Constance Quarterman Bridges

Great-Grandfather Fray was a white man. He went to another Virginia county to get Grandpa Albert (his own mixed son) a wife. He wanted a dark-skin woman because Grandpa looked white. —Aunt Edna Old Man Fray always matched his mules precisely like fitted pieces of a puzzle. The horses at the mill were perfect pairs. So it was not too far for him to travel from his valley over blue mountains to a distant Virginia county where Randolph slaves were darker, with molasses-colored Songhai skin, African kinked hair and mahogany eyes. He wanted to untie the weave of the Gordian Knot, complicated tangle he had created, with the issue of silk-haired Albert, his son, too fair to hide among the varied blacks. The journey was apology or shame. But cut or unwoven, the knotted weave leaves kinks too deep to hide or smooth away. Great-Grandma Rhoda, the woman Old Man Fray found, opulent with African genes, richly colored the complex threads of our generations.