When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

  Tulskaya was not one of the vaulted high-ceilinged stations downtown that was tiled floor and ceiling in intricate patterns with massive statues of Soviet heroes placed at the entrances. The work of Stalin, they looked like underground cathedrals to Soviet power, and they were awe-inspiring. Tulskaya was built in the 1980s and had a simpler design. Marble walls transitioned to art deco designs that extended up the slightly arched white ceiling. Dropped light fixtures shaped like diamonds ran the length of the station, with wooden benches separating the northbound and southbound sides of the platform.

  It was May, and the mounds of exhaust-covered snow that flanked the roads were melting into deep gray pools. The sky was sunny but icy cold. Being a foreigner, I quickly shed my winter layers as soon as the sun came out. Muscovites around me gave me sidelong stares as they trundled by wrapped in thick winter coats. They knew the weather could turn at any point. It was a bad idea to trust the sun.

  To get to the museum, I took the gray line and transferred to Dobryninskaya station on the ring. The city of Moscow is built as a sequence of concentric rings, that lead to the heart of the city at Red Square. The ring line on the metro transfers to every other line and can get you any place downtown. The metro stations along this line were the first to be built and are the most ornate.

  Dobryninskaya was one of the original stations built in 1950, with marble arches, a dark marble floor, and a high ceiling. The architects took inspiration from the interiors of ancient Russian Orthodox churches but balanced those features with twelve bas-reliefs of Soviet workers from different nationalities and three floor-to-ceiling mosaics over a hundred feet tall of Lenin and parading soldiers of the Red Army.

  From Dobryninskaya, I transferred to Oktyabrskaya, where the ring line and the orange line connect. Oktyabrskaya was named for the October Revolution of 1917. At first, I thought the bas-relief figures on the ceiling in flowing cloaks holding laurels and trumpets aloft were angels. The laurel wreaths carved into the ceiling were topped with the Soviet star, hammer, and sickle. One of the figures carved on the colossal station’s marble façade wore a helmet and flowing cape, raising his Kalashnikov to heaven.

  I knew I was getting close to the museum because the station where I disembarked, Tretyakovskaya, named for the gallery above, was decorated with plaques depicting great Russian painters.

  The sprawling red-and-white brick building that housed the gallery looked like a gingerbread castle out of a Russian fairy tale. In a cupola crowning the façade was a rendering of the famous sixteenth-century icon, St. George Killing the Dragon.

  In my program for foreign students at the Russian State University for the Humanities, we were studying Russian painters. Our assignment was to write a report on a painting from the Tretyakov Gallery. I knew the painter I wanted to study, but I hadn’t yet picked out a painting.

  In the modernist hall, past works by Kandinsky, Malevich, and Natalia Goncharova, was a painting of a bull swimming away in the ocean. In a white wake, the long-horned bull swam confidently among the waves, filling the center of the painting. On its back, a dark-haired woman balanced as if deciding whether or not to take her chances with the bull or throw herself into the sea. The image struck me as odd. The colors were bright, done in a broad-stroked style that seemed naïve. The bull was brown with white spots and long horns, the ocean and sky nearly the same shade of blue. The swells and ripples were rendered in thick blue strokes to show motion; two dolphins arched through waves in the background. It looked like a child drew them.

  The scene was complicated, though. The woman on the bull’s back wore a black dress, and her face was inscrutable. She looked unsteady; her knees sloped dangerously close to the churning water, her feet flexed as if readying her to jump. The bull is swimming away, but its head is turned back to look at the woman. I didn’t know why, but the image felt menacing. The waves seemed to rise toward the viewer, rather than into the distance. The perspective made the viewer feel like the sea was all around them. It took me a moment to realize that while the bull was looking back at the woman, he was looking at me, too. He gazes knowingly at us, making the viewer complicit in the woman’s fate.

