Some nights, when medication and meditation have failed to put me to sleep, I think of the relatives who abandoned my family to become white people.
Several generations ago, in midsized Ohio cities during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, some of my father’s ancestors walked away from their families, their homes, and their neighborhoods and stepped into the life-altering fiction that they were white. Most, though not all, of these relatives were female.
Read the rest in the November 2021 issue of The Sun Magazine. Online and in the print edition.