Surviving the White Gaze

by Rebecca Carroll

  “Lena, this is Rebecca.” Tess introduced me to her mother with the certainty of a court prosecutor presenting incontestable evidence. Lena looked at me with vacant eyes. She wore her long, leaden hair in a low bun, and her shoulders were hunched under an oversized khaki-colored jacket.

  “Hi,” I said tentatively. She nodded at me, took a drag of her cigarette, and looked away. Lena seemed almost ghostlike, as if I could see the smoke from her cigarette sucked down into her throat, cloudy and ashen, making lazy loops inside her lungs. There was a dire stillness about her, nothing like the vibrant woman Tess had described, who hosted literary salons at their home in Boston, and loved men and language and music.

  “Thanks for being so generous with Mateo, Lena,” Tess said.

  Lena nodded.

  “Mateo, thank Lena for such a generous gesture.” Tess looked at her oldest boy, who I was now holding on my hip. “Go ahead, don’t be rude,” she insisted.

  “Thank you, Lena,” Mateo, just barely two years old, said dutifully. I gave him a squeeze, and whispered in his ear, “Good job.”

  After a few minutes, we turned to leave, the smell of french fry grease thicker with every step toward the door. I looked back at Lena, sitting under a broken fluorescent light, fading into the darkness as if I’d never seen her at all.

  Thirteen

  I hadn’t heard her voice in what felt like forever.

  “Hey,” Leah said, suddenly standing next to me at my locker in school the morning after my Boston trip with Tess.

  “Hey!” I said, maybe a little too eagerly. I had no idea what had prompted her to suddenly start talking to me again, and I truly did not care. Our bond could withstand anything. I felt it in my bones.

  “I miss you,” she said somberly. “And I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened, but I felt confused, and things were so weird with our parents, and I want us to be friends again.”

  “Oh my God! I miss you SO much!” I nearly shrieked, throwing my arms around her. She hugged me back, and before she could say anything else, I started to tell her in breathless, rapid spitfire about everything that had happened in the months we’d been apart. “I met Tess! She’s so pretty! And I have brothers, they’re so cute! And we went to Boston!”

  “OK! Slow down!” Leah laughed, her smile like a precious family heirloom temporarily lost and then miraculously found.

  “Want to sit with me at the popular table? I’m sitting with Ella and those guys at the popular table. Isn’t that cool?”

  “I know, I saw! That’s great!” Leah, whom I’d seen sitting in the lunchroom with friends from elementary school when we’d first started sixth grade, seemed happier for me and my social mobility than she was interested in getting her own seat at the popular table. Ella granted my request to give Leah a seat, which meant bumping another girl permanently. Leah was happy to sit with us, and I was happy to have her back as my best friend.

  * * *

  Toward the end of sixth grade, a break-dancing crew came to perform at our school. Leah and I sat together on the gym bleachers along with our new friends, the popular kids, Ryan among them. Ryan had a quirky, grown-sounding voice, and made observations about the world around him with an unfussy sense of wonder. There was an elasticity to the way he spoke, an inviting pause in between sentences, that stretched further with every additional word. “Sit here, Becky Carroll,” Ryan had said, tapping the space on the bleachers next to him when Leah and I had first walked in. He liked to say my whole name.

  When a small crew of all black boys came out to give a high-energy performance, I found myself feeling torn between a sense of giddiness and the fear of being found out—that if I expressed any of the excitement I felt at seeing this group of black boys perform, I would be exposing myself as black. Their show was so electric, though, and by the time it was over, my cheeks hurt from smiling. The boys stuck around afterward to answer whatever questions we might have, or for the congratulatory attention they hoped we’d lavish upon them, and which they were probably used to with other less-white audiences.

  Most of the students dispersed, while a few of us lingered to avoid going back to class. Nobody said anything about the show or the black boys who were standing so nearby. It was as if they didn’t even exist. I casually looked over my shoulder to see one of the boys holding his glance toward me. Youthful and serious, round-shouldered and alluring, he bit his lip when he caught my eye and smiled a sweet, mischievous grin that gave me butterflies. I smiled back, flirtatiously.

