“You look like a foundling from the Caucasus,” a white friend of Michael’s said to me when I first met him. I wondered if he even knew what anyone from the Caucasus region—Georgians, Abkzhazians, or Chechens—looked like. I had recently learned about Afro-Abkhazians, a diasporic group that lived in Abkhazia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, making them literal African Caucasians.
But I didn’t think Michael’s friend or my grandfather knew these histories. The labels Cossack and Caucasus signaled that I was far enough from white to be exotic but not far enough to be black. I expected this kind of rationalization from a stranger; presumptions about my exotic roots had dogged me since I was a child. But it was a surprise—and a sad one after I got over the initial hilarity—that such an excuse had come from my own grandfather on my wedding day.
My aunts, uncles, and cousins on my father’s side of the family, I found out later, all knew or suspected that I was not biologically related to them. My grandfather must have known, too. The side-by-side photos of my husband and me as children showed that we shared a similar ethnic mix: he English and Igbo, and I Italian and African American. It was probably clear to everyone in the room that we were both of mixed African and European heritages. We had the same look. Only the people closest to me, my family, chose not to see it.
Thirty-three
My first year of marriage was difficult.
We were married in June 2009, but that same month, my postdoctoral program that had given me a sense of belonging and renewal ended. Most of the friends I made in the two-year program went off to separate corners of the world to pursue the next phases of their careers. We all wanted assistant professorships on the tenure track, which these days were only available when an emeritus professor retired or died. Because tenure guaranteed lifelong employment, professors usually remained in their positions long after the standard retirement age of sixty-five. In some sense, this was understandable because it could take almost that long to reach the rank of full professor. Tenure-track job openings were few, and successful candidates had to move to wherever the job was rather than picking a place they wanted to live and looking for a job there.
In 2009, the country was undergoing an economic recession. My friends left LA, and I saw businesses disappear from Wilshire and Fairfax, leaving empty storefronts in their wake. No one walked in LA, but the streets felt subdued, the sidewalks deserted.
Michael continued his schedule of continuous travel for readings and speaking gigs. That fall, he was going to be the writer in residence at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He would reside there for the fall quarter, from August to December.
Unlike my postdoctoral friends, I hadn’t secured a position for the next academic year. Slavic studies was a miniscule field during the best of times, and now universities were cutting funding for small departments. If a professor of Russian retired, instead of creating a job opening, the university eliminated the position.
I faced the prospect of a friendless year with no husband and no job.
“Work on your translations,” Michael advised.
I was translating the Russian poems of Gennady Aygi, the Chuvash poet on whom I’d written my dissertation. I cared about the project but found it hard to focus when the stability I had built with people I loved in a city I loved was pulled out from under me.
Once Michael left in August, the bright Caribbean walls of our apartment didn’t cheer me; they made me depressed. I began feeling short of breath and visited a doctor who was a family friend and a guest at our wedding. Like my mother had done years before, I made him perform a stress test and EKG reading to make sure I wasn’t having a heart attack. His diagnosis was the same: anxiety.
He prescribed my first antianxiety medication. It helped phenomenally at first, but I still felt lonely and lost. In October, I flew halfway across the country to join Michael in Evanston. I didn’t have a job there either, but I could work on my translations feeling like I had a temporary home.
The next year, with Michael’s intervention, I got a position at the University of California–Riverside, teaching Russian and comparative literature. It was exactly the kind of position I wanted, but it was not permanent. The university could only receive funding for a one-year renewable contract, for a maximum of three years. My title would be visiting assistant professor. The “visiting” part hurt because I was no less qualified than my friends for a tenure-track assistantship and because my husband was already a full professor enjoying the privileges of tenure.
I planned to make my life in Los Angeles; I wasn’t just visiting.
Thirty-four
I paused between bites of blueberry ricotta pancakes. My friend Claire and I were having brunch at BLD, and I was telling her that I had reached an impasse with my mother in finding out more about my biological father. I told her about Jimmy, my godfather, who’d offered to tell me who my father was but who then mysteriously broke contact. He never came to the wedding, emailing that he’d had a falling-out with my mother and didn’t want their bad blood to spoil the event. The falling-out, he’d said, was about an old friend of my mother’s he used to date.
Claire was a writer who was mixed race, with olive skin and straight hair. Most people thought she was Italian or Indian; even I could not see a trace of blackness in her features. Unlike me, she’d grown up with a strong sense of black identity. Claire’s mother, who was white, made sure Claire and her siblings understood they were black and what that meant in our society. It was a political choice. Claire knew who her father was, but he was not always in her life. She, too, was writing a memoir about her search to learn more about her father, her parents’ relationship, and how his identity related to her own.
She asked me a question I hadn’t thought of, and it gave me pause.
I’d told her that when I’d arrived in LA, one of the first things I did was look up the website of the college my mother attended to see if they had digitized any old yearbooks. I knew the year range and thought that if my biological father graduated, I might be able to find his photo. I didn’t have a name or a face to go on, but I thought I could narrow down the possibilities with online research.
