Published in 2020
288 pages
E. Dolores Johnson is the author of “Say I’m Dead”, a multi-generational memoir that shows America’s changing attitudes toward mixed race through the journeys of the women in her family.
Dolores was born in Buffalo, NY. She earned degrees from Howard University and Harvard Graduate School of Business in Boston. After a career in tech, she took an MFA equivalent course to learn creative writing. Johnson is a published essayist focused on inter-racialism, and Say I’m Dead is her first book. Dolores lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What is this book about?
Say I’m Dead is the true story of family secrets, separation, courage, and trans-formation through five generations of interracial relationships. Fearful of prison time—or lynching—for violating Indiana’s antimiscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson’s black father and white mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo, New York.
When Johnson was born, social norms and her government-issued birth certificate said she was Negro, nullifying her mother’s white blood in her identity. Later, as a Harvard-educated business executive feeling too far from her black roots, she searched her father’s black genealogy. But in the process, Johnson suddenly realized that her mother’s whole white family was—and always had been—missing. When she began to pry, her mother’s 36-year-old secret spilled out. Her mother had simply vanished from Indiana, evading an FBI and police search that had ended with the conclusion that she had been the victim of foul play.
