The Women Who Raised Me Read online

  By 1847, many Darling descendants had put down stakes in various mainland cities, while Benjamin and other family members had relocated to nearby Malaga Island. In these years, many of the area islands had been settled unofficially by a variety of ethnic groups, including Africans fleeing slavery and persecution—which was why as many as five different isles in the area were each officially named Negro Island—Native Americans avoiding government interference in their lives, and seafarers and fishermen of European descent. Some islanders built dwellings for temporary use, to stash gear and goods; others waited out bad weather in the island caves; still others looked for refuge where they could evade authorities, taxes, census takers, and other contact from the mainland. Sometimes languages and customs of origin were preserved; sometimes they commingled. Medical care, education, religion, and burial were frequently handled in homes or communally.

  On Malaga Island, by the turn of the century, marriage between different races had resulted in something of an Afro-centered culture with a range of white, black, and biracial citizens, what was then termed a “maroon society.” Initially this was not a complete taboo, since mixed-race marriages had been legalized in Maine long before many other states. Moreover, the community of Malaga Island had kept contact with mainland towns, procuring work as masons and carpenters, traveling back and forth by boat for supplies and commerce and to attend church as regularly as the weather allowed—yet still keeping a separate identity. But in 1903, when a series of dismal harvests led to rampant malnutrition, the people of Malaga Island appealed to the town of Phippsburg to adopt the island and its inhabitants, especially their children.

  In Phippsburg, the nouveau riche, enjoying the town’s new acclaim as a favored vacation spot, raised their eyebrows, worrying that the specter of poverty and so-called illegitimate breeding might taint their upward mobility. Town officials pointed fingers at Harpswell, suggesting that the coastal city on the other side was better suited to adopt Malaga Island. When the state of Maine went ahead and granted ownership to Phippsburg, the summer people complained and the decision was reversed. Malaga Island, unclaimed, became the proverbial noman’s-land, in essence a ward of the state.

  Concerned citizens from across Maine tried to intervene. One philanthropist began the construction of a school. After visiting Malaga Island with his wife, Maine’s governor urged compassion and assistance. But newspapers like the Casco Bay Breeze in 1905, egged on by the land barons, fixated on the Benjamin Darling story and ran headlines calling the island the home of “Southern Negro blood” that marred a “spot of natural beauty in Casco Bay.” Most of the blacks on the island were already fourth-generation Mainers but the public was persuaded that a migration of African Americans from down South had turned it into a “salt water skid row” and that the “Scandal Island” that had diluted pure Anglo-Saxon blood could threaten “respectable” Maine communities. As always, rumors that managed to combine race and sex—like one old tale that local ship captains had returned with black Caribbean mistresses and had stashed them on the island for love trysts—were all the Puritan sensibilities needed to be pushed over the edge.

  The solution, proposed by the moneyed interests and not stopped by the state, was eviction. On a terrible night in 1912, without warning, a mob reputedly descended in boats upon the rockweed and poison ivy–covered beach of Malaga Island. Bearing torches, they broke through doors at every dwelling they found and dragged out all the islanders, estimated to be around sixty Malagaites, including men, women, and children, except for those untold few who managed to get away. Several island citizens were examined by a doctor who lacked legitimate credentials but who determined them to be mentally ill and incompetent. Without advocates or means of appeal, they were immediately committed to the Maine School for the Feeble Minded. The rest of the community was dispersed, sent to a handful of towns in Maine, but not offered any compensation or help. Their estrangement from the only family, language, and customs they had ever known was made worse by the Malaga stigma that followed them.

  The schoolhouse was rescued, and it is believed that a couple of escaped Malaga Island families were able to float their cabins on rafts to another island in the vicinity, but all other remaining buildings and artifacts were destroyed by officials during the eviction. Even their cemetery was dug up, with the remains of generations of island ancestors exhumed, then moved to the grounds of the Maine School for the Feeble Minded and buried in unmarked graves. In one fell swoop, all traces of their unique history, their civilization, their very existence were obliterated.

