I sat in the chair across from her. She had my personnel folder open on her desk and the diagrammed results of the three tests spread out before her. She kept looking down at the papers and shaking her head. The administrator was the practical, exacting type that ends up in human resources, and I could see that I had truly stumped her. After all, I had done well at Scudder, moving up from a customer service representative to an assistant supervisor—in record time, I was told—and now I’d gotten another promotion.
“What do the tests say?” I asked, trying to keep the apprehension from my voice.
“Every time it has matched up with the model for ‘impostor.’ According to this”—she ran her finger along a zigzagging diagram—-“you’re not living in a way that’s true to who you are.”
My face reddened, because this diagnosis felt so conspicuously correct: I wanted to write stories and novels, not letters to shareholders. But who among my coworkers, other twenty-somethings with degrees from good colleges and dreams of “not selling out,” had found their calling among the customer complaints? Couldn’t the same be said of all of them?
Apparently not. “The only thing I can think of is, sometimes if the test is completed too quickly, the outcome gets skewed.”
“That must be it. I always rush through tests. In high school I would finish the SAT practice test way before anyone else.”
We decided that I would take it again. She gave me a fresh booklet and sent me into the conference room next door, telling me to take my time.
Slowly I made my selections, turning each adjective over carefully in my mind to see if it felt true, if it fit with my sense of who I was. Yes to self-assured, sensitive, observant, cranky; no to gentle, patient, detail-oriented, deceptive. I suspected that in the previous tests the discrepancy between my self-image and my conception of how others saw me was too great, so I made sure this time that there was only a slight variation in the two lists. All the while, an indignant sound track repeated in my head: I am not an impostor, I am not an impostor. But when she scored my test, I was, for a fourth time.
In the end the administrator decided that she had stumbled on a new paradigm for a leadership model. She presented the results of my four tests at the annual employee personality test conference that year, where, she told me upon her return, she was met with little fanfare.
During the months following my father’s death, after I got off from work I would take the subway from Scudder to the Boston Public Library on the nights it was open late. The library was usually bustling: professionals browsed through the career section, high school students giggled behind piles of textbooks, and lonely office workers read magazines before heading home.
In 1990 the card catalog was not yet computerized, and the massive wooden filing cabinet that housed the thousands and thousands of alphabetized index cards itemizing the book collection stood in the center of the main room. When I extended the P drawer, it jutted three feet out from the cabinet, and as I hunched over it, searching through the cards for an entry about “passing,” I was acutely aware of all the other patrons having to move around me to cross the room. If someone approached to use a neighboring drawer, I would become as nervous as if I were searching for a title on masturbation.
I was looking for a way to understand my father. As the months passed after his death and I became able to think about him without grief swamping all other emotions, I began to wonder if he had been living in a way that was true to who he was, whether the aspects of his personality that had seemed so inimitably him were actually facets of his camouflage. He was unrepentant boast—in his weekly volleyball game, he bragged, he was always among the first picked when choosing sides—and incredibly vain—he never had to worry about developing a receding hairline, he told me, since the thickness of hair on the back of his head made him “a very good candidate for a transplant.” His hyperbole also fell on those around him. His friend Morgan held the record for the longest Frisbee throw in the state of Connecticut. My brother, Todd, had the longest eyelashes on a newborn ever recorded at Greenwich Hospital. Were these moments that I’d once seen as mostly harmless and charming actually efforts to elevate himself, and the flattery meant to seduce everyone else into collusion? I’d lost my father once, and now I was losing him all over again.
When I tried to picture my dad, the image of him prostrate in the hospital bed appeared. When I tried to think back to when he was well, a shade drew down between us. I couldn’t remember, for example, if he kept the door open or closed when he worked in his study. I couldn’t remember what we would talk about when he came to kiss me goodnight—a ritual he continued well into my teens. I leafed through our family albums and looked at the pictures of the softball games, the birthday parties, my dad and me playing paddleball on the beach, but these scenes refused to reanimate in my head. Only the quality of his voice, both growling and melodious, stayed with me with lasting specificity. Of course many people, when trying to conjure someone who has died, feel this same frustration and loss, but it doesn’t necessarily make them question how well they’d known their loved one at all.
All I could find under the entry for “passing” were books about football and college study guides. I tried looking up “mulatto” (which I learned came from the word “mule”) and was directed to “miscegenation,” a term that I’d never come across during my schooling. It sounded like something illegal, and, of course, it was. In a book on the subject, I discovered that in many states until the late 1960s, and in Louisiana until 1972, marriage between members of different races was against the law. I wondered briefly if my parents’ marriage in New York State in 1960 had been unlawful, making me illegitimate on top of everything else. Then I read on and discovered that it was mostly southern states that outlawed intermarriage.
I read about the many definitions of Creole, which was the term my mother had used to describe the kind of black person my father was. Creole originates from crioulo, a Portuguese word meaning “a slave of African descent born in the New World.” Did that mean that my ancestors had been slaves? My keen interest in this question felt prurient and embarrassing; at the same time, it seemed incongruous that I should not know the answer. I imagined that had I been raised as black, this knowledge would have been as basic to my history as Viking ships were to my mother’s Norwegian ancestry.
