To be the Black mother of a child who appears white can raise all kinds of questions and comments from strangers. Even the “nice” comments are loaded with assumptions about beauty and belonging. By listening to her own family history, reading the narratives of women who raised children while enslaved in her home state of North Carolina, and drawing inspiration from Mildred and Richard Loving, one mother pushes back on the assumption that she must be “the nanny.”
personal essay by Jasmin Pittman Morrell
The few hours I spent in labor with my first daughter were short and urgent. The contractions surged through my body at a rate much quicker than expected, and my husband and I almost didn’t make it to Rex Hospital, which was just down the street from our first apartment in Raleigh, North Carolina. As soon as we arrived in the hospital breezeway, a nurse took my hands, told me to breathe, and, above all, do not push. I will always remember her wide-open eyes, short curly hair, and the pale, lined skin of her face. She reminded me of an old friend’s mother. This calmed me long enough to get us into the labor and delivery room, and me into the hospital bed.
Only a few minutes passed, my doctor hadn’t arrived, and the nurse was still putting on gloves, when Jubilee made her entrance into the world. She waits for no one, I thought.
When the nurse placed my daughter on my chest, I marveled at the way her movements were already known to me. I’d felt her internally for months, and in this way had already grown to know her. Her skin was the color of toasted coconut, and the mass of loose, slick curls, a dark brown. When I kissed her perfect bow of a mouth, she smelled like my blood, and I couldn’t believe how intoxicating this was.
Hours later, as visitors streamed through my hospital room, most of them exclaimed how much she looked like my husband, Michael. My ego was bruised. I saw my round nose and full lips. I saw my mother when she was a child. And I saw my mother’s father, my grandad, too. But her creamy skin — the coveted white girls’ tan — blanketed any of her other features that might have identified her as mine.
In a quiet moment, when it was just Jubilee and me in the room, a nurse with skin like mahogany came in to check my vital signs.
“You’re lucky Dad’s here,” she said.
Did I hear resentment in her voice?
“Why wouldn’t my husband be here?” I countered, confused.
She stared at me, hands frozen in mid-air. I wasn’t sure if she was embarrassed by her assumption, or like a prophet, showing me a small piece of the way before me.
Suddenly I understood. She was unused to seeing white fathers claim the children they created with Black mothers, or claim the mothers at all. In 1967, Loving vs. Virginia nullified existing laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Only 40 years had passed since the Supreme Court officially legitimized relationships like the one between Michael and me, offering the children birthed from this intimate connection a place to exist inside America’s psychic landscape. Forty years wasn’t long enough to erase the sustaining legacy of plantation masters and slave-drivers raping enslaved African women and turning a blind eye to the results.
The nurse and I didn’t speak again, and she finished her tasks, leaving the room silently.
Later that evening, a different nurse burst into the room, rousing me from a haze of exhaustion. A swaddled, content, Jubilee slept in my arms.
“Put the baby down in the bassinet if you’re going to sleep!” she chastised me.
“I’m not asleep,” I frowned and held her closer.
There would be more moments in the future when it seemed white women would continue to ask me to put her down. It seemed as if they pleaded with me to mollify the primal anxiety raised in them seeing a woman like me, nurturing a child that on first glance, appeared to be one of them.
Had part of me wanted it this way? My genes, combined with her father’s, gave her the gift of fair skin. The “gift.” It rankled me, yet the serrated truth of the phrase sat lodged in my throat. Her skin tone, and even the corkscrew pattern of her curls, would make her life in this country easier than mine had been, even if I also shared (albeit darker than Jubilee’s) “rape-colored skin.” History reminded me of it in the form of paper bag tests and the supposed privilege of Sally Hemings. And so did my neighbor, a retired, diminutive Asian gentleman who always waved energetically when we found ourselves outside our homes at the same time.
“Beautiful baby,” he exclaimed. “She is a good mix. She will be healthy, strong.”
