MY MOTHER'S DAUGHTER

A white mother connects with the Black sibling her mother was forced to give up decades earlier.

As a young girl, author Clark-Flory (Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey Into the Heart of Desire, 2021) imagined that she had “a secret sister down the hall whom my parents were keeping from me.” Years later, Clark-Flory wonders if this was a result of her childhood intuition about her mother’s darkest secret: As a teenager, Clark-Flory’s grandfather sent the author’s mother, Deborah, to a maternity home to have a baby conceived out of wedlock. Unbeknownst to her family, Deborah was pregnant with a child whose father was Nigerian and would be born Black. At the home, Deborah was forced to surrender her daughter, Katheryn, for adoption. The experience haunted the author’s mother for the rest of her life, filling her with anxiety, triggering a dependence on drugs and alcohol, and possibly causing a smoking habit that resulted in her untimely death from lung cancer. As part of her research, the author learns that maternity homes were “part of a centuries-old history of using women’s bodies for white supremacist aims in the United States, starting in the earliest colonial days.” Nine years after her mother’s death, Clark-Flory took a DNA test, the results of which connected her with this long-lost sister. Establishing contact with her sibling not only led the author to an extended family of nieces and nephews she never knew existed but also inspired her to dig into Deborah’s painful history as a young woman at the Florence Crittenton home for unwed mothers in Chicago. The author’s interrogation of her own privilege, her insistence on our shared humanity, and her refusal to inherit shame are a powerful rejection of white-male dominated systems of oppression. Deeply researched and lyrically written, this account will stir the hearts of parents and nonparents alike.

A trenchant and moving memoir about adoption and systemic racism.