I kept my relationship with Fred very straightforward, not necessarily formal but definitely pragmatic. I didn’t want to create a situation even slightly reminiscent of my relationship with Elijah, and was constantly mindful of keeping a healthy distance between us. I still didn’t know whether my relationship with Elijah had been healthy, but I wasn’t taking any risks this time. Fred had an Amiri Baraka afro, a bit of a bend in his posture, and a very soothing nature about him. He was a great listener who managed to take something you said, process it, and give it back to you as a gift, a means of encouragement.
My plan was to graduate in three years, even though many of my classes and traditional grades from UNH did not transfer for credit at Hampshire, which uses an evaluation-based curriculum divided into Divisions I, II, and III. I had enough credits to skip the Humanities & Arts Division I requirement, but still had to fulfill three others in the sciences. I found it all super exciting. Wyatt found it less so, and by the end of my first semester, our relationship was suffering.
“It’s just that you seem so absorbed in your studies all of a sudden,” Wyatt said over dinner at a restaurant near the UNH campus. I’d just completed the first semester at Hampshire, and was off for Christmas break. Tess invited me to stop in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where she and William had just bought a new house, on my way to stay with Wyatt in Durham for a night before heading up to Warner together to visit with my parents.
“To see your brothers,” Tess said. “Mateo could really use a visit from his sister.”
Ten-year-old Mateo had been acting out, badly and often, ever since he’d returned from a year living with Miguel on the Lower East Side of New York, which had not gone well. Ever since the first time I held him during that first visit to Tess’s, when I was about the same age he was now, the two of us had always shared an intense bond, unspoken and hardwired. I never searched for a reason, only ever made myself available to him, and Sebastian, too, but to a lesser degree.
Sebastian had bonded with William while Mateo was away living in New York, and was, by all accounts, a happy, confident, sports-focused kid. Mateo, brown-skinned and cerebral, was often perceived as exotic, as I had been as a child—he was plagued by the same misconception that I was—and he didn’t quite know how to come back to this family that had formed while he was away, who to be or how to develop his identity, racially or otherwise.
Tess frequently took advantage of our sibling bond when she was feeling overwhelmed or frustrated about how best to parent Mateo. When Mateo was in New York City, miserable and pleading with her to let him come home, she called me at UNH in a panic. “I think you have to go get him. You’re the only one who can save him,” she said. I remember getting the call one night, on the hall phone at Smith, and then driving into Portsmouth, where I sat with her in the kitchen, and we drank tequila and smoked cigarettes until she felt better about the situation.
Now, with Mateo entering into a tumultuous adolescence, I’d been called yet again to visit, for both of my brothers this time. Sebastian and I agreed that Mateo was in a really rough place, and expressed our concern to Tess. She listened, and then moved on. In a few days, I received a letter:
I know you and Sebastian worry about him. The lateral devotion and instinctive protectiveness of siblingness always floors me. (In my own situation as well.) But I must tell you that it’s hardball time with M. Tough love city. A child simply cannot be allowed to tyrannize his living space as acutely as M has.
My holiday visit with Tess and my brothers started out the same as all the others. I spent some alone time with each brother, talking with him about whatever was on his mind—sometimes we just goofed around. We joined Tess and William for dinner, during which we joked and laughed with one another, and as we were cleaning up after, Tess asked about how things were going with Wyatt.
“Fine, though he thinks I’m too focused on my classes,” I said, handing her a dish to dry. “He thinks that I’m going to forget about him.”
“Well, here’s the thing with Bancroft women…” Tess said, gearing up for what I knew would be another quickly spun theory that planted her power and relevance squarely at the center of things. But whenever she used the term “Bancroft women,” I felt like I couldn’t unhear it, and I felt an automatic, involuntary pull to be in league with the “Bancroft women”—never described as anything else other than charismatic, gutsy, and appealing—and the Bancrofts in general, a lineage that Roy often referenced as well, intellectuals and anglophiles who “summered.”
“The men in my life, our lives, are consumed by love for us, and they know we have lives that are important to us,” Tess continued. “Our lovers know that they are, in essence, expendable.”
The restaurant where Wyatt and I were having dinner the next night was cozy and dark, with strings of tiny white Christmas lights hung along the walls where they met the ceiling. I felt restless and anxious after visiting with Tess, as if I wasn’t doing my relationship with Wyatt right.
“If I’m absorbed in my studies,” I said, nursing a Diet Coke, “it’s because they are important to me, and you, as my boyfriend, my partner, should understand that you are only as important as my studies. Because, ultimately, you are expendable.” I found myself parroting Tess’s words, almost verbatim.
Even though I didn’t actually believe them. I didn’t believe that the men we love were expendable. Yes, there should be equality in a relationship between two people, but there was something about Tess’s phrasing that made it seem like men don’t matter at all, which didn’t resonate with me.
