In the grand scheme of human existence my father and mother were an improbable couple. Their interracial relationship began in 1962 in West Africa, on the red-brown clay soil of Ghana’s capital city, Accra.
My father, George I. Lythcott, was born in 1918 in New York, New York. His father, George Sr., was a Black physician with a medical degree from Boston University who was descended from the Lythcotts of British Guiana. His mother, Evelyn (Wilson) Lythcott, was a descendant of South Carolinian slaves whose father, Joshua, was Postmaster General of Florence, appointed by successive presidents and confirmed by successive senates throughout the late 1800s and into the early 1900s. Evelyn died from tuberculosis in 1920 in Florence. Daddy was not yet two.
Grandfather asked Evelyn’s sister-in-law Lillian to look after Daddy until he could pull his life together and figure out a more long-term solution for Daddy’s care. Walking up Lillian’s pathway to visit his little boy one day, Grandfather could hear Lillian through the screen door shouting at Daddy. “Get your little Black hands off that chair.” Evelyn’s people were light; Lillian was considered “high yeller.” Grandfather urgently sent for his sister Agatha in British Guiana and asked her to move to New York to care for Daddy there.
In 1925 Grandfather got married again to a woman named Corinne—half Black, half Cherokee freedman—and Daddy went to live with Grandfather and Corinne in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Daddy was now eight. Grandfather served the medical needs of Tulsa’s Black community, some of whom could pay him with little more than livestock and produce. Corinne doted on Daddy as if he were her own son. She was the only mother he really ever knew.
Daddy came of age in the deeply segregated South. The thriving Black business community in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, known as “the Black Wall Street,” had been torched to the ground in 1921 by whites. Hundreds of Blacks were killed in the uprising, most of them lynched, and upward of ten thousand Black residents were left homeless when the damage was tallied. The massacre was labeled a “riot” and a few hundred Blacks were arrested. The lie was perpetuated for decades. In 1996, the Oklahoma state legislature would finally acknowledge that the prosperous Greenwood community had been set upon by white supremacists.
When Daddy was about sixteen, a little girl and her mother were walking along the road just beyond the house, and Daddy’s dog, a large Doberman pinscher, got out of the yard, charged over to the young girl, and sank his teeth into her upper thigh. Daddy was terrified—it was his job to make sure the dog was chained up at all times—and he raced first to pull the dog off of the girl and then to get the girl to his father. Grandfather dressed the young girl’s wound and then put the girl and her mother in his car to drive them home. The mother described where she lived in a vague manner, and Grandfather at first couldn’t make sense of it. He soon realized that the family lived in a makeshift home at the edge of the town dump. He knew it was medically unsafe to send a child with such a bad wound back to that kind of home, but he didn’t want to insult the woman, so he simply offered that the girl, Polly, might heal more quickly if he could clean and dress the wound each day, and perhaps she should live back at home with him, his wife Corinne, and Daddy, until the wound healed. The mother agreed. When the wound healed, the mother and Grandfather had a serious conversation about the girl’s future. Grandfather officially adopted the little girl, who became my Aunt Polly.
After graduating from high school in Tulsa in 1935, Daddy went way up North to attend Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where, as he would retell it to me with a chuckle decades later, there was only one Black man in each class, and one Black woman too, so the men would have someone to date.
Daddy ran track for Bates and was dubbed “the Oklahoma Flyer” by the student newspaper for consistently whizzing by his competitors with his lean, six-foot-two frame. In the spring of his freshman year, 1936, he qualified for the U.S. Olympic Trials. Another qualifier, the miler Jesse Owens, would go on to make the U.S. team and to stun Hitler with both his athletic prowess and his Blackness at the summer games in Berlin. Daddy helped pace Owens as he warmed up for his trial—a practice where four of the fastest quarter milers ran just ahead of Owens for one lap each so as to push Owens to run faster. But when it came time to compete in his own right, Daddy pulled his hamstring and had to abandon his Olympic dreams.
Daddy kept running for Bates in his remaining years at college as he pursued premedical studies; he was also quite involved in campus shenanigans. One night he pulled a cart full of hay up the hill above the football stadium, then set it on fire and gave it a push so it would roll back down the hill directly into the wooden stadium, which was quickly set ablaze. (No one complained; they’d been trying to garner support for a new stadium and now they had to build one.)
