The Answer Is Yes

A small-town Southern girl busted loose in Berkeley and, like many young women in the 1960s, said yes to so many things. She marched against the draft, wrote a book, forged a life that mattered, and returned to the South. At 74, she went looking for the father she’d never known — and found, instead, the son she’d never seen. The past and the present come together in this tale of race and love in a divided America.

Words by Patricia Thomas

July 31, 2024

Like coins, we bear mint marks that reveal our origins and stubbornly resist both polishing and abuse. We can be hot-rolled into an asphalt road and the mark will be there still. I was stamped by Dunnellon, the tiny Central Florida town where Grandpa was the postmaster and Mama was the prettiest schoolteacher.

It was a railroad town made briefly prosperous by phosphate mining in the 1890s, but by the time I came along, in 1948, the population had slipped to about 1,400, with white people inside the city limits and Black people on the outskirts. Our claim to fame was Rainbow Springs, a tourist attraction with glass-bottomed boats and man-made waterfalls, and the excellent bass fishing on the Rainbow and Withlacoochee rivers.

Against this sleepy backdrop, no wonder my mother stood out when her young, Yankee husband fell in love with someone else and skedaddled. He was a war hero who wanted to design aircraft; she was a sorority girl who never wanted to leave home. Their union was doomed, and it was no one’s fault.

He abandoned my mother and me in 1952, a time when a woman could not open a bank account without the signature of her husband or her father. With him gone, we were the responsibility of Mama’s parents: the self-made man who owned a store building and was the town’s postmaster, and the brainy daughter of Italian immigrants who was snubbed for being Catholic. In old Polaroids, my grandparents stand shoulder-to-shoulder like the couple in “American Gothic,” except Grandpa is wearing a Hart, Schaffner & Marx suit and Grandma looks like Coco Chanel. They worked hard for their success, they watched one another’s backs, and the Golden Rule was “Do Not Embarrass the Family.”

My grandfather was both conservative and ahead of his time. He fathered four daughters and, in an era when many scoffed at the idea of educating women, he sent all of them to college so they could be independent. Two became teachers, one a nurse, and the other a building contractor. He drummed into all of us grandchildren the idea that education is the path to a better life. Going to college was a given for me, but not for all of my classmates in Dunnellon.  

Slipping off the rails and into perdition was a constant danger for middle-class Southern girls like me. In addition to obeying the Ten Commandments, which was a no-brainer, girls were forbidden to chew gum in public, drink, smoke, dress immodestly, be too loud, hang out with the fast crowd, allow boys to touch you where they should not, gossip, or whistle.

Getting pregnant was the cardinal sin. My mother and her adult friends rarely said the word “pregnant,” even when speaking of themselves. “I think I might be PG,” one would whisper to her best friend. Teenage girls who got PG were expelled from school, although the boys who impregnated them were not. If the girl was lucky, a shotgun wedding ensued, and her new husband left school and went to work on his family’s farm or got a job stringing line for Florida Power. Eventually talk died down, their “premature” baby grew up, and they were absorbed by small-town society. The less fortunate ruined girls? They simply disappeared. 

I would escape Dunnellon, if not trouble. 

•  •  •

During the 11 years that I spent in Dunnellon’s all-white public school, teachers herded us three times onto yellow school buses and shuttled us half a mile to the Lyric Theater. I didn’t think of it at the time, but someone deemed the films we saw on those outings as more important, more educational, than our classes. The canonical movies were “Gone With the Wind,” the Passion Play for believers in the Lost Cause; “The Ten Commandments,” which we admired mostly for the Oscar-winning parting of the Red Sea; and “Ben-Hur,” an action movie in which a Jewish nobleman ultimately converts to Christianity.

The messages from these movies stuck with some of us more than others. The boys smoking beside their pickup trucks and carving “Whites Only” signs in shop class loved to holler that the South would rise again. In some translations the Bible states that the sons of Ham are marked by sin and cursed by blackness, and many of my classmates adamantly believed that God did not want Negroes (they used a less genteel word) to sit beside us in the theater, in classrooms, or on the stools of the soda fountain where we gathered after school. Our elders believed it was especially important that Black men and white women stay far apart, not only because Black men could not control their powerful sexual urges, but also because white women secretly craved sex with those very men.

Like many schools in the South, ours weren’t integrated until 1965, 11 years after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. By then, I was 17 and off at college. And as for our beloved after-school hangout, the soda shop’s owners took dramatic action rather than risk any form of protest. We came in one day to find the booths and stools gone and the curvaceous Coca-Cola glasses replaced by paper cups.

My nerdy friends and I agonized about what had happened. We were fans of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and sang “We Shall Overcome” at hootenannies. We devoured the weekly issues of Life and Look that came to our homes, horrified by vivid photographs of atrocities committed in Birmingham and Selma. We knew that Bull Connor and men turning fire hoses on children were evil. We felt less sure about the two ladies behind the drugstore counter. “I understood that they were not bigots in the stereotypical sense, but human beings who acted in accord with what they believed was right,” I mused in my teenage journal.

