Mixed races, NOT mixed messages
Author Ronne Hartfield discusses the book she wrote about her mother, the daugther of a slave and a plantation master who had an "Emersonian" certainy of herself
By Marli Guzzetta + Independent Arts Editor
It is a matter of personal significance for author Ronne Hartfield to be speaking on her memoir "Another Way Home" at the Atheneum, where Ralph Waldo Emerson once spoke.

COURTESY RONNE HARTFIELD Ronne Hartfield, author of "Another Way Home"

"I learned a language for the way my parents thought when I read Emerson. I call my parents 'Emersonian individualists,'" said Hartfield, whose mother grew up on a plantation, the child of a white master and former slave. "That's what I learned by immersion and conjecture in writing the book. That's what someone like my mother would have to be, the only way you could survive. You had to have some survival tool that allowed you to create your own capacity of thinking. And that's what made my mother what she was."

Nantucket residents Barbara Cohen and Bette Spriggs partnered with the Atheneum to bring Hartfield to the island this week for a reading and discussion on "Another Way Home."

"I read 'Another Way Home,' and I was sim- ply overwhelmed," said Cohen, who'd befriended Hartfield when both were working in the arts in Chicago. "I called Bette Spriggs and said, 'You've got to read the book.' Later, I'm sitting across from her, after she's read it, and she said, 'We've got to bring her here.' I said, 'Of course, we have to bring her here,'" Cohen remembered.

Spriggs is introducing Hartfield, a woman of significant and serendipitous accomplishment. In half a century, she has followed her career path wherever it has led, including the Art Institute of Chicago (where she served as the Director of Museum Education, and also as a dean and professor of comparative literature during the 1990s), Northwestern University, the University of Illinois and Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions (where she was a senior research fellow in 2001 and 2002).

In conducting research for "Another Way Home," Hartfield hired a genealogist to travel with her to the border country between Mississippi and Louisiana, where her mother lived in the 19th century. Her father (Hartfield's grandfather) lived in the master's house on the Southern plantation, along with his mother. He built a home on the property for the former female slave (Hartfield's grandmother) whom he seemed to genuinely love and who bore him children.

"Their father would come to see them. He nourished them, educated them, took care of them," Hartfield said. "His mother said, 'If you're going to build a home for them, I don't want to see them.' So he built a house on the property, with a separate road that led to it. That's the main imagery for the title, 'Another Way Home.' My mother used to say, 'We didn't have to go to the big house, because we had another way home.'"

The story follows Hartfield's mother to New Orleans and eventually to Chicago, where, Hartfield said, her parents led a life of "health and sanity" as a family that came from several generations of racial mixing.

"When you live like that, you have to be highly individualistic," Hartfield said. "My mother was one of the strongest people I knew, and she passed that on to her children." Hartfield said she wanted to pass this same sense of Emersonian individualism on to her grandchildren, and wrote the book mostly as a legacy for them. Hartfield's four daughters have produced eight children - five girls and three boys - and all of them are multi-racial.

"Five of them have read the book, and two have taken the book to school for show and tell," Hartfield said of her grandkids. "That was originally who I thought would be my audience. I thought I was writing it for them."

For them, she said, she intended for the memoir to stand in defiance of "so many cultural messages, especially those directed at children of mixed race, that mixed-race children should be crazy because they couldn't locate themselves as white or black. Being of mixed race was the history of everyone in my family, and they were fine."

(Interestingly, Hartfield said she believes it was "simpler" for multiracial people to identify with a racial community when they adhered to the "one drop" rule of her mother's era. "If you had one drop of black in your backround, that meant you were black," Hartfield said. "The proliferation of choices for everybody in every way are not always salutary. I think they can be confusing and deprive people of a sense of community.")

The book has seen four printings, and Hartfield said she is especially happy when the book is used in college curricula.

"The literature of black America is mostly about pathology. When I began writing this, hardly anybody was writing about ordinary black people who went about their lives, meeting their challenges as anybody does," she said. "I wanted somebody to read about that, and put some of that into the canon, as some might say."

RONNE

HARTFIELD

When: Wed., May 9, 7 p.m.

I

Where: Nantucket Atheneum,

1 India St. Cost: Free For more information,

please call 228-1110.