My mother never saw him again.
MY STEPMOTHER NODS at my question, glances at my father. She is light-skinned and solicitous, with a wide nose and a voice like the breeze of the fans she angles at me.
“Yes, yes.” My father waves his hands. “You'll meet them later.”
He is short like me, his weathered skin dark as plums. A strip of wiry black hair encircles the back of his head. There's a space in his mouth where a tooth should be. I don't see the broad-shouldered rugby player who stared out from my wall all those years. The only feature I recognize is that round nose.
A blur flashes tan and red in the hallway. I glance up to see a velvety brown girl in a scarlet school uniform receding into the dimness, familiar eyes stunned wide. A face I could swear is mine.
It's not possible, I tell myself. Even if the girl in the hall is my sister, we have different mothers of different races. How can we look alike? For twenty-six years I have been an only child, the only child. The only New World African among Scandinavian Americans. The only Black member of our family, our town.
My father is explaining that during Christmas we'll travel to our ancestral village, where I will be formally presented to the extended family and clan elders.
Christmas has always been White. After my mother and grandparents reconciled and we moved to their farm, I grew up hearing Finnish spoken, with a wreath of candles in my curls on St. Lucia Day. Mummi, my Finnish grandmother, and I spent all December at the kitchen table cutting out nissu, little Swedish pigs, and six-point stars from the almond-scented dough. Before baking, we painted them with tiny brushes like the ones she used for tinting family photographs, and the world we created, with its blue snowmen and yellow pigs, was equally whimsical. Sheet after sheet of cookies emerged from the oven transformed, the egg paint set into a deep, satiny glaze.
Each night Old Pappa, my Swedish grandfather, and I set candles in the windows or built snow lanterns in the yard for the tonttu, farm sprites, and I imagined that we were conductors on the Underground Railroad, lighting the way for runaway slaves.
I spent my childhood searching for anyone who looked like me. Wedging myself into the back of my grandparents’ closet among board games, paint-by-numbers kits, and jigsaw puzzles, I sifted through shoeboxes of photographs. Monochrome snapshots of morose White relatives in black clothes. Portraits hand-tinted with Mummi's ice-cream colors. These were the extras that didn't make the cut; I'd already looted the official family album, sliding out the only two photos of my father.
I developed interest in Great-Uncle Vaino, a quiet fellow who always eyed the camera as if from a great distance, the forehead beneath his dark, slicked-back hair perpetually wrinkled from squinting. His broad, swarthy face with cleft chin and hooked nose evoked the unknown origins of the Finns. In his face lay the possibility of Turkey and Hungary. He looked more Inuit than Scandinavian, and when he laughed, the dark slits of his eyes disappeared completely.
Into the box beneath my bed he went. He didn't look like me, but at least he was different and dark.
The sharp bite of Mummi's limpa bread bloomed at the mouth of the hallway, reminding me that it was time for our baking, but at twelve I was pushing my way out of childhood, wondering what I would become. My grandparents had thrown out my nineteen-year-old mother, after all, for being with a Black man and only took her back because I was so cute. After the golden skin and dark eyes my mother rhapsodized over, these curls my grandmother twisted around her fingers, this round nose my grandfather tugged before hanging me upside down, then what?
I studied my African folktales and Norse legends and waited at the window for Anansi the Spider and Loki the Half Giant, the tricksters, to come scuttling over the purple mountains that ringed the farm. They would say, “Welcome, sister!” in a special language that only we understood. But no one ever came. No one has ever looked like me.
IN TRUE AFRICAN FASHION, my father and I move slowly, circu-itously, as if conversation were a tribal praise song or highlife dance with instrumental flourishes and digressive harmonies. Eventually my father calls, “Emekachukwu, Okechukwu, Ad-anna! Come and greet your sister!”
Before the words even leave his mouth, the three are quivering in the center of the parlor. Grins split their faces. The eldest, Emekachukwu, is already languid with teenage charisma. Behind him stoops a lanky boy with yellow skin and glittering, feverish eyes—Okechukwu, the invalid. Pressed close to him is me, fourteen years ago.
“Okay,” our father says, the Igbo chieftain making clan policy, “this is your older sister from America. She's come to visit. You love her.”
He is wrong. It is I who love them, I who have grown up twenty-six years alone. Up to now family has always meant being the focal point. Now, in one day, with one sentence, I go from being the youngest, the sole daughter, niece, grandchild, to being the eldest of four, the one with the responsibility for love.
He is right. Adanna reaches me first. She is twelve, with a personality that shoves her brothers to the side. She is exquisite—luminous skin the color of Dutch cocoa; heart-shaped face with high, rounded cheekbones, slimmer than mine, darker; a mouth that flowers above a delicate pointed chin. I can see myself for the first time; we are exquisite. We come face-to-face, and the rest of the family gasps, Aieeeeel, steps back, disappears, makes way for our love.
THE FIRST THING my sister does upon meeting me is drag me into her room. She pushes me onto her bed and dumps her photo album in my lap. I smile, thinking of the album in my bag. My mother has always laughed at how I hoard photographs, especially the black-and-white, the older the better. Half my collection is unidentified, snapshots of scowling Scandinavians no one can remember. Who was that rotund Elmer always standing next to Bessie, a creamy-faced cow?
