'My Depression Is Part of My Slave Ancestry'

Almost every picture of my grandmother looks sad. When I was a child, I flipped through old black and white photos of my mother as a baby, then as a young girl and teenager. My comments were always the same, “Grandma looks sad.” My mother replied, “She was sad. She missed my father.” I knew that my grandfather died when my mother was just 18 months old, but I couldn’t understand why seven, ten and fifteen years later, my grandmother still had sadness in her eyes.