Dr. Maxine Bryant holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from Ball State University, a Master of Arts Degree from Saginaw Valley State University, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Human Services Degree from Walden University. At that time she was an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology, and the Director of the Center for Africana Studies and the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Center at Georgia Southern University. She has worn many hats in her life, as an academic, an award-winning faculty member, an award-winning columnist, a radio host, a published author and poet, a TedX speaker, and now she adds memoir writer to her long list of accomplishments. When she spoke at Activism in Adoption, she shared her life story in same-race domestic infant adoption, covering the pain of relinquishment for both birthparents and adoptees, as well as the challenges new adoptive parents may face, and when she mentioned that she and her biological siblings were writing a book about her adoption story, we could not wait to read it! Luckily, the wait is over, we got to read it (spoiler alert: it’s a must-read for everyone in the adoption constellation!), and we were able to sit down with Dr. Bryant to discuss it.
Something that makes your book so different from other adoption memoirs is that the telling of the story is shared between you, your biological sisters, and through your biological brother Charles’ personal writings. What is it like, writing a book with so many contributors?
It’s something I will never do again [laughs]. Because of my background in counseling, and my understanding of nature versus nurture, and the impact of environment and heredity, I knew I wanted to tell my story. But then, after I met my sisters and heard their stories, I thought it would be so much richer if I could interweave their stories with my own. I am a very systematic person, so I had them each write what they remembered, growing up: what they remembered about me, and what their own lives were like. My brother had been working on a memoir before he died, and his widow gave that to me, which covered his life up until the time he moved to Georgia, so I had his story, too.
The first thing I did, without any input from them, was to figure out in what kind of order this book needed to be. It’s chronological, starting with my birth, switching between what my two older sisters remembered, and then my brother Chuck’s memories. My sister Birdie was too young to remember that part of the story, so her voice isn’t in this section of the book much, but I did include what I had been told about my own life. Telling the story chronologically but going back and forth between everyone’s version showed some interesting patterns. For example, when we overlap our stories it turns out that, before I’d ever met them, I’d followed them to Michigan, and then to Georgia. Other patterns included having a knack for entertaining. My sisters were all singers, Victoria is a standup comedienne, and Chuck was quite the entertainer. I do spoken word poetry and I am now a cast member in an off-Broadway touring production.
There was some debate about how some of the events happened, because everyone’s memories didn’t line up exactly. Examples of this can be found with the planning of my birth mom’s funeral how the family was saved in the house fire. Going back and forth with them, listening to their recollections of events, was quite an interesting endeavor. Remember, I grew up an only child, so I didn’t know about sibling rivalry, or sibling dynamics, and I got baptized real quick with this book, trying to make sure there was balance in the storytelling.
Having my sisters as contributors also meant giving up some control of the project. This is my fourth book and I’ve always had total control of the content, the cover, the format, etc. Not so with this book – we went back and forth regarding the cover and even the name of the book. From the beginning I knew I would call it “Finding Peoples” (a play on our family name). Victoria and Birdie were the primary contributors for the subtitle: “A Family’s Journey Through Six Decades of Separation & Hope.”
How do you go from living an entire life as an only child to becoming part of a large family at 60? How do you step into their history?
It has been fun, but it has been challenging. It was our literary agent who came up with the idea for me to have short narrative introductions in between each section of the book that can step outside the story and add perspective about what is happening, and I thought that was ingenious. Victoria, and I think to a degree DeeDee too, but definitely Victoria, manifests some trauma connected to watching me being taken away from them. After we finally met, when I’d see Victoria, she’d always have to be right next to me – while I sat in the audience before going onstage to give me TedX Talk, when we took family photos, and when eating out with family/friends. I think that behavior/need to be right next to me must have been a residue from the trauma of seeing me taken away as a baby, and the underlying fear that I would disappear again. I think now she knows I’m a permanent fixture in their lives—she no longer exhibits that behavior.
As a culture, we are just starting to have real conversations about adoption trauma, but the trauma adoption causes biological siblings is just never discussed. Yours might be the first book to do just that, because it gives your biological siblings a voice and a platform to talk about how they experienced your adoption as children, how it impacted their lives going forward, and how they witnessed your parents go through it.
