When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

  My dad had discreetly left my mom and me alone in the backyard to talk. It was the first hint of spring. My mom filled the silence between us by giving me a tour of her garden, pointing out the plants that were coming back and those she’d need to replant. We were standing beneath the pergola covered in bare wisteria vines when I asked her, “So who is my real father?”

  “Don’t call him that!” she snapped, then added, “I do not have that information.”

  “How is that possible?” I asked. “How could you not know?”

  She recounted the story she’d told me during our first conversation on the topic. “I was at a party, I drank too much…”

  “Wait,” I said. “I thought you said you were drugged, that someone put something in your drink?”

  “Well, maybe I was,” she said noncommittally. “I woke up the next morning in my dorm room. I don’t know how I got home; I don’t remember anything about that night.”

  “Then how do you know you were raped?” I asked.

  “I don’t,” she said. “Maybe I wasn’t. I don’t know.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, trying to wrap my mind around what she was telling me. We sat down on cushioned lawn chairs. “Wait, are you telling me now that you were not … you know?”

  “I’m sorry, Sarah. I wish I could tell you what you want to know, but I can’t.”

  None of it made sense. Why would she tell me my biological father had raped her unless she had been sure? Why would she say that she was drugged if it weren’t true? I pressed, but she wouldn’t say anything more. It seemed as if she were trying to protect someone. She had flown off the handle over Thanksgiving when my dad had suggested it was one of the guys she knew in college. If she wasn’t protecting the biological father, then was she protecting my dad from having to confront the man whose child he’d raised? Mostly, it seemed like she was protecting herself. Maybe she was protecting me, too. All I felt when I brought up the subject was hostility, not compassion, so I couldn’t understand what she went through then or what she was going through now.

  In movies and on television, big family dramas are resolved before the credits roll. A secret is revealed, people are hurt, relationships fall apart, and then one or both parties realize it’s better to forgive and forget than hold on to bad feelings. There’s a tearful reunion, everyone is happy and reconciled, and life goes on as before.

  This is not what happened for my mother and me. Every conversation we had afterward ended the same way—in yelling, tears, my demanding that she tell the truth, and her saying she didn’t know or couldn’t remember.

  I felt betrayed because in the days that followed her revelation, unsure of what to do or where to turn, I’d called a rape crisis hotline.

  “My mother was raped twenty-seven years ago,” I said unsteadily when a volunteer answered. “What should I do? Is there anything I can do, legally?”

  The volunteer talked to me about the statute of limitations for rape, that in some states, like New Jersey, there was no set period of time after which a victim of rape could not come forward. In Pennsylvania, the statute of limitation was twelve years. I thought of myself at twelve, how each year of my life after that was another year my mother’s assailant could not be brought to justice. All I’d felt was anger toward whoever harmed my mother; I wanted revenge. I didn’t think it was fair that there was a rapist out there who took advantage of my mother and was leading a normal life. He had to be brought to justice. If my mother didn’t want to pursue legal action or couldn’t do so under the law, then I was determined to do it for her. In those early days, the only reason I wanted to find my biological father was to put him in prison.

  In my second year of grad school, I went to Prague for a summer language course. While I was there, the Vltava River flooded and a state of emergency was declared in the city. Classes were canceled, and we, the foreign students, were instructed to stay in the dormitory. Naturally, we used this as an excuse to party and get blackout drunk.

  During the summer program, I had become friends with and subsequently dated two guys. One was Kami, an American who was half-Czech and half-Sudanese. Though he identified as black, he looked Mexican and often told us how Spanish-speaking folks in New York City, where he lived, would disapprove of him not knowing “his language.” The other was Felix, who was German.

  On the day of the flood party, I wasn’t dating either one of them. We drank vodka straight from the bottle as sirens blared in the streets. We joked about a Soviet invasion. It was the middle of the day, not even close to night. Eventually, when I was so drunk I could hardly stand, I groped my way from the common room to a bedroom to lie down.