When I found the website, there was one yearbook issue from every decade available online, but none of them matched the years I was looking for. Still, I scanned the pages and found that, as I’d suspected, there were few students of color. I was surprised to find that of the black students, male and female, at least half of them were African. I wondered why I’d never considered the possibility of international students at the college, maybe because it was small and rural. I’d assumed most students would be from the surrounding area in western Pennsylvania. That turned out to be true, judging by the hometowns listed under the names of each of the seniors’ photos.
But it didn’t matter, I told Claire, because the dates of the yearbooks I needed weren’t available.
“That was three years ago,” Claire said. “Why not try again?”
I argued that even if the yearbooks I needed were digitized, I had nothing to go on.
“Why don’t you just look for someone who looks like you?” Claire said between forkfuls of salad.
It seemed obvious, but somehow I’d never thought of that. I was trying to get information from family, mainly my mother, and none had been forthcoming. Maybe I was the key after all. Maybe it was that simple.
When I got home, I went straight to my desktop and pulled up the website. A few more yearbooks from each decade had been digitized, and I found the years I was looking for. I scanned the senior portraits. Each featured a name, a major, and a hometown with city and state or city and country if the student was from abroad. Most students were local, from the area near the school or from cities in Pennsylvania. Seeing how many photos of black students listed hometowns in Africa, I realized the person I was looking for might be a foreign student.
For most of my life, I had been convinced that my looks were not black looks, and it was
difficult for me to imagine that I would recognize my own face in a man with dark skin from thirty-odd years ago.
At the moment, I had nothing else to go on. Based on looks, I narrowed the possible suspects down to five photos. One was light skinned and wore glasses. I’d had laser eye surgery a few years before, but before that, I’d worn glasses for nearsightedness for most of my life. My vision was much worse than anyone else’s in my family. Could that be a genetic clue? Was eyesight genetic? Despite the guy’s large polyester collar and plaid shirt—could someone with such a poor sense of style be related to me?—I decided to put him in the “strong maybe” pile.
Most of the African and African American students didn’t seem to look like me; their features were proportioned differently, faces and ears shaped differently, ears sitting at a different height, shoulders too small or too rounded. Then again, there was only so much you can tell from a 1970s senior portrait. For men and women, black and white students alike (there were few of other ethnicities), the haircuts were terrible and the fashion was worse. Faces that were supposed to be around twenty years old looked to be in their thirties and forties. Flicked, feathered, and bowl-cut bobs, manes of brushed-out curls, and disco-ball Afros made everyone look like extras in a throwback B movie. Could I find an echo of myself among these faces?
My anxiety about not looking “black enough,” coupled with the fact that everyone inherits features from both sides of the family, made it difficult for me to know what I was looking for. If I didn’t know my mother, would I have been able to recognize her yearbook photo? We had the same smile, mouth, and chin shape, but our other features differed. Claire’s simple suggestion was turning out to be more difficult than it seemed.
I was about to give up when I came across a photo that I’d overlooked. The young man in the photo was dark-skinned, so dark that I’d passed over him, thinking he couldn’t be related to me. Then I looked closer and recognized the tilt of his head, his dark, almond-shaped eyes, his broad, square shoulders, rounded nose, tasteful attire, and most of all, the hopeful, youthful look in his eyes that reminded me of my own high school senior portrait.
With Photoshop, I removed the photo from the yearbook and superimposed upon it a photo of myself at around the same age. I didn’t change any of the features in either photo. I made sure the scale and three-quarters head tilt of the photos matched. I changed the opacity on the top photo so that the photo in the layer below could be seen, like a ghost, through the other. What I saw took my breath away.
Seamlessly, my photo transformed into his, and his into mine, down to the height and width of the hairline. The shoulders matched up, the eyes, the cheekbones, the height of the ears. His nose and lips were broader than mine, but the shape was the same. Even the smile that showed his straight teeth matched. Both photos were black and white, and my light skin faded into his darker skin with all the features intact as I slid the opacity bar from right to left. We looked like a male and female version of the same person; skin color was the only difference.
I wished I could find software that mapped faces to determine shared genetic traits. Did that exist? Could I get my hands on it? I thought I’d seen it on the History or Discovery channels and CSI. I wondered if that software was real or just a fiction, like the montages of crime-scene laboratory work that produced instant results to assure us that science will always swiftly and unequivocally catch the criminal.
I brought Michael in to look at the results of my experiment. He was as shocked as I was; the resemblance was uncanny. He laughed. “You married an African, and it turns out you are African!”
The name below the photo was Gideon; major, Communications; hometown, Nairobi, Kenya.
