Making Yourself Up

For most of her life, Darcy’s identity is a mystery. Who’s her mother? Who’s her father? And who, in the end, is she?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets, the secrets
that are cut from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. My guest today
is Darcy Ballentine, Assistant professor in the Departments of English
and Black Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. Darcy's is a

(00:35):
story about bedrock identity and the troubles and complexities of deception.
A secret is kept from her that shapes her from
the inside out and the outside inn. It's also a
story of the way so often the truth emerges in
profoundly unexpected ways. Darcy, tell me about the landscape of

(00:57):
your childhood.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
I love the way that you form like that question
because I often think of my youth in terms of geography.
So I grew up in what was essentially a farming community,
even though my parents were not farmers in south western Ontario.
We lived outside of a small town called Sarnia. So

(01:19):
while we lived on a rural route, surrounded by wheat
fields and soybean fields and so on, in a big,
dilapidated red brick house, my parents did not farm, but
I think we ended up living there because there were
so many of us that they needed a really big

(01:41):
house in order to accommodate twelve children themselves and a
bunch of farm animals, a really really big family, which
I think was probably more common at that particular moment
in history, so we're talking nineteen sixties nineteen seventies. I
think a lot of people assumed that there were twelve
of us because my parents needed extra hands to help

(02:04):
with chores and you know, planting season and harvest season.
But they just happened to have a lot of children,
and I was the youngest of those twelve and the
only one who was adopted.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
You were adopted at the age of four and a
half and brought into this family. Do you have any
memories prior to age four and a half?

Speaker 3 (02:26):
I don't. And the only reason that I know for
certain that I was legally adopted by the people who
raised me at four and a half is because at
some point after my adoptive mother died, I received a
copy of my legal adoption order, and so I can date.

(02:50):
I can give a precise date to the moment when
I was adopted, But I don't have any memories of
my life before that moment, and I have to say
that a lot of my memories of childhood are either
vague or simply not there. I have a difficult time
recalling distinct memories of childhood, And of course I don't

(03:13):
think it's uncommon for adults to have difficulty recalling what
they did and what kind of person they were, and
particular events when they were very young. But I think
I must have developed a kind of mechanism to protect
myself from things that were difficult to have to remember.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
So you knew that you were adopted.

Speaker 3 (03:40):
I don't think I was told in so many words.
And I think that before attending probably kindergarten, I didn't
have a very good idea of what made me different
than my adoptive siblings. But I guess over time I
sensed that there was something different, and I think it
was and until a little kid on the playground, probably

(04:03):
at recess, pointed out the fact that my skin was
a different color, that I began to realize that it
was that thing. It was color. I wasn't sophisticated to
have developed a language with which to talk about issues
of race and racial difference, but I could understand that
brown was different than white, and brown skin was something

(04:24):
quite different than white skin. So I think it was
quite a gradual process of coming into a realization that
there was something quite distinct and remarkable that was different,
that made me sort of stand out from everyone else.
And I think it was from there that I began

(04:45):
to ask my mother questions.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
A couple things strike me. One is, given that you
were adopted at four and a half, was probably just
a matter of months from the time you came into
this family to the time you went to kindergarten m hm.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
And so in that.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
Period of time, nothing about the fact that this large
family was white and you were black. Nothing about that
ever came up or was spoken about, not.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
That I recall now. The paper the documentation says that
I was legally adopted when I was four and a half,
but I could very possibly have been with them in
you know, the months before the legal adoption, and in fact,
I think it's probably a requirement. I mean, I doubt
that I could have been identified as someone who needed

(05:36):
to be adopted and then was adopted within a matter
of weeks. So I'm guessing that the legal process of
adoption would have taken some time, and so I can't
say with any sense of conviction where I may have
been in the months before, or the years even before
I was legally adopted.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Many people may have this thought that if one knows
in some kind of clear way, you know where one
comes from. And there are documents, there's a birth certificate,
there's family stories, there is a trail of breadcrumbs leading
back to one's origins. That in the absence of that,
I'm struck by the fact that you don't and you

(06:18):
can't know you.

Speaker 3 (06:19):
Know, was I three? Was I two? Was I four?

Speaker 2 (06:23):
It's impossible to note that moment on the playground in kindergarten,
which was the first time in your life that you
are aware of that someone said to you, you know,
why do you look the way you do?

