When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

  “Let me know what you think,” he said and added before I walked out the door, “No matter what else you’re doing, just keep writing.”

  In my attic room, I devoured the book. I was struck by a poem about the author as a little girl being dragged by her grandmother through Saks Fifth Avenue. The little girl is tired, her legs ready to give out, but her light-skinned grandmother won’t risk causing a scene because she and her granddaughter are passing for white. The grandmother basks in the deference of the salesclerks as they help the little girl try on velvet stockings; she knows what it’s like to walk on thin ice and wants to instill in the girl that when she is in public, she can never, ever let her guard down. When the girl’s legs finally give out, her grandmother pulls her up by the hair and rushes out of the building, away from eyes she fears see past her fancy clothes and light skin, down to genes that give her away.

  I thought about the time I went to Saks Fifth Avenue with my mother to shop for a prom dress. The saleswomen were obliging and cooed over me as I tried on expensive dresses. I was tall, fair, and slim, and they looked good on me. With my hair in a fluffy coif, I looked as if I’d curled it to give it volume, not straightened it to hide its natural kink. We purchased a tastefully fitted black dress with a black sequined bodice and left the store without incident.

  At school functions, my mother would whisper to me to comb my hair if she thought it looked too frizzy; when we went out together, I knew to slick it back into a tight ponytail or at least pull the front back, away from my face.

  Even though it was easier for me to wear my hair in its “wild” state, I knew that for any special occasion I needed to fix it. The fanciest way to fix my hair, I learned, was to straighten it, and my mom was happy to oblige.

  The first method she tried was laying my head down on the ironing board and running the hot, steaming iron over my hair.

  “This is how we did it when I was in high school,” she said.

  It may have worked in the ’70s, for my mom and her friends, whose hair was almost straight to begin with, but it burned my scalp and singed the brittle ends of my hair. I went to bed that night smelling like burned toast.

  A more successful method involved using a blow dryer and brush. The result was a puffy cloud rather than straight tresses, but it was as close as we could get. We never thought of using a flatiron or lye relaxer on my hair, as those products were meant for black women.

  Straightening my hair as well as we could and curling it with a curling iron became the norm for special occasions like my prom and senior photos. I wondered about the hair of the girl in the poem: Was it straight, curled, wavy, or pulled back into neat, tight pigtails? I thought about her grandmother’s pride and paranoia. Did my mother feel like that when we went out? Was her insistence on my combing my hair, which by the way would never tame its frizz, her way of making sure, at least in her mind, that I could pass?

  She said my hair should always look neat, and I admired the white girls in my school whose curly hair fell in smooth ringlets around their faces. Why can’t mine look like that? I thought.

  The girl in the poem seemed reluctant to go along with her grandmother’s charade, but I threw myself into the role of the well-groomed, well-behaved daughter. I wanted my parents’ praise and the praise of other adults; if that meant having straight hair, acting ladylike, and not rocking the boat in any way, I was willing to do it.

  But now I felt split in two: Was I the stone-faced grandmother soldiering on, dragging her granddaughter by the hair along with her, or the little girl who just wanted to be herself? I felt like both. The little girl in me was tired; my emotional legs were about to collapse. A will stronger than my own held me upright, but I knew it could not last much longer.

  Ten

  I found out that I had been admitted to grad school in April 2001, while I was working as a food runner at the White Dog Café in Philadelphia.

  The work of grad school was overwhelming. Each day I lived in fear that I would never finish all the work I had to do, and each day I came to class having read, written, and prepared more than I thought possible. Much of our work was in Russian, and many of my fellow graduate students were native speakers of Russian or another Slavic language. It took me four years of college, one semester of study abroad in Moscow, one intensive summer language program at Middlebury College, and one summer as a Rotary volunteer in Kamchatka to gain not only native fluency in Russian, but also the ability to closely read, analyze, and write critically about Russian literature. While still an undergraduate I wrote and presented conference papers in Russian, translated Russian poetry, and guest taught an advanced Russian language class. I passed Princeton’s oral entrance exam with the department’s preeminent professor of Soviet literature, himself a native of the former Soviet Union. I dreamed in Russian. I lived in Vienna, Austria, for three months to study German to gain the additional fluency required for admission. I was one of only two students admitted to Princeton’s Slavic program that year, and yet, as my time in the program went on, my terror intensified and I felt like an imposter.

  My classmates felt that way, too. Each of us was a kind of Russian literature superhero, but our professors remained unimpressed with our daily feats of linguistic expertise and encyclopedic scholarship. We soon learned that our extraordinary efforts were nothing special. We did earn praise now and then—perhaps on a particularly prescient passage in an essay. In the seemingly endless desert of harsh appraisal, those moments were precious drops of water to slake our thirst for validation. Fear of repudiation overrode our desire to participate, and during our seminars, even when we knew the answers to our professors’ questions, we sat in subdued silence.

  Eleven

  During my graduate program, I took every opportunity I could to write. Tara was in film school in New York City, and we took the train to visit each other, exchanged stories and mused about becoming writers.

