As far as Alex Shepherd was concerned, all of his sons-in-law were (in his words) “sons of bitches”. So, for his daughters, getting married had to be done surreptitiously. One of them, Maude, my grandmother, managed to accomplish the feat under the pretext of leaving the house to go to choir practice.

      Apparently, no man was good enough for any of my great-grand father’s daughters. In my grandmother’s case, I wondered if his objections had anything to do with the fact the son-in-law – my grandfather – was black. Alex and Maude also were black, but Alex – I’m told by my mother who remembers him well – looked like a Native American; his father, Tobe, looks like a white man in the photograph I have. My grandmother, like my mother, was light-skinned. My mother says she doesn’t think her father’s dark complexion was the problem for her grandfather; Alex’s last wife was a dark-skinned woman. Alex’ problem, according to my mother, was just being “mean as a snake”.

      My immediate family, like my mother’s and many others found throughout the African diaspora of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean, is one of those families in which siblings range from dark to light and everything in between. This can save families from succumbing to the pernicious skin-color prejudice still practiced by some blacks.

      In the rural Alabama of my mother’s youth, the attitudes of whites presented enough problems with which blacks had to deal. In the insular world of black Washington, a cocoon-like community often shielded from the everyday vagaries of white bigotry, my father’s challenge was different. That challenge comes to mind with the recent publication of First Class, journalist Alison Stewart’s telling of the story of America’s first black public high school: Dunbar, my father’s high school.

      I’ve long been familiar with the illustrious history of the school, as well as its less savory one. This city, an early enclave for blacks, was notorious for the practice of the so-called brown-paper-bag test; blacks darker than the bag often were not welcomed by blacks who were lighter. Social and cultural clubs and organizations, schools and even churches were not above participating in the practice. Dunbar was no different. Though it may not have been the official policy of the school, skin-tone snobbery was a socially accepted sentiment that permeated it. Knowing this, I once asked my father, – way too dark to have passed that test – if his experiences at Dunbar reflected this history. They had.

      We like to think those practices are no longer an issue, but that is wishful thinking. There’s been a great lessening of the beliefs that undergirded the practice, so much so that it now seems to be individual belief rather than mainstream sentiment, but there is no shortage of people who still think that way.

      I don’t want to leave the impression the South was free of all of this. I’m reminded of a story about an aunt in Alabama (mentioned in an earlier post) who was told by an old mentor about the valedictorian of the graduating class at a black, Catholic high school. The mentor, who looked like a white woman, mentioned to my aunt, in a disapproving tone, that the valedictorian was “a little dark-skinned girl”. She felt free to speak that way because she assumed my aunt, who was light, would feel the same way. She did not know that dark-skinned valedictorian was my aunt’s niece, my cousin, one of Alex Shepherd’s great-granddaughters.