'Where are you from?' is a question I always find hard to answer. 1971: an ad in Nursery World.
'Private foster parents required for a three-month-old baby' - me. The
lucky applicants are a 57-year-old white woman and her daughter, who
love babies, especially black babies.
My mother arrives, a
haughty Nigerian woman in a convertible with a moses basket on the seat
beside her, setting the net curtains in this all-white council estate
twitching. And though the whole place makes my privileged mother's skin
crawl, she returns to London with an empty basket beside her, choosing
this home for me because, unusually for the estate, my foster mother
talks proper, and I'll need a posh white accent for the bright future I
have ahead of me.
I'll cling on to that idea - that I've a bright
future ahead of me - even though there's nothing in my upbringing to
warrant it. Even though my mother's love consists of long absences,
confusing behaviour and dauntingly high expectations. Even though my
foster mother's love is overwhelming and suffocating. Even though I seem
to be a magnet for abusive sexual attention from men I barely know.
Even though the authorities have no idea where to put me or where I
belong, and nor, really, do I. And even when I fall pregnant at eighteen
and find myself back in the rural town I'd tried to escape from, with a
tiny baby dependent on me, I still think the future's out there. I'll
find it, whatever it takes.
Precious is the story of
growing up black in a white community, of struggling to find an identity
that fits amid conflicting messages, of deciphering a childhood full of
secrets and dysfunction. Painfully honest, swerving from farce to
tragedy, Precious has a spirit that refuses to be crushed.
'Private foster parents required for a three-month-old baby' - me. The
lucky applicants are a 57-year-old white woman and her daughter, who
love babies, especially black babies.
My mother arrives, a
haughty Nigerian woman in a convertible with a moses basket on the seat
beside her, setting the net curtains in this all-white council estate
twitching. And though the whole place makes my privileged mother's skin
crawl, she returns to London with an empty basket beside her, choosing
this home for me because, unusually for the estate, my foster mother
talks proper, and I'll need a posh white accent for the bright future I
have ahead of me.
I'll cling on to that idea - that I've a bright
future ahead of me - even though there's nothing in my upbringing to
warrant it. Even though my mother's love consists of long absences,
confusing behaviour and dauntingly high expectations. Even though my
foster mother's love is overwhelming and suffocating. Even though I seem
to be a magnet for abusive sexual attention from men I barely know.
Even though the authorities have no idea where to put me or where I
belong, and nor, really, do I. And even when I fall pregnant at eighteen
and find myself back in the rural town I'd tried to escape from, with a
tiny baby dependent on me, I still think the future's out there. I'll
find it, whatever it takes.
Precious is the story of
growing up black in a white community, of struggling to find an identity
that fits amid conflicting messages, of deciphering a childhood full of
secrets and dysfunction. Painfully honest, swerving from farce to
tragedy, Precious has a spirit that refuses to be crushed.
