Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets, the secrets
Speaker 2: that are cut from us, the secrets we keep from others,
Speaker 2: and the secrets we keep from ourselves. My guest today
Speaker 2: is Darcy Ballentine, Assistant professor in the Departments of English
Speaker 2: and Black Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. Darcy's is a
Speaker 2: story about bedrock identity and the troubles and complexities of deception.
Speaker 2: A secret is kept from her that shapes her from
Speaker 2: the inside out and the outside inn. It's also a
Speaker 2: story of the way so often the truth emerges in
Speaker 2: profoundly unexpected ways. Darcy, tell me about the landscape of
Speaker 2: your childhood.
Speaker 3: I love the way that you form like that question
Speaker 3: because I often think of my youth in terms of geography.
Speaker 3: So I grew up in what was essentially a farming community,
Speaker 3: even though my parents were not farmers in south western Ontario.
Speaker 3: We lived outside of a small town called Sarnia. So
Speaker 3: while we lived on a rural route, surrounded by wheat
Speaker 3: fields and soybean fields and so on, in a big,
Speaker 3: dilapidated red brick house, my parents did not farm, but
Speaker 3: I think we ended up living there because there were
Speaker 3: so many of us that they needed a really big
Speaker 3: house in order to accommodate twelve children themselves and a
Speaker 3: bunch of farm animals, a really really big family, which
Speaker 3: I think was probably more common at that particular moment
Speaker 3: in history, so we're talking nineteen sixties nineteen seventies. I
Speaker 3: think a lot of people assumed that there were twelve
Speaker 3: of us because my parents needed extra hands to help
Speaker 3: with chores and you know, planting season and harvest season.
Speaker 3: But they just happened to have a lot of children,
Speaker 3: and I was the youngest of those twelve and the
Speaker 3: only one who was adopted.
Speaker 2: You were adopted at the age of four and a
Speaker 2: half and brought into this family. Do you have any
Speaker 2: memories prior to age four and a half?
Speaker 3: I don't. And the only reason that I know for
Speaker 3: certain that I was legally adopted by the people who
Speaker 3: raised me at four and a half is because at
Speaker 3: some point after my adoptive mother died, I received a
Speaker 3: copy of my legal adoption order, and so I can date.
Speaker 3: I can give a precise date to the moment when
Speaker 3: I was adopted, But I don't have any memories of
Speaker 3: my life before that moment, and I have to say
Speaker 3: that a lot of my memories of childhood are either
Speaker 3: vague or simply not there. I have a difficult time
Speaker 3: recalling distinct memories of childhood, And of course I don't
Speaker 3: think it's uncommon for adults to have difficulty recalling what
Speaker 3: they did and what kind of person they were, and
Speaker 3: particular events when they were very young. But I think
Speaker 3: I must have developed a kind of mechanism to protect
Speaker 3: myself from things that were difficult to have to remember.
Speaker 2: So you knew that you were adopted.
Speaker 3: I don't think I was told in so many words.
Speaker 3: And I think that before attending probably kindergarten, I didn't
Speaker 3: have a very good idea of what made me different
Speaker 3: than my adoptive siblings. But I guess over time I
Speaker 3: sensed that there was something different, and I think it
Speaker 3: was and until a little kid on the playground, probably
Speaker 3: at recess, pointed out the fact that my skin was
Speaker 3: a different color, that I began to realize that it
Speaker 3: was that thing. It was color. I wasn't sophisticated to
Speaker 3: have developed a language with which to talk about issues
Speaker 3: of race and racial difference, but I could understand that
Speaker 3: brown was different than white, and brown skin was something
Speaker 3: quite different than white skin. So I think it was
Speaker 3: quite a gradual process of coming into a realization that
Speaker 3: there was something quite distinct and remarkable that was different,
Speaker 3: that made me sort of stand out from everyone else.
Speaker 3: And I think it was from there that I began
Speaker 3: to ask my mother questions.
Speaker 2: A couple things strike me. One is, given that you
Speaker 2: were adopted at four and a half, was probably just
Speaker 2: a matter of months from the time you came into
Speaker 2: this family to the time you went to kindergarten m hm.
Speaker 3: And so in that.
Speaker 2: Period of time, nothing about the fact that this large
Speaker 2: family was white and you were black. Nothing about that
Speaker 2: ever came up or was spoken about, not.
Speaker 3: That I recall now. The paper the documentation says that
Speaker 3: I was legally adopted when I was four and a half,
Speaker 3: but I could very possibly have been with them in
Speaker 3: you know, the months before the legal adoption, and in fact,
Speaker 3: I think it's probably a requirement. I mean, I doubt
Speaker 3: that I could have been identified as someone who needed
Speaker 3: to be adopted and then was adopted within a matter
Speaker 3: of weeks. So I'm guessing that the legal process of
Speaker 3: adoption would have taken some time, and so I can't
Speaker 3: say with any sense of conviction where I may have
Speaker 3: been in the months before, or the years even before
Speaker 3: I was legally adopted.
Speaker 2: Many people may have this thought that if one knows
Speaker 2: in some kind of clear way, you know where one
Speaker 2: comes from. And there are documents, there's a birth certificate,
Speaker 2: there's family stories, there is a trail of breadcrumbs leading
Speaker 2: back to one's origins. That in the absence of that,
Speaker 2: I'm struck by the fact that you don't and you
Speaker 2: can't know you.
Speaker 3: Know, was I three? Was I two? Was I four?
Speaker 2: It's impossible to note that moment on the playground in kindergarten,
Speaker 2: which was the first time in your life that you
Speaker 2: are aware of that someone said to you, you know,
Speaker 2: why do you look the way you do?
