I often look around me wondering who really knows me. Do my friends and coworkers? Better yet, what about my husband or my children? Do I even know myself? Does anyone know I secretly wanted to be a singer or a famous actress when I was younger? Probably not. I came from a time that even though some things for people of color were getting better, I still came from the situation I came from. I have decided to find myself through telling the story of me, from beginning to well … who I am now. With the hope that I have a better understanding of where I have been and where I am going. Anyone is welcome to take this journey with me and know that everything I write in these articles is completely true to my knowledge.
Trash-can baby. I guess that would be what you would call me—probably one of the first. I was born in 1974 in Columbia, Missouri. My parents were a mixed couple: my father black and my mother white. It is my understanding that although it was a strong sexual attraction that these two were not a match made in heaven. My father was a very smooth type of guy the kind that could talk a leopard out of his spots. My mother was a bubbly blonde from Long Beach, California. He was the sinner, but she was no saint. She was nineteen and he said he was twenty-five. Unfortunately I do not know how these two met but somehow they came to be. He was an abusive man, the kind that liked to beat his women. My mother finally got fed up with all the abuse and left him after he had kicked her in the stomach several times while she was pregnant with me. I was born shortly after that. So my mother was a single white woman toting around her black baby in Missouri. She became homeless and couldn’t get any help anywhere; no job, no home, nothing. People did not want to help a “nigger lover.”
So my mother went to a lawyer and tried to get me adopted. Papers were signed and hands were shook. I don’t know if any money was exchanged, but I believe that there was. The lawyer then took me to meet my new parents. They took one look at me and knew that I was mixed. They didn’t want anything to do with me. I was from a white woman. So they gave me back to the lawyer to return to my mother who was by this time long gone so the lawyer threw me in the trash. I was found and by the grace of God was still alive and well. I was put in a foster home where I lived for the first few years of my life (my first memory was of myself in a big bed with a bunch of other kids watching Star Trek).
According to my mother she did not know that any of this was going on. She said that she found out through a newspaper article explaining that somehow this baby had been left and found in the garbage. She said that she fought for years to try and get me back. I believe I was around three or four when I first met my real mother. It was at this time I was taken from the only home I had ever known and given to this stranger who now wanted me to call her mom. I know people are probably thinking she was so young, how could she possibly remember these things? I believe that they were so traumatic that they are memories that never will go away. I think the next one or two years were okay as I don’t really remember much. It was when I turned five my life again would be turned upside down.