If I’d asked more about his cultural background, I might’ve known which Asian country he’d immigrated from and understood what shaped his opinion. But in the haze of early motherhood, I merely smiled and thanked him, agreeing that yes, Jubilee was a beautiful baby.
Bright and high as the sun, she was the adored first — first grandchild on both sides, first child born amongst our group of close-knit friends, first to make me a mother. We burrowed at home, mapping the geography of each other’s bodies. The peaches of her cheeks. The now rippled river of my belly. The knobs of her toes. The bulb of my breast.
Feeding her didn’t come easily at first. Before motherhood, no one tells you breastfeeding isn’t always as simple as it might appear. It’s a relationship to nurture, and a skill to tune. We clumsily folded ourselves into different positions: the traditional cradle hold, a “football hold,” or side-lying in bed. Nothing felt instinctual about trying to support the tender nape of her neck and head with one hand, cup my own breast in another, and hold her body close to mine, all in perfect alignment. We were a tangle of awkward limbs, a mess of tears. The shame of being unable to perform this one, essential task threatened to overwhelm me.
Then one humid afternoon when Jubilee was 3 weeks old, I sat on the couch holding her stretched out in my lap. Michael had left to run errands, so we were alone together. I sat spent and unwound by the heat.
I stared down at her. “Listen, little bear,” I said. “It’s time.”
She stared back, trusting.
With hands grown confident, I pulled her close. She nestled into me and after a few moments, relief melted me like butter. I could feed my baby.
Hunger served as our compass, pointing us back home whenever we strayed. We ventured out for groceries, or the occasional playdate with other mothers from my birth class, or winding strolls throughout the neighborhood under a canopy of tree-lined streets.
Seasons changed and Jubilee grew into a spirited toddler. Our quiet private sphere of life became more public. The world expanded to romping through Raleigh’s parks and between library bookshelves. One afternoon, in an uptown library, we stood at the checkout desk while the librarian scanned Jubilee’s prized stories so that we could bring them home.
“It looks like she has a small fine for an overdue book,” the librarian mentioned, glancing up at me from over the rim of her glasses.
I dug through my purse for some change, but she waved at me to stop.
“Don’t worry about it. The nannies don’t have to pay the fines.”
“I’m not the nanny,” I said, my face warm. “I’m her mother. I’ll pay our fine.”
I dropped a few quarters on the counter, letting them bounce and scatter. With shaking hands, the librarian completed our transaction, refusing to meet my eyes. A cooling satisfaction washed over me but quickly evaporated.
Driving home, I replayed the moment in my head, wondering what picture Jubilee and I had painted for the librarian. A young black woman in a T-shirt and leggings, a running-errands uniform, her hair pulled into a messy ponytail on top of her head. Standing beside the woman, a pearly child outfitted in a ruffled dress, complete with a big bow in her ringlets which were tinted honey-brown from the summer sun. Jubilee belonged in the image of Raleigh’s wealthy, white-collar families, her place central and infallible. Apparently, I belonged, too, but only if I stood outside of the frame.
Always a Mammy, never the Mom. Or so it felt under the jaundiced eyes of white strangers. But Black women, with skin spanning the spectrum of glorious brown hues, have never once assumed I was anything other than my daughter’s mother. We know well the varieties of skin tones, facial features, and hair textures that can make our children shine.
“She got the good hair, didn’t she?” was my most often-heard comment about Jubilee.
Perhaps we’ve developed a discerning eye because we are eager to claim our own. It’s a desire born out of an old, cavernous ache. My ancestral mothers had children torn away from them — a boy, James, because he was allegedly the master’s son. Looking at his picture, I wonder how anyone could refute his mixed parentage. James’ portrait depicts him slightly frowning, his face a pool of alabaster longing. And the daughter, Hausie, sent to an auction block in Richmond, Virginia, for reasons unknown. Those stories are undocumented, and I can’t hear them in the mothers’ own words. Hungry to know the memories of enslaved mothers from my home state, I turn to the North Carolina slave narratives collected in the Library of Congress.