  I must have passed out immediately, because when I woke up some time later, it was still daylight. My head was foggy, and my hips were incredibly sore. I looked on the floor next to the bed and saw a used condom; someone had had sex with me. At least they’d used protection; that was my first thought. Felix was lying on the bed across the room reading. He was fully clothed and gave no indication that anything had happened between us or that he’d seen anything happen. My panties were on, but the cargo skirt I was wearing was scrunched around my waist. So, I thought, did I have sex and simply not remember? Who was it with? Could I have been conscious enough to put my underwear back on if I couldn’t even remember anyone getting into bed with me?

  In the other room, the party continued, and no one noticed my absence. I didn’t see Kami, and more important, I was too embarrassed to ask where he was. If I found him, would I have said, “Hey, did you—or someone else—have sex with me? You’ll have to tell me, because I don’t remember.” The idea mortified me. I felt stupid for putting myself in the situation by getting so drunk that I’d passed out. It never crossed my mind that my being assaulted was someone else’s fault.

  My attention returned to my sore hips and pelvis. I’d never been that sore from sex, not that I could remember. Then a terrible thought: What if it had been more than one person? There were many male students in the program, but none of which I thought would have had the temerity to do that to me while I was unconscious. The word rape didn’t even crystalize in my mind at the time because, I reasoned, since I had been involved with both Kami and Felix in the past, if it had been either of them, I might have consented if I were conscious. But I hadn’t wanted to have sex at that time. I’d gone into the bedroom to lie down and get some rest. I was alone when I went into the room and had intended to stay that way. My head was still spinning. Without a word, I pulled my skirt down, smoothed it, got out of bed, stepped over the used condom, and went to rejoin the group as if nothing had happened.

  Twenty-two

  I now found myself in the worst possible scenario: I felt my mother was lying to me. When it happened to me, I had been on birth control, and the assailant had used a condom. Since I was passed out, there was no way for me to know whether the person had been black or white or anything else about his identity. The only way I would have known (assuming the assailant did not confess the liaison to me, which he did not) was if I would have had a child. Since the prospective men were of different races, the child would have provided a clue.

  In my mother’s case, it seemed that, if things had happened to her in the same way they’d happened to me, then she could only have known her assailant was black because I was. If that were truly the case, she was lying about not realizing I was of mixed race from the beginning. And if she realized I was black from the beginning, she must have had some idea, as I had, who the potential assailant was. Even though I was passed out during the act and heavily intoxicated beforehand, I still remembered, at least vaguely, what had happened at the party before and after. She seemed to have had a complete memory wipe not only of that night but of everything that had happened that year in college before she went on spring break with my dad. She couldn’t remember the encounter itself, couldn’t remember what happened afterward, and had no clue who might have been with her.

  From my own
experience, I knew how embarrassing and humiliating it was to be in that situation. When I woke up, I had so many questions.

  I thought back to the scene in the movie Kids, where Jennie is passed out on the couch, fully clothed, and her male friend approaches her for sex. “Jennie, wake up,” he says softly as he kisses her, touches her breasts, and massages her stomach. She rolls over, half shooing him away, but shows no sign of waking up. He is horny and persists. He takes her jeans and panties off, maneuvering her lifeless limbs.

  “Don’t worry, Jennie, it’s me, Casper,” he says as he fucks her unresponsive body.

  He is on top of her for what seems like a long time; her legs are draped over his shoulders, her knees level with her ears.

  It must have been the same position I was in for my hips and pelvis to have been so sore. How else could you fuck a girl who was passed out cold? Everyone around them is passed out, too, so there were no witnesses. Did he put her pants back on afterward? I doubt it. He doesn’t use protection, either.

  At the end of the film, he wakes up on the same couch (Jennie is nowhere in sight) and says, “Jesus Christ, what happened?” He seems to have no memory of what happened, either, or else is simply in disbelief at his and his friends’ levels of debauchery.