In the old American Heritage Dictionary at my parents’ house, other definitions of Creole included “any person of European descent born in the West Indies or Spanish America,” or “any person descended from or culturally related to the original French settlers of the southern United States, especially Louisiana,” or “any person of Negro descent born in the Western Hemisphere, as distinguished from a Negro brought from Africa,” or “any person of mixed European and Negro ancestry who speaks with a Creole dialect.” Which one applied to me? I wondered. And what was the difference between Creole and African American?
I came across terms that described just how mixed someone was: a griffe was three-quarters, or the offspring of a black person and a mulatto. A quadroon was one-quarter, or the child of a mulatto and a white; an octoroon described someone who had one-eighth African heritage; and a ’steenth was one-sixteenth. In F. James Davis’s book Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition, I read about the “one-drop rule,” which classified as black any Americans with the tiniest fraction—just one drop—of “black blood.” It had grown out of a practice dating back to slavery known as hypodescent, which assigned someone of mixed parentage to the lower-status race, and had become the legal and social custom in the country during the era of legalized “Jim Crow” segregation. The rule, however, wasn’t applied to any other minority group, nor was it used to define blackness anywhere else in the world.
Overnight my father’s secret turned my normal young adult existential musing of Who am I? into a concrete question, What am I? I hoped that I’d find in a book somewhere an equation, an algorithm, or a decision tree into which I could plug the circumstances of my
life and come up with the verdict.
When someone asked, I used to say that I was French and Norwegian, a combination that felt right, based on my looks. But beyond providing an explanation for my olive skin and the angularity of my face, my heritage had never been of much consequence, probably because neither ethnicity is a favored target for teasing. Where I was raised, lots of people were French and Norwegian.
My old identification no longer worked. I was determined that unlike my father I wouldn’t keep my African ancestry hidden. My mother had said that his secret caused him more pain than the cancer in his bones. I didn’t want any shame clouding up my life. Besides, I wasn’t any good at keeping secrets. When people asked me what I was, I would tell them. But the question was, What exactly would I say?
From the start my mother’s phrase “mixed blood” sounded old-fashioned and too elemental for my tastes. It brought to mind images of science experiments and large fluid-filled beakers. How were black and white blood different anyway? I wasn’t satisfied with the shortened version “mixed” either: too much like an admission of being mixed-up or confused, which I was, but no need to advertise that fact. Also, “mixed” was vague.
But being too specific presented its own set of problems. Declaring myself as Norwegian and black lacked symmetry: one refers to a location, the other is a color. Calling myself a black Norwegian wasn’t right either. Norwegian and African? Nordic African? They all sounded absurd. Also, how to fit in the French, the identity which for the first twenty-four years of my life seemed like the best fit? I had begun noticing, though, that African Americans, even those who were definitely part Caucasian, didn’t generally acknowledge being anything other than black.
I settled, grudgingly, on the term “biracial,” which sounded to me more like a phenomenon than an identity. Then one night in the fall of 1993, I was looking over some applications to graduate school. I’d just had a short story accepted by a literary magazine, which gave me the idea to apply to an MFA program where I could study writing full-time. Under the general information section, after the space for sex and birth date, there was an optional question about race. A footnote explained that the responses were used in aggregate to track the university’s demographics and your answer made no difference in your chances. The usual choices appeared: White, Black, American Indian and Alaskan Native, Asian and Pacific Islander, or Other. What caught my eye was the instruction: “Check only one box.”
I was at my desk in the basement apartment of my mother’s house, where I was living, and I remember looking up, out the high casement window, where through the shrubbery I could spot cars going by. I was stunned by the revelation that a person could be either black or white but not both. Of course I knew that plenty of people had a parent of each race, but I realized for the first time that when it came to identifying themselves, the de facto method of racial identification required that you choose only one label. And if you chose white over black, then—no matter what you looked like or how you were raised—you were passing or ashamed of the stigma of being black or denying your true self. So the “one-drop rule” still existed.
I’d finally cracked the code: since my father was “really” black, then I must “really” be black too. Yet I still felt unsettled: I’d already experimented with describing myself as black on a few occasions, and it hadn’t gone over well.
Not long after my father died, I was in New York for the weekend with my old gang from college at a bar on the Upper West Side. I was chatting with a white guy named Sven, with whom I’d had an on-again, off-again fling at school. He’d lost both his parents by the time I knew him, and I’d been particularly moved by his condolence letter after my father’s death, illustrating as it did the compassion of the initiated and a rare break from his usual reserve.
It was a Saturday night and the place was packed. I’d found myself standing next to Sven by the curve of the bar, both of us waiting to refill our double vodka tonics. We were near the door, and every few minutes it would open and people would jostle us, trying to get by. I leaned in and told Sven that I’d found out some things about my father before he died.
“Oh yeah?” he said, displaying little of the gentleness he’d shown in his letter.
