‘One Blood’ Is The Most Black And Beautiful Adoption Story You’ll Ever Read

New York Times Bestselling author Denene Millner is a consummate professional. It is evident in the 31 books she’s written to date, and the many books she’s published under her children’s imprint Denene Millner books. However, her latest work, One Blood is personal—and timely with November being National Adoption Month. 

One Blood, a tale of Black life, lineage, and love is loosely related to Millner’s real-life experience as an adoptee which she discovered when she was 12 years old. Though Millner grew up wrapped in the safety and security of her parents and never wanted for a thing—curiosity around her identity and origin grew. Millner had questions:

“One Blood was born of my dreams, of things that I always wanted to ask my mother that I couldn’t because she’s no longer with me in the physical realm,” told BLACK ENTERPRISE. 

“I was just asking myself questions like, what is it that I wanted to know about Grace? Who is a teenage girl who gets pregnant and has her baby taken away? Like, what is it that I want to know about this woman? What is it that I want to know about Dolores? Who is the mother who adopts the baby that’s taken away from Grace? What are the questions that I have for this woman? Not just about raising this child, but what it’s like to kind of raise yourself in society that just grossly undervalues you or devalues you or doesn’t value you at all? And what is it like?”

Millner continued: “What was it that I wished I knew when I was a young reporter in the kind of pouring that into Ray, who is the child of Grace and Dolores, who becomes a mother in her own right. So, it was a lot of sitting around and just thinking and dreaming, literally dreaming and having these thoughts and these ideas come to me and jotting them down on notebooks and pieces of paper and back to envelopes and taking those notes and those thoughts and those questions and really kind of running them through the paces of me.”

For Millner, her own adoption story and who both her mothers were is directly tied to who she is as a Black woman, mother, daughter and partner. And out of that curiosity grew deeply complex characters and a riveting story that became the most important novel of her career. BE obtained an excerpt that won’t disappoint: 

Chapter 28

“You smell it?” Rae asked. “It’s been a while since he came, but he’s here again. For you and the baby. Maybe for me.”

“You used Daddy’s aftershave?” LoLo asked, completely misunderstanding what, precisely, was happening.

“No, Mommy,” Rae said gently. “That’s Daddy’s scent.” Rae looked into her mother’s eyes, her pupils piercing—her pupils saying exactly what LoLo needed to understand.

“He comes to you? Like this?”

“Sometimes it’s his scent I smell—the aftershave,” Rae said. “Some- times he comes to me in dreams. Once I woke up on a Sunday morning and smelled calf liver, plain as day. I jumped out of bed and raced into the kitchen and it was quiet and empty, everything in place. But it smelled like he was standing right there over the stove, cooking liver with that gravy I like, and rice. His favorite.

“I didn’t tell you,” Rae added, “because I thought . . . I thought you would think it was something evil.”

“You know I don’t believe in that hoodoo stuff. It’s not in the Bible and God’s word tells us not to worship false idols.”

“Mommy, I don’t have any control over this. I see things in my dreams all the time—have since I was little. I just never told you. I thought maybe I was evil or sinning against God because that’s what you raised us to believe. But you smell him, too. How can Daddy’s presence be evil?”

“Let me finish, Rae,” LoLo said, raising her hand to shush her daugh- ter. “I have something I need to show you. I’ll be right back,” she said.

LoLo disappeared back down the hall and reappeared just as quickly, with a small white pouch in her palm. She ran her thumbs over it slowly and stood there, her feet stuck to the linoleum Tommy had laid with his own hands when Rae was just a kid, dancing around on the other side of the kitchen threshold, regaling her father with a recap of her favorite book,

The Little Princess.

“This is yours,” LoLo said simply. She pressed it into Rae’s hands.

Rae looked quizzically at the pouch, then pulled it open. Her fingers touched the lock of hair first. She pulled out the bundle and her body tingled, like some electrical current gently shocking her system awake. She laid it on the table, and then the rabbit’s foot next to it, and then the pipe. She gasped when she pulled out the handkerchief and saw the blood-stained material between her fingertips. That, she dropped on the table, this time involuntarily, her hands shaking as she cocked her head to one side and then the other, washing over it with her watery eyes.

“There’s one more thing in there,” LoLo said quietly.

Rae hesitantly reached back into the pouch and pulled out the folded brown paper bag square. She slowly unfolded the paper and read its contents.

“What . . . what is this?” she asked, finally looking up.

LoLo searched for the words that fear—of what Tommy would think of this thing, of what God would think of this thing—had kept her from uttering over the past thirty-three years. Standing there, her daughter’s heart open wide, LoLo found the courage to pour in. “Your daddy didn’t want me to show this to you, but . . .” LoLo paused.

“Mommy. What is this?” Rae asked again, her heart racing as she rubbed the paper between her fingers and stared at the letters.

This baby
This baby
This baby
a sweet, protected, prosperous life

“That was in the bag they found you in at that orphanage.” LoLo’s words, which she’d swallowed whole almost three and a half decades earlier, gushed from her throat. “I think your birth mother left it for you. See what this is?” she said, pointing to the circle of words on the paper. “It’s a wish, like a prayer. But the way they used to write them down in the old days, back in the South, when they believed in haints and roots and such. It’s a petition.”

