Lawton - Raceless : In Search of Family, Identity, and the Truth About Where I Belong (9780063009493)

Being loving does not mean we will not be betrayed. Love helps us face betrayal without losing heart. And it renews our spirit so we can love again.

BELL HOOKS , All About Love

I WAS BORN INTO A SECRET . B UT BEFORE I EVEN KNEW THIS , before it became my secret to hold, it belonged to my parents. And before that, the sole owner of the secret was my mother. Allow me to explain. My parents story, so far as it concerns me, began in 1989, at the Charing Cross Hotel in central London. They worked, catering to the whims of tourists, moments from city attractions like Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. He was twenty-eight and a chef out back in the kitchen; she was twenty-seven and on the front desk, at reception. Both were the last of their siblings to meet someone and settle downhe one of three, she one of eight. Although they were from very different rural backgrounds, they were the only ones in their families to settle so far away from home.

My dads parents saw he was smart and so thought sending him to a boarding school at the age of ten was the best thing, and soon after, the family relocated to Shropshire, a soporific county of green sandwiched between the city of Birmingham and the Welsh hills. He hated boarding school, returned home to his family every holiday until he was eighteen, but found himself keen to leave again as soon as school was done. He went to Wolverhampton Polytechnic after flunking his exams and learned to love the burgeoning punk music scene, teaching himself bass guitar, joining a band or two, and making friends who would later attend his wedding. He studied economics at the poly, and despite never attending lectures, scraped by with passing grades and had an entry-level traineeship at an accountancy firm lined up for him upon graduation. When they called to check if he still wanted the position, it was his father who confirmed that yes, of course, hed be there to start on Monday. But my dad had found the whole number-crunching thing mind-numbingly boring at university and turned the opportunity downmuch to his fathers disapproval. He retrained as a chef, like his mother, and reveling in the fact that he could go back to the student life for a couple more years, he moved to London.

My mum grew up in west Ireland, the second youngest of a very Catholic, very strict household where weekly mass attendance was a precondition for youth club admittance on a Saturday night and many school lessons were taught in Irish. Her parents were hard workers but not well off; they farmed cattle and raised their own pigs and chickens in muddy green fields surrounding the house, fetching turf from the wet raised boglands nearby for the constantly roaring hearth in the main room of the house. They never went without, but there was little time for frivolities like bedtime reading, playing board games, or learning to swimdespite the drama of the Atlantic waves crashing onto the rocks just minutes away. Mass, schoolwork, and chores were the all-consuming bedrock principles to an Irish childhood, with the occasional display of affection and rumination on feelings. And as soon as you could, it was expected that you would move away to make something of yourself, in Limerick, or Dublin, or London. She started in the former and ended up in the latter by 1988, skipping a stint in her countrys capital, unlike her two eldest sisters, who settled there.

At the Charing Cross Hotel my mum and dad were acquaintances at first, then friends, and then they started dating. She lived-in at the hotel but would often stay over at his apartment in Notting Hill. It was small and cramped with a shared bathroom and kitchen, and the man who lived on the top floor often rambled to himself, which was scary when my dad wasnt there with her. When they got married, in 1990, it was in her local parish of Cooraclare, in County Clare. Dad had thrown himself into the Irish culture: he loved the music, the people, the banter, and the rebellious nature of it all, and she loved that he loved it. Over a hundred people attended their wedding. Her fatherDada as he was knowngave them 1,000 (an awful lot of money back then) toward it all, which they used to pay for the hotel reception. They cut a three-tier fruitcake from a bakery in Ennisthe nearest town, which was twenty-five miles awayand danced to (Ive Had) The Time of My Life for their first song.

They had moved out of my dads apartment and into a tiny top-floor flat in Shepherds Bush by the time their first child arrived. My mum had friends in the area, people she knew from West Clare; Dad had started working at a school in Hammersmith. He got two weeks paternity leave, which was good back then, helping with the feeds in the night, hands-on from the beginning, doing what he was supposed to. It was a long labor. I was a large baby, weighing nine and a half pounds, which was a lot for my mothers petite five-foot-four frame to handlethere were many stitches afterward, the pain of recovering from those worse than actually giving birth. After all the sweating and panting and pushing and crying that took place in Queen Charlottes Hospital in Hammersmith on the afternoon of November 12, a baby girl was born. There were no difficult words exchanged on the day, no heated discussions, no angry tears. There was no questioning of my mothers fidelity, no dramatic hospital walkout. There was simply a new family.

But it was not the baby they had been expecting: they both could admit that privately, although not to each other. As she gazed down at the gurgling bundle in her arms, a cocktail of emotionsmixed up with the hormones and drugs for the painswirled through my mums body and made her dizzy. She was floating on a cloud of euphoria, but as she came to, she could see that the actions of her past had invited themselves into her present, and now they were here to stay. She saw the baby in her arms, with her mop of charcoal-black hair and huge brown eyes fanned by thick dark lashes, and she just knew, she just knew straightaway. The baby was not his. That night nine months agoit was just one nighthad led to this. What was she going to do? What would everyone think? She had a healthy baby girl, thank God, but the baby was not her husbands. On what should have been a totally joyous occasion, thoughts of life as a single mother flashed before her. She knew all too well how they treated women like her in Ireland. After all, it was only during her mothers generation that they had banished unwed mothers to brutal institutions run by nuns, snatched their babies and stripped them of their social rights. The legacy of those stories was buried deep within her countrys national fabric. And it wasnt spoken of; you never spoke of such things. What would everyone think?

That night. That one stupid, selfish night, which she had long since pushed into the deepest crevasses of her mind, was something she had not admitted to anyone, much less herself. It was a secret she had kept under psychological lock and key, but now here was this baby, a living, breathing reminder of that fleeting encounter with a man she had wanted to forget, in a place she would not allow herself to return to. And she would have to look at the evidence of that encounter for the rest of her life, the memory haunting her now, and forever, through her baby. Here was her daughter staring back at her with such innocence and expectation. She couldnt talkyetbut there would soon come a time when she could, and what would she tell her then? She didnt know, she couldnt think. But she was relieved when her husband took the baby in his arms and showed no visible sign of distress, of rage. He was elateda daughter! He cooed and cuddled and accepted her without question. But terror hovered above her in that delivery room, an invisible cloud, and who knew if, or when, it would start to rain? She was unsure of what to do, what to say, whether to address the issue right before their very eyes. She panicked, she commented on the babys featureshow dark they were, and with all that thick hair too! And then the midwife, whose face she can still remember to this day, offered her a lifeline that would anchor the story into the bedrock of their lives. The nurse said, so she did, that the reason this beautiful baby was so irredeemably brown-skinned was possibly down to a