Chattanoogan: Lily Mitchell – Not Everything Is Black Or White

Being born of mixed races, Lily Mitchell has never seen herself as one race over another.  She was born in the Dominican Republic, a Spanish-speaking island between Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Lily was very close to her grandmother Lillian, whom she takes after.  Her grandmother’s parents were missionaries. “My great-grandfather was a black Jamaican and he married a white Jamaican. I am actually my grandmother’s color. I have her kinky hair and her skin color,” Lily says.

“My grandmother was born in Puerto Rico and was a huge influence on me.

She was a businesswoman who taught school in the Dominican Republic, came to New Jersey in her 50s and became an LPN, because she loved nursing. My grandmother married a white man. My family grew up speaking Spanish and English and we are mixed races,” she says.

Lily’s two brothers have darker skin. “There is a lot of mixture in my family. Some of us look Caucasian to a white person and some of us look African American to a black person, but it is the language that unites us,” Lily maintains.

Her father Julio was a school teacher while her mother did a variety of things. She was a homemaker, a secretary, she sold products and she was also a model. The family moved to New York when Lily was just a baby and then moved to Paterson, N.J., where Lily grew up.

New Jersey was full of diversity so Lily was never really questioned about her ethnicity and it never became an issue for her.

With her family predominately Seventh Day Adventists, Lily’s life revolved around the church. She was a child with vision, wanting to be an oceanographer, an archeologist, and an astronomer… and later she wanted to be a teacher.

When Lily’s mother was divorced, she struggled so Lily went to work in a boot factory at age 16 to help out. She stayed in Paterson until it was time for college and moved to Puerto Rico.

“I was working at a Seventh Day Adventist hospital as a ward clerk. The doctors and nurses suggested that I go into nursing. I would say to them, ‘Nursing is for crazy people. I am going to be a teacher’,” Lily chuckles.

“My mom’s two brothers had been living in Puerto Rico for a long time so we had just up and moved to Puerto Rico for two years. While there some students from Southern Missionary College in Chattanooga - now called Southern Adventists University - came and talked to my brother and I about coming here to Southern,” Lily states.

In 1975 she came to Chattanooga to go to nursing school and get her RN degree.

In order to make money she started cleaning and also helped Frank Lang with his remedial reading business helping students to improve their reading.

Lily’s first job as an RN was caring for a client in Collegedale who had multiple sclerosis. She took care of her for two years.

Her first husband was Black-Cherokee from North Carolina. “We divorced after 20 years of marraige. I wanted to find out who I was… I found out that I wasn’t really a Seventh Day Adventist and I started going to different churches, trying to find something that resonated with me.  I felt a need to explore that about myself,” Lily says.

“I also learned about tithing, I feel that I make more money when I am tithing. It is a law of the universe – it is about giving and receiving,” she declares.

Lily began attending Unity Church and found a place to belong that shared her inward beliefs.

“At the church of Unity, the idea of marrying outside of your race is totally a non-issue, it is a transcendental church.” she says.

It was at Unity where Lily would meet her current husband, Ed Smith, who is of white race. Interracial relationships were never a second-thought for Lily.

When she recalls her first crush she reveals, “The first boy I ever liked was when I was in fourth grade. He was a chubby, white boy in class with me. That was my first attraction. And now …I finally married my chubby white boy when I married Ed,” Lily bursts with laughter.

“Ed grew up in Carrolton, Ga. He tells me that he grew up ‘white bread’ – that’s his description. I had never heard that term before. Possibly, 20 or 30 years ago, we would have never dated. He came from a totally different background. I basically grew up poor in New Jersey and he grew up wealthy. He was the youngest in a family that includes two older sisters,” Lily says.

A retired psychologist from the UTC counseling department, Ed also is a drummer and plays music. “I love that about him. He also plays tennis, is very much an individualist – I guess our faith and music is our biggest connection,” Lily insists.

When the couple first met in 2008, it was not love at first sight. “I had been watching him in church and thought he was boring. The choir director said to me, ‘Why don’t you date Ed?’ I said, ‘No, he is sloppy and he doesn’t do anything with his hair’,” she admits with more laughter. 

“A cousin of Ed’s ex-wife’s was a member of our church and I heard her once say that Ed was a good man. She lived with them as a built-in nanny, so I paid attention to that. If she lived with him in the house on a day-to-day basis and can say he was a good man, I knew I could bank on that,” Lily claims.

Suzanne Carter was the choir director at that time. She had extra tickets to a play in which she was inviting choir people to. “I had two people in mind to ask, but Ed overheard me say something to Suzanne about not knowing who I’d go with, and he said, ‘Why don’t you go with me. You would be the best looking date I ever had,’ and that’s how he got me!” Lily divulges.

Lily was never raised to see interracial relationships as a problem. It was a natural thing for her. “If you were to meet my mom today, you would say that she is Caucasian because she is very fair and has reddish brown freckles,” she says.

While living in Puerto Rico during her college years, Lily recalls a conversation with a Dominican male who was upset with her. “He was really offended, and had said to me ‘You are a black person with the mind of a white person,’ It just kind of hit me – no one had ever told me that before,” Lily confesses.

“What I have learned is this is who I am… this is how I was raised. If that is how I think, then it came from my mother,” she says.

When asked if she feels a part of one race over another, she says, “No, I feel like I am everything. I am …everything.”

Lily admits that she was never really asked about her ethnicity until she had moved to the South. “The South is about 50 years behind in that, but I love it here… I love the slower pace, and I am comfortable here, but Chattanooga is becoming more diverse,” she says.

Something she and Ed had in common was music. “I have always had love for music, listening to classical music… oh, and the Beatles, I loved the Beatles,” she says.

“Ed keeps up with all the music going on in Chattanooga and if I am not working I go with him. We like jazz, bluegrass, rock and roll… but he doesn’t like to watch dance and I love it. My friend Suzanne Carter used to be director of the Musical Theater Department at UTC. She will sometimes have tickets to certain dance productions and we will go together,” Lily says.

Like any relationship, Lily admits that she and Ed have many differences but nothing interferes in their relationship that stems from any racial differences.

Lily works full time as a nurse at Moccasin Bend and also has a cleaning business www.lily-clean.com .  “I cleaned for nurse practitioners and doctors, who knew me. It got to the place where I couldn’t do it by myself so my oldest son worked with me until he got his RN license. My youngest son still cleans for me and now I have several people working in the family business.

Ed and I both love to travel. I want to take him to Puerto Rico because I enjoyed it so much.

Lily had been singing in church choirs since she was a teenager. “I miss singing so much, I’d like to go to Chattanooga State at night and learn how to read sight music. It would be easier for me to get in the choirs around Chattanooga if I could sight-read,” she says.

With such a passion for music, harmony is a way of life for Lily in more ways than one. She explains, “The feeling of being in the center of the choir and listening to everybody singing all the parts - that is my passion. Just to be in that place…  I love that.”

jen@jenjeffrey.com