  A hundred years later, Maine has come a long way from the true scandal of Malaga Island, not only by acknowledging the wrongs that were done but by making sure that the wrongdoing is not forgotten or ever repeated. But during some of the interim, many of the attitudes stigmatizing mixed-race unions remained. Many antiquated and overtly racist laws on the books that would have otherwise been overturned were kept on, including those laws that forbade the adoption of African American or mixed-race children into white families.

  These laws were still in effect on May 10, 1959, when Dorothy Mabel Collins Rowell, unquestionably of 100 percent white Anglo-Saxon Protestant descent, arrived at Portland’s Mercy Hospital in the advanced stages of labor. The unidentified black man who accompanied Dorothy and attended my subsequent birth—making his only recorded appearance in my life as my father—set off a required hunt for prospective African American foster parents in the area. Besides the fact that there were not many black families in the state of Maine, then or later, there were further concerns that complicated the state’s attempt to place me in a home of color.

  Before returning to Gray, these particulars deserve their own mention.

  The reason the child welfare authorities sought a foster family in the first place comes from Dorothy’s history.

  Dorothy, Dottie, Dot, Dee Dee, Dorothy Mabel Collins. Of the five siblings, she was the family beauty, athletic, the adventurous one. Earthy, funny, rebellious, troublesome. Born on September 19, 1923, in Searsport, Maine—on the coast across the water from Castine, up near Bar Harbor—the daughter of Harry S. Collins and Mabel Bevan, Dorothy may not have exhibited any signs of mental illness until adolescence, and if it was noticed by her parents, it would have been handled clandestinely. I imagine if her parents had considered sending her away, they would have sought treatment at a private sanitarium, from which she would have been welcomed back into a loving home by her parents, her sisters Elizabeth, Edith, and Lillian, and her brother, Harry. Safe. Secure. But soon: boring and then stifling and finally oppressive.

  I could speculate that Elizabeth and Edith Collins each married to escape confinement in the stern, proper but chaotic household brought on by alcoholism, where eighteen-year-old Dorothy shied away from talk of money and status—themes that would dominate her own conversation in later years.

  World War II was on. Handsome, valiant men in uniform marched off to serve their country, strutting down sidewalks of small Maine towns toward Bath, where ironworks and shipyards supported a navy base and a major military installation for shipping out and returning from overseas. Soldiers on liberty congregated at local entertainment establishments, an intoxicating world for a pretty, vivacious young girl. But before anyone else could make their play for the New England beauty, Norman Rowell, a soft-spoken, good-natured man from a working-class background, turned her head and proposed marriage.

  By 1943, Dorothy became a new mother to a son, Norman Rowell Jr. Her baby was precious, healthy, perfect; her husband was devoted to her, and though they had little on which to get by, it seemed she was free of the conscripts of the past and free of the earlier disturbances. All was well: Family and home. Safe. Secure. But soon: boring, then stifling and even oppressive.

  In the nine years that followed, Dorothy stepped out, perhaps, then returned to the unconditionally loving arms of Norman. By 1952, she was pregnant again, this time with David. When he arrived, however, it was apparent by his
darker coloring and curly hair (later assumed to be of South American origins) that Norman Sr. may not be the father, although the question of paternity did not dim his love for Dorothy and did not deter him from wanting to raise David as his own.

  Norman Rowell Sr. begged Dorothy not to leave him after she asked for a divorce. She stayed on, trying to be the best mother that she could, loving both her sons, but again she became uneasy, fearful, distrustful. Soon she was gone.

  Norman was inconsolable. He would not understand until much later that his wife’s behavior had nothing to do with him.

