Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away.

Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away by June Cross Viking Adult, May 2006 $24.95, ISBN 0-670-88555-X

In 1997, June Cross, a well-known television producer for PBS and CBS with many honors to her credit, won an Emmy and a duPontColumbia Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism for Secret Daughter, a documentary on how race had sundered her family. Now Cross, an assistant professor of journalism at Columbia University, details the story in a memoir with equal grace and candor.

Her mother, a white aspiring actress, fled a troubled, interracial relationship with a popular vaudeville entertainer in the 1950s. She eventually felt compelled, given the racial climate of the era, to give up their daughter, when it became apparent that Cross, at age four, could no longer pass for white. Her mother took her to live with a black couple in Atlantic City, New Jersey, whom Cross knew as friends of her parents. Welt cared for but homesick there, Cross still spent holidays with her mother in New York or Hollywood, however, and writes wistfully of their relationship and her close ties to her older half-brother.

Her mother, who later married a successful television actor, kept her true relationship to Cross a secret until June confronted her for the documentary in 1996. Cross also tells how her film led to the discovery of another lost half-sibling and the family's eventual reunion. Her probing and telling of this story opens a rare window on how race takes its toll on the lives of specific people in real but unique situations.--Reviewed by Angela P. Dodson