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My Nigerian father was murdered when I was 6.
At 8, my white mom married Dad’s handyman.
We moved to a Michigan farm.
Archives tell the rest.

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My father’s murder was hardly the worst of what happened to my family. For my brothers and me, it was the just beginning.

My white mother married my dad’s handyman. They moved us to a Michigan farm, away from Nigerian family and culture.

Abuse and religious control closed in around us. My older siblings ran away, but I stayed. I believed my mother needed me and that one day she would wake up and choose to protect her children.

But days before my 15th birthday, I ran too. It took another ten years and my brother’s catastrophic mental health crisis for me to accept that she never would. We’ve been estranged ever since.

For years, I carried the story as I remembered it. I always knew I had to write it. When I opened the diaries, newspaper accounts, photographs albums and family letters, that survived, some confirmed my memories. Others revealed how fiercely we had been loved by a Nigerian family an ocean away—and how much I had never understood about the aftermath of my father’s murder.

That’s the memoir I’m writing: what I remembered, what the evidence says, and what I understand now.

I’m sharing what I find here.

Follow the archive. by @chisalehane

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For years, I thought Nigeria was something I had lost when I lost my father.

But while I was growing up in Michigan—clinging to a few words of Igbo, recruiting classmates for a Nigerian fashion show, writing about him in my diary, and resisting clothes I didn’t yet know how to claim—relatives an ocean away kept reaching for me. Their letters carried the same hope: that my brothers and I would come home to Nigeria.

When I finally reached my father’s village at thirty, I discovered that a photograph from the Nigerian party I attended at fifteen had been hanging on Baba’s wall all those years.

I had been trying to find my way back. They had been keeping me in their hearts, praying for me and waiting for my return.

PLEASE COME HOME is the story of how I finally did.

Did you ever discover that you were remembered after you thought you had been forgotten? by @chisalehane

6 days ago

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At eleven, I thought there was a right way to look Black—and that I was failing at it.

This is the opening of “Can You Talk Black?” adapted from my memoir, PLEASE COME HOME, and read live at DRAFTS by @essaystheshow

Do you remember the first time someone asked you to explain what you were? taken in Los Angeles, California by @chisalehane

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Many comments have combined two different men—and assigned my mother a role I don’t believe she had.

The handyman my mother later married did not murder my father. We knew his family through church.

The man convicted of murdering my father was someone else. Yes, my mother introduced him to my father, but it was for business. The two men became friends and partied together. Trial notes record the killer saying that she disliked their friendship and disapproved of his lifestyle.

There is no evidence that my mother participated in the murder, and no one in our family ever believed that she did.

Where I hold her responsible is what happened afterward: she married the handyman, left behind Ngozi—the Igbo name my father had given her—and became someone unrecognizable. She gave him authority over us and enabled the abuse that followed.

My father’s murder devastated our family. But for the child I was, what happened afterward was far worse.

PLEASE COME HOME is the story of those years—and how my brothers and I eventually fought our way back to the family and country we had lost.

I’m reconstructing the story through photographs, family letters, childhood diaries, and the records adults left behind.

The PLEASE COME HOME reader list is now open through the first link in my bio. by @chisalehane

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21 days ago

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My Nigerian father loved his records—especially the Oriental Brothers and reggae music. When Peter Tosh played, I’d dance, and he’d call me his Mama Africa.

After he was murdered, my mother married his former handyman. Together, they took over my father’s house, where secular music and dancing were forbidden.

On Wednesday, I bought one ticket to see Robyn. Dressed up, I tucked a photo of my seven-year-old self into my purse. When “Dancing on My Own” began, I sang and danced with that little girl—just as I once danced for my father.

What joy have you reclaimed?

I’m writing PLEASE COME HOME, a memoir reconstructed from photographs, family letters, childhood diaries, and the records adults left behind.

Follow for the archives—and what they reveal. taken in Kia Forum by @chisalehane

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23 days ago

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When you’re a child, you love the parents you depend on. You have to trust them and their explanations—even when they are causing harm.

For years, I lived inside my mother’s explanations. She believed angels and demons were fighting for our souls. She told me my Nigerian family thought my brothers and I belonged to them. She feared that if she took us to Nigeria, they would send her back without us.

Then, in 2026, I read the letters I’d been holding for decades.

In one, Baba—my father’s eldest brother—warned her to “avoid evil and wicked men.” I knew he meant my father’s killer, a man we believed was my father’s friend. He didn’t know about the danger that had been invited in.

But the letters revealed something else: my Nigerian family had been reaching for us, asking my mother to bring us home.

She experienced their reaching as a threat. I now understand it as evidence that we were wanted.

Children do not stop reaching for a parent who hurts them. Often, they reach harder.

I’ve tried to let my mother go. But I don’t know if I will ever stop wishing she would reach for me.

I’m writing PLEASE COME HOME, a memoir about what happened after my Nigerian father was murdered and my evangelical mother married his white handyman—reconstructed through family letters, childhood diaries, photographs, and the records adults left behind.

Follow for the archives—and what they reveal. by @chisalehane

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I grew up knowing Chisara meant “an answer to prayer.”

I didn’t know my father had placed another meaning on me, too.

He lost his mother when he was very young. Several relatives later told me he believed she had returned through me. He called me Nne—the Igbo word for mother.

After Dad was murdered, I grew up separated from the people and language that might have helped me understand what that meant.

Decades later, I found letters from his eldest brother, Baba. In one, he sent greetings to my brothers and to “my own mother Miss Chisara.”

I went into the archives looking for facts about what happened after Dad died.

I learned who I had been to him—and to my Nigerian family—before I was old enough to understand. by @chisalehane

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$Before our lives fractured, everyone in our family answered to at least two names. At home, Mom was Ngozi. With her family, she was Char. My brother was Kelechi. We called him “Kelly.” Mom’s family used his middle name, Paul. Dad named me Chisara but called me Nnem. Grandma tried using half my name, Sara, but I didn’t like it and struggled to remember she was talking to me. Relief came when my stepsister Sarah came into our lives and I got to be Chisa or Chisara again. My Dutch relatives were devout Christians. I don’t think they ever noticed the irony: in making our names easier for American mouths, the same syllable disappeared from both of our Nigerian names. Chi. God. It would not be the last time I felt erased, modified, or asked to change for someone else’s benefit. by @chisalehane$

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Chisa Iwuagwu Lehane | Memoirist

@chisalehane