Black Lotus: A Woman's Search for Racial Identity - Hardcover

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Sil Lai Abrams is a NABJ award-winning New York City-based writer, inspirational speaker, and domestic violence awareness activist. She has appeared on ABC, CNN, MSNBC, TV One, Al Jazeera, FOX, BET, Court TV, and TruTV as an expert on relationships and domestic violence, and been featured in national magazines such as Modern Woman, Oprah, Redbook, EBONY, Black Enterprise, and Sister 2 Sister. Abrams is the founder & CEO of Truth in Reality, a social advocacy organization committed to changing the media's depiction of women of color in an effort to reduce the rates of gender-based violence in the black community, and also serves on the national Board of Directors for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. She lives in New York, New York.
 

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Black Lotus

CHAPTER ONE

IN ALMOST EVERY FAMILY THERE is someone who for whatever reason just doesn’t fit in. In the Baber family, I drew the short straw. My outsider status wasn’t because I was moody and defiant. It wasn’t because I was always failing at school, and a blackout drunk by the age of fourteen. Both my mother and father were runaways and high school dropouts who had long-term relationships with the bottle. Unlike in other clans, it wasn’t juvenile delinquency, mental instability, or addiction that pushed me to the fringes. Unfortunately, in my family these issues were not an aberration. My dysfunction, if anything, was an expression of solidarity.

Like those omnipresent cobwebs hanging from the ceiling that you never see until you’re ready to sweep them away, my differentness was based upon something that was hiding in plain sight. I was the black sheep, both figuratively and literally, for I am the only black person in my family.



Looking back on old family photographs today, I have to laugh at the brazenness of Dad’s lie and my naïve acceptance of it. We look nothing alike. I had warm pecan skin and curly hair. While swarthy, Dad was clearly white, with the type of thick, wavy black hair common to Mediterranean men. Despite the obvious physical differences between us, I believed him when he said he was my biological father. He’s the only dad I’ve ever known, and he is white. But not “white white.” He was Italian and English and his physical appearance heavily favored his Italian heritage. Dad spent a lot of time working outdoors, so most of the year he had a “farmer’s tan.” It was dark enough for the brown hair on his arms to seemingly blend into his ruddy, sun-weathered skin. The fact that he was capable of acquiring a deep tan made his lie somehow more plausible. Even though when our family was together in public spaces, people stopped and did a double take at me, the one brown body in our clan.

But I guess what was so obvious to the world wasn’t to me because that’s the way my dad wanted it. When I was born he “adopted” me as his own child the moment he signed his name on my birth certificate. Legally, George Baber is my “real” father. However, as I would come to learn after years of his lies, my biological father is really a black man whom I’ve never met and doesn’t even know I exist.

Yet, as much as he tried to erase the truth, the question of my paternity was always there. Lingering. Like a persistent, unpleasant odor, the source of which you can never quite discern. My nagging suspicion is what led us to have an annual paternity Q&A that went something like this:

“Dad, are you sure you’re really, really my dad?”

Chuckling, he would smile with his mouth and not his eyes, and say: “Of course I am.”

“But why am I brown, and May Lai and Dan are your color?”

“Sil Lai, your skin is brown because you were born in Hawaii, and Hawaiians have brown skin.”

“Dad, are you really, really, really sure? May Lai and Dan were born in California, but that doesn’t make them Californians, right?”

“Stop asking so many questions!”

And for a time his answers placated me.

I’d seen photos of Hawaiians in the National Geographic magazines that Dad’s mother, my Grandma Lou, kept stacked like kindling on the low bookshelf near her front door. While my hips were narrower and hair was much wavier, I thought a hula skirt could look quite natural on me once I hit puberty.

As I grew older, something about his explanation didn’t sit quite right, but I knew better than to debate him. My capacity for argument at the age of seven was still relatively unformed, and he had twenty-six years of living on me. Even though I desperately wanted to press the issue, I’d leave it alone until the next time he was in a receptive state of mind, which wasn’t very often.



I always thought I favored Dad, but as I grew older I was told on more than one occasion that I was a larger-framed version of my mother, Daisy Lui. She was a waifishly built Chinese woman with a five-foot-eight build reminiscent of an Upper East Side Manhattan society wife, and although it might sound like a stereotype, her facial features truly were as delicate as bone china. Her eyes were large, wide-set almonds framed with short, dense eyelashes, accented with salmon-pink rosebud lips. Daisy’s jet black hair fell halfway down her back like a cape, which she often wore pulled behind her ears, showing off her elegant collarbone and swanlike neck. My mother’s movements were refined, betraying her upper-middle class upbringing in the Kowloon district of Hong Kong. Like many Chinese, she kept her emotions hidden under a façade of agreeability, until you pissed her off. Then you’d better duck, for she was known to throw the closest thing to her.

Daisy and Dad were roughly the same height, but that’s where their similarities ended. His olive skin contrasted sharply with her paleness and their personalities clashed as much as their features. Dad was brutish and loud; Daisy was reserved and wary. Looking back at photos of the three of us together when I was a baby, I strain to see how I could have been so misguided as to believe that I was Dad’s biological child. But my sun-kissed, caramel skin and wispy, wavy dark hair appeared to be a fusion of the two adults in the photographs. In the mind of a three-year-old, I believed I was George Baber’s blood-related daughter.



Dad’s features were inherited from his mother Lucy (Lou) Nicastro, an industrious and fiery-tempered Italian-by-way-of-Hammonton, New Jersey, a town known as “The Blueberry Capital of the World.” In her prime, Grandma Lou resembled a more ethnic version of the legendary 1940s American movie star Rita Hayworth. She was noted for her independent spirit, grueling work ethic (a result of a childhood spent laboring in the blueberry fields), her indisputable culinary skills, and the ability to stretch a dollar. She was really something.

Equally renowned were her sharp-tongued criticisms of her two children—my dad and his younger sister, Doni—as well as their father, her ex-husband Ralph Baber. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, Grandma was the first woman with quasi-feminist leanings I ever encountered. Her beliefs shaped much of my early, personal philosophies around gender.

Despite her feminist tendencies, Grandma still favored Dad over Doni. My aunt attributed it to the Italian culture’s reverence for their sons and the fact that out of her two children, Dad was the one most like her. He was the physical embodiment of Grandma Lou’s bloodline—a true Nicastro man. To her dismay, his sister took after their father, both physically and temperamentally. Both had patrician features and a taciturn personality that was as subtle as their gray eyes.

Grandma’s obvious favoritism of her firstborn created a complicated relationship between her and her children. Doni resented being marginalized by her mother, and spent much of her life trying to gain approval that never came. Dad and his sister had a combative way of interacting with each other due to the rivalry that naturally...