Another night, he coaxed a horse through the front door of the main administration building and led it up the steps leading to the offices on the second floor. He walked the horse into the president’s office, scattered some hay on the floor, and shut the door. Then he crept down the stairs and out of the building, and went back to his dorm room. As any Oklahoma cowboy knows, horses will go up a set of stairs but will not come down. So the next morning when a secretary discovered the horse munching hay in the president’s office as it gazed out through the big plate glass window overlooking the college green, the task of getting the horse down would be far more complicated than was the task of bringing him up. They had to hire a glazier to remove the large glass window and then bring in a crane to lift the horse down. Again, no one in the administration ever knew Daddy had done it.
Being one of a handful of Blacks at Bates grated on my father, but so did the stark class differences between himself and many of his peers; he was the son of a physician, yes, but a Black physician serving the Black community wasn’t getting rich. Daddy resented the rich kids at Bates who had bicycles enabling them to get around campus and into town rather easily. One winter night Daddy stole a bunch of rich kids’ bikes from around campus and threw them into the mountainous banks of snow that blanketed Lewiston each year. When the snow thawed the following spring, bikes kept emerging, rusty and bent, like muddy puddles, on the new, wet, green lawns.
Daddy was an anarchist, some might say. A prankster. A subversive. A rule-breaker. Some would say a thug. I see him as a Black man who in the construct of New England in the 1930s had little agency. He was a man of great intellect, tall and strong, still subject to being called “Boy” by any white man at any moment. He was capable and accomplished, yet subject to being second-guessed or blamed without cause. The pranks were perhaps his most vivid way of retaliation, of pulling the wool over their eyes. I imagine he felt a kind of raucous joy in accomplishing these subversive acts. You think I’m bad? You have no idea how bad I am. Yet each prank was just a brief burst of freedom from a cage. To our family’s knowledge no one ever knew my father was behind any of these pranks. Or maybe they knew but didn’t want to jeopardize the athletic eligibility of their track star and the recognition Bates College received whenever he ran.
Grandfather expected Daddy to follow in his footsteps and become a physician, but by junior year Daddy had taken a few courses in architecture, political science, and law. The possibility of law school began to tug on his attention. On April 29, 1938, Daddy’s twentieth birthday, he sat down at the desk in his dorm room to tackle the difficult task of composing a letter to his father seeking formal permission to study law instead of medicine. He was still working on that letter into the night when his buddies came by to take him out to celebrate his birthday. Daddy and his friends went out and had a good time, and he got back to the dormitory quite late that night. The next morning he awoke to a telegram telling him to come home because his father was dying. Daddy took the first available train and made the long trek from Maine to Oklahoma, but when he arrived on May 1, his father was already gone. Never having gained his father’s permission to pursue law, Daddy pursued medicine.
Like his father, Daddy graduated from the medical school at Boston University (1943) and his expertise in pediatrics kept him first in the Boston area, where he and his new wife, Ruth, settled for a time and where their four children were born in 1945, 1946, 1948, and 1950. Ruth began to suffer from mental illness, which grew steadily worse. In 1953 Daddy was called up for military service at Mitchel Air Force Base on Long Island, and after that he set up a private pediatric practice in New York where he treated the children of prominent Blacks, including Jackie Robinson, Nat King Cole, and Harry Belafonte. Because their mother was by this time quite ill, the children went to live in Tulsa with Daddy’s stepmother, Corinne.
In 1956 Daddy and Ruth moved to Oklahoma, where Daddy took a position at the medical school at the University of Oklahoma in Oklahoma City. The Pittsburgh Courier reported on November 3, 1956, “For the first time in the history of the institution a Negro has been appointed to the faculty of the University of Oklahoma.” It went on, “a specialist in the diseases of infants and children, [Lythcott] was recently appointed clinical assistant in pediatrics in the university’s School of Medicine, and became the first and only Negro holding such a position in a Southern university.” He received an NIH grant to establish the nation’s first well-baby clinic on an Indian reservation nearby. While serving on the faculty Daddy also maintained a private pediatrics practice for Black patients, and, like his father before him, was often paid with things like produce and desserts.