  In the fall of my fifth year, I took an undergraduate poetry workshop. The course was taught by the awe-inspiring Yusef Komunyakaa. The class met in his office, and most days we went around the room commenting on each other’s poems. One day, a girl spoke up about a poem I’d written about Whole Foods.

  “I don’t like the fact that the boy pushing carts has cornrows,” she said. Komunyakaa said nothing, but we shared a look. The student went on, “I mean, I know that’s probably how it was, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but I don’t know. I just don’t like it.”

  I had no response, and eventually the discussion moved on. But something had happened. I’d recognized it, and Komunyakaa had, too. We shared a moment of recognition.

  When the year was about to end, just as I had done as a senior in college, I headed to my poetry professor’s office to ask him about writing opportunities I could pursue. There was something else I wanted to ask him, too, but I didn’t know if I’d have the courage.

  Reds and oranges spread against an overcast New Jersey sky as I crossed the parking lot and opened the door to 185 Nassau Street, the university’s arts building. I was nervous as I walked down the echoing hallway, passing faculty offices with names like Paul Muldoon and Joyce Carol Oates on the doors. The floor was polished white, reflecting the lights overhead. I’d read that 185 Nassau Street once housed the city of Princeton’s first integrated elementary school. I wondered how the university fit into that legacy, whether the school’s founders would have marveled or shuddered at the building’s future.

  I’d opened Yusef Komunyakaa’s door dozens of times on my way to poetry class, but today I was opening a door to something else altogether. It was every door I’d stood before my entire life when I had the chance to confront my racial identity but was afraid to. It was the door I’d stood before in high school when I considered applying to minority scholarships for college. It was the door I’d stood before as a sixth grader when a doctor waited for my mother to leave the exam room and then asked me if I was black. It was the door I’d stood before as an undergrad w
hen Jim Daniels suggested I apply to the Cave Canem poetry workshop and I turned the opportunity down. I felt the old conflict between loyalty to my family and loyalty to myself. I didn’t want to be dishonest, and my desire to know the truth about myself was fraught with guilt. Now I felt as though I couldn’t keep that door closed any longer.

  I looked up to Yusef Komunyakaa the same way I looked up to Jim Daniels. I didn’t want my writing to disappoint him, but more than that, I didn’t want to disappoint.

  When Jim told me about Cave Canem and asked me if I’d considered attending, it was easy for me to say no. I didn’t realize it then, but in one crucial way, Jim had been like every other teacher, guidance counselor, and coach that had ever advised me to take an opportunity meant for minorities: he was white. Without my realizing it, their whiteness acted as a kind of buffer for me. White people had been asking me questions about my identity my whole life, and ultimately they accepted whatever answer I gave them. Maybe they thought I was lying or trying to pass. Maybe they could see that my denial was the result of a family secret and decided not to get involved. But no matter how unsatisfying my answers were to them, no one ever pushed the issue. Even though I was constantly questioned about my hair, family, and nationality—the euphemism used for ethnicity or race—no one took it very far. Without realizing it, I had always taken comfort in the white gaze that didn’t want to peer too deeply into the chasm of race and discover what, if anything, it had to do with them.

  Growing up, I had few black people in my life: my first boyfriend in college, some friends in high school and middle school, and an assistant high school basketball coach. I was friends with my coach and admired her, but we never talked about my race. So I wasn’t ready for the feeling I had when I encountered a black mentor to whom I felt accountable for hiding behind my whiteness.

  Now I felt vulnerable and exposed, but not in the same way I had at the St. Patrick’s Day festival. I didn’t feel like I would be punished for what the looker saw. The feeling was at once a relief and a journey into uncharted waters. I had no map for these feelings or what this kind of recognition meant. I squirmed under the newness of the black gaze.

  Komunyakaa’s door was slightly ajar. I knocked, my hand barely touching the door, and it opened. As I entered, I could feel his languid gaze, his ever-present half smile.

  We sat in silence for a moment or two, him waiting patiently, me having no idea how to express all the feelings and questions welling up inside me.

  “I think you have a question for me,” he said in his deep Louisiana drawl. He looked me right in the eye.

  The directness of his statement caught me off guard. I had planned to mention, casually, that I’d been reading his poem “Ode to the Drum” and that I’d learned to make a goatskin drum at a pottery workshop I’d attended before grad school. This now seemed incredibly stupid, nothing more than a student trying to impress her teacher. I sat there for what felt like too long without saying anything, without asking the question that he knew I had come to ask.

  After fifteen minutes or so of chatting about the Polish editions of his work and his dislike of performance poetry, I managed to get around to my main questions: How should I continue writing? What opportunities are out there for me? I couldn’t take another undergraduate class, and I could not imagine finishing a Ph.D. and then enrolling in an MFA program. Did he have any suggestions?

  They were simple enough questions, but in them was everything I’d been avoiding for the last five years—indeed, for my whole life. My eyes welled with tears, and I clenched my jaw to keep it from shaking.

  If he noticed, he didn’t let on.

  “Well, there’s the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. That’s good because it’s two weeks. Have you heard of it?” He said this very casually as if it were the most normal conversation in the world. To anyone other than me, it would have been.

  “No,” I managed.

