WHERE ARE HER REAL PARENTS? Race, Adoption, and Lies in the 1970s

Abstract

When I was a baby, I was adopted by a 54-year-old white widow who lived on the coast of Maine. She insisted that I, too, was white and had the birth certificate to prove it. But the boys at the bus stop called me “nigger,” and on the all-white playground, kids repeatedly chanted, “chocolate chip, chocolate chip, chocolate chip....”

Race, or more specifically the energy it took to deny it, shaped the first 30 years of my life until I learned the truth about my heritage. But race is just a part of my story— both an obstacle and a catalyst to finding my real family and to finally accept who I am.

When I was 12 an uncle handed me my adoption papers and told me that my “real name was Heather.” When I heard those words, I realized that my deep-seated feelings of not belonging were justified, and I also discovered the name of the woman who gave birth to me, and, presumably had the answers I needed. It took me nearly 20 more years to have the nerve—and the technology—to track her down.

Where Are Her Real Parents, lives at the intersection of adoption, race, addiction, and the need for a family. My story takes me through the difficulties of growing up looking completely different from everyone else with a mother who lied about it, making choices based on those lies, and my transformation when I find my real mother who tells me the truth. Years later I meet my Kenyan family and start to develop an identity of my own—one based on facts and not a construct designed to make me fit in where I could never really belong.