My Adoption Story

She was just 15 when she met my father. It was 1971— the first year of forced school integration in Marianna, Arkansas. Racial tensions were high, Martin Luther King had just been assassinated in their backyard, and the halls of the high school were divided, sometimes violently. She was a white teenager with long, blond hair, a hippy, a flower-child. He was a 15-year-old Black boy living in a racially charged culture that was neither healthy nor safe for boys like him. They met at a time that made impossible for them to meet any other way. Hippies, were outcasts as well, especially among the White working class. But, they were the only white students who would even talk to the newly integrated Black students. To her, he wasn’t a risk—he was a person. The culture was a problem.

Their relationship had to stay hidden. Not only would her parents never have approved, but it was still illegal in the South, punishable by violence or even lynching. They dated in secret for over a year. Then came the pregnancy.

At first, she tried to hide it. Baggy sweaters. Closed doors. Denial. But the truth has a way of showing itself, and once it did, everything unraveled. Word reached her family, then the entire town. Furious and panicked, they showed up at my grandmother’s house, where my young father lived. Tensions escalated fast. According to my uncle Bill, who was home from college on Spring break, “I put a shotgun in yo granddaddy’s face and told him to get off our property.” That’s the way he tells it. Whether he takes artistic license in his account in his telling matters not. What did matter is that it was a very inflamed and dangerous situation—for everyone involved.

The girl’s family, my grandfather, came back with the police, demanding the boy, my dad, be handed over to the authorities. That would have been a death sentence. Fortunately for him, and me, he was already gone—sent on a bus to Chicago to stay with his older sister, an exile that saved the young boy’s life. No one knew if he’d return or not. Not unless terms could be “negotiated” by my grandmother.

My grandmother owned an ice cream shop on Main Street called the Dairy Bar—Black businesses on one side of the street, White businesses on the other. When the news that my father had left town got out, my grandmother and her family were in grave danger. They burned the Dairy Bar and every Black business on Main Street, but miraculously preserved the White businesses on the opposite side.

My mother was sent away as well. She had family in Tucson, Arizona. Alone, pregnant, and shamed, she was shipped across the country to a Catholic dormitory for “wayward girls.” These homes existed to erase the evidence of the sins that culture wanted to forget. She give birth, handed over the baby, and returned to a place that could no longer be called her home. The names she was called are not suitable for this book. She hated the racism. She hated the people.

She never gave me a name gave me. I never heard her voice or saw her face. She vanished. I was placed for adoption—quietly, cleanly, permanently. Her disappearance was designed to be permanent. But despite that, we are reunited 40 years later.

My adoptive mother, unable to have children of her own, got a call late one night. “We may have a hard-to-place baby up for adoption. Are you interested?” they asked her. I was the “hard-to-place” baby. I was biracial, the product of forbidden love, and marked from the beginning. But she didn’t hesitate. She said yes without hesitation. At the adoption agency, the nuns left me in a room alone with her to see if we would “bond.” When they returned, I was already in the new baby clothes she had brought for me.