Certainly I’d seen that play out with the men in Tess’s life. Her split with Miguel had been her decision, and when she was done, she was done, while Miguel appealed several times to try and make it work. This was how I remember her talking to me about my birth father, Joe—when she had decided things were over between them, she “closed that chapter” and moved on. In her relationship with William, it was clear that he adored her, and she loved him, though there was no mistaking that she had the upper hand. But I wasn’t Tess.
Now that I said the words, though, I couldn’t take them back.
Wyatt was visibly hurt, but didn’t respond. What could he have possibly said?
Thirty-One
We had a large dry-erase board on the wall in the mod’s common space where we wrote notes, and posted stickers and Post-its. I came in from class one afternoon to see a note pinned to the board written in my roommate’s funky scrawl that read, in all caps: RYAN CALLED, WANTS YOU TO CALL HIM BACK.
I hadn’t seen Ryan, my crush from middle and high school, since we’d run into each other over Christmas break during our first year in college, so it was a surprise to hear from him now. I knew, though, that he was at Wesleyan, about an hour from Hampshire, and I called him back, missing him, curious to know how his life was going. He invited me to come visit and see this “really impressive” black choir perform. I found it both weird and flattering that he called, and even more so that he wanted to see me. I was curious, too, so I accepted his invitation and drove to Middletown, Connecticut, one Friday after classes to meet him at Wesleyan for the concert.
Ryan looked the same, boyish and beautiful, although he also appeared more engaged. We’d never had conversations about race or my being black in high school. Ryan had been into soccer, Bliss, and his schoolwork, which is not to say that he wasn’t smart, but more that he distanced himself from me when these conversations started to matter. He knew about Nate’s father and the prom incident, but never said anything to me about it.
The concert was lovely, the choir divine and urgent, their harmony an arresting cultural cadence, although the audience was mostly white, an observation I expressed over coffee at a community center on campus afterward.
“I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that all the white people in the audience were racist,” Ryan said, his words fat and presumptuous, taking up all the space clear across the table between us.
I was ag
hast since that wasn’t even close to what I’d said. “I didn’t suggest that at all,” I interjected. “I said it’s unnerving to be at a concert by a black choir, and for me, as a black person, to see that the audience is almost entirely white people.”
“But what do you mean by ‘unnerving’? The white people in the audience were there to hear the music, why is that a problem?” Ryan said, both our coffees untouched, his self-assuredness alarming. “How is that unnerving?”
“You really just don’t think about this stuff at all, do you?
“What stuff?”
“Like, race and identity and racism. You don’t see how privileged you are, and all these rich, preppy white kids around you who don’t have to think about racism, or being the only one in a room, or the target of racism every day.”
“Well, what about reverse racism? You talk about these so-called rich, preppy white kids with such contempt and righteousness. Like, all of a sudden white people are expected to know how to assimilate into a race-conscious environment. I feel like there should be some sort of support group for us to figure it out, and not be judged while we do it.”
“A white support group for white people to vent their ignorance about race? Are you serious?” My ire was rising rapidly. “Oh, boo-hoo. Listen, Ryan, you are twenty-one years old, and if you can’t find a way to educate yourself, do a little research, and get over it without a white support group, you’re screwed. We’re all screwed.”
“I don’t think I should be punished for never having been exposed to racism growing up,” he said, with a touch of exasperation.
“Jesus, Ryan. You could have asked me.”
He looked at me with an air of pure, unadulterated arrogance. “It never occurred to me.”
I slept on the floor of Ryan’s room that night, restless and cold with just a blanket and pillow, too angry to ask for more, and woke early the next day to drive back to Hampshire without saying goodbye. I was mad at myself for going, for giving any credence to his opinion, and for allowing myself to be flattered by his invitation. But I was even madder at him. What an idiot, I thought. I realized that my visit with Ryan had inspired in me a surety about my blackness that, as Elijah had once said of my writing, was “gaining steam.”
Thirty-Two
Ironically, I had been the one to encourage Wyatt to start writing in a journal. I’d given him one for Christmas, and was glad to see him writing, something he’d expressed a vague interest in pursuing as a career. In March, I drove to Durham, where Wyatt was now sharing another rental, this time closer to campus, to talk face-to-face.
Things had been strained since our Christmas-break dinner, when I’d told him he was expendable. I’d since apologized about what I said, and thought we’d moved on, but he was still distant and irritable when we talked on the phone. I asked him numerous times what was going on with him, with us, but he just said he had a lot on his mind. So I decided to make a concerted effort to show him how much he meant to me, and surprise him with a visit just as I’d done the year before when I changed my cross-country plans.
It was late when I arrived, and he seemed happy to see me. We had sex, which, for us, was the great connector. While he was in the shower the next morning, I rolled over to his side of the bed, a queen mattress and box spring, and hung my head over the side; the sheet smelled musty, and I knew Wyatt probably hadn’t changed it in weeks. And there it was, his journal, the one I’d given him, a simple gray hardcover with red binding. I reasoned that if he wasn’t going to tell me what was going on, I was going to find out on my own.
I squinted my eyes to read his blocky, half-cursive, half-print handwriting, feeling a love toward the familiarity of it from notes and cards and love letters he’d sent over the past year. I randomly flipped to a page in the middle of the book, and my stomach dropped.
