Author Description

"I was born in March 1947. My arrival was quietly, anxiously celebrated within my mother's family but the rest of society had long since made up its mind to exclude my mother and me from its fold. When I was a year old, my mother married a white German man; a year later my sister was born. We were a family, even if I always knew my father wasn't really my father. I saw no reason in the world that I wouldn't be able to grow up with my white mother, in my white family, and be perfectly happy." So begins the story of Ika Hugel-Marshall, daughter of an African American serviceman who left Germany for the United States the day after learning that he had impregnated the German woman with whom he was having an affair. Seven years later, Ika is led from her home to an orphanage where she is subjected to the tyrannies of Sister Hildegard and is taken to have the "black demon" exorcised from her. Ika struggled to come to terms with life as a German - the only life she knew - among people who seemed bent on disavowing her existence. Only in her late thirties does Ika meet other Afro-Germans and begin to discover her own identity. Emboldened by them, she seeks out and eventually finds her father, who is living on Chicago's South Side, and discovers another aspect of herself.