Daddy’s children, my half siblings, Ruth, George, Michael, and Stephen, were raised in the Jim Crow South. The civil rights movement began to emerge around them, and in the early years the movement was populated heavily by young people. My sister Ruth, the eldest of Daddy’s children, was twelve when she first participated in events organized by the NAACP Youth Council. She was fourteen in 1959 when she decided to participate in sit-ins at a lunch counter at a downtown restaurant. She took our brothers, then ages twelve, eleven, and nine, with her. Daddy knew this was happening and allowed it. One day, the television was on in his office and he saw police dragging Ruthie and Stevie out of a building.
In the early 1960s Oklahoma’s School of Medicine was searching for a new dean. The committee mentioned the fact of Daddy to the finalist, who said it would be no problem. But when the finalist became dean, he didn’t speak to Daddy for a year. Finally, he summoned Daddy to his office and issued a warning. “I can’t have someone on my faculty I can’t invite over to my house for dinner.” Daddy was being told to quit.
When, in 1962, the U.S. government asked Daddy to join a team headed to Ghana in West Africa to help the Ghanaians establish an organization akin to the National Institutes of Health here in the U.S., he jumped at the opportunity. He’d be Deputy Director of a large team and would focus his own research on a measles vaccine, which would be an important step in his career.
But what of his children? Daddy and Ruth were now separated and she was not well enough to care for the children. Corinne was elderly and growing frail, and couldn’t consider making such a huge relocation herself. Men rarely played the role of single parent in those times. A colleague advised Daddy to farm out his kids—now sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, and twelve—to four different families. But breaking the family into bits was an untenable choice for Daddy. Deep down he was convinced that he could handle the challenge. Hell, he was going off to Africa … raising four kids there was doable, had to be doable. He needed to get not just himself but his four children out of the increasingly volatile American South.
Officially a U.S. diplomat, Daddy shipped himself, the kids, their station wagon, and much of their belongings over six thousand miles to West Africa, and moved them into their new home in Ghana’s capital city, Accra, in a section of town called Korle-Bu.
For the first time in Daddy’s life, skin color wasn’t the primary mechanism for evaluating the worth of a human, not the determining factor for whether he’d be allowed or rejected as he tried to make his way in the world. Dark though he was, he was to some Ghanaians “Obruni”—a term in the Twi language for someone not from Africa, a term used, even, for whites. But being Obruni didn’t constrain Daddy’s options. He felt a psychological freedom unavailable to him in America—and finally began to emerge into himself as a man. This was the state of things when he went to a party one night in Korle-Bu and met Jeannie, the woman who would become my mother.
A few months before Daddy graduated from Bates College in 1939, my mother, Jean Snookes, was born to a white working-class family in Yorkshire, England. Her grandfathers had worked in the coal mines, and her father, a schoolteacher, served in World War II, fighting in the Battle of Britain, leaving behind three very young children—my mother, her older brother, and her younger brother—and a wife barely able to make ends meet with the rations that came from the British government. Mom recalls the air-raid sirens blaring night after night as the Germans tried to locate and bomb Yorkshire’s coal mines and steel production facilities, and the nightly ritual of battening the hatches to remove any trace of light from the night sky to conceal themselves from the German pilots. The Britons defeated Hitler so conclusively in the Battle of Britain that Hitler turned his focus elsewhere. Winston Churchill declared, “Never in human history have so many owed so much to so few.” When the war finally ended and her father came home, Mom was six years old.
Her family continued to struggle financially. After the war her parents had two more children and when her mother procured a treat for them—such as an apple—they would split it five ways. My mother was a gifted learner who worked tirelessly and was always one of the strongest students in her school, especially in science and math courses, and she rose to the rank of “Head Girl” based on her academic performance. She was the first in her family to go to university and attended the University of Manchester, where she studied honors science. There, she met and fell in love with a young man named Ian Forrester, an Honors Math student who was on the gymnastics team and rode a motorcycle.
In late 1958 Mom was about to turn twenty and was four months pregnant with Ian’s child. They were due to be married in a few weeks when Ian fell ill suddenly with severe abdominal pain. The doctor at the University Health Center said liver trouble was going around the university. The pain would be severe but it would soon abate. Take some pills, come back Monday. The doctor had failed to properly diagnose the source of Ian’s pain: an adhesion of the appendix.
Mom stayed by Ian’s bedside for four days trying to nurse him through this awful pain, but she grew extremely worried—he seemed so very sick. She called upon Ian’s landlord, who agreed something was terribly wrong and drove the two of them to Ian’s parents’ home in the town of Hanley. Although Ian had told them about her and about the baby, this was to be Mom’s first time meeting Ian’s family.
