all the truth

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Emily Dickinson (1263)

I thought I had done this. Thought I’d put it all on the page. Thought I’d written to the edge, from the edge, over the edge looking up. Turned your name every which way, standing guard over my grief. Wrote letters in that name asking for guardians of the souls of my future children, the ones who wouldn’t die. Qualified my connections by those who still remember his name (there’s only one). 

But I only gave you one name. And I gave your father none. 

— 

I’ve thought about this for a long time, whispered it to a few friends, vaguely referenced it in discussion groups, had this very document in draft for nearly a year. But now I feel that as much as I publicly shared the other fragments of the story, I need to share this part, too. 

—

In 2014, while completing research for my undergraduate thesis at Sally Test Paediatric Centre in Kenya, a little boy named Moses was brought into the hospital by the police, having been found locked in a home alone and suffering from severe illness, malnutrition, dehydration, and abuse. And over the course of the two months he was in hospital, during which it wasn’t always clear he would live, I was involved in his daily care and he and I became attached. 

It was several weeks before Moses’s father came looking for his son at the hospital, telling the staff that he had been away working in another city and that it was Moses’s stepmother who had neglected and abused him and that he wasn’t aware of any of it until he got home and found his son gone. After that first visit, his father came and went, going a few weeks between visits and speaking little to his son. He started to push for Moses to be discharged quickly, and then one day we arrived to the hospital in the morning to find Moses gone. 

—

Those are the bare elements of the story. In some ways, those are the only elements I truly know. But it’s not the story I’ve told. In other writing, I’ve said I loved him as a son, that I was a mama to him, and that there was a period where I seriously contemplated if I could adopt him. And previously, I’ve used the language that my grief over my loss of him began when his father took him away from me. 

The story I’ve told is one where Moses’s father was a monster, snatching that little boy from me, the one who truly loved him, leaving me in mourning and returning Moses to abuse and neglect that would kill him. The story I’ve told is one where Moses’s father acted only out of greed and never out of care, and where Moses held no feeling for his father but absolute love for me. The story I’ve told is one where Moses’s father never knew that child’s light and I alone could see it. The story I’ve told is one where I, a twenty-one year old American student, was better prepared to care for Moses than his father, or his other family who never made it into my view. The story I’ve told is one where I call Moses mine. The story I’ve told is one where I never learned his father’s name.

— 

And maybe his father was all of those things. Maybe he did know of the abuse, maybe he perpetrated it, maybe he didn’t leave the wife, maybe he had no plans for taking better care of his son, maybe he didn’t care. This is not to tell the story with a different, but still singular, name. This is to say maybe there was complexity, and I purposefully didn’t open myself up to it. This is to say that that singular view was of my choosing. 

This isn’t to say I didn’t love that little boy, because I did, fiercely. This isn’t to say he didn’t love me, I don’t know about that. This is to say maybe there was complexity. And maybe I couldn’t, but more likely, I wouldn’t, see it. 

This is to say that my love may have also harmed him. 

This is to say, consciously or not, I used my power to shape a narrative when really, there was no way I could know the whole story and when really, I didn’t try to. This is to say I never was, nor should I have ever been, his mama. This is to say there is a long history of white women portraying themselves as saviours of Black children, perpetuating harmful and untrue stereotypes, reinforcing unequal and colonial power dynamics, and operating within the auspices of white supremacy, and through my actions as well as my rendering of those actions, I was part of that. 

I know differently now. Even then, I thought I knew differently, thought I wasn’t one of those white women. But I am white and I am a woman and I was socialized as an American within a system of white supremacy. That is not an excuse, but a fact which renders me able to walk into a room and decide my love for a child is worth more, is better, than that of his father or his community, able to lay claim to a child who was not mine, and able to tell the truth, but tell it slant, such that I come out the wounded and lauded saviour and his father never even gets a name. Some may say that I had good intentions, that Moses was better off for the short amount of love I gave him, that I was young and didn’t know, and so on. That prioritizes my feelings, my character, my sense of self over those of Moses and of his father and that’s something I won’t do again. 

I don’t know where Moses is, if he is with his father, or if he is alive. And I can’t go back and learn the rest of the story, can’t ask his father’s name. It serves no one to rest in that regret or to let the shame of ‘what if’s’ paralyse me or to keep myself at the centre of this story any longer. But I can hold myself accountable by being honest about my mistakes. I can unwind myself from my attachments to systems that grant me unearned benefits as a white woman. I can unwind myself from my attachment to a narrative where I was Moses’s mama, a narrative I’ve long known, but never publicly stated, was false.

I can tell all the truth, and then keep working to be better for it.