Race Divided Them, but Reunion Came With Luck and Love

Mark thought he knew a lot about himself. He was 14 years old, the son of Robert and Willia Mae Nobling, a black kid from Camden, N.J.

But when he asked his mother for his birth certificate, she was strangely reluctant. And a friend who looked at the document saw the reason at once.

“Yo, man, you’re white?” he asked.

“No,” said Mark, “I’m not white.”

But there it was, as recorded by the clerk in Lafayette, La. Mark ran home, stripped naked and twisted and turned to study his body in a mirror. The golden brown skin, his blackness, suddenly seemed white.

“I was so confused. I didn’t know who I was,” he recalls. “I just knew nothing.”

Another quarter-century would pass before he would learn everything--that he was the product of an interracial love affair, that prejudice had forced his mother to give him up, that his family had never forgotten him.

And he would find out only because of a stroke of luck.

*

Juanita Foreman met Clement Lewis in the 1950s. They were an unlikely couple: She was an attractive white woman from the South with a young daughter, and a waitress at a South Philadelphia restaurant; he was 16 years older and a handsome, smooth-talking black man from Camden, just across the river from Philadelphia.

Their affair ended when Foreman became pregnant. Spurned by Lewis, she returned to her native Lafayette in September 1957. Three months later, Mark Anthony was born; Juanita gave him the last name Crocetto, the same as her 2-year-old daughter, Maria.

Though the birth certificate said he was white, his skin and black curly hair said otherwise, in a time and place when race meant everything.

Before Mark turned 1, Juanita gave birth to her third child. Her future husband, Joe Blanchard, threatened to renege on his promise to marry her if she refused to return her mixed-race child to his father.

“It was hard to give up my child,” Juanita said, occasionally slipping white tissue under her glasses to wipe away tears. “It’s just that it had to be done.”

Said Maria: “I remember him sitting on a dresser and Momma was tying his shoes. She kept hugging him and kissing him. She was crying.

“I knew something was wrong. I said, ‘Momma, where are you going?’ She said, ‘I’m taking him to his father.’ ”

That was in the spring of 1959, when Mark was about 18 months old.

But when Juanita went to the Camden dry-cleaning business where Clement Lewis worked, he refused to believe Mark was his son. Desperate, Juanita pleaded with Robert Nobling, Lewis’ brother. Nobling and Willia Mae, who could not have children, agreed to rear him as their own.

With the cab waiting to take her to the train station for the long ride home alone, Juanita said goodbye.

“I put him in the baby bed,” she said. “I hugged him and kissed him and never looked back. I ran to the cab.

“I was so brokenhearted. I left part of my heart when I left him.”

Back in Louisiana, Maria anxiously awaited her mother’s return.

“I kept asking, ‘Where’s Mark?’ I kept waiting for him to come back and he never did,” Maria said.

For years, Maria thought Mark was in Philadelphia with her father, Frank Crocetto, but learned otherwise when she visited there in 1967. Unknown to her, Mark was just a few miles away in Camden.

When she returned to Lafayette, 12-year-old Maria confronted her mother. Juanita became hysterical, and Maria never broached the subject again.

“For a long time, I didn’t understand. I was mad,” Maria said. “All I could think about was they took my brother away. I didn’t care about what color he was. It didn’t matter. He was my little brother.”

*

Willia Mae was a housewife who kept the family’s Camden rowhouse immaculate; Robert worked in an oil refinery.

A strapping woman who weighed 300 pounds, Willia Mae was the disciplinarian. Every night, she would sit down with Mark and go over his homework. Once a month, she would send Mark across town to Antioch Baptist Church, where her father was a deacon.

When Mark was 15--a year after he found his birth certificate--Willia Mae suffered a stroke that left her partially paralyzed. Robert was dying of cancer. It was not the time to ask about his parents.

Before she died in 1978, Willia Mae told him the truth: Clement Lewis--the man he thought was his uncle--was really his father.

It all began to make sense. For years, whenever he saw his Uncle Clem around Camden, Lewis would give him $10 and say, “You know I’m your father?” But Mark was always told to disregard it.

Now Mark lived with Lewis for two years and even considered changing his name. He got to know his father and what he learned was not pretty: His father was a womanizer, a drinker and a party man.

“When I look back at my life, I was blessed,” he said. “I don’t regret anything. I would not have had the same upbringing.”

He went to high school, attended college, landed a job at a bank and eventually became a mortgage consultant.

When Lewis died in 1985, Mark thought he had lost the chance to look for his mother. He had procrastinated--almost afraid of the reception he would get if he found her.

“I prayed and hoped I would,” he said. “But I always thought it was too late.”

And then, more than 10 years later, a freak coincidence answered Mark’s prayers.

Linda Perry’s husband had been transferred to Baton Rouge, and the couple had to sell their house in Lafayette. She had a list of three mortgage consultants and called one at random: Mark Crocetto.

They chatted across a thousand miles. Perry remembered a grade-school classmate, Maria Crocetto. She asked Mark if he had any relatives in Lafayette. Maybe, Mark said. He told her his story.

Perry contacted Maria through a relative, and was asked to call Mark and check two facts: his birth date and his middle name.

Both matched.

“There was just this silence between us. My heart must have gone down to my toes,” said Perry. “I said, ‘I think I found your sister.’ ”

*

Three weeks later, on June 28, Mark and his wife, Nancy, landed at Lafayette Regional Airport and were greeted by nearly two dozen relatives. Some clutched flowers and balloons; others held a banner that read, “Welcome Back Mark.”

Juanita put a hand over her mouth as he walked through the doorway--trying to hold back the emotion--but the tears flowed as she embraced her son for the first time in 36 years.

In the next 49 hours, Mark was reunited with Maria, 41, and met his younger sister, Roberta Blanchard--who learned of his existence only several months before. Godparents, aunts, uncles and cousins filled the family’s large trailer home.

“We lost a lot of years,” said Roberta, 37. “We’re never going to catch up. We were both robbed.”

Juanita served fried catfish, deviled eggs, crawfish jambalaya and apple pie. Blanchard, the man who forced her to give Mark away, offered a prayer.

“I regretted it. I was hoping someday we would find him,” said Blanchard, 73. “It has always been on my mind. I knew someday everything would get straightened out, and it finally did.”

Mark talked about his life and shared photographs of his three daughters and stepson. His family displayed their own photographs. But there were none of the baby Mark--they had all been destroyed or lost over the years.

Blanchard and other relatives “hated him,” admitted his aunt, Mildred Steiner, who was 12 when Mark left. “They wanted him wiped off the face of the earth.”

When Juanita returned without Mark, relatives would only mention his name privately. Everyone was afraid to ask Juanita where she had taken him.

“God knows it was the best thing for him,” said Maurice Foreman, his uncle and godfather. “But we never stopped wondering. We wondered where he was at--if he was alive.”

Mark had always wondered why his mother had given him up. Now, she explained and apologized; he forgave her.

“We really pick up from today and just move on,” he said. “Whatever time we have remaining, I want to make it good.”

So they danced to Creole music--his mother grabbing him by the hand and pulling him to his feet. And at the airport, when the reunion ended, Mark wept for all that had been lost and all that had been gained.

“Let me wipe the tears from your face,” said Juanita, “because I have never wiped the tears from my son’s face.”