When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

  My grandfather was home more regularly when we moved in, and he and my mother became friends. He liked to talk—to bullshit, as my grandfather put it—unlike her stern, distant father. In a way, he became the father she never had.

  I was four years old when my brother Patrick was born on July 10, 1982, and by then, we had moved out of my grandparents’ house to an apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I was too young for preschool, and we only had one car, which my dad drove to work. My mom stayed home with me while my dad worked at a consulting job that would let him use his degree. My time in Harrisburg was a happy time, too. My best friends were twin boys who lived at the end of the block, and I was always excited to go to their house because their mom let them have Lucky Charms. They were a year older than me, though, and when they began kindergarten I saw them less and less. Until my brother was born I spent most of my time alone with my mom. We went to the park and made crafts. Even though there were not many kids around who were my age, my mother made sure I never felt lonely. She said that she loved playing with us when we were little because she got to watch us learn and grow.

  My mom made our little second-floor apartment as cheerful as she could. She sewed yellow gingham curtains for the kitchen window and put an African violet on the windowsill. Later, she’d tell me that it was a lonely time for her, and with no direction of her own, the only thing she could think of to do was to have more children.

  My dad got a job in Pittsburgh, and we moved across the state to Wexford. The gentle slopes and expansive farmland of eastern and central Pennsylvania gave way to the western Pennsylvania landscape of winding roads, steep inclines, and deep forests.

  The phrase I heard about Wexford again and again from my parents and from the new parents and teachers they met when they enrolled us at St. Alexis Elementary School was that Wexford was a great place to raise kids; it was a great place to raise a family.

  It was at this time in my life that, unbeknownst to me, my difference became an issue. Perhaps people see a five-year-old differently than they see a three- or four-year-old. Perhaps the fact that my family was enrolling me in school and moving to Wexford to stay made people nervous. The racism of otherwise benign and cordial white people began to rear its ugly head. Many years later, my dad revealed to me that shortly after we moved into our townhouse in Wexford, a woman called the house. My mother answered, and the woman hissed into the phone:

  Nigger lover.

  My mom had a black doctor at the time, and my parents reasoned that was what the heinous woman’s call was about.

  “We didn’t even consider that it had anything to do with you,” my dad said. It never crossed their minds that Wexford, this great place to raise children, might be unwelcoming for a child like me.

  But maybe my parents did know that deep down. Maybe that’s why in my teenage years my mother tried to steer me away from anything she thought was too black. It was around the time I entered kindergarten that people began asking me who I was and who my parents were, as if I needed to be vetted and accounted for.

  When I was little, I never wore my hair down; my mother insisted that she fix it before going anywhere public. Usually, she parted it down the middle with the knife edge of a comb and slicked it into tight pigtails. I protested loudly as the stiff-bristled brush tore down my scalp. It was an act of love, but it also felt like vengeance.

  She finally gave in to my eight-year-old demands to get a haircut. When the local hairdresser was finished, she swiveled me back toward the mirror. I saw my hair in a curly halo around my face, almost a perfect circle.

  “I look like Mama from Mama’s Family!” I said. I was too young to care about the style. I was just excited to have something new. My mom laughed. Contented, I got a lollipop, and we left the salon.

  When I got home, my four-year-old brother, Patrick, was equally enthralled with my new style.

  “You look like Eddie Murphy!” he said and started doing a dance. This time, my mom didn’t laugh.

  “No, she doesn’t,” my mother said, reprimanding my brother for an infraction he didn’t understand. He stopped dancing.

  From that time on and all throughout high school, my mother never let me get my hair cut again. I never understood why my brother’s comment about my looking like Eddie Murphy made her angry—he seemed just as funny to me as Mama’s Family.

  Under the white gaze, race clings to people of color like a magnet to iron.

  My parents pushed away the moments when race entered our lives because as far as they were concerned, race had nothing to do with them. It was not their business or concern. It was an unpleasant, impolite subject for other people to deal with. They avoided the discussion of race the same way they avoided the discussion of sex: it wasn’t a proper subject for children. They deflected questions about race like they deflected questions about where babies come from. Like sex, race was the private business of other people; like sex, the subject of race had a sordid, forbidden tinge. My parents never talked to my brothers and me about the fact that there’s a thing called race that divides people into different groups based on their skin color and heritage, yet somehow I knew these differences existed. They never talked to us about the cruelties of history based on the idea that because of their non-European origins, entire groups of people were considered less than human.

  When race isn’t explained to kids as an idea created by one group of people to subjugate another group, the distinctions between “black” and “white” seem inherent and natural. Growing up, the meaning of race was implied: normal people were white, dark-skinned people with African features were black, people with “slanted eyes” were Asian, and they were all fundamentally different from one another. My parents never told us explicitly that we were white, though that understanding was inherent in everything we did, how we looked at the world, and how the world looked at us. Except that wasn’t true for me. When the world looked at me, no matter how much a part of my family I felt, no matter how comfortable I felt in my world, the magnet of the white gaze would pull me into conflict with someone else’s ideas about whether or not I belonged.

