Carl Tyson was there. He and Joy White had been together as teenagers when Carlina was born and had since separated. Carlina was meeting a birth father who was also, in important ways, a stranger to her — a man who had spent twenty-three years waiting for a daughter who had been taken before either of them could build a relationship.
The reunion, as reported, was joyful. It was also, as anyone honest about the situation would acknowledge, complicated.
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## The Weight of 23 Years
Carlina White had been taken at nineteen days old. She had never known Joy White as a mother. She had never known Carl Tyson as a father. She had grown up with Annugetta Pettway as the closest thing to a parent she had — a woman who had stolen her from her birth family, given her a false identity, raised her in conditions that varied depending on which account you read, and told her, when she finally sought the truth, a story about being abandoned by a drug user.
The reunion in January 2011 was not the end of the story. It was, in many ways, only the beginning of a longer and less publicly visible process of understanding what the abduction had taken and what, if anything, could be rebuilt.
Carlina’s own statements in the months following the identification were careful and often nuanced. She said she planned to use the name Carlina White legally. She also said she would keep the nickname “Netty” — “Netty,” she explained, was something she gave herself, separate from the name Pettway had used. The name had become hers, whatever else the circumstances had imposed.