When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

  “Wow,” she said, looking at me intensely. It seemed like an unprofessional response. Weren’t doctors and therapists supposed to have heard everything? I just wanted some assurance that I wasn’t crazy or making a big deal out of nothing; that I was indeed experiencing a life-altering change. I couldn’t articulate any of this at the time, I only had the distinct feeling of coming unmoored. She got up and turned the overhead light on, as if noticing for the first time that the room was darker than it ought to be. I sat on the stiff chair, hugging a throw pillow to keep from shaking. While she sat back down, I waited.

  “It’s just that—you look so much darker to me now,” she finally said, playing with the silver bracelets on her wrist. I didn’t hear the rest of what she said. She asked some questions; I responded automatically. Soon the twenty minutes were up. I thanked her, not knowing what else to do, and left the office more bewildered than when I’d gone in.

  Seventeen

  My family arrived Wednesday afternoon and booked themselves into an extended-stay Hilton on Route 1 not far from the university. Even though I was dreading the reunion, I was more than happy to get out of my drafty house with its paper-thin walls and reclusive roommate.

  The wind had picked up some, but it was still mild. Most of the leaves had fallen, but the air did not yet carry the chill of winter. Clouds in the November sky hung low and lower, it seemed, over the Hilton. Even though the heater in my car was turned all the way up, I felt cold as I pulled into the parking lot, unsure of what awaited me.

  It would be the first time I’d faced my mother since our phone conversation, the first time our family would openly acknowledge my different father and race. After twenty-seven years of all of us avoiding the issue, I did not know what to expect. How would my parents handle the conversation? How would Patrick and Tom react? With the personal crises my friends were going through, I hadn’t talked to them about what was going on between my family and me.

  I walked through the lobby, feeling the eyes of the desk clerk follow me as I went toward the elevator. Maybe I imagined it, but I had the sense of not feeling welcome. I knocked on the door of my parents’ suite, and my dad opened it.

  The familiar sight of him, with his tan skin, slightly grown-out black hair, and dark green L.L.Bean coat one size too large almost convinced me that everything was normal and that their visit was nothing more than a family gathering for the holidays. But the thought lasted only for a moment, and even when he greeted me with his customary “Hey, Bean,” the tension did not give way.

  My dad gave me a big hug, holding me for longer than usual, which made me even tenser. I greeted Pat, who, at six foot one, was skinnier and taller than my dad. I noticed his thick dark hair and beard were growing out, and he was wearing a baggy plaid shirt. We hugged, again for longer than usual. Tom also gave me a hug. He was six foot two and also a bit shaggy. I was glad he and Pat were there; it made me feel like I had allies. Finally, I saw my mother. She looked smaller than I remembered, but everything else about her was the same: pursed lips with neutral lipstick, sensible silver jewelry, her lightened hair cut in a long bob with bangs. She was wearing a V-necked sweater over a button-down blouse and dark pants, and Dansko clogs. We all stood in the entry of the anonymous room, the moment lingering.

  My mother and I hugged, and I felt uneasy. After our first conversation, I’d felt like she was the victim, but now, standing in the hotel room, I felt she’d betrayed me. She made a decision twenty-seven years ago and kept it a secret. Didn’t she know that eventually the truth would come out? Didn’t she think about what it would do to me?

  My dad led us to the living room, and we all sat down, my brothers and I on the hard sofa, my parents in each of the chairs opposite.

  My dad was talking, not my mother. He told us in a grave voice that I had a different father and that I was half-black. With a shake of his head, he swore he had nothing to do with all this and that it was the first he was hearing of it himself.

  Pat nodded thoughtfully. Tom was silent.

  My mom remained silent.

  I felt as if I were hearing the conversation from a great distance, their talk muted and faint.

  My mother brought out a big red velvet heart-shaped box with gold trim from her bag. Shakespeare’s words were embroidered on the top with golden thread: Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.

  “I wanted you to see that I was happy then,” she said, handing me the box. I opened it and took out a framed photo of my parents and me when I was about one year old. It looked like it was taken in an instant photo booth; their heads were pressed together, and my dad was holding me up between them. They sported big toothy smiles and seemed happy to capture a moment of togetherness with their young family. I could see that I was noticeably darker than they were and that my curly hair and facial features didn’t match up with theirs. It was nice to see how young and exuberant they were, so happy to be parents at twenty-one and twenty-two years old. But how could they not have wondered why I was so dark? Why my cute button nose in no way resembled their longer, high-ridged ones?

  We spent the night fighting. I asked my mother these questions, and she said they just didn’t think about it.

  “Don’t you understand we just fell in love with you? We knew you were ours and wanted to take care of you the best we could.”

  I asked her if she understood how I felt to have been robbed of my identity growing up, or why raising me “the best they could” didn’t include acknowledging or celebrating my black heritage.

  “What should we have done?” she mocked. “Eat fried chicken and watermelon and talk like this?”