  Over the sound of sneaker squeaks on the gym floor and the cacophony of adolescent chatter, I heard Ryan say, pointed yet dispassionately, “Looks like somebody has a crush.” I snapped out of what felt like a mini-trance, as if I’d been caught in some sort of shameful act.

  “What?” I said, trying to come off as casually disinterested as possible. “Are you kidding? No way.” I pushed my whole body into Ryan, coltishly, shaking my head and laughing, mindfully signaling to him that I would never be interested in a black boy.

  I innately understood that an open display of solidarity with blackness would make me less viable, less valuable, as a member of the popular clique. I couldn’t gamble with the popularity I’d effectively banked for the sake of this black boy, who was only going to return to whatever faraway city where black people lived, never to be seen again. Ryan pushed back, and we all left the gym in a highly engineered herd of homogeneity.

  I turned back one last time to see the boy I’d betrayed. He shook his head, his face conveying what he’d known all along, that I was a sellout. And then Leah caught my eye. I could tell that she’d seen the whole exchange, and looked at me now so tenderly, with an expression so full of empathy, as if I’d missed an opportunity she knew I needed to have, that I almost turned back and run after the boy with the mischievous grin before he disappeared for good.

  Fourteen

  I didn’t have my hair brushed out entirely until I was twelve years old. For years when I was younger, I’d let Dad use a soft-bristle brush to gently fluff it into a perfectly round afro, but after a while I stopped letting him, and my parents just started to kind of ignore it. Tess said I should have a black person do something with my hair, and during my next visit with her after our trip to Boston, she brought me to Ida’s Beauty Shop, the oldest black-owned hair salon in Portsmouth, where there was a small but vibrant black population.

  The shop was on a back road on the way out of town in a modest-sized converted ranch-style home, with one bathroom and a row of three hair dryers against the wall to the left of the main chair. Ida yanked at my hair with a metal pick until she could pull it all the way through from top to end, shaking her head at the state of my hair. It was completely snarled and matted in the back from years of neglect, and every tug felt like a kind of punishment Ida didn’t want to enact, though she knew it was for my own good.

  Tess sat on a black faux leather couch in the waiting area and flipped through an old Ebony magazine as I sat in the salon chair facing a mirror above a shelf with hot combs, hairpins, and large jars of Vaseline. Ida, tall and regal, with her own hair straightened and permed, stood over me, doing the Lord’s work on a Friday afternoon, stopping every now again to say something like, “Whoever? What in the name? My goodness, chile!” Ida, whose clear eyes reflected the burden of history and the patience it required, was also an ordained minister, Tess told me after.

  Once Ida could work a pick through my hair, she took a hot comb to it. I could feel the heat on my neck as she slid the comb through my suddenly long and luxurious hair, like a hot knife through butter. I had no idea it was even possible for my hair to be straightened like this, but once it was almost as smooth and silky as that of the white girls at school, I never wanted to wear it any other way.

  “You can’t get it wet, chile,” Ida said. “It’ll go right on back to what it was if you get it wet.” I nodded my head dutifully. “And find someone who can help you keep up with it, all right now?” I refrained from te
lling her that there was no someone who could help me keep up with my hair. In the moment, though, I was too caught up in my new straight-haired glory, so I just kept nodding. “You need to wrap it at night, keep it greased at the scalp. You don’t have to wash it but once a week. Use a deep conditioner. Get some shea butter. You got a bonnet you can wear to bed?” Ida’s voice trailed behind us as we left the shop.

  I didn’t care if I never showered or washed my hair again so long as it stayed just like this. That night I babysat for friends of Tess, and I remember standing in front of a mirror in their living room after the kids had gone to bed, flipping this new long, straight hair from side to side, the way I’d always wanted to, the way I used to pretend with a turtleneck shirt over my head when I was younger.

