“My grandmother told me to marry a white man and improve the race. She is Portuguese, dark-skinned, and she believes in the philosophy behind the famous painting called The Redemption of Cain. You marry white, create a mulatto; they marry white, and now your family tree is officially white. That’s her brainwashing, a way of being accepted, safe in a hostile world. You marry white until all the lynching vanishes from your family tree.”