Every time I read DeeDee’s account of taking care of me after my birth, I shed a tear. Additionally, I can actually feel Victoria’s pain as she watched me being taken from the home. They were young and probably didn’t talk about that experience then—what they were feeling. I’m glad this project provided them the opportunity to think back and revisit how they felt. I’m grateful they were each able to talk about it.
It's heartbreaking for my mother to have made the choice, and then to have to live with the pain. She cried about it, and DeeDee remembered that although she cried about it, she wouldn't ever talk about it. Just could not talk about what happened to me. I'm thankful that my birthfather reached out to my adoptive family when I was six years old, and I got a chance to at least see him, and learn that I had siblings, and that I looked like my mother. Of course, I didn't know that for real until I saw her picture, and then, as I say in the book, I saw what he saw. When we talk about trauma, I think about my mother, who was ill after giving birth, and I believe that, knowing she was going to give me up, she did not let herself bond with me. As a result, I believe I suffer from a form of attachment disorder. It was my two older sisters who bonded, especially DeeDee, who loved on me so hard for the few months she had me with the family.
Your book does not shy away from telling any hard truths. Teenage drug and alcohol use, sex, pregnancy—you all talk about it all, no sugarcoating. Did you all talk about how bluntly honest you were all going to be, how deeply you might dive into difficult parts of your histories?
I am proud of my sisters for their forthrightness, and just kind of telling it like it was. Victoria and Birdie have always been forthright about their struggles with drugs. It was good for me to learn that, and it was good for me to learn about my parents and their alcoholism, because but by the grace of God, that would have been my story, too. I loved alcohol as a teenager, and did not know why, and didn't have the words to describe it. When my two children were approaching their teen years, all I could tell them was that we have a propensity towards addiction, and that we needed to watch that, be aware of it, and not get into drugs and alcohol. I had no idea why. Until I met my sisters, I had no idea that my family was just steeped in it; I just knew I liked it too much. And fortunately for me, as a teenager, when I realized I liked it too much, I put a limit on myself of two drinks. That's it. Two drinks. And had I not done that, my story would be so much different, and I don't even know if I would have the boldness and the courage, as my sister Birdie has now, to talk about it, and write about it.
My sisters all wrote their stories individually to me, without talking to each other. I got their stories separately, and then put them together in the book, and then sent it to them, and that's when they read each other's stories for the first time.
A few of your siblings were old enough to remember you as a baby in their family and witnessed you leaving. What was it like for you to read about their experience of losing you? That isn’t a perspective we ever hear about in adoption stories: the trauma of losing your sibling to adoption.
It was powerful, hearing the sentiments that were connected to having me, then seeing me leave. For DeeDee, her story was about how she was taking care of me, and nurturing me, and loving on me. Victoria remembers the voice of the man who took me away, which was my adoptive father. My adoptive father came to their house, and my mother was crying, and then he left with me, and Victoria witnessed all of it. And now, more than sixty years later, she was able to recall it with such accuracy, because it was seared into her brain.
We know more about childhood trauma now than we did back then. We know that at the time of a traumatic event in childhood, the brain of that child experiencing trauma changes physiologically, right? There is physiological change in the brain. For Victoria, the trauma was witnessing me leave with a stranger—bearing witness to the conversation, and then the separation—and for DeeDee, the trauma was loving and caring on this baby, and then suddenly the baby is just gone.
Trauma burns memories into us. When I would have been about two or three, my biological father stabbed my mother, and DeeDee and Victoria saw that, too. They tell almost the exact same story about that experience. That’s trauma, right? The other kids were too young to know what was going on, but my goodness! Those two, I cannot even imagine living the life they lived, you know, and I love their honesty, but hearing Victoria say that she wished she would have been adopted out, too – that she wished she had been taken away – that’s hard to hear.
Do you think it's hard for them to hear the differences in your childhood and theirs?
