Proud to be Proud

Grandmama and I had as close a relationship as any first-born grandchild can have with a grandmother.  In spite of this, she never talked about her life as a girl or as a young woman, until one day in 1951.  I was in my early twenties when she told me that she hadn’t known that she wasn’t White until she was 12 years old, living in Georgia in the late 19^th century.  I asked, “Grandmama, how did you find out that you were Black?”  She said, “I had chosen a little White boy that I wanted to marry, but I was told that I could not marry him because I was Black.” 

            I never forgot that conversation or the picture it rendered.  The idea to research my family’s background began on that day.  However, I did not actually start my research until a few years ago when I discovered that my great-grandfather was named Peter Veal.  He was born around 1845, the son of a slave and a White man on the plantation of Mr. Veal in Wilkerson County, Georgia.

            The Veal plantation was one of the most beautiful estates in this part of Georgia.  Majestic oak trees lined the path to the house.  Their branches reaching across the path to the house provided a magnificent arch.  The house was of Southern Colonial architecture.  Large white columns across the front of the house reached beyond the second-floor veranda to the roof.  The well-kept lawn was dotted with graceful weeping willows and with ancient live oak trees whose branches dripped with Spanish moss.

            Behind this beautiful estate, as far as the eye could see, were many slave cabins and fields of cotton on these 3,500 acres.  This is where the ugliness of slavery was seen.

            Peter Veal became a house servant.  He escaped the beatings and back-breaking work of the cotton fields because of his light skin color.  Simply speaking, he was a “house nigger.”  This practice of differentiation by skin color was the beginning of a self-hate by many dark-skinned Negroes who thought that they must be inferior because of their color.  After all, the light-skinned slaves did not have to work from sun-up to sun-down, picking cotton or doing other back-breaking work.  A former slave in “Slave Interviews,” edited by John W. Blassingame, stated that, “Yellow slaves thought that they were better than the Black slaves.  The darker slaves, real Blacks, were ashamed of themselves when they were with Whites or Brights.”  This differentiation and shame occurred because the masters thought that slaves of light complexion were more clever servants and therefore more valuable.  This idea of yellow skin being better than Black skin was intentionally instilled by the masters to put a wedge in slave relationships in order to keep the slaves under control.  According to Grandmama, she often heard her father say that he hated “that one drop of nigger blood” in him.  Less obvious circumstances of slavery, such as working in the master’s house rather than in the fields, had given him this sense of superiority.