Speaker 3 (06:36):
Why is your skin brown? Is that a memory for you?

Speaker 2 (06:40):
Is that it may be the first time it happened,
But is that something that you then really sort of
you didn't tuck it away. You went home and said
to your mother or your parents, why did this boy
say this to me?

Speaker 3 (06:53):
It was a moment that really began what has been
a very long process of gradually asking questions.

Speaker 2 (07:02):
So how did your mother respond when you asked that question,
what did she say?

Speaker 3 (07:08):
I think that she probably said what a lot of
people at this historical moment would have said, which was,
we don't even see color, and you're just like everybody else.
And my guess is that that was in part out
of frustration. Maybe it was because she didn't know herself
what to say about racial difference and didn't want to

(07:30):
have that kind of conversation. And I'm sure in part
she also wanted to protect me from you know, school
ground bullies and so on. But it seems to me
when I think about those moments now, she as well
lacked a language for talking about the fact that this
young child that she had legally adopted was a black

(07:54):
child and that they're needed, or there should have been
a kind of conversation about that, the kind of conversation
that would initiate me slowly into the idea that racially speaking,
I was different than the people who were raising me
and the people who were my adoptive siblings who surrounded me.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
And later you would also receive comments from acquaintances or
even strangers along the lines of, You're so lucky you
were taken in by good people.

Speaker 3 (08:25):
M Yeah, and again, I think that, at least in
my experience, that's been very common. And I'm still not
quite sure why that is the case. But I've even
had people in the last decade or so, people who
know me fairly well, people who have a lot of
world experience, who have traveled the world, who have friendships

(08:48):
and relationships with people of color, who will still say,
despite knowing my story, or at least part of my story,
will still say, oh, well, you're still really lucky that
your mother took you in. And I'm not sure quite
what is at the core of that, other than a
still really pervasive sense that there is a goodness that

(09:13):
goes along with whiteness. And I think that in my
experience and in the experience now beginning to do research
into interracial adoption, that there has always been a sense,
at least in the Canadian context since the nineteen sixties,
which is the period that I'm beginning to look into,
there's always been a sense that children of color, orphans

(09:36):
of color, whether black, biracial, Asian, indigenous. Certainly in this country,
the history of indigenous adoption is very fraught that those
kinds of orphans, those kinds of children who have been
for whatever set of reasons, relinquished by the people who
gave birth to them are always better off with white

(09:57):
adoptive parents. And so, despite knowing part or all of
my story, I still encounter people that I know who
are part of my circle who will still say, You're
so lucky that good people, that these good people adopted you.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
So now you're out in the world going to school,
you're fielding comments that then when you come home are
being sort of shut down. And in an essay that
you wrote, you describe turning increasingly inward And I'm wondering
what did that feel like for you and look like

(10:41):
for you as you were you in that stage in
sort of elementary school and middle school heading into becoming
a teenager, that inwardness, how did it express itself?

Speaker 3 (10:53):
Well? I think that I became quite a loner. I
did not have a big group of friends. I was
not part of the cool kids, the kids who took
music classes, the basketball team, anything like that. I really
isolated myself and I took up running for a few reasons.
But one of those reasons was to sort of give

(11:16):
myself a space in which physically and intellectually I could
begin working through some of the issues that I was
grappling with, so I would go on long runs down
country lanes by myself rather than joining a team or
becoming part of a group of people, a group of
young people who were meeting regularly. And I think that

(11:40):
I realized during the COVID nineteen lockdowns that the kind
of desperation and sense of wondering whether there could be
something different than what I was experiencing at the moment
when I was a young person reasserted itself, or at

(12:01):
least I felt the same kind of desperation about my
plight during COVID nineteen, after George Floyd was murdered and
so on, as I felt to a certain extent when
I was a younger person. That is to say, I
felt a kind of creeping desperation, a relentless kind of

(12:22):
worry and stress that this might be all that there is,
and that I might never get out of this plight
that I found myself in, and I might never be
able to have a way to figure out what this
blackness of mine means and what it means to grow

(12:43):
up in a context that, from my perspective then as
a kid, was entirely white. I mean, I grew up
in the country. I went to a small town school.
My country neighborhood was, from my perspective, all white. I
don't recall myself meeting anyone else who was black until
I think I was in grade eight, and I believe