Were their actions racist? It took me half a century to understand that whenever I ask myself whether racism could be a factor in a situation – whether it’s a Black person being told no tables are available or a jogger murdered by vigilantes – the answer is always yes. 

•  •  •

Ernestine Jennings was not upset by bloody noses, power failures, dogfights, overflowing sinks, or the hundreds of other things that can go wrong while minding children and caring for a household. She was unflappable except during afternoon thunderstorms, when the two of us huddled together on the living room sofa until the thunder boomers rolled past.

She stood tall and regal, with high cheekbones and an auburn cast to her brown skin. She had four children who were cared for by her own mother while she worked for my family. She was an upstanding member of her community and a devoted church lady.

Our house lacked air-conditioning, but the concrete floor of the garage was cool, and when Ernestine opened the back door and turned on the big box fan, it pulled a breeze past the jumbled tools and bags of charcoal briquets and chlordane. I struggled with multiplication tables and long division, and I practiced on the plywood blackboard my stepfather had hung near the ironing board. Ernestine ironed, smoked Kools, and corrected errors in my arithmetic all at the same time.

Ernestine fixed excellent dinners, which my stepfather and I appreciated because Mama excelled at baking but not at regular meals. Periodically, Mama and Ernestine teamed up on some huge project: making three sour cream pound cakes for a bake sale, preparing sheet pans of fragile lady fingers for a baby shower, baking a dozen small fruitcakes that would be lovingly swaddled in whiskey-soaked cheesecloth until they were distributed as Christmas gifts.

Ernestine’s observations of others were keen, her judgment sound. When I reached high school, she steered me away from friends headed in dangerous directions. When I returned home from college for holidays, Ernestine and I camped out in that same garage and smoked cigarettes together. We talked about friends and relationships and worldly temptations, and I told her things I would never have told my mother.

Ernestine’s children and I grew up on different sides of the color line, but when we’re together now – more than 60 years later – we laugh at the same things and agree that smoked turkey wings are better than fatback in a pot of greens. Late in life, she finally married. Her husband was Dunnellon’s first Black everything: police officer, police chief, City Council member, and mayor. She and my mother could barely contain themselves when Ernestine became the town’s first Black First Lady.

When Ernestine died in 2007, my mother called me, sobbing. “My best friend has died,” she said.

I knew instantly who she meant. 

•  •  •

My high school was both all white and unaccredited, thanks to the absence of offerings in any foreign language, dead or alive. Editing the high school newspaper became my portal to worldliness and a way to rebel without risking arrest or pregnancy. During a summer journalism workshop at the University of Florida, I went to a Civil Rights meeting where Black and white agitators planned boycotts and picket lines not in North Carolina or Alabama, but 46 miles from where I’d lived my whole uneventful life. I pined to be part of this world but was stuck in Dunnellon.

My 10th grade biology teacher, who also did some preaching on the side, saw his classroom as just one more chance to spread The Word. We were studying cell division when he began rhapsodizing about an upcoming tent revival and the opportunities it presented for personal salvation. Puffed up with secular sanctimony, I raised my hand and said we should be talking about biology, not about religion. If you don’t want to listen, he said, you can go sit in the principal’s office.

“Went to office from biology today,” I wrote in my diary. “I had a choice.” My stepfather, summoned there, listened quietly to the story and told the principal that he was fine with what I’d done.

Nor were my parents upset when I applied to a summer program for high school journalists at Northwestern University. They agreed to pay for it when I was accepted, which brought us to the Jacksonville airport on June 27, 1964. I spotted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the newsstand, and went straight over and asked to shake his hand because I admired his work. Why would you want to shake hands with that N-word? my Aunt Dot, who’d tagged along, asked afterward. Sixty years later, her words are indelible, but my reply is not. Later, I won a feature writing award for my story about that chance encounter.

That summer changed my life. I saw Stravinsky conduct “The Firebird” at Ravinia. I read part of Fanny Hill, a florid piece of 18th-century erotica, in my dorm. On a trip to San Francisco with my parents, I visited City Lights books and leafed through issues of The Realist, a risqué leftist magazine, and browsed porn featuring men dressed in leather.

There was still a lot of small-town South in the girl: I crushed on a young man who knew he was gay when I did not – a guarantee of chastity. Next came sweaty boys who were all over me, but I drew the line at unhooking my bra. I was so prudish that when one of my friends lost her virginity, she begged our other friends not to tell me.

