Tell My Story

This project began when I met my biological grandmother and she asked me to write her story, which I understood to be a story about surrendering a child for adoption in 1946, my father.

I crafted what I thought was a suitable response, a story about how she was the youngest daughter of an evangelical minister at the end of WWII, a nurse who met a sailor.  She said she was in love.  He said they would marry.  She became pregnant.  She told me she had written to him at the naval base and that the letter was returned unopened, marked "Return to Sender, Deceased".  She said she destroyed the letter.

At the time, I figured that was the end of the story, at least from her perspective.  How sad that we didn't have that envelope because I might have been able to find out more about the man if I had that information.  His name, according to her, was Charles Johnson, Johnson being the most common last name in this state.  

I spent a lot of time looking for a Charles Johnson who was stationed at that naval base during the time of the conception event.  I contacted the base museum, which explained that records from that era had been transferred to the archives.  So I visited the archives, paging through duty books describing everyone who reported to base, who had been injured or killed, during the months around the time of conception.  No one named Charles Johnson, Chuck, Carl, Jansen, Johnsen, Johnston, or Johansen, was injured or killed on or off base during those months.  

I studied the social security death index and found 66 people with names like Charles Johnson who died during that time and contacted the Military Personnel Records office in St Louis to inquire: "which of these GIs is my grandpa?"  The clerk on the other end of the line flustered; that's not the way this works.

Can you imagine if every GI-spawned kid around the planet could use US military records to confirm paternity?  Commercially available DNA tests were not yet available, nor were websites like family tree DNA, 23andMe, and ancestry.com.  DNA is what eventually revealed the identity of the biological father, whose name is not Charles Johnson.

I realized then that the story was related to legitimacy, and the kinds of questions I was asking were making people uncomfortable in a way I did not yet have language for.

Legitimacy as a Concept Two Ways:  Family Law definitions and Political definitions

I dove into the concept of legitimacy first from the perspective of family law, as in a child born to parents who are married to each other, the "problem" allegedly being solved by plenary adoption, the type of adoption which erases the legal name, family history and associated statuses to be replaced by a new birth certificate with adoptive parents' names in the places where biological parents' names would be.  This fiction replaces the names and relations of the biological family, presumably to protect someone from shame.  It also protects the institutions which run on shame, namely churches like the one my grandma's family were deeply entwined with.  Church records in Germany/Prussia recorded marriages and baptisms, the first text records substantiating claims to legitimacy for a population emerging from illiteracy to reliance on the recorded word.  The Gutenberg bible enabled the spread of Christianity and the coloniality and centralizing authority of empire and its enforcers.  Individual churches created/recreated the idea of legitimate birth by inscribing patronymic names into their books.  Her grandfather was the first to use a "son of" name (Nommensen, or son of Nommen) as a permanent patronym for his family line rather than just taking his place in a long line of sons of.  He was not only a son, but the patriarch who grants legitimacy to his sons and assures the virginity of his chattel daughters. It turns out the impregnator's family was deeply entwined with a legitimacy-oriented church as well, which may have contributed to his abandonment of a pregnant woman.  To preserve the "legitimacy" of the biological father's family, it was necessary to walk away from the situation he created, to let her deal with the consequences, denying "legitimacy" to the child conceived, and forcing the mother to navigate the narrow slit of options available to unmarried pregnant women in 1946.  Three million US women found themselves in this situation in the years following WW2.  Upon reviewing more of my family history, I discovered other women who were forced to deal with the consequences of men stepping out on women they impregnated pregnant, creating so-called "broken families."

The second definition of legitimacy pertains to legality and comprehensibility.  Both definitions can restrict one's rights: children whose fathers did not claim them were ineligible for public benefits, a crisis which led to the church's role in legitimizing offspring and presumably shaming men into taking economic responsibility for the children they create along with the women made dependent by the male-headed nuclear family model.  This male-headed nuclear family model posits that only men may hold title and be citizens, may "own things", and in the context of Germany/Prussia Lutherans, was exclusive to people outside of this closed religious group, explicitly excluding Jewish people, as well as anyone outside of the emerging narrow construct of whiteness.  Beyond this sense of legality is also the idea of "realness" and "believability," as in the usage of legitimate to describe a project, program, government, or argument.  This ontological sense of legitimacy, a negotiated shared agreement of whether something or someone is valid, is the language I didn't have earlier to describe how adoption creates alienation, separation and discomfort.  This sense of legitimacy helps me think about who is legitimized by structures of gender and other differences which create power differentials.  People who are not legitimized in this sense simply do not count, do not matter, are not recognized as "people."  Examples include everyone whose belonging is contingent, exceptional, revokable: women and gender non-conforming people, people classified as non-white, people with perceived disabilities, people lacking papers which "legitimize" them, ie, "illegals."  This sense of legitimacy is what makes it possible to believe that we are not accountable to others, that some people are not related to me and so I have no responsibility to be "my brother's keeper."  It is what makes it possible to deny humanity to others who are suffering, what makes it possible to look away rather than act, to blame victims for behaviors perpetrated by those seen as legitimate who get the benefit of the doubt because maybe he had a good reason to victimize.  Michel Foucault and Judith Butler describe a grid or matrix of intelligibility as the way one is recognizable in a society, and when one is unrecognizable one is unseeable.  This sense of legitimacy requires being recognized on one or the other side of the binary of legitimacy, with a ruling of deligitimacy leading to a dismissal and invisibility.  Part of what makes it difficult to change hearts and minds with regards to seeing diverse people as people is that people cannot see what they are not prepared to see, and some of people's sense of their own legitimacy is tied to denying that same legitimacy to others.

