When we set out on our journey to Richmond, it never occurred to me that I would have a story to tell. I took some notes on thoughts I was having at the time. I wrote in my journal some. But I never intended to write out this story. It just came to me over the course of the end of 2003, sort of as an unrelenting need to struggle with what had happened to me–especially the strange sleepy sensations I was having and the vague auditory hallucinations.

I could not even have conceived of writing the story of our quest for Dana without having read Dick Wertime’s Citadel on the Mountain several years ago (see “true links” to the right for a sample from the book, or click on the title of this entry to go to Amazon). Citadel is Dick’s memoir of growing up with a father who was brilliant, intense, possibly connected to the CIA, and also at times paranoid and delusional. Dick’s story is about trying to understand his father (and himself) after his father had died, realizing how much of his own life he did not understand.

I had the pleasure of meeting with Dick in his office at Arcadia University here in the Philadelphia area several years ago. He is a professor of English and writing there. We spent maybe a half hour talking about writing and his book. The intent of the meeting was for him to give me advice on my first novel, Beyond the Will of God (sadly, unpublished). In ten minutes he illustrated five key points of fiction writing that I have taken to heart over the years. We also talked about non-fiction and the memoir as a form. Until that conversation, I had resisted the hype surrounding “creative non-fiction” and New Journalism. I have always admired Mailer, Wolfe, Matthiessen and others capable of exploring real-life in essays and books, but I never saw their “journalism” as art. To me, even serious photography was not art. It approached art, but it was still simply getting lucky by catching a piece ohttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.giff someone’s or something’s moment.

But Dick turned me around. We discussed the whole idea of what Citadel was about: a sort of detective story, a refitting of the puzzle pieces of his life after discovering new shapes and new dimensions.

I came away from Dick’s office with a greater appreciation then, for the literary quality of non-fiction. (Please understand that I have been a cretin all my adult life and I apologize for this. Although I have been writing since I was eight, I never took an English class or a fiction workshop of any kind after high school).

I’m still not sure where creative non-fiction and memoir fit in the taxonomy of the field of “Litchertchure.” I do know, however, that without reading The Citadel on the Mountain, and having the opportunity to listen to Dick’s wise counsel, I never would have figured out that I could write this story.

Dr. Wertime will be releasing a new novel soon called San Giovanni.

The Acadians of the Maritime Coast in Canada were a fully integrated culture mixing Native and French cultures over the course of several centuries prior to the Revolutionary War. They were a culture of some 18,000 people wiped out in a few years by the British, utterly eliminated through forced removal or simply driven into the wilderness to fend for themselves. Some of these displaced Acadians eventually straggled down to Louisiana. Over the next century (mostly the 19th), French/Creole language shifts eventually came up with the name Cajuns for them.

An article in Salon.com contains an extended interview with John Mack Faragher, a Yale professor of history, who wrote the book entitled, “A Great and Noble Scheme.” The article can be found at Salon’s website in the books section, “America’s Forgotten Atrocity.”

Here’s an interesting clip from the article:

“To what extent should the Acadians be viewed as a mixed-race or an ethnically mixed people? And how much did that perception contribute to their downfall?

There was an early period in their history, mostly in the 17th century, where there was considerable intermarriage. It really characterized the first and maybe the second generation, when the community was in formation. Once they had established their community the rate of intermarriage fell off, but the important point was that they recognized kinship across community lines. The Acadians looked at the Míkmaq and didn’t just see “others” there. They saw cousins, distant cousins perhaps, but cousins nonetheless. They often went to the same missionaries, their names were placed in the same baptismal records, the same marriage records. Because of the early pattern of intermarriage, they came to recognize a cultural and Christian kinship across ethnic lines.

In fact, this also characterizes a lot of American history. I don’t like the word, but we’re a miscegenated culture. There is nothing really pure about Americans. You scratch us, and we bleed many colors and many ethnicities. Our culture is about hybridity, bringing formerly separate things together. The Acadians are perhaps a more dramatic example.

Now it must be said that the French had a tendency, in part because they emphasized commerce rather than agriculture, to create the kinds of ties with the Indians that made commerce possible. They also practiced an ecumenical Catholicism and were genuinely interested in converting the Indians, where the English really were not.

