When she turned toward me, the white of her eyes was dazzling, almost fluorescent set against the bare, brown-skinned beauty of her face. Her smile seemed as wide as my six-year-old wingspan, the full vision of her now walking across the studio floor.
“And who is this?” she said, extending her large, graceful hand.
“I’m Becky,” I said, giving her a good shake.
“What a firm grip! Welcome to class, Becky,” she said. “I’m Dede Rowland.”
My ballet teacher was black. The first black person I had ever seen in real life. Was she real? Did she know Easy Reader from The Electric Company? Did she go home at night to live inside the TV with him and the words and letters he carried around with him in the pockets of his jacket?
* * *
Mrs. Rowland turned to get the attention of the rest of the other girls, all white, as were all the students in my elementary school. I had only known being the only black kid or person anywhere until this moment, when Mrs. Rowland made me one of two. “Girls! Let’s get started at the bar. First position!” Mrs. Rowland demonstrated in the center of the room, her toes pointing straight through from her heels to form a V shape.
We practiced first through fifth of feet and arm positions, then pliés and a round of relevés. About halfway through class, we’d already finished one series of grand jetés when I stepped up to take my turn again to fly across the room.
“You already had a turn,” one girl said, with her slender cap-sleeved arms crossed tightly over her flat, preadolescent chest, sleek brown hair pulled into a neat, high ponytail. “You can’t just go again, you have to stand in line.”
I was standing in line, I told her.
“You haven’t even been here before. You can’t just come in and take over the class and go first every time.” How was I taking over the class? I wondered. Was I taking over the class?
“Girls!” Mrs. Rowland said, her voice slightly raised. “Everybody quiet now. Let’s go back to the bar for some rond de jambes.” I turned back toward the bar and saw the girl who told me I was skipping the line lean in, whispering something to one of the other girls. They looked at me and laughed. I tried to make eye contact with Nicole, who turned away.
“Come on, girls! Let’s go!” The music came back on, and we each assumed first position, then extended one leg forward, toe set to mark the beginning point before circling outward to the side, and back through first position to complete a rond de jambe.
“Very nice, girls,” Mrs. Rowland said.
* * *
After class when I got home, I was telling Mom about how much fun I’d had, and she gently interrupted me. “And isn’t it nice that Mrs. Rowland is black?” I paused for a minute.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. Somehow hearing Mom say the word “black” took me off guard, and I got lost in a sudden reverie of questions. Why did Mom bring it up? Could I be related to Mrs. Rowland? Had I ever even heard Mom use the word “black” to refer to a person before? Did Mom like black people? Would I go live with Mrs. Rowland now?
* * *
Over the course of my lessons, I would learn that Mrs. Rowland had three children of her own—two boys in high school and a girl, Everly, who was two or three years ahead of me and in her mother’s class for older girls, where she was also the only black student. We would occasionally cross paths in the studio, which was across the driveway from their house, or I might see the two boys in the front yard after class. Everly wore her hair long and straightened, styled with barrettes or bows, in ponytails and buns, like the white girls did. The boys wore big afros like Easy Reader, and gave off the same kind of coolness that felt both confusing and alluring. The Rowlands were a black family, and mine was not.
I could somewhat grasp that my ballet classes with Mrs. Rowland were a way to expose me to another black person, but without any further explanation or context, I still felt other, even if it was a very case-specific kind of othering. In my world my blackness made me feel special and treasured, but it didn’t seem that was the case for Mrs. Rowland.
White mothers often dropped off their girls for class without making eye contact with her, and sometimes spoke to her in a dismissive manner. The Rowland family existed outside the realm of Mom and Dad’s life and lens, and after Mom’s initial comment about Mrs. Rowland being black, the issue never came up again. As if a box had been checked and Mom’s work had been done. Every Thursday afternoon after I left class, I came home to a family and a world of whiteness, a world where no other black people ever entered besides me.
