Back in 1981, a group of New Bedford residents got together and created a book called Spinner. Inspired by the “Foxfire” books from Georgia, the staff of Spinner collected lore, legends, and oral histories from older residents of the city. Five volumes eventually got published, the latest in 1995.

I came across the first volume of Spinner at Upstair Used Books, on Pleasant Street in downtown New Bedford. I went in and asked Ira, who owns Upstair Used Books, if he had any books on local history. “Oh sure,” he said, “I’ve got a couple of copies of the first volume of Spinner.”

The essay that really caught my attention was an interview with Lucy Ramos titled “Black, White, or Poruguese?: A Cape Verdean Dilemma.” Here are some excerpts from this interview:

Being a Cape Verdean is special to me and to my children even more so — because we’re a potpourri really, we’re a mixture of people. We have both European and African influence. When I was younger our country was still ruled by the Portuguese government, so we’ve gone through some changes, you know. When we were young we were Portuguese because that was our mother country, and the we went through the Black part of our lives in the sixties. And now I think we finally know who and what we are, which is Cape Verdean, and it is something special. And we are different, we’re different from the American Blacks and we’re different from the Whites. We’ve taken from both cultures and that makes us unique….

Here in New Bedford, you know, we just kind of accepted the fact that we were Cape Verdean and that everybody knew what that meant. But when Cape Verdeans began to go away from the community, they began to have problems.

For instance, one of my sons was in the ROTC and they travel a lot. Everywhere he went he would say, “My name is Ramos,” and everybody thought he was Spanish. And he would say, “No, I’m Cape Verdean.” “What’s a Cape Verdean?” they would all ask, so it became a thing to be able to tell them where the islands were, that we had our own language and dialect, had our own foods, music, and culture.

The older people may still say “We’re Portuguese”; that is how they were raised. But I think the New Bedford Portuguese always objected to us saying we were Portuguese, because they felt we really weren’t. And so we always had this little slight conflict. Now I think we have our own identity and we’re not Portuguese and we know it. But I think it was important in particular for our children to know this. Especially after the Black Crisis we went through. I think our children needed to know that they have their own culture and their own heritage. They don’t have to borrow from the Portuguese or anyone else….

In the sixties we had lots of problems here locally with the labels “Black” and “White.” You see, up till then the kids identified themselves as Cape Verdean. But at that point they had to take a stand, especially in high school. You were either Black or you were White, there was no in-between. So you had to decide then, “Am I a Black or am I a White?” and nobody wanted to hear whether you were Cape Verdean or not. The kids had a difficult time then because they had to make that decision.

People may not understand this, but it was very difficult because Cape Verdeans come in shades from pure white to ebony black. For instance when my kids were going to the Greene School, the teacher would identify the child’s race by looking at him. I had three sons all in the school at the same time. I was a carpet joke because I have three sons three shades; and one teacher identified one boy as Black, one teacher identified one as White, and one was identified as Mulatto. So I have three children identified as three different races….

I think the majority of kids now are coming around to saying they are Cape Verdean. But if it is a choice of identifying White of Black, I think they would choose Black. I think it was more difficult for the older ones, the parents and the grandparents, to accept that their children identified as Black. Some of the kids were even dropping the Cape Verdean altogether and it was just Black. There was lots of peer pressure, and they felt you couldn’t be in-between, you had to be one or the other, and if the color of your skin wasn’t pure white, that didn’t give you much choice to begin with anyway.

This essay caught my attention not only because it tells about a moment in time when racial categories shifted and forced some people to have to claim a new racial identity.

As a result of reading this one short interview, I’ve added another long book to my summer reading list: Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860-1965 by Marilyn Halter (University of Illinois, 1993) — when I finish reading it, I’ll post a summary of this book here. I think there are some fascinating implications for the ways we perceive and construct racial identities here in the United States.