Surviving the White Gaze

by Rebecca Carroll

  The letters I wrote were romantic and seductive. I was trying to seduce him, and it worked.

  Ryan flew in from Berkeley and arrived late at night in Cambridge, where I was housesitting for Roy and Claire while they summered in Durham, New Hampshire.

  “I want you to be my environment,” he said as we lay together in the dark.

  His environment? I thought. What the hell did that even mean? It made me feel like I was a project and not a person. As if he still didn’t, or couldn’t, actually see me.

  * * *

  The next day we visited my parents in Warner, and then went to a community play his mother, Ann, had helped put together at our old high school. I was wearing a bright orange tank dress and a pair of sandals that kept falling off only my right heel. We crossed the old parking lot, holding hands, Ryan waiting as I stopped to slip my shoe back on; it was the same parking lot where I’d leave fifth period in Ryan’s borrowed car so that I could escape his giddy young love with Bliss.

  Inside the high school, people were gathered in the cafeteria just outside of the auditorium, and Ann greeted us, grinning proudly. She grabbed Ryan’s arm and pulled us over to meet a conservative-looking white couple. “This is my son, Ryan,” she beamed, almost maniacally. “And this is his girlfriend, Rebecca,” Ann said, as if I was a newly appraised object on view, once thought to be valueless but now possibly worth millions. I knew then that I wouldn’t be able to go through with it.

  Suddenly, I saw dinners and family gatherings and holidays that would play out just like this if Ryan and I stayed together. His mother would take pride in how she had ultimately come to accept her son’s black girlfriend, and her important white friends would look at her, then at me and us, with polite discomfort, while an internal struggle played out over how best to pretend they accepted an interracial relationship when black people still weren’t even allowed at many country clubs in America.

  I was having an awakening that Ryan couldn’t possibly understand: taking pride in my blackness did not depend on white approval or proximity. For years, maybe my whole life up until then, I had only ever thought of my blackness in the context of whiteness—my family, Mrs. Gordon, Tess, Nate, Mr. James, my boss at the oil company, Wyatt, and now Ryan. Even when I’d established connections to black people—Mrs. Rowland, the boys at the Speakeasy, Elijah—white people controlled those relationships and, in most cases when Tess was involved, sabotaged them.

  Ryan stayed with his parents that night, and I stayed with mine. The next day we met at an outdoor café in New London, where I’d asked him to meet me.

  “I thought I could do it, but I can’t,” I said.

  “You’re making a mistake,” Ryan said.

  “I’m sorry. I love you, I do, but it just feels wrong,” I told him, wishing I could explain to him why I had to save myself from his whiteness, which suddenly felt so suffocating to me. But I already felt like I might change my mind again, and that would have been enormously unfair. The only thing I knew in that moment was that I had to hold on to myself, my blackness.

  “It just feels wrong? You and your instincts and your beautiful fucking letters and your righteousness, my God. Maybe you should listen to my instincts this time. I think we’d make an amazing team.”

  I couldn’t trust myself to invest in another white relationship without losing my sense of self, without tricking myself into believing that his stamp of approval gave me strength, as I’d thought with Wyatt, when it really just made me feel less black.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, I got a call from Tess. There had been postcards and brief notes between us, but we hadn’t seen each other for nearly a year. We met at a restaurant in Harvard Square, and Tess said she’d been thinking maybe we should collaborate on a book together, which oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, kind of made sense to me at first. A co-memoir, of sorts, she said, about adoption and reunion.

  The tone between us was cordial and cautious, like the first meeting after an agreed-upon trial separation between spouses that may or may not end up in divorce. “I’m actually not feeling that great about adoption or reunion at the moment,” I told her over a salad I barely touched. For most of the summer I had subsisted on a small low-fat yogurt during my lunch break from the bookstore where I was working, something like steamed broccoli with a splash of tamari for dinner, and laxatives. I had a routine, and a salad, however few in calories, would mess that up.

  “But think of all the people going through what we’re going through,” Tess said. “This book would be for them.” She looked serene, well loved, and, as always at the height of summer, tan.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  Walking through Harvard Square after lunch, back toward Roy and Claire’s, where Tess had parked, I saw Michael, a familiar face from campus, coming toward us just past the Au Bon Pain to our right. I was wearing a faded green, short cotton T-shirt dress, with a long-sleeve chambray shirt tied low and tight around the forced slenderness of my hips. Up close, his eyes were nearly the same color as my dress.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey yourself,” Michael said, his smile pushing wider, thick red-red lips set inside a toffee brown face.

  “You home for the summer? You were off last semester, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Staying with Moms. Tryna gather myself up for next semester.”

  “Oh, you coming back?”

  “Yeah”—unabashedly looking at me like he wanted to devour me whole.

  “Well, OK then,” I said. “Cool.”

  “I’ll look you up when I get to campus,” he said, still grinning.

  I nodded and turned to leave, having forgotten entirely that Tess was there.

  “Who was that?” Tess asked.

  “That’s Michael Ladd,” I said. “He’s a poet and rap artist, his mom is the director of the Bunting Institute here in Cambridge.”

  “Well, I guess we know what you’ll be doing this semester.”