I studied ballet with Mrs. Rowland for five years, and often in her company, I felt small pangs of fragile awareness regarding who I might be, what my skin color might mean. There were days when I wanted to be, or believed I was, black just like Mrs. Rowland, but it also seemed as though I would have to give something up in order for that to remain true. Cocooned within a whiteness where my brown skin was mocha-colored, I spoke with an inflection similar to that of my white brother and sister, and my adult guardians were welcomed and centered wherever we went. I was being ushered through my life via the powerful passport of white privilege.
It didn’t appear that Mrs. Rowland had that same access, and although she never seemed lonely or bitter, I at six and seven and eight years old simply could not imagine being out in the world as a black girl or black woman, as Mrs. Rowland was, without the benefits afforded by white stewardship—without my family. But I also couldn’t deny how it felt when Mrs. Rowland saw me in ways that my parents could not, or did not.
* * *
Mrs. Rowland often made cameos in our seasonal recitals, which were always my favorite moments in the show, even more so than my own turn to perform. I loved to watch her dance. She commanded the stage and the audience, whether she was dancing to Rhapsody in Blue or something from the Nutcracker Suite, her torso an anchor of moving parts, waving and jutting and looping. There was so much power and love in her movement, so much dedication and range. And she absolutely exuded joy.
When I could, I’d watch her perform from the curtain wings and wait for her to finish, when she’d exit the stage and rush off to a costume change or some other recital demand, but not before giving me a quick, tight hug, looking me squarely in the eyes, her face agleam with a thin layer of sweat, lucent eyes and full lips, backlit by the dim transition lights set in between numbers, and nodding her head assuredly to acknowledge me in a way that defied words.
Makeup looked different on brown skin than it did on the white girls, and Mrs. Rowland brought her own for herself, and to share with her daughter and me. A lipstick or a blush that worked best on our particular skin tones. She always found ways to celebrate or emphasize my hair, which was generally a mess, by suggesting a crown or colorful scarves as part of my costumes. When we performed a stage version of The Wiz, she cast me in the role of the scarecrow, which had been played by Michael Jackson, whom I secretly loved, in the film version. Mrs. Rowland suggested a straw hat with wheat sticking out, which also served as a way to affix the hat to my afro so that it would stay on during my performance.
* * *
My relationship with Mrs. Rowland inspired me, in part, to write my very first essay. I had been encouraged by Dad to keep a journal, as he did, but meeting Mrs. Rowland led most pointedly to my discovery that writing could be a way to figure things out, or at least to write them into existence. One afternoon during my first year of ballet lessons, I found a piece of yellow-lined paper and a pencil in the drawing supply closet in our living room, and sat in the kitchen at the dinner table—the same one Mom and Dad used to carry out to the yard behind the house on the hill to eat our suppers outside—and wrote: My name is Rebecca Anne Carroll. I am a black child.
Five
Anita was the second black person I ever met in real life. She was from Massachusetts, and a longtime friend of Leah’s parents, Hannah and Ezra. Anita wore her hair short and natural, and held beams of brightness in her eyes. She tried to teach me and Leah to danc
e the day I first met her at Leah’s house. We were probably eight or nine years old, and could not stop laughing our way through Anita’s instructions, which were both firm and generous.
“It’s a very easy dance, you two. It’s called the Bus Stop,” she said, showing us the moves as she kicked one heel out in front of her, then to the side, before taking a few measured steps in both directions, her arms in matching motion. Leah and I watched, and tried to mimic her movements. Even though I had been taking ballet lessons for three years at that point, watching Anita dance, her round body fluid, at spectacular ease, less practiced and formal than Mrs. Rowland’s, felt like a revelation.
“Y’all have two left feet!” Anita broke into uproarious laughter. Gradually Leah and I started to really focus, feel the beat, and there we were, a trio of Anita, Leah, and me—shuffling to the left, to the front, to the right, all in unison.