Yes, you write that the Puritans made no attempts to do that.

Well, there were some attempts, John Eliot and the Mayhews — these were missionaries in 17th century New England. But the Indians that Eliot converted, who lived in the “praying towns” in Massachusetts, those Indians were attacked during King Philip’s War, and subjected to the same hatred and violence as non-Christian Indians. This remains one of the fundamental problems in understanding North American history: the English way of dealing with the Indians vs. the French way.”

From the beginning it is likely they had a good idea what orphanage I would be sent to. I’m sure the Wayne County, Indiana professionals in the Department of Children and Family were considering their options–that I may well have been a topic at staff meetings, even brainstorming sessions. How cost effective could it be for a social worker in Middle America to spin her wheels looking for a family that might legitimately want to adopt such a conundrum?

The social worker in charge of my case had three daughters all nearly full grown. She and her husband had always wanted a boy. I’m told I was one of those very personable, fat and happy babies. The story is that she and her husband decided if no one else was going to adopt me, they would.

But that was not to be. In the same town, Loureide Jeanette Biddle, a feisty, compassionate, in-your-face woman barely five feet tall, had taken it upon herself to expedite the adoption process for her son Bruce and daughter-in-law Ellen who had just suffered their fourth miscarriage in as many years. Loureide was no ordinary woman. Neither was her husband Bill. Together, during the thirties and forties, they forged a new approach to applied social science that they called community development. Drawing on principles of anthropology, social work, and religion, community development meant helping solve the problems of the poor and destitute by going out and living with them, participating in their way of life, understanding their values and the needs of their town or village. Then, from within, using the networking smarts of the social worker, Bill and Loureide would work with group leaders to solve the problems of the community. Bill was a very respected thinker in the progressive and liberal world of social science and education. By the fifties he was a professor at Earlham College, a small Quaker liberal arts college on the western half of the town of Richmond, Indiana (besides my mother who did graduate work at Earlham, my brother Jesse received his BA there thirty years later). Bill was busy teaching his theories in 1958. Impish, frenetic Loureide was a super-bright woman in her own right: an accomplished musician and political activist who had organized the socialist democratic party of Philadelphia in the early forties, and was also the first female lower school principal at Friends Central, a private school in Philly’s privileged mainline. In slow-paced Richmond she was champing at the bit for a new project, a new challenge. Bruce and Ellen were living in Lexington where he had his first job as an associate professor of social psychology at the University of Kentucky. Louriede pushed for adoption and, as the story goes, figured they all had a better shot in sleepy little Richmond than Lexington.

In my early years, I saw my grandmother Loureide tell off and boss around any number of people. She never took No for an answer. She had the remarkable skill of being domineering and even bitchy in order to get her point across, all the while never leaving you with the sense that she’d done anything other than sweetly ask you to do something for her. I can only imagine how the social work agency responsible for me dealt with her.

Ellen Horgan Biddle and Bruce Jesse Biddle became my parents on May 5, 1958. I’m sure I was dumbfounded and overwhelmed by the love and happiness surrounding me. On my birthday every year for my entire adult life my mother would send me a card reading the same words: “Dear David, when I first saw you I fell in love with you. I loved you then and I love you now. I held you in my arms and smiled down at you and you smiled right back at me and cooed like a little dove. Happy Birthday. I love you.”

For the first twenty-four years of my life, that love was all I needed. Faithfully, I never felt the need to know anything about my origins. People would always ask me: “Don’t you want to find your birth parents?” But my answer was always the same. “No. No, I don’t need to find them. I belong to this family. That’s more than enough.”

But it wasn’t enough. I spent the first two decades or so of my life ignoring something so fundamental and personal that it may permanently have warped my sense of identity. In the heart of my heart, I was nothing to the world and I was nothing to myself.

Around the time of my birthday every year, my mother would tell me how happy she had become once I came into her life.

“Tell me how you found me,” I would say.

“It’s a sad story,” she would respond. “But it has a happy ending.” This was a ritual between us, because I knew how much my mother loved me and I knew the story by heart.

