Surviving the White Gaze

by Rebecca Carroll

  This letter, more than others, rocked me, because she wasn’t attacking or judging me; she was literally erasing me from existence. I called Mom and Dad, who had been instantly against the book idea when I told them about it in July when Tess had first brought it up.

  “You have to let this saga go,” Dad said.

  “She’s trying to manipulate you,” Mom said. “And she’s obviously already planning to paint us in a bad light.”

  How was it that they were only concerned about how they might come across badly in a book about my adoption and reunion? Where had they been when I was being eaten alive by Tess and lost my entire sense of self in those early years after the reunion? Shouldn’t they have been the ones to help me get that sense of self back? What happened to their scoops and buckets of love and encouragement from when I was a little girl? Surely they could see she was missing—that little girl they used to tell was special and talented and gorgeous.

  A few days later, Mom sent me a letter:

  Heard on some crappy TV channel that one of the most compelling needs is a need to belong and maybe that is what drives you toward the destructive rocks of the Bancrofts. You know you belong to us and we to you.

  Confused, hurt, angry, and sad by the rollicking mess of my relationship with Tess, I turned to Lottie, Deja, and Ruby for one of our frequent “war council” gatherings at the Umoja center, when we hashed out all that was troubling us in our lives.

  “Fuck her,” Lottie said about Tess and her most recent letter. “Listen, Rebecca, have her in your life, if you can, if you love her, but you can’t let her destroy you like this.”

  “She said I didn’t exist,” I said.

  “Sis, girl, what? Why? Why do you even mess with her?” Ruby said, talking out the side of her mouth, fixing herself on something else in the room, as she always did. Deja, characteristic of her, had said little, but her expression had an opinion.

  “What, Deja?” I said. I could tell that she was quietly going over the ways to tell me how to do better. “Say it.”

  “I can’t tell you shit, and you know it,” Deja said, in the spoken-word cadence that was really just the way she spoke. “But why are you trying to break your own heart?”

  I felt so grateful for Deja at that moment, for all three of these black women, and so truly afflicted to my core that I’d been without them, and other black girls and women, throughout my life growing up.

  * * *

  “What do you think your birth father would say about all this?” Michael asked tenderly, a few days later, as I wept in his arms after another volatile phone conversation with Tess, during which she told me I was flailing as a person, that I seemed misguided and listless.

  I’d not thought about my birth father in this context at all, when he might have offered a distinct counterpoint to my birth mother, and of course it made sense that Michael would bring him up, as a black man who placed such a premium on the voices of black folks.

  “I don’t know,” I said. Michael held my face in his broad, loving hands, looking straight at me. “I mean, he’s still alive, isn’t he? Couldn’t you find out?”

  At that moment, I decided that I needed to find Joe Banks before I did anything else with my life after graduation in May. Roy, who somehow knew where everyone was, like an emissary of descendants, reported that Joe had last been seen in the late ’80s around the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he couldn’t afford classes but would sometimes jam with students.

  Within a few months, I’d secured an internship at Blackside Productions, the film company that produced Eyes on the Prize, and after graduation, I was moving to Boston.

  Forty

  I found a studio apartment that I could barely afford on Hemenway Street in Boston, not far from the Fens in Back Bay, about three blocks from Berklee. Like Mother Jones, Blackside paid a very small stipend, and I had to hustle to make rent and other living expenses. I got a waitressing job at a popular restaurant in Harvard Square and split my time between the two, with more time waitressing than listening to archived speeches by Malcolm X.

  Michael was living at home with Claudia and his stepfather, a white man named Pat, making that his home base while he tried to book poetry readings and spoken-word gigs, not sure what he wanted to do otherwise but certain he wanted to do it with me. Over Indian food one night, we talked about a wedding, and kids.

  A few months before I graduated, Michael and I had gone to a conference in Paris on the subject of black expatriates, and stayed together in the garret of an apartment owned by friends of Michael’s family. We went to the Sorbonne during the day and listened to speakers like Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cornel West, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and French historian Michel Fabre; ate crepes from street carts at night; and then climbed the steep staircase up to our little room above an apartment in the sixth arrondissement of Paris and fucked our brains out.

  When we got back to Hampshire, I took a pregnancy test and it came back positive. Michael, whose face lit up like a Christmas tree when I told him I was pregnant, deferred to me entirely on how I wanted to handle the pregnancy. I was twenty-two years old, and did not for one minute hesitate about whether I would have an abortion. It was my choice, free and easy at the Planned Parenthood off campus.

  Now, as we finished up our chicken masala, naan, and yellow curry, we talked dreamily about our future together. We envisioned a big tent outside, at night, with tiki lights and white tablecloths, giant bouquets of wildflowers in plum and red colors in the center of each table, cream-colored streamers hanging from tent pole to tent pole, and piles of marvelous food. Our fairy-tale wedding would extend to a honeymoon back in Paris, near where we had stayed in February for the conference, where we would eat crepes in the street and think about names from Toni Morrison novels for our children.

