More from that book
By the way, here’s the official site for her book and the documentary that inspired it: SecretDaughter.com
I wrote this up last night but firefox crashed and I lost it.
June Cross was placed in an informal adoption when she was about four because she couldn’t pass as white. (She is biracial — her mother was white and her father was African American.) There’s a harrowing scene when she’s splashing in a bubble bath during one of her visits with her mother and her mom idily says, “If only you hadn’t gotten so dark, you could have stayed with me.”
Her aunt and uncle (really her parents’ old landlords) take her in but never legally adopt her (something that becomes a problem towards the end of the book when her aunt is ill). And she continues to have regular visits with her mother, Norma, who also sends money for her keep.
Throughout her life, June’s loyalties are torn as she grapples with family, with race as perceived by her family and with race as is the reality of living in America in the 50s and 60s. For transracial adopter such as myself, there is a lot to think about.
One of the things I was thinking about when I was rocking Madison last night was the revelation in this book (not in the documentary) that June has an older sister who was placed for adoption in a formal, state-supervised adoption. (There are very little details about this in the book but June’s sister is white so race isn’t an issue in that adoption.) She also has an older brother (older, too, than the lost sister) who was raised mostly by Norma’s mother. Then even later, June discovers that her mother was farmed out to relatives, too, as a child. June herself never has children.
This was hot on the heels of reading this (courtesy of a link from Susan):
Of course, there was the occasional blip. Like the time the yoga teacher asked us to visualize our own birth. At first I pictured a wooden-paneled station wagon. But then I went somewhere else. My non-adopted friends left the room feeling relaxed. I left the room terrified.Then there was the nightmare I had that I was leaving the hospital with my baby when the lights suddenly went out. When the lights came back on again, all the newborns had been stolen, including mine. A man with a stethoscope explained that he wasn’t really surprised, as babies were getting top dollar on the adoption black market that week.
–from an essay by Alison Larkin
It’s strange how things get handed down. This, of course, made me think about some things specific to our adoption and specific to my family of origin, (which includes a history rife with reproductive crises and difficult resolutions).
Then (because my mind will wander however I try to reign it in), this made me think about FauxClaud’s tragedy post because I was thinking about how deeply run our choices and how impossible it is to take adoption as a stand-alone event in anyone’s life.
Anyway, I’m not quite ready to articulate how this is all coming together in my head but this is how it’s all running around in there.
I think Randall Kennedy discusses this case in his Interracial Intimacies book. It sounds really familiar.
We have turned down a handful of opportunities to have our profiles shown to white mothers expecting biracial children. They have been people not commited to open adoption, because they wanted the Black child to disappear. Just doesn’t seem like the right scenario for our family!
Now that you say this, when I think back to why my husband and I were drawn to adoption from Korea, I can definitely see connections back into my childhood that influenced our decision. And our experience will undoubtedly influence someone else in our family in the future.
Looking forward to seeing where this goes!
I am reading this book now too. I am struck by how much talk there is of hair care (and now you are talking about hair every day…) and how much black cultural wisdom gets passed on to her through her aunt and uncle. The white mother doesn’t give much or recognize it, but she is clearly being trained/brought up in the black cultureal expectations by her black community/family. It is facinating to me the way she shows the differences.
PS I wish you had comment spell check and preview options. I always need to edit my writing! I know some mistakes are getting through and I hate that.
My post on the book is here http://awrungsponge.blogspot.com/2006/10/secret-daughter-mixed-race-daughter.html
I don’t know how to do trackbacks. Thanks for telling me about this book and making me want to read it!