the reason this story made so much sense from this woman, who seems to be a 2nd or 3rd cousin (My great grandpa was her great grandpa’s older brother), I get it mixed up, but she’s fairly close, but she struck something with me when she explained that my version may be completely false. It makes sense - IF my grandpa was born under his mother’s name, and he had such a passionate hatred for his own lineage - why on earth did he end up not only taking his father’s LAST name, but middle name as well? It had to have been his choice. Why? The only thing I could conclude was that he had a relationship with him, which was completely the opposite of what I was told.
Anyway, I did find the birth certificate, and its under a completely wonky name I still can’t make sense of, but it’s for sure him, because it lists the mother and father as the people I know them to be, and it’s his birthday, and exact location I’d expect him to be born.
so i dug into his dad at that point to figure out who the fuck this guy was and oh my lord he is FASCINATING. born in 1872 (maybe 1873, I dont have it all sitting in front of me atm) he only had one arm and I have some surprisingly good first-hand accounts of him from elderly family I tracked down. Apparently he somehow became educated (this was a theme in the family - educated black men), started businesses, became extremely successful and managed hundreds of people under him. in addition, he only had 1 arm, which is irrelevant but pretty funny because I can’t imagine starting from a lower place in life than a reconstruction era black man with a slave mother that only has 1 god damn arm, talk about starting with a shit hand (no pun intended).
curiously though, that unlocked the secret to another mystery. Why are some of us so white? I had gotten in an argument with this woman about it more than once actually, when she showed me the picture of her great grandpa, I swear to god he’s the nerdiest looking white man that ever walked the earth:
she said my great grandpa was a bit darker but similar, and she swears up and down that this guy’s dad was black and his mom was black/native american (she’s interesting, still have to research her, but the family legend is that she was an infant on the trail of tears and survived). the argument was me expressing shock at this, and she said “you know race isnt genetic, black people have white children all the time.” well, yes race isn’t genetic, but the genes that control skin tone are highly hereditary and when black people have completely white children, yes that happens, but there’s a term for it… albinism. lol.
after that convo though, I did realize there is something weird here. She described in her family some kids coming out whiter, some coming out much darker, without rhyme or reason to it. I see it in my own family - my dad was by far the darkest, his brother looks exactly like him but is completely white, and his sister looks like a white black lady. hmmmm. Realiing I’d just had a genetic study done to diagnose some irritating mental health stuff, I went looking at some of the gene stuff they found, and I had a few that were kind of rare and although I’m not a geneticist I did seem to find some stuff suggesting it is related to some kind of very very mild albinism, which they’re even now considering not calling it albinism at all (if you’re curious, it’s called rufous albinism). Not only that, it’s typically only found in EXTREMELY specific populations at a very very high incidence. that got me a bit excited because if my theory is correct, I could unlock the holy grail of any black geneology project - I could maybe trace us to specific locations in africa using genetic markers like this. however, I’m still waiting on the results of that, so I cant do much now.
ANYWAY this is all important because it explained a mystery, which was explained to me later by some older relatives I found. Apparently, the white ones and the black ones would all still associate, obviously, but they had to do it pretty secretively. What would tend to happen is the white ones would white pass as they could and get education/money/whatever and then help their darker relatives out. Funny though, as that picture I linked above would probably suggest - some of them absolutely would not fucking hide who they were, which to me seems so insanely brave I have a hard time understanding it. The guy in that pic was openly married to that woman his entire life and I can’t imagine how scary that must have been living in the deep ass south. My great grandpa was one of those as well - apparently he could have white passed if he wanted, but chose not to and lived as a black man. Fucking awesome IMO, and I struggle with not placing an enormous amount of blame and bitterness on my grandpa for doing the complete fucking opposite and trying to destroy this fascinating history for all of his children.
so, what now? I dont know. I found some woman that’s actually writing an entire fucking book about my family, but she’s more focused on the slave owner’s lineage - she had traced them back to the 1200’s in the UK, but she got understandably stumped immediately when she went looking for the American side, which is basically all of my immediate relatives. What I’ve told her makes her quite excited but she needs a bit more from me than I have time for atm, but I’m going to try to.
i dont know why im doing this but it’s long been a complicated topic for me whenever race comes up. I have lived my whole life as a white man and would probably identify as white. but like - clearly this is there, and I feel like it is a bit insulting to my very very courageous ancestors to hide it, so I’m trying to figure out ways I can embrace it without pissing people off very badly.