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  “Or you could get him some blocks or a picture book,” I suggested. “Ezra likes the same things all one-year-olds like.”

  Grandma Schertel and her husband were extreme in their views, particularly when it came to race and religion. Unlike Larry’s parents, who had come to religion late, now belonged to the relatively sedate Church of God, and were fairly tepid in their religious expression, Ruthanne’s parents, Rupert and Dorcas Schertel, embraced a radical faith tradition that was almost Taliban-like in its intensity. Grandpa Schertel, who’d emigrated from Germany to the United States when he was nineteen and held very Eurocentric views about race, was particularly austere. He prayed on his knees for an hour every day. His go-to breakfast was shredded carrots and cabbage, served raw. After eating, he would retreat to his immaculately clean garage where he kept his tools, all carefully labeled and organized in rows, and spend the rest of the day in solitude. He rarely showed any emotion, so his reaction when he first found out that Ezra wasn’t white was as shocking as it was telling.

  The man cried.

  That these were tears of sadness, not joy, was clear to me, but no one else seemed to pick up on it or be bothered by it.

  “Maybe he’s not Black,” Ruthanne suggested, pointing to his skin, which was pale, and his hair, which was only slightly curled. “I think he might be Jewish. I’ve always prayed I’d have a son of Zion.”

  Grandpa Schertel remained inconsolable. After being introduced to Ezra, he apparently started getting up at five in the morning every day to pray for the strength to accept Ezra as his grandchild.

  The Schertels only lived a half-hour drive away, and we always spent Christmas Eve with them at their house, along with Ruthanne’s siblings and their spouses and children. Grandpa Schertel would read the Christmas story passage from the Gospel of Luke, and Grandma Schertel would float around the house, tending to grandbabies, making sure everyone ate too much food, and shouting, “Praise Jesus!” or “Hallelujah!” even when it made absolutely no sense in the context of what was going on.

  Even though they lived, by Montana standards, just down the road from us, the Schertels almost never came to our house for holiday gatherings—or any other occasion for that matter. We invited them to Christmas dinner every year but grew so used to their inevitable absence that it no longer became noteworthy enough to discuss, and the first Christmas Ezra spent with us was no different.

  Grandma and Grandpa Doležal, on the other hand, never missed a single Christmas dinner at our house, and they always arrived first, bringing with them holiday treats like olives, pickles, and sparkling apple cider. Despite Grandma Doležal’s apparent disdain for children and the germs they carried and the messes they made—she’d made hers strip down and get hosed off before entering the house every time they played outside—she’d raised two others, besides Larry.

  Her son, my Uncle Dan, usually came to our Christmas dinners, but this year he opted to spend the holiday in Idaho with Vern, his longtime partner, and Vern’s family. To me, Vern was “Uncle” Vern, but we weren’t allowed to refer to him that way in front of Larry and Ruthanne. I can’t say that anyone in my extended family had a very healthy reaction to Dan and Vern’s homosexuality. Some family members insisted that they were “just roommates,” while others openly referred to them as “the sodomites.” No wonder Dan always came to our holiday gatherings alone, if he came at all.

  Larry’s sister JoAnn wasn’t held in a much better light. She’d married an abusive man when she was young and religious, then committed one of the worst sins imaginable by divorcing him. Compounding her wickedness, she refused to remarry until she was past her childbearing years and chose a man she’d only known for a couple of years. Rumors circulated within our family that she was now an atheist. It always gave me a nervous thrill to open my eyes while prayers were being said before our holiday meals and catch her looking around the table.

  There were certain unwritten rules we had to follow whenever we had guests. Men and boys were rarely allowed in the kitchen. Josh was in charge of chopping wood and inserting leaves into the dining room table. I was responsible for vacuuming, dusting, cleaning the bathrooms, setting out our sturdy and practical dinnerware, helping to cook the meal, and cleaning up afterward. Larry always took it upon himself to say grace and read an entire chapter of Scripture from his Amplified King James Bible, which provides the definitions of certain words as well as commentary, making each chapter twice as long as it normally would be. Only after he was done reading were we permitted to pass the food around the table, and Larry always served himself first.

