Imagine you are watching a movie and suddenly the action stops and the credits begin to roll. Leaving Africa was like that. I had been going along in my African story, full of its sights and sounds and smells'children balancing kerosene tins on their heads, drums rumbling at night, air scented by smoke from charcoal and wood fires. . . And then: Cut. It was over. After twelve years of growing up mostly in West Africa, I was back in the United States, where people thought growing up in Africa was strange and growing up the daughter of missionaries was even stranger. I learned to avoid mentioning that part of my life at all, because if I did, I would feel the stereotypes close round me. I did my best to pass as American without ever quite succeeding. When my mother asked me in her last days, ?Do you appreciate your African childhood? I replied with cruel honesty, ?Yes, but now I don't belong in America.' Just weeks after her death at the age of 96, I sat myself down in a state of survivor's freedom to explore the childhood I had tried to put behind me. I poured out memories across a yellow notepad and began reading the letters Mother had passed on to me'intimate letters she and Daddy had written back to family from Africa, letters I myself had written from my boarding school in Nigeria my last three years there. As a historian I already understood the richness of life told in letters: the way secrets spring from their pages. Thus innocently (if any historian can be said to be innocent) I began'and found myself tangled up in a story I had not just forgotten but had never known.