A few weekends ago I caught a segment of "This American Life" on NPR where a man named Gene Cheek was interviewed about his childhood. He's also written a book about it.
The story on the radio show began with a young Gene coming home to find his mother crying. When he inquired what was wrong, she eventually told him that her boyfriend thought they should break up. Why was that? Because her boyfriend, Tuck, was black, she was white, this was North Carolina in the 1950s, and he was afraid of what would happen to Gene if they were found out. They didn't end up breaking up, though, and Gene then related the kind of decent man Tuck was. He also related the tremendous lengths they all went through to keep the relationship a secret. Like when Tuck wanted to give Gene a football as a gift and had to circle the block twice to make sure no one was following him, then throw it out the window and drive off. And how when he and his mom spent the evening at Tuck's house playing board games and such they were still vulnerable to the police barging in and breaking the party up.
But the pivotal moment in everyone's life came after his mom gave birth to Tuck's son. Once people took a look at the baby, once-close relatives immediately walked out of their lives. But that was only part of the problem. Gene's biological father, a hateful, irredeemable man, brought an action to have his mom lose custody of him. Not because he wanted custody of Gene, but because he didn't think his mom should since she would be raising him with a black child. The court was inclined to agree, and gave his mother a choice: either give up the baby, or give up Gene.
Before his mother could make this impossible choice, Gene, already a teenager, recounts how he leaned over and whispered to her, "At least I'm old enough to know where home is - so I'll go," and then he stood up and declared his intentions to the court. (By the way, Gene's mother's lawyer never appeared at the hearing, leaving her to fend for herself.)
So Gene was taken away to live with a foster family. At first he lived nearby, but he kept getting in trouble for running away. For running back home. Eventually he was sent to a boy's home a few hours away, but in a weird way that helped him. Since he couldn't run away anymore it forced him to make the best of the situation. And given the circumstances, everyone turned out about as well as they could, though his mom never could overcome her sense of guilt and died fairly young. And Gene never got over his anger at his dad's family, at least not until he wrote the book.
But this isn't the story of a family so much as it is a story of a time, a time when the unthinkable could take place. Where manifest, publicly-sanctioned meanness could be allowed, with all the force of the law and its institutions, to rip families apart and destroy good people's lives.