The search for a missing father
David Lomas reunites long lost families leading him to help a Hamilton woman find a missing American stripper with a story to tell.
Faith Miru wants to find her dad – an African-American stripper who disappeared from her life when she was just 3 years old.
Miru, 32, a professional singer, is one of Hamilton’s flamboyant and most recognisable characters. Tall, large and loud, with dreadlocks and dark skin, she is very much her father’s daughter.
But she knows almost nothing of her dad – and can’t find him. And that has left a big cultural and emotional void in her life.
‘‘I definitely see myself as a black woman,’’ said Miru. Then, with a big laugh, she added: ‘‘and I am sure everybody else does, too.’’
Growing up, Miru always stood out. She was, she said, the ‘‘young black girl in a pretty white world with a fair mother and no siblings and no father. It was very isolating, very lonely’’.
Miru said she did not have a concept of colour and race until one day a young Pakeha ‘‘pointed at me and said ‘ooh, you are black’.’’
‘‘I was so upset, I remember being just mortified and running home and just beside myself, and that moment was wow, I am different.’’
For Miru that set up ‘‘a lifetime of inferiority of not being good enough, not being beautiful enough, not being pretty enough, not fitting in’’. It drove her to try to find her father so she could understand who she was.
The search for Miru’s father, Booker T Baines, features in the opening episode of the third series of Lost & Found tonight (Three, 8.30pm).
It is a story of intrigue which touches on the attempted murder of a US policeman with a samurai sword, the kidnapping of two young boys who were held in a crack house in Mexico and inherited insanity.
Baines was a bigger than life character, according to Miru’s mother Tracy, a New Zealander who met him in Sydney.
‘‘Booker T Baines? People used to say what does the T stand for and he’d say trouble,’’ said Tracey Miru, who was the 18-year old daughter of a church minister when she ran off and had a threemonth affair with the then 33-year old Baines in the mid-1980s.
‘‘He was a male stripper, he used to do one-man shows with a thousand women and entertain them for an hour or so,’’ she said. ‘‘He was pretty outrageous actually and quite popular.’’
An ex-US Marine, Baines was also ‘‘a singer, a nightclub bouncer and a bit of a hustler’’.
Tracey Miru said she left Baines before she discovered she was pregnant with Faith.
Baines tried to rekindle the relationship but Tracy Miru said she decided to return home to New Zealand to live with her parents because ‘‘I wanted my daughter to grow up with the religious life that I had had’’.
Faith, she said, had always been determined to find her father. ‘‘When we got a computer, when she was 13, she was online looking for her dad straight away – that was her main purpose,’’ she said.
For Faith Miru, finding her father was about finding her identity.
‘‘I feel like I’m 100 per cent Kiwi, but also there’s this really strong impulse for Africa and America and African-American culture and life and history, the history is what really is really compelling for me,’’ she said.
Lost & Found took Miru to the United States to search for Baines. The journey took her to the largely African-American area of Compton, in southern Los Angeles, the home of the infamous Bloods and Crips gangs and also the suburb with one of the highest murder rates in the US.
Miru said it was an amazing feeling to walk among so many people ‘‘that look like me’’.
‘‘I feel at home here. I don’t look different.’’
The search for her father took her further north to Oxnard, California, where some oldfashioned door knocking lead to an emotional discovery that was to shock Miru.
❚ David Lomas presents Lost & Found, tonight, 8.30pm, Three.