(13:05):
a family moved into the town and a couple of
children from that family ended up at the school that
I was at, And even that was shocking to me,
because I had been socialized into believing a certain kind
of whiteness, and I believed in all the stories about

(13:27):
blackness and black people that I had been socialized into,
and so I was really anxious to suddenly see a
couple of other black people at my school, and I
did not know what to do with that. I was
not interested in being friendly with them. I don't remember
their names. I don't think I ever played with them

(13:48):
or had a conversation with them. I suppose I figured
out a way to exist as invisibly and as quietly
as possible on my own, rounded by whiteness, and so
when there were suddenly a couple of other black kids
at my school, I found it very disconcerting and didn't

(14:09):
know what to do with it. I've gone to therapy
several times over the years to try to work out
a variety of different issues. But I always come back
to the running because it is a kind of therapy,
and it allows me to get in touch with my
body in a deeply corporeal sense, and then also to

(14:31):
give my head the time and maybe the extra oxygen
as well to sort of work out all of these
issues that I guess I didn't have a context in
which to work them out when I was younger, which
is why I ended up in the academy, because I
felt like there was so much I was not taught.
And then in the you know, in the ways in

(14:53):
which I was schooled and experienced school from kindergarten to
you know, the end of high school was a particular
kind of learning. So you know, we didn't study any
kind of black history, not even Black Canadian history, not
even the history of you know, really historically important black
communities on the East Coast of Canada and the West

(15:16):
Coast of Canada. And you know, we weren't reading the
work of black authors or Indigenous authors, and so I
felt like I needed to unlearn everything that I'd been taught,
both formally and informally and then teach myself how to
think differently, not just about the world, but how to

(15:38):
think differently about myself and myself in the world as
a black woman.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
When Darcy is a young teenager, her mother takes her
on a summer trip to the West Coast to visit
her oldest sister. This sister doesn't come home often, and
the trip is billed as a special visit, especially since
that sister's last trip home had been cut short. Darcy
is excited about the trip. This kind of travel just

(16:07):
doesn't happen in their family. It's unusual. This should have
been a clue, but it wasn't, because we cannot suspect
what we cannot imagine.

Speaker 3 (16:18):
So the trip, yes, was billed as a really exciting
trip to the West Coast, but it was prefaced by
an event that happened the Christmas before. So several of
the older kids in the family had already moved away
from home, and the oldest girl in the family had
long lived on the West Coast and probably elsewhere. But

(16:41):
I don't really know a lot about her life, but
she came home for Christmas, and I believe that she
came home with one of the other older sisters who
was also living in the western part of the country,
and the younger kids who were at home. We were
very excited because we didn't see them all that frequently,

(17:02):
and we were thrilled that they were both home. My
mother was preparing foods and Christmas cake, and we weren't
at school, and we would go to boggaining. The older
kids took us to boggaining and ice skating, and so
it was all a really exciting time. So we the
younger kids in the family, all went to bed earlier

(17:24):
than the older kids in the family on Christmas Eve,
excited of course for Christmas morning, getting up lining up
outside the door to the living room, which would always
be closed. We'd have to line up outside the door
in order of age, so I would be the first
at the door when it was opened, and then the
door would open and we'd all pour into the living

(17:46):
room and open our Christmas gifts. But when we woke
up that morning, the oldest sister in the family was
not there, so of course we were all incredibly baffled,
maybe a bit concerned, but I think that personally I
was too young to be concerned. I was just disappointed

(18:06):
that she was not there, and confused as to why
in the world she would not be there for the
most exciting day of the year. And I'm not quite
sure when I was told the story about why she
was not there, But the story was that she'd received
a phone call sometime after we were in bed, and

(18:29):
it was her work, calling her back to the West Coast,
and so the story was that she had to pack
up her things and immediately go back to Vancouver. Now
I didn't have a great sense of precisely where Vancouver was.
It all seemed pretty exotic and wonderful to me, so

(18:52):
I think I didn't go through any logical process as
to how in the world would she have gotten from
our house way out in the country where she would
have had to have fought her way through snowbanks just
to get to the end of our driveway and into
a taxicab if there had been the possibility of getting

(19:14):
a taxicab that late at night, and there wouldn't have
been any trains to take her from Sarnia to Toronto
at that time of night, And how could she have
changed her tickets so quickly to fly back to Vancouver. So,
of course, as an older person, I realized that this
was just an impossible story. I'm not quite sure how

