Lily Meade’s work has been published in Bustle and Teen Vogue and she has been featured in Romper, BuzzFeed, and Rolling Stone. Her debut YA speculative thriller, The Shadow Sister, is due from Sourcebooks Fire in June. Here, Meade reflects on her complicated family history, her identity as a biracial woman, and embracing all aspects of herself in her writing.
I’ve always wanted to know where I came from. Well, let me rephrase: I’ve always wanted to know where we come from. My parentage has never been a mystery. I know my mom and dad. I know they were deeply in love when I was conceived. I know I was wanted and welcomed—cherished. I have photographic evidence of it, even though my parents didn’t stay together.
I know where my mother came from. You could say that was easier for me to learn considering she raised me and my two younger brothers by herself after my father left when I was seven. It’s only natural that I would know more about her siblings and parents considering the majority of the extended family I interacted with growing up were from that maternal line. It makes sense that the anecdotes and bloodline gossip that got passed around the Thanksgiving table belonged to her.
My mother’s family never wanted to talk about my father or share stories about him. That sounds like a familiar broken-family story. If there’s an absent parent and a sense of being jilted, you don’t rub salt in the wound.
But the wound opened before my father ever left.
My father and his ancestral legacy would never have been a subject at the rural Montanan dinner table of my mother’s closest relatives, because he himself would probably have never been allowed. My father is Black. My mother is very, very white.
This is not a story about being stuck between two worlds as a biracial daughter. There are a million ways I could twist this essay, a dozen different diatribes I could take from my origin to paint it for wider consumption, but I can’t tell you any of those stories with absolute honesty because I don’t know them myself.
I won’t let you get it wrong—I am not lost at sea. I am confident in myself and my worth and pride in my Black identity. I am proud to be biracial, but I am not half anything. You cannot take my heritage test DNA results and break me apart to show exactly where each percentage point lines up.
It is because I am so passionate in the whole truth of who I am that I am furious at the history I have been denied.
I can trace my mother’s white lineage back to German royalty. It’s easy to find the first colonial settlers of several branches of her family tree, whether I’m following a matriarchal or patriarchal genealogy. Through her, I have an ancestor who has fought in every American war, including both sides of the Civil War. A several times great (in every sense except the positive) grandfather of mine willed his two favorite slaves to his son when he died, and sometimes when I’m feeling very petty, I think about how it must chill him in hell to know that I have sullied his glorious bloodline with my free negro blood.
I think about that ancestor of mine often because his record is all I have in written, concrete proof of slavery in my family line. He claimed ownership over at least two people. He took that in addition to every clear root in his family tree that tied him to his past, to the people he loved in his lifetime, and to his future—crawling all the way down to me, a great granddaughter he would have despised.
On my father’s side, I have my daddy. I have his parents and a slew of great aunts and uncles. I have my great grandparents. And that’s it. That’s where my family line ends. It’s not simply because he was absent from a large part of my childhood, though we reconnected in my early 20s. It’s because the records aren’t there. For every dozen documents electronically matched to my mother’s white relatives, there is one potential hint for my father’s side.
Taking a DNA test definitively proved that we came from Nigeria and that my family was most likely enslaved in Virginia and the Carolinas—where my father and his living relatives still reside to this day. But the only solid proof I have of where we might have been kept here is in my father’s surname: Cureton. It’s the name of a plantation and most likely the only thing our ancestor was given from their former master upon emancipation.
All I ever do is think about stories. I write young adult novels about real-world issues through an extraordinary lens, taking the things I can’t solve in real life and finding a way to overcome them. A way to empower my past self, even if only on paper.
I imagine and try to manifest my own happy ending as a coping mechanism for the frequent unfairness of life. I want to believe that every obstacle is just a plot problem I must solve to progress to the next chapter. Still, I get caught in empty threads that lead nowhere. I spend days desperately hoping my real-life issues would solve themselves like plot fixes in a revision often do.
Sometimes it feels like no matter how hard I try to rise above, I am destined to stay stuck on the ground, disappointing every soul that suffered before me. Like I’m trapped inside a story that has already been told.
I refuse to believe that. I know so much and so little about my history, but I’m a writer. If all that is available to me are the bare bones of a story, I’ll build the foundation myself.
In my debut novel, The Shadow Sister, I gave the Black Cureton legacy back every ounce of prosperity they built for others. I imagined that the labor demanded of them became a prosperous construction business that still exists to this day. The father of my protagonists is a historian who specializes in Black genealogy. He shares my passion for legacy, though he has much more to go on.
Of course, I ruin their charmed life before the opening of the novel even begins. After giving them everything I never had, I take their eldest daughter from them and give her back as a shattered reflection of every crack in their family that their perceived perfection couldn’t smother.
Try as you might, you can only build so high from a cracked foundation. I can’t rewrite history to avenge my ancestors, to make my living family or circumstances more fair and just. In the end, all we can do is embrace what made us and move forward—just like those who came before us.
This is a story about where we come from, and how we reclaim it for ourselves.
