The Fire This Time

Upon moving from Mississippi to California in 1969, Jesmyn Ward’s father was mistaken for a Latino man and a Samoan man due to his skin color and hair texture. In Oakland, he attended an all-black school after growing up in a small house in Pass Christian, Mississippi. 

Like her father, Ward grew up a black child in the South as well. Once, when her father tried to make her stumble into a blonde white woman in a drug store line, Ward discovered the woman was her relative Eunice. “‘I thought you were white,’ I said, and she and my father laughed” (90). In that area, Eunice’s African heritage classified her as black, and she experienced racial prejudice from a young age.

Eunice witnessed attempts to redefine the term Creole without including those with African or Native American backgrounds. This exclusion, Ward writes, “erase[s] us from the story of the plantations, the swamps, the bayou; to deny that plaçage, those unofficial unions, during the time of antimiscegenation laws, between European men and women of African heritage had ever taken place” (91). African Americans find family trees difficult to make, as fewer records exist than those tracking European bloodlines, as Ward herself has experienced with her complex ancestry.