Ian’s parents went to their family doctor and he came back to the house with them. Looking at Ian, the doctor seemed to Mom to be dubious about the university physician’s diagnosis, but it being the university physician, the family doctor didn’t want to second-guess the situation. He said he would come back the following morning but stressed to Ian’s parents that they should come get him if Ian’s condition changed at all. (Ian’s parents had no phone.)
Ian’s condition did change—the terrible pain went away later that day—which his parents took as a good sign. Ian asked his parents if Mom could come up to his bedroom to see him, which caused some consternation since she and Ian were unmarried. But these circumstances threw regular rules into relief and his parents agreed. Mom entered Ian’s bedroom and saw his belly blown up like a huge balloon. His skin was an awful gray color. He looked like a shadow of himself, she told me.
The family doctor came as promised early the next morning, took one look at Ian, and raced out the door to call for an ambulance. Doctors operated immediately. Hours later Ian’s father took Mom to see him in recovery. She wanted to crawl up into the bed with him, but the sides were pulled up high on his hospital bed to prevent his attempts at escape. She could only stand on her tiptoes to lean over the barrier and kiss him. As she did so, Ian spoke.
“Marry me, kid,” he pleaded, using his pet name for her.
“Just as soon as you get out of here, Love, we will do it.”
Mom realized only later that Ian had known he was dying, had known he needed to spare her the stigma of being an unwed mother, had needed to marry her right then and there.
She went back to the house with Ian’s father. Later that night there was a knock at the door. It was a local policeman relaying a message from the hospital that they must come quickly because Ian was dying. But Mom did not know about the knock at the door or the message, would not know this until the night’s events were relayed to her the following day. Ian’s parents decided that in her “condition” Mom would not be able to handle what would come next.
Ian’s father had gone to the hospital alone that night while Ian’s mother stayed home with her three younger children and Mom. He arrived just as a priest emerged from Ian’s room. He’d been administering last rites and now looked around and asked, “Who is Jean?” The doctor told Ian’s father he could have saved Ian if he’d had him twenty-four hours sooner. When Mom learned this she was shattered. She would blame herself for these elapsed hours for the rest of her life.
In May 1959 Mom gave birth to their baby, whom she named Ian after his father. Her parents bucked the tide of decency and reputation extant at the time by allowing Mom and Little Ian to come live with them and by being emotionally supportive. Big Ian’s parents were supportive too—agreeing that the baby would have their last name even though Mom and Ian had not been married. Mom graduated from university the following year with honors, and with her dean’s support applied for and received a full scholarship to do a PhD in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. The scholarship would pay for everything once she got herself and Little Ian to Canada; the stumbling block was how to find the money to travel there. She went for a loan at her bank but had only her trustworthiness as collateral, which was not enough.
She applied for a few teaching jobs locally but the fact of Little Ian (and his status as a “bastard,” which was the prevailing ideology at the time) was a stigma not to be overcome. Finally, after her father pulled some strings in the district in which he’d worked for over ten years, she got a teaching position in Sheffield, found day care for Little Ian, and moved there. The school’s headmaster said, “No one is to know about the baby,” except, the headmaster said, for his deputy Mr. Braxton, who the headmaster felt needed to know. Mom worked at the Sheffield school for two years. Braxton began to blackmail Mom, forcing her into an unwanted sexual relationship with him in order to keep the news of Little Ian quiet. Little Ian came down with double pneumonia—pneumonia in both lungs—and almost died.
Mom was beginning to give up. She blamed herself for Little Ian’s poor health and for not getting Big Ian to the hospital sooner. Braxton demanded to know her whereabouts at all times, who she was with, and what she was up to. She had few prospects for a better life in England and began applying for various teaching fellowships in other countries again, desperate for a better outcome this time.
In 1962, when he was not yet three, Mom gave Little Ian up for adoption to Big Ian’s parents, via a formal proceeding. She and Little Ian would not reunite until 1977, when he was eighteen and she was legally allowed to contact him. I was ten. I recall my mother taking me on a walk in our Madison neighborhood to tell me that I had another sibling, in England, and I recall feeling angry to have been kept in the dark on something so important. She quickly set me straight. “How does a mother tell one child she has given up another?” she said. “I needed you to be old enough not to worry whether I might give you up, too.” I stared off in the distance blinking away tears.
