While researching a close branch of my family, I found a woman with two daughters.  The woman and both daughters were listed on the census as Black…until one of the daughters wasn’t.  I found her on the rest of her census’s as an adult listed as white.  As were her husband and children.  I thought some more and realized that most of the people in my family are medium to light skinned - except for my mother and I.

This got me thinking about colorism in my family (my mother is an only child as well, so this is extended family that I haven’t seen in 15 years), and wondering if it existed, how strong it was, did it affect me subconsciously, and most important - is it why my mother is such an outsider in her own family?

Some history:  My great grandmother was extremely light skinned.  I was told as a child that she was half Native American and half Black, and so was her husband.  I hope to prove or disprove this someday, but all I know right now is that she was so light skinned that I’m not entirely sure if she was at all Black - she certainly could have passed for white in her old age.  I assume that her husband was darker because all of her children (my great-aunts and -uncles) are medium skin toned.  That generation of children?  All married and had children with people who were lighter than them.

Except for my grandmother.  She, the oldest, moved from rural Ohio to Washington DC when she was eighteen and started waitressing (now I know where my sense of adventure comes from) and met my grandfather, who was very dark skinned.  They got married and pregnant with my mom, who is very dark skinned, and divorced ten years later.  My mom eventually met some guy named Michael Glover and got pregnant by him, and I, as well, am very dark skinned.  So my mother is likely the darkest member of her generation of the family, and I am one of if not the darkest member of my generation of the family.

Now I’ve always thought of my family as being upwardly mobile people, as most Black families focused on back then.  My grandmother and her 5 siblings were born and partially grew up in rural Alabama during the Jim Crow era, and sometime in the early ’40s moved with their parents to join their uncles and aunts in rural Ohio.  Moving up North meant that farm jobs turned into factory jobs - my grandmother, after returning to Ohio after her busted marriage to my grandfather, spent the rest of her life working at the local RCA television manufacturing factory that (I believe) exposed her to so much radiation that her body was eaten up by cancer in a few short years.  Her brothers all managed to achieve upper-middle classdom.  My grandmother and her two sisters did not, but they grew up during a time when so much of a woman’s success was dependent on your husband, and all three of them were or are long divorced.

Because in this society, depending on the situation, lighter skinned people are treated as though they have higher value as a person than darker folks do, skin color, along with education, income, and religion, became one signifiers of the quest to gain higher class status.  To put it bluntly, I think that my family has been breeding the Black out of it.  Which means that my mother complicated the upward mobility of the family, and I know that she has always felt like she was the black sheep, though she’s never given me the details on why.  It’s definitely something that I plan to ask her, though.

In this context, I started to wonder what parts of my upbringing were affected by this mentality in my family.  I spent a lot of time with my grandmother and great grandmother the first six years of my life, even going to kindergarten in Ohio.  Somewhere between four and six years old, my grandmother permed my hair straight.  Perms are extremely unhealthy in general, but for a child that age…my scalp may have been permanently damaged, since I’m still dealing with sensitivity and hair breakage even though I’ve been natural for almost six years.  Ironically, my hair texture was less kinky and more curly before my hair was permed, and hung past my shoulders.  But it was very thick, and I remember her pulling the comb through my hair every morning while I tried not to cry.  I don’t remember hearing comments about my skin tone, but who knows what was said when my little ears weren’t around.  I did get a lot of the other pressures of being one of the first grandchildren in an upwardly mobile family, though, such as pressure to excel in school (so I can make more money as an adult), pressure to “speak properly”, pressure to go to church and be a “good girl”, etc.

I don’t want to make it sound like my family was awful or anything like that, but colorism does permeate many segments of the Black community and other communities of color.  I was still the favored great grand daughter of Mama Lou, as I called her, and the only granddaughter of her oldest child.  I just wonder where the disconnect was with how special my treatment was, and that of my mother, who has never really felt like a part of the family.

Dear Mr. Glover,

To shoot straight to the point, the short version of this letter is that you may be my father, and I may be your daughter.  My mother hasn’t given me much to go on, so I’m casting a wide net:  I know that you have the right first and last name; according to whitepages.com you’re around the right age (my mother turns 59 in July and she said that you were around her age, or possibly a little younger); and you live in the DC area, which is where I’m starting my search because people in your generation didn’t move around as much as subsequent generations.  Whitepages.com does not tell me if you are Black, though.  If you are white, you are probably not my father, as I am very dark-skinned.

Long version:  It would have been early to mid-August of 1984.  This is my guess because I was born on May 20^th, 1985, and when I count back forty weeks I reach the weekend of August 11^th and 12^th.  My mother’s name is Vicki Moore.  She is about 5’6”, dark-skinned, and she lived in the Southeast area of DC.  I think she was slender, and she may have had long, straight hair at the time.  She was 31.  Her two best friends were Cherry and Darlene, and her mother’s name was Beulah, if those names ring a bell.  She won’t give me any details but I’m guessing that it was a one night stand or a short fling, you gave her a phone number that wasn’t yours, she looked for you for a little while before her mother told her that she might be better off not finding you.

And so she raised me pretty much on her own.  We moved to Silver Spring, MD when I was 4 and then Olney, MD when I was 14.  Her mother died when I was seven, and her father occasionally sent money, but overall she worked a variety of secretarial jobs to take care of me, and I became responsible for myself at a young age.  She never had any other children, and has yet to marry.  I graduated from high school in 2003 and graduated from Cornell University in 2007.  I moved to New Orleans right after to help rebuild the city post-Katrina, and I’m happy to say that it’s still my home.  I’m an aspiring actress and a writer.

I never spent a lot of time wondered about my father when I was growing up.  It’s only recently, as I’ve started filling in a family tree on Ancestry.com, that I realized that unless I found the right Michael Glover I’d only ever have half of the branches.  I also started wondering if I have half brothers and sisters out there, living grandparents, nieces and nephews, 1^st cousins.  People often question my ethnicity, and I wondered if my father was part African or Caribbean to explain why some people think I look exotic.  I look a lot like my mother, but we differ in many key ways, and I wonder if those differences came from you or one of the other Michael Glovers that I’m writing.  I also think that I should know about any potential genetic diseases or mental illness that travel along my father’s side of the family, as I may have children in the next 10 years.  And whether I have children or adopt a bunch, I want him to know his future grandchildren, and I want them to know him.  I recently realized that my father could already be dead or dying, and I’ve wasted so much time wondering these things and not knowing anything.

I’ve attached a fairly recent picture of me.  If you think that you might be the Michael Glover that I’m looking for, I would like to take a paternity test to confirm it.  You can call me at 504.xxx.xxxx, email me at xxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com, or write back to me at xxxx Ursulines Ave, New Orleans, LA  xxxxx.

 Sincerely,

 Denise Jena Moore