Queen Anne’s Lace for Her Truth : MY PLACE : An Aborigine’s Stubborn Quest for Her Truth, Heritage and Origins <i> by Sally Morgan (Henry Holt: $19.95; 360 pp.; 0-8050-0911-6) </i>

Most appropriate for Sally Morgan’s first book is a loosely bound bouquet consisting of Michigan lilies, supported by a fist full of Queen Anne’s lace. Green velvet is suggested for the tie.

Morgan is an Australian aborigine octoroon who surfaces out of a woodpile as ancient as the stones it rests upon. She bravely selects the category nonfiction when many less courageous would have gone the path of protective fiction. She tells almost all that matters about the insidious affects of racism as it exists on the continent of Australia. Her story is not unknown anywhere where indigenous people have been hardily conquered by celebrating colonialists. She tells her peoples’ story tenderly, courageously and convincingly.

“You bloody kids don’t want me, you want a bloody white grandmother, I’m black. Do you hear, black, black, black!” Nan, her maternal grandmother screams this out unexpectedly one day at the 15-year-old narrator, Sally. For the first time, she was conscious of Nan’s color. “She wasn’t white.” She thought logically . . . “if she wasn’t white then neither were we. What did that make us, what did that make me? I had never thought of myself as being black before.”

That night, she asked her younger sister as they stared at a poster of John, Paul, George and Ringo. “Jill, did you know Nan was black?” Of course she did. “You know we are not Indian, don’t you?”

“I don’t want anything blacker than a pair of patent leather shoes” is a statement more than once heard in a world where the color of a citizen’s skin does make the difference. To breed out of blackness is a conscious desire of many miscegenated human beings. The closer one gets to ivory, the closer one gets to earthly salvation is a maxim wherever the European has entered.

“Blue eyes are like money; they pay your way in.” So states one of Alice Walker’s characters in her newest novel, “The Temple of My Familiar.” Toni Morrison, cemented her career on the title “The Bluest Eye” and her premise that the secret wish of many little black children was to possess a pair of blue peepers. More than a million dark parents have rested easier historically at the birth of a child who was more white than they. Survival has often been based internationally on the color of one’s skin. Often, forgotten is that (the one) God has no gender, no race, no color. Her Uncle Arthur speaks. “I’m ‘shamed of myself now. I feel ‘shamed for some of the things I done. I wanted to be white, you see. I’d lie in bed at night and think if God made me white, it’d be the best thing. Then, I could get on in the world, make something of myself. Fancy, me thinkin’ that. What was wrong with my own people?” Uncle Arthur, Nan’s older brother, estimated as being over 90, reasons this way as he nears his end. And like this:

“In those days, it was considered a privilege for a white man to want you, but if you had children you weren’t allowed to keep them. You was only allowed to keep the black ones. They took the white ones off you ‘cause you weren’t considered fit to raise a child with white blood. I tell you it made a wedge between people. Some of the black men felt real low, and some of the native girls with a bit of white in them wouldn’t look at a black man. There I was stuck in the middle. Too black for the whites and too white for the blacks.” His testament makes one consider how racially pure hundreds of thousands of visibly white humans could be once their seeds are blended with the visible others.

In a church school meeting, sometime after Sally Morgan surmises her new knowledge of her racial self, she believes she received a message from God. She was surprised to find Him in church. “My Place” is filled with humor. “It had to be Him because the voice seemed to come from without not within, it transcends the reality of the room. . . . The mental images that I had built up of Him so far in my life began to dissolve, and in their place came a new image. A person, overwhelming love, acceptance and humor. What Nan called real class. In an instant, I became what other’s refer to as a believer.” This second revelation put the starch in her collar that lifted her head above her race.

She moves out of herself and into the world of others with conviction. The courage of her Uncle Arthur launches an investigation that nets the fears and shame of first her mother, then her grandmother. Transcending their oppressed memories is the key to comprehending Sally’s accomplishment. There is nothing to fear but human mediocracy, she convinces them. Rally around my voice, she convinces them. Our truth is a light that we need, that we possess and that we must share with all others. To be successful, so that our lives are not spent in vain, is the reason.

“Well Sal, that’s all I’m gonna tell you. My brain’s no good, it’s gone rotten. I don’t want to talk no more. I got my secrets. I’ll take them to the grave. Some things, I can’t talk ‘bout. Not even to you, my granddaughter. They for me to know. They not for you or your mother to know.

“I’m glad I won’t be here in body when you finish that book. I’m glad I’m goin. . . . Time to tell what it’s been like in this country.”

The name of the man who sired Sally’s mother is left only implied by her Uncle Arthur and several others that she questions. This adds mystery and discretion and loyalty to Nan’s vow that she would be buried with that proof. She leaves some disintegrating bones in the closet to inheriting the wind. Sally Morgan is gracious, courageous, important and deserving of all hands up in her praise.