“We got it!” Leah and I kept dancing while Anita cheered us on.
When it was time for me to go home that day, Anita gave me a big hug, even though we’d only just met. I leaned into her willingness to hold me as she gently ran the smooth of her palm across my cheek, up to my hairline and over my hair, which she drew into her as close as the rest of me. She didn’t pat my hair like most of the white adults in my life had; she hugged my hair with a palpable sense of loving familiarity.
* * *
Like mine, Leah’s parents were artists, but Hannah and her husband, Ezra, were more sophisticated and modern in their artistry. They’d gone to RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), the prestigious Ivy League art school of art schools, and they were politically savvy and culturally sophisticated in a way that my parents were not. Ezra was a glassblower, and Hannah, a textile artist. Together, they made and sold Ezra’s exquisite beaded glass necklaces, goblets, and tumblers for hundreds of dollars at seasonal craft shows around the country.
They also spent part of every summer on Martha’s Vineyard, where Leah’s grandmother owned a summer house, and had elaborate Hanukkah and Christmas celebrations that always included expensive gifts from Leah’s uncle, a successful housewares distributor in Washington, DC. I was endlessly envious of those gifts. One year it was a VCR before anyone else in town had one. Another year ski equipment arrived for everyone in the family, which included Leah’s two younger sisters.
Their house, with its big black potbelly stove and deep farmhouse sinks in the kitchen, narrow stairwells and dark back rooms, was marvelous to me. There were bowls of blown-glass marbles everywhere, random skeins of multicolored yarn and different metals and gems nestled in corners and random surfaces. It was an interior world that felt like being inside an actual piece of art, like the work of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, whose bold and brightly hued, spiral-influenced art was laid out in books big and small spread throughout their house. I loved Leah’s house so much that one time I stole a can of tuna fish from their pantry. “I just wanted something from their house,” I lamented when Mom discovered what I’d done.
One afternoon a few weeks after Anita taught us the Bus Stop, Leah and I were alone in her house while her parents worked in Ezra’s glassblowing studio, about a hundred feet up the driveway. We’d finished taking turns reading aloud to each other from Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume, and chanted our mantra from the book: “We must, we must, we must increase our bust!” Snooping around out of boredom and curiosity in the doorless connecting bedrooms upstairs, we discovered her father’s stack of Playboy and Penthouse magazines under a bunch of other magazines and books in her parents’ room.
Leah and I sat together on the floor with our backs pressed against Leah’s bed, opposite the crib that her youngest sister still slept in, knees bent and bums touching, as we flipped through the pages of Playboy, eyes glued to image after image of naked women in various poses. We paused at one shot of a woman sitting with her legs spread, and tried to make out her vagina under its giant tangle of pubic hair.
“Our vaginas don’t look like that,” I said.
“Because we’re little,” Leah said, her eyes the shape of almonds, lips thin and girlish. “We don’t have hair down there yet.”
“Do you think we should look?” I asked. “To see if any hair has grown today?”
“Maybe later,” Leah countered. “We should probably put these back before my parents come inside.”
“But what do you think that cartoon meant about vagina’s smelling like a skunk?” I asked as we stood up together to put the magazines back on the floor in her parents’ room where we’d found them.
“I don’t know, but my vagina doesn’t smell like a skunk. Does yours?” Leah said, now on our way down the narrow, dark stairwell that led into the kitchen. “Wanna play I Want or Mon-Oh-Poly?”
I Want was a game we played by flipping through Hannah’s issues of Vogue or the various department store catalogs she received in the mail, and taking turns pointing to one thing we were allotted to choose per page. We used the name Mon-Oh-Poly for another game we made up in which we pretended to be grown-ups with husbands and fancy clothes and cars and jobs.
“Let’s make our houses today,” I said.