(19:37):
it all happened, but nonetheless, she was not there on
Christmas morning, and much much later on, I was told
that I, for some reason, was the lucky one in
the family who was going with Mom to Vancouver for
the summer holiday, which would have been I think we

(19:57):
would have gotten out of school at the end of
June and school would not have resumed until the beginning
of September. So I got out of school, packed my bags,
flew to the West Coast with Mom. I was really
excited about being there, really excited about spending time with

(20:20):
my big sister. And I think it was only a
couple of days into the trip that she and I,
meaning the person I thought was my sister, she and I,
I believe, went for a drive somewhere. She was living
someplace in downtown Vancouver, which was really eye opening to

(20:45):
me because the landscape I grew up on was deeply rural.
You know, it was not uncommon to see tractors and
combines and cows and horses and pigs and so on,
So it was really interesting to be in downtown. And
I believe that the two of us went for a drive,

(21:06):
and it was nice, it was summertime, and I seem
to recall the sound of trickling water, So I'm assuming
that we were I don't know, maybe beside False Creek
or a body of water close to the downtown where
she lived. We were not sitting there for all that long,
So I believe that she simply said, I'm your real mother.

(21:31):
And I think she would have used that term, I'm
your real mother, not your biological mother or your birth mother,
but I'm your real mother. And there was so much
distance between my idea of where I may have come
from and this big sister sitting beside me that I

(21:53):
could not logically connect the two things, and whole being
really stunned and not knowing what to say, and I
think feeling a combination of shock and for some reason, embarrassment.
I don't know why.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
Well, you go in one moment from the story that
you've understood to be true of yourself all your life,
which is that you were adopted by these good people,
by these good white people, and you're so lucky, and
you have all of these many many many older adoptive
brothers and sisters two in one moment, whether you could

(22:38):
have processed it in that moment or not, which I
suspect you could not have. That your oldest sister was
your mother, and that that meant that the adoptive parents
who had raised you were your grandparents, And that meant
that all of the brothers and sisters who you had
grown up with thinking that they were your adoptive brothers

(22:58):
and sisters were actually your aunts and uncles.

Speaker 3 (23:02):
Yes, and I'm not quite sure how long it took
me to begin thinking about that and the rippling effects
of this new information and what it meant in the
wider context of my entire family, in the entirety of
my young life. But yes, eventually it dawned on me

(23:23):
that Mom and we all called my adoptive father Pop.
It dawned on me that Mom and Pap were not
only my maternal grandparents, but they had lied to me
all this time, and that really changed my relationship with
them and with the entire family.

Speaker 2 (23:46):
We'll be right back. In the wake of this enormous revelation,
Darcy finds herself physically unable to even look at these women.
Her sister is now her biological mother, her adoptive mother
is now her grandmother tangled up in the thorns of

(24:09):
this new configuration, she recoils.

Speaker 3 (24:13):
I couldn't bear to be touched by them. And I
remember it was possibly the afternoon of or maybe the
day after this big revelation my sister and now I
had this new knowledge that she was by biological mother
was cutting my hair, I believe, on the back porch

(24:34):
of the house that she was probably sharing with some others,
and as she was, you know, sort of moving from
my side to my back to cut my hair, I
recall distinctly moving away from her touch. And I don't
know quite what that is about. I mean, we have

(24:57):
never been a touchy feely family. Parents did not hug
us or express their love for us. That's just not
who they were, and I think in this moment after
the revelation, there was perhaps a desire on their part
to reaffirm the fact that they cared for me and

(25:18):
loved me. But I was not interested at all. So
I had a really visceral response to the news and
then to their proximity in the same room. I didn't
want to be around them, and I demanded to go
back home. And I think it was probably intended that
I spend the entire summer in Vancouver, or perhaps that

(25:40):
I stay behind and begin a new life there. But
I was having none of it. I just wanted to
go home to the familiar, to the landscape, to the sounds,
to the people that I knew and that I'd grown
up with as brothers and sisters.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
And it's also left to you to tell or not
tell your brothers and sisters who don't know anything about this.
It's on you to either continue to keep this a
secret about yourself or to speak it right right.

