image copyrightLacey Tezino
"You know you're black, right?"
The girl who asked the question thought it was a joke. Of course Lacey had to know she was black. It was obvious to everyone. "Look at your lips, look at your hair. You're black, you have a black mother or father, which one is it?" the girl insisted.
But for Lacey Tezino, it was something totally unexpected.
She didn't know she was black, and had grown up in Vidor, Texas, a place infamous for its racist past.
For a naive teenager arriving at college ready to look to the future, not the past, it was a moment that would change her life.
Lacey never knew her mother.
Her family told her that she was a drug addict and had died of an AIDS-related illness when Lacey was a baby. They also told her that she was Hawaiian, which explained why Lacey looked different from her cousins.
"Every time I drew her, she had a flower in her hair because that's what I associated with Hawaii," he recalls.
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Her father, Ronnie, took her from the city of Houston to live with his parents in Vidor when she was a child, after he was diagnosed with cancer. He died when she was 6 years old.
But despite having lost her parents and growing up in a town with a reputation for being a place of hate, she always felt accepted by her white family and loved playing with her cousins.
"I just went from house to house... and everyone wanted to play with me... I got gifts and they pampered me," Lacey says.
However, there was always a feeling of unease.
Going through university
When Lacey was 17, "a big, tall, bald black man" knocked on her door, claiming that her mother was still alive.
Lacey's grandparents told her the man was lying and she tried to forget the incident, although it left her upset and "very confused."
But when he arrived at college in Houston with his thick rural accent, his sense of identity completely crumbled.
Her three African-American roommates simply didn't believe her when she explained that she had a white father and a Hawaiian mother.
"They're angry because I believe it. They're sad because I believe it," he says. "They feel like it's now their personal mission in life to help me figure out what the hell's been going on."
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When Lacey returned home for the holidays, she says she "felt the change" and saw the racism all around her.
When he asked his relatives why they had never told him his true origin, they replied: "You are from our family... we didn't give it any importance."
She discovered that, on occasions, her cousins had gotten into fights with people who had insulted her with racist comments.
Lacey now believes her grandparents hid the truth from her, thinking they were protecting her.
One day, during a conversation with her grandmother, she was told that she could bring home a black boyfriend. "No doubt she was trying to be very kind and open."
But when her grandfather used a racist slur while reading the newspaper, she says she was overcome with rage and told him, "You will never speak like that in front of me again."
She left the room crying and he followed her and apologized.
"This is my grandfather, who raised me and cared for me my whole life. And he said, 'I'm so sorry, and it won't happen again.' And it did."
Elizabeth
Even though she had been told that her mother had died, she still wanted to know more about her.
Her sophomore year of college, on Mother's Day, she called the phone book service and asked if there was anyone registered under her mother's name.
Without prior notice, they contacted her with a woman. When he told her he thought she might be his daughter, his response was all the confirmation he needed: "Lacey?"
She lived just over an hour away.
When he went to meet her that same day, he saw that she was accompanied by the same man who had come to her house a few years before: her mother's boyfriend.
But she only had eyes for her mother, Elizabeth.
"She was the most beautiful person I had ever seen in my life... we didn't greet each other, we didn't say anything, we just hugged each other and sobbed," Lacey remembers.
During the conversations that followed, she discovered that Ronnie was actually her adoptive, not biological, father.
They had been friends when she drank at the gay bar he ran in Houston. When Elizabeth confided that she was having an abortion after becoming pregnant by an African-American truck driver, Ronnie told her that she had always wanted to have children.
So they reached an agreement. He would help her detox and stay sober, and take care of her. Later, she would adopt her baby.
Lacey didn't even know she was adopted.
In the years that followed, Lacey gradually rebuilt her relationship with her birth mother. When Elizabeth became ill and died of cancer nine years later, Lacey says she was with her until the end.
By then, he had already forgiven his family. "You have to be very understanding with the parents because they were just young people trying to find their way, just like us," he thinks.
Currently, in both her professional and personal life she focuses on helping people overcome their difficulties in the mother-daughter relationship and breaking down barriers.
The grandmother who raised her in an all-white area ended up moving to Houston with her black family after a hurricane damaged their home.
Lacey says there was friction at first because "at the time there was a lot of buzz" in the news about racial issues in the United States.
Although she was sympathetic to her grandmother's age-appropriate views, she says she also wanted to show her children that in the black community "we have pride and we stand up for ourselves."
But after some "productive and beautiful conversations," and at age 86, his grandmother had become a vital part of the family.
"My daughter is 6 years old and her best friend is my grandmother... They sit on the couch. They eat ice cream. They water the plants in the backyard," he says.
"It's lovely".
This article is based on the podcast "Why Did They Never Tell Me I Was Black?" from the BBC World Service series Lives Less Ordinary. Lacey's grandmother passed away in 2026, after that episode was filmed.
This article was originally written in English and we used an artificial intelligence tool to translate it. A BBC journalist reviewed the text before publication. Learn more about how we use AI.
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