When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

  I waited, watching the deliberation play out of Sveta’s face. Angie had graduated three years ago and moved to Texas with her husband, Ryan, but things hadn’t gone well.

  “Ryan wants a divorce,” Sveta revealed, not able to hold back. “Angie thinks he’s cheating on her.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “There’s something else, too,” Sveta continued. “She kind of prostituted herself for crack.”

  “What?” I didn’t think I’d heard her right. I knew Angie liked to get drunk at parties—we all did—but I had no idea she would do something like that.

  “She didn’t mean to,” Sveta continued. “And she didn’t have sex with anyone. She was at a motel, and these guys asked her if she wanted to party, and things just got out of hand. She’s won’t talk to her therapist about it and is threatening to commit suicide.”

  “A black guy gave her the crack in his car,” Martin chimed in from his seat at the computer. “But he made her watch him masturbate first.”

  It sounded more like sexual assault than prostitution. I couldn’t imagine what Angie must have been going through, how scared and vulnerable she must have felt—and how desperate.

  Angie was fluent in a dozen languages instead of only three or four like the rest of us. She wrote her private journal in Czech and was fluent in American and Spanish sign language. In addition to feeling bad for Angie, I didn’t understand how she could feel so bad about herself that she’d let herself get into such a situation. I didn’t know how she could have felt so alone. Didn’t she know she was worth more than that, that there were people who loved her and would listen to whatever troubles she had? Didn’t she know that her life meant something to us? To me?

  I didn’t know what to make of Martin specifying that the man who took advantage of her was black. Was it necessary to tell us that? Did it make her already terrifying experience even scarier or more dangerous? Is that what Angie conveyed when she’d told Sveta the story? Martin didn’t mention the race or ethnicity of the other guys at the party.

  “I told her to come here and stay with us,” Sveta said. “David’s going to be in town, too, and she could use the moral support.”

  David had graduated two years before and was now an assistant master at one of the residential colleges at Harvard.

  “That’s a good idea,” I said, “but are you sure you’re up to it? You look pretty worn out.”

  Sveta had been keeping Angie on the phone all night to make sure she didn’t harm herself. It was obvious she’d lost a couple of nights’ sleep, and being so far along in her pregnancy, that could be dangerous.

  “Why doesn’t she stay with me?” I volunteered. “I’m sure my housemate won’t mind.”

  “Didn’t you say you had something you wanted to talk about?” Sveta asked me, remembering why I’d come over. “You sounded kind of worried on the phone.” She stretched out her arm with the now empty water bottle, and Martin rose to fill it.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not a big deal. It can wait.”

  We got down to making final plans for the conference, but even as I double-checked the housing arrangements and worried about our friend, my mind kept creeping back to what I had experienced that day. I desperately wanted to tell my friends about my own emotional turmoil, but how could I dump my problems on them with everything else that was going on?

  “Hold on,” Sveta said, pushing herself up from the couch. “I have to pee. I pee about every fifteen minutes.”

  “The book says that’s normal,” Martin called from the kitchen.

  “I’m going to get going,” I said to Martin while Sveta was still in the bathroom. It felt a bit strange to announce this while Sveta was out of the room, and for a moment, Martin and I stood there looking at each other awkwardly.

  “Well, then,” he said, full water bottle in hand, “I’ll tell her you had to go.”

  We made some small talk on the way to the door. I laughed at things he said that I didn’t think were funny. It was a habit I’d started to notice recently—the friendly persona I often showed when all I really wanted was to close down into myself. Why did I need to expend so much energy to make others comfortable when I wasn’t? It was something I’d always done, even when I was a kid: a quick joke, a smile, even laughter. Lots of nodding and facial expressions that showed I was listening.

  Most of the time, I didn’t even notice that I put on this type of show, but lately the forced extroversion made me feel depleted. It wasn’t only discomfort I was masking. At some point in my childhood, I must have learned that a girl, especially one whose difference was noticeable to those around her, should always smile and be polite and cheerful to put others at ease. I was eager to please my parents, coaches, and teachers. I couldn’t stand the feeling that I might let someone down who had put their faith in me. But I was equally eager to placate acquaintances and strangers. Was it just a habit, or did I feel like I had to constantly apologize for being who I was?

  I was so eager to please that I even took on extra work. I was planning one conference with Sveta, but I also agreed to help out with another that wasn’t my field, to fill in for someone who had backed out at the last minute. I remembered agreeing with enthusiasm, without a second thought, even though in truth, when I stopped to think about it, participating in a conference on Victorian English literature was the last thing I wanted to do. Who was I trying so hard to please?

  This barrage of thoughts went through my mind in the moment it took for Martin to walk me to the door. As I stepped out into the chilly evening, I wondered where all these new realizations were coming from, and I wondered why I suddenly felt so angry.

  Thirteen

  When I got home, the rain was beating on our roof. I opened my email again and thought about how to broach the subjects of my ethnicity and paternity to my mother.