Speaker 3 (26:16):
And I was probably not a sophisticated enough young person
to go through any kind of intellectual process to determine
whether it was beneficial to keep the secret or to
reveal the secret. I think I was so deeply in shock,
and I was beginning to feel angry that in my recollection,
I told my brothers and sisters. As soon as I

(26:39):
got home. I was listening to a documentary by an
American academic, June Cross, where she talks about the fact
that she sometimes still lies when people ask her questions
about her connection to her white birth mother and white stepfather,

(27:03):
because it's just easier to continue the lie. So I
think because I grew up socialized into this lie and
it became who I am. And I've always spot of
myself in the ways in which I was told to
think about myself. That in many instances is just easier

(27:25):
to say to people, oh, yeah, well, I'm adopted and
these are the white people who adopted me, rather than
go through the whole story.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
Well, of course, which it's a whole history. It's a
whole history, and also sharing it and talking about it
can actually be re traumatizing, no matter how many years
have gone by.

Speaker 3 (27:46):
Yes, yes, exactly it is, you know, because it gets
to the core of precisely who we are. And if
we are told a lie and then encouraged to keep
that lie and to reproduce it because it is the
family secret, then at least for myself, there's a kind

(28:06):
of guilt in revealing that secret every time someone has
a probing question about well, who are you and who
are your family and what do you mean these white
people are your family? So it's a difficult sort of
catch Twenty two.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
When you return home from this trip to Vancouver, you
have another new piece of information, which is the name
of your father. Right, So you have this name you
don't do anything with this name for a while.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
It seems to me.

Speaker 2 (28:39):
Like you have enough on your plate and you just
kind of file it away.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
I mean, I was a teenager, and, like most teenagers,
dealing with all of the kinds of things like hormones
and crushes and all of the things that teenagers for
the most part deal with, and then to have to
deal with this new information related to the fact that
the person I have always assumed is my older, somewhat

(29:06):
exotic sister from Vancouver is my biological mother. The people
who are raising me are my maternal white biological grandparents
who have lied to me all this time. And the
people I thought were my adoptive siblings are aunts and uncles.
So I had a lot on my plate, and I

(29:28):
think I ignored everything for quite some time, to be honest,
And it wasn't until I was probably in late high
school that I started wondering, Okay, who is this other
person then? And of course the name meant absolutely nothing

(29:48):
to me.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
Darcy leaves home after high school, goes to college for
a year, then leaves college for a while and works
as a nanny. She's become interested in her blackness and
what it means to be black in this pretty ideologically
conservative white landscape, and that name, the name of her
birth father, Austin Clark, is a name that begins to

(30:12):
appear on course lists as a prominent Caribbean Canadian writer,
Darcy becomes increasingly fascinated and curious. Could this writer, this
perfect stranger, be her biological father.

Speaker 3 (30:27):
I recall going to my university library where I was
doing my undergraduate degree and taking out his books, and
so my first encounters with him and the way in
which I got to know him, those were textual encounters.
They weren't in person encounters. So I got to know
a sense of his history as a Caribbean born, Barbados

(30:51):
born writer who immigrated to Canada, came to Toronto, and
I think it was nineteen fifty five to go to
the University of Toronto. So as I developed a textual
relationship with him through his literary fiction, I began to
sense a whole history that was mine that I knew

(31:16):
nothing about. And because English literature was my forte academically,
I really slowly began to grow into the field of
black literature and became increasingly sort of enamored of the
idea that I could access my own history via this

(31:39):
body of work without necessarily knowing the person.

Speaker 2 (31:44):
How did it feel to you during that period of time?
And you say that you developed a textual relationship, which
is so fascinating because it's almost a form of snooping
it is. It's a form of Wow, there are clues
throughout these pages, and you know this person is my

(32:04):
biological father, but he doesn't know that I'm reading his work.
But I'm reading his work and I'm reading it deeply
and like a detective. Would it have been fine with
you at that time to never actually meet him, to
just continue having this textual relationship or was there a
longing or a feeling of wanting more grounding than what

(32:27):
you had.

