PHILADELPHIA — Janelle and Jasmine Newswanger lead simple, contented lives in one of Pennsylvania’s Mennonite communities.
The 17-year-old twins drive a horse-drawn buggy, wear long dresses and white head coverings, and see their friends at church on Sundays.
Done with education at 14, after finishing eighth grade, Jasmine works as a teacher’s aide, and Janelle helps her mother around the house, speaking Pennsylvania Dutch and English.
The girls blend in with the people in their lives, set apart in only one way.
Janelle and Jasmine are African American.
They are among about 100 children, most of them black, born to women who were incarcerated at Pennsylvania prisons and sent by their mothers to Mennonite foster families in Central Pennsylvania as part of an informal caretaking program. About 29 remain in Mennonite homes.
The children navigate two worlds as they grow up in white insular cultures.
Some, like Janelle and Jasmine, have been with Mennonite families for years and ultimately adopted. Others continue in a temporary status as their birth mothers struggle with addiction, the law and their parenting roles.
These young lives upend and bend notions of community, family, identity — and what makes a happy, healthy childhood when birth parents are unavailable.
The popular image of Mennonites is of stoic, white followers in the countryside. Yet blacks, originally recruited by missionaries, have been in the flock for years, including in Philadelphia and other cities.
In 1897, the first African-Americans in the United States were baptized as Mennonites and joined a Juniata County church, said historian Tobin Miller Shearer, a Mennonite and assistant professor of history at the University of Montana who studies interactions between white and African-American Mennonites.
Now, he said, “There seems to be a predilection, or at least a tendency, for conservative white Mennonites to be engaged in the practice of adoption across race lines.”
Good intentions fuel the caretaking, Shearer said, but, “Hosts are not equipped themselves to equip their children to live within a racist society.”
Debate roils around transracial adoptions and fostering in general. Are youngsters better served by going to a permanent home as soon as possible, or by waiting for a same-race household? That question also hovers over the children from the Philadelphia region who live in rural Pennsylvania.
Ruth Newswanger and her husband are Old Order Mennonites who shun cars, TVs, computers, and cellphones at their Cumberland County, Pa., home.
Jasmine and Janelle’s birth mother, a Philadelphian, was in prison elsewhere in the state when the girls were born and the Newswangers got a call from a church friend involved in the prison ministry. Would they care for the babies?
The Newswangers, who have four biological children, said yes, acting on their belief that “you should share what you have,” Ruth, 55, said.
The twins twice returned briefly to their biological mother, the second time for a year when they were about 2 ½ years old. Relatives sent them back both times.
When the Newswangers finally adopted them two years ago, the girls were elated.
“We could write our last name Newswanger,” Jasmine said.
Along with their name, they share a daily routine.
“We milk cows every morning and every evening. We also did some discing this year,” Jasmine said, referring to farm equipment that prepares soil for planting.
One evening, the twins and Ruth were preparing dinner. “Janelle, du wenig mei nei.” Put in a little more, Ruth said, and Janelle added baked beans to the spaghetti soup.
Before dinner, the girls went to a market owned by the family of some friends. The friends, two white sisters, and the twins instantly smiled when they saw each other, and all four began chattering and giggling.
Janelle and Jasmine were the only black children at school, which didn’t bother them.
“We had each other,” Janelle said.
“Everyone was used to seeing us,” said Jasmine, so no one treated them differently.
“I seem like everyone else. I don’t think about it,” she said, “I just think about having friends.”
The Newswangers tried to be race-sensitive as they raised the two — they gave them black dolls and books with African Americans pictured in them. A black woman who lived in the area befriended the girls, Ruth said. They see other African-American children who live with Mennonite families at church and social gatherings, and they keep in touch with their birth family.
The sisters described one visit about seven years ago, when hair styles entangled their two worlds during a visit with their grandmother, aunt, and two half-sisters.
Jasmine and Janelle normally wear their hair pulled back in a bun, common among Mennonite women. Their Philadelphia aunt braided their hair into tight cornrows.
“They thought it would be fun,” Janelle said.
It wasn’t fun. It hurt.
What’s most important to the twins’ biological grandmother, Margaret Garris of West Philadelphia, is not their hair style.
“They are happy and healthy,” Garris said. “That’s the main thing.”
Garris talks regularly over the phone with her granddaughters and sees them once or twice a year. The girls know about their African-American culture because they know their birth family, she said, adding that one of their half-sisters talks to them about black history.
Still, Janelle and Jasmine know little about slavery or the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His name is familiar, they said, though they know nothing about him.
The twins do not see black history as relevant.
“To our own life?,” Jasmine asked. “No, I don’t think so.”
They said they had not felt prejudice themselves, and they chuckled about how their young nephew asked whether their arms were brown because they were left in the oven too long — a connection he made based on what happens when cookie dough is overbaked.
The girls’ limited grasp of African-American history does not overly worry Richard Gelles, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice: “There’s a general lack of knowledge about the civil rights movement whether you’re black, white, or green.”
But their happiness is a good sign. Research shows it is developmentally healthier for children to be in permanent homes as soon as possible, he said, no matter the race of the family.
“It is important for a child to be able to know he or she has someone who will be there for him or her in an unqualified relationship.”
The girls feel that way about their Mennonite family.
Asked whether they loved their birth mother, they hesitantly said they did, explaining, “We’re supposed to like everyone.”
Do they love Ruth? Immediately, the twins enthusiastically nodded yes.
A white Mennonite family can raise a healthy black child, said Toni Oliver, vice president of the National Association of Black Social Workers. But race does matter in America.
“We make decisions about people’s value and capabilities based on race.”
If these children are racially isolated, she said, they have no role models to counter negative images and stereotypes of blacks.
Joseph Crumbley, an expert in transracial adoptions and fostering, doubted the girls would always be around tolerant Mennonites.
“If they’re going to stay in that bubble, then fine,” he said. “Once they leave that bubble, they’re still looked at as African-American children.”
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