When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

  The main story we were told growing up is that our great-grandmother and great-grandfather came to the United States from Italy without any money. My great-grandmother never learned to speak English, but she raised my grandfather as an American and always kept their small house in Freedom, Pennsylvania, clean. Their first and last names were Americanized at Ellis Island. We didn’t learn that our great-grandfather might have had a second family in Michigan or that my great-uncle Ledo, my grandfather’s oldest brother, served five years in prison for larceny. We were only supposed to know and care about the good parts of our history. As our mother liked to remind us, we were inheritors of the Roman Empire, the greatest civilization on earth.

  The story of the Dunn family, my father told us, was that they were horse thieves who were arrested in eighteenth-century Ireland and given a choice: be sentenced to death or be sent to the New World. The fact that they were most likely sent as indentured servants was never part of the story. One of my father’s ancestors was the mayor of Camden, New Jersey. His great-uncle on his mother’s side owned a pheasant farm. The stories of our immigrant ancestors were of hardscrabble endurance, of fearlessness at leaving home to make a life in a new land, and, most of all, of upward mobility. Generation after generation, they worked and scraped their way to the middle class, and it was our duty to go even further.

  Being American was important to my parents. One of my father’s ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War, and my father used to tell me that meant I was a Daughter of the Revolution, part of a select group of women who could trace their ancestry in this country all the way back to the Colonial era. He did not mention that it was an organization that required official membership or that it was an organization at all; it was simply presented to me as a fact, an honor, and a birthright.

  But as it turned out, I was not a Daughter of the Revolution, at least not in the way my father meant it. I was not a Dunn, not the descendant of the brave Irish ruffians to which my father and brothers could lay claim.

  My father—my real father—was a mysterious black man, which put me in another category altogether. Without a face, a place, or a name. Did that mean I had no place and no name, too? I knew I was no longer part of the dark Irish clan, but at the moment I lost that heritage, I had no story or lineage with which to replace it. Even though I couldn’t admit it, I felt the sting of losing my family’s whiteness and felt like I now stood firmly on the other side of a line none of us ever acknowledged, let alone crossed.

  When Zoran came out of the bathroom, I wanted to tell him about my mom’s phone call, but I hesitated. I still didn’t know how I felt about the news. I wanted to know the whole truth, but I also dreaded knowing. So I just kissed him and patted him on the butt as he passed.

  In the shower, my brain cells awakened, and I experienced the strangeness and disconnection I was feeling once again.

  While I always knew I looked different—as was no doubt obvious to the outside world, including my friends and family—my difference had been a kind of open secret. Our attempts to straighten my hair didn’t hide or change how I looked, but the name of what my looks represented was never mentioned.

  In high school, my difference was an inside joke between my friends and me. They would say I was the daughter of “Jerome” the milkman and that the racial profile of our school changed depending on how I wore my hair that day. I went along with the joke; after all, I had no straightforward way of articulating the contradictory nature of my position. I had seen enough photos of my parents with me as a newborn and heard the story of my birth enough times not to doubt that they were my “real” parents, but I also knew there was something about my looks—more than just being a dark-featured Italian—that made me different. How could both things be true? It did not help that no one in my family—grandparents, aunts, uncles, and certainly not my brothers or parents—ever remarked about my appearance. My difference—my blackness—was always the elephant in the room, but to us, it all seemed normal. When my brothers’ friends asked if I was adopted, they simply responded, “No.”

  My family was well known and well liked in the community. Ever since we moved to Wexford when I was in kindergarten, my mother had volunteered for everything from lunch lady to Sunday school teacher to PTA to fund-raiser for our varsity sports teams. My father coached our extracurricular sports teams, from my brothers’ peewee football and T-ball teams to my softball and basketball teams, even when I was too young and uncoordinated to be any good at sports or care about them.

  When I turned twelve, I grew six inches and my coordination improved, helping make me the star athlete I became in high school. In a class of six hundred students, everyone knew me, and I was voted “Most Athletic” every year, despite the fact that there were girls on our varsity diving team who had qualified for the Olympic trials. I was five foot nine by age thirteen and must have looked exotic to the people of Wexford. My appearance prompted comments like, “How old are you? Where are you from? You should be a model!”

  Growing up, I lived with a kind of double consciousness. With people who didn’t know me, I was exotic, different, possibly black, but definitely other. At home with my family, I was a good Irish Italian Catholic girl.

  When I got out of the shower, I realized that I no longer had to live with this split sense of self. Finally, I could resolve the contradiction. My difference was no longer a secret. It was like coming out—cause for uneasy celebration. I was both elated at having the burden of identity performance lifted from my conscience but also terrified of what would happen next, of fully stepping into my new identity. So, although it was usually something I did on weekends because it took time to set, I opened the cabinet and reached for my pore-refining charcoal mask. The steam cleared as I applied the blue-black substance to my face, and when I looked in the mirror, my eyes and lips popped out at me from my blackened face under a towel turban.

  This is it, I thought. No more pretending to be something I’m not.

