My Time Among the Whites

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  There is nothing like having a middle-aged wedding DJ ignore you to the tune of “Crocodile Rock” to make you realize how different your life is from what you thought it would be. He began ignoring me as if knowing before I could that I’d never need to hire a wedding DJ ever again. I thought about DJ Freddy J’s foot in the air with a mimicked doosh, kicking out all the white people. I had a track record with men in this profession sending me subtle cues about how my life might unfold. Through the speakers, Elton John joined in with the wedding fair DJ’s oblivious mockery of my life choices: Naaaaaaaaah, nah nah nah nah naaaaaaaah.

  I didn’t know what I was doing there, not just there as in trying to pick a fight with a wedding DJ, but there as in divorced, in a job I hadn’t seen myself taking, in a geographical state my high school best friend and I jokingly banished each other to when we wanted the other one to disappear. I didn’t know what I was doing there, and the strangest part is that it felt okay that I didn’t know—or more accurately, the sensation of not knowing felt right, which hadn’t been the case for a long while. In fact, I’d been avoiding that sensation ever since saying yes to someone when they offered to spend their life with me. I could’ve never imagined myself in any of the roles I now inhabited, and yet now I was these things. I’d told the DJ what I’d observed, and what had come from all those careful observations? Say he told me to get out of his face, say he blushed and hoped no one had heard what I’d said, say I slammed his laptop shut and got myself kicked out of the wedding fair. Say whatever you want, because ultimately, the DJ just wants people to dance. I was the only one saying anything, trying to get at what I had wanted to be part of, and then, having lived it, no longer wanted: That’s what I’ve been trying to say.

  Behind me, another DJ—not a vendor but one hired by the wedding fair—announced that a bridal gown runway show was starting. His voice was my excuse. He asked everyone in the hall to have a seat in some chairs arranged around the runway, so the women modeling the gowns would have at least a handful of people in the crowd. Let’s say a couple dozen of us listened. Say I wandered over, sat there in my pajama pants, registering that every bride was white, was wearing white—and that in looking around at the white faces that had joined me, I understood I was the only person there having these thoughts. Say I accepted this, and that I said nothing, because I knew where I was.

  Say I knew, at least, where I didn’t belong.

  GOING COWBOY

  One of the first things I did when I moved from Florida to Nebraska was find myself some cows to herd. It seemed like a must when considering one of the state’s claims to fame: There are over three times as many cows as there are people within its borders. I’d moved to the state to take a job at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, the state’s capital and its second largest city, and learned before my time there officially began that roughly 25 percent of the incoming class would be first-generation college students. I had this in common with them, but there was a key difference: Many of these first-gen students came from rural backgrounds, from families where work centered on cattle and corn. I’d grown up in Miami, had gone to a high school whose population rivaled that of some entire Nebraskan towns. With the last few weeks of summer ahead of me, I decided that to be better at my job, I needed to see the real Nebraska, whatever that meant.

  I eventually found a website for a ranch in a town that some folks considered to be the rodeo capital of Nebraska. (There’s a rodeo capital? I thought.) Aside from what seemed to be easy access to cattle, the ranch offered visitors a chance to stay for days or even weeks at a time and work from dawn until dusk, to experience what it’s like to be, as their website put it, a real Sandhill cowboy. The website also promised that this was a real working cattle ranch; no spa day, no golf or yoga, it warned. I would be driving the herd, it said. “The Sandhills proves to guests there is a lot more to Nebraska than flat lands and cornfields!” I read in that exclamation point my defense of my own hometown: There’s more to Miami than South Beach! I should expect to spend at least six hours a day on a horse; I would get my own horse for the duration of my time there. I’d never been on a horse for much longer than it took to take a picture of me on one.