  She made some crude rapper gestures and did her best impression of a ghetto accent. She didn’t think it was offensive; to her, that’s what black meant. Her idea of blackness was just an amalgam of stereotypes and violence.

  She told me I already had an identity: Wasn’t that good enough for me?

  I locked myself in the bathroom and cried. I had a brief flash of doing the same thing at my fourteenth birthday party when Rachel Turner told me I was a snob.

  Outside, I could hear Pat and Tom arguing with my mom, their voices rising angrily. My dad knocked on the door and implored me to come out, but I didn’t answer. I always suspected my mom had no interest in anyone’s culture but her own. I remembered us walking through the mall when I was young and seeing a woman wearing a sari walking toward us. As she passed, my mom whispered to me, “If she wants to be in America, she should dress like it.”

  I couldn’t understand how my dad, who seemed so much worldlier and more open-minded than my mom could have gone along with this. Was it even about worldliness? Or did the rules change when it came to one’s own family?

  “It has nothing to do with me,” he kept saying through the door. “This is between you and your mother.”

  All I could think about was how little this seemed to mean to my parents. They were upset because I was upset, but if they had their way, we would have never discussed the subject at all.

  After I got the call from my mom, my life changed into “before” and “after.” Not only did things change for me from that moment onward, I now saw the past in the light of a fiercely kept family secret.

  I heard my mother yelling through the door, “If this is the worst thing that’s happened in your life, you should be grateful!”

  I didn’t know if she meant that I should be grateful that what happened to her didn’t happen to me, or if she meant that learning what I had just learned should not be a big deal. I didn’t think she understood the kind of rupture I was experiencing.

  The news made me question all my experiences with my family. The birthdays, holidays, family dinners, summer vacations, basketball practices, games, camps, and tournaments—everything we did together now felt like a lie, like the whole time an untruth was hovering around us we’d all agreed to ignore. I just kept thinking, if my race or biological father didn’t matter, as my mother insisted, then
why did it need to be a secret? Why couldn’t we have the same experiences as a family without pretending I was white? If my parents wanted to spare me the pain or confusion of knowing I had a different biological father when I was young, why didn’t they tell me when I was older?

  When I came out of the bathroom with tears still streaming down my face, my dad tried to ameliorate the situation by saying, “It’s kind of like you’re adopted.”

  “But you said you didn’t know!” I yelled back. “You can’t adopt a child by accident!”

  It was too late for them to frame our situation as adoption. During our conversation, they never said, “We wanted to wait until you were ready,” or “We were waiting for you to ask.”

  My mother had tears streaming down her face, too.

  “I wish I’d never told you,” she kept saying.

  I began to feel like my denial of my race all these years was more about protecting my parents than protecting myself and that deep down I always knew it. My mother instilled in us how much she sacrificed to be a mother, dropping out of college, staying home with us throughout our childhoods, never having a job or life of her own until she was older. She told us what a great father we had, and it was true. She said she wished she’d had a father like that. Growing up, I saw my parents—especially my mother—the same way I saw Jesus: selfless martyrs who only cared about others. I felt loyal and indebted to them. I could never pay them back for all they’d done for us, but I felt compelled to dedicate my life to trying.

  Feeling this way, how could I have forced the issue of my difference as a child, or even as a teenager? It was difficult enough for me to do now. The subject of my essay for college applications was about how my mother, like Jesus, set a moral example for me and how I wanted to do my best to embody that spirit of honesty and sacrifice.

  Now, that all seemed like a bad joke. It was still true, but at the same time, it wasn’t.

  I knew that from their point of view, they were protecting me from an ugly truth that could have affected my self-esteem, especially in the world in which we lived. It could have made me feel more isolated among my peers; my identity crisis could have come much sooner. Would I have been able to resolve it and adapt?

  “When I found out I was pregnant, I was twenty years old,” my mother said. “I didn’t want a child, and I was scared. I thought about having an abortion, but I just couldn’t do it. If your father hadn’t married me, I would have given you away.” She paused. “I just couldn’t raise you as a single mother. We would have been outcasts. Don’t you see that it doesn’t matter?” she implored.

  “After everything you just said,” I yelled, “how could it not matter?”

  “All that matters is that we loved you and wanted the best for you. You think being black is more important than that? It doesn’t mean anything! It’s all made up!”

  Her tone was desperate but still had an edge.

  “I can’t believe you really think this is important,” she continued, her voice steadying. “You have no idea how happy we were to raise you. You were so much fun! It was so gratifying watching you learn and grow into a smart, beautiful, young woman, and we made sure you had all the opportunities we never did. Isn’t that what’s really important? I wish someone had done all that for me when I was growing up. That’s how I based everything I did as a parent: to do the things no one had done for me.”

  I always felt my parents loved and supported me. They celebrated my successes and made me feel special. In the face of that feeling, I didn’t know how to explain the emptiness, betrayal, and loss I felt. It felt like I was being told that only one of these things—either my race or their love—could matter.

  My mom went on to insist that she didn’t know I was black.