  I also thought about the night in college I spent with Craig after the Barenaked Ladies concert. When Craig passed out, I didn’t violate him or continue to have any sexual contact with him. I left him as he was and went to bed without touching him further. In the morning, when he was still too drunk to walk, Tara and I helped dress him, walked him to the car, and drove him home. I didn’t take advantage of his vulnerable state. I didn’t even consider it. Why would I? The same thing happened with a guy I met on spring break in college. He was drunker than I was, and not long after we went back to my hotel room, he passed out on the bed. I immediately stopped kissing him, got up, and waited for our friends to come back to the room so they could take him back to his place. It would not have been moral or enjoyable to continue intimacy with him. How could someone look at their romantic partner passed out and think otherwise? Someone who looks at a passed-out person and sees a sexual opportunity is a predator, not a friend. In that situation, no matter how drunk the victim is, he or she is not to blame. I didn’t think Craig or the guy I met on spring break counted themselves lucky because they didn’t get taken advantage of while they were passed out; the possibility probably never even crossed their minds.

  So why did I only blame myself for what happened to me and blame my mother for not knowing what happened to her?

  After the flood, we went back to our classes, and I never spoke about what happened. I had the same friends as before, and as far as I knew, no one whispered about what had happened at the party. I put it out of my mind as the activities of the summer continued—seeing Czech-language films, practicing my broken German with some of the German students, acting as an English interpreter on our walking tours, and helping clean up the destruction wrought by the flood around the city. There was too much to do to think about that strange encounter. Like my mom, I kept the confusing, humiliating event to myself.

  As I sat in my parents’ backyard talking to my mother, I still couldn’t see her point of view.

  “What’s hard for me to understand, Mom, is that, if you were willing to carry me and raise me—and you knew where I came from—why couldn’t you just accept me for who I was instead of raising me as white? Why was that necessary?”

  “I only saw you,” she said. “I don’t know how else to explain it to you.”

  I could see she was tired of talking about it and was frustrated because she thought what she was saying was self-explanatory. I’d never had a child and didn’t know what it was like to have a new, vulnerable life in my care. Maybe the all-encompassing maternal feeling she described was something I couldn’t comprehend. But a nagging skepticism returned. Surely not all mothers who had mixed-race children kept the child’s identity and the identity of the father a secret.

  My point of view felt just as self-explanatory to me. Why did I have to explain that in the world in which we live, it’s important for a mixed-race, African American person to know their identity and understand where they come from? It’s important for anyone to know. I knew that there was emotional trauma behind the explanation, and she had told me that she didn’t know how to explain the situation to a child. She said she never wanted me to feel bad about who I was, and I guess for her, admitting my blackness was inextricably linked with the possibility of my feeling bad, knowing I came from an unwanted, hurtful event. She insisted, though, that things would have been different if the perpetrator had been white.

  Twenty-three

  I was born on December 6, 1977, at Chestnut Hill Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Back then, we lived with my dad’s folks at their house on Grove Avenue in Flourtown, Pennsylvania. I can look through family albums and see photos of my dad holding me right after I was born, looking down at me with excitement and a little bewilderment, wearing a pair of turquoise scrubs the hospital gave him. When I was little, he wore those scrubs around the house until I was ten or eleven, at which point they got so faded and holey my mom made him throw them out. There’s another shot of the three of us lying on a floral comforter in the room we shared in the Grove Avenue house, heads toward the camera, my mom’s hair long, dark, and wavy, my dad’s straight and black, mine short and curly.

  My dad was completing his undergraduate degree at West Virginia University. My mother had already left her college, and when I turned one we moved to an apartment in Morgantown, West Virginia, so that my dad could complete his studies. A year later we moved to State College because my dad was accepted into Pennsylvania State University’s graduate program for public administration. My first memories are of living in State College, running over to our neighbor’s apartment, opening the door without being invited and breaking my friend’s crayons. I was having a great time, but my mom had to explain to me that none of these behaviors were socially acceptable. I also remember the blue-and-white checked blanket that represented Penn State’s colors; from a very young age I knew to root for the Nittany Lions.

