BY TANYA BRICKING
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Tanika Dowdell studies people on the bus.
She wonders whether the young man sitting next to her could be her brother. If so, they could talk about their mother, fill in the blanks she longs to understand.
At 20, Tanika "Nikki" Dowdell is pregnant, about to marry, and has just discovered that everyone in her family has been keeping secrets from her all her life.
The woman she grew up believing was her mother is actually her grandmother. Her siblings are actually her aunt and uncles. And there is a brother somewhere, given up for adoption 20 years ago, whom she has never met.
She feels lost. And this betrayal she feels stings, like the tears that burn her cheeks.
"I just wish I hadn't found this out," she said. "It changed everything and the way I thought everything would be. Now, I sit around and think, "Who is my family? Who's going to be around?' I just want to be free of thinking about this."
The first clue Nikki had about her missing past came in February 1997. Three years after graduating from Hughes High School, she was ready to move out of her Over-the-Rhine home and be on her own. An application for a downtown apartment required her birth certificate as proof of identity. She walked over to the health center on Elm Street and bought a copy of her birth certificate for $10. When a clerk handed her the piece of paper, the father's name was blank. Caprine Dowdell was listed as her mother.
"I thought it was a mistake," she said. "I thought "Caprine' was short for Katherine," the woman she knew as her mother. She folded up the paper and stuck it in her purse.
But the strange name gnawed at her. Something just didn't seem right. "Everything started to go together like a puzzle," she said, "little by little."
She remembered a dream, a woman telling her to go to a street in search of something. Maybe it was my mother, she thought, telling me about the birth certificate. Nikki called her sister, Trina Dowdell, and told her about the dream.
Trina Dowdell picked up her mother and drove to Nikki's apartment in Madison Place. In a rush of jumbled words, they explained that her real mother was dead.
They didn't say how Caprine Dowdell died, and Nikki was too stunned to ask.
"There was no need to keep asking about it when I didn't think they were going to tell me the truth," she said.
All she knew was that it seemed everything she ever knew about her family was a lie.
A mysterious death
From the moment of Nikki's discovery, the life of Caprine Dowdell has been a forbidden subject in her grandmother's household.
Nikki loves her family and is grateful that she was raised in a loving environment. She still calls her grandmother "Mom" and talks to her just about every day. But all her questions about her real mother's identity went unanswered. Her grandmother refuses to discuss the subject.
Nikki decided to look elsewhere for information. She started with the public library, where she she found news clippings that said Caprine Eloise Dowdell -- known as "Louise" -- died at 17. She was pushed or fell from an expressway overpass. Police classified it as an unsolved homicide.
Her body was found on the foggy morning of Sept. 15, 1978, by a passing motorist where Interstates 74 and 275 cross in Green Township. Tanika was 5 months old. Her brother, Troy, was 1 1/2 years old.
Reading the old newspaper articles, Nikki broke down in tears. It was the first time she knew what happened to her mother.
A copy of the autopsy at the coroner's office gave her a few more details. Her mother died of a skull fracture. She also had fractured ribs and injuries to a lung and her liver. She had sickle cell anemia, a trait Nikki shares.
Calls to the police brought more bad news. David Moonitz, a former Hamilton County sheriff's deputy who had been a detective on the homicide case, said police have long suspected Caprine Dowdell was a teen prostitute and had been dumped from the overpass by someone she picked up one night. Detectives never had enough evidence to charge anyone. The case remains open but inactive.
Nikki now understands that her family may have kept her mother's death a secret to protect her.
Her grandmother has refused to be interviewed about the past, saying she doesn't want to "rehash or relive anything."
Still, Nikki struggles to find an explanation. She just recently saw a picture of her mother as a child. But she wonders whether her mother -- who would have turned 37 last month -- grew into the same kind of lanky, 5-foot-9, 135-pound frame Nikki has herself.
"I don't know anything about that lady," she said. "That's why I can call her a lady. I don't know her. Did she have big toes? Long nails? A big nose? I don't know nothing. That's sad."
Somewhere, there is a brother -- who may know even less about Caprine Dowdell than his sister. Nikki Dowdell desperately wants to find him.
His adoption records are sealed, but Nikki knows he was born as Troy Lydone Dowdell on Aug. 16, 1976. That would make him 22. Nikki plans to be married on his 23rd birthday. By then, her own baby should be 7 months old.
By the time she is married, she will have celebrated a Mother's Day as a mother herself. She spent last Mother's Day searching for Caprine Dowdell's grave at Wesleyan Cemetery in Northside. She searched for Section F, Lot 144 East, Grave 8.
She and her boyfriend took red and yellow roses to lay on the grave. But they couldn't find it. They dug with their fingers for grave markers and got dirt on their dress clothes. They never found Grave 8. Nikki went home and used the flower petals in a warm bath, trying to soothe away her sorrow.
The heartache is still there.
She grasps at any shred of her unknown past.
She's saving money for a gold tiger-eye ring left as collateral for her mother's funeral. No one ever paid the $328.39 bill at Jamison & Jamison funeral home in the West End. The director agreed to settle the bill for $200. The ring was left by her grandmother's boyfriend, a man Nikki called "Daddy" but who has since lost touch with the family.
But the most important thing to her now is finding her brother. Then, she thinks she will be able to move on.
When she's riding the bus, looking at all the people seated around her, she imagines how it might happen. She sees it like a scene from a movie.
"Sometimes I think my life is more interesting than the movies on TV," she said. "At least they resolve it. My movie is still going on."
