Project Description
We all have a personal history, a story we pass on. Perhaps, we were rejected, neglected, abandoned or hidden. Could it be that we were loved, but too much, or were we lost either, each, or neither? Author June Cross has experienced as most of us have, a life filled with feelings. Her experiences told her life was loose, it was also tightly constrained, dependent on which home she lived in. No matter her home, June Cross knew she had a secret. Cross was a young woman told to keep her heritage a secret… by her mother. And she did for a time. In a book , Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away, and later through a film, Secret Daughter. Later, June Cross stood on a stage at The Moth she shared what speaks to the sense.
“Every family has secrets. In my family the secret was me.” I was secret because I was Black. These days you’d say I was bi-racial, but in the fifties you were either born Black or you were born white – end of story. My mother was a farm girl from Pocatello Idaho, Who’d come to New York to seek her fame and fortune here on the big stage. She met my dad who was a performer from Philadelphia…He was part of a duo called Stump and stumpy then popular in the forties…they met backstage at the Paramount Theatre and pretty much became constant champions for four or five years. And here I am.
But as the fifties progressed my dad’s career began to go down hill. And his career began to go downhill so did his life. And he drank more and more. And the more he drank the angrier he got. And in some kind of twisted sort of vision he thought if he beat my mother long enough she would stay with him. My mother had sunk pretty low she hadn’t sunk so low that she was willing to stay with a man who beat her everyday. So sooner of later she got up. I was about eighteen months old…she left him. And we moved into another apartment…on the upper West Side of Manhattan, and that is where I lived with her for the next four or fives years.
But there was one problem. She had the courage to get into a relationship with a Black man but she did not have the courage to raise his child, who looked like me. who was me. And so she began to leave me for periods of time with a friend of hers…
Might you relate or have a story of your own? Were you suffocated, stifled, smothered, and surfaced only long enough to gulp some air. Or could it be that you were free, so free that you ran anywhere and everywhere just looking for some structure? What is your story? Would you dare repeat it?
If you did might you too discover that the tales we tell explore the twists and turns of our lives. For good or bad, the emotional knots we experience tear at listeners. An oral history is profound; it is the sound that resonates deeply. How many of us recall the details of another person’s life when all we did was hear it? There is something about the spoken word, the cadence and the candor. The cacophony of sounds that comes from within – we can feel a cry, see a sigh, look at a laugh, taste the terror, and smell the stench that is a secret, one that cuts like a knife.
LISTEN to Secret Daughter | Added to The Moth: Nov 5, 2013 | Recorded: May 12, 2011 or watch…
