All in the Family : What does color mean if you can choose your race? : THE SWEETER THE JUICE: A Family Memoir in Black and White, <i> By Shirlee Taylor Haizlip (Simon & Schuster: $22; 268 pp.)</i>

It seems like a story from another age: light-skinned black people who decide to “pass” for white, shunning their darker relatives and their black communities for a “better” life. The theme of the tragic mulatto--central in such popular movies and novels as “Imitation of Life,” “Pinky” and Nella Larsen’s “Passing”--was common throughout the first half of the 20th Century. As we edge toward the 21st Century, carrying with us the legacy of the Civil Rights movement, these stories seem antiquated, like the browning image of an old photo.

In her family memoir, “The Sweeter the Juice,” Shirlee Taylor Haizlip reminds us that “the past is prologue.” Having grown up in Connecticut, the child of a prominent (dark-skinned) Baptist minister, she enjoyed a life of comfort that she rarely questioned. It wasn’t until she was much older that she began to look for the missing links in her mother’s life. She knew they were there:

“Three of my grandparents died before I was born. The remaining one, my mother’s father, William Morris, whom my mother called Willmorris (I heard it as one word), was inaccessible to me. As a ‘white’ man who could not admit colored people into his world, he lived a distant life in a distant place. I knew he was alive, because whenever the subject of her father came up, my mother, with uncharacteristic venom, referred to him as ‘Wilmorris that-bastard-in-Maryand’. . . This need, this pain of my mother’s became mine. Her loss and rejection gave shape to development. It touched me in ways I am yet unable to fathom. As my mother approached her eightieth birthday, I made a conscious decision to use whatever means possible to find her family. I knew that I would find them.”

Haizlip discovered many things in the process, beginning with a grandfather and a slew of fair-skinned relatives who had “disappeared” into the white world, leaving Haizlip’s mother, who was very light herself, and a younger brother behind.

With the dedication of a skilled investigative reporter, Shirlee Taylor Haizlip hunts down her family tree--both black and white. Her discoveries lead her to the startling conclusion that there is no such thing as “real white Americans”:

“Some geneticists have said that 95% of ‘white’ Americans have widely varying degrees of black heritage. According to ‘The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy’ (edited by Arlene H. Eakle and Johni Cerny, Ancestry Publishers, Salt Lake City, 1984: $39.95; 786 pp.), 75% of all African-Americans have at least one white ancestor and 15% have (a) predominantly white blood line. . . . As Adrian Piper wrote (in Transition 58, 1993), ‘The longer a person’s family has lived in this country, the higher the probable percentage of African ancestry--bad news for the DAR, I’m afraid.’ ”

In Haizlip’s own family line, she finds a prominent white judge, James D. Halyburton, federal judge of the Eastern District of Virginia from 1844-1861. She also finds that her great-grandmother, Margaret Mahler, was an Irish immigrant who married not only one “mulatto” man (Haizlip’s great-grandfather), but after his death, another “colored” man.

One of the memoir’s most touching scenes is when Margaret Mahler’s father, an Irish immigrant turned successful American entrepreneur, shows up offering to take care of her and her child--on the condition that she leave her “colored” husband. Margaret replies that her husband, “colored” or not, was, to her, “the best man that ever was”--and promptly refused her father’s affection and wealth.

As for the relatives who chose to pass, Haizlip deftly deals with the hows and whys--no easy task, considering her mother’s pain at being ostracized by her “white” relatives for more than 75 years. Through Haizlip’s efforts, her mother and her Aunt Grace, who has lived all her life as a white woman, were reunited in 1992. Despite the obvious joy of the reunion, the author realizes: “It was just as well that after this visit, they would be three thousand miles apart. Race still separated them. I understood now in ways that I had not that Grace was indeed white. She could not give up being white, nor could she tear down the alabaster walls she had built around her life. She would be content to see us as often as we might like to visit, as long as no one in her circle knew who or what we were. In other words, she would be satisfied to continue the pattern of the past.”

The very notion that one could choose to be black or white shows how meaningless the delineation of race can be. On the other hand, the fact that there are those who find being “white” so much easier, psychologically and economically, shows how heavy the burden of racism can be. But when a person chooses to be “white,” it is always at a cost, a point that Haizlip makes painfully clear in this passage about a great aunt and uncle she discovered:

“Ruth and John had no children. Some in the family say it was because they feared their genes would tell: They might give birth to a brown child. . . .

“The year my great-uncle John died I graduated from high school. I did not know about this interesting man who liked to catch butterflies and loved books until I began to do research on my family. Once again, I felt anger over being deprived of an older relative that I would love to have known. It is likely he would not have wanted to know me. He was a loyal American and a loyal Harvard man, but he did not claim his blackness.”

A resident of Los Angeles, Haizlip takes interesting note of California’s special appeal to blacks who wanted to pass: Here was a place far away from the South and the East--far from those communities where relatives might give away their secret.

She points to Lyle Saxon’s 1937 novel, “Children of Strangers,” about Louisiana Creoles. When the protagonist, a light-skinned black man, decides to pass, he tells his mother: “I’ve left Chicago for good and all, and I’m going to California where I don’t know nobody at all. I’ve crossed the line in Chicago, but it’s dangerous there. Too many people know that I’m not white. On the coast, nobody will ever know. I’m going and I’m breaking off clean with the people I’ve known.”

This memoir marks not only a new and necessary chapter in American racial history, but the debut of a fine writer as well. “I have been called Egyptian, Italian, Jewish, French, Iranian, Armenian, Syrian, Spanish, Portuguese and Greek,” Haizlip writes. “I have also been called black and Peola and nigger and high yellow and bright. I am an American anomaly. I am an American ideal. I am the American nightmare. I am the Martin Luther King dream. I am the new America.”

May this stirring American voice tell us many more stories.