See No Color (16 page)

“Alex,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

“You should call me Alex.”

He coughed. “Oh. Think about it, Alex.”

“I will.”

“Okay, then. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” I said, and gently placed the phone on the bed beside me. Then I got up, turned out the light in my room, and crawled under my covers. As evening fell, I tried to cry for my mother, but I couldn't. I was crying for myself, and for everything I had missed.

• • •

A girl in the library was watching me and had been for some time. She wasn't a girl, actually, but a young woman, with light skin and closely cropped hair that was wound even tighter than mine had been. She worked at the reference desk, and the button pinned to her shirt read “Kara.”

“Unfortunately, most of these books are written for adults,” a middle-aged, slightly frumpy-looking librarian was telling me. I had asked her to help me find books on adoption and reunion. The young woman, Kara, was diligently stacking returned books beside her, trying to look like she wasn't listening. “There doesn't seem to be much at all in the way of choosing for young adults,” said the older librarian.

“Nothing?” I leaned into her screen.

She turned the screen toward me, so I could see. She frowned. “Not really. It looks like there is one book on general adoption issues for teens, but that's checked out.”

I sighed. “Well, if you could just print out the list of adult books you have, that would be fine. I'm sure they apply in some way.”
Anything is better than nothing. And if I am going to go to Detroit, I am not going out there empty-handed.

The woman gave me a half-smile and apologized. “I think the problem may be that so few people search before they're of legal age, so there may not be a market for books like this. You're something of an outlier, I'm afraid.”

I winced. “Tell me about it,” I said under my breath.

The librarian handed me the printout, and I could see Kara struggling with herself over whether or not she should take this last chance and actually say something to me. Apparently, the louder side won, because she awkwardly leaned over the older woman and said, “I know of some other resources.”

The librarian raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”

Kara ignored this, and instead, addressed me again. “I'm sorry to butt in like this, but I'm an adoptee myself, and I've gone through search and reunion. I can help you with a few things … I mean, if you want.”

An adoptee?
The words “adoption,” “adopt,” and “adopted” were familiar to me, and I had heard lots of people use them, but I had never heard anyone actually call
themselves
an “adoptee.” It was strange to me, the idea of turning what others had done to you into a noun to describe yourself. “Yeah. Sure,” I stammered. I felt my vision shifting out of focus again.

Kara lifted the gate between us and stepped beside me. The older woman looked at us with interest, decided her attention was better spent elsewhere, and turned back to her screen.

“Kara Murphy,” she said, offering me her hand. I nodded, wanting more than anything to bolt and get out of there as quickly as possible. But if talking to her meant that I could get some information that might help the slow spread of panic in my chest every time I thought about Keith, then I could move my mouth, or listen and look interested forever.

“And you are…”

“Alexandra Kirtridge,” I said. “I'm in high school.” I don't know why I added that. Probably because it was a random and relatively safe piece of information that meant nothing.

If Kara thought I was strange for saying it, she didn't let on. She just nodded, took my arm, and gestured toward the other side of the room. We began walking.

“You said…” I cleared my throat. “You said you are an adoptee yourself.”
An adoptee. I am an adoptee.

She nodded, leading us through a set of double doors, into the stairwell. “Yes. I'm a transracial adoptee.”

“A trans … ?”

Kara laughed. “Transracial adoptee,” she said, slower this time. “A person of color adopted into a white family.” We had reached the top of the stairs and walked into the main nonfiction area.

“Oh,” I said. “Never heard that phrase before.”

“Never met any other transracial adoptees then, huh?” She asked, guiding me down aisle 818.75 NS.

She didn't say it in a mocking tone or anything—it was just matter-of-fact. Still, I felt exposed and somehow inadequate for some reason, so I lied. “Oh, yeah. I do know quite a few. We just don't call ourselves that.”

Kara raised an eyebrow but didn't say anything. I'm sure she knew I was lying.

We had reached the end of the aisle. Kara led me to a small computer lab and sat me down in front of a computer. She turned on the monitor.

“I love Fran, but she, like most older white folks, doesn't really know much about TRA culture,” said Kara. The screen lit up and I pulled my chair in. “Sorry, Fran's the head librarian you were talking to.”

I nodded.

“There's actually a lot of decent stuff online now. Ten years ago, no. But now you can find tons of blogs, some discussion boards, even adoptee-led magazines. Even the mainstream media thinks we're the hottest new thing. Even though we've always been here.” She laughed and began to type something into the search engine.

There is a “we.” There is an “us.”
It was like I had never even entertained the possibility. That I wasn't completely alone.

“Okay, so here's a list I like,” Kara said, sitting back in her chair. She pointed to a long list on the screen, with links to pages called
Harlow's Monkey, Land of a Gazillion Adoptees,
and
A Birth Project
. “These are all blogs for and by adoptees.”

I blinked at the screen. “Really?”

“Yep,” she said. “Some of them are international adoptees, some of them domestic. Some are young like you, some are older, some are more personal, others more scholarly.”

My head was spinning. I was still trying to make sense of the fact that there were more of us.

“Some people are talking about search and reunion, others about redefining their relationship with their adoptive family, and others are discussing dating as an adoptee. So I think you should be able to find some insight and support for any issue around the adoption experience here,” she said.

It was a little like talking to a teacher but infinitely more useful. I found some of the terms she was using, and their context, completely unfamiliar, but it was fascinating to realize that there was a whole field of study on this topic. “Thank you,” I said slowly. “This is really helpful.”

She nodded, leaning back in her chair. Everything about her—her wide shoulders, long fingers and finely manicured fingernails—oozed confidence. Perhaps she was twenty-five, almost thirty? Maybe this was how I would look at that age.
That would not be bad at all.

