- I'll tell you one thing. If your family's been in this country a long time, there's some secrets in your closet that you don't know about. That's my family's story. I was raised in Parma, Ohio. It was the kind of neighborhood where everyone was white, working class. My dad worked, mom stayed at home. And I felt very close to my mom, I really did. But she had a certain mystery. She wasn't from the north, she was from New Orleans. And she had very few family photographs. And I used to ask her about that. I said how come there are no photographs? And she'd say oh, I just don't have any, which I thought was very strange. And the other thing was that my mother really didn't have people from her family visit. So I didn't know anything about my mother's family. And I'm the kind of person that I wanna know the truth. So I decided to find out once and for all who my mother's family was. So I went up to the library and started searching. I went through a lot of microfilm. I'm just flying in the dark making guesses. And finally I sent away for my mother's birth certificate. I open it up, and I'll never forget it, when I look at it and it says race. And in parentheses are three letters: C-O-L, C-O-L for colored. I think I actually sat down for a minute and just held it, looked at it and thought about it. My mom always described her heritage as her father was French, and her mother was Scotch and English, and that's it. So I'm thinking what is going on here? So I waited 'til she came to visit me, and we were sitting down after lunch, and I said Mom, you know, I sent away for your birth certificate, and it says you're colored. So it got very quiet. I could see she was thinking. And then she says, um, "Promise me, you can't tell anyone. You can't tell anyone until after I die." I had never seen her so afraid, and so reluctantly I agreed to keep her secret. But after my father passed, we were visiting my mother. And she brought out this photo album. And she says, um, "This is my photo album. I kept this separate from your father. And I know your love of photographs and how much they mean to you, so I'm gonna give this to you. I want you take it, and I want you to keep it." And when I started looking through it, it was an eyeopener to me because I realized the depth of my mother's story of passing. She went from living in New Orleans as a woman of color, and then had to make this tremendous shift in her identity to move north and marry my father and live as a white woman. She had to give up family. She had to give up her authentic self, who she really was. And I thought about how sad that must have been for her. My mother died in 2014. So I kept her secret 17 years. That's a long time to keep a secret like that. But after her passing, I discovered that her father went and started a whole other family. And he had five other children. And so there was a whole other family, and I didn't know they existed. And then, I'll never forget, I received an email from a woman who said, "My father is Azemar Frederick Junior. I'm your cousin, and we want to welcome you to this family." - I got a phone from my cousin saying that I had a cousin that was coming in town. But when she told me it was a cousin named Gail, I was like, "I don't remember a cousin named Gail." I was excited, I was like, "Wow I have a cousin that I did not know about, so it would be very interesting to meet." And so when we got together, nobody missed a beat. Everybody welcomed her happily with open arms. And I could see the family resemblance, I could, in the face. - Suddenly, now I have a whole other family, and to get to know them and seeing my mother in them and them in my mother, it's incredible. This journey started with
an absence of photographs. But now this is my own photo album.