Speaker 3: Why is your skin brown? Is that a memory for you?
Speaker 2: Is that it may be the first time it happened,
Speaker 2: But is that something that you then really sort of
Speaker 2: you didn't tuck it away. You went home and said
Speaker 2: to your mother or your parents, why did this boy
Speaker 2: say this to me?
Speaker 3: It was a moment that really began what has been
Speaker 3: a very long process of gradually asking questions.
Speaker 2: So how did your mother respond when you asked that question,
Speaker 2: what did she say?
Speaker 3: I think that she probably said what a lot of
Speaker 3: people at this historical moment would have said, which was,
Speaker 3: we don't even see color, and you're just like everybody else.
Speaker 3: And my guess is that that was in part out
Speaker 3: of frustration. Maybe it was because she didn't know herself
Speaker 3: what to say about racial difference and didn't want to
Speaker 3: have that kind of conversation. And I'm sure in part
Speaker 3: she also wanted to protect me from you know, school
Speaker 3: ground bullies and so on. But it seems to me
Speaker 3: when I think about those moments now, she as well
Speaker 3: lacked a language for talking about the fact that this
Speaker 3: young child that she had legally adopted was a black
Speaker 3: child and that they're needed, or there should have been
Speaker 3: a kind of conversation about that, the kind of conversation
Speaker 3: that would initiate me slowly into the idea that racially speaking,
Speaker 3: I was different than the people who were raising me
Speaker 3: and the people who were my adoptive siblings who surrounded me.
Speaker 2: And later you would also receive comments from acquaintances or
Speaker 2: even strangers along the lines of, You're so lucky you
Speaker 2: were taken in by good people.
Speaker 3: M Yeah, and again, I think that, at least in
Speaker 3: my experience, that's been very common. And I'm still not
Speaker 3: quite sure why that is the case. But I've even
Speaker 3: had people in the last decade or so, people who
Speaker 3: know me fairly well, people who have a lot of
Speaker 3: world experience, who have traveled the world, who have friendships
Speaker 3: and relationships with people of color, who will still say,
Speaker 3: despite knowing my story, or at least part of my story,
Speaker 3: will still say, oh, well, you're still really lucky that
Speaker 3: your mother took you in. And I'm not sure quite
Speaker 3: what is at the core of that, other than a
Speaker 3: still really pervasive sense that there is a goodness that
Speaker 3: goes along with whiteness. And I think that in my
Speaker 3: experience and in the experience now beginning to do research
Speaker 3: into interracial adoption, that there has always been a sense,
Speaker 3: at least in the Canadian context since the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 3: which is the period that I'm beginning to look into,
Speaker 3: there's always been a sense that children of color, orphans
Speaker 3: of color, whether black, biracial, Asian, indigenous. Certainly in this country,
Speaker 3: the history of indigenous adoption is very fraught that those
Speaker 3: kinds of orphans, those kinds of children who have been
Speaker 3: for whatever set of reasons, relinquished by the people who
Speaker 3: gave birth to them are always better off with white
Speaker 3: adoptive parents. And so, despite knowing part or all of
Speaker 3: my story, I still encounter people that I know who
Speaker 3: are part of my circle who will still say, You're
Speaker 3: so lucky that good people, that these good people adopted you.
Speaker 2: So now you're out in the world going to school,
Speaker 2: you're fielding comments that then when you come home are
Speaker 2: being sort of shut down. And in an essay that
Speaker 2: you wrote, you describe turning increasingly inward And I'm wondering
Speaker 2: what did that feel like for you and look like
Speaker 2: for you as you were you in that stage in
Speaker 2: sort of elementary school and middle school heading into becoming
Speaker 2: a teenager, that inwardness, how did it express itself?
Speaker 3: Well? I think that I became quite a loner. I
Speaker 3: did not have a big group of friends. I was
Speaker 3: not part of the cool kids, the kids who took
Speaker 3: music classes, the basketball team, anything like that. I really
Speaker 3: isolated myself and I took up running for a few reasons.
Speaker 3: But one of those reasons was to sort of give
Speaker 3: myself a space in which physically and intellectually I could
Speaker 3: begin working through some of the issues that I was
Speaker 3: grappling with, so I would go on long runs down
Speaker 3: country lanes by myself rather than joining a team or
Speaker 3: becoming part of a group of people, a group of
Speaker 3: young people who were meeting regularly. And I think that
Speaker 3: I realized during the COVID nineteen lockdowns that the kind
Speaker 3: of desperation and sense of wondering whether there could be
Speaker 3: something different than what I was experiencing at the moment
Speaker 3: when I was a young person reasserted itself, or at
Speaker 3: least I felt the same kind of desperation about my
Speaker 3: plight during COVID nineteen, after George Floyd was murdered and
Speaker 3: so on, as I felt to a certain extent when
Speaker 3: I was a younger person. That is to say, I
Speaker 3: felt a kind of creeping desperation, a relentless kind of
Speaker 3: worry and stress that this might be all that there is,
Speaker 3: and that I might never get out of this plight
Speaker 3: that I found myself in, and I might never be
Speaker 3: able to have a way to figure out what this
Speaker 3: blackness of mine means and what it means to grow
Speaker 3: up in a context that, from my perspective then as
Speaker 3: a kid, was entirely white. I mean, I grew up
Speaker 3: in the country. I went to a small town school.