  The painting was The Rape of Europa by the Russian painter Valentin Serov and depicts the Greek myth of Zeus, transformed into a bull, who captures a beautiful Phoenician woman named Europa and carries her across the sea to the island of Crete, where he rapes and impregnates her. I knew the classical version of the story painted by Titian in 1560. In that painting, Europa writhes violently on the bull’s back, her clothes in disarray. The meaning of the painting is unambiguous; she is being taken against her will. Cherubs reach for her from the sky, but their efforts are in vain. Although she is still near the shore, she cannot escape.

  Serov painted his version in 1910, and the scene is both ambiguous and hopeless. Instead of cherubs in the sky, there are two dolphins who are blind to the situation, their heads in the water. The shore is nowhere in sight, the entire canvas taken up by the rising waves. Zeus is not the enticing white bull in the myth but a more realistic shade of dark brown. Europa’s clothes are black instead of white, and she is not writhing or screaming like in Titian’s version. She knows she is lost and is deciding what to do: take her chances with the bull or throw herself into the waves. There is no one to save her. Instead of displaying classical drama, Serov’s painting evokes quiet menace. The bull’s look is one of cold aggression. He knows that we know. And like the dolphins and Europa, there is nothing we can do to stop it.

  I stood in front of the painting in the Tretyakov Gallery in awe of the feelings of serenity, resignation, beauty, and terror it kindled. A well-known figurative painter, Valentin Serov always left a clue, a wink to the viewer in his paintings. A knowing eye catches you in its crosshairs, like the horse in his 1897 painting of Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich Romanov. A decorated aristocrat stands in the foreground in his Imperial military uniform. He wears a golden cuirass emblazoned with red; heavy gold epaulettes with long tassels adorn his shoulders; and a gold sculpture of an eagle, the symbol of Imperial Russia, is attached to each of his gauntlets. Though the image is supposed to be regal, the slim figure of the grand duke seems overwhelmed by his uniform’s awkward grandeur. His eyes stare vacantly into the distance. A dark brown horse stands close behind him, its head turned so that one eye looks directly at the viewer. The look is one of irony, as if even the horse knows the aristocrat is not as glorious or courageous as his royalty and rank would have us believe. In The Rape of Europa, the joke turns sinister when you realize that by meeting the bull’s gaze, you’ve given consent for what is about to happen.

  My trip to the Tretyakov Gallery and my fascination with Valentin Serov stayed with me over the years. As I thought about changing my name in a way that truly embodied my own experience, not determined by my family or the ethnicity they chose for me, I recalled the painting.

  I was more than my biological heritage on both sides of my family. Even though the last name Valentine sounded Anglo, I knew where my inspiration came from. My experiences in Moscow—riding the metro, making the city my own—created a world of memories and knowledge that no one could take away.

  Even though the name change was liberating for me, there was an unintended consequence—it hurt my father’s feelings.

  One day when I was home for vacation, my dad picked me up from the airport. We drove in silence for a while, and then he said, “Family is about loyalty.”

  “I know,” I said, “but…,” and I launched into my explanation about why changing my name was important to me. He didn’t say anything after that. In fact, he never mentioned my changed last name again, but I knew what he meant, and I knew I had crossed a line.

  At first, my mother supported me changing my name. I was surprised, because she seemed wary of my desire to evolve my sense of identity.

  “A woman should have her own name,” she said, perhaps reflecting on her own choice. In the past, she’d told me that she hated when people
wrote her letters or addressed her as Mrs. Later, she switched to Ms. in her correspondence, leaving her marital status undisclosed.

  The feeling of sisterhood did not last long, maybe because she realized my father felt betrayed. She told me it was selfish, that I was choosing someone I didn’t know over our family, over my father who was the best father I could ever wish for. I tried to explain that I wasn’t choosing someone else, I was choosing me, but she could only see it as me creating more distance between my family and myself.