Shortly after giving Little Ian up for adoption, Mom left England, having accepted a teaching fellowship at Ghana’s Pre-Nursing Training School—the first fellowship offered that would pay her airfare to the country on top of providing her a house to live in. She boarded an airplane for the first time in her life for a flight that took her from London thirty-one hundred and fifty-nine miles due south down the Greenwich meridian. She landed in Accra, where she was met by a new colleague, who drove her to her new home at Number Four Nimtree Circle in Korle-Bu. The colleague brought her small suitcase from the trunk, then pulled away as she stood looking up at her new home, a second-floor walk-up over the garage with a circular staircase to one side. There’d be no need for that garage; she didn’t know how to drive and was, as she called it, “poor as a church mouse.” She was twenty-three.
One evening soon after Mom arrived in the country, the head of the Pre-Nursing Training School had her over for dinner to introduce her to a few more people in the community. At about ten p.m. she was walking the short distance home along the dusty red-brown road when a car pulled alongside her. It was Fran, a nurse on the American medical team in Korle-Bu. Fran had spotted Mom three or four times before on her walk to or from work and had given her a ride, and the two of them had started to become friendly. Fran leaned out of her car window.
“It’s too late for you to be walking alone. Let me give you a ride.”
Mom got in the car. As Mom’s house came into view, Fran slowed down and nodded back toward the trunk of the car. “Actually, we’re having a party and I left to go get more beer. I’m headed back there now. You should come.”
Mom looked over at her house. A party with the Americans probably required a fancier outfit than she’d worn to the dinner. She had one elegant dress to her name and it was in a closet in her bedroom at the top of those stairs.
She shook her head, said she’d need to change first. But Fran was in a hurry to get back to the party.
“You look fine. C’mon.”
Mom gave in. Fran turned the car around and a few minutes later they arrived at the party now in full swing.
Mom was curious about people and gregarious, so she quickly found herself in conversation with other partygoers. A short while later Daddy arrived, making a stir in the crowd because of his high status in the diplomat community and because he had on his arm the sister of the American writer James Baldwin. Baldwin was on an official visit to Accra, and the embassy had tasked Daddy with taking his sister out for the evening before her midnight Pan Am flight back to the States.
Mom and Daddy soon found themselves on the same side of the living room and struck up a conversation. Forty-five minutes later Daddy looked at his watch and realized he had to get Baldwin’s sister to the airport. It was eleven fifteen p.m. He asked Mom if she would wait.
“I can’t promise. I’m here with Fran. I have to leave when Fran does.”
“Well, if you’re not here when I get back, can I come see you tomorrow then?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
Daddy left. A short while later Fran was ready to go. When Daddy returned to the party sometime later, Mom was gone.
The next day—a Saturday, Mom rose early. She didn’t know when Daddy was coming by and she wanted to be ready. She bathed, put on the special dress she’d wanted to be in the night before, made up her face, dabbed herself with perfume, and fluffed her hair just so. She walked over to the window that faced the road and peeked through the blinds. She could see much of the neighborhood from the second story and saw no sign of Daddy. But it was early—only nine a.m.
Accra is four degrees north of the equator so even the smallest movements can cause a person to sweat, particularly a person unaccustomed to the heat, as Mom was in her first months in Ghana. So she felt it was best to sit as still as possible on the couch and wait for Daddy. She finished a book she’d been reading. Then she began working a crossword in one of the many puzzle and logic books she’d brought with her from England. She got up to stretch her legs and stirred the heavy heat with her movements. The click of her heels on the floor disturbed the silence. She sat down and did more puzzles. Got up to make a sandwich. More puzzles. Hours went by and still she waited, trying to keep cool. Finally, at six p.m., as the sun made its quick drop to the horizon, she gave herself a stern talking-to. What makes you think a man like him—a doctor—would be interested in you?
She woke the next day feeling frustrated, not just over her foolishness in thinking this man might actually want to see her again, but because in spending an entire day waiting for him she’d neglected her housework. She put on a pair of old shorts and a T-shirt and began by making her bed, cleaning the bathroom, and putting dishes away. Then she settled in for a morning of furniture polishing. At about noon she heard the scrunch of tires on her gravel driveway and peeked out the window. It was a huge Mercury station wagon with wings at the back. “It was him, at my house,” she’d tell me years later. “I was mortified to be in grubby shorts polishing furniture but here he was. That’s the thought that took over. That’s what mattered.”