Speaker 3: My country neighborhood was, from my perspective, all white. I
Speaker 3: don't recall myself meeting anyone else who was black until
Speaker 3: I think I was in grade eight, and I believe
Speaker 3: a family moved into the town and a couple of
Speaker 3: children from that family ended up at the school that
Speaker 3: I was at, And even that was shocking to me,
Speaker 3: because I had been socialized into believing a certain kind
Speaker 3: of whiteness, and I believed in all the stories about
Speaker 3: blackness and black people that I had been socialized into,
Speaker 3: and so I was really anxious to suddenly see a
Speaker 3: couple of other black people at my school, and I
Speaker 3: did not know what to do with that. I was
Speaker 3: not interested in being friendly with them. I don't remember
Speaker 3: their names. I don't think I ever played with them
Speaker 3: or had a conversation with them. I suppose I figured
Speaker 3: out a way to exist as invisibly and as quietly
Speaker 3: as possible on my own, rounded by whiteness, and so
Speaker 3: when there were suddenly a couple of other black kids
Speaker 3: at my school, I found it very disconcerting and didn't
Speaker 3: know what to do with it. I've gone to therapy
Speaker 3: several times over the years to try to work out
Speaker 3: a variety of different issues. But I always come back
Speaker 3: to the running because it is a kind of therapy,
Speaker 3: and it allows me to get in touch with my
Speaker 3: body in a deeply corporeal sense, and then also to
Speaker 3: give my head the time and maybe the extra oxygen
Speaker 3: as well to sort of work out all of these
Speaker 3: issues that I guess I didn't have a context in
Speaker 3: which to work them out when I was younger, which
Speaker 3: is why I ended up in the academy, because I
Speaker 3: felt like there was so much I was not taught.
Speaker 3: And then in the you know, in the ways in
Speaker 3: which I was schooled and experienced school from kindergarten to
Speaker 3: you know, the end of high school was a particular
Speaker 3: kind of learning. So you know, we didn't study any
Speaker 3: kind of black history, not even Black Canadian history, not
Speaker 3: even the history of you know, really historically important black
Speaker 3: communities on the East Coast of Canada and the West
Speaker 3: Coast of Canada. And you know, we weren't reading the
Speaker 3: work of black authors or Indigenous authors, and so I
Speaker 3: felt like I needed to unlearn everything that I'd been taught,
Speaker 3: both formally and informally and then teach myself how to
Speaker 3: think differently, not just about the world, but how to
Speaker 3: think differently about myself and myself in the world as
Speaker 3: a black woman.
Speaker 2: When Darcy is a young teenager, her mother takes her
Speaker 2: on a summer trip to the West Coast to visit
Speaker 2: her oldest sister. This sister doesn't come home often, and
Speaker 2: the trip is billed as a special visit, especially since
Speaker 2: that sister's last trip home had been cut short. Darcy
Speaker 2: is excited about the trip. This kind of travel just
Speaker 2: doesn't happen in their family. It's unusual. This should have
Speaker 2: been a clue, but it wasn't, because we cannot suspect
Speaker 2: what we cannot imagine.
Speaker 3: So the trip, yes, was billed as a really exciting
Speaker 3: trip to the West Coast, but it was prefaced by
Speaker 3: an event that happened the Christmas before. So several of
Speaker 3: the older kids in the family had already moved away
Speaker 3: from home, and the oldest girl in the family had
Speaker 3: long lived on the West Coast and probably elsewhere. But
Speaker 3: I don't really know a lot about her life, but
Speaker 3: she came home for Christmas, and I believe that she
Speaker 3: came home with one of the other older sisters who
Speaker 3: was also living in the western part of the country,
Speaker 3: and the younger kids who were at home. We were
Speaker 3: very excited because we didn't see them all that frequently,
Speaker 3: and we were thrilled that they were both home. My
Speaker 3: mother was preparing foods and Christmas cake, and we weren't
Speaker 3: at school, and we would go to boggaining. The older
Speaker 3: kids took us to boggaining and ice skating, and so
Speaker 3: it was all a really exciting time. So we the
Speaker 3: younger kids in the family, all went to bed earlier
Speaker 3: than the older kids in the family on Christmas Eve,
Speaker 3: excited of course for Christmas morning, getting up lining up
Speaker 3: outside the door to the living room, which would always
Speaker 3: be closed. We'd have to line up outside the door
Speaker 3: in order of age, so I would be the first
Speaker 3: at the door when it was opened, and then the
Speaker 3: door would open and we'd all pour into the living
Speaker 3: room and open our Christmas gifts. But when we woke
Speaker 3: up that morning, the oldest sister in the family was
Speaker 3: not there, so of course we were all incredibly baffled,
Speaker 3: maybe a bit concerned, but I think that personally I
Speaker 3: was too young to be concerned. I was just disappointed
Speaker 3: that she was not there, and confused as to why
Speaker 3: in the world she would not be there for the
Speaker 3: most exciting day of the year. And I'm not quite
Speaker 3: sure when I was told the story about why she
Speaker 3: was not there, But the story was that she'd received
Speaker 3: a phone call sometime after we were in bed, and
Speaker 3: it was her work, calling her back to the West Coast,
Speaker 3: and so the story was that she had to pack
Speaker 3: up her things and immediately go back to Vancouver. Now
Speaker 3: I didn't have a great sense of precisely where Vancouver was.