•  •  •

The fact is that it did not take long for Mama’s good girl to go bad once Florida was in the rearview mirror. I read Ulysses in college and, like Molly Bloom, said yes to so many things. Dylan told us the times were a changin’, and they were. I marched against the military draft and was tear gassed from helicopters. I racked up a couple of misdemeanors. Oral contraceptives made it marginally safer to have casual sex, although the pill was no protection against chlamydia or heartbreak.

The trouble with having gone to UC Berkeley in the ’60s is that everyone over a certain age assumes they know your story. They’ve read novels or seen movies and TV documentaries about the antiwar movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers, the United Farm Workers and the grape boycott. They know about psychedelic rock, the Summer of Love, and Timothy Leary’s admonition to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” They’ve seen images of students dancing naked during music festivals or being tear gassed and beaten by police.

Most people under 30 have none of these associations. The exceptions are kids who own turntables, play in bands, and are fascinated by tragic icons like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin or consider themselves Deadheads. I’m always amazed to see a skull and rose image or a kick line of bears on the bumper of an SUV with Greek letters.

Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated during my junior year at Cal, and we hungered for revolution but knew we might flunk out if we threw ourselves entirely into protest. So we studied hard and marched.

Once finals were over, I moved from the dorm into a tacky shared apartment that my parents paid for. I sold encyclopedias, typed term papers for grad students who could pay, hawked alternative newspapers on street corners, and stuffed envelopes for the Black Panthers.  

I met Peter at a fundraiser in Berkeley Hills, where there was acid in the punchbowl, soul music on the turntable, and a crowd of white people dancing frenetically to “Respect” and “Proud Mary.” The action seemed to swirl around Peter and his wife, Judy, who had the gravitas of royalty on the dance floor.

I was 20 and about to start my senior year. Peter was 43. A tall, dark-skinned Black man, he wore a ruffled white pirate shirt, mostly unbuttoned, and tight velvet bell-bottoms with Frye boots. Jimi Hendrix was the only man who might have looked better in that outfit. Judy, a voluptuous white woman with silky blond hair, wore as many layers of silks, shawls, and beads as Janis Joplin, but undulated like seagrass instead of clenching and stomping like the famous singer.

Our host, a white law student from an old East Coast family, was raising money for Jerry Rubin, who planned to disrupt the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Guests included donors, braless college girls like me, and hip locals like Peter and Judy, whose presence guaranteed the wealthy friends of our host an authentic Berkeley scene.

My college friends and I were smitten with this couple, who were charismatic, up on everything, and seemed to know everyone. They had an honest-to-god house of their own and a matched pair of Weimaraners. Judy commuted across the Bay to her job as a high school teacher; Peter’s schedule was a little looser. He worked in construction and spent his second shift at the Caffe Mediterranean on Telegraph Avenue, a legendary coffeehouse noisy with political debate. Peter sold the occasional lid to those in the know. Sometimes a gram or so of hash.

My friends and his often finished our nights at a bar called The Steppenwolf, maybe the only bar in Berkeley where Black and white patrons were equally welcome. Everyone sang along with an upbeat Stax release by Johnnie Taylor (backed by Booker T & the MGs) with the lyrics “Who’s making love to your old lady (while you were out makin’ love).” When this played, Judy saw her husband flirting with me and did not seem to mind.

Our relationship progressed to the sexy soul of the Temps and the Four Tops, and “Born on the Bayou” would throw the place into a frenzy. Peter was a man who understood that less is more on the dance floor. The white boys thrashed around doing something like the jerk, but his hips traced slow dreamy movements through the smoky air.

Eight months after we met, we were having mind-blowing sex in a no-tell motel.

When I finished school and celebrated my 21st birthday, Peter and Judy came to the party. In a side conversation, drowned out by The Who, Peter made it clear that I should not fall in love with him, which of course I laughed off. We continued to rendezvous in sleazy motels on San Pablo Avenue in Albany. I was “in lust,” I said breezily to my friends. I was the classic younger woman on the side, sure that he knew me better than I knew myself, thrilled by stolen glances in public, living for our illicit hours alone.

Fall arrived just four months after our affair began, and I moved my few possessions and my cat 40 miles south to a room in a shared Palo Alto house. Journalism school at Stanford felt like the big time; famous writers and editors guest-lectured in our classes, and that year I found new friends who are still my chosen family. This life replaced those wild Berkeley days. I barely paid attention when friends said Peter and Judy had moved to Costa Rica, where she was going to have a baby and he was building a wooden sailboat to travel the world. 

•  •  •

On Mother’s Day in 1971, Peter walked back into my life. The coursework for my master’s degree was done, but the dreaded thesis loomed. My classmates and I wanted to be journalists, not scholars, and some of them got newspaper jobs and put off their thesis projects for years. But I had no job offers and I was a good girl from Dunnellon, the one who made her parents proud, so I plunged into my research. This was no time to recycle an old lover, especially since I wasn’t taking birth control pills and he was a married man, father of a new baby, and living in a faraway country. Surrendering to a night of great sex was a bad idea, but it’s not the worst thing a young woman has ever done in the grip of thesis-induced insanity.  

