Remembering Randy.

It is 2:30 in the morning, and I can't stop thinking about my brother's first wife Judy.
When she was young she had the idea that love could sustain her. More than the great wealth that her mother an father showered upon her.
She chose instead my brother, who also thought that love would see them through.
I can remember seeing Judy for the first time and thinking that she was the sweetest, the prettiest girl I had ever seen as she stepped out of her bright red Thunder bird convertible.

My neighborhood seemed an odd place to see such a vision of wealth and beauty, but there she was all decked out in her summer's finest clothes.
"Hi"! She said. "You must be Tommy?" Yes! I said. She said her name was Judy, and asked for my brother Eddie. I told her that he was in his room, which was on the second floor in the rear of my parents house.
I ran into the house and up the stairs to my big brother's room. I entered the room with the only thought that would have produced the words. Who is Judy?
The look on my brother's face told the story of a book that I had not read yet.
He ran past me as though he was late for the most miraculous event that would ever happen.
I followed right behind him until he jumped into Judy's car and speed off down the block and disappeared around the corner.
A short time later my brother Eddie came walking very quickly toward me from the side of our house. They must  have gone down the ally and parked in the back of the house.

Eddie looked at me very sternly, and told me of a mission that I had to complete for him.
He wanted me to watch for any sign of a family member returning home from places unknown.
I agreed. Mostly because I could see the excited happiness on both their faces, and I didn't want to ruin it for them.

The three of us were in the house by ourselves. They were in my brother's,  room and I was on the main floor living room watching our black and white Philco television.
They were alone for a long time, but Judy left before my mother and father got home.
Eddie came into the room where I was watching the TV. He looked as though he had just seen God face to face and God blessed my brother with a great deal of knowledge.
He swore me to secrecy, and I was very happy to keep it, because Eddie treated me as though I held his greatest possession.

A while later, two years or so, my brother had joined the Navy.
He and Judy had been married for a few months before he left home to enter the Navel training program. For the purpose of getting the education he would need to give his wife the life that might keep her happy.
After basic training he returned home on a furlough.
Judy had left her family and moved in with a man and his wife who were of different races. The man was mixed with black and who knows what else, and his wife was Jewish.
this couple had a great deal of sympathy for Eddie and Judy.

When Eddie had return to the Navy after his furlough, Judy got the news that she was pregnant with my nephew Randall.

I can't remember exactly when he was born, but I do remember a bright sunny day and the weather was warm and the air was fresh and clean.

Judy arrived with Randy all bundled up in baby blue blankets and a white jumper.

My mother invited Judy and her new baby into the living room and sat her down on the sofa close to her.
My mother was given the baby and as the baby entered the embrace of my mother's waiting arms, I heard the sounds of love and expectation coming from my mother's mouth." Ooooooooh Judy" she said, with joy and love in her voice. "He is beautiful!
I remember feeling  immediately bonded to my little nephew. I didn't want him to leave our home.  Our hearts were filled with love for our visitors.
Judy suddenly got quiet. As though she wanted to say something that might change the good feelings she brought to us with her new born child.
Indeed! When she did start talking, each word she spoke brought fear and sadness to my mother's growing tortured expression.

Judy was telling us that her parents wanted her to come back to their home and raise Randy as a white child. If she would agree to never see my brother again, she would be welcomed back into the life she had known before she married Eddie.

Randy had skin white as milk and there were no features that would give any clue that he had any African blood in him at all.

 My family would not think the fact that he was so fair in color was strange, because the presence of European blood had diluted half of our African ancestry and many of my cousins could have easily passed as white.
Now this had been bread into my family for a couple of generations without adding more European blood into it. My Grandparents on both sides of my family were mixed African and European and their children had children with this same ethnic mixture. So, for two generations we brought a rainbow of color into the world. From the color of a brown paper bag to almost white without diluting what we were till Randy was born.
Diluted with European blood one more time gave Randy the appearance of a curly headed blond Scandinavian baby.
Poor child!
Judy's parents convinced her to go with their plan and have the marriage annulled.

Annulled?

Annulment must have made some lawyer very wealthy.