Speaker 3: It all seemed pretty exotic and wonderful to me, so
Speaker 3: I think I didn't go through any logical process as
Speaker 3: to how in the world would she have gotten from
Speaker 3: our house way out in the country where she would
Speaker 3: have had to have fought her way through snowbanks just
Speaker 3: to get to the end of our driveway and into
Speaker 3: a taxicab if there had been the possibility of getting
Speaker 3: a taxicab that late at night, and there wouldn't have
Speaker 3: been any trains to take her from Sarnia to Toronto
Speaker 3: at that time of night, And how could she have
Speaker 3: changed her tickets so quickly to fly back to Vancouver. So,
Speaker 3: of course, as an older person, I realized that this
Speaker 3: was just an impossible story. I'm not quite sure how
Speaker 3: it all happened, but nonetheless, she was not there on
Speaker 3: Christmas morning, and much much later on, I was told
Speaker 3: that I, for some reason, was the lucky one in
Speaker 3: the family who was going with Mom to Vancouver for
Speaker 3: the summer holiday, which would have been I think we
Speaker 3: would have gotten out of school at the end of
Speaker 3: June and school would not have resumed until the beginning
Speaker 3: of September. So I got out of school, packed my bags,
Speaker 3: flew to the West Coast with Mom. I was really
Speaker 3: excited about being there, really excited about spending time with
Speaker 3: my big sister. And I think it was only a
Speaker 3: couple of days into the trip that she and I,
Speaker 3: meaning the person I thought was my sister, she and I,
Speaker 3: I believe, went for a drive somewhere. She was living
Speaker 3: someplace in downtown Vancouver, which was really eye opening to
Speaker 3: me because the landscape I grew up on was deeply rural.
Speaker 3: You know, it was not uncommon to see tractors and
Speaker 3: combines and cows and horses and pigs and so on,
Speaker 3: So it was really interesting to be in downtown. And
Speaker 3: I believe that the two of us went for a drive,
Speaker 3: and it was nice, it was summertime, and I seem
Speaker 3: to recall the sound of trickling water, So I'm assuming
Speaker 3: that we were I don't know, maybe beside False Creek
Speaker 3: or a body of water close to the downtown where
Speaker 3: she lived. We were not sitting there for all that long,
Speaker 3: So I believe that she simply said, I'm your real mother.
Speaker 3: And I think she would have used that term, I'm
Speaker 3: your real mother, not your biological mother or your birth mother,
Speaker 3: but I'm your real mother. And there was so much
Speaker 3: distance between my idea of where I may have come
Speaker 3: from and this big sister sitting beside me that I
Speaker 3: could not logically connect the two things, and whole being
Speaker 3: really stunned and not knowing what to say, and I
Speaker 3: think feeling a combination of shock and for some reason, embarrassment.
Speaker 3: I don't know why.
Speaker 2: Well, you go in one moment from the story that
Speaker 2: you've understood to be true of yourself all your life,
Speaker 2: which is that you were adopted by these good people,
Speaker 2: by these good white people, and you're so lucky, and
Speaker 2: you have all of these many many many older adoptive
Speaker 2: brothers and sisters two in one moment, whether you could
Speaker 2: have processed it in that moment or not, which I
Speaker 2: suspect you could not have. That your oldest sister was
Speaker 2: your mother, and that that meant that the adoptive parents
Speaker 2: who had raised you were your grandparents, And that meant
Speaker 2: that all of the brothers and sisters who you had
Speaker 2: grown up with thinking that they were your adoptive brothers
Speaker 2: and sisters were actually your aunts and uncles.
Speaker 3: Yes, and I'm not quite sure how long it took
Speaker 3: me to begin thinking about that and the rippling effects
Speaker 3: of this new information and what it meant in the
Speaker 3: wider context of my entire family, in the entirety of
Speaker 3: my young life. But yes, eventually it dawned on me
Speaker 3: that Mom and we all called my adoptive father Pop.
Speaker 3: It dawned on me that Mom and Pap were not
Speaker 3: only my maternal grandparents, but they had lied to me
Speaker 3: all this time, and that really changed my relationship with
Speaker 3: them and with the entire family.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back. In the wake of this enormous revelation,
Speaker 2: Darcy finds herself physically unable to even look at these women.
Speaker 2: Her sister is now her biological mother, her adoptive mother
Speaker 2: is now her grandmother tangled up in the thorns of
Speaker 2: this new configuration, she recoils.
Speaker 3: I couldn't bear to be touched by them. And I
Speaker 3: remember it was possibly the afternoon of or maybe the
Speaker 3: day after this big revelation my sister and now I
Speaker 3: had this new knowledge that she was by biological mother
Speaker 3: was cutting my hair, I believe, on the back porch
Speaker 3: of the house that she was probably sharing with some others,
Speaker 3: and as she was, you know, sort of moving from
Speaker 3: my side to my back to cut my hair, I
Speaker 3: recall distinctly moving away from her touch. And I don't
Speaker 3: know quite what that is about. I mean, we have
Speaker 3: never been a touchy feely family. Parents did not hug
Speaker 3: us or express their love for us. That's just not
Speaker 3: who they were, and I think in this moment after
Speaker 3: the revelation, there was perhaps a desire on their part
Speaker 3: to reaffirm the fact that they cared for me and
Speaker 3: loved me. But I was not interested at all. So
Speaker 3: I had a really visceral response to the news and
Speaker 3: then to their proximity in the same room. I didn't
Speaker 3: want to be around them, and I demanded to go
Speaker 3: back home. And I think it was probably intended that
Speaker 3: I spend the entire summer in Vancouver, or perhaps that
Speaker 3: I stay behind and begin a new life there. But
Speaker 3: I was having none of it. I just wanted to
Speaker 3: go home to the familiar, to the landscape, to the sounds,
Speaker 3: to the people that I knew and that I'd grown
Speaker 3: up with as brothers and sisters.
Speaker 2: And it's also left to you to tell or not
Speaker 2: tell your brothers and sisters who don't know anything about this.
Speaker 2: It's on you to either continue to keep this a
Speaker 2: secret about yourself or to speak it right right.