  I could hear the short and long vowels of Slovak in the other room—probably Zoran talking with his mom on the headset. She was in Slovakia, and they talked almost every day. I couldn’t remember the last time, before that morning, my mom had called me.

  It was like learning to swim without water wings, waking up one day, a grown woman, and learning once and for all that I was black. I knew that having an Italian American mother meant that I was mixed, but I had even less of an idea of what that identity meant. Before I could approach mixed identity, which seemed even more complex and fraught, I needed to integrate my newly effable blackness into my identity.

  My first moments of race consciousness were jarring, drowning out every other thought. As I walked around, performing my daily tasks, I was black. I was black as I looked at the sun shining through trees, black as I talked to Zoran on the shuttle to campus. When I walked across the stone courtyard and under the Gothic arch of the Humanities building, I did not do it as a “dark-skinned Italian” but as a black person. I wondered, Are there certain black ways to do these things that I didn’t know about? Will my behavior now change somehow to reflect my official blackness?

  It occurred to me, since I felt inclined to mentally specify that I was black while doing these things, before that I was not simply doing them in some neutral state but as white. It was something I’d never thought about, and it struck me with surprise and shame that my assumed whiteness—despite my persistent doubts—had been a condition of my existence. It also meant that if I felt this way, everyone else must, too. White people were walking around being white without realizing it. Black people were walking around being black, and because of the country we live in, were forced to be aware of it. In this country, minorities were not allowed to forget that they were flying kites, picking out groceries, driving their kids to school, sipping coffee, attending business meetings, and writing books while being whatever hyphenated identity they held, but white people were allowed to think they were just doing these things as human bein
gs. If you were to ask a white person if he was aware that he was being white while gardening or waiting for the bus, he would probably ask you what you meant by that.

  I stopped at Small World to get a coffee and stood in line scanning the densely crowded café for people I knew, getting annoyed at the loud banging against the counter that signaled a barista emptying espresso grinds into the trash, and I realized once again that I was doing all this as a black person. My manner had not changed—I still did these routine things in the way I always had, half-consciously, impatiently, thoughts jumping from subject to subject, taking in the sights and smells around me and having positive and negative reactions to them, thinking about what I’d rather be doing, dreading the next day’s class preparation and the exhausting tedium of teaching three identical introductory Russian language classes in a row—but the fact of my existence had.

  So far, everything was the same—and yet everything was different.

  After Small World, I stopped at the graduate lounge in my department to pick up the conference abstracts—the organizers had said they’d leave them in my mailbox. The lounge remained dark, the automatic light not turning on as it should when someone enters the room, and I wondered why it didn’t see me.

  With the natural light, the old newspapers on the table, the computer parts stacked in the corner, the place felt deserted. I walked to a side wall to look in my mailbox, which was really just a recessed slot among two such rows of slots, and sorted through brightly colored flyers to lectures and events long past, alumni giving requests, and a few old phone bills. (I made a mental note to change my address.) Just as I found the abstracts and was about to take them out of the brown, string-tied envelope, Frank, the language instructor for whom I’d been a teaching assistant, walked in.

  For some reason, his flaming hair and beard, his tie that only hung halfway down his shirtfront, and his self-important junior-faculty manner particularly annoyed me at that moment. I pretended to be deeply engaged in my abstracts, hoping he’d ignore me, but he stuck out his potbelly (perhaps not intentionally) in collegial recognition when he saw me.

  “Okh! Zdravstvuite, Sara Robertovna,” he said. “Have you picked up Monday’s homework?”

  “No,” I said, angling to avoid a conversation he would inevitably steer toward the linguistic specificity of Russian participles or the deterioration of university a cappella singing. He was American—from Boston—but liked to keep up the language teacher façade even outside the classroom, which I found incredibly creepy and unnerving. In that moment, I noticed that everything about Frank was very, very white. As I registered this, I realized that, in addition to being annoyed, I also felt defensive.

  Though I always tried to avoid conversation with Frank, this time I didn’t even smile. I tried to edge past him, my envelope held in front of my chest, but he stood resolutely between me and the door, sweating a little.

  “Sara Robertovna,” he said again with a false nasality that made my skin crawl. In Russian, Sarah is written and pronounced without the H, a point he never failed to mention, even though I had been writing my name in Russian for years. The patronymic Robertovna, synthesized from my father’s first name, which he insisted on using “for the sake of cultural authenticity in the classroom,” as he put it, seemed like an especially cruel joke in this moment. “Your family’s Italian, right?”

  I did not know what he was getting at, but I had to pause because, technically, that was true. I waited in silence, trying to look defiant, although I wasn’t used to not smiling—even at Frank—and it made me uncomfortable, like I was the one being rude.

  “Last semester, McGavaran TA-ed with me,” he continued. “I bet we looked like two stuffed shirts!” He fingered the paper cup in his hands but did not throw it in the trash. “At least this semester, they have one instructor who’s less male and less white than me. Looks good for the department, too. Russian doesn’t get many instructors like you.” He lingered, smiling, but my lack of response put us both ill at ease. Was he trying to give me a compliment?

