Mixed Race Studies

Black and Bengali

In These Times
2013-03-02

Fatima Shaik

A new book traces the hidden story of a mixed-race community.

The federal census taker comes every 10 years and, for most people in the United States, this has little consequence. But not where I lived, in New Orleans, just outside the historic district of Tremé. There, people talked to each other about whether to lie to the census taker and which lie to tell, and that conversation produced stories about who had disappeared from us and who had stayed, and what was more important: loyalty or money.

That was the mentality in Creole New Orleans from as far back as I can remember—that is, the 1950s—until recently. The lying, the disappearing, the money and lack of it had everything to do with race.

We were part of a mixed-race community of immigrants and Louisiana natives, and there was no place for us in the data tables of the census or in the mind of a black-and-white America. And yet we existed, for generations. Now, in a thoroughly researched new book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, Vivek Bald traces one vein of our lineage, from a most distant country…

…Racially, the Bengalis confounded the official categories. On documents, they appeared as “white, colored, Negro, Indian and East Indian,” Bald notes. And after their intermarriages to local women of color, their descendants still operated in all of these categories. When I was growing up, people talked on front porches and at kitchen tables about light-skinned family members who “passed” for white and were never seen again. Other people “passed” by simply going across town each day to work in banks, stores and other places where jobs were unavailable to Negroes. Bald notes that some darker-skinned Indians escaped Negro segregation by wearing turbans and calling themselves “Turks” and “Hindoos” while selling their wares, before coming home to their black families.

But the Bengalis in the mixed-race community kept few written accounts of their lives. Bald’s evidence is their footprint in business—restaurants and shops—and their occupations listed in census tables, for example, as countermen, chauffeurs, porters, firemen and subway laborers.

My grandfather became a shopkeeper and lived the rest of his life in the black community of New Orleans. People from around the world melded easily into our location. In the 19th century, Tremé was home to one of the most powerful and liberal communities of free people of color in America, rooted not only in Africa but also Europe, the Caribbean and—I recently learned from a classmate—as far away as New Zealand…

Read the entire article here.