My sister, who has lived all twelve of her years in my absence, hands me the images to accompany her life, this language we share. Still shy of my eyes, she huddles close, her head on my shoulder, the African seeking warmth.
She whispers that she's been lonely all these years, the only girl in the family. The house is full of women—young cousins come from the village for schooling, orphans my father inherited after the war—but I know what she means.
“I was so glad to learn about you,” she says. Her pulse throbs against my shoulder, a flutter of life working its way inside me.
“When did you find out?” I ask, touching her curls.
“Yesterday.”
I twist around on my new sister's bed, winded as if I had run all the way here from America. Inhale, I remind myself.
Adanna beams.
“He never told you that he had a child in America?” I want to add: That until I was twelve, the age you are now, he wrote to me? That for months beforehand he knew I was coming to Nigeria, and that I've been here, just kilometers away, for weeks already? Only, it comes out as “Are you sure? He didn't tell you before?”
“No.” She shakes her head, her eyes soft. She repeats: “I learned about you yesterday.”
It's the logistics of the betrayal—rather than the betrayal itself—that stun me. I wonder how a twenty-six-year concealment of a whole daughter is even possible. It's quite a feat, even half a world away. I try to breathe, the thick Nigerian air a helpful reminder. Scoop it up, heavy and green, draw it in warm, circulate it through the blood and lungs, send it out cooler. Stay alive.
I leaf through Adanna's album, amazed at how she and I have always looked alike, from infancy onward, despite different mothers, and gradually the stitch in my side subsides.
I smile. I could almost swear that her baby pictures are mine. I too posed for the camera, mouth open in a silent, show-stopping exclamation of delight. I too was all brown eyes and blooming bud mouth.
On the fifth page I find an actual photo of me in front of the Joulu tree in my grandparents’ living room. Like Adanna in her photos, I am dressed in red—stretch stirrup pants. A halo of tinsel laces my short Afro. I see another snapshot that I recognize from my mother's c
ollection back home: me piloting a shiny red tricycle in the driveway. Slowly I realize what I am seeing: Her photo album is a blend of her photos and mine. Our lives intertwined.
I tap the corners of my photos, relieved to find myself. This is not America with its books and magazines and television shows and movies that refuse to reflect me, its glossy surfaces that for twenty-six years have been telling me I don't matter, no one needs my image. I have always been here in Africa. I exist.
“Yeah,” I marvel, “Mom used to love to dress me in red.” Adanna was mistaken. I was cherished, perhaps even longed for.
Now it is Adanna's turn to stare. “B-b-but,” she stammers, “I was the one they loved to dress in red. These are my pictures.”
She palms our images, her fingers the brown tributary linking the same face, same stubborn personality, fourteen years apart, half a world away. Her eyes train on mine, widen. “I found them in a drawer and just assumed …”
At my shaking head, she gasps. “All these years I thought these were me!”
THE VILLAGERS LOOK at my sister and me and start to cry. Time and again it happens. We are strolling down a village road at dusk, hand in hand, quiet, our feet red with dust, and some woman stops pounding yam in mid-thrust, the heavy wooden pestle suspended above her head, and drops her jaw.
“Chineke,” she gasps, looking from Adanna to me to the sky, where Chineke resides. “Can she be mmoT A ghost or an ancestral spirit reappeared from the land of the dead.
Adanna and I laugh, hurrying down the path before the others can hear her shouts to “Come see—o!” and run out of the house, wiping their hands on their bright, Dutch-printed wrappas, ululating like a wedding party.
Or we are lounging in the embrace of the giant iroko tree, chewing on bright mango pits and waiting for the afternoon heat to pass, and some distant-distant cousin will drive by in a battered Peugeot belching a halo of sour diesel and smack his long pink palm against his inky forehead.
“Oh-ho!” he shouts, nearly piloting the vehicle into the ditch, a move my father is famous for. “Are there suddenly two Adannas now?”
I accept this attention as I have always accepted attention, with the tight, unspoken greed of the addict, the flex in the heart muscle, the warmth spreading out through the bloodstream. This time it is not about being female, but the hunger, the expectation, is always the same: to see myself conceived, given shape, in the mirror of another's eyes. Loki the Trickster, Shape Shifter.
I accept these laughing and sobbing women, these nearly smashed cars, as confirmation that I belong to this family. Yes, I may be the American, missing for twenty-six years, raised without language in the Land of Efficiency. I may be the secret my father keeps hidden in the compound until he can explain to the clan elders. But my face is the password, the key unlocking the door to family.
I HATE HER. She lies curled asleep with her head in my lap, breath thick and milky as an infant, wearing my name. Our shame is evident every time someone calls her. Ada—the senior daughter of the lineage, Nna—father. Adanna. Father's firstborn daughter.
“If she's Adanna,” any Nigerian must surely ask, “then how can you be?”