  My parents have told me about many of my antics during their college days: I would hide in the clothes racks or run away, inevitably to the toy section, while they were shopping. Once, a kindly stranger had to bring me to the security booth in the mall because she had found me, a two-year-old, roaming free. My parents were glad I returned safely. After getting over the shock and scare of my being lost, they laughed about these times. My mother told me that once, during a tantrum, I lay down in the middle of the street and she was laughing so hard she couldn’t pick me up.

  Back in Flourtown, where I attended preschool, my dad worked construction while he tried to parlay his MPA into a career. In the meantime, my mom worked at McDonald’s. My dad and I dropped her off every day in a little rust-colored Volkswagen Beetle, and my treat was a pancake breakfast with sausage and lots of syrup. Some kids found Ronald McDonald creepy, but to me, he, Grimace, the Hamburglar, Birdie, and the Fry Guys were celebrities. I had a Ronald McDonald doll and figures of the characters from Happy Meals. As far as my four-year-old self was concerned, McDonald’s was perfection.

  I loved the house on Grove Avenue: the creaky staircase, the smell of my grandmother’s coffee and cigarettes, the pantry at the top of the basement stairs with narrow shelves filled with cans and boxes of food that reached to the ceiling. I would chase my grandparents’ cat, Rosie, down those stairs and into the basement, a dark, mysterious world of old box fans, furniture, and card tables stacked with boxes of Christmas decorations. My dad’s younger siblings, John and Kathleen, were aged twelve and nine at the time, and although they were my uncle and aunt, I saw them more as my big brother and sister. Because my grandmother was often ill, my mom took care of John and Kathleen too, making them lunch and getting them ready for school. I loved Uncle John and Aunt Kathleen, as I called them; I thought everyt
hing they did was cool. My dad’s brother Steven was only one year younger than he, and by the time we moved back in, twenty-two-year-old Steven was already out of the house. I loved my uncle Stevie, who looked so much like my dad, though I rarely saw him.

  My early years were very happy ones. When I was young, I never realized I was different because my family never made me feel that way. When I look at photos from those times now, as happy as they are, I can’t understand how my parents and grandparents avoided the subject of my race; I looked so obviously different. But they loved me just as I was and didn’t need any more explanation than that.

  Even though the house on Grove Avenue was a fun and loving place when I lived there, my father’s own childhood was fraught.

  He grew up in Olney, a neighborhood in north Philadelphia, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As the family grew and the demographics of the formerly redlined neighborhood changed, his family moved to Flourtown in Springfield County, a mostly Irish and Jewish suburb. His mother and her two younger sisters grew up at the Scotland School in Franklin County for orphaned and abandoned children of military veterans. My grandmother was valedictorian of her nursing program and had begun a promising career as a nurse when she was introduced to my grandfather, a handsome paratrooper from the Korean War. When they married and had children, at my grandfather’s insistence she gave up her career. Later, my father would tell me that the illness she experienced for much of my childhood was depression. While my grandmother stayed home with the children and became increasingly depressed, my grandfather had extramarital affairs. My dad told me stories of his father staying away for days and weeks at a time and never knowing when he was going to be back. Eventually, a friend of his dad’s from the Black Horse Pub would come by and say he saw Bob (my dad’s father) with some woman and that he should be coming home soon. My dad’s need for self-reliance at an early age helped him develop a strong and independent character, but he was also perpetually anxious and uncertain about the commitment of those he loved. He had a need for stability and a need to be needed. When my mother was younger, she was not particularly close to her parents, older sister, or younger brother. Even though our situation wasn’t perfect, my parents both enjoyed the closeness and stability of having their own little family; in some ways it made up for their dysfunctional childhoods. I felt secure having young, energetic, and loving parents. Unlike my dad, I never feared one of my parents would walk out on me or not be there in the morning when I woke up.