  But then it rained, and just like Ida had told me, my hair went back to what it was—frizzy and coarse, all its luster gone, curls shrunk up around my ears. It was at least long enough that its own weight forced it to fall downward rather than sticking upward, like it had when it was an afro, an untamable mess.

  Fifteen

  Slave Day was a time-honored, annual tradition at Kearsarge Regional Middle School.

  The way it worked was that seventh grade boys would bid on the seventh grade girls, and vice versa, and the highest bidder would then buy that girl or boy and make them their personal slave for the day. The ramifications of this for me, the only black girl in the school, occurred to no one—not my parents, not my friends’ parents, not teachers or the principal. Not a single white adult took issue with the fact that in 1981 rural New Hampshire, a black child, me, could be bought by a white boy of means without any consideration of the short- or long-term consequences. It didn’t occur to me either; I was actually thrilled when Nate bought me, handily, with the highest bid.

  Nate was a junior pro skier and competed regularly on a regional team. On Slave Day, he made me wear his skin-tight, full-body, thick neoprene ski-racing suit, clunky ski boots, and ski goggles, while I carried his books from class to class. Other girls were instructed to wear Halloween costumes, or maybe a suit and tie that belonged to the father of their owner.

  Clomping to class in our middle school model of a Southern plantation, I noticed a boy I’d never seen before.

  “Who’s that?” I asked my friend Jessie, who had been dressed in a nurse’s uniform by her slave owner.

  “Oh,” she said, enraptured. “That’s Hopper Tilson.”

  * * *

  Tall, with a shock of white-blond hair and lucent blue eyes, Hopper sauntered through our middle school hallways like he could take or leave school, like it was ultimately useless but potentially amusing. Hopper had an older brother and an older sister, both as blond and arrestingly attractive as him. I almost choked on my own saliva when he said hello to me in the hallway a few days after I’d first noticed him.

  Hopper’s father, Henry, an established novelist and screenwriter, was born to a wealthy family in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was raised, and was the near spitting image of Warren Beatty. His wife, Rose, a multimedia artist, also from Birmingham, was a former Miss Alabama who had once dated Elvis Presley. They’d recently moved to a small town a few miles north of Warner to raise their three children, Silas, Tallulah, and Hopper, who each excelled at skiing and snowboarding and singing and acting and, above all else, being better than the rest of us, larger than their surroundings and effortlessly appealing. I was drawn to them in a narcotic way.

  Their house, about twenty minutes away by car, was at the top of a back road off the highway and sat opposite a small pond surrounded by acres of grass. There was a garage turned personal gym where Henry worked out, and a tennis court behind the house. They had two golden retrievers, and the interior of their home was modern country glamorous, something you’d see in the pages of Town & Country magazine. Rose had a dressing room at the top of the stairs where all her clothes and shoes were housed, along with a vanity table with brooches and jewels in velvet boxes, ribbons and hats, feathers and her own shadow box art.

  As with Ella, I asserted myself into the Tilson world because I wanted what they had. And, also like Ella, they were either charmed or impressed by my somewhat furtive moxie. With the Tilsons, though, my blackness seemed like an advantage, a way to be exceptional and interesting—nobody in their sphere was “common.” Dinner guests included famous filmmakers, actors, and broadcast journalists. Tallulah had a picture in her room of herself at a party with Michael Jackson.

  When we first became friends, Hopper would roller-skate the twelve miles or so to my house to hang out, and then later his father would pick him up in their Jeep Wagoneer with side paneling. Ours was a friendship that took place outside of school, where the popularity politics were rigid and irrelevant to Hopper’s level of agency. Later, after I got my driver’s license, I would drive myself to his house, and very often said little, immersing myself in their world and blending into the furniture as they played out this life that seemed fantastically unburdened, captivating, and casually luminous. Silas and Hopper were always making music out of weird things like window frames, kitchen utensils, or pot lids alongside a regular electric keyboard, while Tallulah, the lone girl child, tall and striking, exerted as much voice and vocals, either singing or just talking loudly, as she could.