  The passage Larry read this year seemed particularly long, and while he was droning on and on, the food we’d spent all day cooking—elk steaks, roasted potato wedges, green beans, and homemade rolls—was growing cold. At one point, I observed Aunt JoAnn picking at the olive and pickle tray in quiet protest and passing little bites of food to Ezra, who was sitting next to her in his high chair. When it became clear after Larry had finished that Ezra wasn’t interested in his food, JoAnn scooped him out of his high chair and put him in his walker, and he happily scooted around the dining room and into the kitchen as the adults started passing the plates of now lukewarm food around the table.

  We were having forced conversations about school, the current road conditions, and hunting season, when Ruthanne suddenly cried, “Where’s Ezra?!”

  Both of us shot up from the table and ran around the corner to the top of the stairs—the same stairs I’d fallen down when I was a one-year-old!—to find Ezra approaching the edge of the top step in his walker. At some point, Larry had gotten up from the table to stoke the woodstove in the basement, our house’s sole source of heat, and when he returned to the table, he’d left the door to the stairs open so the rising heat could fill the rest of the house. Ruthanne and I arrived just in time to see Ezra lurch forward over the lip of the top step. She lunged to grab hold of him, but she was too late. He disappeared from sight. I ran after him, but only succeeded in getting a better view of him flipping head over heels down the thinly carpeted steps, his head hitting the stairs one, two, three times, before he came to rest on the thin linoleum now covering the basement’s concrete floor. He landed face down, just inches from where I’d fallen as a toddler.

  The wheels of his upturned walker continued to spin long after his body had come to rest. I braced myself in preparation of him screaming, but he remained silent and that was much worse. He was so quiet and unresponsive I thought he might be dead. Ruthanne and I bounded down the stairs, taking two and three at a time, and, after reaching him, turned him right side up and worked frantically to unbuckle his seatbelt and remove him from the walker. His body was limp. His eyes had rolled back in their sockets. Ruthanne held him up and lightly slapped his cheeks to no avail.

  “Ezra!” I shouted, patting his leg. “Ezra?”

  Ruthanne started speaking in tongues. As she held Ezra’s body and stared into his eyes, she would occasionally shout, “Praise Jesus!” or “Hallelujah!” or “Life for this baby!” Everything else that came out of her mouth was pure gibberish. I don’t remember putting my shoes on or climbing into the car, but soon Larry, Ruthanne, Ezra, and I were whizzing down the highway driving 85 mph on our way to the hospital in Libby. Maybe if I’d been male and only half conscious, I would have received the same treatment after I’d fallen down those stairs fourteen years before.

  Unlike his wife, Larry was always eerily calm in a crisis, but I was terrified. Ezra remained unresponsive during the long ride to the hospital, and all I could do was hold his small hand in mine as tears streamed down my cheeks. I was petrified that this wide-eyed baby who I loved so much was never going to walk or talk ever again.

  When we arrived at the emergency room, Ezra was whisked through the automatic doors and engulfed in a scrum of doctors and nurses. After an hour or two, we finally got the news: everything, thank God, was going to be okay. Ezra had a concussion but no broken bones or other significant injur
ies, a surprisingly fortunate outcome for such a brutal fall. He fully recovered from the head injury, but stopped growing for an entire year following the accident. On his second birthday he was the same size he’d been on his first.

  After that night I felt like Ezra and I shared a special, albeit horrifying, bond. We’d both taken nasty falls, we’d both survived, and we’d both learned a painful lesson: in the Doležal family, you couldn’t always count on your parents to keep you safe.