  Upon calling to confirm the trip, the woman on the phone—who turned out to be the wife of the rancher, the whole enterprise of getting tourists to pay to work the ranch being mostly her idea—told me to be sure to bring a hat. “A cowboy hat with a stampede string would be best,” she said. I wrote down stampede string to google later and asked if a baseball cap would suffice. “The tops of your ears will burn,” she said. “But if that’s what you have, that’s what you have.” I told her I didn’t sunburn easily because—and here I stuttered, covering up what I almost said with the phrase because I’d grown up in Miami. I’d been living in Nebraska for about two weeks, and it hit me at that moment in our conversation that with this new home state came very different demographics and assumptions: Leading with the fact that I was Latinx (which in Miami is all but assumed) might make my hosts a little less excited to meet me. Just as I’d never spent time on a ranch around white folks, this woman had, more than likely, never meaningfully interacted with a “Latino Hispanic”—as Republican candidate Donald Trump would mistakenly come to call us during one of the presidential debates. This was the summer of 2015, and this call took place just days before Trump announced his run at the Republican nomination by slandering all Mexicans as rapists and murderers. It wasn’t until I caught myself trying to avoid mentioning my background and masking my Miami accent that I realized my ranch host might be afraid or suspicious of someone like me, feelings that the next year would only amplify—a year that taught me to be very afraid of my new white neighbors.

  The woman laughed into the phone and said, “Well! I don’t think we’ve ever had someone from Miami come stay with us.” Her big, easy laughter scooted us right past any other questions about me. She gave me the heads-up that there would be a film crew there for part of my stay. “Some French folks,” she said.

  The French folks turned out to be four guys who never bothered to clarify their names to me. They were boy-bandish in nature; I thought of them as “The Leader,” “The Wannabe Leader” (he was the main character in the documentary), “The One with the Long Hair” (their camera person), and “The Other One” (destined to be forgotten, his presence is blurry in every picture I took). They arrived at the ranch a few hours after I did and, strangely, by cab: They’d flagged one down at Omaha Airport and somehow convinced the cabbie to drive his minivan more than two hundred miles to drop them off. Before the cabbie drove away—another two-hundred-mile return drive ahead of him—I ran up to his window, through the cloud of cigarette smoke the French guys had created within seconds of getting out of the cab, and asked him the fare. “Over five hundred bucks,” he said. “Those jerks didn’t even tip.”

  They were at the ranch to film part of a documentary about completing an American-themed Bucket List for French Hipsters. They were doing everything American; they’d come to this ranch to be real American cowboys, they kept saying. And they wanted it all on tape. They’d flown into Omaha from Chicago, where they’d just completed another French-designated quintessential American Experience: going to a Cubs game and eating a deep-dish pizza.

  They wanted to play cowboy but they came to Nebraska? I asked nobody. Prior to this trip, I hadn’t known there was a significant cowboy and rodeo culture in Nebraska. The Nebraska I imagined was just flat fields of corn—and that’s true for most of the parts you can see from I-80—but I didn’t know that much of the state rolled with cattle-covered hills. The cowboy boots I’d sometimes seen on the feet of people in Lincoln were not, as I’d originally thought, some kind of quirky or subversive fashion statement; these people were legit. The mud wedged under the heels should’ve given that away, but I had my own assumptions about Nebraska, and none of them included cowboys. My own imagination placed all cowboys in one of two places: Texas or Wyoming. It hadn’t sunk i
n for me yet that Wyoming, a state I’d grown up thinking was the definition of the middle of nowhere, was now right next door.

  I’d shown up to the ranch wearing a pair of extremely clean and not-at-all-broken-in black leather boots, a pair I’d bought in Davie, Florida, years earlier when my dad, after becoming an American citizen, dragged our family north of Miami for an afternoon to buy everyone real American cowboy boots. I’d owned the pair since I was fourteen and had worn them maybe twice; I wore them to the ranch thinking they would help me blend in right away—a kind of disguise, along with the plaid shirts I’d bought at a Lincoln thrift store for a quarter apiece the day before. The rancher noticed the boots immediately as I approached his barn and asked me why I was wearing ropers. Days later, I learned that ropers are a style of boot with a shorter heel than standard boots, typically worn not for long distance rides like the ones we’d be doing, but during rodeos, when a cowboy would need to slip in and out of a saddle’s stirrups more quickly than a standard boot heel allows. I looked down, lifted a foot off the ground as if the correct answer to his question were written on the bottom of my boot, and answered him by saying, “I think these are just boots?”

