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A Member of the Royal Family
Watch Sarah's incredible story
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In April 2004, Sarah Culberson got a call she’d spent nearly 30 years waiting for. She was eating dinner with a friend at a noisy beachside café and could barely hear the person on the other end, 6,850 miles away, in Africa.
“This is your father, Joseph Konia Kposowa,” said the voice. Sarah asked him to hold on, then hurried down the crowded street in search of privacy. She found it in a vintage clothing store, among racks of faded dresses. “Please forgive me,” begged the caller. “I didn’t know how to find you.”
“Please forgive me,” Sarah replied. “I’ve been blaming you my whole life. I’m not going to anymore.”
Sarah, then 28, had had no previous contact with her birth parents; she’d assumed they wanted it that way. Her adoptive parents, Jim and Judy Culberson, had told her what little they knew: Her biological father had been an exchange student from Sierra Leone, attending Salem College in West Virginia. He dated a young white woman who worked at West Virginia University. When she became pregnant, they decided to give the baby up. The couple separated, and Sarah’s father returned to his homeland.
Now he was urging his daughter to come visit. “As a member of a royal family,” he told her, “you could be chief here someday.”
At that moment, Sarah knew her life had changed forever. From now on, she would be inextricably connected to a small, war-ravaged village halfway across the globe.
Sarah Culberson grew up in West Virginia as a normal American girl. Jim, a professor of neuroanatomy at WVU, and Judy, a special ed teacher, showered their youngest daughter with love and encouragement. Sarah caught turtles in the woods behind the house, rode her bike around the neighborhood, and enjoyed vacations with her parents and two sisters.
Still, she could never quite shake the sense that she didn’t belong—in her fair-haired family or in Morgantown, a leafy college community with few minorities. Worse, she felt the simmering anxiety shared by many adopted children: If one set of parents abandoned you, why wouldn’t another? “I would think,” she says, “I’m gonna be a really good kid so they don’t ever want to give me back.”
Sarah was an A student, a star athlete, student body president and homecoming queen. “She really enjoys people,” says Judy. She majored in theater at WVU and went on to graduate school at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.
It was there, in 1999, that she took the first step toward investigating her origins. Because of a clerical error, Sarah’s adoption papers listed the names of her birth parents, but she wanted to know more—“who I looked like, medical history.”
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