Perhaps—I don’t know for sure. Some of the differences are evident by choices that I've made, right? You know, going to college and then going all the way; not just undergrad, but a master's degree, and then a PhD, and the opportunities that I have had to travel to the extent that I have. Some of it is obvious, but some of it I intentionally don't share. I don’t talk a lot about my childhood with my adoptive parents, for example, the trips I took as a child. It appears they made regular trips to Cedar Point, while I was taking train rides to Seattle, flights to California to go to Disney Land, and road trips to Louisiana by way of Hot Springs. They didn’t have those kinds of vacation experiences as children, and I did. There are things about my childhood that I don’t talk to them about, because it makes the disparity that much greater, and talking about it serves no purpose.
What I will add here is that as adults, my sisters have all had opportunities to travel around the US and abroad, so that particular disparity is not as great any more.
The book is not an academic treatise, but rather, pure memoir and storytelling ,however, in the introduction to one section, you reference the work of Dr. Ruby Paine, whose research brought to light how generational poverty works and how hard it is to break through, and there is other research, complementary to hers, that has found that the damage trauma causes us can be carried through to the following generations through their DNA, as epigenetic scars. In some ways, reading your book is a kind of anthropological study of a very specific slice of American life at the intersection of poverty and systemic racism, and in the very early days of the Civil Rights movement.
I'm an academic, and when we started the process, I put a lot of thought into the philosophies of adoption, particularly adoption in Black families, but I didn’t want to write an academic book about my experience and then lose the personal meaning in the story. I didn’t want my family members to not be able to relate to it, but in telling my story, and my sisters’ and brothers’ stories, I wanted to sew some threads into a larger landscape where our stories can be understood with a sociological perspective.
There are so many aspects of our lives, particularly with Birdie and I, but also with all the sisters, that were so very similar. Chuck, too, because Chuck also started having sex at an early age. I know why that happened for all of them, but what is the explanation for me? Curiosity always plays a factor, but my upbringing was so very different than theirs, and yet, the propensity to alcohol, the exposure to sex so early, I also experienced that. Why were the men I chose to date, and marry, so much more like my biological father, rather than the man who raised and nurtured me? I believe that’s worthy of a sociological study, for real!
Did your adoptive parents talk to you about your adoption?
They told me I was adopted, and I think the only reason that came up is because my biological father, from what I have put together of the story, was getting ready to leave Indiana and move to Detroit, and I think he wanted to see me before he left. He must have reached out to them, and they agreed to the meeting, and we met, and that was it. After that we talked nothing about adoption. They told me I was adopted, I met my father, and nothing more was said until right before my mom died, when she gave me my birth certificate. I wish I still had a copy of that. I would have put it in the book. It read, "Infant Peoples" – that was how I was listed on the certificate, and that was overwhelming for me to know I didn't have a name. Infant Peoples. I was nobody. I was a baby without a name, and after finding my sisters, they told me that my mother called me Heretha. That she had given me a name. They wanted to know if I would let them call me Heretha, which was the name they knew me by, but I am Maxine. I don’t know Heretha.
Seeing that birth certificate made me feel so empty. I didn’t have a name. After the adoption, I had another birth certificate, and that one reads Maxine Taylor, but for the first three months of my life, I had no recorded name. To know that you were nameless? That’s hard. It was almost comforting to know my birthmother kind of had a name for me. Even I don't like it, she had a name for me.
You wrote the book with your biological family. How did your adoptive family feel about that?
In my adoptive family, I was an only child, but I have cousins, right? And one of them in particular had a real hard time with me finding my birth family, because it was like, are you going to reject us? We nurtured you. We grew up with you. We played with you. They didn't. I tried to navigate through that as gracefully as I could. I had to be deliberate and intentional about how I spoke and what I did. The cousin that struggled the most with my reunion with my birth family was a cousin on my adoptive mother’s side, and a cousin on my adoptive father’s side, who I am very, very close to, was just full of questions about this new-found family, but in a good way.
When I have gone up north to visit, I have reminded one cousin in particular, you all are still my cousins. I may have new family members, but that doesn't make you not my family anymore. It had just never happened in our family before, an adopted person finding their birth family, and of course they had to wonder, what does this mean for us? It’s a very weird place to be, being the common denominator to two families that do not know each other, having nothing in common with each other, except me
Your book really comes full circle, because it begins with you finding your birth family being on that side of the story and ends with you being part of a birth family that someone else finds as they are seeking answers about their own biological roots.
