This paper explores the imprint of slavery and its ensuing intergenerational transmission of trauma. It further explores a biracial man’s shame over the disavowed paternity of his white father. His ambivalence about his identity transmitted a traumatic world to his daughter, in which an imaginative and creative experience was foreclosed. The man’s hidden aspects of self left him with dissociated, deeply ambivalent feelings about racial identity which, transmitted to his daughter, brought into sharp focus the liminality of the Black experience in a White world. His daughter, the author’s patient, was deprived of an imagined realm in which she could see herself as knowable and loveable. Her identity was damaged, not only by her attachment experience, but by generational cycles of racial hatred that came before her. The analytic work generated a search for the father’s love, which had been eclipsed by his hidden shame.