Tell Me True

Writing my memoir began as a way of correcting the public record. The false story that my white mother and stepfather adopted me needed to be replaced by the truth. Telling the secret, making it public, was my way of inserting my truth into the national story. I was motivated not by a desire to tell the story of my fascinating life, but because I know, as a student of racial history and race relations in America, that my story has been replicated untold millions of times by sons and daughters who never found their way to a book publisher.

In order to tell that story, though, I had to use the tools of the documentary filmmaker, the medium in which I’m most fluent; as well as the sources of the historian. That is where I encountered the crevasse between documented history and the wider reality, between oral tradition and the public record.

Probably because I was already mulling over how to present the narrative sequence of my own life, time became the first mystery of personal storytelling for me. I needed to become a historian. I had to search through a wealth of documents for the written record and the artifacts of important moments. I had to listen to the meanings carried in oral histories. This historical digging yielded a more detailed framing of what happened to me and my parents. But as I researched my own life history for the documentary that ultimately became Secret Daughter, I discovered that historical records themselves are fallible and incomplete.

I grew up in a black section of Atlantic City, before the civil rights movement. We had, within one block of my house, two grocery stores, two barber shops, a tailor, a notary public, and a bookie. But aside from the title deeds in the City Hall, there is no information on the people who owned those homes and lived in that community. There’s no film of them, for the simple reason that those who owned cameras and film in those days saw no reason to document the lives of the black community. It was as if we did not exist.

So how is one to bring together the fragments of inaccurate or incomplete history and faulty or incomplete memory? This is where the detective work begins. As I went back into the census data to trace the lineage of my father and grand father, who, according to the Social Security Administration, worked as a laborer in the Philadelphia shipyards[Q3], I had to rely on the notes of faceless government bureaucrats with bad handwriting. Was my grandmother’s name Wilkes or Wilkinson or Wilson? It depended on whether I looked at my father’s birth certificate or my grandmother’s marriage certificate.

My relatives remembered that she lived somewhere in North Philly, but they couldn’t remember exactly where. Using estate and title records, I finally found the house my father had bought for her in north Philadelphia—a wide, three-floor, four-bedroom row house with parquet floors, that had been left to deteriorate. It took me three days of door knocking in the neighborhood where she had once lived to find the woman I was told had been her best friend. In our interview I discovered that she and my grandmother had lived in a committed relationship, as partners, for almost twenty-five years.

Even on my mother’s side, the Anglo European side that is better documented, I ran into problems. A cousin had told me that I was related to Miles Standish. But it turned out I wasn’t. My mother’s ancestral tree, very well documented thanks to Mormon genealogical research, did indeed go back to colonial Boston. I was related to a ship’s captain named William Pearce (or Pierse, or Pierce) who plied the waters between London, Boston, and the Bahamas in a ship called The Lyon and who had made as many as thirty crossings during his career. Pearce also compiled the first almanac published in North America in 1639, for Harvard College. My mother, who had attended only one semester of community college before dropping out when she got pregnant, had plutocratic roots deeper than anyone knew.

My seven-times great grandfather Pearce was a person with standing, a person with a documented life. But he had a dark side—he kidnapped Indians from New England and sold them into slavery in Spain. He brought one of the first African slaves to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1639. She was a woman listed on the ship’s manifest only as “Angela.” For all I know, she was one of my father’s ancestors.

I found a rather eerie footnote in Captain Pearce’s life story: he had three wives during his lifetime. And the first, who came to Jamestown on a ship back in 1639 with that slave named Angela, was named June.

She died at Jamestown, and left no memoir to tell her tale.

(Originally published at GoArticles and reprinted with permission from the author, June Cross).