The Invisible Line by Daniel J. Sharfstein Page B

contemporary home, although piles of paper and a baroque tangle of computer equipment made it feel cramped inside. A lifelong bachelor, Murphy explained to me that he never married because for the past thirty-five years he had been too busy researching his family’s genealogy, devoting his spare hours to tracing his mother’s roots back to medieval England. In the mid-1990s he established a connection to the royal house of Lancaster. Since then he has called himself Sir Thomas.
    Thomas loved his hobby, all the more because it offered a break from an unhappy work environment. At the rent-a-car company, he could not get along with his co-workers, most of whom were black. He challenged them on the way they dressed and talked, and they frequently called him a racist. After years of arguing, he stopped disputing the accusation.
    Having finished his mother’s genealogy, Thomas turned to the pedigree of his father, Patrick. Almost immediately he hit a wall. Patrick had died when Thomas was a baby, and his mother had never met anyone from that side of the family. All she seemed to know was that the Murphys came from New York. But after searching birth, death, marriage, census, and probate records, Thomas could not find a single mention of their existence.
    Online Thomas found new paths to pursue. He explored some of the dozens of ancestry Web sites that offer searchable databases and connect hundreds of thousands of family-history enthusiasts. He posted inquiries in genealogy chat rooms. He had little luck at first, but then his mother remembered that when she and Patrick first married, he had mentioned a few aliases that he used in case he was ever arrested. About ten years ago Thomas posted this information on the Web. The responses he received changed the way that he looked at himself in the mirror.
    A woman in Mississippi wrote in, recognizing the aliases and identifying herself as the granddaughter of one of Patrick’s sisters. The Murphys, she informed him, were not from New York. Nor were they Irish—they were not even known as the Murphys until the 1930s. The family name was Wall. Thomas’s father had changed his first name, too, the woman wrote. She knew him as Uncle Russell, but he was born Roscoe Orin Wall. Roscoe’s grandparents—Thomas’s great-grandparents—were named Amanda and Orindatus Wall. Amanda Wall was an Oberlin graduate and civil rights activist who after the Civil War taught newly freed slaves to read and marched for a woman’s right to vote. Her husband had been born a slave, but when he died in 1891, he was one of the most politically connected African Americans in Washington, D.C. The Walls were buried together in Arlington National Cemetery. If Sir Thomas Murphy’s mother descended from English royalty, his father’s ancestors were late-nineteenth-century “colored aristocrats.” 2
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    THOMAS MURPHY’ S STORY IS shared by millions, most of whom do not know it. From the colonial era to the present, people of African ancestry have crossed the color line and faded into the world around them. They have lived among white people, identified themselves as white, and been regarded by others—neighbors, strangers, government officials—as white. On a daily basis, in ways large and small, they asserted their new racial status. On vacation they posed for pictures in front of the “whites only” sign at the beach. At night they told their children and grandchildren tales of the horrors of Sherman’s March to the Sea. Their descendants had no reason to imagine that they were anything but white. Like most Americans, they were taught to believe that the line between white and black is and always has been a natural barrier supported by science and religion and fortified by politics and law. Slavery and freedom, segregation and civil rights, whippings and lynchings, discrimination overt and subtle—the history of race in the