Speaker 3 (32:28):
That feeling was definitely beginning to develop. But I also
felt a certain sense of trepidation because even when I
was in my undergraduate degree in Waterloo, Ontario, I did
not have a lot or maybe even any contact with

(32:48):
black people. I had a couple of black acquaintances, but
I did not have a rich black life. The extent
of my black life was me and my journey to
try to figure out what it meant to be me
and to be black, so I felt an increasing sense

(33:10):
of curiosity. I wanted to meet him. I recall feeling
a need to be in his presence and see him
in person as a way to reaffirm myself and my
connection to him. I mean, to me, it was quite
obvious that we were connected, because I do look quite

(33:31):
a bit like him. There was an increasing sense that
I wanted to reach out to him and to meet
him physically, after getting to know him as much as
I could via his writing, although I have to say
that a lot of what he wrote, and a lot
of what I read, his short stories and his longer fiction,

(33:52):
was difficult for me to connect with because he was
writing about issues that I had no experience with, you know,
the life of slavery and the logics of the plantation
and the particular brand of Canadian prejudice and anti black racism.
And while I had experienced my share of anti black racism,

(34:16):
I found it difficult to see myself as being in
direct relationship with the kinds of histories that he was
probing in his literature.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
And during this time, you had pretty much no relationship
with your biological mother. Was she in your life at all?

Speaker 3 (34:39):
No, not in any significant sense, and she never has
been in a significant sense. I know that she was
deeply disappointed that I did not move to Vancouver and
move in with her. There was on my part, there
was just no sense of a connection. And I've never
thought of her as my mother. We've never had that

(35:02):
kind of relationship.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
Well, she was also part of the betrayal, right, Yes,
yes she was, And I mean there are layers of
stories there.

Speaker 3 (35:13):
I still really don't have a full understanding and I
probably never will have a full understanding of precisely what happened.
Was she pressured to relinquish me, I don't know. She
could have been. Was there a lot of tension when
her parents, her white parents, found out that she was
pregnant with a black man's child. I don't know. I

(35:36):
can speculate that, yes, that was probably part of what
was happening, but I can't say with any sense of certainty.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
Will be back in a moment with more family secrets.
So Darcy is reading her father. He's a blank slate
in a way, but she is discovering a lot about him.

(36:08):
On the page, it turns out that Austin Clark is
friends with Darcy's academic advisor. The circles are beginning to
overlap intersect. She doesn't tell her adviser for a while
about her connection to Austin Clark, but he's a big
deal in the field in which she's pursuing a doctorate.

(36:29):
And then Darcy's adviser asks her to be a greeter
at a conference to hand participants their welcome packets. And
when Darcy looks at the list of participants, there he
is Austin Clark.

Speaker 3 (36:42):
I'd volunteered to do some work on a black music's
conference for my dissertation supervisor, and she asked me to
be one of the people at the front door of
the venue who would greet attendees and give them their
information package and name plaque. And I was happy to

(37:02):
do that, amongst other things. And one afternoon, just before
the conference was about to begin, I was going through
the list of those who had confirmed their attendance and
lo and behold, Austin Clark was coming to the conference.
I think this was the day before the conference, and
so I thought, I cannot do this. I just can't
do this. And so I told my supervisor that there

(37:25):
was an issue, and we went into her office and
I closed the door behind me, and she has said
multiple times that that was her first indication that something
serious was up, because you know, she had an open
door policy and there was really no need otherwise to
close the door. And so I told her that I
would do anything else she wanted me to do for

(37:46):
this conference, but I could not be one of the
greets at the front door because I said, you know,
there's someone on the list of attendees that I you know,
I just don't want to meet to encounter in this way,
and she insisted I tell her who it was. So
I said, well, it's Austin Clark. And her response. By
this time, I'd made it clear that I wanted to

(38:09):
work with her as my supervisor and that my dissertation
project was going to be on a set of contemporary
Black Canadian writers, and she said, well, I mean this
is your dissertation work. You cannot do this work without
working on Austin Clark, and this is a perfect opportunity.