  Chapter Nine

  Separate but Equal

  SOON AFTER EZRA’S FIRST BIRTHDAY, an adoption agency in Chicago called Larry and Ruthanne to inform them that there was a good chance a baby would be available in June. The mother and father were both Black, and the mother had hoped to place her baby with a Black family, but once she discovered that the only Black families looking to adopt at that time were looking for a girl, she loosened up her criteria, allowing the Doležals to adopt Antwon Dante’. In accordance with the guidelines set by Larry, we renamed him Izaiah Allen. He was born June 11, 1994, and two weeks later Larry and Ruthanne drove to Chicago to pick him up, while I stayed home and took care of Ezra.

  When Izaiah was six months old, Ezra contracted whooping cough. Because the disease was so contagious and carried such a high infant mortality rate, and none of us were immunized thanks to Larry and Ruthanne’s distrust of vaccinations, someone had to be quarantined with Izaiah. With Ruthanne focused on Ezra’s recovery, the task fell to me. The only time I ventured out of my bedroom was to use the bathroom and prepare bottles of formula for Izaiah, and whenever I did, I’d walk on bedsheets to avoid touching the carpet, which was difficult to sanitize, and always made sure to thoroughly wash my hands. Izaiah and I lived together in my room for more than a month, so long I began to lose track of the days of the week, and it was during this time that I began to form a deep and lasting bond with him.

  When Izaiah was nine months old, we got a call from a couple who’d been doing missionary work in Haiti and had returned to the United States with a baby roughly Izaiah’s age. The baby’s exact birthdate was a bit of a mystery because he’d been left on the doorstep of a hospital one morning, forcing the doctors to guess his age from studying what remained of his umbilical cord. Did Larry and Ruthanne want him? Certainly! His name was Joshua Alexander, but any possibility of confusing him with my older brother was cleared up after we changed his name to Zachariah Amoz, soon to be shortened to Zach. He arrived with eyes full of wonderment, a persistently runny nose, and lots and lots of energy.

  Larry and Ruthanne had planned to stop adopting babies after they’d taken in three. But the very same day that the missionary couple introduced Zach to our family—they were actually sitting on our couch at the time—an adoption agency in St. Louis, Missouri, called to let us know that a female baby was available. Baby Grace had been abandoned at a hospital and placed in temporary care after two prospective families had backed out at the last minute. One of the families thought the hospital bills they were being asked to pay were way too high; the other worried that the baby’s dark complexion made her a bad fit for their lighter-skinned Black family. Larry and Ruthanne expressed no such reservations.

  Names for women that contain a “z” are scarce in the Bible. Larry wanted to name the baby Ezther, but I lobbied to make the name more palatable to the eyes and ears. Approving my suggestion, he and Ruthanne named her Esther Ahava, which means “beloved star.” Larry and Ruthanne often referred to her as the “icing on the cake,” the one girl amid three boys and the final piece of the puzzle that, now solved, ensured they wouldn’t be paying taxes anytime soon. In eleven hectic months, Larry and Ruthanne had adopted three babies, all born within eight months of each other. Only the parents and siblings of quadruplets can understand the sort of chaos that ensued. Simply changing my adopted siblings’ cloth diapers was like working on an assembly line.

  With four Black siblings and two white parents, I was now living in a home that was Blacker than it was white. Some of my relatives began referring to Larry and Ruthanne as “colorblind” and “cultural revolutionaries” for adopting four Black babies, but this assessment didn’t sit right with me, as I was a firsthand witness to the cultural ignorance and racial bias they continually displayed. Often describing my younger siblings as “a little gang,” Larry and Ruthanne treated each of them differently based on the color of their skin. Ezra, whose biological mother was white, had the lightest skin. He passed the “brown paper bag test,” a method, popular in the early part of the twentieth century, of determining whether a particular Black person merited inclusion in certain institutions such as a church, fraternity, or university. If your skin was darker than a brown paper bag, you were denied entry. Larry and Ruthanne often referred to him as “the smart one,” and it quickly became clear from the preferential treatment they gave him that he was their favorite. They indulged his every whim, and all the attention he received came at the expense of his younger siblings, who were often ignored for long stretches of time.