Like many white-identifying people, I have begun wrestling with my relation to whiteness and white supremacy, how the privileges afforded to whiteness and white adjacency, to "passing," to presumed bona fides in a so-called master race have shaped my life, my education, my opportunities, my health outcomes, my present material conditions. How do I tell the stories of my relatives who were/are Nazi-sympathizers as well as those who proudly supported Hitler?  Of those Berlin-based cousins who survived the Second World War and who were certainly complicit in the holocaust if not active participants?  Of those ministers who used their power in the community to tacitly and explicitly endorse white and male supremacy?  These stories are my way to make sense of how I am situated in these realities as well as what we might do now to challenge the legitimacy claims posited by my ancestors to imagine new ways of legitimizing ourselves and our relations to each other.

At first I thought I was writing grandma Dorothy's story about how she surrendered her baby "Surrender Dorothy!" but then I realized I needed to look more deeply, to ask questions about whose stories matter, and how these stories shape what we think of ourselves, and what we believe to be possible for the future.  It is time to recognize that male-centric churches and the powers they grant to men create secrecy and the conditions for abuse.  The church creates the conditions for people to choose to abandon their responsibilities in order to present as respectable, legitimate.  They create the conditions for innocent children to be seen as illegitimate and unworthy, ineligible for the conditions to survive and thrive.

The Plantation Mindset

Others have written about the social and economic system of The Plantation, the framework for wealth creation in what has become the United States.  I mention it here because we have many examples of a Plantation owner, white-passing and male, who creates sons and daughters with multiple women.  If the child is male, light-skinned, and born of his wedded wife, he may be heir to property, title, education, opportunity.  If the child is borne by someone other than his wife, an enslaved person, that child may be considered chattel property, creating the conditions for an heir to "own" his brothers and sisters, the conditions of alienation and separation necessary to enact the cruelties of delegitimization.  US legal history includes this idea of children inheriting their racial status from the mother for this reason.

White women have a long history of "Karening" or policing the margins of race and gender, whether as delivery room nurses making sure birth certificates record and enscript what is whispered in delivery rooms, the race of "white" as a marker, or as teachers and other community leaders sorting people into categories of deserving and undeserving.

The 1619 Project helps us see US history from the perspective of the decisions made in 1619 which determined the emerging binary of whiteness and non-whiteness, and which created the conditions of lifelong enslavement rather than temporary indentured servitude.  Prior to the year 1619, people of all skin tones who served as servants, sometimes to pay for passage to the new world, could eventually become free after an agreed period of time.  The concept of hypodescent, essential to create the racial caste system in the US, means that children born of enslaved women would retain their mothers' status, rather than the fathers' status.

The Doctrine of Discovery, an argument originating with the Catholic Church which legitimized the idea that non-Christians were not human and therefore could have their lands seized, their people genocided, was retracted in 2023 by the current pope.  US real estate law used this argument centuries ago to decide that Indigenous people could not legally own land.  Its retraction offers radical reimagining possibilities for all real estate transactions which used it as precedent.

Milwaukee, City of Immigrants and Refugees

There is a German word, Gemütlichkeit, which translates to a kind of cheery hospitality, a welcoming spirit, which one can experience in beer halls and polka parlors, especially in the autumn during Oktoberfest festivals.  I know that my German and Prussian ancestors loved their beer and were proud to welcome and be gracious to newcomers when they came from the same provinces and church relations in the old country.  Some of these ancestors were church leaders in the mid-1800s in what would become the state of Wisconsin.  In 1850 Lutherans in this part of the world experienced a schism based on hospitality: while many church members were abolitionists and welcomed Black people fleeing racial persecution, some were not sympathetic to these refugees.  They formed what is now called the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, and their political power in 2023 includes state and federal politicians who continue to espouse racist ideology, white Christian nationalism and denial of the outcome of the 2020 election.  Their church schools are the fourth largest private school system in the US.  In 2023 these schools are still explicitly male-supremacist: women are not allowed to be principals, for instance, because it is not allowed for a woman to countermand a male teacher as his supervisor.  They believe women must always defer to men.

I am the illegitimate heir of this illegitimate church, and as such I have a birthright to demand new kinds of hospitality. The city of Milwaukee is already home to many refugee communities.  While the definition of refugee used here is narrow, Milwaukee is already receiving displaced persons, people seeking refugee, due to extreme weather and climate change.  My vision is that we do a better job of welcoming our diverse kin than my ancestors did a century ago.

There are two concepts: religious trauma and spiritual abuse.  Religious trauma is what is experienced by an individual in a spiritually abusive situation.  Spiritual abuse includes the conditions of secrecy, coercion and gaslighting which are used to control and manipulate someone in the context of religion.  I am still learning language to describe how I have been impacted by this church and wish to create a pathway for others like me to reimagine how to live in spiritual community without the pain enacted by these churches which sow division, which create illegitimacy, alienation and separation.  My vision is that gender should not hurt, should not be used to hurt people, to coerce people, to manipulate.  My vision is that binaries which enact power based on difference (racialized, gendered) be troubled, that we name when these binaries cause harm and that we do what we can to reduce harm.  I am not alone in recognizing that a church has done real harm to me and to people I love.  As others begin to realize their situation, I pray they find ways to heal and make new worlds possible.