  My dad always told us that in Ireland, Dunn meant “the dark clan.” Almost everyone on his side of the family had dark hair, light eyes, and tanned rather than burned in the sun. He said his grandmother, who had black hair until she died, was part Native American. His mother was supposed to be German, but she looked like she could have been Spanish with her light olive skin and black hair. His brother, my uncle John, had dark curly hair, and when I was little, everyone said that my curly hair came from the same genes. Maybe the source of my dark features lay somewhere in my parents’ genes, after all. They say characteristics can skip a generation or two. Maybe I was the perfect genetic blip.

  Deep down, I knew this wasn’t true, though as I approached the precipice of finding out for sure, part of me wanted it to be. Since the subject of my race had always been taboo in my family, it seemed important for them to see me as white, no matter what kind of explanations they had to invent. I worried that acknowledging I was black and had a different father from the one I grew up with could shatter the unity of the family my parents had worked so hard to create.

  My rational mind knew I was not responsible for the way I’d been born and that I was entitled to know who my father was, but I felt guilty for stirring up what I knew would be a terrible family conflict. I felt guilty for my own denial and resentful of my parents for theirs.

  Fourteen

  Paper clips, spare change, glue, combination locks, tape measures, Scotch tape, masking tape, cassette tapes, rubber bands, pencils, address books, sticky notes, light bulbs, batteries, nails, screws, keys, twist ties, sequins, matches, thumbtacks—all of these and more floated in the tangled swamp of the junk drawer at our house on Lincoln Boulevard. Need a hammer? It might be in there, or it might be in there one day and gone the next. It created the eerie feeling of constantly losing things. I knew there had been a hammer in there the last time I looked. Was it yesterday or the day before? Why couldn’t I find it?

  One thing I could almost never find was a decent pair of scissors. I could find safety scissors like the ones kindergarteners used, but when I needed scissors that would actually cut, they were not there. It may h
ave been because Tommy and Pat were young, and scissors were dangerous in the hands of children.

  In ninth grade, our English teacher, Mr. Yanzek, handed out scissors so we could cut up our essays. He didn’t want us to cut them into little bits but cut out the paragraphs and rearrange them to see if they made better sense in a different order. I held on to my scissors after class like a prize. When I got home, instead of putting them safely in my rolltop desk like I should have, I chucked them into the junk drawer. The next day, they were gone.

  My mother had a habit of removing things from my room like rap tapes; a red, yellow, and green Rasta hat; a Michael Jordan T-shirt with a spray paint design that looked too urban for her tastes. She thought I didn’t know, but I did. Once these things were gone, I never saw them again; they were not in the trash, my parents’ closet, or even in my mother’s top drawer. Billy Joel, John Denver, even the Doors—all music I inherited from my parents—those cassettes remained. Michael Jackson was okay, but Bell Biv DeVoe was not. The only thing she did not confiscate was a rock I’d found one day after track practice. It was large, flat, and irregularly shaped. The shape was that of a mysterious continent, and I took it home, feeling its contours in my pocket. I named it my Africa Rock, and it sat on my desk in plain view, unmolested, until I forgot about it. Before that, though, it reminded me that the only black things I could have were the ones only I could see.

  A hammer and sharp scissors were actually dangerous, but as far as I knew, my mother never permanently removed them from the house. They weren’t confiscated, locked up, or spirited away. After a while, they always turned up. Not so with my cache of teenage trophies.

  Instead of writing my email, I decided to work on one of my dissertation chapters.

  I retained the trick Mr. Yanzek taught of us cutting up our papers to physically revise them, and as I sat at my desk looking at the printout of my chapter, I realized I needed a pair of scissors.

  I rummaged around my desk drawer half-heartedly, knowing already that I didn’t have a pair. It was the same kind of junk drawer as the one in the kitchen at Lincoln Boulevard. Everything was in there, but nothing was there when you really needed it.

  I thought about the big paper guillotine in the department mail room. There was something satisfying about going in there when no one else was around, slipping an unsuspecting page of an essay under the bar, lining the edges up with the gridlines, and bringing down the blade. It made a gritty slicing sound as it chopped through the imperfect work. I was looking forward to using the guillotine to cut our half-page flyers for the graduate conference—slipping them under the guide rail, lining them up, and chopping them in half with mechanical precision.

  The guillotine was the opposite of a pair of scissors in the junk drawer. It was large and heavy; its placement had to be intentional. No one could walk off with the long-bladed device by accident. It multiplied the danger scissors posed but also the fulfillment gained in shaving off a sliver of paper in a perfectly straight line. No chop-chopping crookedly from one end of the page to another. The guillotine was swift and decisive; it got right to the heart of things.

  As I sat at my desk dreaming of the guillotine, the image of my younger self, rummaging through the junk drawer at Lincoln Boulevard, returned.

  “Mom,” I heard myself say as my hands waded through the junk, “where are the scissors?”

  “They’re in there!” she called from the other side of the kitchen, where she was sweeping a pile of dirt and dog hair into the corner. “Knight!” she yelled at our black Lab, who lumbered through the kitchen, knocking into the heavy oak chairs around the kitchen table, with my four-year-old brother, Tom, chasing him.