  His mustache hid whatever his mouth did before he turned away.

  I learned the next morning that I’d been assigned a horse named Katie, which I took as a good sign. I’d loathed a girl in college (for good reason!) by the same name, and here was the universe, giving me a chance to make amends. Both Katies were plain, dull-yellow blondes, nothing distinguishing them as memorable in appearance. The rancher assigned Katie to me in part because he (correctly) sensed that I was afraid of horses and she was their nicest, most mellow horse (the same cannot be said of College Katie). I was to brush her, feed her, get the saddle on and off her each day. The horse looked at me like she’d seen enough of my kind and was not looking forward to doing most of the heavy lifting in our relationship.

  The French guys argued with the rancher over their horse assignment, wanting animals that would play into a certain narrative in their film and not the calm, admittedly unremarkable horses with which we’d all been matched. I can imagine these guys planning out this part of the film while still in Paris, smoking cigarettes and sitting around their third bottle of wine, dreaming of their version of the American West, each of them atop a sleek wild beast looking exactly like the marbled jumpy horses the rancher didn’t dare trust us around, the ones still in the pen. I almost sympathized with them. The Wannabe Leader felt he’d been given a smallish horse on purpose and asked the rancher to reconsider, claiming the horse would make him look silly and weak and “not like a tough man.” I suspect the rancher knew this and that was exactly why he’d assigned him that horse. When the rancher ignored him, he traded horses with the Leader, whose horse at least had some freaky blue eyes (the negotiation of this trade happening in whispered French). The rancher responded only by intentionally confusing the names of these two men the rest of the time they were there.

  A thirteen-year-old girl who volunteered on the ranch was tasked with showing me how to put on (and later remove) Katie’s saddle by myself. When she saw how nervous I was just to come up close enough to the horse’s side to do this, she tried to assuage my distress by telling me she’d been riding horses since before she learned how to walk. I was impressed, but this revelation didn’t make me feel any better. Not at all. It made me feel my foreignness more, despite, I think, her hope to do the opposite. This offered-up fact of her life seemed unimaginable to me—as unimaginable as the claims made by Nebraska students and new neighbors I’d later meet that they’d never seen the ocean in real life. I’d grown up going to the beach, a place some of them—when faced with the concept of the sheer vastness of the ocean—described as terrifying. As terrifying, probably, as the moment I first slid my foot into that saddle’s stirrup.

  After several days of herding, I had a strong sense that the rancher wasn’t a huge fan of the French guys. (For good reason, as they often rode their horses very quickly in directions that he didn’t want them to take, filming the unauthorized galloping and spooked cattle along the way, which meant more hours of work for him.) I wasn’t much of a fan either, in part because they were showing me the ugly side of what I was really doing there: They were there to say they’d been there, to have it mean something about the kind of people they thought they were. They were there for the story of it—and I was doing the same thing, really, hiding behind the excuse that it would make me a more empathetic professor. Like them, I was using the relative foreignness and perceived exoticness of the rancher’s day-to-day life as a form of entertainment, or perhaps edutainment, since I entered into it hoping to learn something I could take back with me and apply to my interactions with other Nebraskans. My curiosity about his world was not in and of itself a bad thing, but when the rancher joked over after-work ice tea and vodka that in this country, “Things certainly have changed. I met my wife in Gun Club,” I snuck away and typed the exact phrase into my phone. I’d been doing that since I’d first arrived, my curiosity converting into a kind of touristy voyeurism as I documented things he or his wife said that revealed just how much distance there was between my version of America and theirs. Even if I’d convinced myself I was coming from a place of sincere inquiry, I still harbored expectations, and the setting in which we’d found ourselves allowed for the kinds of quick stereotypical judgments I was all too willing to catalog every time the rancher fulfilled them. He had pointed to my car from across a field minutes after I’d gotten there and asked me, with a sincerity I can only describe as Nebraskan, “What kind of car is that? A Prius? Who makes that car?” I was suddenly aware of how teal my car was. I’d answered, “Toyota?” He made no other response except to stare a few seconds longer and then walk away. From that distance, I could see my car as he saw it: a giant misplaced Easter egg from somewhere overseas.

