Homes in Village Creek were advertised mostly by word of mouth—and it worked. Even though mortgages were hard to obtain because Norwalk banks feared the community would become “too black,” the residents thrived, and Village Creek lived up to its goals. It maintained a healthy balance of white, black, and mixed-race neighbors.14

Elinor and Frederick purchased a split-level house in Village Creek, on Split Rock Road, and settled into a community where they finally could walk hand in hand down the street without feeling self-conscious. There were even neighborhood children, white and black, for Chris and Stephen to befriend. For the first time since they married, Elinor and Frederick had found a welcoming neighborhood. Just a year prior to their move, in 1958, a Gallup poll recorded that only 4 percent of white Americans approved of interracial marriages.15 Elinor and Frederick had found a community that fell into that small percentage.

The children were thrilled. There were trails and playgrounds where kids could hang out for hours. Chris and Stephen rode their bikes up and down the street and visited their friends anytime they wanted. There were always community parties where neighbors came together for picnics and sports.16

But the utopian environment couldn’t erase prejudice beyond the neighborhood. Chris, because he was much younger, didn’t experience as many socially isolating moments as Stephen apparently did. He had been a toddler during the period when the family moved frequently. As both children got older, however, the question of where they fit in was subconsciously planted in their minds. Elinor and Frederick didn’t actively acknowledge that their sons were in fact different from their classmates. It was something Chris would discover on his own.

When he was seven or eight years old, Chris was getting dressed in the locker room for gym class. Intense conversations were hardly common in second grade, but his friends Joe Johnson and Robert Little were certainly having one.

“All of a sudden they got into a real animated discussion,” said Chris. “And they went back and forth and I was kind of listening. And finally Robert Little said, ‘Well, his mother’s black so he’s got to be black.’” That was the first time Chris noticed he was different. It had never occurred to him to ask his parents about his racial identity, because Frederick and Elinor never discussed it. Being mixed-race had never come up.

The way Elinor and Frederick were raising their sons—with no open dialogue about identity—inadvertently created distance between the parents and their children. Something was missing in the Albert household, and the lack of acknowledgment of racism and their unique family characteristics contributed to that. There was a division in the home. Elinor and Frederick were on one side, totally in love with each other, and the children were on another, emotionally neglected and figuring out how to be half white and half black by themselves.