My maternal great grandparents were both half black and half white. No further details are known, mostly because Bajans of that era will absolutely NOT discuss their blackness with you. At all. I have inherited photo albums full of white people who clearly resemble my cousins, but no one is alive to tell me who these people were, or how they are related. One photo is labeled. The handwriting looks like my grandmother's, and the label is Aunt Ada. Who's aunt is she? Not my grandmother's. My great-grandmother did not have any sisters, and they almost certainly would have been more obviously of mixed heritage if she (or her husband, for that matter) had any. Then again, my grandmother's cousin Bernard is blue-eyed and pink-skinned. Looks like a typical white dude. Gotta be part black though, he's kin by blood. Anyway, the Bajans came here in the early 1900's, and that side of the family has mostly married darker and darker, and my generation does not look white at all. Personally, to the best of my ability to calculate, I am 1/8 white. And that includes white folks on my father's side.
My father's people came here on slave ships. We can go back to his grandmother's mother. She was black, as far as we know. Her daughters either never told my grandmother, or my grandmother just never told me otherwise. My grandmother says her grandmother and her grand-aunt had their mother sold out from them when the younger was a suckling infant. Their father owned them. We do not know his name. Every once in a while, as a kid, I would find a strand of red hair in my dark brown curls in the summer. Those were his legacy. His daughters had long, wavy, red hair. They sold it in wig shops to make ends meet after they fled the plantation.
Runaways on my paternal grandfather's side found refuge among the Cherokee. That story is unclear, and I never met grandpa, but I'm told there is some lineage through there. My very best calculation puts me at 1/32 Cherokee.
No one knows anything about my maternal grandfather's people, but they come from South Carolina and are dark-skinned, like I am, and darker. My parents both had skin darker than mine, but I do tend to wear sunblock and avoid excessive sun-exposure. When I was a lifeguard, I was much, much darker, for years. So, it is hard to say whether their coloring was just ethnicity or partially sun exposure. I'm guessing the latter, because the other women in my mother's family (my grandmother, most of my second and third cousins, and my aunt) are about my complexion or lighter.
At any rate, I'm very nearly all black on both sides, and I identify as black. I plan to get pregnant with my dude, who is white. I wonder how our children will choose to identify. They will be more white than anything else, but I assume they will look multi-ethnic, like my grandmothers and great-grandparents.
