“Wait,” he said. “What?”
All at once, he was overcome by a deep and acutely painful sense of déjà vu. As if she had already told him this. As if he had already sat by this record player, listening to this exact melody, looking up at his mother as she sat on the bed in this precise way. It had all happened before. It was as if they were merely rehearsing lines from a play.
“What do you mean, I was black?” Hearing himself say the words again for the first time.
“I don’t know why I did it. He told me not to go.” The glint of tears on her cheeks.
“Did what?” he said.
She got up from the bed.
“Did what?” he repeated. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I just needed to find out what had gone wrong.” She was moving the bedside table, the smelling bottles tinkling against one another, one spilling onto the floor, filling the room with a strong scent of lilies. The candle trembled.
She was down on her hands and knees, prying at a loose floorboard.
“Hey, Mom. Don’t do that,” he said. “What’re you doing?”
He was about to go over and stop her when the board came up and then she was reaching inside the floor and pulling out something from the depths. A folder. Manila. Dusty. She wiped it off, came over, laid it in his lap.
“What’s this?” he said.
“It’s for you,” she said.
Fig. 3.8. “Black Baby’s Condition Remains a Mystery”
From the New York Post, April 25, 1975
Inside, there were pages and pages of newspaper clippings. He moved over to the candlelight and squinted at the text, though, again, he already somehow knew what he would find. “Caucasian Couple Give Birth to Black Newborn at St. Elizabeth’s,” “Easter Miracle in New Jersey,” “Doctors at a Loss to Explain Child’s Appearance.” He saw his name. His parents’ names.
His hands felt as if they were not his own. He saw a copy of a birth certificate, the blurry picture of a baby lying in an incubator. He had seen this picture before. He felt a rushing sensation in his ears. Another burning wash of the familiar frissoned his body’s circuity.
“I’ve never shown this to anyone,” she said.
“This. .” He tapped the picture of the incubated baby. “This is me?”
“Not even Kermin,” she said.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?”
She didn’t say anything.
He felt the heat in his face. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me about this? I mean, this seems pretty fucking important, right? Pretty fucking important to let your son in on. .”
“I know—”
“Were you just never going to tell me?”
She was weeping suddenly, uncontrollably, and his anger parted as he watched her crumple onto the bed.
“Hey,” he said softly. “Hey, all right. It’s okay.”
“Your father. . Your father didn’t like to talk about it,” she said finally, wiping her face. “So we just left it. We left it and hoped it would go away.”
“But—” He was staring at a journal article, “On an Isolated Incidence of Non-Addison’s Hypoadrenal Uniform Hyperpigmentation in a Caucasian Male.” A diagram of skin cells surrounded by a mote of long, polysyllabic words. “I don’t understand. Why was I black? I mean, how is that even possible?”
She slid down beside him on the floor. Put her hand on the page, touching a cross-section of dermis.
“It was just the way of things,” she said slowly. “There were theories. There were theories, but no one could prove anything.”
Radar looked over at the record spinning in circles. Caruso’s voice was full of quiet counsel. He blinked, trying to make room for this. Trying to imagine himself emergent, a black newborn.
“Fuck,” he said.
“I know, I know.”
“So then. . wait.” The wheels spinning. “What does that make Kermin?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is he my father?”
She was silent.
“Mom.”
“There were tests. They tested his blood.”
“And?”
“The doctor said he was your father.”
He turned. “But I’m asking you. Is Kermin my father?”
“Yes! Yes, of course. I mean. .” She sighed. She rubbed her face. “I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t want to believe it.”
“Didn’t want to believe what?”
She was silent.
“Didn’t want to believe what, Mom?”
“It was just one night. He only came back for one night,” she said quietly.
“Who came back for one night?”
She turned back to him and closed her eyes. “Oh, Lord.”
“Who came back for one night?”
“I never knew his real name. T.K. That was it. I had known him from before — when I first moved to New York. And then we lost touch. And right when your father and I were getting married, he came back. He showed up on my doorstep one day.” Her eyes glazed over. “He was from Minnesota. He had a laugh. He had a way of laughing. .”
“He was a black guy?”
She nodded.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“I still couldn’t believe it. Even when you came out how you did. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, I thought. And then there was all this coverage about you, and I thought for sure that he would show up and say, ‘That’s mine, that’s my kid. Give me back my kid.’”
“But I was your kid too.”
“Yeah, but for a while it didn’t feel like that.”
“And so did he?”
“Did he what?”
“Did he come back?”
“No.”
“And you never tried to find him again?”
She shook her head.
He looked down at the diagram of the skin cell. Trying to imagine T.K., this black man from Minnesota, from whom he had possibly sprung.
“Did Kermin know?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He was so quiet. That was his way of getting through things. But he always knew more than he let on. I mean, how could he not know, right? You would look at you and you would look at us, and it was obvious that something had gone wrong.”
“Why didn’t you tell him?”
“If you don’t want to believe, if you do enough not to believe, if you see a doctor and he tells you a whole other possibility. . then you believe what you want,” she said. “But your father. . he was so. . so patient. He loved you from the moment you were born. He always loved you, even when I couldn’t take care of you. Even when I fell apart. He never stopped loving you.”
“But,” Radar said, suddenly feeling dizzy. “But. . I’m not black anymore.”
“You’ve got to understand,” she said. “I became obsessed. I became obsessed for all the wrong reasons. .”
“So what happened?”
“I just got this idea in my head that there was a solution. Some kind of medical solution.”
“What do you mean, medical solution? My father was black. What other solution could there be?”
“I didn’t see it like that. It was like that wasn’t an option. That was impossible. Everything else became possible. I was searching for the possible. And then we found these people. .”
“What people?”
“You’re going to hate me if I tell you.”
“I’m not going to hate you,” he said. “What people?”
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. “Well, we saw all these doctors, and no one could tell me what had happened to you. And then, out of the blue, I get this letter. And it was from these people. These scientists. They were in Norway. They said they could help us. And we shouldn’t have. . but we did.”