That same weekend, my parents told me that as soon as I graduated, I needed to find a real job, with decent pay and benefits. They simply could not afford to keep sending me money, my stepfather said. School desegregation had not gone perfectly in Dunnellon, and my mother struggled to incorporate students brought in from Booker T. Washington School, where “separate but equal” education had been a charade for generations. Some read nowhere near grade level; others had been held back repeatedly. For decades, she delighted in teaching her kids the minuet and square dancing. Now “Soul Train” culture had reached Dunnellon Elementary School and kids wanted to boogaloo and lock. Mama was more than a little lost. She had been a star teacher for two decades and recognized as Florida’s Teacher of the Year. Now she was a menopausal woman who had lost her mojo. No wonder she was depressed. My stepfather gamely ferried her to a psychiatrist in a larger town, but that was expensive.

Thirty days after his last visit, Peter came back. Again the moon was full, and we had sex with only contraceptive foam for protection. He was confident of his hold on me, even as he prepared to return to Latin America with his wife and child. “We’ll always have a thing,” he said, “whether you get married or otherwise involved, unless you find someone you enjoy making love to more than me.” His words landed like a prophecy, and I copied them into my journal the next day.  

At the end of September, my thesis was accepted, and I filed paperwork for December graduation. Now I needed to pull up my socks and move on. I made an appointment at a community health clinic to ask two questions: Why hadn’t I lost any weight on the various fad diets that my roommate Kit and I had done all summer? And why had my menstrual periods, intermittent since I’d stopped high-dose oral contraceptives two years earlier, ceased entirely? The flustered but kind resident said I either had a tumor or a five-month pregnancy. The floor fell out from under me. Surely neither could be true.

He referred me to an experienced OB-GYN, who quickly ruled out cancer, told me it was too late for an abortion in states where it was legal, and sat me down for a primer on how to be an unwed mother. I was an educated, 23-year-old white woman who rented a room in a shared house, had no job or health insurance, no partner, and no confidence in my ability to raise a child. Adoption looked like the best course. The doctor wrote a note that would make me eligible for MediCal, welfare, and access to the public adoption agency that would find an appropriate home for my mixed-race baby. I told the agencies the truth about Peter: We were not in a relationship, he lived in Latin America with his wife, and I didn’t know how to reach him. Nobody insisted that we track him down.  

Despite the best efforts of my friends, my doctor, and my social worker, I spent much of my pregnancy feeling angry, resentful, and frightened. My own cells had rebelled against me. I was no longer the independent, self-sufficient woman I imagined myself to be. A stranger within me was now calling the shots, and I could feel him kick and turn. This was the miracle of new life I’d always heard about, and despite my emotional turmoil, I wanted to keep him safe until he could breathe his own air, live his own life.

On the phone, I told my stepfather that I was pregnant, and he said all the reassuring things that parents say in Hallmark movies. He somehow prepared my mother, who was equally supportive. She saved the letters I wrote during this time, and those pages weep with love and gratitude for my parents’ support. Only one topic was off limits, and that was the baby’s father. The relationship is over, and he is not in my life, I told my mother when she asked who he was. Case closed. Never did either of them inquire about his race. Why would they?

Time and experience had weathered the mint marks that Dunnellon, Florida, put on me, but they remained. When the adoption social worker asked whether my parents would accept my bi-racial baby, I said that they were from the South and they wouldn’t understand. In fact, I had no idea whether that was true.

I did know that my Black friends in Berkeley sucked their teeth and shook their heads when they saw white couples with dark-skinned children. Black children needed to be raised by their own people, in their own culture, my friends said. So I told the social worker that I wanted my baby to be adopted by a Black family. In time, she came up with what sounded like a great match: a Black couple in San Jose with one biological daughter and one multiracial adopted son. The couple worked in health care and valued education, she said. In my mind, everything was decided.

My mother loved spoiling babies, and she had always wanted to be a grandmother. Looking back, I know she was heartbroken by the adoption. She asked Kit to buy a set of blue baby clothes, what used to be called a layette, because her grandson should leave the hospital with something. Did she want to signal to his adoptive parents that he was not a child of poverty or neglect? Or, like the good Catholic she was, did she seek to clothe the nakedness of Adam and Eve when they sinned and were expelled from the garden? Was she doing the right thing or making the right gesture?                                                                 

•  •  •

My breasts and my lady parts leaked fluids, and I was emotionally labile for weeks after delivery and the formal surrender of my rights. Tired and fragile, I visited my parents in Florida, and we handled one another with care. Then I returned to the California house I shared with Kit, where eventually my energy returned, and my belly skin stopped drooping like a hound dog’s jowls. I got an office job, paid my bills, and wrote a long and tiresome book about being an unwed mother. No publisher would take it, thank God, probably because feminism and the growing acceptance of single motherhood were making the very concept obsolete.