From 1936-1938, the Federal Writers’ Project sent out-of-work writers across the country to interview formerly enslaved people as a part of the Works Progress Administration (later renamed the Work Projects Administration in 1939.) Many who’d lived that long were children when the Union Soldiers (otherwise known as “Sherman’s Army”) came tearing through the plantations declaring their freedom. The mothers’ voices remain elusive, except when heard through the voices of their children.
On a late spring day in 1937, off South Person Street in Raleigh, Martha Allen describes her mother’s life in Craven County, just off North Carolina’s coast. Going without her own breakfast, Allen’s mother left her babies in the kitchen with the cook. The cook, along with preparing food for the master’s house, nursed the babies while Allen’s mother worked the fields.
Cornelia Andrews was interviewed in Smithfield, North Carolina, the same town where she’d been enslaved. She remembered the whipping post — her back and shoulders, the interviewer observed, were “as though branded with a plaited cowhide whip.” Whether by choice or necessity, if Andrews remained in Smithfield for her entire life, it would take a resilient soul to live with the town’s history etched into her body. Her body remembered the slave market, watching tearless mothers sold away from their babies, babies someone else would have to feed.
When she was 80 years old, Sarah Louise Augustus was interviewed in Raleigh. Born on a plantation in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Augustus grew up learning to respect herself. Her grandmother, and possibly her namesake, Sarah McDonald, was a spry and enterprising woman. She grew hops and herbs to help alleviate the pain of rheumatism and traveled as a healer to nurse those in need. McDonald bore 15 children of her own, held them to her breast and nursed them all, as well as all of the plantation master’s children. The record doesn’t tell us whether or not some of McDonald’s children belonged to her enslaver, but I wonder how she navigated the complexity of her relationships with each of those children. Did she stare into their eyes as they nursed? Did she marvel over their perfection? Did some call her mama, and did others grow up and learn to ignore her? Regardless, it sounds as though McDonald became indispensable.
Mothering was, and is to this day, a valuable commodity.
When a white librarian sees my labor only as a commodity, she misses the fullness of what is.
My body nourished another life. This joy can only be measured by the pleasure of a heart so taut, it has no choice but to burst.
When I was around 12 years old, one of my best friend’s parents were “different colors.” Her dad reminded me of my own. He was tall and barrel-chested, occasionally goofy, and teddy-bear brown. Her mother was Scandinavian, an icy blond with round cheeks and a kind smile. Both of her parents were artists, instruments and paint supplies scattered their home — so unlike my own, and I loved basking in it. Somehow, I intuited from my parents, that my friend’s parents only fit together because, “well, they’re artists.” And artists were granted all kinds of privileges to step outside the rules. A small seed of something like rebellion was born in me.
I’d like to claim the quiet tenacity of Mildred Loving, the woman who inspired the 1967 decision to overturn anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. It doesn’t seem as though she intended to become an activist, but like so many other Black folk, she’d grown weary of the way the state, upheld and supported by her white neighbors, tried to erase her and the simple truth of the intimacy between Mildred and her husband, Richard. Their children were the product of consent, not domination.
Rape might be present in my legacy, but so is the energy of boundless love. If I’m able to embody this, pass it down through the generations, perhaps the wounds of the past will begin to heal.
Now, Jubilee stands as tall and slender as a sapling. She needs to bend, a slight curl of her back when she wants to find the circle of my arms. Now, she can answer for herself when someone asks, “Is that your mother?”
In those moments, her skin isn’t a gift as much as it is a burden. The burden of explanation. The burden of wiping the lens of perception clean. The burden of bearing the mirror.
By grounding her in our family’s legacy of love, we’re giving her what she needs to face the questions asked of her, to make peace where she needs to, and war if she has to.
Jasmin Pittman Morrell co-edits "The Porch Magazine" and serves as the literary assistant for DownSouth Press. Alongside her family, Jasmin loves calling the mountains home.