Speaker 3: And I was probably not a sophisticated enough young person
Speaker 3: to go through any kind of intellectual process to determine
Speaker 3: whether it was beneficial to keep the secret or to
Speaker 3: reveal the secret. I think I was so deeply in shock,
Speaker 3: and I was beginning to feel angry that in my recollection,
Speaker 3: I told my brothers and sisters. As soon as I
Speaker 3: got home. I was listening to a documentary by an
Speaker 3: American academic, June Cross, where she talks about the fact
Speaker 3: that she sometimes still lies when people ask her questions
Speaker 3: about her connection to her white birth mother and white stepfather,
Speaker 3: because it's just easier to continue the lie. So I
Speaker 3: think because I grew up socialized into this lie and
Speaker 3: it became who I am. And I've always spot of
Speaker 3: myself in the ways in which I was told to
Speaker 3: think about myself. That in many instances is just easier
Speaker 3: to say to people, oh, yeah, well, I'm adopted and
Speaker 3: these are the white people who adopted me, rather than
Speaker 3: go through the whole story.
Speaker 2: Well, of course, which it's a whole history. It's a
Speaker 2: whole history, and also sharing it and talking about it
Speaker 2: can actually be re traumatizing, no matter how many years
Speaker 2: have gone by.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, exactly it is, you know, because it gets
Speaker 3: to the core of precisely who we are. And if
Speaker 3: we are told a lie and then encouraged to keep
Speaker 3: that lie and to reproduce it because it is the
Speaker 3: family secret, then at least for myself, there's a kind
Speaker 3: of guilt in revealing that secret every time someone has
Speaker 3: a probing question about well, who are you and who
Speaker 3: are your family and what do you mean these white
Speaker 3: people are your family? So it's a difficult sort of
Speaker 3: catch Twenty two.
Speaker 2: When you return home from this trip to Vancouver, you
Speaker 2: have another new piece of information, which is the name
Speaker 2: of your father. Right, So you have this name you
Speaker 2: don't do anything with this name for a while.
Speaker 3: It seems to me.
Speaker 2: Like you have enough on your plate and you just
Speaker 2: kind of file it away.
Speaker 3: I mean, I was a teenager, and, like most teenagers,
Speaker 3: dealing with all of the kinds of things like hormones
Speaker 3: and crushes and all of the things that teenagers for
Speaker 3: the most part deal with, and then to have to
Speaker 3: deal with this new information related to the fact that
Speaker 3: the person I have always assumed is my older, somewhat
Speaker 3: exotic sister from Vancouver is my biological mother. The people
Speaker 3: who are raising me are my maternal white biological grandparents
Speaker 3: who have lied to me all this time. And the
Speaker 3: people I thought were my adoptive siblings are aunts and uncles.
Speaker 3: So I had a lot on my plate, and I
Speaker 3: think I ignored everything for quite some time, to be honest,
Speaker 3: And it wasn't until I was probably in late high
Speaker 3: school that I started wondering, Okay, who is this other
Speaker 3: person then? And of course the name meant absolutely nothing
Speaker 3: to me.
Speaker 2: Darcy leaves home after high school, goes to college for
Speaker 2: a year, then leaves college for a while and works
Speaker 2: as a nanny. She's become interested in her blackness and
Speaker 2: what it means to be black in this pretty ideologically
Speaker 2: conservative white landscape, and that name, the name of her
Speaker 2: birth father, Austin Clark, is a name that begins to
Speaker 2: appear on course lists as a prominent Caribbean Canadian writer,
Speaker 2: Darcy becomes increasingly fascinated and curious. Could this writer, this
Speaker 2: perfect stranger, be her biological father.
Speaker 3: I recall going to my university library where I was
Speaker 3: doing my undergraduate degree and taking out his books, and
Speaker 3: so my first encounters with him and the way in
Speaker 3: which I got to know him, those were textual encounters.
Speaker 3: They weren't in person encounters. So I got to know
Speaker 3: a sense of his history as a Caribbean born, Barbados
Speaker 3: born writer who immigrated to Canada, came to Toronto, and
Speaker 3: I think it was nineteen fifty five to go to
Speaker 3: the University of Toronto. So as I developed a textual
Speaker 3: relationship with him through his literary fiction, I began to
Speaker 3: sense a whole history that was mine that I knew
Speaker 3: nothing about. And because English literature was my forte academically,
Speaker 3: I really slowly began to grow into the field of
Speaker 3: black literature and became increasingly sort of enamored of the
Speaker 3: idea that I could access my own history via this
Speaker 3: body of work without necessarily knowing the person.
Speaker 2: How did it feel to you during that period of time?
Speaker 2: And you say that you developed a textual relationship, which
Speaker 2: is so fascinating because it's almost a form of snooping
Speaker 2: it is. It's a form of Wow, there are clues
Speaker 2: throughout these pages, and you know this person is my
Speaker 2: biological father, but he doesn't know that I'm reading his work.
Speaker 2: But I'm reading his work and I'm reading it deeply
Speaker 2: and like a detective. Would it have been fine with
Speaker 2: you at that time to never actually meet him, to
Speaker 2: just continue having this textual relationship or was there a
Speaker 2: longing or a feeling of wanting more grounding than what
Speaker 2: you had.
