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It’s said that Benjamin Darling, a slave on a New England merchant ship, saved his master when the ship collided with this jagged shore in the 1790s. In return for saving his life, Darling’s master granted Darling his freedom and his name, and Darling settled nearby. A fair and upright citizen, he was a reliable worker at the local salt mill. He was mauled by a bear while trying to defend his neighbor’s corn patch. Eventually, he bought his own island, Horse Island. Fifty years passed, and the Civil War had reached its end by the time Darling’s granddaughters made a home on their own island, half a mile to the north of Horse, forty-one acres without a name.

Originally home to those granddaughters and Darling’s other mixed-race descendants, the island soon blossomed into a multiracial fishing community. Intermarriage was illegal, but the white mainlanders of nearby Phippsburg pretended not to notice—at least in the beginning. For those whose connections to the place run deep, the story of Darling’s granddaughters and their families is a tale of a quiet island community, “dyed in the wool,” that subsisted on what the Atlantic could offer and committed to teaching their children how to read, write, and eke out a life from the sea.

They called the island Malaga.

I came to Maine for college, a girl who shaded in the bubble for “two or more races” on the SAT, who left Texas for the whitest state in the nation. I was startled to view the coastline, to see the pines open up before me, to know a landscape that is both vast and deep.

Although it is often said that there are “two Maines,” there is an abundance of progressive history here: Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote much of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the white clapboard house at 63 Federal Street, which the College now owns; one story claims that she read passages to celebrated Union general Joshua Chamberlain, Class of 1852, the war hero, Maine governor, and ������Ƶ president who was known for his valor at the Battle of Gettysburg. This history is a part of everyday life at ������Ƶ: To enter campus from downtown Brunswick, you pass a statue of Chamberlain in a town plaza outside the campus gate; and historians seem sure that Brunswick was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Yet it was here, not in Texas, that I found myself confronted by carefully couched questions while I was waiting tables or reporting for the local paper.

The questions were always variations of the same: Where are you from? And why are you here?

The answer is neither linear nor easy to weave into casual conversation. “My mom’s from India,” I grew accustomed to saying, and leaving it at that. But inwardly, I found myself obsessed with quantifying my own identity: half-white, half-brown, part-Indian, mostly American, not Hindu, raised Christian, speaks broken Arabic; no, not Muslim either. How many times could I splice myself on the basis of imagined biological facts and the cultural codes they carried? They are constructs, and yet I molded myself around them, every day.

The world often presented narratives of race as monoliths—Black, white, brown—but I found fewer lampposts for being mixed-race. If I could find an exact story to match my complexity, perhaps I, too, could fit into a larger narrative, make sense of the world around me.

Then, sifting through old issues at the Portland Press Herald, the newspaper where I worked, I found Malaga. There were other people here once, living on an island twenty-five minutes away from my predominantly white town, people who confounded the essentialist ideas of race I kept encountering. I knew that I could not lay claim to Malaga’s history: I am neither Black nor a Mainer. But I wondered if learning about the descendants of this island might help me consider and navigate the experience of being a mixed-race person in this very white state. Perhaps, if I listened long enough, the island’s history could help me learn how to inhabit two spaces in one.

Born across from the sardine factory in South Ferry, Portland, Marnie Darling Voter was disguised as a boy until the age of twelve. Only boys could be on the dock, and her father needed help fishing and hauling traps. Other days, she would go crab picking with her aunts. Later, Marnie, who is white, became a hippie, she says, and ran off without a destination—just a desire to live freely.

Everything changed years later on the day that Marnie’s late husband, Delmar, took her to peruse the genealogy records at the Augusta library, a straight shot up the interstate from Portland. Marnie was twenty-one years old and had never heard of Malaga. Leafing through the records, she found the link between herself and her last name: a Black man named Benjamin.

“I called my father immediately,” she says. “He told me to shut the f—k up and never mention it again.”

Like many descendants of Benjamin Darling, Marnie’s father had been shamed into silence, but Marnie kept searching. She found out what happened to Darling’s descendants, a story that other local residents said was “best left untold.”

In the years after the island’s founding, hundreds of sensational accounts circulated about it, spreading claims of ignorance and contamination. A 1902 article from the Bath Enterprise, a local newspaper, condemned Malaga in the name of religious purism: “No worse heathenism we imagine could be found in far off heathen countries than can be found on this godless island.” Another article from the Casco Bay Breeze described the island as “the home of southern negro blood . . . [an] incongruous scene on a spot of natural beauty.” Word of Malaga spread south as mainlanders grew fixated on an island that they believed marred the state’s idyll. Without these “incongruous” outliers, Maine might be easier to sell to tourists; shipbuilding, the backbone of the regional economy, was dying, and a tourist economy beckoned. Perhaps, without the island’s residents, Malaga could be made into a resort.

The interracial island community was nearing forty members when Maine Governor Frederick Plaisted told them to leave. The residents were too poor, according to the state, and too dark; within the framework of the emerging eugenics movement, the two were made out to be akin to immorality.

In 1912, the county sheriff delivered the official notice: The islanders would have thirty days to leave Malaga and take everything, even their homes, with them.

Some floated their homes to the mainland, where they docked on a landing that a number of Phippsburg residents would call by a name that is both derogatory and offensive. The state government took others to the Maine School for the Feeble Minded. And the bodies of those who had lived and died on Malaga were unearthed, taken by boat, ferry, and then stagecoach to the same state-run mental institution, and interred there. The island was left barren. It has hardly heard the voices of humans since.

I am looking for Marnie, but all I can see is fence. I continue driving for two miles and then I am there, face-to-face with a stone sign that reads PINELAND, taking in the red brick buildings with their blinding white details. Pineland Farms is a destination for cross-country skiers in the winter, for Maine weddings, for those interested in sustainable agriculture. It is a five-thousand-acre campus of farmland, cottages for rent, a market, and a business center.

It is also, Marnie tells me, a place of annihilation. All it took to get committed to Pineland—when it was known as the Maine School for the Feeble Minded—was the unanimous approval of a doctor, a sheriff, and a judge. For the ten or so Malaga residents who were brought here, already stigmatized, it wasn’t hard to get the stamp of all three. Some were forcibly sterilized.

They, along with the remains of the disinterred people of Malaga, are buried at Pineland—but even here, they are not equal. Divided in two parts, the cemetery is an object lesson in historical erasure. The front section, a conventional burial plot for mainlanders, faces the road. In a meadow beyond, facing the woods, lie those who were evicted. The tombstones there look like paint chips, and memorial plaques are placed haphazardly in a square area—maybe six-by-six yards—as if they were built at different times and for different reasons, placed there by people grappling with the past in different ways.

The largest memorial spells out the names of the islanders, one by one, and paints the fullest picture of what happened on Malaga. It was dedicated by the state in 2017, only two years before I made the visit with Marnie. The story is written on the stone: “From the 1860s until 1912, a community of laborers and fishermen lived on Malaga Island off the coast of Phippsburg. A controversial community for its time, white and black residents married and lived together on the small island until the state of Maine evicted them in 1912. Included in the eviction was the state’s removal of the island cemetery to the grounds of Maine School for the Feeble Minded, where some island residents were committed. Remembered here are the community members exhumed from the Malaga Island Cemetery by the state and those who died here as patients.”

My eyes hover over the words for its time. I wonder if Malaga and its people aren’t considered controversial for our time, too: The story has been stifled for a century, but, depending on who you’re talking to in Midcoast Maine, the word Malaga can still be a slur.