“We came to Richmond, Indiana because your grandparents lived there. I had finished my master’s work at Earlham College which is located there a few years earlier. It was a small town then. People had trouble dealing with skin color in those days. Your birth parents were high school students in Richmond. You were put up for adoption as soon as you were born, but you were too dark-skinned to be adopted by a white family. And you were too light-skinned to be adopted by a black family. You were perfect for us, though, as soon as we saw you.”

I felt the radiance of my mother’s love when she told me that story. But the message wasn’t lost on me either: no one could deal with me. Light and dark. Black and white. It was early 1958, one of the pinnacle years of the civil rights movement. I was actually born thirty miles from Richmond in Dayton, Ohio, a city that twenty years earlier had been the temporary home of a young Ralph Ellison who found inspiration there to begin his writing career that would eventually lead to the novel Invisible Man. I always figured my birth mother had me in Dayton in order to escape the humiliation and shame she would have faced in her small home town. No one would know her in Dayton. She would have been invisible.

Through the last weeks of the winter of 1958 I was shuttled from one Richmond foster home to another while my social worker sought a family who could accept the implications of my skin color. There’s no telling how I was treated during my first month and a half. March has always been a tough time for me if I’m not careful. I imagine my round face and big, dark eyes staring at different ceilings, very quickly coming to expect a sense of being alone in a small room at the back of houses that all smelled different: camphor, old newspapers, garlic, cat urine, rubber tires, old lumber, fried food, fresh paint. How many inquisitive seven-year-olds peered over the railings of my many cribs and spit on me? How many gentle sixteen-year-old daughters stroked my cheek and sang the songs of the day to me? How long did it take for the realization to set in that I was very likely the product of a mixed race union? How long before a new home had to be found for me, a new ceiling, new smells, new people who might or might not have the time to hold and comfort me? How might I sense that life would ever be otherwise, that normal babies are doted over by their mommies and daddies, that there is only one house to wake up to every morning, that no matter what the smells and sights and sounds, it all comes to equal warmth and love and security to a baby in the end?

Back then there were those who believed in equal rights for African Americans and those who did not. But I wasn’t an objective legal principle, I was the end result of it. In a hypothetical world, if all couplings between men and women could be mixed, the question of “the Negro in America” would fade away–so would the question of Caucasians. In the late fifties, those of mixed descent must have confounded everyone. The riddle of white versus black was so big and so volatile and carried such emotional valence–even hysteria–that the gray areas and the nuances of real life were too much for people to handle. Even today in the year 2003, the majority of mixed race children feel the need to choose sides.

My skin was the color of raw teak or breakfast coffee half full of heavy cream and sugar. My nose and lips were nondescript Anglo, though my hair was nearly black and my eyes were the color of baker’s chocolate. I was, and still am today, a dark-featured blend of something.

There are many versions of mix in this country. Although there are no useful statistics, it is very likely that ours is a country dominated by mixed heritage citizens. Certainly, most African Americans and Hispanics are mixed race. And the number of so-called white people who are actually combinations of multiple ethnic groups with hints–or more–of African, Native, Hispanic, Jewish, Asian, and Mediterranean genes in their histories, is untold. But no one could tell me anything about my story. In one sense I was whatever you wanted to imagine I was. You could make up just about anything and it probably would have worked.

My demons come back when we return to our room. The ventilation system doesn’t work well and there are no controls. The room is a perfect seventy-eight degrees with moderate humidity, but I want it seventy-two and I want a unit that will allow me to drive the humidity well below fifty-percent.

We go to bed, all four of us, and I lie there feeling the heat prickle my skin, thinking about the fact that I am driving to Richmond, Indiana with nothing but the name of a high school student from 1958. In order to fall asleep, I count the things I want to take back in my life. There are many of them. I have lied and stolen things. I’ve manipulated the lives of those I love. Most of my major decisions were made in order to please others. My ego drives what I accomplish. I am a materialist. I want desperately to be rich. I’ve done worse too, far worse. The worst thing though, I realize in the dark, is that I’ve worked so hard to appear to others as a good person, a noble, decent, gentle man with positive, progressive values, that I’m no longer sure who I really am. “I’ve worked hard,” I think, “at covering up what a shit I’ve become.”

