Dr Kelly Fleming

I have written a lot about being adopted, life as a Disabled person and my faith.

I want to share a little more about myself.

Having been put up for adoption, there was very little background on my biological family in the file and it only included my birth mother’s information.

I met my biological parents about 25 years ago. I felt an immediate connection with my birth father. I really couldn’t explain why I felt a strong connection with him. He was a lovely man, may his memory be eternal.

I have always felt I didn’t belong. When I was young, I thought it was because I was adopted. I loved my parents and I had a good life. I was loved and I had all the medical care I needed. I had food, a home and although we didn’t have a lot of money, I never lacked anything I needed.

I thought once I met my biological family, the “I don’t belong” feeling would dissipate. It didn’t and I did not understand why. I thought I had finally found answers to my questions. What I found out was a lot about my maternal history. My birth father really didn’t say much about his family. I knew he was a carpenter and where he had grown up (a nearby town). That is all I knew.

After taking a DNA test a while back, I discovered that my birth father’s maternal family are descendants of slaves. My DNA shows my African ancestors come from 9 different countries in Africa.

With some research, I have found that my 3rd and 4th grandmothers were born into slavery in Ontario, Canada. My 5th grandmother was a slave bought in New York State and brought to Canada by a loyalist as his domestic (they really tried to avoid using the word slave to separate themselves from the “terrible institution of slavery in the United States”. Yes, indeed it was a terrible institution, but by avoiding the word slave when loyalists came to Ontario, they were trying to justify their own ownership of slaves by calling them domestics and farm hands.

A part of Canadian history that is well covered up.

As I have discovered more about my paternal grandmother and her life, seen her picture, the more I feel that I’ve found where I belong.

She had light brown skin, a beautiful smile and hair that looked like mine! She had a very difficult life. I understand why she “passed” as white and married a white man.

I have a friend who is an immigrant from Africa and she has been so helpful to me in embracing who I am. I asked her today, “is it wrong of me to feel that I’m black, even though my skin is light”? She said, “no, you are black.”

That “small” yet vital piece of information that was left out of my biological history when I was put up for adoption has changed my world.

Social services knew who my birth father was but wrote down “unknown” in the paperwork.

I have done a lot of thinking about this.

I was considered “non-adoptable” because I was disabled. I was adopted in a city that was 99.9% white. Imagine if they had included “by the way, this child, although light-skinned is also black”? Of course it would not have been worded that way. However, ethnicity is included in my adoption papers. If they had listed my birth father’s name, they also may have included biracial. That would not have found many prospective parents for a child who was already on the list of non-adoptable.

Honestly, all my life, I felt that my skin colour did not match me for some reason. I did not understand why I only tanned and never sunburned. My hair was my worst nightmare. Everyone has something about their body they may not like. I like my body, I’ve always been comfortable with it. My hair? Not so much.

Brushing my hair has been a painful experience for me all my life. When I would go to a salon with my Mum and flip through the pages of hair styles, I remember saying so many times “I want this one”. Mum would shake her head and tell me no, my hair couldn’t make that hair style.

I was raised as a white kid in a white town. Sure I looked like others by my skin tone but my hair was always tied back. I couldn’t have the same fashion cuts as my friends. If my hair was short, it looked awful. Mum would spend so much time trying to untangle it and use a curling iron to try to make it not stick out everywhere.

Ultimately I just ended up mostly having long hair that took hours every week to get the knots out of it and braid it or put it in a pony tail and spend an hour every night trying to untangle the knots.

After all these years, a mystery has been solved. I have watched interviews with other descendants of black Canadian slaves and they too are often light-skinned like me.

So here I am. I know I am not alone and especially here in Canada, there are many of us who are light-skinned black people. Descendants of black Canadian slaves brought from the United States following the American Revolution.