Taylor wasn’t just denied feelings of kinship and family connections. She was deprived of an education. In a court hearing in the 1960s, Taylor’s aunt would testify that her niece “didn’t go to no school I went to.” Taylor’s older sister Mary Jane, who had two white parents, did have the opportunity to spend time in a classroom.

While Taylor’s family didn’t let her forget her heritage, they did their best to obscure it publicly. Not long after Taylor was born, her mother and her stepfather, J.J. Miller, moved to Mississippi County, Ark., to find work planting and picking cotton. In both 1930 and 1940, Taylor was marked as white on the census, just like the rest of the Millers. This government-adjudged racial purity affirmed that the Millers were law-abiding citizens. Arkansas law at the time banned the “cohabitation of persons of the Caucasian race and of the Negro race, whether open or secret.” According to a state statute, “Any woman who shall have been delivered of a mulatto child, the same shall be prima facie evidence of guilt without further proof and shall justify a conviction of the woman.” If Taylor had been declared a “Negro,” her mother would have been guilty of a felony.

When she became a young adult, Taylor traveled the same road as millions of other black Americans, leaving the South for a locale that was reputedly more equitable. Taylor landed in the Bay Area during the World War II shipbuilding boom. But while California was often depicted as a place full of opportunity and relatively free of prejudice, the reality often didn’t live up to that dreamy vision. Taylor found herself in a rat-infested apartment building in West Oakland. She was arrested multiple times in the mid-1940s for prostitution-related offenses.

In California, as in Arkansas, Taylor hid her racial identity. In March 1948 — six months before the Supreme Court of California declared the state’s miscegenation ban unconstitutional — she married a man with German ancestry. Their marriage license identified Taylor as Hawaiian, a fiction that allowed her to account for the color of her skin while still conforming to the government’s parameters for whiteness.

That marriage wouldn’t last, nor would her stint in California. She eventually moved to Chicago, managing to blend in for a time while living in the predominantly white neighborhood of Lincoln Park. But in 1964, Taylor chose to pursue an outlandish, risky gambit, claiming that she was the daughter of a black gambling kingpin and the rightful heir to his substantial fortune. Taylor didn’t assume this new identity all that skillfully. The documents she presented to affirm her heirship were clear forgeries. More painfully, her white relatives came from Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas to tell a probate court judge that Taylor was a liar.

Linda Taylor’s family was motivated less by a burning desire to tell the truth than an impulse to bury an uncomfortable secret. Taylor’s uncle claimed improbably that her father was Portuguese. Taylor’s mother also denied that she’d given birth to her own daughter, testifying that the child had been left on her doorstep as a 3-month-old infant.

That was a laughable story. It was also a pitiable one, confirmation that Taylor had never been wanted. The judge in that heirship case ruled, correctly, that Taylor had no claim on the gambling kingpin’s estate. At that point, one of her sons told me, Taylor decided that she was done with white people — that they’d done nothing but abandon and abuse her. Taylor left Lincoln Park and moved to a part of Chicago’s South Side that was essentially all black. That’s where she was living in the 1970s, when she was christened the welfare queen.

Linda Taylor was inarguably a villain. She had no regard for other people, and she preyed on most everyone she met, including her own children. It doesn’t excuse her crimes to acknowledge that she was also a victim, and she was victimized because of her race. It’s impossible to understand her life without understanding where she came from, a place and time where the line between black and white could not be smudged. When Taylor changed identities, she wasn’t deviously leveraging race to her advantage. She defied America’s strict racial categories to secure a life she couldn’t otherwise grasp, and to construct a private mythology that made more sense to her than the grim reality of what she’d seen and what she’d done.

Josh Levin (@josh_levin), the national editor of Slate and a host of the podcast “Hang Up and Listen,” is the author of the forthcoming book “The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth,” from which this essay is adapted.

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