106 HEREDITY OF SKIN COLOR IN NEGRO-WHITE CROSSES. 



and are intelligent and mature for their years. The daughter, about six years 

 old, has fluffy, wavy hair and skin with 15 to 20 per cent N. Mrs. B. said: 



I understand you have separate cars and churches for colored people. An American 

 seems to think he will become black if he sits beside a colored person. I can understand 

 why they might object to marrying a colored person, for then it is a matter of blood, but 

 I don't see how contact with them can hurt anything. A man doesn't marry for skin color; 

 he marries someone equal in mental ability, and a white man may find that in a colored 

 woman as well as in a white. 



An olive-skinned man, with a brown wife, five children, and a neat, 

 well-kept home in a quiet country place, says : 



I've often said I'd change the British flag for the American flag any day. In America 

 they are prejudiced against all colored people. You may be a millionaire, but if you're 

 colored you can't marry into white families or associate with them. Here with the English, 

 if you are colored and have money you are all right, they associate with you; but if you 

 haven't money you are nowhere. The English aren't as honest as the Americans, for they 

 (English) hate the color just the same and only accept it for the money. So I'd rather be 

 under the American flag, for I don't want to mingle with the white people. I like my own 

 race and want to live with my own people. 



A brown woman, with a brown husband, in a neat, well-furnished home, 

 says: "I wouldn't change my race; I'm not ashamed of my color!" 



(c) Louisiana. 

 To the field worker, from a friend : 



I have thought a good deal about the subject of which you write and have myself 

 been interested in it; but I do think it is one of the most difficult pursuits and for the reason 

 that the data are so obscure, are not on record anywhere, and the people themselves are 

 inaccurate and frequently ignorant. There are comparatively few pure Africans and when 

 there is an admixture it is next to impossible, I find, to discover the exact proportions of the 

 kinds of blood involved, both because of lack of knowledge and untruthfulness. 



I have had in my employ at different times notable examples in which I was greatly 

 interested. One, a handsome mulatto, was notable for her fine contour and color, the daugh- 

 ter of two comely mulattoes, but of the blood of the parents I know nothing. I always sus- 

 pected Indian blood in the mother because of her high cheek bones and straight bearing, 

 but back of her is all guesswork excepting the single fact of a probable white father (or else 

 mulatto parents). This mother, who was even handsomer than her daughter, married, late 

 in life, a pure African and had a son who was a little black crow in color like his coal-black 

 father, and who displayed all the wretched traits of a poor paternal line, nearly breaking 

 the hearts of his mother and half-sister. 



Another Rose, we'll say was the daughter of my black cook, her father a white 

 *youth, both absurdly young at the time, so the mother told me. I met Rose, a handsome 

 mulatto with fairly good hair, after her marriage to a very light blue-eyed mulatto with 

 kinky hair. Their children were all very light, almost white, but with the close-clinging 

 reddish negro wool all excepting a very handsome daughter who was darker but whose 

 lovely brown limp curls hung low over her shoulders. She was altogether superior as a 

 type to her brothers, and the mother said to me one day, "Mrs. S., I wouldn't take anything 

 for Ellen's dark skin. If she had her brothers' light skin with that fine hair, people wouldn't 

 believe I was an honest woman. You see, there's just so much negro blood in these children 

 and it's bound to show one way or another. It's either a kinky-haired pale face or a brown 

 girl with white folk's hair." 



