Vanessa A. Bee - Home Bound: An Uprooted Daughters Reflections on Belonging

Copyright 2022 by Elisabeth Vanessa Assae-Bille

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bee, Vanessa A., 1988 author.

Title: Home bound : an uprooted daughters reflections on belonging / by Vanessa A. Bee.

Description: First edition. | New York : Astra House, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: A multifaceted global memoir reflecting on Bees adoption from Cameroon, her childhood experiences with public housing and homelessness in rural France, Lyon, and London, her immigration as a teen to Nevada, and eventually rethinking her devotion to evangelical Christianity at Harvard Law. Home Bound touches on constructions of home, and the issues of identity that can complicate it, including class, race, education, faith, and nationalityProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022006629 (print) | LCCN 2022006630 (ebook) | ISBN 9781662601330 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781662601347 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Bee, Vanessa A., 1988 | AdopteesBiography. | AdopteesFamily relationships. | Essayists21st centuryBiography.

Classification: LCC HV874.82.B43 B44 2022 (print) | LCC HV874.82.B43 (ebook) | DDC 362.734092dc23/eng/20220209

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006629

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006630

First edition

for my mothers

1a: ones place of residence: DOMICILE

b: HOUSE

2: the social unit formed by a family living together

3a: a familiar or usual setting: congenial environment

also the focus of ones domestic attention

b: HABITAT

4a: a place of origin

also ones own country

b: HEADQUARTERS

MERRIAM-WEBSTER DICTIONARY (2019)

I HAND MY AMERICAN DRIVERS license to the black guard in the window of the French consulate in Washington, DC. When he calls me madame, his accent resembles mine: the impeccable French of double-diaspora children, seeded in the tropics, grown in European schools, and re-scattered in lands more fertile with opportunity. I wonder if his accent changes when he speaks to his mother, the way mine does. I show him proof of my appointment for today, December 4, 2017. Passport replacement. He looks at the license and at my face again. He asks: Where are you from?

My features are distinctly sub-Saharan but unremarkable. Protruding brown eyes, broad nose, thick lips, dark skin. The last name on my license, Assae-Bille, reveals nothing about my origins. This throws himand every African-born Uber driverfor a loop, spiking their curiosity almost as much as it did French whites. They would not be asking if my being from here, wherever here is, was a possibility in their minds. For all their shortcomings on race, this is one thing I appreciate about Americans: how in this country, black people have the right to simply declare, if asked, what city is home; how people of my complexion can claim Richmond or Dallas without being pressed a second or third time. Standing on the fiction of French soil in the United States, the rules revert back, the question beneath the question.

I could tell him about the recurring dream, the one I have had for more than a decade now, and that each time feels more real than the last. I realize that I am scheduled to leave for Yaound imminently and cram clothes into a suitcase as fast as my arms will let me. But I never make the flight to Cameroon. Some nights, I am trapped in traffic with minutes to takeoff. Or I am waiting in the security line when my boarding pass evaporates from my hand. The layovers grow more elaborate; they pick up where previous nights have left off. My psyche is sly. Sometimes, she whispers: This time isnt a dream, see? We are finally making good on our promise to return. A flight attendant directs me to my row and the seat belt sign comes on. Then the airplane floor splits in two. The fuselage vanishes; our seats hang in midair. I open my eyes and find myself in bed, summoned again by a homeland that doesnt quite feel like its mine.

I answer the guard: Poitou-Charentes. I doubt hes ever been to that region. Theres no reason to pass through that sleepy mosaic of grapeseed and wheat, where the countryside bleeds into a flat horizon dotted with ruins of forts, and the dwindling villages that once toiled for them. The Poitou-Charentes exists only in reference to other places. It is ninety minutes inland from the Atlantic coast. A jaunt south of the Loire Valley. A short drive from where the Cardinal de Richelieu, the scheming villain in The Three Musketeers, once built a magnificent chteau. For my American friends, I draw a ring in the air for Paris and trace a downward diagonal to indicate: two hours southwest by train. In the twenty years since I left France for good, the government merged the Poitou-Charentes with the neighboring Limousin and Aquitaine, binding the three regions into a supergroup that it renamed Nouvelle-Aquitaine. I will never call it that, though, so in a way, my finger points to nowhere on this virtual map. But I am all too familiar with the knowing smile on the guards face. This is not what he is thinking of. Indeed, he insists: Cte dIvoire? Centrafrique?

Growing up, I used to envy my classmates for having the option to explain where they were from in one breath, without caveats or asides. Home was in this or that city, this or that state, often under a single flag. My classmates could see themselves in the faces and names of their parents. Answering the guards question, the luckiest ones might picture a childhood house where boxes of their crayon drawings were still safeguarded and friends from kindergarten reappeared down the block on family holidays. Even the kids who had been ostracized for their social standing or economic class could identify a place to which they unequivocally belonged.

I yearned for a home this absolute. Mine, however, always felt slightly out of reach. My parents, Suzanne and Laurent, adopted me out of Cameroon at ten months old. I was Suzannes niece, born out of wedlock to her sister Florence. For five years, they raised me in Chtellerault, a small, majority-white French town that might have been best known for its relative proximity to the Futuroscope media park. In places, Chtellerault was quaint. Its heart pulsed with cobblestoned streets that wound like varicose veins between artisanal storefronts. Much of the population descended from farmers and manual laborers, and now powered the institutions that made up our modest townboulangeries for bread, ptisseries for sweet confections, and tabacs