  * * *

  A few weeks before graduation, I cut all my hair off, and if I was going to keep it this short, I’d need someone who knew how to manage black hair to maintain it. Which was how I found myself sitting in a barber chair at Ace Studio on a hot afternoon in August.

  Ace Studio was a barbershop on Massachusetts Avenue that I passed on my way to Blackside from my apartment on Hemenway Street, and there were always young black men hanging out in front, laughing and getting up, being foolish and funny. I could hear them from fifty feet away, and always smiled as I passed, flirty and curious, but had never stopped before when they’d shout, “Hey, sis! Come through, girl!”

  “Whatchu doin’ in here, girl,” said Jaden, the young and cocky one who’d been hollering at me.

  “I just need a cleanup,” I said.

  “Oh, you need a cleanup,” Jaden said, mocking me.

  “Yeah, can you do it?” I said, with a bit of an attitude now. I had moved to Boston to find my black birth father, with my black boyfriend, and was doing an internship at one of the blackest documentary film production companies in America, so go ahead and try me, Black Man.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, his smile spreading across his face and down into his body.

  * * *

  Michael and I had been apart for several days while he toured with his band when I invited him to meet me at a tea house in Harvard Square. I’d grown restless and concerned that our relationship was turning into a friendship. There was so much love between us, but our conversations over the phone just in the days when he was away had lost their spark. And if I was being perfectly honest, even before the dinner over Indian food when we’d talked about marriage, things between us had felt more comfortable than thrilling and vital, as it was in the beginning.

  “Are you breaking up with me? Is this because I’ve been away?” Michael said. He’d successfully booked gigs that had taken him out of town for the first chunk of the summer, and we hadn’t seen each other, or been intimate, for weeks.

  “I just feel disengaged,” I said.

  That was the absolute truth of how I felt, and we had always been bracingly honest with each other. Michael looked at
me, took a sip of his tea, and gave way to acceptance, and sadness.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  It wasn’t as cliché as actually saying to each other that we’d stay friends, but we both knew we would, and we are to this day. He’s been sober for twenty years.

  * * *

  I didn’t break up with Michael to date Jaden, but there was a clear attraction, and the next time I went in for a cleanup, a couple weeks later, he asked me to dinner, and pretty soon after, we were seeing each other regularly. Slight and boyish, with sea green eyes and scalp-short hair, Jaden told me he was second-generation Cape Verdean. He had a quick temper, and saw me as an opportunity more than a girlfriend. He wanted more for himself than the barbershop, he told me, and I had “that white education and shit.” We both wanted something from each other we thought we could get by osmosis. I thought I could get blacker, and he thought he could get smarter, the lack of nuance in our singular endeavors lost on us both.

  “See, girl, this is what white girls have over you all, they know how to take care of themselves,” Jaden said one night, pinching my belly fat after we’d just had sex.

  “That’s really rude,” I said.

  He pinched my belly harder. “What’s wrong with you? You want a fat lip? I’m trying to tell you something about yourself. I’m just saying, honey,” he said, trying to sound sweet now. He’d never hit me, but he’d threatened more than once. “You have a good body, I wouldn’t be with you if you didn’t. But this is one of them things that white women got over on black women. They know how to take care of themselves.”

  The truth is, I agreed with him. Had I not starved myself off and on throughout my entire life to make my body look like those of the white women who “know how to take care of themselves”? I was reminded of what Wyatt said about Sophie when we first met, how she didn’t take care of herself, meaning that she was overweight. It was astonishing how quickly and easily I could revert back to white standards of beauty.

  Elsa was who I turned to the most about my relationship with Jaden, which, not surprisingly, unraveled fast. She and I had become good friends as soon as I started working at Blackside, where she was a producer. A black woman who had gone to mostly all-white schools, Elsa understood what it felt like to navigate white spaces as the only black person. She was the latest in a series of black friends, mentors, or boyfriends (whom I’d started to think were sent by the ancestors) who, when I needed them the most, reassured me of the blackness I was still instinctively trying to own.

  “Even though we grew up around white people,” Elsa offered after I told her what Jaden had said about my body, and how I didn’t know why I stayed with him, “we still feel the need to take care of our men, right?”

  “Yes! I thought I couldn’t claim that, but I feel it, I really do, like in a soulful way,” I said. We were sitting in the coffee room at Blackside, taking a break to connect, the original promotional poster for Eyes on the Prize framed and mounted on the wall behind us.

  “Our blackness is in us, and we are in it, all the time,” she said, her eyes warm, knowing. We smiled, sighed, laughed, and went back to work. Jaden and I broke up a few months later.

  Forty-One

  I received another postcard from Tess, who had turned to examining my relationship with Dad, ostensibly as part of her book research.

  OK. I just read a chapter in Women and Their Fathers by V. Secunda and I cannot get over what I read because the information on The Favored Daughter is excruciatingly familiar. I’m serious. Do you want me to send excerpts, do you want to get the book, do you want me to read it to you over the phone, or forget about it for now?

