William and Ken Dyson. Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Help me! I’ve been kidnapped!” shouted 6-year-old William Dyson. He sat among the branches in the tree in his front yard. His mother, Donna, stood below, a touch embarrassed as neighbors stopped to stare.“You haven’t been kidnapped, Willie,” she said. “Come down.”But Willie knew he had been. They’d been talking about strangers and kidnappings in school. Then he’d watched his friends get picked up and noticed for the first time that the white kids got into cars with white parents and the black kids got into cars with black parents. Willie had walked home thinking about his own family and how he didn’t look like them.When he’d arrived home, he’d found his mother standing in front of the bathroom mirror. She’d picked him up, and he had stared at his black face next to her white one and realized he’d been kidnapped. A moment later, he’d bolted out of the house and up the tree.His father, Ken, came home from work and helped Donna coax Willie out of the tree. Donna made SpaghettiOs and explained to Willie that he was adopted. His mother had been only 16 when she had him, and at 5 ½ weeks, she’d given him up. He had been malnourished and lucky to be alive when the Dyson family took him in. He’d also been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Doctors said he would never walk or talk. But the Dysons adopted him.William accepted the explanation with a shrug, perhaps finding just as much solace in SpaghettiOs as in his mother’s words. Later, however, he would remember that as the day that everything changed.“That was the key point in me realizing that I was adopted, that I was different,” Dyson says now, 20 years later. “And realizing that it’s OK to be different.”
The Dyson family seemed to be an unlikely foster family. Ken, a former Minor League pitcher, and his wife, Donna, a stay-at-home mother, had just moved to St. Louis in 1981 with their five children.But a few months after they arrived, the front page of the paper featured a fire in East St. Louis, Ill., that killed 11 children. The children’s mother, Virginia Williams, had left them alone to go gambling. Ken and Donna’s kids, upset by the news accounts, wanted to help.“I said, ‘If you really want to help, Mom and Dad can become foster parents,’” Ken recalls. “And I said, ‘That’s a joke. No one is going to let us get licensed with five kids.’” But they went to Catholic Charities Community Services to inquire. When Ken told them that they had five kids already, he expected to be shown the door. Instead, he and Donna got licensed to take in special-needs children.“We fought for our foster kids,” says Ken. “When things weren’t right, we put a lot of pressure on people to get it right.” He recalls advocating for one of their foster children to be put in a mainstream school. When the authorities wouldn’t listen, the Dysons took it up with the state of Missouri and got the child moved. Then they became foster parents for the state.Some kids only stayed a weekend or a week or two; others stayed for years. The last foster child they cared for before Willie was Cliff*, a boy with severe mental disabilities whose mother had been murdered. He’d been abused so badly that he wouldn’t let any of the men in the house hold him. Instead, he would scream and kick and fuss. Ken went to his social worker for a solution.“Lots of cookies and ice cream,” she advised him.Cliff came around and eventually became like Ken’s shadow, tagging along with him everywhere. Then, in 1990, after Cliff had stayed with the Dysons for 3½ years, his father “came out of the woodwork,” Ken remembers, and demanded the boy. The Dysons didn’t want to give him up.“It was devastating to our family,” Ken recalls. “After they took Cliff, we got Willie in about two or three days. When we sawWillie’s medical problems, and especially after we rehabilitated him, we said, ‘He’s not going anywhere.’”Willie arrived at the Dysons’ house as a malnourished 5½–week–old infant with a diagnosis of cerebral palsy. By the time he was 11 months old, he still hadn’t taken his first steps, and doctors predicted he never would. The state sent in nurses to teach Donna physical-therapy exercises for him, however, and Donna worked at it for hours every day. She invited friends over to help her and keep her company. In one exercise, she rolled him on a huge beach ball, so he could stretch and feel sensation in all his limbs.When Willie walked into SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center a scant six months later, nurses ran to get his doctors.“They said, ‘Where’s Willie?’ And we said, ‘What are you talking about? This is Willie right here.’ ‘That’s not Willie. Willie can’t walk,’” Ken recalls with a smile. “We said, ‘Well, look at him. He’s walking all over the place.’”
Ken and Donna waited 2½ years before they started the adoption process. They had to fight African-American social workers who told them that a white family shouldn’t raise a black child.“They said, ‘You can’t teach him his culture,’” Ken recalls. “I said, ‘Watch us.’”Willie had his own fights at school. Kids teased him about being adopted, telling him that his parents weren’t his real parents and that he wasn’t really black.The Dysons won out in the end. Ken and Donna were able to legally adopt him. Despite the teasing, he made a wide array of friends of different races, and by high school, the teasing stopped altogether. His cerebral palsy never bothered him again, and he even played on the defensive line for the Kirkwood High School football team.When students on the team couldn’t go home after school was over because of a bussing policy, Willie invited them over to his house for a pregame party.Willie says his father encouraged him to befriend all types of people. “My dad never set any boundaries socially,” he says. “And my mom believed that love cures everything.”Donna was diabetic, and in 2001, she had to get her foot amputated. Willie was 12. He remembers one particular visit on a Sunday, when the whole family was there, gathered around her bed.“The doctors say I’m going home on Sunday,” Donna said. The family protested. The doctors were actually considering amputating her entire leg. Ken gently told her that she probably wasn’t going home that day.“I think she knew she was going to pass,” says Willie. “She knew that her time was come.” A week later, she was gone.
While he was in high school, Willie would sometimes rap with his friends. “I was terrible at it,” he says. But he enjoyed it and kept trying.In 2006, he went to college at the University of Minnesota, where a friend invited him to perform with Voices Merging, a student group that sponsors the largest open-mic night in the Twin Cities.“I played a couple songs, and people started liking it. That’s when my confidence really grew in terms of pursuing a music career,” says Willie.He began working on music and picked the stage name Dyce, which stands for “Do you and change everything.” It was also a nod to his father’s nickname on the baseball field, Dice.He released his first single, “No Color,” in August 2013. The song addresses what happened when he was 6 years old and realized he was adopted.“I remember like yesterday, in the bathroom mirror for the first time, I saw my mother’s face,” he raps in the refrain. “She looked at me. I looked at her. I began to scream. She did not care, ’cause once I finally stopped crying, I saw no color.”The video has nearly 7,000 views on YouTube. Dyson says he wanted to be honest in his music. “I’m not going to talk about stuff I never experienced,” he says. “I’m not going to rap about ‘It was hard on the block,’ because I didn’t grow up on the block.”Instead, he talks about being adopted, hisfather’s legal fights to keep him, and his mother’s death. “I just needed to let the world know who I am and who my mother and father are,” says William. “Anybody can have kids, but it takes a parent to actually raise their child from the ground up.”Ken is now William’s manager, and Dyce’s been working on an album, The Adoption, that chronicles much of his life after college through hip-hop, pop, and R&B tracks. The subject matter runs from football to his personal life, showing that growing up black doesn’t have to always be a certain way—and neither does a family.
* Name changed to protect privacy