It was a dream I dared not mention to find out that my biological father was not the villain he was painted to be. Looking through other photos in the yearbook, I saw that Gideon was on the soccer team and part of the international student organization. A broad, confident smile, good fashion sense, a student athlete with a hopeful look in his eye? Could this be the same ill-intentioned person who took advantage of my mother? Would a black foreign student at a school with a white, rural majority take that chance? It didn’t seem likely, and yet her story and the photo were all I had to go on. All I wanted was to feel a connection that had been missing all my life. Now, whatever connection I found would be muddied with the possibility or reality that the man in the photograph was a rapist and I was his biological daughter.
I was determined to find out as much as I could about this person and establish the connection without doubt. Through an online search of his name, I found the British-style boarding school he had attended in Kenya and the national radio station he’d helped to build.
I thought maybe I could finally get a straight answer by emailing the photo to my parents and my mother’s parents. Would they recognize him? Would they admit it if they did?
My mother denied it, saying, “I’ve never seen this man before in my life.” My father also denied knowing him.
My grandfather’s answer was more ambiguous. “I don’t know who he is,” he wrote, “but does he have a nickname?”
I looked in the yearbook again but couldn’t find any mention of a nickname.
It occurred to me that even if my grandfather didn’t know who Gideon was, he must have known of or heard about a black student involved with my mother who did have a nickname. I emailed him and asked if he could be more specific, but he only responded, “Don’t be angry with your mother.”
Anger wears away at you, and I was physically and mentally exhausted. I wanted our battle to be over, but our desires were too much in conflict. It was a power struggle for information but also a yearning for forgiveness, love, and acceptance. We were both mistrustful people whose feelings were easily hurt. Neither of us could handle betrayal, and it was almost impossible for us to forgive and forget as others might have been able to in the same situation.
I told Tara about the photo first. She was shocked and agreed the guy was a dead ringer for me. She also found my parents’ denial suspicious.
Later, I asked Michael what he thought of my family’s silence around my reveal of Gideon’s photo. He responded with a German proverb: “No answer is also an answer.”
Even though Gideon’s photo said he was from Kenya, when I looked up his last name to see what ethnicity he might be, most of the results came from Nigeria. Maybe I was Nigerian after all!
I wondered what truth lay behind my family’s silence. Even though the resemblance between Gideon and me was striking, maybe he wasn’t the guy and my parents really didn’t recognize him. Or was I just trying to fool myself, afraid of what it would mean for me to have finally found the father I was looking for?
I had one clue: a nickname. A Kenyan student named Gideon would have been unique in western Pennsylvania, and maybe his American classmates preferred to call him something else.
Even though I didn’t have any confirmation, I wanted this handsome, enterprising young Kenyan to be my father. I wanted my mother’s story to be a lie, so for the time being, I put it out of my mind. I printed out Gideon’s black-and-white photograph and put it in a frame in my study. I watched the Oscars with the framed photo nearby and kept looking, gazing at it, like I had a crush. I practiced looking at it, mentally saying, This is my father. It would take a while to integrate that information into my sense of self, but I needed something to hang on to. I only needed to repeat the story to myself like our family story had been repeated to me.
Thirty-five
Later that year, my grandfather on my father’s side, Pop, passed away. My brother Patrick and I flew into Philadelphia from LAX, and my parents picked us up at the airport to drive down to Long Beach Island, New Jersey, for the funeral.
My father navigated the black Yukon out of the airport onto I-95. Tommy and his girlfriend, Julie, flew in from Pittsburgh and were already in the car. Julie was easygoing and self-possessed. I hoped she would not have to experience the full force o
f our family’s insanity, but it was already beginning.
My father had probably been at the airport all day waiting for our flights, which he’d scheduled and paid for, to arrive. It was six in the evening, and we still had two more hours to go with traffic. None of us had eaten, and we were all on edge, having been brought together for this unexpected family reunion.
“What was the inciting event?” my mother was asking from the front seat as we pulled onto the interstate. After years of staying home with us, she had gone back to school and became a nurse practitioner. She wanted to know the specific medical details of my grandfather’s death.
“Didn’t he have a heart attack?” Patrick and I both chimed in. “That’s what you told us over the phone.”
“No, he had a cardiac arrest; that’s different,” my mother said and launched into a medical explanation of how the two differ.
The events leading up to Pop’s death seemed to be: Paula, his wife, woke him when she realized he had vomited in his sleep. She called an ambulance, and Pop was well enough to step into the ambulance himself.
By the time he arrived at the hospital, which was forty miles away, most of his organs had failed and he ceded, no longer conscious.
“That doesn’t seem right,” my mother said. “I want to see the autopsy report. I want to know what really happened.”
“Septic shock,” my brother Tom ventured from the farthest row of seats. “From inhaling his own vomit.”
“Kathleen said it was a hundred degrees in that house when she visited last week,” my mother parried. Kathleen was my aunt, my father’s youngest sister. Like my mother, Kathleen didn’t like Paula.
When I Was White Page 20