Secret Daughter.

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Author: Kaufman, Joanne

CRITIC'S CHOICE

It was their skin color that set them apart from each other-and kept them apart. At the age of 4, June Cross, the daughter born of a relationship between Norma, a white would-be actress, and a well-known African-American vaudevillian, was sent in 1958 from New York to Atlantic City to live with Norma's friends, Paul and Peggy Bush. Known to June as Aunt Peggy and Uncle Paul, the African-American couple would raise her, love her and provide much-needed stability in her young life. Meanwhile, the ambitious Norma, who later married the actor-comic Larry Storch, sent her postcards and took June for occasional weekends and summer vacations. In Secret Daughter, Cross wonderfully recaptures a child's bewilderment with the adult world-a realm full of strange words ("colored" and "segregated" and "passing") and inexplicable behavior. Why, when her mother was having a party for Storch, did she ask June to call her "Aunt Norma" rather than "Mommie"? Why did Mommie advance the fiction that she and Larry had adopted her? Deeply moving, Secret Daughter chronicles a complex life buffeted by lies and only partly buffered by love. [4 stars]

PHOTO (COLOR): June Cross remembers the mother who couldn't raise her.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): June with her guardians, Peggy and Paul Bush, in Atlantic City in 1964.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)

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Reviewed by Joanne Kaufman