  The only question I’d ever asked about race in our family was when I was three years old, before my brothers were born.

  My dad tanned very dark in the summer, and I remember looking at his tanned arm and realizing his skin was much darker than my mother’s and mine.

  “Mommy,” I asked, “is Daddy black?”

  “No,” she answered, and she never said another word about it.

  Twenty-four years later, I needed a better answer. The only way I felt I could approach this powder keg was to suggest that my dad’s grandmother was something other than German. I would ask about the father I knew and hope she told me about the other one.

  Fifteen

  It was still dark out when my cell phone began to buzz.

  When I flipped it open, my mother’s voice came through, broken by static. We made some awkward small talk, then she said, “I guess you want to talk about the email you sent me last week.”

  “Yes,” I whispered, trying not to wake Zoran, who was asleep beside me. I glanced at the clock and realized it was 6:30 a.m.

  “Before I say anything,” she said after a long pause, “tell me if you think we’ve always loved you.”

  I began to tear up, and I felt my body grow weak. I knew what was coming.

  “Of course,” I managed.

  She began to cry, and through sobs, she told me a disconnected story about being at a spring break party as a sophomore in college. Someone must have put something in her drink … She woke up the next day knowing something had happened, someone had taken advantage of her.

  “Are you saying … you were raped?” I asked as delicately as I could.

  She only cried more and did not answer.

  “Was he…,” I began, but I couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Yes,” she said. “He was African American.”

  “Who was it?” I asked, clambering over Zoran in my underwear, taking the phone into the hallway so as not to wake him.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember.”

  I stood listening to the silence and static on the line.

  “Why are you only telling me this now?” I asked.

  “Because you asked. I have to go; I’m going to be late for work,” she said and hung up.

  I stood there shivering in the dark as something came over me I couldn’t quite describe.

  I’d finally gotten an answer to the question I’d always wanted to ask, but at the same time, I was coming undone.

  I suspected I would learn that my biological father was not the man I’d grown up with, but I never expected I was conceived in rape by some guy whose face and name my mother did not remember who might have drugged her. Something didn’t make sense, though. If she remembered nothing about him, how could she remember his race?

  I had so many questions, but one thing stuck in my head: I’m not a freak of nature. Even if it wasn’t the explanation I’d expected or wanted, there was a rational explanation for me after all.

  I fell asleep again in a daze, overwhelmed by where the road I’d chosen had taken me.

  It was almost noon when Zoran tried to wake me up.

  “Time to wake up,” he said in Slovak, rocking me back and forth. As he propped himself up on the pillow next to me, his hair fell down around his face and over his shoulders.

  “I don’t want to,” I replied in Slovak, pulling him and the blankets close. His warmth was reassuring. I suddenly felt like I was back in my own world where things made sense, and the phone call that morning seemed like nothing more than a bad dream. I turned my head over on the pillow and squinted up at him through our mingled hair. Dark stubble framed his lips, and his eyes, almost black, sparkled. He saw me looking at him and winked.

  “You look like a pirate,” I said.

  “Of course,” he said, brushing some hair back behind his ears. “Slovaks were brigands of the mountains. How else could we have survived?”

  While Zoran was in the bathroom, I went over the day’s tasks in my head. It felt good to keep my mind busy with mundane thoughts. I had to prepare for the graduate conference on Victorian English literature that weekend, the one for which I’d volunteered.

  As a moderator at this new conference, I would have to introduce the presenters, say a few words about the topics, and, when participat
ion flags, come up with informed questions … but there was a vague disconnect as my mind slipped back to the revelation I’d received that morning. It wasn’t a dream. I tried to incorporate the new information into my store of self-knowledge.

  My real father was black and had raped my mother.

  When I’d left my meeting with Komunyakaa only a week before, I’d felt a soaring sense of possibility, like I was on the edge of a whole new life. What I knew deep down had been confirmed, but as a result of the worst circumstances possible.

  At first, my mother sounded mostly terse and mechanical over the phone. I could tell she’d rehearsed the beginning of what she’d said—if I thought they’d always loved me—but after that she fell apart. The conversation left me stunned and confirmed my worst fears: the asking had hurt her, but the answer hurt both of us. I guess my history was a taboo for a reason.

  After my initial shock, I didn’t have to put the violence and violation out of my mind; it happened automatically because it was too much for me to deal with. I suddenly felt as if I were looking at myself from the outside. Even as I looked down at my hands, which had always been a few shades darker than my brothers’, the color of my own skin seemed foreign. I had always thought of myself as tan, dark, olive, brown—many colors. But never that color.

  My family identified as Irish and Italian. When I was growing up and people asked me about my nationality, that’s what I’d told them I was. My mother’s father was the son of Italian immigrants, but her mother was the daughter of immigrants from Greece and Ukraine. The fact that my grandmother was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church or that part of our heritage came from Eastern Europe never entered our family story. I only recently learned that my grandmother’s first name was not actually Mary but Dolores. It seemed like my parents and grandparents didn’t want our family history to seem complicated so that we could grow up with certainty about who we were in the world.