  Did the rancher see himself differently, either in that moment or later, because of the way I looked at him, with surprise and confusion for not knowing which company manufactures the Prius, a car that—in the various American cities I’d lived in—was as unremarkable as Katie the Horse? Perhaps he hadn’t experienced the same flash of self-awareness as I had, maybe because he likely saw me as another tourist, not so different from the French guys—someone with enough free time and extra money (things I learned ranchers rarely have) to actually pay to work on his ranch. I can admit that if I were him, I’d have trouble taking people like me seriously. I could think my wife was a genius for coming up with a scheme like this while also quietly resenting her for the extra work these visitors sometimes made for me. No one had yet asked me what I did for a living, so no one knew I was about to be a professor at the big school a few hours southeast. If asked, I didn’t know if I would even answer with that fact. While true, it didn’t feel totally accurate, in part because I’ve always thought of myself as an accidental professor, someone who came into the job because of a whole other career as a writer. I suspect the rancher didn’t actually care what we did in real life; it had no bearing on his own, what time he had to be up or how many hours it would take to track down the herd’s bull—who was (and is) always alone—to make sure he looked healthy. When I joked that he should just track the bull via GPS, he didn’t grin or frown, and the neutral mouth behind his heavy mustache was worse than either because by then he’d assessed what I still hoped to prove wrong: that we would never, ever understand what the other’s life was really like, and worse, he’d decided long ago that there was little point in making the effort.

  * * *

  One morning, I snuck cookies from the previous night’s dinner into my saddlebag for that day’s ride: The six hours a day on a horse turned out to be a conservative estimate and I needed snacks. Cookies were a bad choice, though, because the chocolate in them melted in the heat and left my hands sticky, and also because the rancher took to calling me Cookie Monster once he caught me eating one while on my horse, yelling out, “Let’s go, C
ookie Monster,” every time I’d lagged too far behind or got my horse in the wrong spot while trying to pen cows.

  To shake off the Cookie Monster label, I tried to be on the rancher’s side when it came to dealing with the French film crew. Over dinner one night, the Wannabe Leader tried to talk to us all about wine (there was no wine on the table; the rancher was strictly a spirits man, from what I could tell). I knew enough about wine to understand what he was talking about, but I kept that knowledge tucked away that night, instead turning to the rancher with a face that said, Can you believe these fancy jerks? The Frenchman then began talking about how us Americans ate turkey on the Fourth of July. “Why do you do this?” he asked, and even though I realized right away he was confused—he meant Thanksgiving—I kept my mouth shut.

  One reason why the Frenchman was talking as much as he was might have been the fact that during every meal, from the minute we walked in, the TV perched at the end of the dining table was on and permanently set to Fox News. The volume on low, no one really acknowledged that it was on, but it seemed to me that everyone at the table was watching and not watching, the hum of hatred unacknowledged even though we could all hear it. The Frenchman was trying to drown it out, which was more than what I was doing. After hearing the rancher go off about Mexicans getting free passes into the United States—he used the word Mexican as a synonym for Hispanic, and I was, I learned in that moment, passing as white to him—I was too afraid to ask if we could perhaps change the channel.

  The rancher’s misinformed grievance about Latinx Americans is one I hear often because, as a light-skinned Latinx woman, I often accidentally trespass into moments that are essentially displays of white power intended only for other whites. It wasn’t until my first year of college, when I read Nella Larsen’s novel Passing in a course, that I first recognized this trespassing as an act in which I had sometimes found myself but didn’t yet know how to define: White people who misread me as also white sometimes display the kind of pervasive racism usually reserved for white-only spaces. They inadvertently include me in these white power moments, ones that we aren’t supposed to witness, which are perpetrated by the kind of well-meaning white folks—people who genuinely don’t consider themselves racists—when they’re sure we aren’t around to hear them. I once walked out of a spin class at a Lincoln gym because, in the darkness of the room, the trainer (almost correctly) assumed everyone in the room was white, and she’d begun the class by shouting her excitement that we were now on the road to making America great again. This was the day after the 2016 election.