Sable Monroe

This is not a love story, and it is not a condemnation; it is an attempt to understand how women made choices when choice itself was limited.

Author’s Note:
This essay is part of an ongoing body of work drawn from memory, family history, and reflection. It does not follow a linear timeline. It follows patterns. Some pieces may feel out of sequence, but together they form a larger map.

I was nine years old when my great-grandmother died. By the time I knew her, she was already well past old age. Her skin was pale and freckled with time, her blue eyes dulled by years, her hair long, white, and hanging straight with only the faintest wave. I didn’t know her youth. I only knew the version of her that remains after most of life has already passed through.

Everything I know about her younger years comes from fragments. Kitchen conversations. Veranda talks. Family recollections that were never meant to be flattering, just factual.

One fact came up again and again: she was not considered a great beauty.

Not whispered. Not softened. Just stated.

And strangely enough, I love that.

In a world that compulsively rewrites women’s pasts to make them more palatable, more romantic, more exceptional, there is something grounding about a lineage that doesn’t bother. No one felt the need to say she was beautiful “in her own way.” No one tried to rescue her with nostalgia. Multiple relatives, independently, said the same thing. So I believe them.

This matters because men have always broken social rules for women they found irresistible. They did it then. They do it now. Across race, class, and culture, desire has always had the power to disrupt norms. That didn’t happen in her case.

Which tells me this was never a forbidden love story.

My great-grandmother married a Black man in late-nineteenth-century Jamaica, a time when race still rigidly structured social life. Her own mother later showed open resentment toward her mixed-race grandchildren, withholding affection and small comforts. Racism didn’t disappear because of the marriage. It was simply tolerated, then displaced.

So how did the marriage happen at all?

The answer, I believe, lies in survival.

She was not considered beautiful by the standards of her social circle. By local norms, she lacked the figure men prized. She was thin. Her face was described as plain. She did not inspire romantic competition or rule-breaking devotion. What she did have was skin color that carried weight.

In a colonial, post-slavery society, skin color was not just aesthetic. It was status.

For a Black man, marrying a white woman, even an unremarkable one, could signal legitimacy. It softened social boundaries. It elevated perception. That dynamic has not vanished. It still exists today, even if people are uncomfortable admitting it.

At the same time, her husband brought what mattered most to her survival: land, food security, and independence. He could not read or write. He signed documents with a mark. But he owned property, employed others, fed his household well, and funded the education of relatives, including opportunities abroad.

This was not romance. It was mutual leverage within constraint.

Her skin carried symbolic value. His land carried material power. Together, they created stability in a world that offered little mercy to women or to Black men.

Later generations in my family make this contrast clearer.

My grandmother inherited a mixed-race appearance that local culture openly prized. Her complexion, hair texture, and features drew attention. Her husband did not fall in love with her personality. He saw her. That was enough.

He encountered her briefly, became fixated on her appearance, and told her that once he returned from overseas labor, he would marry her. And he did exactly that. He accumulated resources, bought property, and secured status, driven largely by attraction. Beauty mobilized effort. Desire justified ambition.

That difference matters.

My great-grandmother was not chosen for beauty. My grandmother was.

And that contrast tells me everything I need to know about how skin, status, and survival operated in my lineage.

None of this diminishes my great-grandmother. If anything, it clarifies her strength. She was not carried by desire or protected by romance. She navigated a harsh system using what was available to her. She lived past one hundred years. She raised children. She endured hostility. She anchored a family line that still exists.

I don’t need her story to be softened to honor it.

In fact, I prefer it this way.

Because real histories are not predictable. They are pragmatic. They are shaped by power, scarcity, and choices made under constraint. And sometimes the most honest thing you can say about an ancestor is not that she was beautiful, but that she survived.