Speaker 3: That feeling was definitely beginning to develop. But I also
Speaker 3: felt a certain sense of trepidation because even when I
Speaker 3: was in my undergraduate degree in Waterloo, Ontario, I did
Speaker 3: not have a lot or maybe even any contact with
Speaker 3: black people. I had a couple of black acquaintances, but
Speaker 3: I did not have a rich black life. The extent
Speaker 3: of my black life was me and my journey to
Speaker 3: try to figure out what it meant to be me
Speaker 3: and to be black, so I felt an increasing sense
Speaker 3: of curiosity. I wanted to meet him. I recall feeling
Speaker 3: a need to be in his presence and see him
Speaker 3: in person as a way to reaffirm myself and my
Speaker 3: connection to him. I mean, to me, it was quite
Speaker 3: obvious that we were connected, because I do look quite
Speaker 3: a bit like him. There was an increasing sense that
Speaker 3: I wanted to reach out to him and to meet
Speaker 3: him physically, after getting to know him as much as
Speaker 3: I could via his writing, although I have to say
Speaker 3: that a lot of what he wrote, and a lot
Speaker 3: of what I read, his short stories and his longer fiction,
Speaker 3: was difficult for me to connect with because he was
Speaker 3: writing about issues that I had no experience with, you know,
Speaker 3: the life of slavery and the logics of the plantation
Speaker 3: and the particular brand of Canadian prejudice and anti black racism.
Speaker 3: And while I had experienced my share of anti black racism,
Speaker 3: I found it difficult to see myself as being in
Speaker 3: direct relationship with the kinds of histories that he was
Speaker 3: probing in his literature.
Speaker 2: And during this time, you had pretty much no relationship
Speaker 2: with your biological mother. Was she in your life at all?
Speaker 3: No, not in any significant sense, and she never has
Speaker 3: been in a significant sense. I know that she was
Speaker 3: deeply disappointed that I did not move to Vancouver and
Speaker 3: move in with her. There was on my part, there
Speaker 3: was just no sense of a connection. And I've never
Speaker 3: thought of her as my mother. We've never had that
Speaker 3: kind of relationship.
Speaker 2: Well, she was also part of the betrayal, right, Yes,
Speaker 2: yes she was, And I mean there are layers of
Speaker 2: stories there.
Speaker 3: I still really don't have a full understanding and I
Speaker 3: probably never will have a full understanding of precisely what happened.
Speaker 3: Was she pressured to relinquish me, I don't know. She
Speaker 3: could have been. Was there a lot of tension when
Speaker 3: her parents, her white parents, found out that she was
Speaker 3: pregnant with a black man's child. I don't know. I
Speaker 3: can speculate that, yes, that was probably part of what
Speaker 3: was happening, but I can't say with any sense of certainty.
Speaker 2: Will be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 2: So Darcy is reading her father. He's a blank slate
Speaker 2: in a way, but she is discovering a lot about him.
Speaker 2: On the page, it turns out that Austin Clark is
Speaker 2: friends with Darcy's academic advisor. The circles are beginning to
Speaker 2: overlap intersect. She doesn't tell her adviser for a while
Speaker 2: about her connection to Austin Clark, but he's a big
Speaker 2: deal in the field in which she's pursuing a doctorate.
Speaker 2: And then Darcy's adviser asks her to be a greeter
Speaker 2: at a conference to hand participants their welcome packets. And
Speaker 2: when Darcy looks at the list of participants, there he
Speaker 2: is Austin Clark.
Speaker 3: I'd volunteered to do some work on a black music's
Speaker 3: conference for my dissertation supervisor, and she asked me to
Speaker 3: be one of the people at the front door of
Speaker 3: the venue who would greet attendees and give them their
Speaker 3: information package and name plaque. And I was happy to
Speaker 3: do that, amongst other things. And one afternoon, just before
Speaker 3: the conference was about to begin, I was going through
Speaker 3: the list of those who had confirmed their attendance and
Speaker 3: lo and behold, Austin Clark was coming to the conference.
Speaker 3: I think this was the day before the conference, and
Speaker 3: so I thought, I cannot do this. I just can't
Speaker 3: do this. And so I told my supervisor that there
Speaker 3: was an issue, and we went into her office and
Speaker 3: I closed the door behind me, and she has said
Speaker 3: multiple times that that was her first indication that something
Speaker 3: serious was up, because you know, she had an open
Speaker 3: door policy and there was really no need otherwise to
Speaker 3: close the door. And so I told her that I
Speaker 3: would do anything else she wanted me to do for
Speaker 3: this conference, but I could not be one of the
Speaker 3: greets at the front door because I said, you know,
Speaker 3: there's someone on the list of attendees that I you know,
Speaker 3: I just don't want to meet to encounter in this way,
Speaker 3: and she insisted I tell her who it was. So
Speaker 3: I said, well, it's Austin Clark. And her response. By
Speaker 3: this time, I'd made it clear that I wanted to
Speaker 3: work with her as my supervisor and that my dissertation
Speaker 3: project was going to be on a set of contemporary
Speaker 3: Black Canadian writers, and she said, well, I mean this
Speaker 3: is your dissertation work. You cannot do this work without
Speaker 3: working on Austin Clark, and this is a perfect opportunity.
Speaker 3: So I said, well, he's actually my biological father. And
Speaker 3: she tells me that she almost fell off her chair
Speaker 3: when I told her that, because she was really She
Speaker 3: is an American born academic whose doctoral work is in
Speaker 3: Black American theater and the Black arts movement, and she
Speaker 3: introduced Austin Clark's fiction to the university where I did
Speaker 3: my PhD. So she not only had an intellectual relationship
Speaker 3: with him and his entire corpus of work and you know,
Speaker 3: the work that he had done helping set up black
Speaker 3: studies in the American context, but they were close friends.