(38:30):
So I said, well, he's actually my biological father. And
she tells me that she almost fell off her chair
when I told her that, because she was really She
is an American born academic whose doctoral work is in
Black American theater and the Black arts movement, and she
introduced Austin Clark's fiction to the university where I did

(38:55):
my PhD. So she not only had an intellectual relationship
with him and his entire corpus of work and you know,
the work that he had done helping set up black
studies in the American context, but they were close friends.
So it was really very stunning for her to realize
that this person whom she had worked with already for

(39:18):
a couple of years in the PhD program, was the
daughter of Austin Clark. And suddenly all of my contacts,
some of my friends, my colleagues, my peers, were people
who were also either black folks, black scholars, or working
on black literature. And so there were many points at

(39:39):
which my life was beginning to intersect with him. And
it just seemed, probably to my supervisor firstly, sort of
ridiculous that we weren't, you know, sitting with each other
and beginning to get to know each other and have
a conversation with each other, which is what you said
I should do. So I did. I met him when

(40:00):
I was younger. One time I was in my twenties
and I came to Toronto from Waterloo, where I was
in my undergraduate program. I just cold called him and
said I'm your daughter, and he was, of course stunned
and said that yes, he would meet with me, and

(40:23):
the following day I met him and we spent an
afternoon together. My first and my enduring impression is that
he was very formal, very polite, very British, having been
born in Barbados and colonized by the Brits. He served
me tea. We had what I guess I would characterize

(40:45):
as you know, kind of polite conversation, and then a
few hours after that I was on my way and
that I hoped that that first encounter would lead to
the beginning of at least a friendship, but it did not.
He was not interested. And one of the things I

(41:07):
recall most distinctly from that visit is our conversation about
university and he wanted to know what I was doing,
and I said, well, I'm at the University of Waterloo
doing a degree in English literature, and he immediately told
me where his two daughters were attending university, and they
were at the Ivy League. So they are a few
years older than I am. They are his two daughters

(41:29):
with his one and only wife, and they were at
IVY leagues in America, and that seemed very important to him.
But you know, I was proud of where I was,
and I was proud that I had scraped enough money
together to go to university to learn, you know, what
a university was. The context in which I grew up

(41:49):
was one that was not all that concerned with higher education.
So I was really happy to be at university. I
was late to start myundergraduate degree, but I was really
proud that I was there, and I didn't quite understand
what it meant to be at the kind of university

(42:10):
that I was at versus an American IVY League university
or even a Canadian Ivy League university. But that was
a kind of sticking point in that conversation. But we
lost contact almost immediately after that, and he did not
reach out maybe other than one phone call after that

(42:31):
very first encounter, and then a couple of decades went
by and we had no contact at all. Then, of course,
at my dissertation supervisors prodding, I reached out to him again.
By this time, I'm in my forties, I've kind of
been a late arrival to everything, to all of the milestones.
So I was what they used to call a mature

(42:53):
student at each step of the way, my undergrad my BA,
at my MA, and my PhD. And I thought about
it for a while and then I just sent him
a card in the snail mail and said, I'm here
doing a PhD. This is who I'm working with on

(43:14):
my doctoral project, and these are the other folks whose
work I'm studying, and would you like to meet for
a drake And he wrote back to me fairly quickly
and said that he'd be delighted, And it was as
if the first encounter had never happened. I really felt

(43:39):
that I was meeting him for the first time, and
perhaps that's because he sensed that we were on more
equal grounds and I was part of a community that
he understood. And I think there was sort of a
de facto sense that I'd been approved by someone who

(44:01):
had great meaning for him, meaning my doctoral supervisor, so
I'd obviously been approved by her. I was in this,
i think at the time fairly small circle of black
scholars and academics and intellectuals and writers, So I think
that he felt a sense of comfort around me that

(44:24):
was absent the first time, and so this second encounter
it took. And not that we ever really had a
father daughter relationship, because of course it was way too
late for that, but we had the kind of relationship
we had until he died in twenty sixteen. We had

(44:47):
around a decade in which to get to know each other,
and I would say that it was at the beginning,
certainly a pretty tentative relationship. We were probably sounding each
other out. And this is a man who was at
his full writerly and intellectual powers, and after long years

(45:09):
of struggle, was winning major literary prizes and traveling around
the world. So it wasn't that we were in each
other space all the time. But when we did spend
time together, I had a sense anyway that we were
meeting as equals, which is something that wasn't the case earlier.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
What was the feeling after this lifetime of having been
lied to, the whole reshuffling and re understanding of you know,
being raised as this black child and girl and or
a teenager in a world where no one is black

(45:51):
pretty much, and you're left to figure that out for
yourself to be in your forties, and you know, in
the presence of this person who strikes me like a
tent pole in some way.