  We laughed, like we used to, because we both knew she was right.

  Thirty-Seven

  Sure enough, a few weeks later when I got back to campus, I saw Michael in front of the library, and we spent the afternoon together talking about books and art, where we were from and what we thought about Hampshire. We laughed at how white and bourgie it was, and laughed even harder at how easily we ourselves had blended in.

  We went from a couple afternoon talks in the quad to the tiny single mattress on the floor in my room almost before the season had time to change from summer to fall. I was smitten. One night early on in our relationship, Michael read the Langston Hughes poem “I Play It Cool” to me over the phone, and I thought he could lift my body with the sheer timbre of his voice, so potent and full.

  Michael was plainly gorgeous, elegant-looking, with soft, resplendent skin and a crown of dark curls, loose and large. His voice was gravelly and ancient, like something between a Beat poet and an African griot. We were both studying black literature, and shared Fred as an academic advisor. There are no classes for final-year students at Hampshire, so I was writing and working on my Division III, while Michael, who still had another year to go, was taking courses in black poetry and history and music.

  Not long into the semester, Michael performed live in front of a big crowd at a major music venue in Northampton, rapping his own verses with a band he’d put together, and I stood in the audience, awestruck, cheering and clapping and hooting wildly. THIS is the one, I thought. He’s IT.

  Like me, he had one black biological parent, Claudia, and one white biological parent, his father, who died when Michael was young. Technically, we both were biracial, but while I was still struggling with where to put or how to manage the biracial part of my identity, there was no questioning Michael’s blackness. That’s where I wanted to get, I thought, that resolute confidence and self-awareness that comes with being black, owning it, and willfully denouncing white supremacy. In the same way that Elijah had taught me the
re was more than one way to be black, Michael taught me, and more important made me feel, that who I was was black enough.

  Among other things, like rap music that could be both lyrical and cogent, Michael introduced me to fucking. Like real, unabashed, sweaty, gorgeous fucking. And we did a lot of it. With Wyatt, the only other guy I’d had sex with on a regular basis over an extended period of time, sex felt like something that could keep us fastened together. It was always emotional and meaningful, but it didn’t make my skin burn and ache the way it did when Michael and I had sex, like a language we made together, a carnal vernacular that took shape around the words he wrote and the way I received them.

  Michael could be moody, though, and distant. And he drank heavily, which only made his mood swings more severe. A week could go by when I spoke with him only once or twice on the hall phone, or he’d show up to my room drunk late at night, banging on my door, his voice on the verge of breaking. At the time, I was not drinking, and had very little patience for his binges. Sometimes I’d let him in and hold his heavy, hard-headed crown in my lap until he fell asleep or passed out. Other times I shouted through the door for him to go away, and after a while, he would.

  Thirty-Eight

  Lottie was the first black girlfriend I’d had since Jazmine in Portsmouth, a friendship that hadn’t lasted much past our talent show performance in DC, and the first black girlfriend to grease my scalp. Like Ida when I was twelve, Lottie looked at my hair, sighed, and shook her head. “Sit down, girl,” she said, pointing to the floor in front of the couch in her mod’s common space. I sat, and she left the room, coming back with a giant jar of shea butter and a comb.

  Lottie sat behind me, with me in between her knees, and pulled my forehead back to start at my edges. She parted my hair in sections with the comb, tugging not too hard but not too soft either, and ran her index finger down through the line of bare scalp with a generous dab of shea butter. It felt so immediately ritualistic, like a necessary chore and an act of love, that I didn’t mind the tugging.

  We sat quietly together for an hour or more, Lottie working her fingers through my hair and scalp, while I let my head move in the direction she was pulling it. “There,” she said when she was done. “We need to do this again in a couple of weeks, OK?”

  I’d met Lottie through Michael, along with Deja and Ruby, three black girls who were active in Umoja, Hampshire’s organization for students of color. I quickly became friends with this forthright, funny, and charismatic woman, who brought me up to speed on Umoja and myself. Lottie was studying textile art, and introduced me to black artists like Adrian Piper and Faith Ringgold, and had absolutely no problem whatsoever letting me know that when I first started at Hampshire, all the black folks referred to me as “the black girl who thinks she’s white.”

  My lip started to quiver a little when Lottie first told me that, and she quickly added, “Hey, girl. You don’t need to feel bad about that now. I’m just telling you the truth. We can’t grow without the truth.” I nodded and let her hug me.

  I never thought I was white, I wrote in my journal the night Lottie told me what the other black students had said. I am aware that I was raised in an all-white environment, but I always knew I was not white…. I know that I will not, and I repeat, will not, have white kids or mixed kids—no way. I won’t do it to them. I wonder now if I remembered then the essay I wrote when I was six that started with, I am a black child.

  Molly didn’t like Lottie, because she felt threatened by her personality, and Lottie most certainly did not like Molly, because Molly was everything she hated about so many college-aged white girls, especially at our expensive private school, which Lottie and I both attended on scholarship—wealthy, self-involved, didn’t know any black people other than the ones she selected to know on her own terms, played Ultimate Frisbee, and drove a pretentious car.

