When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

  Since I had no idea where these questions were coming from, and since I’m contrary by nature, I’d answered, “Brown,” and “I don’t like flowers.” Little had I known she’d been passing this intelligence along to Brian, who apparently wanted to impress me with just the right corsage. When she finally asked me to the dance on Brian’s behalf, I said a tentative “Yes,” mainly because Kristen was popular and genuinely friendly. I thought, Well, if she and Brian are friends, he can’t be that bad.

  When my mother asked me what he looked like, I replied:

  “Okay.”

  It was the most accurate description I could think of; Brian was neither attractive nor unattractive, of average height and build with no outstanding features.

  Somehow my mother found out that Brian was black, and her attitude about my going to the dance with him changed completely. The next day when I got home from school, she confronted me.

  “You didn’t tell me he was black,” she said.

  “I didn’t think it mattered,” I replied.

  “Well, you’re not going to the dance with him.”

  “Why?” I yelled. “Because he’s, like, the only black kid in our class?”

  “Let someone else go with the only black kid in your class,” my mom said.

  My mom made me tell Brian, which I did through Kristen, that I had a basketball program to attend on the day of the dance. I did have a program, but it was early in the day and wouldn’t have interfered.

  The night of the dance, a friend’s mom took some of the other of my friends and me to tour the brand-new Pittsburgh International Airport. We marveled at the glossy, high-end retail stores with handbags and high-heeled shoes in the windows. It was the first time I’d ever seen people movers, and we rode these back and forth until my friend’s mom told us it was time to go home.

  I wasn’t upset about not going to the dance with Brian, since we hardly knew each other; I was upset on principle. When I argued with my mother about race and injustice, she insisted that race was “made up.” But in the case of my going to the dance with Brian, she acted as if it were deadly real.

  Six

  When I was sixteen, we moved from the house on Lincoln Boulevard to a much larger house on Ash Court, a cul-de-sac in a newly developed part of town. We didn’t have enough furniture to fill all the rooms, and though the birthday parties and holiday celebrations continued, the cavernous house with a chandelier hanging from the high ceiling in the entranceway didn’t really feel like home. But it meant my dad was doing well and that he could take care of us, which was all he ever wanted.

  I played volleyball in the fall, basketball in the winter, and ran track in the spring.

  My brothers played baseball, basketball, and, most importantly, football.

  On Friday nights, my friends and I went to the varsity football games. No weather could keep us away; if it was cold we brought blankets, if it rained we wore ponchos. We’d giggle and whisper about the boys we liked, cheer for our team, and boo the refs. We developed elaborate schemes for getting the attention of senior boys, on which we never followed through. Afterward, we’d go to Pizza Roma, eat giant, greasy slices of pizza, drink Cokes, and continue our scheming.

  I drove my family’s old blue Buick station wagon that had a rear-facing seat in the back. My friends and I blasted classic rock and disco from its small speakers and called it the double Dutch bus. We crammed in as many of us as we could, and after Pizza Roma, a handful of us would go to an all-night diner—usually King’s, Eat’n Park, or Denny’s—to drink coffee, eat sundaes, and complain about how much life in suburbia sucked.

  That summer I began working at King’s Family Restaurant. It was a grimy diner with country décor that sat right off the freeway. Folks wore their good jeans to King’s, and the most popular item on the menu was Salisbury steak. King’s was known for its ice cream bar, and Little League teams would come in after their games to try to conquer the King’s Castle, a twenty-four-scoop sundae with nuts, bananas, chocolate, peanut butter and caramel sauce, whipped cream, and maraschino cherries. It came in a red plastic castle, and if you finished it, the castle was yours.

  After my shifts serving taco salad, liver and onions, iceberg lettuce salads, and soups of the day, I’d lie on the hood of the station wagon eating leftovers out of a to-go container. I’d look up at the stars and fantasize about leaving. I couldn’t wait to go to college and get out of Wexford. I didn’t care where; I just wanted it to be somewhere far away. Even though I excelled in all the ways that counted in my high school, I felt different from most people. I looked different, cared about and noticed different things. I saw letters, numbers, and music in color. When I mentioned this to my friends, Tara asked:

  “Do all words have colors?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What color is butt plug?”

  “Blue and orange,” I replied.

  I was often sad when I was alone. Mostly, I kept the things that made me different to myself. It was good to be smart, but not weird. It was good to be tan, but not dark-skinned. It was good to be mentally tough, but not emotional. I learned to cover my introversion by throwing big parties. I don’t know how much I consciously understood these things, but they were etched into my subconscious as clearly as if someone had written them there.

  I realized, with the encouragement of one of my English teachers, that I wanted to be a writer. In my fantasies, I lived in New York City and traveled the world, writing about my discoveries and adventures. I would be like Larry Darrell in The Razor’s Edge, or Jack Kerouac in On the Road, except I wouldn’t be as whiny. I never thought I’d write about my own life. None of the great works of literature we read in high school were about teenage girls growing up in the suburbs. None were about teenage girls at all. The books about women we did read were The Scarlet Letter, The Awakening, The Bell Jar, Hedda Gabler, Wuthering Heights, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Things never worked out well for the women in these stories; in fact, they all ended up spiritually or literally dead. I didn’t see myself as a tragic flower wilting under the weight of the cruel world. The future I saw for myself was active and free, like a man’s. I never thought to write about my own life because, according the literature I’d read, it wasn’t worth writing about.

