INVISIBLE BOY

A debut memoir recounts a scarifying childhood as the adoptive son of White religious fundamentalists.

“We give them Black children to raise, like they’re flowers in a vase, and perhaps that’s what they think of us,” writes former Vancouver Sun reporter and editor Mooney toward the end of the book. “Well, think again. Lovely as they look inside your living room, the flowers are dying.” Soul death came in the form of a studied denial of any possibility of exploring Blackness. As Mooney, the biological child of a Ghanaian mother and a German father, details, in the remote wilderness community in which he was raised by adoptive White parents, there simply were no Black people like him, no books about the Black experience, and no access to appropriate education or media. As a progressively unwilling devotee of a certain kind of religious understanding, he found role models in the Bible among those sold into slavery and oppressed by authority: Joseph, Moses, and Samson, “whose hair was a total mystery to everyone and impossible to manage. Needless to say, no one knew what to do with my hair either.” Entering college and leaving a household headed by a man of sour disposition and a surpassingly mean-spirited woman—“father” and “mother” increasingly failed to remain appropriate designations—Mooney eventually replaced a religion marked by suspicions that demons were all around with a more secular one whose texts included the songs of Nina Simone (“I was using her to signify a Blackness that I didn’t really feel”) and the writings of James Baldwin, who, “like me, was a child of church.” Having become racially conscious through that education, Mooney is highly sensitive to systemic racism—which is practiced, he wisely notes, by people who are “as brainwashed as anyone, mindlessly minding their homes in a slave state.”

An affecting portrait of life inside the twin prisons of racism and unbending orthodoxy.