I drift across a sea of sleep, bumping into myself over and over, wondering about all of my transgressions, wondering if they’re somehow related to being adopted. If you aren’t connected, if you’re untethered, isn’t it inevitable that you will be at least slightly morally off-center and selfish? I usually do the right thing in life, probably more than some, but occasionally I make mistakes. And when I do, there is nothing to face. No guilt. Nothing. I am alone and floating outside the rest of the world. I am a mistake, an alien, a lone wolf cut off from the pack. I struggle to find sleep in the incessant heat of the room and tumble in and out of guilt and self-consciousness.

There are moments in all of this, while I drift, where I understand things better. At one point in the night, I realize that loneliness might be a good thing. It is the root cause of my ability to love others. It is the source of my deep need to find, and my belief in, true love. I went through so much to discover that love, to find Marion.

That same loneliness is filled every day being around my sons. The desperation of my situation in the world has been salved by my family, but it has not been eliminated. I lie in a room on the 16th floor of the Pittsburgh Ramada Inn and I can only be cured of this desolation by overcoming my adoption, by understanding, at least in part, the formal reasons for why I occurred.

I’ve dreamt of wolves and wild dogs my whole life. Sometimes I am in my house sitting at the kitchen table by myself. There are house noises all around me, common house noises: a ticking clock, the refrigerator, the far off sound of a vacuum sweeper, maybe I forgot to turn the water off in the sink. A wolf comes into the room. He is salivating and panting. I smell him. Death out of the dark. His eyes are ice cave blue, his fur the color of burned forest and dust. And then he’s gone. I’m afraid I will forget. I’m afraid I won’t remember he was there.

It’s sunrise, the air is moist and thick, a pack of wild dogs goes noisily through our back yard, mongrels bred of pit bulls, boxers, bull dogs, and mastiffs, some with huge, almost bald skulls, bulging eyes, vicious snarls. They breath in unison, messengers of fear cruising through our suburban neighborhood, looking to fall on any living thing, flesh on their minds. I struggle to figure out if I’m dreaming. Our suburb is on the edge of a great, sprawling metropolis. The pack streaks through our yard, then silence. The yard is vacant. I am looking out the window, standing on my bed, wondering if what I saw was real. Sometimes you’re the wolf. Sometimes you’re the dog. Sometimes he’s just there, like in the kitchen–watching, waiting, moving through.

A single dog finally comes into the yard, unable to run with the pack, it seems too goofy and deranged to belong in the group. It is the quintessential mongrel: part Shepard, part Lab, part Beagle, part Golden Retriever. Sometimes I am that dog and sometimes he is me.

After checking into the Pittsburgh Ramada Inn, we head out onto the streets to find a place to eat, but all the restaurants are closed and there’s practically no one around. It’s a beautiful summer evening, a bit of cool coming off the rivers that converge around this old city’s center; the sky is a dusty violet. All four of us are hungry after our long drive. Coming from Philadelphia, though, we are somewhat flummoxed by the lack of people. We wander the streets, temporarily forgetting the idea of food. We are simply in search of human beings.

It grows dark. We hear live music reverberating amongst the buildings, but it is impossible to locate. There are no people, but there is old, industrial-age stone and iron mixed with modern glass, polished marble, and granite. Ornate office buildings vault to the sky, shimmering in the twilight. Ancient brick and stone churches and storefronts crouch in the shadows, lit by the warm glow of light off the evening clouds. Everything is coated with a layer of dried coal syrup from more than a century of steel manufacturing. We peer through dark restaurant windows, scratching our heads. I begin to feel the day has been an omen for our quest: first the fierce, tangle of cars and families on the highway, now the ghost town of Pittsburgh’s famed downtown Golden Triangle. Our search will yield nothing but people all going their own way, then closed doors and darkened rooms.

“This is a lost cause,” I say to Marion.

“Let’s go back to the hotel,” she says. “There was a bar or something that looked open just off the lobby.”

