Cole Family: His life and legacy would be shaped by a long journey of unfreedom and the blurring of lines between the complexity of race, family and property. As a farmer, he fought for the Confederacy and wanted to see the mission of keeping slavery forever realized. Maybe, his family’s survival depended on another’s family destruction.

His wife’s family would, in a small way, usher in a connection to people whose racial heritage and birth denied their freedom and a bondage cemented and celebrated as a nascent idea to form an established concept of this country. The farmer would risk his life to keep “the peculiar institution” in place. Its history in America begins with the earliest European settlements and ends with the Civil War.

Imitation of Life, based on Fannie Hurst's best selling novel, traces the lives of two widows, one white and the employer, the other black and the servant. Each woman has one daughter. The white woman, Beatrice Pullman (played by Claudette Colbert), hires the black woman, Delilah, (played by Louise Beavers) as a live-in cook and housekeeper. In the Depression of the 1930s, the two women and their daughters live in poverty, although even a financially struggling white woman can afford a mammy.

Their economic salvation comes when Delilah shares a secret pancake recipe with her boss. Beatrice opens a restaurant, markets the recipe, and soon becomes wealthy. She offers Delilah, the restaurant's cook, a 20% share of the profits.

“Regarding the recipe, Delilah, a true cinematic mammy, delivers two of the most pathetic lines ever from a black character: ‘I gives it to you, honey. I makes you a present of it.’ While Delilah is keeping her mistress's family intact, her relationship with Peola, her daughter, disintegrates.”

Delilah knows her place in the Jim Crow hierarchy: the bottom rung. Hers is an accommodating resignation, bordering on contentment. Peola hates her life, wants more, wants to live as a white person, to have the opportunities that whites enjoy. Delilah hopes that her daughter will accept her racial heritage. "God made you black, honey.” 

Ultimately and inevitably, Peola rejects her mother, runs away, and passes for white. Delilah dies of a broken heart. A repentant and tearful Peola returns to her mother's funeral. Similar themes abound in this fictional story and our family’s renditions about the two Coles sisters who were light enough to pass for white.

The tragedy was not that they were black, or had a drop of "Negro blood," although whites saw that as a tragedy. Rather, the real tragedy was the way race was used to limit people of color. Surviving hating and being hated is a slippery slope. The Cole farmer and his Driskell wife just might have been ground zero for a different kind of kinship.