  “Daddy is dark,” she said. “He’s darker than you. Don’t you see? There was always an explanation.”

  She wanted me to believe her, and maybe she wanted to believe that herself, but when she talked about knowing she would have to give me away unless my father married her, I knew she feared her parents would not have accepted her as a young single mother with a black child.

  I knew the circumstances of my conception made it even more difficult for her to accept my identity as part black. She wanted to forget—and had forgotten—the person who conceived me. She wanted that whole moment in her life to vanish, and it until now had.

  Now here I was bringing back painful memories when I should have just been grateful for the life I had. It made me feel like the bad guy, an advocate for someone who had harmed her. Was it really impossible for her to separate my identity from the person she wanted to forget, or did she have to bury that part of me in order to love and care for me the way she did? Could some lines simply not be crossed?

  My parents gave me a culture and an identity. Growing up, I knew who I was and where I belonged. We built our family together. For them, that was enough.

  As I grew, I realized there was more to me—not less—than the person my family recognized. Identity is all the aspects that make up a person, and the facts of who I was were more complicated than my family wanted to admit. Identity is culture and affinity—characteristics I had that were shaped by my environment and ones I possessed independent of it. I was Irish, Italian, and African American. All those heritages were a part of me whether my parents believed that or not. The part of me my parents wanted to deny was the part that everyone saw.

  Black, African American, mixed, biracial. What did these identities mean to me? I had a whole set of questions to figure out, and I knew my parents couldn’t help me.

  As we argued, Pat took my side. He was as outraged as I was that they kept this secret from us and felt a deep sense of betrayal. He talked about telling his friends no when they asked if his sister was adopted. He and I—and probably Tommy, too—always had to field questions about why I looked different, but no one had the courage to confront my parents about it. Didn’t they realize they forced us into a position that made it look like we were lying?

  Besides my racial identity, there was an even bigger elephant in the room. Our entire discussion begged a question we had so far avoided: Who was my biological father?

  “How could you even ask that?” she said in disbelief. “Why is it important?”

  I said I had a right to know and that it was completely natural and rational for a person to want to know who his or her father was.

  It hit her like a slap in the face.

  “Haven’t I done enough?” she asked. “How stupid do you have to be to really believe that’s important?”

  One of the photos in the Valentine’s Day box showed my mom and her friends in a dorm room in their pajamas. They were laughing, all piled on the bed. I recognized some faces in the photo as friends my mother had known since grade school. A couple of the faces were unfamiliar.

  “Who took this picture?” my dad asked. His question was unexpected.

  “Why are you asking me that?” replied my mother, exasperated.

  Suddenly, I wasn’t the focus of the argument. The air between them was tense with something unsaid.

  “Sherry was dating someone black,” he said, pointing at one of the unfamiliar girls in the photo. “Wasn’t it—”

  I didn’t hear what he said because I was lost in a cloud of thoughts and emotions, but whatever it was hit a nerve, and mother screamed at him in response, “Why are you accusing me? Aren’t I allowed to have friends? I can’t believe you would bring that up!”

  After being shouted down, my father gave up.

  We were all exhausted, and my parents decided to go to bed.

  Eighteen

  “What was that about?” I asked my brothers as soon as the bedroom door closed.

  “I don’t know,” Pat said. He and Tom seemed as dazed as I was, with as many questions and no good answers.

  “Tara has been interning on a film in the city, and it just came out,” I said.

  “What’s the film?”

  “It’s
a Jim Jarmusch film; I don’t know what it’s about. She said she got to hang out with Bill Murray on set. It’s called Broken Flowers. Want to watch it?”

  “Sure,” he said. Tom also nodded.

  We turned on the TV and clicked Pay-Per-View.

  The film opened on a black screen and the rich clicking of a manual typewriter.

  An envelope, bright pink, drops into a mailbox and makes the rounds through an automated mail sorting facility as moody surf rock plays. A mail carrier walks through a quiet neighborhood past a stand of shade trees, a kid wearing a helmet riding a bike. Dappled light all around; the picture of suburban tranquility.

  The first house we see has blue siding. Black children are playing in the front yard. A child’s swing hangs from a tree; a small basketball hoop, a mini table and chairs set for tea, and other toys are scattered around the yard and driveway. The front door stands open; funky music plays within. The children laugh; fall leaves swish beneath their running feet. A truck and a van stand parked at angles in the driveway.

  As the mail carrier passes a thicket of high, well-groomed shrubbery, the boisterous sounds fade, and the chirping of birds in the silence grows louder.

  She enters a wide, manicured lawn and begins to walk toward the front door. The camera zooms out to take in the grand scale of the house as she walks up to a door flanked by stone columns.

  In the living room, a beautiful woman in an expensive-looking pink suit, played by Julie Delpy, is breaking up with Don, played by Bill Murray, who wears a black tracksuit with red stripes. He seems confused but not upset by what’s happening. She asks him if he wants a family.

  “Is that what you want?” he asks.

  “I don’t know what I want,” she says. “I just know I want to figure it out on my own.”