Mine certainly does. My paternal grandparents, May Edwards Hill and Daniel Hill, had to elope to get married in 1918, shortly before he went overseas as an American army officer during World War I. May came from a well-to-do Catholic black family, and there was nothing satisfactory about the Baltimore-raised young man with whom she had fallen in love. May’s mother, Marie Coakley, who could pass for white but was married to a black dentist and was living as a member of the so-called “black bourgeoisie” in Washington, D.C., led the charge against my grandfather. What was so bad about him? In the opinion of my great-grandmother, Daniel Hill had three strikes against him. He was not Catholic. (He was soon to become a lifetime minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and therefore close to being a heathen. Indeed, when May wrote love letters to her husband while he fought in the trenches of France, she began some of them with “My dear pagan buzzard.”) He was not from money.
