Ben Nightingale
Ben Nightingale, 72, checked both white and black on the recent U.S. census. “And if it”™s not on a form, I always write it in.”
His birth parents ”“ a Jewish Polish mother and a mixed-race “Negro” father ”“ placed him up for adoption.
His adoptive mother was Ethyl Nightingale, a star of early black cinema ”“ “race films” produced for black audiences in the ”™20s and ”™30s. His adoptive father ”“ also Ben Nightingale and also African-American ”“ left the family soon after young Ben arrived. He remained a factor in his adoptive son”™s life only in a “distant and vaporous manner without continuity. So, basically, I was growing up with my adoptive mother.” Ethyl Nightingale died in the 1980s in Philadelphia, where she lived all her adult life and where she raised young Ben.
As racial variety goes, Nightingale”™s story is a humdinger that has come to light over the course of his life as he gained access to records. But of his makeup, he said, “It didn”™t make me any different, what the adoption papers said. Thoreau said, ”˜We are not all one thing.”™ I love it.”
A 4-year-old Ben Nightingale declares “I am too tullored,” to open Nightingale”™s one-man autobiographical play, recently produced at Elmwood Playhouse in Nyack. He is being taunted by neighborhood kids who call him “whitey.” His young tongue pronounces colored “tullored.”
“My family, neighborhood, church ”“ everyone colored. I had no memory of another world,” the play continues. “My South Philadelphia, Martin Street world was all that existed. For me to exist, I had to be tullored, even if no one believed me.”
After the March Elmwood performance, there was a 20-minute Q&A session: “The audience looked upon me as an expert ”“ an expert on adoption, an expert on Jewishness. I”™m more about looking out at the world, observing it, than participating ”“ it could be the writer in me.”
Nightingale possesses a 1948 YMCA summer camp photo that hints at the curious reality he observed growing up: the only (apparently) white boy among eight black campers and staff in a segregated America.
Nightingale”™s play, “Too White to Be Black,” was for him a necessary effort. “I looked at the works of people like Hal Holbrook who did Mark Twain and those are some pretty high standards,” he said. “I am not going to live up to those performers. Mainly, I did this because I was driven. It”™s almost like having therapy in public.”
Nightingale”™s humility collapses in the face of his eloquence:
“I have ceased wondering what to do with my black heritage and experiences, I sing them. I write them. For they have been singing within me for a long, long time and they were written in my heart ”¦ I was given up for adoption, placed in the Hebrew Home for Infants, transferred to the Negro Foster Home and finally adopted. I wonder if there had been a Solomon at the agency if he would have threatened to cut me in pieces, separating me from me. And would there have been cries of, ”˜No, don”™t! Leave him all of a piece.”™? But that is not what was done. There was a tearing away of me from me. My work has been to reverse my dismemberment. For at one time I did exist in wholeness, as the adoption agency file described me, ”˜a Hebrew, white, negro child.”™”
Nightingale is a 22-year member of Temple Bet Am Shalom in White Plains: “We raised our kids there.” He and his wife, Gillian Friedlander, have two grown children, Elana, 28, and David, 25.
Nightingale has been since 1999 a certified QuickBooks adviser. He teaches QuickBooks ”“ an accounting and bookkeeping program targeting small business ”“ at Queens College at night and is an associate member of the state Society of CPAs. He is president of White Plains-based Ben Nightingale & Company Inc., which provides bookkeeping and some tax services for individuals and companies. (Email: nightingale.ben@aol.com.)
The black, Jewish, white, accounting teacher, playwright, actor, bookkeeper, father and husband said he smiles when
people ask him what he does. “”˜At this very moment?”™ I”™ll ask.” The timing is important with Nightingale because a moment later he is running scales on a rich operatic voice: “For four years I sang in the chorus of the New York City Opera,” he said. “I”™ve always had the straight job ”“ the accounting, the bookkeeping, the tax work ”“ and I”™ve always done this other stuff.”