![]() ![]() My mother was a secretary at the OEO, and my father a public information officer. Shriver had joked to my father that despite Robin's marked fecundity and the occasion of their marriage (my pop is still hazy about which situation arose first, which can only mean that the ghost of a freshly dead rabbit accompanied them to City Hall), "there would be only one raise allocated per household." ![]() They were both working for Sargent Shriver at the Office of Equal Opportunity. ![]() My father, Ralph Matthews Jr., a prominent black journalist, then forty, married my mother, Robin Kahn, then twenty-seven, in the spring of 1967. It says "Negro" on my birth certificate as well. That is what my father, a lean, butterscotch-colored man, was called then-a Negro. By the time he arrived at Washington, D.C.'s Sibley Memorial Hospital a few hours later, my prunish skin was settling somewhere closer to Caucasian than Negro. God knows why, labor was induced a month early, on the afternoon of November 8, 1967, while my father, who had received an unruffled phone call from my mother informing him of the impending proceedings, was at work. ![]()
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