Speaker 3 (46:05):
I think that it was a real revelation to me
to have the opportunity to get to know someone in
a more personal and intimate way and have a window
into a full and a rich black life that included

(46:28):
black community, black family, black ancestors. And there were several
moments over the course of that decade when I began
to realize, and certainly after his death as well, that
what I had just thought of as history, you know,
the history of chattel slavery, the history of the plantation

(46:53):
in the Caribbean and in Barbados specifically, it was certainly
for me, compel and horrifying history. But then I slowly
began to realize that it's not just history, it's my history.
And these people that I had previously thought of as

(47:14):
victims of enslavement, the Middle Passage, the plantocracy, etc. Were
actually my people, like my own people. And that was
really sort of mind blowing for me when I made
that switch, and it wasn't like I was looking to
make the switch, It just suddenly began happening. And I

(47:38):
think that that is one of the things that Austin
really gave me without knowing that he gave that to
me or was in the process of giving it to me.
I think of that as the real legacy that he
left for me. Of course, there's the whole rich body
of his work, his writing, and his intellectual will work,

(48:00):
his social activism, but there's also the legacy of a
history and a past and an ancestry that I was
not connected to previously. So at an emotional level, that
really has, you know, deep and sort of forever meaning
for me, because in a way, he gave me what

(48:23):
I'd been searching for since I found out about this
whole family secret. He gave me the black past that
I'd been looking for, and the history and the connection
to my own roots, which are very different than the
roots that I retain on the white side of my family.

(48:44):
So that's definitely one of the things that he has
given me. And also I have to say that, yes,
I was interested in studying Black Canadian literatures and cultures
before I began focusing on my father's writing. But in
the last few years, the other thing that he's given

(49:05):
me is an intellectual and a research focus, because now
more than ever, I'm focusing on not just his writing,
but his intellectual life and his participation in helping to
articulate what black studies could be in America, you know,
and has been since the nineteen sixties forward, but also

(49:28):
what black studies in the Canadian context could and should
look like. And so all these years later, here I
am one of the black scholars hired in those post
George Floyd years to teach in a black studies program.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
Before she died, Darcy's grandmother never did explain to her
how and why there was so much subterfuge about her identity.
There are still so many unknowns about her early life.
There are still so many fictions and so many lies.
Darcy writes. If there's a way to achieve a state
of equilibrium in the wake of this kind of betrayal,

(50:10):
I still haven't found it.

Speaker 3 (50:13):
I recall in the first year of my PhD registering
for a class that I then dropped out of because
the first assignment was called making yourself up, and the
instructor asked us to go home and talk to our parents, siblings, etc.
And gather together all the home movies and pictures when

(50:35):
we were first born, and pictures of crowd mom and
dad holding us and create a story about that. And
I remember walking out of that class thinking I'm dropping
this class. There are no videos, I have no idea
where I was. I know now who my biological parents are,
but there are still no photographs, and there was no

(51:00):
celebration I don't believe, certainly not the kind of celebration
that we associate with the arrival of an anticipated and
desired baby in a family. So there is something I
think luxurious and intellectually interesting in being able to make

(51:23):
yourself up. On the other hand, of course, there's also
something quite grounding in knowing who you are and where
you came from, where you were born, who helped you first,
who changed your diapers, where you were living when you
were one in two and three? Was that a good context?

(51:44):
Were you did someone read to you every night? Those
are the mysteries in my life, and I will probably
never have access to those mysteries. And I'm not sure
if there was a way that I could have all
of this knowledge. I'm not even sure at this point

(52:04):
that I would want it, because I don't know. It
might be more horrifying than I imagine it is, or
it might for a variety of reasons be more upsetting
than the memories that I suppose I've constructed based on
what people in my family have told me over the years.

(52:25):
So there is I think, a kind of comfort in
being able to relinquish the desire to know every last
detail and rather to reconstruct oneself and a history that
has meaning for the person that I've become or that

(52:46):
I'm in the midst of becoming, based on my own
research and my own reading of my history, and my
own reading of the body of work that Austin Clark
has left me.

Speaker 2 (53:11):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacour is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan.

Speaker 3 (53:17):
Is the executive producer. If you have a.

Speaker 2 (53:19):
Family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a
voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode.
Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's
the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram
at Danny Ryder and if you'd like to know more
about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my
memoir Inheritance.

Speaker 1 (54:03):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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