Kara stood up. “I have to go back to work now, but here's my e-mail address and cell number.” She ripped off a small piece of scratch paper and scribbled down the info. “You can always write, call, or text me if you have another question.” She smirked. “We're already too alone as it is.” There was some heat behind these words, and I wanted to ask her what she meant exactly. I wanted to hear her story. Did she make contact with her birth parents? What were her adoptive parents like? Did she fit in anywhere? But we had only just met, and these were not conversations that strangers had.

“I'll do that,” I said, grabbing the paper possessively. “Definitely.”

Kara turned on her heel and walked away, back toward the stairwell. She walked like she owned the place, and maybe she did. I was sure that this wasn't the only thing she knew more about than the head librarian.

I faced the computer and sighed. Where to begin? I finally just clicked a link, any link, and began reading.

“I have asked the agency a million times for my birth records, which they still insist were burned down in a fire shortly after I was born. There is no record of such an event, however, so I know they are lying,” one woman wrote on her blog. “It's like they think they rescued me from some treacherous Third World childhood in Bangladesh,” another wrote, “and that they believe that I should be endlessly thanking them for this ‘rescue,' this access to First World education, health care, housing, and amenities. But what about everything else I missed, and am still missing because they took me from my home? What about my language? My food? My culture? What about my birth family?”

And one blog finally unraveled for me the mystery of my “special needs” status at the time of my adoption:

The narrative of colorblindness which most white adoptive parents strictly adhere to is flawed in many respects, which I have explored in detail in previous posts. But one of its most serious contradictions lies in the reality of the market for children, whose monetary ‘value,' both in domestic and international markets, is largely determined by their race. More specifically and insidiously, the lighter you are, the more you will cost, because there will be more demand for you. Such are the consequences of doing the ‘business' of child welfare in the capitalist context, which has always been (if not overtly, then covertly) racist. Black children, especially those marked with some disability, are consistently the cheapest, followed by mixed children, and Native and Latino children, then Asian children. At the top of the Available for Adoption food chain lies The Healthy White Infant—that ever-elusive treasure that so many white adoptive parents would give almost anything to attain. This is why so many children of color were, and in some cases still are, labeled as “special needs,” by state agencies, thus putting them in a category with lowered (incentivized) adoption fees for prospective parents. It is a way to combat these racist market forces, and make black, mixed, Latino, and Native children more ‘attractive' to potential ‘buyers,' i.e., adoptive parents.

I gasped. So, simply being black or mixed, or just not white made you “special needs” in the eyes of these agencies and their clients? What did this mean about me and my parents? Did they then somehow see me in these terms as well? Was I somehow “less valuable” to them than Jason or Kit because I wasn't white, because they had gotten such a “deal” on me? It was disgusting to think of family like this, but on the other hand, it was hard not to, given this information.

Browsing blog after blog, I had the oddest feeling. Like all this time, I thought I was a freak, an aberration of nature, born with a skin that wasn't my own. But now, I began to wonder if I was actually just an archetype. Maybe this loneliness and shame, this fear of being discovered as not truly black, were just part of what it meant to be a “transracial adoptee.” And if so, there was maybe another way out of it, another side to the experience.

After three and a half hours in front of the monitor, my eyes were bleary and my stomach was rumbling. I'd missed a whole weight-training session. All of the blogs, the sites, the voices, had given me some perspective on meeting Keith but also on my family. I saved all of the sites on my phone before I left.

As I drove back home, I reflected on the fact that I might not be as much of a freak as I always thought I was. Maybe I just belonged to an outlaw tribe. One that you wouldn't even know was there unless you knew how to go looking for it. And maybe, those of us in the tribe weren't responsible at all for what had happened to us, all the things that had made us who we were. Maybe we actually had nothing to apologize for. To anyone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

K
it and I sometimes went to the kiddie playground just a few blocks away. We liked to sit on the swings that almost dropped to the ground under our weight and twist and turn the chains, spinning ourselves back and forth. The motion reminded us of some part of ourselves we tended to forget in our house and made us giddy at the same time.

“I knew it,” Kit said, when I told her about Kara. “I knew you couldn't be the only one.”

I nodded. “Of course I'm not the only transracial adoptee in Madison.” I spun myself fast to the right, unwinding my chain and almost flinging myself off the swing. The words
transracial adoptee
still felt strange in my mouth, but I was getting more used to hearing them. “It's logical…” I frowned. “But also strange.”

Kit rammed her swing into mine. “Strange like how?”

I moved back a little, so her swing missed mine. “Like there's all these people out there who are walking around feeling like just as much of an imposter as you do, and you never knew it.”

She laughed. “You're not an imposter.”

I looked away from her, at the violet beginning to pierce the night sky. “I am to most black people.” I sighed. “You don't get it. You're white.”

She stopped ramming my swing for a minute and looked hurt. “Yeah, I'm white, but … I don't fit in either. We're both different.”

I started to kick at the dirt, pushing my toes in deep, and slowly turning myself in a clockwise motion. “We're both different but not in the same way. I can't explain it.”

Kit frowned. “You're uncomfortable being uncomfortable.”

I let go of my twisted-up chain and spun crazily, as fast as I could. “Yeeee!” I yelped as the wind smacked my cheeks.

“I'm comfortable being uncomfortable,” she said. “Maybe that's the difference.”

I felt anger bubbling up in my stomach. “You don't have black kids in your face every damn minute teasing you because you don't talk right or don't have the right hair. You don't stick out at all—you blend right in with everybody. And everybody thinks you're so fucking beautiful, too.” I looked down at my scuffed up sneakers. “They always have.”