Nested Wombs in the Maternal Grandmother's Remit

A weird fact of human biology: you existed, in egg form, inside of your mother even while she was developing inside of your grandmother’s womb. Human eggs, unlike sperm, are numbered and come into existence within the first 20 weeks of the baby’s development. A metabolic line can be traced backwards from your life now, through nested wombs, into your maternal grandmother’s world from the gestation of your mother. My own egg came online historically in 1951 when my grandmother Cleo—Cleopatra?—followed my grandfather from her home in Miami FL to the harsh winter climate of St. Paul Minnesota. “What are you, grandma?” I asked as a child. “I’m British, Dutch, Scotch-Irish and a little bit Cherokee,” she would say, grinning and winking. That was the family myth: Grandma is an Indian. My sister did a DNA test recently to confirm the native hypothesis; the results were not Cherokee but rather Congolese. We deduced from this a secret that the family, and especially Cleo, was heretofore not willing to comprehend: Grandma Cleo was an eighth Black. According to the one-drop rule in Jim Crow America, this made Cleo an octoroon, an illegal person in white spaces—especially in marriage. It was not until the Loving vs Virginia ruling of 1967 that these anti-miscegenation laws would finally be repealed.