As we begin to retrace our steps, I realize I am growing irritable. I need a drink desperately. I don’t want to think about what we’re doing, what I’m doing, what I may end up doing to another person. Finding her. Stopping her dead in the tracks of her reality and telling her what she may or may not want to hear. I’m your son. I’m forty-five. Do you remember me? What happened?

My family instinctively knows to keep their distance. They trail five to ten yards back, leaving their father and husband to his black thoughts and a growing sense of futility.

Coming back up a hill toward our hotel, we hear the live music again. At the base of the U.S. Steel Building is a mass of young business professionals drinking and cavorting with each other at Willy and Pete’s Bar. On the patio in front are a man and a woman playing electric guitars, singing Shawn Colvin’s song The Avalanche. The woman is attractive, and though petite, very athletic looking. She has dark features: long black hair, almond skin a bit darker than mine. Her face is at once Hispanic, Asian, Jewish and mulatto. I begin to wonder, stupidly, whether she is my sister. Not “Wouldn’t that be funny if she were my sister?” more like: “I wonder if she’s my sister.” Her voice is nothing special. There is a bit of range to it, the timber and vocal quality are pleasing enough, but my black mood, my hunger, my thirst for booze, and the overarching knowledge I have of how overwrought my thought processes are, do not let me appreciate the woman’s singing. I watch the crowd swilling it up and downing hors d’oevures, thinking how dumb they are in their contentedness. Something keeps me from going over the edge, though. The words: “No man is an island,” pop into my head. I am not a stranger here in this empty maze of hulking architecture. Behind me is my family, in front of me is a country of people partying and trading banter, on the prowl, about to consummate any number of relationships and deeds everywhere on this Friday night. It is raining somewhere. It is perfectly cool and gentle where we are, paused in front of U.S. Steel headquarters.

“I guess we’re eating at the hotel,” Jesse says, coming up from behind me, using his best quiet, wise eleven-year-old voice on me.

“I guess we are,” Marion sighs.

“I want chicken fingers,” says Conor.

We have a horrible meal at the Ruddy Duck, with slow service, bland food, over-salted meat, mushy vegetables, meager salads, and loud table neighbors with two noisy toddlers. But I do well enough at ignoring the demon thoughts lurking in my cluttered mind while I drink a beer and consume my cheap, stringy steak and a salad smothered in what is the only saving grace of the meal: a delicately flavored raspberry lime vinaigrette.

My brother Jesse is one of my best friends. I didn’t realize that until we were in high school. Another best friend is my sister Jennifer. They are both brilliant professionals now. Jesse is a USAID program director in Kenya, and Jennifer is a professor of anthropology in Australia. Our parents had suffered through four miscarriages before they adopted me. People used to say that my siblings would never have been born if it weren’t for me.

When we were teenagers my brother and sister both read over one thousand words per minute and had near perfect recall. I could barely read five hundred words per minute and had maybe eighty percent recall. Our parents were both dazzlingly brilliant as well, with information processing abilities similar to my siblings. I always felt stupid in my family, that I just didn’t have the intellect the rest of them did.

Our original idea for a summer vacation had been to rent a cottage in Maine or New Hampshire. Sam, my oldest son and from my first marriage, spends Augusts in Maine with his mother at their family summer home. The rest of us thought we would all four go up and maybe spend a few days in the Penobscot Bay area learning about sailing from Sam and exploring Maine’s maritime setting. We miss Sam desperately every August. But the cottages we wanted were all reserved during the week available to us. We had waited too long to make reservations. Confronted with this obstacle, I jokingly suggested we drive to Pittsburgh to see a baseball game at the Pirates’ new stadium. Jesse and Conor thought that was a great idea. Then I suggested we go to Missouri to visit my dad. On the way, I said, we could stop in Richmond and go to the library to see if we could find a picture of Dana Black in an old Richmond High School yearbook. Marion liked that idea, but topped it by suggesting, “We drive to Richmond and find out what we find out.”

“What about going to see the Pirates?” Jesse asked.

“Well, let’s go to Pittsburgh first, then,” Marion said. “We’ll spend the weekend in Pittsburgh, then drive on to Richmond. And we’ll find out what we find out.”

“Wow,” Conor chimed. “A picture of her is in a school yearbook at the library all the way out in Indiana?”