The New York Times
July 7, 1996
A Mother and Daughter Meet After 33 Years
By SARA RIMER
BOSTON -- The gray-haired white woman and the brown-skinned woman with
the short black hair sat side by side, mother and daughter, on top of
a picnic cooler.
So much has happened, they kept saying. "We'll never catch up," said
the mother, Geraldine Nephew Cummins.
Her daughter, Barbara Williams, was born 33 years ago in Boston, the
result of a rape. Back then, Mrs. Cummins said, she felt so ashamed of
having been raped and so afraid of raising a black child in the all-
white housing project where she lived that she gave her baby up for
adoption.
"It was unheard of that you would walk around with a little black
child," said Mrs. Cummins, who was married at the time, and whose
husband, Robert, died 11 years ago. "I've regretted it many times. But
it was too late. I'd already signed the papers."
For 33 years, mother and daughter lived in separate universes,
completely unknown to each other, but each wondering about the other.
In March, after years of sporadic searching and with help from
adoption records, Mrs. Williams, who lives in Minneapolis, found her
mother.
Their first conversation was over the telephone. Mrs. Cummins, who
folds linens for a rental company, recalled: "She said, 'I think
you're my mother.' I said, 'I know I am.'"
Each woman was brimming with questions. Mrs. Williams said: "We were
asking each other, 'How has it been for you? What's your life been
like?' She kept apologizing for having to give me up. I explained to
her that I understood."
Mrs. Cummins is 59 years old and has three other grown children. Her
blue eyes filled with tears behind her large glasses. "She was so
vibrant over the phone," Mrs. Cummins said. "I was trying not to let
her know I was crying.
"After we got off the phone, I sat there for a good long time and just
cried. It was a happy cry."
Mrs. Williams, who is an administrator for a financial-services
company, flew to Boston in April to meet her mother. She returned this
week with her husband, Don, who is black, and their five children,
ages 6 through 16 -- Mrs. Cummins' newly found grandchildren -- and
Don's parents.
On Thursday the Williamses were welcomed into Mrs. Cummins' large
extended family at their annual Fourth of July picnic in a park in the
city's South Boston neighborhood. Cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers and
sisters, black and white, hugged, kissed, ate, talked, danced and
played volleyball for seven hours. Williams, a forklift operator, was
already calling Mrs. Cummins "Mom."
The mother and daughter reunion has drawn extraordinary attention,
with many reporters, and other people outside the family, seeing it as
a parable about race and America. But to the two women, it is not so
complicated. When Mrs. Cummins was asked how she felt about her
daughter being black, she put her arm around Barbara. "She's my
daughter."
Asked how she felt about her mother being white, Mrs. Williams
shrugged. "She's my mother."
She had learned about her mother's race, and the rape, from social-
service records long before their first conversation. It was not the
color of her mother's skin that preoccupied her. "I wondered why she
didn't keep me," Mrs. Williams said. "I wondered if we'd have anything
in common."
As it turns out, they have plenty in common. They both love music --
all kinds of music -- family gatherings, and dabbling in arts and
crafts.
After that first telephone call in March, Mrs. Cummins told her other
three children about the rape and revealed that they had a sister.
Mrs. Cummins' son, Ted, a 32-year-old laborer, said: "I called Barbara
and said, 'I'm your kid brother. What's happening?'"
Mrs. Cummins' two daughters, Carol Delehanty and Theresa Shamshak,
also called to extend warm greetings. Mrs. Delehanty said: "My mother
was protecting her from society. Now, in the '90s, look at Boston --
everything is biracial."
For 33 years her mother had told no one other than her husband about
the rape. Her assailant had pulled her into an alley as she was
walking home alone.
"We talked about calling the police," she said. "My husband just
didn't want me to go through all that."
A month later she discovered she was pregnant. As a Catholic, she did
not consider abortion an option. For nine months, she said, she prayed
the baby would be her husband's.
"She had a little round face and dark hair," Mrs. Cummins said,
recalling the newborn she had held in her arms. "She had very light
skin." She had thought her baby might be white, she said, but doctors
told her otherwise. She had loved her baby instantly, she said.
The baby was placed with a foster mother, Corrine White, in Boston's
predominantly black Roxbury neighborhood. Three weeks later, Mrs.
Cummins and her husband, who worked as a driver for a Catholic
hospital, went to the foster home, picked up the baby and had her
christened at a Catholic church. They took her back to the foster home
and did not see her again.
Barbara spent nearly eight years with Mrs. White, whom she thought of
as her mother. But a social worker arranged for her to be adopted by a
white couple in Minneapolis, and she was moved.
For all Mrs. Cummins knew, her daughter spent all her school years in
Boston. In the 1970s, racial tension erupted in white South Boston
over court-ordered busing to desegregate the schools. "You'd see the
buses pulling up to the schools, and you'd see these little girls
getting off," Mrs. Cummins said, recalling the images on the
television news. "I'd think: 'Was that her?'"
For a while after the rape, she said, she had a fear of black men.
"But I eventually said I've got to put this behind me. I can't be
blaming the whole black race."
Mrs. White has stayed in close touch with Barbara over the years, and
she was at the picnic. She went warily to South Boston. "I don't go
around there, " she said. "I guess it's all right as long as I'm
around a lot of people."
Her foster daughter had no qualms about the neighborhood. Mrs. Cummins
smiled and cried throughout the festivities, as they made plans to
meet again in Minneapolis. "Before, there was an empty spot in my
life," she said. "It's all here now."
Her daughter said she felt at peace. "No more questions," she said.
"This is something I've wanted all my life."
Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company
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