  “Look, Frank,” I said, focusing on a spot above his head and shifting my weight forward, “I am not less anything. I have a student waiting for me downstairs. I have to go.” My heart was pounding, and my only instinct was to get out. I pushed past him, but I sensed he was watching me, and I tried not to run down the corridor.

  Just before I went down the steps, he called, his voice still too near, “Don’t forget to take the homework!”

  Downstairs, the café, with its red walls and silver tables, seemed like another planet. The place swarmed with students, and every seat on the black couch circling the room was occupied by these vagabonds and their giant sacks. The lights and noise were dizzying, and I had to shoulder through the line forming at the counter to get a seat.

  I finally unpacked the abstracts. They did not contain the authors’ names but were simply marked for the panel entitled “The Voice of Sense.” There were only three papers: “Sense and Sensible Nonsense in the Poetry of William Butler Yeats,” “No Sense Is Good Sense: The Open Poem and Postmodern Receptivity,” and “The Dramatic Monologue and the Divine Auditor.” What a bunch of bullshit, I thought, disappointed that I could not even drown my thoughts in them. I got up to get coffee and suddenly realized that I was like one chip in a really big cookie. Looking around, I noted a few other chips. Funny, I thought, that I never noticed.

  As I read the abstracts, my frustration and anger mounted. Not only were they poorly written, they were completely irrelevant. Why should I, as a black person, care about Yeats and postmodern receptivity? And what the hell is the Divine Auditor? I read:

  In the nineteenth century, speakers of dramatic monologues address themselves to God, the Divine Auditor, because they cannot reveal their thoughts to one another.

  I slammed the papers down in disgust; around me, the din of the café was deafening. The topic was so English. So white. No black person would ever think of a topic like this because the inability to communicate openly was a white problem. Black people had no problem speaking their minds. Just that morning, the guy cleaning the women’s bathroom tried to pick me up!

  I was pained that I had to concentrate on these ridiculous abstracts when I had much more pressing concerns. Ingrid, a fellow grad student in my program, saw a free spot at my table and came over. Sveta and I didn’t like Ingrid, and we didn’t invite her to the grad conference. The awkwardness was palpable.

  “Hallo!” she said, the ha as breathy as her pixie cut and freshwater pearls. “There is no room today, ah?” She unbelted her skinny trench coat and slid into the seat opposite.

  “Has Frank seemed strange to you lately?” I asked.

  She tried to suppress a smile, but failed.

  “You mean he finally tried to ask you out?” She asked this as if it were a reasonable question.

  Even though I usually do not blush, I felt heat rising in my face. “What are you talking about?” I asked, and it was not a question as much as a demand.

  “You haven’t noticed? The whole department knows!” She laughed, and I realized what was stunning about Ingrid, besides her creamy skin and doe eyes, was that her voice, with its killer accent, could become very husky and low. “Remember the little birthday cake, the Valentine card in your mailbox, the Orthodox Easter card? You are not even Orthodox, ja?” She had a point, but this was not what interested me.

  “He said something racially offensive to me today,” I said, trying to convey the gravity of the situation.

  “What?” Ingrid said in disbelief. “What is your race?”

  “I’m black,” I said as if I were used to saying this, as if it were self-evident.

  She looked at me and thought for a moment. “No, you look not so black. Greek, maybe, or Creole—from Martinique.”

  “My mother is part Greek, actually,” I said, but she wouldn’t let me finish.

  “Oh, so you are mixed; that is different. See Zoran over there?” I looked to see Zoran at a
far booth with his laptop and headset and wondered why she’d spotted him before I did.

  “In Slovakia, they are all mixed. There is no such thing as ‘Slovak.’ He, for instance, is quarter Czech, quarter Austrian, quarter Hungarian, and quarter Slovak.” She squinted across the room at him, reckoning. His hair was down and collar undone as if he’d just blown in from the high seas.

  “He is very tan,” she continued. “He looks more Hungarian than Slovak.”

  “How do you know so much about Zoran?” I asked, as an inkling of suspicion dawned.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said. “I only see him at the international dinners.”

  My stomach gurgled acidly as I sipped my coffee. “It had better only be international dinners,” I said, looking, unsmiling, into her big, velvety eyes.

  “Well,” she said, her voice low, “Central Europeans are naturally close. We have a lot in common, much more so than with Americans.”

  “That’s a lie,” I said. “Zoran said himself that no one would speak to him in Berlin. He said no one hates Eastern Europeans more than Germans.”

  “I am from Austria,” Ingrid said. She picked up her trench coat and, before making her exit, added, “Maybe you should not forget Frank, ah? Americans with interest in language have much to talk about.”

  “Slut,” I said under my breath, but she was already gone.

  Fuming, I looked over again at Zoran, who had not noticed anything of this little scene. He had his headset on and his expression was concentrated, a sure sign he was talking to his mother. Again? How many times does a grown man need to talk to his mother during a single day? This was not normal, not even for him. Still, I collected my bag, coffee, and papers and elbowed through the crowd to his table.

  “Hey,” I said, and he waved in a way that both greeted me and signaled that I shouldn’t talk. I sank into the leather booth.