  In the summers, often with my young aunt and uncle, we vacationed on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, where my dad’s father grew up. The house had blue siding with a long front porch and a yard filled with smooth white pebbles. When I was very young, my great-grandmother and great-aunt lived in a back room that was separated from the rest of the house. When we arrived, I was made to say hello to Nana (my great-grandmother) and Great-Aunt Betty, both of whom were small, emaciated, wheelchair-bound, and smelled of urine. Nana had dementia and smoked cigarettes with her gnarled hands, her eyes looking vacantly past me. Aunt Betty had had a stroke and only mumbled, “Bob is dead. Ruth is dead. Betty’s dead.” They terrified me.

  I soon forgot the specters at the back of the house, though, as we packed up our gear, donned our flip-flops, and walked two blocks to the white sandy beach beyond the dunes. We’d make fun of the people who wore shoes and socks on the beach, calling them “shoobies.” When we heard the ice cream truck jingle in the street, my brother and I would beg some change from our parents and run up the beach, hot sand giving way under our feet, to get our popsicles or ice cream sandwiches.

  I loved those summers of making sandcastles and burying our feet in wet sand; collecting shells and hermit crabs at the water’s edge; wading into the salty green ocean and braving the small swells. We’d stay out until our skin got dark and sweaty, pack up our gear, and go home for lunch.

  My aunt was only five years older than I; when I was eight, she was thirteen. To me, she was the epitome of cool: a blond teenage beach babe in an OP bikini. Every time she went to the beach, usually with a surfer boyfriend, I begged to tag along.

  One day, we were heading out with a tanned surfer boy who came to pick up my aunt. Before we left the house, she called back to me, “Bean, will you grab an extra towel?”

  Bean, or Beaner, was a nickname my dad made up for me when I w
as a baby, as dads do. All my family members, including my aunt and uncle, called me Bean. As far as I knew, it came from the phrase “as cute as a bean.” But it was the first my aunt’s friend had heard it. To our surprise, he asked, “Do you call her Bean because she’s dark like a coffee bean?”

  I don’t remember how my aunt responded. It seemed bizarre to me that my family nickname would refer to my skin color. After all, my whole family got tan in the summer. What made my tan so different? Only as an adult living in LA did I learn that the term beaner is a slur for Mexican immigrants. Though everyone in my family thought I was cute as a bean, for an outsider, the nickname took on a racial connotation.

  No family is perfect. After we moved from Hickory Hills to Lincoln Boulevard, homelife became difficult. It was a chaotic time. My brother Thomas was born on May 17, 1986. Things became difficult for my mother. She described having two children as being manageable, but three was too many. Knight tore up the house and broke windows to bark at the paperboy. My dad was traveling more and more, leaving my stay-at-home mom with an increasingly unmanageable household.

  During this time, my mother’s anger often got the best of her and kept us in fear of making her lose her temper. Dragging me by the hair, the arm, or the leg and throwing things like a television or my brothers’ clothes down the stairs were common occurrences. Not cleaning our rooms or leaving a backpack on the floor was always the straw that broke the camel’s back. When my dad came home from work in the evening, he sat on the couch watching TV as though he were miles away. He didn’t drink, he didn’t yell, but after what was undoubtedly a long, stressful day at work, he was mentally and emotionally unavailable. Since my mother had had a long, stressful day at home but still had dinner to make, dishes to clean, clothes to fold, and kids to put to bed, every night they fought. The sound of my parents screaming at each other, my mother crying and yelling, “You’ll all be sorry if I leave!” and, to my dad, “You’re just going to run off with someone younger and thinner like your father did,” was a nightly ritual.

  She wasn’t always angry, but I never knew which mother I was going to get: the happy, smiling mom, who fawned over me, told me how much she loved me, and got teary-eyed reminiscing about all the fun things we used to do as little kids, or the irate mother, who would threaten us at home and hiss through her teeth at me when we were in public, “Comb your hair,” as if frizzy hair like mine could be combed.

  When I was young, I always tried to play the peacemaker with my parents, but it rarely worked. I developed a diplomatic personality that was less focused on my own views and needs and more on the needs and views of those around me. I felt like an emotional translator, always trying to de-escalate the situations that made me uncomfortable. Because I wanted my parents’ approval, especially my mother’s, more than anything else, I tried my hardest to excel in every possible way—in school, in sports, and in appearance—to minimize conflict that I thought had something to do with me.

  Twenty-four

  Back at Princeton, I finally broke the news to my friends, telling them about what I’d been going through with my parents and the fact that I learned I had a black biological father. My friends weren’t blind; they knew or suspected all along.