And then, for the next 50 years, I lived my life and mostly kept my son’s existence a secret.

Peter had once told me that I would enjoy sex with women, but I was too besotted with him to consider it. That changed, and now I look back on three long, loving, (mostly) monogamous partnerships with women. Two are dead. One, the poetically named Meriwether, is still kicking it.

I’ve lived my childhood dream of being a journalist, written about everything from rock music to recombinant DNA, interviewed fascinating people, traveled the world, beat my head against seemingly impenetrable concepts, all in the interest of telling stories that would make a reader, somewhere, say, “Wow. I didn’t know that.” 

My life has been richly peopled, with two exceptions: I never knew my birth father, and I never held my baby.

My father left me. I gave up my baby. I was afraid to look for my child because I worried he would hate me for not being brave enough to keep him. Or that he would be gravely disappointed in me. I was not famous or glamorous. I was a working journalist turned professor, living not in San Francisco or New York but in Athens, Georgia. Plus I was a married lesbian whose idea of fun was cooking.

Years passed, and I made no move to find him or help him find me. Nor did I talk about him. Until recently I did not comprehend how powerfully many adoptees yearn to know about their biological parents. I thought about the adoption purely from my own narrow point of view.

As blind as I was to the needs of adopted people, I wanted to know more about my own birth father. I had spent a lifetime listening to my mother and her three sisters relitigating the past, sometimes describing him as handsome, sexy, brilliant, and a war hero. That aside, he was a cad for leaving my mother and me. I wondered what was really true.  

By the time the Covid lockdowns came in 2020, the man who’d raised me had been dead for nearly 30 years. Russell had won my heart even before he married my mother. I was 7, and he became the best father anyone could have. Now my mother, who’d married two more times, was gone, along with all her husbands, including the original, Joe Thomas. A simple online search showed that he and his wife had been dead for more than a decade. I began to explore.

Joe Thomas’ five other daughters were alive and not hard to find, so I sent each of them the same letter in January 2022. I introduced myself and explained that I simply wanted to know more about my biological father and about them, my half-sisters. I invited them to reply by letter, email, or phone. 

Ten days passed, and then came a three-paragraph email from Barb, the youngest. Years earlier she had searched for me on ancestry.com, she said, but came up empty-handed. All she knew was that I had studied to be a journalist, and she thought I lived in California. Barb went on to enumerate her children and grandchildren, and to say that she would write again to tell me about my birth father. 

And then, in the last paragraph, she said, “I do have questions for you. I hope this is not too disturbing.” In 2019, she wrote, a young woman in California with whom she shared significant DNA had contacted her on ancestry.com. The woman was helping her father search for his birth mother, and they knew that the mystery woman was white, “in school for journalism. And that she had to give the baby up because she was raised in the South and her family would never understand.”

Barb had been baffled by the strong DNA overlap, until she heard from me. Now she asked, “Would she be your granddaughter?”

I knew instantly that the answer was yes. And I wept with relief, because if my son was looking for me – and had a daughter who cared enough to help him – he was both alive and loved.

•  •  •

After decades of thinking my son and I would never be reunited, this now seemed likely. I was an emotional wreck and asked Barb to postpone telling my granddaughter that her search was over. Sure, Barb replied, and in the meantime here’s a picture his daughter sent.

I looked at the image and didn’t see any resemblance to Peter or to me right away. But in a split second I saw that the handsome, muscular man with the immaculately shaved head had been photographed in a cell. Cue the screech of tires on asphalt: My son was a criminal.

Countless times I had feared that he was a victim of street violence, but I had never once imagined him as a perpetrator. The Central Park jogger case hit the headlines when he was 17, Black youths were demonized as antisocial and dangerous, and I worried that my son could be one of many Black men killed not because they were doing anything wrong, but because some white man got nervous.  

Other times, I imagined him inheriting the best of Peter and me and excelling at everything. At the University of Georgia, I taught young Black men who were smart and playful and on their way to great lives and careers, and when I edited their work or wrote a recommendation letter, I imagined some professor somewhere doing the same for my missing son. But all I really knew, thanks to Barb, was that he had been alive and looking for me in 2019 and that he most likely was incarcerated.

For the second time I asked my new sister to hold off for a little longer. The photo unnerved me. 

Maybe knowing he is alive is enough, I thought. Maybe I should end it here. But I could not. As a teacher, I’ve always given students second and third chances. No matter what my son had done, or what he had been wrongly sentenced for, he was my son and I wanted us to know each other.

