ather.
America was very different form Guyana. From the way people drove to the way they greeted each other...I saw that I was going to need a lot of help adjusting to this new frontier...3
Gihaan moved to Lamar, South Carolina in 1956 where her father had been residing for the past 16 years. Here only her father raised her. This was especially new to my mother because she was used to being raised by females, she had never really been around men, besides her younger brothers. My mother came to America at a bad time. Down in South Carolina civil rights had not really been established just yet. It was still a bit of segregation going on down there. My mother had never been exposed to things of this nature and they came as a surprise to her.
...I saw how it was to growing up as a child, the white people had everything from the water fountains, to comfortable places to sit while playing in the park...sometimes I would wish that I were white so that I could have all the things that they had...4
This is how my mother often felt but she would always say, "I never wished that I wasn't the color I was I love my color and I love my culture."
At the age of twenty-one Gihaan changed her name from Gihaan Alexis Alniif to Graceyella Demetria Slater, Demetria for her father's name Demetrius.
A year later, my mother would move to Baltimore, Maryland and there she would meet my father, Wildon Alexander. She met the six foot seven inch man in a laundry mat. She recalls falling in love with him immediately.
My father, Wildon, was born and raised on the out skirts of Kingston, Jamaica. His mother, Eleanor, and father, Timothy were both full born Jamaicans, born and raised in the country section of Jamaica. My father never experienced any biracial or bicultural conflicts before but he surly would when he would marry my mother in winter of 1960.
Right away, my grandfather disapproved of his daughter's marriage to a "Rasta" as hecalled my f...