  I wanted none of the above. But, as usual, what I wanted remained irrelevant to her, and less than a week later, when Woody Allen released a public statement announcing that he was, in fact, in a relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted Korean daughter of his former partner, Mia Farrow, Tess sent me a letter that began: Sound familiar? Re: Woody + Soon-yi, and you + DMC? It felt like the sky had opened up and sucked me into an alternate universe.

  “You have all the signs of being traumatized as a child,” Tess said when I called her to talk about the letter, and her less-than-subtle insinuation.

  Ya think? I thought to myself.

  “Sexually traumatized,” she clarified in response to my silence on the other end.

  “OK, but why my father?”

  “Because he is incapable of seeing you as his daughter,” she said, firmly in her element. “I’ve said it all along—you are more confidante and muse than daughter to him.”

  “Right, but that doesn’t mean he molested me.”

  “Think about it, Rebecca. Even if you don’t remember anything specific from your early childhood, think of all the late nights with him you told me about, when you guys stayed up talking and smoking and drinking and telling each other intimate details about your relationships. Fathers and daughters don’t do that.”

  * * *

  And then, in a moment that felt like sticking a shard of glass into my neck, I thought she might be right. I did feel like something had happened to me as a child, something sexual or at the very least inappropriate—something I carried in my bones, but had no clear vision about. Dad and I were close, and we did have a relationship that was wildly different and separate from the relationship he had with his two other children, his biological children. I didn’t believe he had molested me, but I started to think that someone else had.

  “I guess I’ve always felt something happened in my childhood, too, but I really don’t think it was my father,” I said, cautiously.

  “Who else would it be? The younger you were, which would account for you not remembering, the more likely it was a family member who abused you,” Tess explained. “Statistically, something like 50 percent of young kids who are molested are molested by family members. You have to confront him.”

  What if she was right? I thought. What if I’d blocked it out? What if Dad’s blurred boundaries in his marriage had extended to his daughter who wasn’t his biological child?

  “Frankly,” Tess said, “I don’t believe that most white adoptive fathers are able to see their ethnic-looking daughters as their actual daughters.”

  * * *

  Again, I wrote a letter making extreme accusations against a man I held dear, accusations fed to me by Tess, this time addressed to both Mom and Dad. I sat on the idea of it for a day, and then another day. I didn’t want to write it, but I couldn’t see that Tess was trying to sabotage my relationship with Dad. And I also felt that if anyone would understand how important it was for me to reconcile myself with whatever had happened to me as a little girl—something that had shaped the way I responded to men, and sex—it was Dad.

  Whether Dad was innocent or guilty, I trusted that he would respond to a claim that I tried to word as gently as possible. I think maybe our relationship was inappropriate when I was growing up, I wrote. I think maybe some lines might have been crossed.

  Only Mom read it, and she was devastated.

  * * *

  “How could you write something like this?” Her voice trembled on the other end of the phone. “David would never do something like this, he would never hurt you, I just can’t believe you would write something like this.”

  “Did Dad read it?”

  “No, but I told him about it, and he’s so hurt, Becky. So hurt. My God. And he just doesn’t want to have anything to do with it.”

  “Something happened to me, Mom.”

  “Well, it wasn’t something that David did, I know that for sure,” she said. “And I hope you apologize to him, or never bring this up again.”

  I didn’t, and we all pretended the letter never happened. I regret only that Tess had forced my hand. But Dad’s nonresponse changed the tenor of our relationship forever. I knew Mom was right, that he could never have hurt me, but I could hardly bear the fact that he refused to tell me that hims
elf.

  Forty-Two

  The minute I walked in the door for my interview and saw Damian, it was over for me. He was sitting at a small round deuce table near the back of the café, wire-rimmed glasses resting on his forehead, looking over a food order, his velvet ebony-black skin emitting a near torrent of magnetism. I swear my knees buckled. Damian was the chef and co-owner of a new black-owned restaurant, Take It Black, along with his brother Clive.

  Blackside didn’t have enough funding to keep me on as a full-time production assistant, and I wasn’t making enough money as a waitress to keep my studio apartment on Hemenway Street. I moved in with Monique, my best friend from a year of scooping ice cream during high school, and her boyfriend from college, Marco, a fun-loving guy from a working-class Italian American family in Revere, Massachusetts.

  When I started at Take It Black, Damian was dating a thin white woman named Meg with long blonde hair and the annoying energy of a sprite. Meg came into the restaurant often, usually right at closing time, and I hated her. Damian’s ex-girlfriend Rachel, also white, also often showed up at the restaurant. When Rachel came, she and Damian would sit at a table going over what looked like paperwork. It never occurred to me that Rachel might be an investor in the restaurant, which it turned out she was.

  Take It Black was more a café than a full-blown restaurant, vibrant and cozy, with orange walls and big glass windows. It seated about twenty-five customers, and most evening shifts I worked the entire floor, while Damian cooked and Clive managed the floor and register, handling the after-dinner cappuccino and latte orders. Sometimes their younger brother Zachary came to help out as a dishwasher.