Exactly. Her very name denies my existence. As does Eme-ka's. After the birth of a child, parents are thenceforth known by the name of the firstborn: Papa-Emeka and Mama-Emeka, not Magnus and Grace. I keep waiting for a correction, a memo to be sent out: Dear So-and-so, up to now you've known me as Papa-Emeka, but I'm actually Papa-Faith. Please adjust your Rolodex accordingly.
Faith. “Your mother named you well,” my father muses. He is full of praise. For my mother for naming and raising me well. For me for traveling all this way. “She found us herself,” he announces to the countless stream of singing-clapping-dancing guests that come to witness my miraculous arrival. “She's the one!”
Adanna stretches like a cat in my lap, unshutters thick lashes. She sees me: elder sister. The one who spoils. The exotic American. Her passport to what lies ahead, what she might become.
I stare back. I see: younger sister. The one who adores. Exotic African. The passport back home. Who I might have been.
She is popular, quick to laugh, not afraid of math and science. Her eyes speak. “I missed you.” She gleams.
Isaiah 9:61
BRIAN GILMORE
I never named names …
HOWARD FAST2
1.
My children have unique names. African-American names. This pronouncement requires some explanation.
But first, let me advise the reader that what I want is for my children to know they are special and that the African-American experience is new each day and always in a state of being created. Perhaps that is the greatest thing about being African-American: More so than any other racial or ethnic group in America, we “African-Americans” can define ourselves newly every day in America because of our peculiar history of becoming who we are right here in America, for the most part. There is no old country or old village somewhere for us where we know where we are from; for the most part, it all happened right here, through chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and now onward.
For that reason, when it came time to name each of our three children, my wife, Elanna, and I tried to give each child a name that was unique and meaningful. The name had to infer confidence within the child, a sense of self As African-Americans, no matter the name, it is an “African-American,” so the emphasis, to me, is on the special nature of the name.
2.
We once loved predictable names. Tyrone, Leroy, and Chantay ruled my youngest days. These names are slipping into history.
In the sixties and seventies, thousands of Black people got rid of their birth names and adopted Arabic or African names. The sixties and early seventies were all about redefinition and self-determination for Black people, so their names were changed as well as the names of their children. As a result, Bobby is Ahmad. Calvin is Jabari. Their children have similar names.
Next was the period where African-Americans, in attempting to create an authentic Black identity, simply made up names. Keisha, Tamika, and Diante ruled the world. This is still prevalent.
My parents, born during the Great Depression, kept it simple: American names for their children. I have an Irish name. It has served me well. I cannot tell you how many times I have walked into job interviews and the mouths of the white interviewers dropped open. They were certain I was a white public interest lawyer with publishing credits after reading my resume. I remember sitting down at one interview before four Whites grinning inside as they sat there in shock. A Black woman walked into the interview; she was an office assistant.
“Welcome, Mr. Gilmore,” she said with a huge grin on her face. She placed a cup of water in front of me, and wished me luck.
3.
A job applicant with a name that sounds like it might belong to an African-American—say, Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones—can find it harder to get a job.
—NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, 20063
4.
Our first child is Adanya, meaning “her father's daughter.” The name is West African, Ibo, and neither Elanna nor myself is Ibo. Everyone loves the name mostly for its meaning.
It took us forever to find “Adanya;” ours was the endless search through every baby name book ever published. The hospital representative from D.C. Vital Records came to our hospital room a half dozen times seeking our completed birth certificate application.
“Not yet,” we said in unison.
Eventually, our first child did become Adanya a few hours before mother, child, and father were discharged.
Elanna always agreed: Our children should have unique names that tell them they are special. The power of the African-American experience is that we are becoming who we are right here, right now. All of our names are “African-American,” but the names should possess meaning for them and for us.
Adanya was born in 1999, February 23, the same birthday as the Black intellectual W.E.B. DuBois4
and Chicago Black Arts poet Haki Madhubuti5. DuBois, born in America, 1868, eventually left America in self-imposed exile in the early 1960s, died, and is buried in Ghana, West Africa. Haki Madhubuti, the poet, was born in America, as Don L. Lee, in 1942. In the renaming movement of the sixties and seventies, Haki changed his name in 1973.
5.
Adanya's godparents are from India. Her godfather, Dev Kayal, is a good friend whom I met many years ago. Dev once related an interesting story to me about the significance of naming and names.
According to Dev, when he was born, and in his country's tradition, he did not receive his permanent legal name for a year. He was observed for a year and then received a name. This is an East Indian tradition. His given name was Devashis: that means “from the divine with blessing.” The name, in my view, was simply beautiful.
This is what happened to his name:
When Dev was a young teen, his parents immigrated to America to become citizens. When Dev legally entered the country, his father had to submit a name for him. It was, as he recalls, like the unverifiable stories from Ellis Island when Europeans claim that their names were changed when they entered America. Dev says the name he received as a one-year-old was changed when he came to America. He was, thereafter, Dev Kayal.
An excerpt from the poem “Dying with the Wrong Name,” by the Arab-American poet Sam Hamod, captures it as well:
Na'aim Jazeeny, Sine Hussein, Im'a Brahim, Hussein Hamode
Subh',
all lost when “A man in a
dark blue suit at Ellis Island says, with
tiredness and authority, You only need two
It's All Love Page 24