My love for her is dishonest, the entry started. It went on to say that he only loved me because I was beautiful, and was trying to figure out why he had been so drawn to me in the first place. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, my back to the bathroom, where I didn’t even hear the shower turn off, reading in disbelief, when Wyatt came into the room with a towel wrapped around his waist.
“What are you doing?” Wyatt said angrily.
“What is this?” I said, tears streaming down my face.
“Oh God, Beck, listen,” he said, more tenderly now, as he sat down next to me on the side of the bed and tried to hug me, but I flinched.
“When were you going to tell me? Was any of it real?”
The whole scene was so cliché, like a bad made-for-TV movie. But also absolutely devastating.
“Yes, I mean, sort of,” Wyatt said. “I’m just trying to figure out what I want, you know? You always seem so clear about what you want, and I just, I don’t know. I think we should take some time apart.”
“Are you breaking up with me?” I said, through melted, murmured words and tears.
“I guess so?” This was Wyatt, though. Nothing was over until it was over. A pragmatist through and through.
I cried the whole way back to Hampshire, listening to Steely Dan’s Gaucho album over and over in my car’s cassette player. When I arrived back to my dorm, puffy-eyed and distraught from grieving the breakup of my first love and first relationship, I realized that I had no real community there, no close friends or girlfriends to help me through it. My girlfriends from youth—Leah, Monique, and Beck—were all occupied with their own lives. I could have called, but a phone conversation seemed like effort, and a disruption I didn’t want to cause.
Leah was pregnant with her first child and had left Oberlin to move back to New Hampshire, where she planned to raise her child in close proximity to his father, a black man who lived in Vermont, and his extended family there. Monique was living in Boston with her boyfriend from college and getting ready to apply to law school, while Beck was studying biomedical science at Cornell.
I had a single room in Dakin, and spent the next two days holed up there by myself, wallowing in my misery. One friend left a cup of granola and yogurt in front of my door, which I left untouched. When I reemerged to finish up classes, I felt like my heart had been stripped of its arteries. Tess’s words rang in my head, as usual: Your happiness only makes it more poignant for me that it will eventually end between the two of you. That she was right only intensified my heartbreak.
I spent the whole summer trying to get over Wyatt. We slept together a number of times, after which I always left in tears. It was a way for me to feel wanted, and for Wyatt to indulge whatever fantasy version of me he was still trying to figure out—occasionally I felt like he was trying to work out the shame he felt around treating his black adopted sister badly. Other times, it seemed he just couldn’t comprehend how or why he found me attractive.
Thirty-Three
I returned to Hampshire that fall, this time to live in a mod instead of the dorm, ready to put Wyatt behind me. Mod life turned out to be just what I needed.
In Mod 42, our three-bedroom apartment in the Enfield housing area, I lived with three other women, each spirited and smart in her own way, all white, from working-class, academic, or artistic families. They were curious and inclusive, gay and bi and queer, good-humored and kind. We cooked together every night, and read to one another sometimes, talked about ways to make the world better, and how they could be allies to me as white feminists.
Back at Dakin, my room had been so small there wasn’t enough wall space to hang art or posters. In Mod 42, my room on the first floor was a good size, large even, with a big, built-in desk and plenty of wall space, where I hung my favorite poster, the iconic “Playground” image of Michael Jordan playing on the blacktop against a wall of colorful graffiti, mid-jump on his way to the basket for a dunk, surrounded by Nike-clad kids in motion, their shoulders barely reaching Jordan’s ankles.
It’s an arresting, joyful, and poetic image that was a way to keep my blackness, and black greatness, in full sight. I bought a small
throw rug with vibrant oranges, yellows, and reds to cover the nasty gray carpeting, and a bright red butterfly chair that I put between my desk and the bed. It was cozy and it felt like mine, a space that I alone had made.
I completed my Division I work, and homed in on what I needed to do for my Division II, which usually consisted of a year or two of designated coursework and research in preparation for Division III, essentially a written dissertation to be presented to a committee and defended in your final year. In an advanced black literature class with Fred, I discovered Audre Lorde, who had gone unintroduced in my class with Elijah at UNH, and read her seminal essay, “Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power,” which became the impetus for my Division III, a collection of interviews with black women writers.
I reconnected with a guy from Botswana named Kigosi I’d met in my African history class during my first semester but had not pursued a friendship with, despite his clear interest in one. I’d been too focused on Wyatt. Kigosi led me to the Prescott mod area, which I finally learned, in my third semester at Hampshire, was broadly known as the mod area where all the black folks lived.
I had been curious about where the black students in my classes lived on campus, but I never asked because, it finally occurred to me one warm afternoon in the quad, sitting with Kigosi and a few other black students on the steps to the library, when a group of white students walked by, that being with black people meant not being with white people, and vice versa. I wasn’t equipped to be in a white relationship, or in any white-centric dynamic, and also invite blackness other than my own. I didn’t have the tools to fluidly navigate both worlds.
Surviving the White Gaze Page 15