When Barb told me that his given name was Effron, the only Ephron I could think of was Nora. But Meriwether, whose biblical literacy surpasses mine, informed me that the name appears in the Old Testament. My son’s uncommon name made it relatively easy to find a few digital footprints, including information about a divorce and where he was imprisoned. Then LinkedIn made my heart race: He was enrolled at the University of California in Santa Cruz and said he was looking forward to finding work.

On Valentine’s Day 2022, I wrote to Barb and asked her to share my contact information. Two tense weeks passed before my son and my granddaughter emailed on the same day. Donesha’s note was straight up: We’ve been looking for a long time, and we’re so glad we’ve found you. Effron’s note was more nuanced: “Please find comfort in the fact that I believe you made the decision to place me in a home based on the opportunities it would have given me in life,” he wrote. “I thank you for making such a tough decision. I hold no ill will although as a child I struggled a bit. But as I got older, I’ve come to understand life a lot differently.”

We exchanged giddy and intense emails, asking questions and blurting out things we’d thought over the years but never had the chance to say. We talked about oceanic feelings and basic facts. I learned that Effron goes by Donnie, a riff on his middle name, that he has a son named Effron Jr. in addition to my granddaughter Donesha, and that I have two great-grandchildren. He learned that Meriwether and I met in Boston more than 30 years ago and have been together ever since.

Donnie didn’t mention prison at first, but then he attached an article from the UC Santa Cruz magazine. Headlined “Building a prison-to-university pipeline,” the story described a program called Underground Scholars. The opening anecdote said Donnie was convicted of “shooting a man in the legs during a confrontation in San Jose,” which landed him at San Quentin as a terrified 24-year-old. It described his long road to academic success and his passion for helping others transition from incarceration to the university.

The article would give me insight into his journey, he said. He described it as a hard path but also credited it with making him the man he is now.  

Donnie was indeed raised in San Jose by the Black couple I had selected, but his childhood had not gone as hoped. His light skin and soft wavy hair made him feel like an outsider, even in his own family. Grownups made a fuss over him for having “good hair,” but he envied kids whose kinky hair had to be hot-combed to make it as straight as his. His sense of alienation increased when his family fell on hard times because of divorce, substance abuse, and domestic violence.

Donnie and his junior high pals were routinely stopped by cops during an intense period of “broken windows” policing in San Jose. He fell into the life of the streets, fathered two children, and went to prison for attempted murder. 

His appeal dragged on for 10 years. As it inched forward, Donnie earned a GED and took college courses, driven by the certainty that whenever he got out, education would be the best armor against recidivism. 

In 2019, after 23 years behind bars, Donnie won his appeal. His conviction was overturned because his lawyer had failed him. A competent attorney, the court decided, could have gotten the charge reduced to assault, and Donnie would have faced a lighter sentence. Ironically, he was freed just as the pandemic lockdown took hold. His parents were both gone. His brother, who had been Donnie’s lifeline to the outside, gave him a place to live, and Donnie started online courses at nearby Cabrillo College. Underground Scholars helped him transition to UC Santa Cruz, where he was working on a B.S. in sociology when Donesha found me.  

I didn’t learn all this right away, of course, and we all have so much more to learn about one another. But as February 2022 blustered into March, all I could think about was that I would meet my son – and my two newly discovered grandchildren – on March 18. They all live in California, but they were about to turn up in Atlanta. 

•  •  •

We hugged. I reached up to wrap my arms around his neck. He reached down and enfolded me in a strong and tender embrace. He felt as solid as he looked. We clung to one another, eyes closed, in epic reunion. When I saw Meriwether’s pictures of this moment, tears welled up. I knew there had never been another hug like that in all of human history. You will disagree, citing evidence of your own most memorable hugs. But I know I am right.

When I opened my eyes, I realized that this rented house in Marietta, Georgia, was my first step into the world of my new family. Donnie had celebrated his 50th birthday a few days earlier, and a trip to Atlanta was his gift. Having been incarcerated for literally half his life, he hadn’t traveled much. Now he had a driver’s license and a passport.

When Meriwether and I arrived, a March Madness game filled a giant flat screen in the living room; tall dark men holding tall cans milled around, talking and laughing. My grandson Effron Jr. was inhaling a bowl of greens at the kitchen table and praising their excellence to his sister Donesha, who had cooked them. Other women fussed over giant pans of ribs, chicken, and various sides. The air was perfumed with weed. Everyone was friendly, and although we were acutely aware of being the only old white ladies in the room, no one else seemed to care.

Donnie wanted the five of us, the immediate family, to go somewhere we could talk. I’d reserved an out-of-the-way table at a nearby seafood restaurant. Questions and answers flew.

Donnie said he’d learned from the adoption agency that his father was Black and more than 20 years older than me, and he figured these facts influenced my decision. He asked whether his father was alive, had other children, and knew of his existence. I had only best guesses to give: probably not alive, one son that I know of, and no idea.