We did not hear another word from Judy till seventeen years later. I received a phone call form Mrs. Judy Lee, formerly, Mrs. Judy Bruce.

What could this mean?

I was filled with hope that she had brought Randy back into our lives. To share his true heritage with him.

Unfortunately for Randy, his mother's family had betrayed her.
Randy's wealthy grandfather had provided for Randy a third of his grand estate.

After his grandfather died.

This was not the way one of Randy's uncles would see it.

At the reading of the will after the money was given to his two sons and one grandchild, the uncle that had been responsible for having my brother severely beaten, spoke out saying that the bastard, nigger should not receive a penny of Randy's grandfather's wealth.

This was the first time Randy had ever heard of his true familial history.
By the time I received this story, Randy, who was raised in a life of privilege, and luxury had been ostracized by friends and at least one family member.
Randy was curious and wanted to meet his colored family especially his father.

 Judy left the marriage before Eddie had ever seen his son, and for seventeen years Eddie had done a good job forgetting he had a son from that marriage.

I had a chance to speak with Randy for a short while before we got onto the subject of his real father.
Randy seemed unemotional and a little distant as I asked him question that might reveal that nature prevailed over nurture.

He told me that he was in a band and loved to sing and play the guitar.
Judy had told me that music was not stressed as a discipline to enhance his expression in life, but he found it important.
She said she saw this as a contribution from his real father.

Randy asked me if his father wanted meet him..
I told Randy that I would try to arrange a meeting for him and his father.

What now? I thought.
My brother had sworn off trusting any white person in his life, calling them "devils".

Knowing what might happen to each of them during their first conversation ever in life, I decided to call my brother and tell him as much as I knew at that point.

The news was met with immediate discomfort. After a few moments of silence, he began to speak with a monotone very softly saying, " He wants to meet me after never having set eyes on him?" "No, I don't want to meet him".
I could not imagine how he must have felt. His own son a stranger. What could possibly be said that could explain away seventeen yeasr of absence. For both my brother and Randy the differences that each experienced began with the simplest things like the very food that they ate, the music they listened to, and years of racial upheaval seen from opposing sides of this tinderbox issue.

I could not blame my brother for his decision to not meet with his son.

I however wanted it all to workout and install my nephew to his rightful place as a prince in the family that is royalty to me.

It was now my duty to tell my reclaimed nephew that his father would not meet him.
A young man at 17 is getting ready to enter a world to explore the possibilities the world has in store for him.
How strange the world must be when the world he was born into betrayed him by the mother that gave birth to him.

I'm sure Judy's parents convinced her that she and her child would be better off hiding the fact that Randy's father was a man of color. If only his father were darker in color Randy might not have been so easily hidden behind his fair skin.

After I told Randy that his father didn't want to meet him, I offered to be his advocate. I hoped in time that Eddie might want to get to know his son after the shock of having him return from oblivion.

Randy declined. What happened after were his mother's attempts to bring him back from depression, to the son she knew as a confident youth.
Randy told a few close friends of his newly found identity. His best friend started avoiding him, the girl he had planed on marrying told him that she didn't want to have black children, and worst of all he could not trust the family that raised him.

His mother offered to send him and the friend that didn't ostracize him to Europe, where he could see places that might give him an idea of how broad the minds of the world truly are. The world outside his rigid, exclusive, small minded community.

One night in Paris he and his friend had been drinking like a couple of sailors. They decided to join the French Foreign Legion.
The French Foreign Legion was known for taking young men with hopeless lives ahead and give them new purpose.
This how I imagine the recruitment process works.
After recruitment is finale I'm told that these young men somehow loose their old identity and given a new one.
Randy woke up the next morning no longer free. He could write letters to his mother to ask for help. To free him from an unsure fate. She tried and tried to use any influence she had with the politicians she had met in her very connected life. Where people who do the moving and shaking are capable of helping their friends in need.
No one, with all their money and international influence, could free Randy from the  grasp of the Foreign Legion.
Letter after letter Judy pleaded with the French government to help free her son.

A few months later she received a letter and a container of the chard human remains of a Legionnaire, who died in a helicopter crash during a battle somewhere in Africa.

I'm am not convinced that the remains in that container belong to my nephew Randy.