We had three good years together, but when she was born he blamed me and treated Lula Ann like she was a stranger-more than that, an enemy. That was what did it-what caused the fights between me and him. He wasn’t a cussing man, so when he said, “God damn! What the hell is this?” I knew we were in trouble. My husband, Louis, is a porter, and when he got back off the rails he looked at me like I really was crazy and looked at the baby like she was from the planet Jupiter. I went to bottle-feeding soon as I got home. All I know is that, for me, nursing her was like having a pickaninny sucking my teat. Recently, I heard about a couple in Germany, white as snow, who had a dark-skinned baby nobody could explain. But I was scared to be one of those mothers who leave their babies on church steps. I even thought of giving her away to an orphanage someplace. But I couldn’t do that, no matter how much I wished she hadn’t been born with that terrible color. I know I went crazy for a minute, because-just for a few seconds-I held a blanket over her face and pressed. I thought I was going crazy when she turned blue-black right before my eyes.
#Another word for embrace skin#
Her birth skin was pale like all babies’, even African ones, but it changed fast. I hate to say it, but from the very beginning in the maternity ward the baby, Lula Ann, embarrassed me. Neither one of them would let themselves drink from a “Colored Only” fountain, even if they were dying of thirst. And my father could try on shoes in the front part of the shoe store, not in a back room. But because of my mother’s skin color she wasn’t stopped from trying on hats or using the ladies’ room in the department stores. I heard about all of that and much, much more.
#Another word for embrace free#
But how else can we hold on to a little dignity? How else can we avoid being spit on in a drugstore, elbowed at the bus stop, having to walk in the gutter to let whites have the whole sidewalk, being charged a nickel at the grocer’s for a paper bag that’s free to white shoppers? Let alone all the name-calling. Some of you probably think it’s a bad thing to group ourselves according to skin color-the lighter the better-in social clubs, neighborhoods, churches, sororities, even colored schools. They ate every meal she cooked and insisted she scrub their backs while they sat in the tub, and God knows what other intimate things they made her do, but no touching of the same Bible. The Bible! Can you beat it? My mother was a housekeeper for a rich white couple. The other one was for white people’s hands. When she and my father went to the courthouse to get married, there were two Bibles, and they had to put their hands on the one reserved for Negroes. She told me the price she paid for that decision. My own mother, Lula Mae, could have passed easy, but she chose not to. Can you imagine how many white folks have Negro blood hiding in their veins? Guess. Almost all mulatto types and quadroons did that back in the day-if they had the right kind of hair, that is. Finally they got the message of no message and let her be. Any letter she got from my mother or my aunts she sent right back, unopened. You might think she’s a throwback, but a throwback to what? You should’ve seen my grandmother she passed for white, married a white man, and never said another word to any one of her children. It’s different-straight but curly, like the hair on those naked tribes in Australia. Tar is the closest I can think of, yet her hair don’t go with the skin. Ain’t nobody in my family anywhere near that color. I’m light-skinned, with good hair, what we call high yellow, and so is Lula Ann’s father. It didn’t take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs for me to realize something was wrong. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened.
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