One of my favorite things to do with Leah was to tear off giant pieces of paper from the tall utility rolls her parents had for packing their glasswork and draw blueprints for our dream houses, with detailed interior design for each room and the two-car garages we imagined we’d have. After we tore off our blank paper to work with, we pulled bins of glitter and glue, markers and buttons, tape and pipe cleaners from a row of shelves against the wall between the kitchen and the living room in Leah’s house. And then we’d spread everything out on the floor and work for hours. Sometimes we’d tear another piece of paper off that we’d use to draw out the roads between that connected our houses.
“What do you think of a gold bathtub?” I asked.
“Seems a little much,” Leah said without looking up, her hands as careful as I remembered them from that day from years before when we made mud pies in the driveway on Pumpkin Hill.
“I’m going to make an extra room for my biological mother so she has a place to stay when I finally meet her and she comes to visit me.”
“That’s gonna be so neat,” Leah said cheerfully. “I wish you knew her already, because she’s probably really nice.”
“I sometimes don’t know if I’m really going to meet her,” I said, gluing some red glitter to the sides of my gold bathtub.
“Why not?” Leah looked up now, suddenly concerned for me, instinctively protective, as she’d always been. Her shiny brown hair was parted in the center, braided into two neat ponytails.
“Mom and Dave don’t know when she’ll be ready.”
“Don’t worry, Beck. Let’s keep working, OK?”
“OK,” I said, and we smiled at each other before putting our heads back down to create our worlds—worlds that felt as if they would be forever connected.
Six
Every year, from as far back as I can remember, Roy came to visit, usually during the summer so that he could play Wiffle ball with Dad. I knew that Roy was Tess’s brother, which made him my uncle, but I never talked with him about this, because he seemed impossible to talk with about anything.
Blunt and loud, frenetic and opinionated, Roy concluded everything he said with a round summation—women shouldn’t wear makeup, middle-class values are evil, marriage is provincial. He and Dad struck a feverish tenor from the moment Roy stepped in the door, like competitive scholars each trying to make the case for his better dissertation on the anti-intellectual roots of Dutch Calvinism or the liberation of cultural imperialism.
It wasn’t until I was sixteen years old that I found the full-throated courage to confront him, even if it was in a letter and not to his face. I wrote:
You never listen to me or let me talk. And why are you constantly telling me how self-absorbed I am? Doesn’t it make me more self-absorbed by focusing on it?
He wrote back:
As for letting other people talk—I am a blatant ageist, as well as a fast listener. I do interrupt and have never felt that any 16-year-old was nearly as interesting as I am, or has as much to offer conversationally. Naturally, this is frustrating, at times, to energetic youth…. Regarding self-absorption: since you posed the question—I do think it is the Number One cause of most men disliking most women. Girls from 12–23 do tend toward it, rather than cultivating the world, they cultivate a mirror, so to speak. I think you’re susceptible—and I do kid you about it.
But in the years before, I kept my distance, straight up until the time he brought his girlfriend, Claire, along with him for his annual summer visit, when I was ten. Claire was tall and willowy, with soft brown eyes and round, plummy cheeks. Easy to approach, with an almost angelic, Glinda the Good Witch voice and presence. The complete opposite of Roy. After lunch, she and I took a walk out to the two big gardens behind our house. Mom and Dad had planted and grown large gardens here, as they had behind the house on Pumpkin Hill, and in late summer, they were teeming with vegetables and flowers—tomatoes and green beans, zucchini and summer squash, sunflowers and peonies, poppies and tulips.
Claire and I strolled the wide, grassy path together, passing the compost pile on the right midway to the gardens. Claire told me she worked as a social worker with kids and families back in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where she and Roy lived together. I shared with her that I liked ballet and other kinds of dancing, and sometimes reading, but mostly I liked watching TV and going to the movies. But something else was on my mind as we approached the first garden off the path, opposite the clothing line that hung the length between a tall pine tree and the old, dilapidated corn crib.
Surviving the White Gaze Page 3
