#Color lines free#

Consequently, my identity was shaped by the racial boundaries of the American South as well as the double consciousness that W. Claiming mixed status meant you were either trying to be white (implying that black was inferior) or trying to pass for white (a dangerous business few spoke of openly), and doing so carried the risk of being labeled a racial traitor. We were first colored, later Negroes, and still later black. But in the world I grew up in-the American South of the 1950s and 1960s, where the idea of race and identity determined who you were and your place in the world-you were either black or white. In 21st-century America, my family would be described as multiracial. It has taken me 20 years, but IвЂ™ve finally begun to figure things out and better understand my own history as well. I saw that gift as an invitation to learn more about the man within the borders of the frame. My mother knew that the portrait fascinated me, and when I got married, she gave it to me.

#Color lines free#

So the picture stayed hidden, part of my motherвЂ™s past, and my own-something I knew about but didnвЂ™t yet feel free to explore. Severe social consequences awaited any black person claiming close kinship with a white person. My parents kept my grandfatherвЂ™s portrait hidden because in 1960s Mississippi, with all its racial paranoia, displaying the picture in our living room would have been risky, if not impossible. But not until I was 16, when I overheard a conversation between my parents in the middle of the night, did I learn that he was white. In time, I learned that the unknown man was my grandfather James Morgan Richardson. Who was he? His hair, parted neatly in the middle, peeked out under a broad-brimmed hat perched jauntily on his head. A dandyish man in a dark suit and skinny tie stared out at me, bearing a striking resemblance to my mother.

When I was a young boy, I found a photograph half-hidden in the back of my parentsвЂ™ closet, leaned up behind my motherвЂ™s stacked boxes of high-heel shoes.