  Dorothy received custody of Norman Jr. and David and then made her way to Brunswick, putting together enough money, by working at Bill’s Restaurant, Averbach Shoe Factory, and Bath Laundry, for an apartment, which was situated over a bar where soldiers on leave from the Korean War congregated. As it happened, Maine became home to many black soldiers. Enjoying their liberty while in Bath and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the men were dazzled by Dorothy’s pinup looks and quick wit. From time to time, she invited a number of the soldiers to her privately hosted after-hours soirees at her apartment, where a swinging time was to be had. The parties were interracial, inclusive, less about the drinking and smoking, more about the camaraderie and showing off moves to the music of Bobby Darin and Peggy Lee.

  Two more children followed—a daughter, Sheree, in 1956, whose father was Puerto Rican, and another daughter, Lori, in 1957, whose father was African American. Sheree and Lori were given the surname Rowell and raised in this lively atmosphere by Dorothy, much to the horror of onlookers and, no doubt, family members. Things were said. Warnings. In tight-jawed, flat-voweled Yankee undertones. “Carrying on with a child and two babies under the same roof, for shame!” The neighborhood whispered about the three colored children, passersby stared at the scarlet woman, or turned away, shaking their heads, clucking their tongues, and Dorothy could imagine what they were saying—“Why, it’s another Malaga Island, right here in Bath!”

  Maybe this was what tipped the scales with her schizophrenia, her paranoid beliefs, based on actual painful gossip, all starting to compete for control of her psyche. Maybe she needed the sex, that physical release to escape her voices, like an alcoholic needing to drink or a drug addict needing a fix to numb out the pain, with vast quantities of whatever. Dorothy needed to feel that click in her brain that let her feel peace, or nothingness.

  Another theory was that maybe Dorothy’s chemical imbalances were temporarily cured by the hormones of pregnancy, so that for nine months she was given a reprieve, a sense of joy and serenity, such that her drive to conceive and carry babies to term was innate, a function of her will to survive. To live.

  With this kind of drive, none of the warnings mattered, none of the gossip, not the fact that she was divorced without visible means of support, not even that local social welfare workers had been to see her on a landlady’s observation that she stayed inside for weeks to months at a time, not bathing herself or her children. Some had reported that the older child was a girl, based on how long his hair was. Learning of this state of affairs, Norman Rowell Sr. petitioned the court for custody, which Dorothy insisted she would fight. None of these particulars, nor her age of thirty-five, would prevent her from having another affair in the summer of 1958 with a dashing young black sailor.

  I want to believe that this man and Dorothy Collins Rowell had more than a passing lust for each other. Having been denied the experience of ever knowing my biological father—or any father for that matter—I feel that I am due the license to believe that I was conceived in love, that perhaps my mother and father listened to Lady Day sing “Moonlight in Vermont” as they embraced. If permitted to imagine myself present at the moment of my conception, hovering as a soul awaiting invitation into human form, I could say without a question that something greater than physical attraction between strangers is what summoned my being into this life. My proof was nothing more than a birth certificate acknowledging a man as father unknown. Why else would he have shown up at the hospital if there wasn’t more between them, some sort of relationship? Dorothy planned on marrying my father, just as she undoubtedly planned to marry the four daddies before mine. And maybe that could have happened, were it not for a bad sequence of events tied to my untimely arrival on Sunday, May 10, 1959.

  Dorothy had made no advance arrangements for going to the hospital, nor had she received prenatal care while carrying me. When her water broke, with no phone in the apartment, which she had not left for days, she struggled downstairs to the bar and used the pay phone to call a taxi to get her to the hospital. Dorothy didn’t ask a soul to watch her children, because there was nobody to ask to look after seven-year-old David, three-year-old Sheree, and two-year-old Lori. Besides, no one was trustworthy. There were no family members or friends she could count on. She didn’t want to risk her children getting hurt, molested, or stolen as children were every day by perfectly normal-looking people. She believed it was better to leave her children safely at home, get to the hospital, have me, and hurry back.

  Outside, a taxi arrived, its engine idling and horn honking, loud enough to interrupt the otherwise quiet Sunday afternoon.