Meriwether, who loves genealogy research, brought my childhood photo album and showed our new family their greats and great-greats, their uncles and cousins. They loved discovering their Italian ancestry and were shocked to learn their immigrant forebears weren’t welcomed with open arms in Central Florida.

In the UC Santa Cruz magazine story, Donnie had said that he hoped his children and grandchildren would follow his footsteps to college. Over lunch, it looked like Donesha, who was in community college before having her son, might go back, at 31. Effron Jr., two years younger, said that school wasn’t for him. But I’m holding out hope, because like me he’s a passionate gardener who knows the value of soil amendments and the names of plants. I urged him to consider taking some horticulture classes.

I probably talked too much about all the doors that education had opened for me, first as a journalist and more recently as a writing teacher. They were impressed that I had written a book about scientists searching for an AIDS vaccine, not caring that it was a commercial flop.

The clarity and eloquence of Donnie’s writing was obvious in his emails. He credited daily writing and gym workouts with keeping him out of trouble inside, and he sees himself as a writer. People always tell me I should write a book, he told me. Of course, you should. You’re my son. We sat side by side, and I kept reaching out to touch him.

•  •  •

Meeting face-to-face opened doors. Within a month, Donesha and a friend stayed with Meriwether and me the night before a Lil Durk concert in Atlanta. No matter how poised and beautiful my granddaughter looks now, she told me that she grew up feeling like an outsider. Her friends didn’t have incarcerated fathers, and her mother wasn’t interested in fostering the father-daughter connection. Fortunately, Donnie’s older brother and his wife drove her to various prisons over the years to be with him.  

On the day of the concert Donesha and Alice slept late before launching into hours of primping. I’m not a girly-girl and was spellbound by their beauty rituals for skin and hair, their trying on and casting off of tiny tube tops. I realized that my granddaughter’s chin is shaped just like mine was at her age, though it looks better on her. When the fog of hairspray and perfume dispersed, they looked like an Essence fashion spread, wearing huge eyelashes and tiny bits of lace and spandex.

A massive floral arrangement arrived on Mother’s Day, an occasion I had ignored since my own mother died in 2017. I sent pictures to all my friends — my first Mother’s Day flowers.  

For the next year, Donnie and I wrote the occasional email but mostly stayed in touch using group texts with the adult kids. Donnie loves FaceTime, which I don’t, but I get a thrill every time I see his number come up. In my ’70s, I’m feeling what my friends felt decades ago when their children left home for college or work. They never call, they never write, my pals said. Now I get it.

That said, we’ve gotten braver about exploring each other’s worlds. Every summer I go to San Francisco to visit Kit, my friend who was in the delivery room when Donnie was born, and her husband, Peter. Effron Jr.’s 29th birthday was coming up on July 13, which seemed the perfect reason for a party. Kit and Peter offered their art-filled home as a venue, and I was worried because all I knew about my great-grandsons was that Eligh was 7 and Sáir not yet 3. What if they were hellion homewreckers? And what if the adults didn’t like sleeping on futons and inflatables?

Fortunately, Eligh Angel is a well-behaved boy with tawny Pre-Raphaelite hair that does indeed make him look angelic. Hair like Donnie had as a child. Sáir is a darker-skinned blur of motion waving a Hot Wheels toy. The images on my phone tell the tale: Effron manning the grill on the deck, his partner, Jayla, making amazing creamed corn at the stove, kids racing Matchbox cars in the hallway, Kit and Donnie in earnest conversation, tequila shots being tossed back, Peter watching cowboy movies with two exhausted little boys before everyone collapses – without complaint – on futons and inflatables.

The more we talked, the more we became like family. Donesha loves to cook. Effron was curious about the exotic succulents and cacti thriving on Kit and Peter’s deck. His son Eligh collects Dog Man books. Donesha’s son Sáir loves miniature cars and rocks, and has become a fan of Elephant and Piggie. I’ve always been a reader, and as a child I collected rocks; as an adult, I write, cook, and garden. So many revelations. So much laughing and eating. DNA may be more powerful than I thought.

The next day, I woke up early and was shocked to find Donnie and Effron out on the deck, counting push-ups and sit-ups. Theirs is not always the easiest relationship, but these two fully ripped men overcame my short and pudgy genes to spread their feathers in a timeless display of masculinity. I wrapped my hands around a coffee cup and shivered in the chilly air. They are so beautiful, I thought. 

Jayla prepared a huge breakfast for everyone, and afterward we hiked to Douglas Playground, a bald hilltop with a commanding view of San Francisco and the Bay. The morning was cloudless and blue, and we mugged for pictures. As we headed back to home base, little Sáir motioned for me to lean down. His big dark eyes locked on mine, and he handed me a smooth black river stone. Keep this, he said. 