  One night on my way to the movies with Silas, Hopper, and Tallulah in the Jeep, windows open in the summertime at dusk, heading out on Route 103 just before the exit to Concord, I saw the outline of a tiny woman trailed by a medium-sized dog walking on the shoulder of the road. As we got closer, I could see the switch of her angry hips, a rabbit’s-ear key chain dangling furiously from the belt loop of her stonewashed jeans. She flicked her cigarette out into the highway as we sailed by. It was Riana, with her dog Peaches, on the road to nowhere, while I was in a chariot with gods.

  After that night she’d come home filled with rage, Riana started dating physically abusive boys, among them a boy named Scott, who once showed up at our house with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his shoulder. She’d broken up with him, and he couldn’t live without her, he said. Dad told me to go to bed while he dealt with Scott.

  I pretended not to recognize my sister as we sailed past her on the highway. I was embarrassed by her. She looked like a redneck, or a prostitute trying to escape her john in some seedy R-rated movie. But seeing Riana walking along the highway alone at night, with cars flying by within feet of her small frame, which was not just stupid but dangerous, suddenly brought to bear the acute lack of guidance or structure we had in our family.

  There was no grounding in culture or religion or aspiration. We were a family in cognitive disarray, empirical chaos—no one belonged to anyone. We lived in a castle with an absentee king. At the Tilson’s house, Henry reveled in his Southern-style patriarchy, tapping both his daughter and his wife on the ass when they said something clever, and called smart, attractive women “good girls.”

  There was an ease, a merry nonchalance inside their home, an ongoing, rousing movement that felt like a movie set, with flawless performances, glamorous costumes, and the smartest, funniest dialogue. They had special pet names for one another, and laughed at one another’s jokes. The children were the focus—how they grew and observed the world and succeeded; what they liked and loved—and I felt a sense of mourning for the loss of that same kind of focus from Mom and Dad when we were very small kids, up on Pumpkin Hill. A focus that had shifted abruptly after I’d met Tess, when it seemed they felt free to focus their attention elsewhere.

  * * *

  Hopper, like his brother and sister, went away to private school for high school, but whenever he was home for a holiday break, I’d invite myself over to visit with him and his family, suck in their rarified air, and fantasize that my blackness would always grant me such provisional gold-star approval.

  Sixteen

  I saw him only once. Usually when Tess went out with her “lover,” a black man named Carl, she left to meet him somewhere in town, but t
onight he’d come to pick her up. Since she’d split with Miguel three years before, Tess dated now and again, but her monthly night with Carl, she’d told me, was mostly just about sex.

  “Well, hello,” Carl said when I answered the door.

  “Hi, I’m Rebecca,” I said, welcoming him inside.

  “Oh, I know who you are.” He smiled. Carl’s head nearly grazed the ceiling, and his voice was rich and slow, drawn out like a long summer day.

  “You do?” I asked, surprised.

  “Yes, of course,” Carl lilted. “You’re Tessie’s daughter.”

  Tessie? Who the hell calls her Tessie? I thought. As if summoned, Tess suddenly appeared, flush from running down the stairs.

  “OK, the boys are in bed, ready for you to read to them,” she said, hurriedly. “Sebastian is not pleased that I’m going out, so you should head up now.”

  “OK,” I said. “Have fun, nice meeting you, Carl.”

  “Nice meeting you, too, my dear,” Carl said, putting his arm around Tess’s shoulders to lead her out the door.

  * * *

  Tess wore a sandalwood or similarly scented perfume. It wasn’t overly strong, and I never actually saw her apply it, but I loved the smell, like bare skin, honey, and musk. With the boys asleep after I’d soothed Sebastian and read them both several bedtime stories, I went into Tess’s room to find the small amber-colored vial on her dresser. I unscrewed the black cap, held the contents to my nose, and inhaled Tess’s smell. The vial was tiny in between my fingers, and I was afraid I might drop it, but before I put the cap back on, I held my finger over the opening and gently flipped it so there was just a fingerprint of liquid that I drew across the inside of my wrist.