The Search for Big Brown, Pt. 1

Jill Lepore, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a professor of history at Harvard, grew up in a small town in Massachusetts. One town over lived a girl named Adrianna Alty, and they became friends. Adrianna was one of the only people of color in her town. But her adoptive parents, who were white, weren’t able to help her deal with the complications. “'It doesn’t matter what color you are,'” she recalls them saying. “'You could be any color -- you could be orange, you could be blue.' But I’m not orange or blue. I’m this other color.” Adrianna knew very little about her biological mother, and the only thing she knew about her father is that he was black. (Part one of a three-part story.)

Eric Molinsky and Karen Frillmann produced Jill Lepore’s story, with additional sound design and original scoring by Paul Schneider.