I’ve been thinking about our late son, who learned who he was from two African tribes.
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
I’ve been thinking about our late son, who learned who he was from two African tribes.
When Jesse was a college junior, he told us he wanted to find his natural mother. So we handed him the file we’d developed when we adopted him twenty years earlier, and over the next several nights watched as he flipped through the pages of his personal history, filling in gaps in the stories we’d told him since we first talked with him about his adoption.
He was born Jesse Carlton in 1976 in L.A. County hospital. His biological father left three months into his mother’s pregnancy and never re-appeared. His young mother had been previously diagnosed with schizophrenia, but we persuaded ourselves that she was a misdiagnosed mid-seventies drug user, and then spent two decades praying that symptoms of schizophrenia would not appear.
They never did.
When he was three months old, his mother gave him up to the County’s child welfare services; he lived for the next two years in the foster care system until we adopted him when he was twenty-seven-months old. Becky was his fifth mother.
A blond whirlwind takes over center stage: our first Summer vacation with Jesse.
Our daughter was ten years old, our son eight when Jesse moved in. Integrating him into our family was more strenuous for us than we anticipated; it must have been significantly more difficult for him. Our kids were used to the food we ate and the portions we served; he hadn’t a clue about cottage cheese waffles or oven-cheese fondue. Still, he’d eat dinner until his little tummy was distended, go to the bathroom to throw up, then return to the table; it was as if he wanted to take in all he could for fear he might be sent packing soon again. They knew about church and school and where the park was; he was an oddball careening through a world with new venues and habits that baffled him. He brought a hyper-kinetic energy that disrupted our sedate existence.
Though we devoted ourselves to making him feel a part of us, there were ways in which he was an alien. Shannon and Brendan had our darker hair, brown eyes and an intellectual and verbal grammar they’d practiced since they were born. They knew our friends and their kids, who were our extended family; he was a stranger to everyone, and everyone was a stranger to him. Even as a little boy, blond and blue eyed Jesse had his own idiosyncratic styles of thinking and speaking and feeling, as if he’d collected bits and pieces from his biological parents and each of his foster families.
Shannon and Brendan make a safe laughing-place for him.
When he graduated from college, Jesse was accepted into the Peace Corps. We learned later from Michelle, the girlfriend who helped him fill out his application, that he wanted to get away from all of us, to find an isolated place where he could think about his own fragmented history.
How do you figure out who you are when your family of origin is simply a story you've read? How do you adapt when you wind up in a family who insists that they love you but have no idea what your inner world is like, who can't know your memories and fears as an abandoned baby and as a toddler passed from family to family? What if this fresh kind of love befuddles you?
Jesse Carlton (the name on his birth certificate), abandoned by both parents, one Jewish, the other a ghost long gone, blond and blue eyed, with a grammar and vernacular of his own. Adopted as a toddler and baptized JESSE PATRICK THYNE by Presbyterians with Scottish and Irish roots, later an acolyte in an Episcopal church.
Our early experiences of loving and understanding him were made awkward by his sometimes contrary disposition, probably a product of the contradictions roiling around in his growing mind. When Becky was upset with his siblings, they would hang their heads and tears would well up. When she was upset with Jesse, he would smile a plastic smile that she couldn’t interpret.
By his mid-teens, he was arguing with us that the death penalty was no big deal; eventually we’re all gonna die one way or another. This startled us, as we were again startled in that same period when he professed himself an atheist. I think now that he began to discover and re-define himself by going to great pains to demonstrate during his adolescence that he wasn’t like us.
The Peace Corps assigned him to Diountou (pronounced June-too), a rural village in the West African country of Guinea, at that time the sixth poorest country in the world. He and his Peace Corps companion were the first white people to ever spend time in this village. Diountou had no electricity, no running water; farmers, mostly the village women, tended vegetable gardens on the hillside above where corn and mangoes grew. These same women baked small loaves of bread early each morning, which villagers paid pennies for. Men gathered at village cafes, drank very dark coffee, smoked Marlboros, and argued about theology and politics.
A long afternoon break from the strain of village life: count the empty cans!
When he first arrived, the Peace Corps encouraged him to take on an African name. He settled on a first name: Abdoulai. But in deciding on a second, tribal name he ran headlong into the centuries-old division in Diountou between Diallos and Bahs. The two tribes have coexisted for a thousand years, but each retains strong pride in its distinct history and traditions and an inherited sense of superiority over their co-inhabitants.
In the month between his arrival and when he began teaching their children, members of each tribe lobbied him to take on its name: “You will be Abdoulai Diallo.” “You must be Abdoulai Bah.” For a month he and they lived with uncertainty until, on the day school began, Jesse resolved the dilemma: he created a new tribe. He announced to his students and their parents, “My name is Abdoulai Diallo Bah”.
They’re still a bit camera-shy: kids who’ve never had their picture taken with the first white man they’ve ever seen.
By the time Michelle, Becky and I arrived in Diountou a year after he settled there, this anomaly had morphed into routine. When we walked the village, whether on the Diallo slope or on the flats where Bahs live, everyone greeted him the same way: “Diallo Bah!” called the Diallos. “Diallo Bah!” hollered the Bahs, as they waved to us from the frail wooden porches of their tiny huts.
I’ve spent most of the past two decades thinking that, by taking on both tribal names, Jesse taught the Diallos and the Bahs to see past their divisions and live together more comfortably. But the truth is that these two tribes have lived relatively peacefully with these conflicting identities for a millennium: Jesse didn't change this.
Finding a comfortable home in a strange new place.
So now I think instead that these two tribes gave Jesse a model for understanding his own complex identity, figuring out what it means to be Jesse Carlton who became Jesse Thyne. He learned from them what the Diallos and Bahs had learned, to accept his incompatible stories rather than trying to resolve them into one sensible narrative.
Jesse died halfway through his second Peace Corps year on a road outside of Diountou, when a truck carrying day-laborers crashed into the bush-taxi he was riding in: bad road, dilapidated car, reckless driver. He lives in us still, day by day, this lost little boy who became a brave young man off on a search for himself.
The twelve-year-old on the left, Abdul, was at Jesse’s side every day. His Grandmother and two more of her grandchildren lived outside Jesse’s door.
I like to imagine that, by the end, he discovered who he was in the ambiguities and uncertainties of his own history.
That's what I've been thinking - what is your tribe?
Blessings,
– Rick