Sharing Her Story
Written by Amy Coyne Bredeson | Photos by Ruthe Ritterbeck
The challenges of growing up biracial in the South in the 1960s did not break Edra Stephens. Instead they made her who she is today. And they inspired her to eventually share her story through the written word.
The Bluffton woman has just penned her first novel, “Born White, Dying Black,” based on her personal story. Stephens is still looking for a publisher but hopes the book will be available to the public soon.
“The novel is just a glance at some of the things we’re still struggling with in society, unfortunately,” Stephens said.
Stephens was born in November 1962 in Charleston. Her mother was white, and her father was Black. Because her mother was white, her birth certificate identified her as white.
Stephens’ birth mother put her up for adoption, and in those days a white child could not be placed with a Black family. Since her birth certificate identified her as white, she spent the first four years of her life with a white foster family in Horry County.
Stephens’ foster parents wanted to adopt her, but the law would not allow it. While she remembers her foster mother as a loving caregiver, she also has memories of her foster siblings calling her the N-word.
A judge eventually changed her race from white to “Negro,” and Stephens was adopted by a Black couple, David and Ruby Jones of Hilton Head Island.
Stephens grew up in the historic Gullah neighborhood of Jonesville, which was named after Caesar Jones, a freed slave who bought more than 100 acres of land on Hilton Head.
Stephens began elementary school in Bluffton in 1968, which was around the time Beaufort County schools were desegregated. She had a hard time fitting in. The Black children didn’t want to play with her because she was white, and the white children didn’t want to play with her because she was Black.
“Born White, Dying Black” looks at that duality of Stephens’ life, of being in between and never really feeling completely Black or white.
This excerpt from the novel appears after the main character, Ann, had just been taken from her white foster parents and placed with her Black adoptive parents:
“That marked her beginning, and end. The mother she knew was gone, only a hand in a picture, ripped, cut straight out of her life. Baby Ann died. Reborn a negro. Living in a world not formally introduced or identified to her. A world stripped of white, with Black looking back at her pale face. Chills gripped the small heart, holding it hostage.”
Stephens said a birth relative who found her through Ancestry.com, once asked if she was raised Black or white. Stephens didn’t know how to answer the question. She had never thought about how it would’ve been different to be raised by a white couple or to be raised by a biracial couple.
“I think we kind of look at it as a race thing when it’s really a culture,” Stephens said. “My culture is the Gullah culture, and we’re Black, but I never really thought about how that only focused on one side.”
Stephens hasn’t always been in a creative line of work. She studied accounting in college and worked in the field for years.
She had always loved writing but didn’t consider it as a career option until taking a poetry class at the University of South Carolina Beaufort.
When Stephens originally went off to college, she ended up dropping out so she could support her son. Her car broke down one day, and that was the last straw.
So, she went to work. She promised herself she would earn a bachelor’s degree by age 60. She took classes here and there over the years and accomplished her goallast year.
The hardworking mother of two and grandmother of two had retired from her job as director of business licensing for Beaufort County and gone back to school to complete her classes.
On Dec. 10, 2022, Stephens received her long-awaited degree — a bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in sociology and a concentration in creative writing from USCB. It wasn’t the degree she had set out for all those years ago, but it was what she really wanted.
Inspired by writers Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan and Maya Angelou, as well as USCB English professor Ellen Malphrus, Stephens began writing about her experiences as a biracial person in South Carolina.
“As her professor and mentor, Edra Stephens is one of those students who make me overjoyed to have entered the profession,” Malphrus wrote in an email. “Edra’s quiet demeanor belies the powerful force that rises through her words. The work is always a pleasure, but it is also often disturbing. As I’ve said before, she backs away from nothing.”
Some of her work was published in USCB’s literary magazine, “The Pen,” and Stephens was chosen as a manuscript fellow for The Watering Hole, a workshop for poets of color in the South. Stephens said she was the first USCB student to be chosen for the opportunity.
At the workshop in McCormick, Stephens got the chance to share her poetry and a portion of her novel.
“It was an experience I never would’ve imagined having,” she said. “There’s a vibe of ‘It’s a community; it’s your tribe.’ It’s like, ‘OK, I found my people here.’ ”
As part of her fellowship, Stephens will get to return for two more weeklong workshops within the next four years.
For now, she will focus on publishing her novel. She will keep writing and do some contract work with the Native Island Business & Community Affairs Association.
Stephens’ dream is to one day be named South Carolina’s poet laureate. She would also love to work with children, helping them find their voices like she found hers.
Hopefully a little sooner in life for them, she giggled. Stephens wants to encourage young people to follow their dreams.
“We’re not defined or stuck because of anything that may happen in life,” she said. “We can achieve what we want to achieve.”