“Yeah,” I said and blurted out with: “It turns out I’m really black.”
“What?” he asked.
The music was loud and I had to raise my voice to be heard. “My dad was actually black. It came out right before he died. So”—I shrugged—“I guess that makes me black too.”
Sven made a face like I was playing a trick on him and he wasn’t in the mood. “How can you be black? That doesn’t make any sense.”
My friend Allison, who was standing nearby, chimed in. “It’s true. Her dad was really black.” She was smiling a little queerly, as if we were discussing the fact that I actually had six toes.
He still looked skeptical. Sven had grown up in Manhattan, where he’d attended Bronx Science, a public high school, and met one of his best friends, Chris, who sometimes hung around with us and was most definitely black. Sven knew a black person when he saw one, and the white girl from Connecticut he used to tease for her Waspy ways wasn’t it.
A couple of years earlier, before I’d learned about my father’s secret, my friends and I had started out at this same bar one night, gotten drunk, and then headed down to a club in Greenwich Village to go dancing. There was a guy with us that Sven or someone knew—a handsome, dark-skinned black guy in a blue oxford shirt and tweed blazer. When I asked him why he was so dressed up, he explained that he’d been out to dinner with his parents. He’d already told me that he’d attended Dalton, an elite prep school in Manhattan, which pegged him in my mind as even wealthier and more sophisticated than the kids I’d known growing up.
The club was decorated like a harem, and this guy and I danced in the middle of other drunk young couples in a round dark room, surrounded by curtains of red-and-gold tapestry. When the music turned slow, I leaned into him a little, and he put his arms around my shoulders, pulled me close, and after swaying back and forth awhile, he lowered his mouth to mine and kissed me.
I had never been kissed by anyone black before, and I can remember catching sight of the deep pink of the inside of his mouth despite the darkness of the room and being surprised by it. He tried to get me to leave the bar with him, but I declined. I didn’t go home with men—white or black—that I’d just met. He took my number and said that he would call, but I never heard from him. I wasn’t too hurt, since he hardly knew me. Also, as a budding writer, I was in the business of collecting experiences, and now I had another one to cross off the list: kissed black guy.
Here was the problem: I could check off “black” on that graduate school application, but I would be an impostor. How could that same young woman who imagined the foreignness of a black man’s kiss now be a member of the tribe herself? I could scratch out the “white” next to the race of my father on my birth certificate and write in “Negro,” the term used in 1966, the year I was born, but I would still be the same person.
From my reading I’d learned that it was culture as much as a color that made a person black, and besides not looking the part, I wasn’t raised knowing about that side of my heritage. But then I considered the clues during my childhood—however superficial or stereotypical—that my dad wasn’t exactly white. There was the music—James Brown, the Commodores, Machito, Miguelito Valdés and the rest of the Afro-Cuban players—and the central role that dancing played in my family. I’d remember the stories my father told about the nightclubs in Harlem where he used to hang out and the black company he commanded during World War II (to which he’d been assigned, ironically, as a white officer), and his foregone conclusion that black athletes and black performers were superior to their white counterparts. I’d compare my father’s style to that of other fathers: his natty dress code of slim pants and colorful sweaters, his belted jackets and carefully combed hair; and the rhythmic, graceful way he mov
ed and talked. And I’d remember the nights my family crowded around the TV set to watch Ali and Foreman fight, the special on the Jackson Five, and, later, The Cosby Show, during which my father admired the sweaters worn by Dr. Huxtable—he owned similar sweaters himself. I’d consider my own kinship with black culture, which made me choose South African literature as my focus in a world lit class and jazz as my one elective during my college freshman year, and led me to work during my semester abroad in England at an arts foundation in Dalston Junction, London’s equivalent of the South Bronx, where I was the only white person on staff besides my boss. When I’d weigh these factors in my mind, I’d wonder if calling myself white would make me an impostor too.
These recollections represented means by which I felt connected to my father’s hidden ancestry, and I wasn’t willing to deny them. I wanted to take his secret history and make it my own, to cultivate these bits of heritage and celebrate them. Most of all, I wanted to convince myself that I’d understood all along everything that mattered about my father, and that this legacy had always marked me, whether I realized it or not.
When I was still living with my parents in Cambridge, before my father died, I used to go dancing at a place called the Cantab Lounge in Inman Square. The house band that played every weekend featured an older black man who was so short that he had to stand on a chair while he performed. He was famous for a song called “Mr. Peanut,” which he crooned in a falsetto, swaying back and forth on his perch. Every time I went there, he sang the same two sets, repeating the first one again at the end of the night. The Cantab attracted a mixed crowd of graduate students from the local universities, yuppies and hippies, and some regulars from the neighborhood, which was mostly African American.
I usually danced with my girlfriends, but sometimes when the song ended and we began to move off the floor, one of the regulars would intercept me. Generally I preferred women as dance partners because they tended to be better at it—we’d mirror each other, one taking the lead, then the other, and test out our moves. But black men were different. I didn’t feel like I had to hold back, as I often did with white guys.
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