  Twenty-six

  Walking into the library one day during my final year of grad school, I saw a poster advertising a poetry reading. I stopped and stared at the photo of the poet—a handsome mixed-race man with salt-and-pepper hair, kind, intelligent eyes, and a warm smile. I had never heard of him, but I knew that I’d be attending the reading that evening.

  His name was Michael. I became even more enchanted when I attended the event and heard him read. In a lilting British accent, Michael read poems that were romantic yet unflinching from life’s uncomfortable complexities. After the reading, he signed a book for me, even though I was a broke grad student and couldn’t afford it. Being shy, I ran away before we could have a conversation.

  The next day, I looked up his home university and emailed to thank him. I gave him my number. We emailed back and forth, talked on the phone, and, since he lived in Los Angeles, we met up when he had readings on the East Coast, in D.C. or New York. On our first date, at a little Japanese restaurant in lower Manhattan, he told me about his experience being half-English and half-Nigerian, about growing up during the Biafran War, fleeing a repressive government in his home country, moving to London and feeling like an outsider, and finally finding a home in the United States.

  As I listened to his story, I felt like Michael was a person to whom I could tell anything, who would immediately understand my conflicts with family and identity even though they were somewhat different from his own. I told him about what happened to my mother. It was the first time I’d uttered the words I am a child of rape.

  Part of me wasn’t sure if that were true, but my mother’s insistence on being violated made it the only explanation for my conception that I had.

  The first night Michael and I spent together, I cried tears I never thought I’d be able to share with anyone.

  In the spring he moved to Princeton, and we lived together while I finished my dissertation.

  One day we were driving in New Brunswick and spotted an African shop.

  “Let’s stop here,” he said. “I want to see something.”

  We parked and got out of the car.

  It was a salon, which to me looked sketchy, with a few pieces of glossy black-and-red furniture left over from the ’90s. Strands of long black hair littered the floor. In the corner near the front window was a filmy display case that featured long bags of synthetic hair, DVDs with covers that looked homemade, and a tangle of other items that blended together before my eyes. The store was empty except for a black girl about eight years old sitting on one of the chairs next to a side table covered with magazines.

  A disinterested woman sat behind the counter. It was the kind of place I’d seen many times in passing but never considered entering. As Michael entered the shop with full confidence, I felt unsafe, like I was some place I wasn’t supposed to be. What can he want in a salon like this? I was nervous, though I tried to act nonchalant. He greeted the woman behind the counter in pidgin, so different from the educated, British-inflected language I was used to hearing from him. The woman was also from Nigeria and was Igbo like him. Because of his mixed background and lighter skin, she was skeptical of his identity.

  He spoke Igbo to her, and she asked him in English, “You are African?”

  He said yes.

  Then, unexpectedly, she turned to me and asked, “Are you African?”

  Distracted from my reverie, I said, “No!”

  They both laughed out loud.

  Apparently, I gave away my discomfort by my emphatic and surprised response. Michael got what he had come for—a few Nollywood DVDs—and we left. I was just getting used to the idea of being black and being mixed, but I couldn’t conceive of my being African.

  How could I connect with the roots of American blackness if I didn’t know what it meant to be African? I was ashamed that I had quickly and automatically disavowed any relation to what I unconsciously perceived as an inferior identity. “Don’t confuse me with that!” my response said. “I don’t belong there!”

  Michael was a culturally fluid, multilingual professor and writer. His identity included black, mixed race, Igbo, British, and American, though these distinctions sometimes merged or conflicted with one another. His family was ethnically Igbo, and their lineage could be traced back to the founding of Afikpo, the village in which he grew up. He did not have to contend with the erasures of the Middle Passage: his identity was grounded in an ethnicity that had its own ancestral state.

