When I was born, my mother gave me 3 names — one Nordic, one African, one American: Faith. Eventually, with help from surprising quarters, my mother managed a return to college, raising me fiercely in Seattle housing projects on African storybooks she wrote and illustrated herself, government-surplus cheese, and strange grains she had no idea how to prepare. She never married. Eventually she reconciled with my grandparents, and we moved to their farm in southeast Washington State. There, in a segregated community of white landowners and Latino farmhands, I — the lone African for miles — lived an idyllic, rural life, Mummi and Tati gossiping in Finnish at the kitchen table, a wreath of candles in my Afro on Swedish holidays.

Our family kept the true circumstances of my birth hidden from the community — including me. While baking pulla, however, I learned other family secrets: white children sold into servitude, wives left behind when bigamist husbands remarried in America, fathers thought long dead but actually institutionalized. My legacy was strong women whose menfolk disappeared to unsettled countries, to mental institutions, to the barn with a bottle of vodka.