Speaker 3: So it was really very stunning for her to realize
Speaker 3: that this person whom she had worked with already for
Speaker 3: a couple of years in the PhD program, was the
Speaker 3: daughter of Austin Clark. And suddenly all of my contacts,
Speaker 3: some of my friends, my colleagues, my peers, were people
Speaker 3: who were also either black folks, black scholars, or working
Speaker 3: on black literature. And so there were many points at
Speaker 3: which my life was beginning to intersect with him. And
Speaker 3: it just seemed, probably to my supervisor firstly, sort of
Speaker 3: ridiculous that we weren't, you know, sitting with each other
Speaker 3: and beginning to get to know each other and have
Speaker 3: a conversation with each other, which is what you said
Speaker 3: I should do. So I did. I met him when
Speaker 3: I was younger. One time I was in my twenties
Speaker 3: and I came to Toronto from Waterloo, where I was
Speaker 3: in my undergraduate program. I just cold called him and
Speaker 3: said I'm your daughter, and he was, of course stunned
Speaker 3: and said that yes, he would meet with me, and
Speaker 3: the following day I met him and we spent an
Speaker 3: afternoon together. My first and my enduring impression is that
Speaker 3: he was very formal, very polite, very British, having been
Speaker 3: born in Barbados and colonized by the Brits. He served
Speaker 3: me tea. We had what I guess I would characterize
Speaker 3: as you know, kind of polite conversation, and then a
Speaker 3: few hours after that I was on my way and
Speaker 3: that I hoped that that first encounter would lead to
Speaker 3: the beginning of at least a friendship, but it did not.
Speaker 3: He was not interested. And one of the things I
Speaker 3: recall most distinctly from that visit is our conversation about
Speaker 3: university and he wanted to know what I was doing,
Speaker 3: and I said, well, I'm at the University of Waterloo
Speaker 3: doing a degree in English literature, and he immediately told
Speaker 3: me where his two daughters were attending university, and they
Speaker 3: were at the Ivy League. So they are a few
Speaker 3: years older than I am. They are his two daughters
Speaker 3: with his one and only wife, and they were at
Speaker 3: IVY leagues in America, and that seemed very important to him.
Speaker 3: But you know, I was proud of where I was,
Speaker 3: and I was proud that I had scraped enough money
Speaker 3: together to go to university to learn, you know, what
Speaker 3: a university was. The context in which I grew up
Speaker 3: was one that was not all that concerned with higher education.
Speaker 3: So I was really happy to be at university. I
Speaker 3: was late to start myundergraduate degree, but I was really
Speaker 3: proud that I was there, and I didn't quite understand
Speaker 3: what it meant to be at the kind of university
Speaker 3: that I was at versus an American IVY League university
Speaker 3: or even a Canadian Ivy League university. But that was
Speaker 3: a kind of sticking point in that conversation. But we
Speaker 3: lost contact almost immediately after that, and he did not
Speaker 3: reach out maybe other than one phone call after that
Speaker 3: very first encounter, and then a couple of decades went
Speaker 3: by and we had no contact at all. Then, of course,
Speaker 3: at my dissertation supervisors prodding, I reached out to him again.
Speaker 3: By this time, I'm in my forties, I've kind of
Speaker 3: been a late arrival to everything, to all of the milestones.
Speaker 3: So I was what they used to call a mature
Speaker 3: student at each step of the way, my undergrad my BA,
Speaker 3: at my MA, and my PhD. And I thought about
Speaker 3: it for a while and then I just sent him
Speaker 3: a card in the snail mail and said, I'm here
Speaker 3: doing a PhD. This is who I'm working with on
Speaker 3: my doctoral project, and these are the other folks whose
Speaker 3: work I'm studying, and would you like to meet for
Speaker 3: a drake And he wrote back to me fairly quickly
Speaker 3: and said that he'd be delighted, And it was as
Speaker 3: if the first encounter had never happened. I really felt
Speaker 3: that I was meeting him for the first time, and
Speaker 3: perhaps that's because he sensed that we were on more
Speaker 3: equal grounds and I was part of a community that
Speaker 3: he understood. And I think there was sort of a
Speaker 3: de facto sense that I'd been approved by someone who
Speaker 3: had great meaning for him, meaning my doctoral supervisor, so
Speaker 3: I'd obviously been approved by her. I was in this,
Speaker 3: i think at the time fairly small circle of black
Speaker 3: scholars and academics and intellectuals and writers, So I think
Speaker 3: that he felt a sense of comfort around me that
Speaker 3: was absent the first time, and so this second encounter
Speaker 3: it took. And not that we ever really had a
Speaker 3: father daughter relationship, because of course it was way too
Speaker 3: late for that, but we had the kind of relationship
Speaker 3: we had until he died in twenty sixteen. We had
Speaker 3: around a decade in which to get to know each other,
Speaker 3: and I would say that it was at the beginning,
Speaker 3: certainly a pretty tentative relationship. We were probably sounding each
Speaker 3: other out. And this is a man who was at
Speaker 3: his full writerly and intellectual powers, and after long years
Speaker 3: of struggle, was winning major literary prizes and traveling around
Speaker 3: the world. So it wasn't that we were in each
Speaker 3: other space all the time. But when we did spend
Speaker 3: time together, I had a sense anyway that we were
Speaker 3: meeting as equals, which is something that wasn't the case earlier.
Speaker 2: What was the feeling after this lifetime of having been
Speaker 2: lied to, the whole reshuffling and re understanding of you know,
Speaker 2: being raised as this black child and girl and or
Speaker 2: a teenager in a world where no one is black
Speaker 2: pretty much, and you're left to figure that out for
Speaker 2: yourself to be in your forties, and you know, in
Speaker 2: the presence of this person who strikes me like a
Speaker 2: tent pole in some way.