  “It’s for African diaspora poets and fiction writers. The deadline hasn’t passed yet. You can still apply for this summer.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said.

  There was so much more I wanted to say, to ask. I wanted his blessing, his validation. I wanted him to tell me there was nothing wrong with the life I’d lived up to this point, the life my parents chose for me and that I’d consented to in order to please them and make things easier for myself. I wanted him to tell me that none of it was my fault; that I was just being a good, loyal daughter who had no reason to suspect her parents would lie about something so fundamental.

  I wanted him to tell me I wasn’t a traitor or a coward, but as I left his office, those were the only two words screaming over and over in my head.

  Whether I realized it or not, in his own way, he had given me what I wanted.

  As I left the arts building and walked out into the fall day, I felt like I had been beaten to a thin skin and stretched to the point of tearing apart. I was neither a gazelle nor a panther, but all the secrets that had been trapped inside my old body now resonated from me in a new sound—beautiful, foreign, and terrifying.

  It was windy and dark when I got home from campus. Wind rattled the doors and windows of the small house I shared with Fang Fang, a doctoral student in aerospace engineering. I closed the front door as quietly as I could and tiptoed across the linoleum floor so as not to disturb my housemate. Was she home? Even though the doors and walls were thin, I hardly ever heard her moving around the house. Her bedroom door was always closed, and I never dared knock.

  I needed to unload my books and gather some things to take to my friend Sveta’s house. We were in the final stages of planning a graduate student conference. It was hard to shift my mind from my inner turmoil to the task of scheduling panels, printing posters, and making arrangements for guests, but it was also a welcome distraction.

  Before I left my room, I sat down at my desk and opened my laptop. My meeting with Komunyakaa was all I could think about. The most important question was: What happens next? Just as when I was an undergraduate, I knew there were other workshops I could attend, other scholarships for which I could apply. There were workshops for women, emerging writers, experienced writers, young writers, older writers, poets, fiction writers, regional writers, and international writers. I didn’t think that workshops or grants for African Americans were the only ones out there. The issue was about finding support in a community. I was tired of existing in what felt like a vacuum of racial ambiguity. Since I grew up identifying as white, I knew the social codes. I knew how to affirm my belonging in mostly white groups, which often included subtly disparaging other races. Those moments became increasingly uncomfortable. I was tired of playing along; the more aware I became of others questioning my identity the more isolated I felt. I felt adrift on a sea of contradictions that would not resolve until it was I, not others, who defined who I was. For that to happen, I needed to know for certain on which side of the color line I stood, and there was only one person who could answer that question.

  I opened my email, clicked Compose, typed in my mother’s email address, and let the cursor blink in an empty field. I knew the gist of the email I needed to write but didn’t know how to phrase it. With a few simple words, I could open a Pandora’s box that my family had kept carefully closed for twenty-seven years.

  I knew my mother was my biological mother. The words Who is my father? were straightforward enough, but they were loaded with the emotional and psychological freight of a lifetime. My Irish American father had raised me since I was in my mother’s womb. They married when she was twenty and he was twenty-one because she was pregnant with his child, or so they believed.

  So what happened?

  Who was the person who intervened in my family’s history, and who was he to my mom?

  Why had she married my father and not him?

  Could I find and get to know this person now?

  Did I even want to?

  These questions were the reason my ethnicity was taboo in our famil
y. If I were black, then I had a different father, and my mother had been with another man. I’d never been able to consider that possibility, and perhaps, for her own reasons, neither could my mother.

  I let the cursor blink. It was too much to handle at that moment. I didn’t know how to phrase my questions, and I wanted to ask them gently. The thing I feared most, even more than what would happen to my world if I found out the truth, was that even asking would hurt my mother. What compelled her to ignore and avoid the question for twenty-seven years?

  Twelve

  “Hey, Sveta, Martin,” I said, shaking my jacket off in the doorway, nodding to my friend and her husband. When I got into the apartment, I could hear their upstairs neighbor practicing chords on his bass.

  “He’s figured out it sounds better if he leaves out the fourth and seventh on the runs,” Martin said, closing the door behind me. Martin had a nasal voice and a penchant for pointing out facts that no one asked for. I wasn’t as good of friends with Martin as I was with Sveta, who was one of the first people I’d met in my program, but they were a package deal. Anything you wanted to tell one you had to tell the other.

  I was all set to tell them about my meeting with Yusef Komunyakaa and my decision to email my mom about the question of my race, but when I looked at Sveta, I noticed that she was even paler than usual with dark purple rings under her eyes. Sveta was eight months pregnant and a workaholic like the rest of us, organizing the graduate conference, going to prenatal yoga and therapy twice a week, and working on her dissertation.

  “Are you okay?” I asked as I joined Sveta on the couch. I expected her to give me some graphic description of the symptoms she was experiencing from her pregnancy, which she had done before; whether it was her Slavic forthrightness, her personality, or both, she had no filter when it came to delivering sensitive information.

  “It’s Angie,” she said, unscrewing the top from her blue Nalgene bottle with a slim-wristed hand. “Something happened; she told me not to go into any details…”