  Zach, who had the darkest skin, was often treated the worst. Larry and Ruthanne made references to him being “blue Black,” a variation of an old racial slur. Some people, particularly a certain type of southerner, believed that Black people’s ancestry could be determined by looking into their mouths. If their gums were very dark or bluish, it was believed to represent a pure bloodline (100 percent African), proof, in their eyes, that they were dumber, lazier, and more savage than everyone else. This sort of overt racism spawned a myth, accepted as fact in some parts of the Deep South, that you could die if you were bitten by a “blue gum.” After bathing Zach one night, Ruthanne commented on the bathtub ring he’d left behind. “This is why [white] people think Black people are dirty,” she said. “The residue from their skin looks like dirt.”

  In the racially determined hierarchy that existed in our household, Esther was just above Zach because her skin was a shade lighter than his. But growing up, she had to endure the double burden of being both Black and female in a household that was white and patriarchal. Izaiah had nearly the same complexion she did, but the fact that he was a boy ensured that he received better treatment than her. Happy-go-lucky as a baby and a toddler, Izaiah grew more serious and cautious as he grew older, trying to avoid making the same sort of mistakes that had gotten Zach and Esther severely punished.

  Growing up, my adopted siblings were not only treated differently from each other but were also raised much differently than Josh and I were. Ruthanne would often make them put on their church clothes and sing songs for dinner guests, something that had never been asked of me or Josh. The way they were disciplined was also different. Spooked by the random post-placement visits made by social workers during an adopted baby’s first six months in a home, Larry and Ruthanne ditched the wooden paddle they’d used to spank me and Josh in favor of twelve-inch-long glue sticks, which were designed to be used in a hot glue gun but which Larry used like a switch. Whatever redness or welts one of these glue sticks left faded quickly, but, boy, did getting whacked with them sting! Larry and Ruthanne used the glue sticks so often it began to seem more like a way for them to take out their frustrations when dealing with four crying babies than an actual disciplinary tool. The adopted kids’ punishment was also doled out in a much more haphazard fashion. While Josh and I only got spanked on our butts, any part of my younger siblings’ bodies was fair game. If one of them refused to finish a meal, Larry would “glue stick” that child on the knuckles. As hard as it was to witness, it was even worse when Larry made me (and Josh whenever he was home from college) do it.

  I imagine Larry and Ruthanne thought they were treating my adopted siblings fairly, despite treating them differently than they had Josh and me, but in effect, our household was a two-tiered system. When I later read about Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case which gave legal authority to the idea of “separate but equal,” I couldn’t help thinking about my brothers and sister. In its decision, the court ru
led that, as long as services, facilities, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation were equal, they could be separated along racial lines. Segregation, the judges determined, didn’t violate anyone’s constitutional rights. But the facilities and services provided for Blacks were the same as those reserved for whites in name only. In reality, they were almost always inferior.

  On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that by denying Black children the right to attend schools closest to where they lived and forcing them to go to segregated ones, the Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas, had violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education effectively overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and brought an end to the Jim Crow era.

  In making its historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court seemed to be particularly moved by the testimony of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, educational psychologists who’d conducted a series of experiments with Black schoolchildren, ages three to seven, in the 1940s. In the experiments, the Clarks gave each of the children four dolls, identical in every way except for the color of their skin. Two of the dolls were Black, two were white. The Clarks then asked the children a series of questions: Which dolls were “nice”? Which were “bad”? Which were most like them? Which did they like best?

  The results were chilling. Most of the children cited a preference for the white dolls, assigning positive characteristics to them, even saying they looked like them. When the Clarks conducted this experiment in Massachusetts, some of the children got so upset they refused to answer the questions, while others cried and ran out of the room. But the response Dr. Kenneth Clark found most disturbing occurred when he asked a Black child in Arkansas which of the dolls most resembled him. The boy smiled, pointed to one of the Black dolls, and said, “That’s a nigger. I’m a nigger.”* While writing the Supreme Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, Chief Justice Earl Warren specifically noted the adverse psychological effects that segregated schools had on Black children, including “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.”