  One day in English class, we were asked to write an in-class essay on the poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop.

  When I read this poem, it made me angry. I didn’t understand why, but something in the poem hit a raw nerve. Most of the wisdom my parents and coaches instilled in me was about how to be a winner. What was the “art of losing”? Who would want to master that? The villanelle’s jaunty rhymes made it seem almost like a joke. I usually liked humor and irony, but the refrain had an ominous undertone I couldn’t grasp.

  I was used to understanding literature, but “One Art” elicited unwelcome confusion. I’d never lost anyone close to me; no family member had suffered any major trauma. My life in Wexford seemed to be without incident, protected and supported, just like my parents wanted. I’d always pushed away anger and sadness. But I couldn’t hide the irritation I felt reading this poem. I hated it as I’d never hated anything before. I didn’t know what loss was, or that I might be mourning something I didn’t understand, but the feelings I kept inside were beginning to come out. Something huge and messy was about to break through, and it felt like disaster.

  Meanwhile, my calendar was filled with activities to impress the college admissions boards. Tara, Courtney, and I volunteered at the Carnegie Science Center on the weekends, giving out flyers and greeting patrons at the entrance, giving tours of the model train exhibit, and pretending not to notice as our supervisor looked down our shirts or let his hand graze the backs of our pants. I was an honors and AP student but was also supposed to remain a three-sport athlete. When I quit the volleyball and track teams my senior year, my mother got angry.

  “Why are you throwing your future away? You won’t even remember this!” she s
aid about the days I came home late after spending time with my friends instead of training. Whenever I complained about being pushed too hard, my mother would respond, “I wish someone had taken an interest in my future when I was growing up. I wish someone would have helped me apply for college or given me some kind of advice.”

  She recounted graduating from a Catholic high school in her small town and having no idea what to do next. Neither of her parents went to college, and even though my mother was a good student, they did not encourage her or take the time to learn about her interests.

  In the end, she applied to community college because that’s what her friend Karen was doing. When it came time for her to leave, her dad didn’t even offer to drive her; she had to get a ride from Karen.

  From that perspective, her over-parenting made sense. I had to follow all my interests, both academic and extracurricular, to the extreme. My schedule was always full. I took the SATs in seventh grade so I could start preparing early for the real thing. All of this fueled my success, but it also produced a feeling of pressure that never let up.

  Things were different for my brothers. In high school, Pat rebelled and, despite receiving a perfect score on the SATs, he almost failed out of high school. Tom was a good student but only did what he needed to do to get by. When I protested that I was being made to do things my brothers didn’t have to, my mom replied, “It’s a man’s world. Tommy and Pat will be fine. You have to try harder.”

  When I got a C in physics my senior year, my mother asked me, “Are you even serious about going to college? Why don’t you sign up for Hills College right now, because you’ll never get into Princeton with those grades.”

  “Hills College” was the community college of Allegheny County, located in the building where the Hills Department Store used to be. I didn’t know if my mother regretted her own experience with community college, but “Hills College” became a euphemism in our family for falling short or giving up. I didn’t want to end up there, but I didn’t know where I wanted to go. I applied to Ivy League schools because that’s what my parents wanted.

  “It’s my dream for you to go to Princeton,” my mother would say. It sounded like the right goal to have, so it became my dream, too.

  I was captain of the basketball team my senior year. My friends came to cheer me on, Tara and Courtney wearing their fiesta dresses because they had just gotten off from work at Chi-Chi’s.

  We always made it to state finals, and I wore my four-year letter jacket proudly. My brothers kept track of my defensive and offensive stats. Sometimes there were college scouts in the stands, and my parents were counting on my getting a full ride to play basketball at a good school.

  Even though my parents were doing well financially, college was expensive, and they also had my brothers to think about. I played the best I could my senior year, but my heart wasn’t in it. I wasn’t sure if basketball was in my future.

  My guidance counselor was also the boy’s basketball coach, and in one of our meetings I told him about my hopes for college recruitment. He knew I was a standout on the team but he was realistic.

  “Getting a scholarship to play ball in college isn’t easy,” he said. “But because your grades are so high there are a lot of academic scholarships you are eligible for, particularly ones for minorities.”

  “I don’t qualify for those,” I said.

  He was silent for a moment, and then the conversation moved on.

  My dad picked me up after practice that day, and I told him about our conversation.

  He shook his head.

  “But if people really think I qualify for them…” I ventured.

  “It’s dishonest,” he replied without a moment’s thought. “You’d be taking an opportunity away from someone who really needs it.” Then he paused as if thinking something over and said, “Don’t tell your mother about this.”

