FOR CENTURIES, some of the most searing, explosive and divisive descriptive terms in the black community have not been the "N" word, but rather the colorism words such as "mixed," "high yellow," "light," "bright," "fair-skinned," "almost white," "passing," "mulatto" and "fair," to name a few. And if you mix any of those colorisms with descriptions of the hair being "good" (meaning naturally fine and straight like Caucasians'), or capable of "blow" (meaning to be able to blow in the wind) you have the formula for a pathetic prophetic syndrome that has haunted blacks for centuries and has been manipulated by whites to divide blacks. In Alex Haley's "Roots," we were awestruck by what we saw and read of the dramatic re-enactment of an African birth where the black baby was raised and held high to the heavens for everyone's glory. But in Susie Nickens-Ludlow's "Carry Me Back," mulatto children were raised to the light to be examined to see if the skin around their fingernails was pink, not tan, and to see if their strands of hair separated. That's how they who were "colorstruck" determined if the child would be "light" with Caucasian characteristics, equipping them with the ability to "pass" over blackness into whiteness. Nickens-Ludlow, 80, a retired school teacher now living in Oakland, takes you inside the closet of the "light-skinned" world of black America in "Carry Me Back," her historical memoir describing the difficulties of being part white, part Indian and part African-American. The memoir will help you understand why some of America's most articulate and ardent black activists have been "fair-skinned Negroes" who have been treated unfairly by whites and often despised by blacks. "Carry Me Back," her own self-published family history, provides detailed proof that blacks came to this country before slavery as free people of color. She traces her mulatto Nickens lineage back to 1660, when Richard Yoconhanocan, an Indian American known as "Black Dick," married Criss, a mixed-race woman of black and white descent. Her African-American Brown family lineage was traced back before 1800, when an unknown slave married Mariah Brown-Berry of black and Indian-American descent. The two sides of the family, which have gotten progressively darker in skin color over the years, have yielded the newest offspring, after many hundreds, by the name of Mikkail Muhammad. Nickens-Ludlow helps you understand why free people of color, usually lighter in skin color than those enslaved, were scorned by whites and resented by slaves, when she describes how they lived an insular life, developing their own institutions, social clubs, churches and family associations. They often married among themselves to keep the "color as close to white as possible" to help to remain free because if one were caught while traveling by horseback or in a carriage by a white without their "free papers" of identification they would be sold into slavery. The lighter one was in color the less likely to be considered a slave. These were America's first cases of "riding or driving while black." Nickens-Ludlow explains how Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and some of the other founding fathers could have organized their "love relationships" that produced the mulatto children as she explains how her great grandmother, a free mulatto woman had a long love relationship with a rich white farmer named Colvin. Colvin allowed the children from this relationship to carry his name. The Colvin, Tapscot and Grigsby families, who were all predominantly Caucasian "with a tint of Negro and Indian mixture" formed an enclave, isolated from the general black communities to perpetuate the color line. They propagated "a distinct race of Americans," said Nickens-Ludlow, "with straight to wavy hair and blond to black hair color." All their skin colors ranged from white to light brown. The Nickens/Brown full-color family portrait foldout shows clearly the results of how the "almost white" family members were inbred. "Who am I?," she asks. "I am not a European American, nor African-American nor an American Indian. I am an American." Her descriptions of the steep criteria for determining membership in the post-slavery black aristocracy would even be difficult for most of today's whites to qualify. She chronicles her life in Washington, D.C., where she taught before remarrying and moving to Oakland where she served on the Oakland Museum and the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame boards. "I wrote about my life to make it interesting; after all I've lived for 80 years and God has blessed me with good health," she says. Before writing her story she was nervous that she wouldn't find all the family members. Now that she's told this story, the readers, many mulatto-descendants, some whites and blacks will undoubtedly become amused and/or angered. But they will surely become educated of what life was like from the view of a descendant of one of the free people of color. You will laugh uproariously when you discover how some Native Americans "passed" as mulatto or black to avoid being persecuted by whites during Indian disturbances and how whites denied blacks from owning phones because, the party lines would allow them to listen to their conversations. She tells of how a college date blew on her hair because he was "obsessed with good hair." She meticulously describes the role and rationale for many of the black society clubs and organizations and how they currently network with each other. As she embarks on her nationwide book tour, she hopes to sell books to more than 3,000 of her "club members" whom she personally knows. She can be reached by e-mail at honocanpress@bigplanet.com | 