Ronne Hartfield’s family tree bears an African branch, a Jewish one, a British one, and a Choctaw Indian one. Her heritage is so varied that when a radio producer wanted to recount Hartfield’s family history as part of a series to be pitched to WBEZ, a genealogist had to be hired to help fact check. “My maternal grandfather was a plantation owner who had three children with my grandmother, who was the daughter of a married German Jew” and a half-white woman, says Hartfield. “So my mother was really only an eighth black, though she considered herself black. Our clan, so typical of African-Americans, has been completely miscegenational for generations.”
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Hartfield–whose five decades of work in arts administration and social service include stints as head of Urban Gateways, the Chicago Children’s Choir, and museum education at the Art Institute–set out a few years ago to fulfill a longtime goal: writing a book. “I decided on a family chronicle, because I felt the need to dispel the stereotype of the tragic mulatto.” Her agent is still shopping “Another Way Home” around to publishers. Meanwhile, it’s serving as a main thread in “Crossing Boundaries: Stories and Music From Biracial America,” produced by Ann Feldman and set to air on Eight Forty-Eight next fall.
Hartfield’s mother left New Orleans for Chicago during the Great Migration of 1918. She found a job in a factory–where she passed for white–and met her husband, who worked in a neighboring factory. They brought up five children in Bronzeville, making sure each got a college education. “That’s another theme of my book–the optimism and protectiveness of that lower-middle-class community,” says Hartfield. “People who write about black life tend to ignore the quotidian.”