  I wondered how my dad could not notice that others assumed I was black. Once when we were in line to register for a basketball camp, the staff organizer cut the line off between my father and me. He assumed I was the child of the black woman standing in front of me, and not with the white man standing behind. I knew other people’s perceptions were false, but it didn’t change the facts of my experience. I got the message, though: I was not to even consider the possibility of identifying as black, and my family didn’t want to talk about it.

  I applied to Ivy League and liberal arts schools on the East Coast. I also applied to a few safety schools, including Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I didn’t want to stay in the ’burgh, as we called it, but CMU had a great reputation and was one of the only schools that continued to recruit me for their women’s basketball team.

  That spring, I went on an overnight visit to campus and stayed with the captain of the women’s basketball team, Penny. She and the coach showed me around the gym, the weight room, and locker room. They described the travel schedule and that we’d fly to most away games. Then Penny took me to have dinner with her friends in their dorm. I’d never been in a dorm room, and the idea of living without parental oversight thrilled me. We stayed up late; I could hardly keep my eyes open, but I powered through because I didn’t want to seem like a baby around the college seniors. They were four years older than I was, already in their twenties, drinking beer and cooking mac and cheese on their own hot plate! Their life was the stuff of fantasy.

  When we woke up in the morning, Penny poured us bowls of cornflakes—and sprinkled chocolate chips in them. I couldn’t believe what was happening; my parents would have never let me eat that for breakfast. I ate the cornflakes, still slightly crispy in the milk, with the bittersweet crunch of chocolate chips, and they tasted like freedom. I decided then and there that if I got in, I would go to Carnegie Mellon.

  When we received the polite rejection letter from Princeton, my mom was heartbroken.

  “That’s where you should be,” she said. I had gotten as far as the alumni interview, and my mom made tea and homemade biscotti for the man who came to interview me. We sat at the table in the kitchen, and when he asked me my plans, I told him I wanted to major in English and be a writer. The interview went well, I thought, and when he left, my parents were hopeful.

  I didn’t really care. My parents had driven us to New Jersey to visit Princeton, and the campus was beautiful. But I didn’t get butterflies like I did when I ate those chocolate chips. The same was true when we flew to Cambridge to visit Boston College and Harvard. Tara came with us, and even when she ordered couscous at the restaurant—an unknown delicacy that we pronounced cautious—it did not stir my imagination the way the hot plate of mac and cheese did on my overnight visit.

  I was waitlisted or rejected from the other schools to which I applied. When I finally received an acceptance letter from Carnegie Mellon University, it seemed like the obvious choice. Because my grades were so high, the school offered me the President’s Scholarship, which would cover half my tuition every year. Since the school didn’t offer athletic scholarships, I would have to try out for the basketball team, but it was understood that if I showed up, I would make the cut.

  Despite the rejections from more prestigious schools, and despite staying in Pittsburgh, I was ecstatic. Carnegie Mellon felt like the place I wanted to be. Tara was going to the University of Pittsburgh, and we were excited because the campuses of Pitt and CMU were right next to each other in the hip neighborhood of Oakland. We had ventured down to the “O” for its trays of fries and the Beehive for vintage films and coffee, which we could barely choke down. Oakland was the first place I tried soy milk (terrible) and Greek food (pretty good). Even though we would still be in Pittsburgh, it felt like a world away, and we were excited to explore it together.

  When I told my mom the good news, she acted as if I had thrown my college applications in the trash and set them on fire.

  “If you want to stay in Pittsburgh, you should just go to Hills College,” she said.

  My dad tried to defu
se the situation.

  “If you want to go to Yale, I can get you in,” he said. He explained that someone he worked with was an alumnus and that he was certain he could pull some strings.

  I didn’t want to go to Yale. Kyle Johnson was a senior on the boys’ basketball team who wore his pants low, his hat backward, and went around spouting Public Enemy lyrics—the explicit versions. When he got into Yale he suddenly cleaned up his act, exchanging his rapper look for khakis and polo shirts. I thought Kyle Johnson was a poser, and his behavior made me suspicious about what it meant to attend an Ivy League school.

  In addition to not wanting to be a poser, it seemed wrong that my dad would even suggest pulling some strings to get me into the Ivy League. Was our situation that desperate? Did he think the consolation prize of my attending Yale would really console my mom? I didn’t want to get into college by the back door. My parents taught me not to take shortcuts, that I had to work harder than others to be rewarded. How was my dad asking a coworker to get me into Yale more honest than my applying for a minority scholarship? Wouldn’t I be taking a spot away from someone who really wanted to be there?

  When it came time for parent orientation at Carnegie Mellon, my mom refused to go. When my dad finally convinced her, she sat with her arms crossed and refused to wear the CMU PARENT button. Going to college was exciting, bewildering, and freeing, but a part of me internalized a sense of failure that came with my mother’s disappointment. When we arrived on campus, my parents helped me carry all the new stuff they’d gotten me to my tiny room in Morewood Gardens. Even though my mom wished she were helping me settle in to a dorm at Princeton and despite her protestations, I knew she was proud of me. Like the day she dropped me off at the bus stop for my first day of school, I couldn’t wait for what lay ahead, and she fought back tears as I waved goodbye.