And It Begins Like This. LaTanya McQueen
white, two floors, with a black roof. No indoor plumbing, at least not while my mother is growing up, and she’ll tell me about her late night ventures in the dark to the outhouse. She’ll talk about her fear of snakes reaching up from the hole. The smell.
Open the front door and you're in the living room. Adjacent to this and separated by two large French doors is the kitchen. In my mind, I'll convince myself I remember these doors but really what I'm remembering is the telling of the doors to me throughout the years. A hallway leads to a staircase where if one were to walk up they'd be taken to one of the three bedrooms. Downstairs are where the other two bedrooms are—my mother's, which she shared with her brother, and her parents'. Further down the hallway is the kitchen where there's another door leading out back.
None of this is of particular interest except for one detail: a door is affixed to the entryway leading upstairs. This door will be locked. No one except for Mayo, my great-uncle, who lives with the rest of the family, will ever be allowed to go up there.
Let me rephrase that—it is not “no one except for my great-uncle will be allowed up there” but rather my great-uncle will not be allowed in the rest of the house. The locked door, I’m told, is not to prevent the rest of the family from interacting with him, but to prevent him from the rest of the family.
“Mayo?” On the phone, my grandmother pauses to think. I'd been looking through census records when I stopped at this name, not recognizing it. “Oh yeah. We called him Pigaboy—Pigger sometimes. It was always that. Not Mayo.”
“Pigger?” I ask, not going further. My grandmother does not like to talk about the family of the husband she was once married to. It's been decades since his death, but my grandmother still flinches when I ask about him or his relatives. There is the sense she was not treated well by them. Even though she'll never tell me, my father will relay stories of how she was beaten by her husband and how his brothers and sisters disregarded her because her skin was not light like theirs.
Most of them were light-skinned, some bordering on even looking white. If you saw a picture you'd think they were Italian maybe, or Jewish, and they could have passed if they wanted.
It bears mentioning that like my grandmother, Mayo was darker too.
“Yeah, because he ate like a pig,” my grandmother says. “He ate his food like a dark little pig, you know Pigger. Pigaboy.”
“You know what Pigger sounds an awful lot like,” I say to her, thinking of all this.
“Yes, well,” my grandmother responds. She swallows hard in the phone. “I realize this now.”
Mayo, born 1920, and sometimes called Pigaboy or Pigger by his family.
As I've mentioned, Mayo will live upstairs. The downstairs door that leads to the rest of the house will be locked from him. His only route of access will be to the door out back. His meals will be placed on the back porch where he'll either eat them or carry them back upstairs.
There are reasons for all this. Mayo eats like a pig so his nickname will be Pigaboy, shortened to Pigger. My family will say he's unstable, explaining that there were been incidents but never explicitly telling me what they were. To keep the rest of the family safe, especially the children, the doors had to be locked. Mayo couldn't be with everyone else, he had to be separated. He had to eat his food out back. It was all they knew what to do. It was the only way.
Mayo's death record shows that he died on January 17, 1973 at the age of fifty-two. What it doesn't show is that he died upstairs in his bedroom and that it will be days before the rest of the family notices.
“Down in Yanceyville Billie went as white,” my godmother tells me. “That’s what I’ve always heard, and remember it was eight miles to Yanceyville from Caswell and this was horse and buggies time, you actually had to travel to get there. So why would the people there think that this man was white? Under what circumstances would they imagine that to be the case? The only reason I can think of is because he went there to see his father, and if he’s with his father out in public that means his father must have claimed him—not only claiming but helping him, and in light of all that it fits in to the paradigm that the relationship his father had with him was consensual.”
There is a slight pause. Before I’m able to respond she continues again.
“Also, in the consensual relationships I’ve read about, the child bears the name of the father.”
In The Fluidity of Race: “Passing” in the United States, 1880-1940, Emily Nix and Nancy Qian estimate that “using the full population of historical Censuses from 1880-1940, we document that over 19% of black males ‘passed’ for white at some point during their lifetime.”
Billie Siddle, my great-grandfather, will periodically pass for white. I’ll hear versions of this from my mother as well, but she’ll explain he left to pass and work the coal mines in Virginia, making enough money to come back and buy the land and build his own farm the family will live on decades later.
If Billie could pass, and if in fact there were circumstances when he did, then what made him decide not to?
Maybe the answer to this question is the behind the reason he’ll have issues with skin color the rest of his life. He’ll pass them on to his children, each of them harboring the same prejudices, and they’ll pass them on to their children—to my mother and eventually to me.
Billie Siddle will die on November 11, 1923, at the age of 48. The cause of death being chronic nephritis, a disease caused by infections, most commonly caused by autoimmune disorders that affect the organs, like lupus, a disease my mother will come to suffer from.
On the death certificate, in the space for the name of the father, there is only a question mark.
In the story of Cain and Abel from the book of Genesis, Eve bears two sons—Cain, a tiller of the earth, and Abel, a shepherd. When they both offer sacrifices to God, Abel’s is respected more, much to the jealousy of Cain. Acting out of his own anger, he takes Abel into a field and kills him, and when God asks him where Abel is, he answers, “I know not, am I my brother’s keeper?”
After God finds out the truth about Abel’s murder, he curses Cain for what he’s done. Cain pleads with God, explaining that this punishment is too much for him to bear. If he is a fugitive and a vagabond, then anyone who happens to find him will kill him. Hearing this, God tells him that whoever slays him will have vengeance taken upon them sevenfold. “And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”
Theologians have interpreted this mark in many different ways. Some believe it to be a symbol of God’s promise of protection. Others have suggested that the mark was a distinguishing characteristic God gave so that people would see and not harm him. In the 18th century it was taught that the Cain’s mark was black skin and that his descendants were black and still under the “the curse of Cain.”
There is no clear consensus as to which of these definitions is being referred to regarding Cain’s mark.
In the famous Clark doll experiments conducted in the 1940s, husband and wife team Kenneth and Mamie Clark gave a child two different dolls, identical except for their skin color and hair. One doll was white with yellow hair and the other doll was brown with black hair. Then, the child was asked questions like “Which is the pretty doll?” “Which is the bad doll?”
Of course, you know this story already, even what the answers were, that their findings showed the internalized racism present among the children, the majority of which showed a preference for the white doll.
In 2006, Kiri Davis recreated the experiment for her documentary A Girl Like Me. Davis found that, nearly seventy years later, nothing much had changed. Girls still picked the white doll. The pretty doll. The good doll.
I do not need to wonder which doll I would have picked had I been asked. Growing up, I never had black dolls. The choice for me was never even a possibility.
Seeking information on the mixed or african american siddle family. Possible starting