Daddy pulled his car to a stop in front of the tree at the end of Mom’s driveway. Took the circular stairway two steps at a time and knocked on her door. She welcomed him in and they sat on her couch and talked for hours. Then, just as before, he looked at his watch and knew he had to leave. This time he needed to be home with his four kids. They parted. But they were together from that hot Sunday afternoon in Accra until his death on a Saturday thirty-three years later off the coast of Massachusetts on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. My unlikely parents.
Mom soon met Daddy’s children—Ruth, George, Michael, and Stephen, who, at sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, and twelve years old, were much closer in age to her than she was to their father. They attended a local boarding school and when Daddy traveled back to the States for six weeks, Mom brought the children the things they needed at school and handled his affairs as a secretary might or perhaps even a wife. Over the ensuing months their attitudes toward her ranged from bemused, to indifferent, to warm, to skeptical, to defiant, and even, at times, to hostile. A year later, Mom was writing regular letters to Daddy’s stepmother, Corinne, back in Oklahoma to update her on the family’s goings-on. Like Daddy’s children, Corinne experienced her own range of emotions about this white woman Daddy was dating who was now writing to her. But on one of Daddy’s many trips back to the States, Corinne gave him her ring for when it came time to propose.
He did propose, on a sandy beach along the road to the fishing village of Tema, which President Kwame Nkrumah correctly envisioned would be an international seaport one day. They married in January of 1966 in Accra in a civil ceremony, with only three witnesses, a white man and two white women. The clerk initially mistook the white man to be my mother’s intended husband. Then the huge ceiling fan doing its best to keep the air a few degrees above stifling ruffled the pages of the clerk’s text and he began reading the procedures for divorce. But they sorted it all out with a chuckle and managed to get married in a ceremony that would have been illegal in seventeen states back in the U.S. at the time.
They moved to Lagos, Nigeria, later that year, when my father joined the historic effort to try to eradicate smallpox and was put in charge of the operation in twenty West African countries. One by one first Ruth and then George had left for college in the States, and then Michael left as well. I was born at the tail end of this adventure, in November 1967, at Lagos Teaching Hospital. Stephen was the only sibling still in Africa when I was born, and he brought me a dark purple fuzzy stuffed animal with long hair. Ruth sent me a Black baby doll. I’d keep both of these toys for years. The West African smallpox effort succeeded a year and a half ahead of schedule and the disease was declared eradicated from the globe in 1980.
When I was four weeks old we headed back to Accra to spend Christmas with my parents’ friend, the American Ambassador to Ghana, Franklin Williams, and his wife. Daddy’s driver, a Nigerian man named Eric, sped us across the coastal road from Lagos through Dahomey (now Benin), through Togo, and into Ghana, a trek of over three hundred miles. While we were there, a political skirmish broke out in Nigeria related to the Biafran civil war; there were new contentions that children were starving in the Biafra region, and the U.S. government asked Daddy to return to Nigeria immediately to assess the situation. We would have to fly. Daddy hastily drew up the papers Eric would need by way of explanation for himself as he drove alone through the borders of Ghana, Togo, Dahomey, back to Nigeria. Eric dropped us off at the Accra airport. Mom held me in her arms as she and Daddy went through immigration.
“Where’s her passport?” spurted the immigration officer, nodding in my direction.
“She’s only four weeks old,” Daddy stated, with the authority of a pediatrician and the airs of a diplomat.
“She’s a person, isn’t she?”
As would be the case often in Daddy’s life, his rhetoric and authoritative manner would win the day. Though I lacked any identifying evidence of my existence or citizenship, I was permitted to exit Ghana and, a short plane flight later, permitted to enter Nigeria.
America recognized citizenship through either parent, although Britain only recognized it through the father, so British citizenship was never an option for me. Nigeria’s rule was that I could claim citizenship up until I was eighteen if I wanted to do so. I never did and really can’t say why. Nor did my parents. Indifference? An unwillingness to confront the red tape in a foreign country? A sense that I would never “need” it? A few months after the tense moments at the airport in Accra, I would have my own passport certifying me as American—the only citizenship I’ve ever had. My parents never dreamed that the American-ness of my citizenship—and that of countless others born to an American outside the U.S.—would ever be the subject of political debate. To them, my being of mixed race might be a contentious issue in my life, but when it came to citizenship, they foresaw no question. I was an American.