WHITE WIFE/BLUE BABY

Howard’s memoir chronicles the challenges of a mixed-race marriage in the 1960s.

The author was 21 when she gave birth to her daughter Carolyn in Chicago in 1969. Carolyn was born with a heart condition that rendered her health fragile. Carolyn was also born to a Black father and a white mother; as Howard details throughout this work, this was not exactly the easiest family makeup for the time period. The author explains how racial tension seemed to underly everything from finding an apartment to interactions with the police. She felt her family was “treated horribly” in Chicago, prompting a move to Washington, D.C. The memoir skips back and forth in time, often focusing on Howard’s upbringing; her father is described as an alcoholic who left the family. The author was raised Catholic and describes a traumatic event she suffered at the hands of a monsignor; there were also inappropriate interactions with a family doctor. As Howard entered her college years, she began to question more of what she had always been told; perhaps the Vietnam War was not justified after all, and maybe authority figures were not always right. The author also provides a firsthand account of gritty 1960s Chicago, a place that was not exactly welcoming to Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1966 and where the notorious Democratic National Convention of 1968 took place. At the center of it all is a young family struggling to live a normal life. Many distinct characters help to make the work memorable, like the priest who conducted the author’s wedding and who had nearly been killed while agitating for civil rights in the American South. Some episodes are less than thrilling—a description of a visit to Second City, where “Players were masters of their craft: putdowns of the powerful, cutting mockery,” does not illuminate much. Nevertheless, Howard effectively conveys the strife of a famously divisive period in American history.

A highly personal, character-driven take on race relations during a turbulent time.