  A few neighbors were drawn to watch the spectacle below as a frighteningly unkempt Dorothy struggled out of the building, wobbling on high heels, holding her swollen stomach with me inside while getting into the cab. This was when, significantly, the landlady wondered who was looking after the screaming children upstairs and decided to investigate.

  When Child Welfare Services arrived and found three hungry, unbathed, frightened children in a “deplorably filthy, cluttered home,” that was all it took for the wheels to be set into motion for Dorothy Collins Rowell to be prosecuted and ultimately found to be an unfit mother. The hospital report noted that Dorothy herself appeared so dirty and ill that the emergency ward put her into quarantine for my delivery. Norman Rowell Sr. was notified and came to rescue David at once, while Sheree and Lori were taken into custody by Child Welfare Services and transferred to an orphanage until a suitable Negro foster or adoptive family could be found for them. As for me, Dorothy’s newborn baby girl, there was to my knowledge never a chance that I would be allowed to go home with my mother. I lived for five days at Mercy Hospital, run by nuns, and was then transferred to the Holy Innocents Home orphanage on Mellen Street until an appropriate placement could be arranged for me.

  There was never a time when Dorothy stopped believing that she would have her girls back with her. It was now her driving force, her reason to live, and when she became pregnant again, with my younger brother, she did her mightiest to raise him on her own, despite some interruptions. But we three Rowell daughters were another story.

  Clearly, there weren’t easy answers in May 1959. The social service agencies serving the state of Maine recognized that they were going to be hard-pressed to find a Negro foster family willing to take in two toddlers and later a newborn. But they understood that it was likely to be just as difficult to find more than one African American home looking to foster or adopt. Perhaps this was why, after two weeks of searching, a social worker was forced to listen when a grandmotherly fifty-four-year-old married white woman from Gray, named Bertha C. Taylor, stood before her and said she was ideally suited as a prospective foster mother and strongly asserted that no justification on earth should stand in the way of an infant being placed in a loving, safe home.

  “But Mrs. Taylor…”

  In her unassuming manner, with her plain clothes and graying no-nonsense hairdo, Bertha stared out from behind her functional wire-rim spectacles with a steely-eyed intensity. She leaned forward in her sensible shoes, tapping the caseworker’s desk, and promised politely to drive to Augusta and speak to the governor himself. The social worker tried again to explain but to no avail.

  Bertha just didn’t see color; she saw only a baby in need of mothering. It was as simple as that.

  A series of rotary-dialed phone calls were launched that crissc
rossed the counties, not producing any answers for the very insistent prospective foster mother from Gray, until finally someone close to Governor Clinton A. Clauson, one of the four governors who served office in 1959, did indeed agree that as a temporary solution, the State of Maine would basically look the other way.

  Against this backdrop and these many machinations, Bertha C. Taylor was granted her wish to take me home on June 8, 1959. On September of that same year, my caseworker, Ms. Small, noted that administrative permission was being requested

  to place this little girl in adoption, as we believe that this particular child’s welfare can best be served by adoption in a negro or part-negro family. The mother, who is white, is willing to sign the courtesy consent but wants long-time boarding care in a negro foster home for this child…. It was suggested that she (Mrs. Rowell) seek legal advice which she did.

  Attorney I. Edward Cohen phoned me of his decision not to represent Mrs. Rowell as he believed our agency understood the situation and was making the best plan possible for this child. He seemed sympathetic of Mrs. Rowell’s problem but did believe it was our responsibility to make as good a plan as possible for these part-negro children of Mrs. Rowell’s.

  Mrs. Rowell is of the Protestant faith and Vicki should be placed in a Protestant adoptive home.

  Mr. Collins Taylor must have known that he was a lucky man to have married Miss Bertha C. Wing, originally of Montville, a small burg not far from Belfast, but he may not have known what to say on that day in the early 1940s when she asked him to come with her to see a piece of property in Gray that she had purchased with her savings and the remainder of her family inheritance.