  He explained that the “village” of Afikpo had a population of over two hundred thousand, making it around the same size as the city of Pittsburgh, where I grew up, and which, to him, accounted for my unrefined “bush” ways. I’d always pictured an African village as a collection of thatched huts connected by a few dirt roads, with women cooking over open fires and washing clothes in a nearby river. In reality, it was a large, complex community. As an educated middle-class family with a white mother, his family enjoyed status and privilege that I imagined had been reserved for white colonials. Michael said that when he showed up to school in second grade, he was the only student who had a pen, and the teacher sent him home for being arrogant.

  Despite having been paraded in front of my high school World Cultures class dressed in a Nigerian wrapper as an example of the “African woman,” I knew nothing about the real lives of people from African cultures. I had a mountain of prejudice and shame to overcome before I could embrace those aspects of myself and how they squared with my decidedly white, middle-American upbringing.

  How could two identities that existed so far apart reside in a single person? And what about African American identity? How did that relate to Africanness?

  I defended my dissertation in the spring and felt like St. George slaying a dragon I’d wrestled with for six years. I was triumphant, elated, and exhausted. I not only survived the trials of graduate school, but passed with flying colors. I felt like a true expert on my subject as I sat at the head of the once-threatening huge mahogany seminar table surrounded by the most elite professors in my field.

  During my defense, Michael was the only other dark-skinned face in the room, and I was grateful that my stuffy, self-important professors had to cope with the presence of this much more widely known and celebrated writer and that he was on my team, so to speak. For the first time in my six years of grad school, and for the first time in my life, I felt like the majority. There were only the two of us, but we could not be ignored.

  Twenty-seven

  Backstage at Richardson Auditorium amid the throng of black-clad bodies, I adjusted my graduation robes. My mother had paid the $800 needed to get me the high-quality doctoral regalia: a black robe made of heavy fabric with thick orange velvet chevrons on the sleeves, large orange stripes down the front, a blue velvet hood, and a black velvet four-sided hat with a gold tassel.

  “You’ll need them for graduation ceremonies when you’re a professor,” she said, “It was always my dream for you to go to Princeton.”

  I thanked her over the phone. Even though my graduate fellowship, teaching, writing center tutoring, and research assistantships, paid for most of my school, it was never quite enough, and my parents helped me financially all through grad school. In graduating with my doctorate, I felt like I had made good on their faith in me, but like all the support they gave me throughout my life, it was a debt I could never repay.

  I straightened my hair with a new flatiron I’d bought from the Home Shopping Network, which showed women of various
ethnicities having their hair turned from curly or frizzy into straight, sleek cascades. It was the first one I’d ever bought, and while I was getting ready, I was surprised by the sizzle and steam when the hot irons clamped down on my still-wet curls. As I pulled the burning irons down my hair and away from my scalp, I was amazed at the light, straight wisps that emerged; I thought the already ridiculous-looking puffy hat I’d have to wear would look much better over straight, sleek tresses than over my natural hair.

  Graduate students, undergraduates, and their parents milled around in anticipation backstage, and they were all members of the African diaspora, including me. There was such a feeling of pride as the younger students and their parents looked at the black students receiving their doctoral degrees. Parents of undergrads looked at me and my doctoral hood and smiled or nodded proudly. For the first time, I felt seen as both a high-achieving scholar and a black woman. I was part of the black excellence filling the auditorium and not a token for the white gaze. The ceremony was a witnessing for us, our friends, and families.

  The event was organized by the Black Graduate Caucus. I’d thought about joining the group when I first came out, but I didn’t quite know how or if I would fit in. I still felt like an outsider in black social groups.

  The organizer, a light-skinned woman with perfectly quaffed shoulder-length hair and a professional demeanor, came by to get my name and check me off the list of participants. We greeted each other and shook hands; we’d only met a couple of times before. Maybe she wondered why, after six years at Princeton, I had suddenly popped out of the woodwork, why I hadn’t attended any Black Caucus meetings or events before. At the start of the year, I had gotten an email from the group about a Black and Brown Barbecue they were hosting to kick off the school year.

  “Do you want to go?” I asked a friend who studied in the Slavic department. She was of Indian descent.