•  •  •

Donnie had arrived at UC Santa Cruz not knowing how to save a file, turn a JPEG into a PDF, or analyze situations from a free person’s perspective. The Underground Scholars program saved him, and now he aspired to a career where he could help young people choose what he called “education over incarceration.”

Donnie is a slick talker, like me, and his media profile soared during his senior year in college. Every month or so, he sent me a link to a podcast where he’d spread his gospel. He had spent nearly half his life in a cell; now he was an honor student doing outreach to people in jails and prisons, inspiring them to see a way forward. In return, I sent articles about pathway programs in other places. We chatted on random occasions and holidays, and our rhythm seemed similar to those of other families.

In early April, Donnie called sounding more excited than I’d ever heard him. Cabrillo College, where he took courses during the pandemic, had just created his dream job:  coordinator for Rising Scholars, their version of the program that had helped him. He’d applied immediately.

Though Donnie’s experience made him perfect for the job, he worried that college administrators would want someone with more work experience, a graduate degree, or both. I told him that the best hire I ever made was the applicant with the fewest academic credentials but the most relevant life experience. Don’t assume, I said.

Two weeks later, a text arrived: “Hey, when you get a chance, can we talk? I have good news to share.”  

He had the job. My 51-year-old son was not headed toward an uncertain future as an ex-con with a college degree, but toward a position with health insurance, a retirement plan, and even a parking space. We were both ecstatic and probably just a little afraid, too. This struck me as the first step toward the life he wanted. The life his mother wanted for her son.

•  •  •

I saw Donnie rise up the escalator at Valley Fair Mall and step off into the food court, where I had asked him to meet me. To my dismay, he was wearing a white tank top, camouflage shorts and Crocs with socks – not the dark jeans and white shirt I had suggested. Shopping with Mom seemed new to him, but not me. My mother had taken me shopping for every milestone in my life.

I had determined in advance that Donnie did not own a blazer or sport jacket or jeans without fashionable rips and tears. He had bought himself some khakis and leather shoes, though, which was a start. I was totally unprepared for the bedlam in the men’s department of every store, where multiracial, multicultural family groups in various states of agitation fought to claim the perfect shirt, tie, or bathrobe. The next day was Father’s Day 2023.  

We covered three stores, and Donnie must have tried on 100 jackets over the next several hours. I smoothed shoulders, tugged lapels, and said “nope” over and over; we discussed Jacket A versus Jacket B with fellow shoppers and finally settled on a black blazer and a tan and blue sport coat. More trying on led to two pairs of black Calvin Klein jeans, versatile for work or play. 

Shopping and navigating the rental car through metro San Jose tired me out, and I was more than ready for a Maker’s on the rocks by the time we reached Donesha’s apartment and took our drinks to the pool. Many hours later, I perched on a barstool, picking ribs and corn cob out of my teeth and surrounded by friends of Donnie and Donesha. Everybody seemed cool with the white grandma sitting back while they took turns struggling with the new “some assembly required” chairs and table. I gamely tried to converse over a slow jam coming from the flat screen and the rap blaring from the cellphone sitting 2 feet from me. When no one was looking, I reached over and turned down the volume on the phone.

Around midnight, people started leaving “for the club” and Donesha said they assumed that Sáir, who had conked out after hours at the pool, could stay with me. “Grandma Pat don’t babysit,” I said, shortly before falling asleep on an inflatable.

The next day was Donnie’s graduation, but when I woke up, not a creature was stirring. Donnie snored peacefully on a pallet of blankets in the living room, and I could find no sign of a coffee pot or coffee. I showered and drove myself to the nearest Denny’s.

It was Father’s Day, and the place was slammed. Only because I was alone did I nab a seat at the counter. Donnie called with panic in his voice. Where ARE you? he asked.

Despite that rocky start, that very afternoon I stood on a sunny hilltop with hundreds of other sweaty parents and grandparents, looking out over Monterey Bay, cheering for our loved ones when their names were called and they crossed the stage. Donnie looked like a professor with his neat gray beard and gold spectacles, resplendent in his royal blue robe draped with shawls and cords signifying various honors. He was so proud.

Two days later, he started his job and stepped toward his future.

Those days of celebration still echo in my mind. I swipe through the dozens of pictures in my phone and linger on images of Graduation Day, the culmination of a dream for Donnie, and for me. A dream I didn’t know I had for 50 years.

 Looking back, though, the shopping trip is the memory I’ll always hold closest. I could not send my son into the world of work unless he was properly dressed. Any more than my own mother could have allowed him to leave the hospital without that blue layette.  ◊

Patricia Thomas is a journalist, author and editor who is a professor emerita at the University of Georgia and a mentor in UGA’s MFA program in narrative non-fiction writing. She left Florida for California in the Sixties and then lived in Atlanta and Boston while writing about science, health and medicine for general and professional readers. She’s been in Athens for nearly 20 years and loves farmers markets and gardening.