I had to include Anthony's story because it was important. It felt good to not be the only found person. He reached out to me first, and we have a good relationship, and he reached out to his other two aunts. Birdie and I have gone to visit him in his hometown. He reaches out to all of his aunts. He's come to Atlanta. He hasn't been to Savannah, yet, but he visits us, and recently, another person with the last name Peoples found Birdie’s daughter, and so that's on our father's side in Texas. That just happened, right before the book came out. The book was being printed when she reached out to us. I know I was joking about never writing a book with family again, but here we are and there may be another book to write!
To go from “I have a great idea for a book” to writing a book is a daunting task. What advice do you have for someone? How did you find your voice, how do you find the courage to be unflinchingly honest with it?
You can't allow shame about your experiences to inhibit your ability to talk about them. There was some shame connected to my adoption, because my adopted parents are so much older than me, and also because we did not look anything alike. I carried that shame, and I didn't know any other adopted children, which was also hard. All of my childhood playmates lived with their biological family. In order to get to a place where I could tell the story, I had to work past the shame, and that meant I had to have some conversations with myself. I didn't have counseling about that, although I think that an adoptee should be willing to have counseling or to engage in counseling to work through any of those kind of issues. I didn't need counseling for that, but I had to come to grips with acknowledging the shame, then putting it where it needed to be. I worked through it, thinking, okay, yeah, this is how I feel, this is why I feel, and this is why I'm not going to allow it to paralyze me. That was important in my own maturation and growth, to be able to tell my story. I think adoptees need to recognize that we do have voices, and our voice matters. It matters in both families. It matters to the birth family as well as to the adoptive family.
Can you tell us a little bit about Griot Speaks?
The name of my business is B.E.S.T: Bryant, Educational Seminars and Training. I facilitate training workshops, give keynote speeches. In January of this year, I was at Birdie’s house in Atlanta, and as I was awakening out of sleep, the name GriotSpeaks just dropped into my mind. I do a lot of Africa-centric educating, so I was very familiar with the Griot, the title of the village history keeper in Africa. I saw ways of teaching Black history in new ways, and one of them was an educational series, taught online to make it accessible to everyone.
I developed educational modules for it, because I'm a trainer, I'm a teacher. Module One addresses the greatness of Africa, because so many times in the way our history is told, it begins with enslavement, but our history is so much more than that. I go all the way back to Africa and educate people about the greatness of the Kingdoms of Africa, the Kings and Queens of Africa, and remind us of the greatness and genius that existed prior to slavery. Module Two is a deep dive into captivity and the resistance of Black people, to captivity and enslavement.
I have been to Africa at least five times, and one day found myself having a conversation with a young woman who asked me why I keep going back. In her mind, if those people had resisted more, fought harder, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in today. I wanted to make sure that Black people learned their true history, and about the resistance and fight African people put up.
Module Three is coming up in October, and it covers the truth about enslavement, and what the life of an enslaved person was. After that, Module Four is about teaching people to bring out the genius within themselves. Each module is four weeks in length, and we meet one hour a week. Participants ask for it to be more – they get so much out of it.
Griot Speaks is for adults who were not taught this information in schools as children. If Black children were taught the truth about their greatness and the genius within them, genius that contributed to not only American history, but world history, we can raise up in ourselves the sense of pride they deserve.
“Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero.”
Dr. Maxine Bryant’s memoir, Finding Peoples, A Family’s Journey Through Six Decades of Separation and Hope, is now available. Don't miss her previous books, I Want My Groove Back....God's Way, The Truth be Told, and Heart Notes. Visit the Griot Speaks website for more information about her online educational series. You can also find her online on Instagram, Facebook (one) and (two), and LinkedIn. To learn more about her work, watch her TedX talk, listen to her on The Osiris Munir Show or The Somewhere In the Middle Podcast, or her interview at Savannah Now.
