch,” my mom said, her eyes narrowed on the hairdresser.  

Patrick had never heard our mother speak in such an indignant tone before. He suppressed a smile.

“Mom, do you know you just said a bad word?”

“I’m sorry, Pat.” Our mom briefly paused, then added, “But she is a bitch.”

As I dug deeper into old family stories, I discovered that my mom had long been infuriated by any display of injustice. She glared back at white people who stared at her while she walked in public with my father in the early 1960s. Sometimes she’d say, “You act like you ain’t never seen people before.” She and my father trashed a bar when the bartender refused to serve them. Once, I heard my mom say she had been arrested as a young woman. For what, I inquired. “For opening my big fat mouth,” she said with a wide grin.

Even her illness couldn’t erase her spirit of defiance. I hated visiting her group homes. Some were run by good people who treated my mom with compassion, but many seemed designed to crush whatever humanity was left of those consigned there. Unscrupulous caretakers stole from or bullied people in their care. Some confined them to squalid, roach-infested rooms. When I came in to greet my mom, I’d often see heavily medicated residents sitting on couches, staring zombie-like at soap operas on television. Most of them hadn’t received a visitor in years. There were few smiles or genuine laughter in these environments. But my mom could somehow bring light into the most desolate places.

Patrick sneaked into a group home to surprise our mom one morning, only to be shocked by what he saw: our mother bopping and weaving down a “Soul Train” dance line as the group home staff and residents cheered her on. Any gifts we sent her quickly disappeared because, we discovered, she gave most of them away to other group home members who she said needed them more. And when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, her caretaker had to buy a separate living room chair for my mom to enforce social distancing rules. All of the group home members wanted to sit near her.

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 travelled 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 neighbours 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 neighbourhoods. Outsiders, particularly those who had the “wrong” colour, 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 neighbourhood 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 institutionalised. 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 realised. 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 marvellous 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. 

If I could have written a caption for that photo, it would be the final words I wrote to her not long after that visit — words that she never saw. It’s what I wished I could have said to her so many years earlier. 

“Now I see you, Mom. I finally see you.”

John Blake is an award-winning journalist for CNN.com. He is the author of “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.” Blake’s memoir has won five book awards, including the 2024 Christopher Awards, which celebrates books that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.” Blake has spoken at colleges, symposiums and in documentaries on race, religion and politics. He is a graduate of Howard University and a native of Baltimore. For more info, visit his website.

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