  On the one hand, they were happy for me because they could see how relieved I was to finally learn the truth. On the other hand, they could see how emotional I was and how hurt and bewildered the whole situation made me feel. I had come out as black, and they supported me. David said when he came out to his family, their reaction was similar: they had known or suspected all along. His mother and his sisters were supportive, but his father was not. In my family, my father and my brothers were supportive, but my mother was not. I was glad I had such good friends—all white—who, even if they had never encountered the situation of someone switching races before, were committed to helping me through the transition.

  To celebrate, they threw me a “coming out as black” party. Sveta and Angie came over with a gift bag. The card read, Congratulations, you’re black!

  When I opened the bag, I found a box of Dark & Lovely hair relaxer, a copy of Black Hair magazine, and a packet of Kool-Aid. They christened all of us with “black” names: Sveta became Chardonnay, her husband, Martin, became D’Martin, Angie became Aisha, and I became Sariqua. They were trying to share the experience with me and let me know that I was not alone in the only way they knew how, but at the same time, I realized that once again, my friends and I were making a joke out of the very blackness I wanted so desperately to embrace. We didn’t know how else to deal with it. I didn’t know what kind of response would have been more helpful at the time because I had little experience with what I considered authentic blackness myself. If I didn’t know how to handle my transition or what to do, how could I expect that of my friends?

  In private, though, my friends reached out to me with a gentler kind of humor.

  In my gift bag, Angie included a “Happy Coming-Out-as-Black Day” card, as she put it. She wrote that she was impressed with the way I was handling everything and that I should celebrate my newfound heritage even though the circumstances were traumatic. She was glad I hadn’t lost my sense of humor and thought I should embrace the rare opportunity of changing races. If I needed help, she wrote, she would always be there for me.

  Her words meant a lot to me. Humor was always my coping mechanism. Being able to joke about a serious and traumatic situation made it easier for me to communicate about it and opened the way to more heartfelt expression. The gift bag items and the “black names” were stereotypical and went too far in turning blackness into a punch line, but I needed my friends now more than ever, and even if I was slightly offended by the gifts, it took a back seat to my need to be accepted.

  I couldn’t believe Angie thought I was handling things well. My life was changing so fast I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what I was going through. Uncertainty and nervousness settled deep in my stomach and made my bowels tremble. The constant quivering took away my appetite, and anything I did eat I couldn’t digest. I crawled into bed and stayed there as long as I could no matter the time of day, only getting up twice a week to go teach my Russian language class, which felt like torture. Even when I got home and crawled back to the safety of my bed, I couldn’t relax. My head throbbed, and I was always cold.

  At least my friends brought me out of my own private hell long enough to let me know they would help me in whatever way they could. Angie’s letter offset the tone deafness of the gift basket and helped put what I was going through into perspective.

  Abby, my friend from high school who had gone to Middlebury and was now living in Boston, wrote me a letter in her small, neat hand that included these lines:

  This one is pretty tough. Just know that whatever a white girl from suburban PA can do for you, I totally will. (Wow, I feel like that was an insensitive remark or something. Just know that I didn’t intend for it to be so. It’s hard transitioning from “joke-mode” to “serious-mode” when it comes to you.)

  I didn’t find her remark offensive at all. In fact, it was the first time one of my friends called out her own whiteness, and I appreciated it. In contrast to focusing on the blackness I now identified with, she focused on the whiteness from which I was becoming estranged.

  Her letter also made me realize how difficult my armor of humor was to penetrate. We took Mr. Lynch’s World Cultures class together. She was there when I was wrapped in an African cloth in front of everyone. Instead of talking about how we felt afterward, we joked about Buba. We joked about her Jewish father and Catholic mother, how she got double the holidays. Even now, my friends helped me through difficult times by throwing me a racist mock party.

  My racial background was so fraught for me that I didn’t know how to talk about it openly. When I talked to my parents about it, we fought. When I talked to my therapist, we seemed to be on different pages. At least my friends knew this was a big moment, the kind that divides your life into “before” and �
��after.” The language of coming out was borrowed, but it symbolized that even if I always knew who I was deep down, and even if others could see the identity I was trying to hide, I no longer had to live a double life, denying who I was on the outside to keep others—in this case, my family—happy.

  What my family didn’t realize was that, as far of the rest of the world was concerned, I was already out. Even when people asked me about my background growing up, it was because they knew or suspected that I was not white. Most assumed I was at least partly African American.

  When I was in high school, black boys were especially fond of me. When I went outside our small white community to the mall, to the amusement park, or to a basketball game with a rival school, I was often approached by young men who saw me as a light-skinned black girl. I was flattered by the attention they gave me because I didn’t get that kind of interest from the boys at my school. If they seemed nice, I would give them my phone number. Eventually, a guy would call the house asking for me, and I’d have to explain to my mom who he was.

  “You can’t do that here!” she’d say about the possibility of me, her white teenage daughter, dating a black guy. “Not in this kind of neighborhood.”