Inside the Family Archive
The memoir draws from decades of journals, family photographs, newspaper coverage, and correspondence between Nigeria and the United States.
July 1980
A letter my mother sent to my father while he was doing business in Nigeria, shown with a photograph of my parents.
Correspondence like this helped me reconstruct parts of his life and family that I had been too young to remember.
April 1985
The Grand Rapids Press
Coverage following my father’s murder, including the investigation into the man accused of killing him, Harry Bout, a family friend and business partner.
I was six years old.
January 1989
I had just turned ten when I wrote this entry about hearing my mother crying behind her bedroom door. My journals recorded both the frightening things I was trying to understand and the ordinary childhood details that existed alongside them. I would eventually fill dozens of them, documenting events I wouldn't understand until much later.
