" Gloria told Maria the whole story of her adoption by the time she was seven years old. She had adopted Maria after breaking up with a man---a fellow graduate student she would only ever refer to as H---who had wanted her to stand behind him at protests, and type up his dissertation, and serve him dinner and wash the dishes and bear him some children and write her own dissertation in between folding laundry. He'd seemed attracted to her in direct proportion to how well she disappeared into their backdrop.

Gloria was in her midthirties then and just beginning her graduate program. She knew there were many black babies languishing in the system, unwanted. She put in a request for a healthy black infant girl. It was only a few months before she got a call from the agency saying they had one available. The baby was only a few weeks old and her name was Maria. She came from the Cane River in Louisiana. They didn't have much more information than that except that she was in the care of a Catholic orphanage now----the Saint Ann's Infant and Maternity Home in Maryland. Gloria dropped everything and drove eight hours to collect her child. "

― Senna, Danzy