Passing for White--Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820-1920 (review)

In the winter of 1951, seventy-three-year-old Bessie Cunningham did not welcome historian Albert Foley's inquiry into the lives of her grandparents, Irish immigrant Michael Morris Healy and his slave/wife, Elizabeth Clark Healy. This mixed racial ancestry constituted the Healy secret that most family members did not want to acknowledge. Without the support of the family, yet inspired by the new openness toward questions of race in the 1950's, Foley revealed in Beloved Outcaste: The Story of a Great Man Whose Life Has Become a Legend (1954) the Healy family secret not as the sin that the family generally understood it to be, but as the starting point for Bishop James Healy's ascent over adversity. More than half a century later, in Passing for White—Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820-1920, the historian James O'Toole wonderfully tells the broader Healy family story not only in light of a different, more fluid understanding of race, but also with a greater appreciation for the role that Catholicism played in the rise of the celebrated Healy family.

Using surviving historical documents, supplemented by an extensive exploration of the broader context in which the Healys lived, O'Toole weaves together fascinating tales of the earliest Healys in the United States, beginning with the Irish immigrant father. After moving to Georgia in 1818, Michael Morris Healy gained substantial wealth, including at one time as many as forty-nine slaves. Healy married one of these slaves, Eliza Clark. Foley had described the marriage as a "frontier process" (p. 17). O'Toole added that the relationship may have been based on love. Eliza Clark bore in quick succession ten children, nine of whom survived into adulthood.

Given the children's ambiguous status in the South, Michael Morris Healy lined up for each child a secure place in the North. Since born to a slave mother, all the children remained legally slaves, as did their mother. But the Healy children never really knew slave life, especially after they began to move to the North. Using their father's wealth and connections (especially profiting from Healy's chancemeeting on a steamer out of Washington, D.C., with the auxiliary bishop of Boston, John Bernard Fitzpatrick), the children attended Catholic schools in Boston and Quebec. Exhibiting deep concern for each other (but not necessarily for their parents), the Healy children, as O'Toole demonstrated, "For the rest of their lives... followed each other around the country, and wherever one or two of them settled through the circumstances of career, others soon came too" (p. 24).

In the North the talented Healy children formed an unlikely, though not altogether unexpected alliance with the Catholic Church. As O'Toole argues, the Catholic Church generally was not welcoming to African Americans. Yet the Healy children consistently refused to identify themselves as black. Effectively confirming themselves as white, all of the Healy offspring were consequently baptized Catholic. Most even professed religious vows. Though Michael Morris Healy, and, presumably, Eliza Clark Healy probably were unchurched, their children certainly would not be, especially after a number of Catholics, including Bishop Fitzpatrick, virtually adopted them.

With the sponsorship of Fitzpatrick, who repeatedly helped the Healys avoid embarrassing questions about their racial heritage, the oldest child, James, was ordained a Catholic priest in Paris in 1854. He served as Fitzpatrick's first chancellor, a position that prepared James well for his eventual consecration as Bishop of Portland, Maine. The third Healy child, Patrick, joined the Jesuits and eventually was appointed President of Georgetown College. The fourth, Sherwood, was ordained in 1858 and soon became, as O'Toole asserts, "one of the best schooled American priests of his generation" (p. 106). He taught moral theology at Saint Joseph's Seminary on the Hudson River, and was appointed rector of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston where he served as...