“Mother, I’m moving to Los Angeles and I will stay in touch, but I don’t want you and Daddy to visit me there.”
“Sheila, don’t do this. Don’t do this. It’s a terrible life.”
Mrs. Harrison sat at her makeup table with the phone to her ear. As her husband sat on a chair, he buried his head in his hands.
“Mother, I’m sorry, but I’ve made my mind up.”
“But, Sheila, sweetheart, just come home and let’s talk about this. We can figure it out; we can help you.” As she tells me the story of how she “lost” her child, Varnelle Harrison recalls how she attempted to talk her daughter out of passing.
As she stares at the black-and-white photo of Sheila and her two other daughters standing in front of a summer beach cottage, she clenches a tissue in her left hand. Angry and somewhat embarrassed by her daughter’s choice, she asks me not to use her or her daughter’s real name (or identifying characteristics), even though she knows that her daughter has long since found a new identity.
“We had sort of expected that this call might come one day,” says Harrison, a woman who, ironically, has strong ties to her black sorority, which she joined more than sixty years ago. “Some people don’t understand why a black person who was born with a good background of educated and well-to-do parents would want to pass, but I think it’s more likely that we would try to pass rather than a poor black person because we actually get to see what the most privileged white person has in life. We have the same education, the same money, and the same potential. In a way, we get so close that it becomes an awful temptation.” For that reason, she wasn’t terribly surprised that Sheila, a smart and ambitious child, would one day fall prey to that temptation.
Varnelle says it started becoming obvious when Sheila spent four years in college with only three visits to her parents’ home. “She came home Christmas of freshman and sophomore year—and the summer in between,” says Harrison as she recalls. “She told my husband and me that she was doubling up on coursework in order to graduate in three years, so she was working through vacations and doing research with professors during the summers.”
It was all a lie, and Varnelle and her now-deceased husband, Roger, had an inkling of what was going on, particularly when Sheila had planned two visits with them and insisted that they stay at an inn that was forty-five minutes from campus. When Sheila went away to college in the early 1950s, she picked a small women’s college in the Northeast against the advice of her parents, who had both attended a black southern college.
“I told her she should be going to Howard, where she could meet some nice friends from good families,” explains Varnelle, who is now almost ninety and has had limited contact with her daughter since that phone call. “But she came up with this college in New England that none of us had ever heard of. I remember asking her why she would ever want to go to a school in a place like that. And the minute I asked it, I knew the answer. It was devastating to my husband. And I think I just got angry.”
Although she had been raised in a black neighborhood with an entire circle of well-to-do sophisticated black friends, Sheila had intentionally picked a white college in a rural community. Such an environment would allow her an easy transition out of a black culture. Her mother now concludes that it was Sheila’s testing ground to see if she could live a life of passing.
“It was like she killed herself off as a black person, and then reemerged with an entirely new identity,” says a childhood friend who knew Sheila as a black kid in their southern hometown. “She almost never came home for summers during college—always telling her parents that she was doing extra papers and research with the hope of graduating early,” says the childhood playmate. “Around her junior year, we started to hear rumors that she had suffered a breakdown and was institutionalized. Somebody else said she’d left the country and settled in India somewhere. And a couple others—friends of Sheila’s parents—told my parents that she’d killed herself. All these crazy stories to explain her disappearance.
It was just a nontopic for Sheila’s parents. They just never discussed her anymore.” According to a white classmate who claims to have known Sheila only as a white person, Sheila got married, unbeknownst to her parents, during the late part of her junior year to a local white high school graduate. “I think his last name was Masters,” says the classmate. According to the former classmate, Masters was a quiet, rather simple, unsophisticated man who worked in a grocery store.
Presumably, he was somebody that she knew would care little about her background and would be suitably impressed by the fact that she was a college student. “I later got the sense,” says Varnelle, who says it was years before she ever heard about a marriage—and to this day, she is not certain it took place—“that she told this boy that we were deceased and that she was an only child with no other family. I never met him or saw him, but he probably wasn’t too concerned about her background. After all, unless you’re in places like certain parts of South Carolina or Virginia, whites don’t think about blacks passing that much. It’s foreign to most white people.”
Evidently, according to a former friend of Harrison’s daughter, Masters was also somebody Sheila would not stay married to. Making the calculated decision that her husband’s value was only in his name and white family heritage, she made no efforts to meet his friends or to build a life together. One black childhood friend learned that Sheila had taken off the next year from college and guessed that her intent was to gain a different graduation year—further altering her original school records. With a new last name, he concluded, her plan was to graduate and enter the real world with a new name and a new identity.
When Mrs. Harrison hears this pieced together, she says, “Before my husband died, we pretty much figured out what she’d done, but I long ago stopped trying to understand the convoluted decisions our daughter made. I’m not even sure she married this man. She may have just taken his name. It’s like trying to figure one of those murder mystery novels.”
At age twenty-two, only months before graduation, Sheila evidently parted from the white man who was believed to be her husband. Soon after graduating, she left town for Los Angeles with a completely new name and identity.
Today, Sheila has two different identities for two different communities. The black community in her hometown knew a Sheila Harrison, a black woman, who they believe, for the most part, is either dead, institutionalized, or living in some other country.
The white community in her adoptive city and surrounding environs know a Sheila Masters, a white socialite, whose Vermont doctor father and Greek mother died when Sheila was a child. “I knew Sheila as a black person,” says an elderly black physician who belonged to the same fraternity as her father. “And what’s so amazing is that none of us have interacted with her since she re-created herself as a white woman. I have a pretty good idea of where she lives, what she does, and what she looks like. I had the opportunity to meet a white colleague who had actually been to Sheila’s new home fifteen years ago. My colleague knows her only as a white person. From what I understand, when people ask her about her background, she says that her maiden name is Sheila Masters and that she is part Greek.”
It seems that Sheila never mentions her former husband, but on the rare occasion when someone learns that she has previously been married, she will quite matter-of-factly offer the incredible story that “my name was originally Masters, but I ended up marrying a very distant cousin—also named Masters.” With the dexterity of a double agent, Sheila has developed a clever way to guard her true identity and steer even the most curious genealogist directly into a white family tree. Of course, it was her former husband’s family tree, but by claiming him as a distant cousin, she suddenly made it her family history too.
“I tried to rekindle my friendship with her,” says a retired college professor who had grown up with Sheila and had been a friend of her father’s. “I ran into her and confronted her in an airport several years ago, but the lies were so outrageous and so well-rehearsed that I couldn’t get through to her. It was so ridiculous to be keeping that story going now that she was successful and living a great life. It’s not as if this was still the 1950s or 1960s anymore. She kept insisting that I was mistaking her for somebody else. Here she was with the same face, the same voice, and the same first name—and she’s telling me that I’m confusing her with somebody else. It absolutely amazes me that white people can’t see the black in her. She even has a southern black twang. But I guess the whites she socializes with have absolutely no ties to black people. If she’s gone through that much trouble to live in the white race, all I can say is good riddance. They can have her.”
A black secretary who worked for one of Sheila’s white friends says, “When I first saw Mrs. Masters stop by to see my boss, I immediately assumed she might be black. Even with her white skin and the straight hair, in my eyes, there was nothing else she could be. But then I could tell the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes when I greeted her that something was up. She was always direct with the white secretaries but not with me. She wasn’t mean to me, but it was almost as if she was scared of me. And here she was, this rich, confident lady with all these rich white friends. I guess she was afraid they’d all dump her if they knew she was black.”
The secretary paused and shook her head in disgust.