  “If I’m being honest, though, your friendship with her is about that white-girl shit you’re always trying to detach yourself from. You still think white is right.”

  “I mean, she’s…” I was suddenly at a loss for words to list a single one of Molly’s redeeming qualities. “Funny. She’s funny.”

  “I’m not blaming you. The forces of white supremacy are strong,” Lottie said plainly. “I’m just saying that one of the reasons folks said that shit about you thinking you’re white is because you hang out with a lot of white people.”

  “Less than I used to,” I said, in my defense.

  “OK, girl.” Lottie shook her head and gave me a half smile.

  Again, I found myself pulled between two worlds, although Lottie telling me about the way black students had perceived me when I first arrived on campus, telling me about myself, for that matter, and the sheer bliss I felt with Michael had tipped the scales toward what always felt like the visceral pull of blackness and black community.

  It’s why I became active with Umoja, the politics and efforts of diversifying the school, and saw less and less of Molly, who had started to spend time with a golden boy around campus named Canaan.

  Canaan was rakish and handsome, the son of a famous artist in New York, and had been involved with Lottie long before he and Molly became friendly. At a party we were all at toward the end of the semester, Lottie and I got into a deep conversation with Canaan about art; then Lottie left, and it was just me and Canaan talking. Molly approached me the next day to say she thought I’d been “inconsiderate” in the way I monopolized all of Canaan’s time at the party.

  The subtext in her condescending tone and expression was clear to me: Just because Canaan went out with one black girl doesn’t mean he’d want to go out with you. But how was I monopolizing someone simply by being in conversation with him? A conversation that had been going on with more than one person before it became just between us?

  I was offended and angry, but didn’t want to get into it with her, so I just walked away.

  “That bitch really tried it,” Lottie said when I told her what Molly had said to me. “I don’t know why you’re friends with her. That white girl will never have your back. Trust.”

  Back on campus after the Christmas break, which I had spent in Warner with Mom and Dad as usual, Molly slipped a note under my door. I had consciously been avoiding her for some time. The note read: What’s going on? We haven’t spoken in weeks. I feel yucky about it. Let’s talk. I walked downstairs, mad as hell, not even sure of what I might say, and knocked on her door. “Listen,” I said after she opened it. “Racism. OK? Racism. I am trying to figure out how to survive and navigate everyday racism as a black woman in America, and you’re not helping.”

  “You can’t just barge in here,” Molly said, clutching her proverbial pearls. “It’s always about you, and what you want, and what you think. You just come in and take up space like you own it.” I wondered if she had any idea how much she sounded like her father at this moment. The presumption that she, or any white person, could tell me how or when or where to exist.

  I walked out of her mod, and back upstairs to mine. “Told you,” Lottie said over the phone.

  Thirty-Nine

  I stood agape at the bookshelves filled with books by black writers, among them June Jordan, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, all personally signed over to the woman standing next to me, Michael’s mother, Claudia.

  Tall and elegant-looking, like her son, Claudia showed me her books as if they were precious and rare gemstones, and I held each one with the same regard. Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence paintings hung framed on the walls, with faded velvet upholstery in muted colors on the couch and chairs, beaded pillows, family photographs, and beautiful, ornate vases filling the room. “So you,” Claudia said, her voice husky, low, and feminine, “are the woman called Rebecca.”

  I talked about Claudia the whole way back to Hampshire, asking Michael a flurry of questions about her life and work, prompting him to suggest, teasingly, that I was more in love with his mother than I was with him. It was true that in Claudia
I saw the black mother I’d never had—literary-minded, stately, and fearless—and felt drawn to her more than any of the other, sadly few, older black women I’d been exposed to in my life. It was like pixie dust from the books I’d read at UNH with Elijah, from Toni and Zora and Audre and Alice, was sprinkled all over the shelves, and Claudia, herself glorious, erudite in the pigmentation of her flesh, was a standing wand spreading it all even further.

  In my journal, after Michael and I visited his mother in Cambridge, I wrote:

  I’ve absolutely had it with white people. I’m sorry, but Jesus, I’ve put my time in. Black culture is rich and it’s my heritage. I’m moving to Atlanta after I graduate because I have absolutely decided that I want to be surrounded by black folks. I want to work for a black literary publication, I want to be involved with urban politics, I want to contribute to, create and encourage black culture, I want to celebrate Kwanzaa instead of Christmas. I want to start a new life that is completely my own. I choose blackness. Although I am half white and was raised in a culturally white environment, I am choosing blackness, because there is more dignity in that. I want my kids to be brown. I want my life to be brown, as I am.

  That January, after another couple of months of not being in touch, Tess wrote me a letter that began, You do not exist. She had decided to move forward with the book idea on her own.

  She went on to explain that she’d tried to request a copy of my birth certificate, but the hospital told her it was impounded—that’s what they did with the birth certificates of babies put up for adoption in 1969. She wrote:

  I did not birth you, you did not come from me. I am not your mother, never have been. You are not my daughter, never were. Your life began when, at 3 years old (or whenever), you were legally claimed by the Carrolls and recognized as a member of that family by the state of New Hampshire. The Third World stork brought you.