This National Adoption Awareness Month, I reflect on what might have been, and what still could be

I remember the first time I really saw myself in a book. 

Tired and raw from a wet winter in the Pacific Northwest, I’d fled Seattle for the sunbaked sand of the Florida Keys where, in a white Adirondack chair on the beach behind a bungalow facing west towards Blackwater Sound, I turned page after page, ravenous, a pink highlighter and black pen woven between the fingers of my right hand, marking in the margins until I closed the back flap, sweaty, thirsty and disoriented.

It was 2021. I was 43 years old. The book was Our Nig by Harriet Wilson.

Like me, Wilson was born and raised in rural New Hampshire and, like me, she was Black. But, despite having attended what was considered one of the best public high schools in the state during my time there, I’d never heard of Wilson or her 1859 novel, one of the first ever published by an African American woman, until that winter in the Keys. I can’t recall how I learned about the book, though I suspect timing played a part. In the nine months following George Floyd’s murder, media and corporations seemed to be taking greater interest in the promotion of Black history and Black creators. Numerous white friends, colleagues and coworkers were engaged the long overdue work of examining their privileges and contributions to racial inequities in America. In fact, it seemed nearly every white person I came into contact with took an interest in what I had to say about my life experiences as a Black woman in America.

Everyone, that is, except my white, adoptive family and friends in the white, New Hampshire community in which I was raised.

According to census data, New Hampshire is today 92.6% white, 1.4% Black. This aligns with my own lived experience. For the entirety of the 18 years I lived in the state through high school graduation, I was one of fewer than five Black children in my classes, in schools that lacked even a single Black teacher, administrator, or staff person. The only Black adult with whom I interacted before attending college out of state was the mother of two girls with whom I figure skated, and they lived in a neighboring town. 

While I had read Black authors before Wilson, theirs had always centered stories of Black family and Black community. In Wilson’s autobiographical Our Nig, however, I read for the first time of a Black protagonist, Frado, who, like me, was born in New Hampshire to a white mother and a Black father, but was soon deposited at the home of a white family, where she existed in racial isolation. This too was true of my life. 

“Did you know one of the first novel ever published by a Black woman in the United States was by someone from New Hampshire?” I asked my adoptive father, a lover of his home state’s Colonial history and an avid reader, though I’d never seen him read a book by an author who wasn’t white. “Is that right?” was his only response. I didn’t know it at the time, but this brief interaction would be both the beginning and the end of any conversation we would ever have about my experience growing up Black in a white family in a predominantly white state surrounded by white people. 

In the years since reading Our Nig, I have gravitated more and more towards study of Black history, as so many Black, transracial adoptees have before me in an attempt to both understand and reclaim our identities as Black Americans. Unlike many within my community, however, I find myself drawn not to the Civil Rights era, or even the Civil War era, though my readings often take me there as well, but to the Colonial and Antebellum eras. I find kindred spirits in women like Phillis Wheatley Peters, purchased by the Wheatleys of Boston and, while enslaved, published a book of poetry and held the place of a favored daughter in the household until she successfully petitioned for her manumission in 1774. Or Ona Judge, enslaved by George and Martha Washington until she fled their captivity in 1796 and settled in New Hampshire. Or Harriet Wilson who, after 18 years as an indentured servant to a white family, wrote her novel in hopes it would provide financial support for she and her young son. 

My reading of Our Nig set me on a path of scholarship and creative writing that examines the intersections between the Colonial and Antebellum African American experience in the U.S., and the experience of contemporary Black, transracial adoptees. I have completed an autobiographical collection of poetry exploring these ideas, and am presenting academic analysis on the topic at the 50th Anniversary Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival at Jackson State University in Mississippi this month. 

Still, as important as I believe my endeavors are, both to my own continued identity formation and to the understanding of Black history, adoption policy, and adoptee storytelling as a whole, I can’t help but wonder, what would my sense of self be had I been introduced to representative characters in literature sooner? And how would I now see myself if those characters had not been enslaved by or indentured to white people? 

In her published lecture, An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading, acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand articulates the questions this way:

Narrative is not just the simple transportation of language but of ideas of the self, and ideas of the self that contain negations of other people. What is it, then, to adopt or be indoctrinated into these narrative structures, those ideas, to come to know those ideas as your own, when you are the negated other people? The intravenous being, the being administered into being, through the idea of the universal that is, at the same time, self-negating?

I ask myself these questions as I close the back flap on When We Become Ours, a newly-released YA adoptee anthology featuring stories by adoptees of color. What if, instead of meeting Harriet Wilson’s protagonist, Frado, a girl made depressed and bitter by her isolated existence and second class treatment within her white household, I’d met Cora and Benji, the rebel poets in Mariama J. Lockington’s “Cora and Benji’s Great Escape;” or Hazel, the fearless spirit hunter in MeMe Collier’s “Haunt Me, Then;” or Louie and Nia, the brilliant bibliophiles in Shannon Gibney’s “Oreo?”  

Like me, the adoptee characters in When We Become Ours, and their author creators, exist everywhere. Editors Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung, through courage and resilience, have made them visible to readers who are part of the dominant structure and who, more often than not, continue to prioritize the voices and experiences of the privileged oppressor class. This class includes adoptive parents—people who have willingly and sometimes eagerly opted into the system on the side of the privileged oppressors. “As if,” Brand says, virtue, modesty, goodness, and religion and god “are divisible” from colonialist oppression.

Most importantly, the editors and authors of When We Become Ours have brought mirrors to adoptees of all ages. The book and its characters have refused the negation of our experiences; refused negation of our existence in the world. Within the pages of this groundbreaking collection, adoptees are seen and heard as fully formed humans who matter.

When We Become Ours is published by HarperTeen, and imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, and is available everywhere you can buy books. 

November is National Adoption Awareness Month. Please use this time to support adoptees and adoptee content creators.