“A . . . a what?”

“A petition. A prayer—for you, Rae. I think from your mother, asking for your protection,” LoLo said. “I think she wanted this to be with you. I think that’s what she hoped for you. Protection.

“Your daddy, he was your protector. He was my protector,” LoLo said. She rubbed Rae’s shoulders as she talked. “That’s all I required of him and he did that. He protected us. He found you in that basement and he is the one who made sure you were okay, even when it was me who was hurting you. He didn’t want me to give you this, because as far as he was concerned, we are your family and you were born the day we brought you home. We are your parents. Nothing else before that mattered to him. But this paper, this petition, he did what it asked of him. His presence here, right now, tells me he still is.”

Rae, overwhelmed by the idea that her birth mother wished the best for her, that she was holding her hair and blood in her hand, that her dead father was taking up space in the room in which she and her mother stood, just down the hall from where her baby was laying her head, took off running— out the kitchen, down the hall, to the bathroom, the scent following her as she moved. Rae slammed the door and slid down onto the bathmat, still wet with the water she’d just bathed her daughter in not an hour earlier.

Over the years, Rae had used her imagination to fill in her birth story with color and light and grace: Maybe my birth mother was young and scared and couldn’t fathom raising a baby on her own, was the first of her thoughts. Sometimes, the story had villains: Maybe she was forced to leave me on that stoop by a family that refused to support her and her child or Maybe she was in an abusive relationship and feared her baby would get swooped into the violence. The stories, they would be as varied as the books she’d tucked on the top shelf in her childhood closet. Always, though, Rae’s birth mom was the hero. Afterall, there were so many ways that life as a little, defenseless baby could have ended badly for her. But this woman, she earned her place on the pedestal Rae had tucked away in her heart and forever stood there, still, immovable, innocent, like the tiny ceramic angels LoLo kept on her glass étagère.

Now, her mother’s blood between her fingertips, her own baby just down the hallway, Rae regarded this woman as so much more than an inanimate object or some made-up fairy tale gathering dust on a shelf. Rae understood her humanity. Her decision, as far as Rae was concerned, was beautiful, selfless, steeped in pain, heartbreak, and yes, love—a love that she could now understand because she, too, was a mother who had carried her own baby in her womb and couldn’t fathom the strength and courage and resolve it must have taken for her birth mother to leave her child, her blood, the very beat of her heart, on a stoop for someone else—LoLo and Tommy, who loved her deeply—to have. To Rae, it was the ultimate sacrifice. A miracle, no different from the miracle of conception—what it took for sperm to meet egg and egg to attach to womb and for womb to maintain the absolute perfect conditions for new life and for new life to find its way to loving arms. The pouch was proof to Rae that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.

Rae held the paper to her heart and inhaled her father’s scent. “Daddy, I miss you. I love you. I love you. I love you and I miss you and I love you,” she said.

And then, for her mother, the one whose blood ran through her veins, she wailed …

According to Youth.Gov, the adoption theme for 2023 is “Empowering Youth: Finding Points of Connection.” In 400 words, One Blood manages to do this—and then some—with her young characters as well as the adults.

Based on a 2020 study, roughly 100,000 children are adopted annually. Twenty-five percent of those children placed in permanent homes are Black. One of the biggest adoption myths is that birth mothers are young, misguided women. According to Lifelong Adoptions, women well into their forties place children in adoption for myriad of reason. The organization states that “almost all expectant mothers who are pursuing adoption are doing so because they want to give their baby a better opportunity for a life they deserve.”

You can get your hands on ‘One Blood’ at Charis Bookstore or at the multitude of Black online booksellers.

Excerpted from ONE BLOOD by Denene Millner. Copyright © 2023. Available from Forge Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers.

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New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist Denene Millner is a highly respected and sought-after writer, whose captivating books, columns, and essays have secured her place in the entertainment, parenting, book publishing, and social media worlds. Denene was chosen by Black Voices website as one of 40 Influential Black Female Writers in 2011 for good reason: she has had huge reach with dozens of novels, non-fiction titles, celebrity memoirs, and children’s books to her credit. A veteran author who has written and collaborated on 31 critically acclaimed and bestselling books, Millner is a prolific author whose work is in high demand. She is best known for co-authoring Steve Harvey’s two #1 New York Times bestsellers: Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, named the bestselling book of 2009 by Nielson, and Straight Talk, No Chaser. Both books became hit feature films—Think Like a Man and Think Like a Man Too. The original Lifetime movie With This Ring, based on Millner’s co-authored book, The Vow, debuted in January 2015. She is the co-author of Charlie Wilson’s memoir, I Am Charlie Wilson (2015), and Jessye Norman’s memoir, Stand Up Straight and Sing (2014). Memoirs she wrote with Cookie Johnson, Believing in Magic, and Taraji P. Henson, Around the Way Girl, appeared on the New York Times bestseller’s list simultaneously when they were released in fall 2016. In 2019, Millner penned Fresh Princess, a children’s picture book written with Will Smith and inspired by The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.