Speaker 3: I think that it was a real revelation to me
Speaker 3: to have the opportunity to get to know someone in
Speaker 3: a more personal and intimate way and have a window
Speaker 3: into a full and a rich black life that included
Speaker 3: black community, black family, black ancestors. And there were several
Speaker 3: moments over the course of that decade when I began
Speaker 3: to realize, and certainly after his death as well, that
Speaker 3: what I had just thought of as history, you know,
Speaker 3: the history of chattel slavery, the history of the plantation
Speaker 3: in the Caribbean and in Barbados specifically, it was certainly
Speaker 3: for me, compel and horrifying history. But then I slowly
Speaker 3: began to realize that it's not just history, it's my history.
Speaker 3: And these people that I had previously thought of as
Speaker 3: victims of enslavement, the Middle Passage, the plantocracy, etc. Were
Speaker 3: actually my people, like my own people. And that was
Speaker 3: really sort of mind blowing for me when I made
Speaker 3: that switch, and it wasn't like I was looking to
Speaker 3: make the switch, It just suddenly began happening. And I
Speaker 3: think that that is one of the things that Austin
Speaker 3: really gave me without knowing that he gave that to
Speaker 3: me or was in the process of giving it to me.
Speaker 3: I think of that as the real legacy that he
Speaker 3: left for me. Of course, there's the whole rich body
Speaker 3: of his work, his writing, and his intellectual will work,
Speaker 3: his social activism, but there's also the legacy of a
Speaker 3: history and a past and an ancestry that I was
Speaker 3: not connected to previously. So at an emotional level, that
Speaker 3: really has, you know, deep and sort of forever meaning
Speaker 3: for me, because in a way, he gave me what
Speaker 3: I'd been searching for since I found out about this
Speaker 3: whole family secret. He gave me the black past that
Speaker 3: I'd been looking for, and the history and the connection
Speaker 3: to my own roots, which are very different than the
Speaker 3: roots that I retain on the white side of my family.
Speaker 3: So that's definitely one of the things that he has
Speaker 3: given me. And also I have to say that, yes,
Speaker 3: I was interested in studying Black Canadian literatures and cultures
Speaker 3: before I began focusing on my father's writing. But in
Speaker 3: the last few years, the other thing that he's given
Speaker 3: me is an intellectual and a research focus, because now
Speaker 3: more than ever, I'm focusing on not just his writing,
Speaker 3: but his intellectual life and his participation in helping to
Speaker 3: articulate what black studies could be in America, you know,
Speaker 3: and has been since the nineteen sixties forward, but also
Speaker 3: what black studies in the Canadian context could and should
Speaker 3: look like. And so all these years later, here I
Speaker 3: am one of the black scholars hired in those post
Speaker 3: George Floyd years to teach in a black studies program.
Speaker 2: Before she died, Darcy's grandmother never did explain to her
Speaker 2: how and why there was so much subterfuge about her identity.
Speaker 2: There are still so many unknowns about her early life.
Speaker 2: There are still so many fictions and so many lies.
Speaker 2: Darcy writes. If there's a way to achieve a state
Speaker 2: of equilibrium in the wake of this kind of betrayal,
Speaker 2: I still haven't found it.
Speaker 3: I recall in the first year of my PhD registering
Speaker 3: for a class that I then dropped out of because
Speaker 3: the first assignment was called making yourself up, and the
Speaker 3: instructor asked us to go home and talk to our parents, siblings, etc.
Speaker 3: And gather together all the home movies and pictures when
Speaker 3: we were first born, and pictures of crowd mom and
Speaker 3: dad holding us and create a story about that. And
Speaker 3: I remember walking out of that class thinking I'm dropping
Speaker 3: this class. There are no videos, I have no idea
Speaker 3: where I was. I know now who my biological parents are,
Speaker 3: but there are still no photographs, and there was no
Speaker 3: celebration I don't believe, certainly not the kind of celebration
Speaker 3: that we associate with the arrival of an anticipated and
Speaker 3: desired baby in a family. So there is something I
Speaker 3: think luxurious and intellectually interesting in being able to make
Speaker 3: yourself up. On the other hand, of course, there's also
Speaker 3: something quite grounding in knowing who you are and where
Speaker 3: you came from, where you were born, who helped you first,
Speaker 3: who changed your diapers, where you were living when you
Speaker 3: were one in two and three? Was that a good context?
Speaker 3: Were you did someone read to you every night? Those
Speaker 3: are the mysteries in my life, and I will probably
Speaker 3: never have access to those mysteries. And I'm not sure
Speaker 3: if there was a way that I could have all
Speaker 3: of this knowledge. I'm not even sure at this point
Speaker 3: that I would want it, because I don't know. It
Speaker 3: might be more horrifying than I imagine it is, or
Speaker 3: it might for a variety of reasons be more upsetting
Speaker 3: than the memories that I suppose I've constructed based on
Speaker 3: what people in my family have told me over the years.
Speaker 3: So there is I think, a kind of comfort in
Speaker 3: being able to relinquish the desire to know every last
Speaker 3: detail and rather to reconstruct oneself and a history that
Speaker 3: has meaning for the person that I've become or that
Speaker 3: I'm in the midst of becoming, based on my own
Speaker 3: research and my own reading of my history, and my
Speaker 3: own reading of the body of work that Austin Clark
Speaker 3: has left me.
Speaker 2: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacour is
Speaker 2: the story editor and Dylan Fagan.
Speaker 3: Is the executive producer. If you have a.
Speaker 2: Family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a
Speaker 2: voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode.
Speaker 2: Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's
Speaker 2: the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram
Speaker 2: at Danny Ryder and if you'd like to know more
Speaker 2: about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my
Speaker 2: memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,