Opal’s Jim Crow Blues – Research & Share Your Family History (Part 2)

Today’s blog post is by guest Cheryl Wills.  Cheryl, a television news anchor and reporter, has extensively researched her family’s history.  She has generously agreed to share a  story about her grandmother’s perspective on skin color.  Enjoy.

I love my grandmother to pieces, but she just doesn’t get Black History Month.

She was born during the roaring twenties when half of America was doing the Charleston and the Lindy Hop – as African-Americans danced around the pitfalls of Jim Crow.

Regrettably, my grandma drank the kool-aid like so many of her time.  Born in Haywood County, Tennessee, she didn’t think black was beautiful – in fact she thought it was downright repulsive.  The blacker you were – the worse off you were. Although her skin color was of the deepest cocoa – she looked in the mirror and pitied her complexion.  She even married a light-skinned man with hopes that her children would not be as dark as she.

Her first born, my dad, Clarence, was the spitting image of her – color and all.  She adored him but was thankful that he was a boy – and not a girl.  A dark girl, she reckoned, would have a tougher time finding a man – which was all a mature girl was destined to do in her mind.  It was such a shame.  When I grew up during the turbulent 1960s, I recall my grandmother looking at me with that same unspoken pity.  I was a dark-skinned girl and Jim Crow was dead but it lived on in my grandma’s heart.  Opal never told me I was pretty – she never pushed me out front – she just looked at me and wished me well for what I was.  Like I was some cursed thing.   I would hear her brag about how pretty the lighter-skinned girls were in her presence – but she could never focus beyond my brownness.

As I grew older, I embraced my African identity.  Opal was puzzled.  As I read black literature by my favorite writers like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin and Maya Angelou, I learned to love and embrace my heritage, just like other Americans who were proud of their Irish, Italian, Asian and Latino backgrounds.  Although Jim Crow made Africa a dirty word, I did not accept such twisted logic and instead felt honored to call myself a daughter of Africa. 

Had Opal been properly educated in a society that viewed her without contempt, my grandmother would have been proud of our heritage, too. When Opal danced in the spirit inside a vibrant pentecostal church, she was wholly unaware that the motions of her fancy footsteps were set in motion long ago in Africa. The swivel of her hips and the songs that bounced off her tongue were not indigenous to North America; they were eerily reminiscent of a colorful African tribe.  

Her round stunning face and deep chocolate color came from a continent that she dared not even utter its name in personal references. When she spoke in tongues while enraptured in the spell of the Holy Spirit, even I could discern the native tongue of an African chant; Jim Crow tried to make her deny it—but it was right there in the fullness of her mouth. The music, her laughter, her strength, it was all from Mother Africa,  and it was something of which to be proud—not ashamed.

A couple of years back, I went on ancestry.com and unearthed an amazing family story of our ancestors who were brought from Africa and sold on slave auction blocks in Tennessee.  One ancestor in particular, Sandy Wills, went on to fight in the Civil War.  When I told Opal about my incredible find, she was pleasantly surprised.  No one had ever connected the dots for her before.  It was a needle on the record moment.

Opal is now 85 years old.  She told me I was beautiful the other day.  I proudly told her that she was too.

Cheryl Wills
Author, Anchor, Reporter

Here is a new video of Cheryl speaking about her new book.