“I think I may have been pregnant with you in this one,” she said.
“Really?”
“That looks like the fall, and I got pregnant with you in August. I mean, I wouldn’t have known I was pregnant because I was in total denial,” Tess said. It was something she’d said before, but I’d already gone back into the pictures, immersed in the images of my black father, suddenly feeling deeply attached to him.
The second photo, this one in color but also of the two of them, is more close-up, with Tess and Joe sitting on the grass among friends, at a political rally of some sort, Tess told me. Joe, again in profile, is wearing the same cargo jacket from the other picture, the same dark sunglasses, leaning back on his arms, looking forward, nose sloping down toward his lips. Tess is looking straight at the camera, her hair down and tucked behind her ears, wearing regular glasses and a denim jacket.
“Joe loved to be seen,” Tess said. “And he was cool as a cuke.”
“He looks it,” I said. “I wish you had a picture of him without the sunglasses.”
“Oh, he wore those sunglasses all the time. It was part of his appeal. He was very stylish, and veeeeeery into his looks.”
I had never heard Tess say more than four words about my birth father—“Basically, he was a dog”—and so this felt exciting, if also slightly unsettling. Why now? I didn’t dare ask. I just wanted to sit with the photos and write a story in my head about me and my black father.
I wondered what he would say to me about these black boys I found so appealing all of a sudden. Would he call them jive, young Negro boys, as Tess had called more than one of them? Would he caution me to stay away from them, or tell me exactly how to handle them, and myself as his daughter?
“Do you know if I was his only daughter?” I asked.
“I don’t, but you know black men are often out here having kids with a lot of different women. So who knows?” As soon as she said that, I lost the thread, and the story I was writing shifted. Even though I was sitting there staring at pictures of my birth father, Tess’s comment suddenly lessened him to a faceless, stereotypical black man in America, and suddenly Dad, the only father I’d ever known, fell into the void created by Tess’s racism.
I gathered the pictures up and put them in my bag to bring home to Warner, thinking that when I got home, I would ask Dad his feelings about black people, whether he’d had any black friends growing up, and maybe I’d show him the pictures of Joe Banks if he seemed interested.
* * *
“The blacks mostly kept to themselves,” Dad said plainly, when I asked him if he’d ever had any black friends. “But I was mostly interested in girls, and turtles, of course.”
“But there were black students at your school in Groton, right?” Dad had gone to a public high school in Groton, Connecticut, which, he’d told me before, was integrated with black students.
“Yes, a handful,” he said. “But like I said, they really just preferred to keep to themselves.”
“Did you ever think that might be about self-preservation in a predominantly white environment?”
“I never really thought about it, Beck,” Dad said.
“Did you think about trying to make friends with any of them?”
“They weren’t interested in being friends with white people.”
“And since then, though,” I said, struggling to map this out in my brain, “no black friends. You and Mom have never had black friends.”
“Well, look around, Beck!” Dad laughed, thinking the whiteness of our town and immediate surroundings was funny.
“That’s kind of my point, Dad. Look around!”
“Of course there was my friend Lee Ling, when I was at the Museum School,” Dad offered. “And he was just a great friend, and all.”
“Also Chinese.”
“Yes, Lee Ling was this little Chinese guy, funny as hell,” Dad said. “I don’t know, Beck. I’ve mostly chosen to live in places where there aren’t that many humans in general, I really need to be around the natural world.”
“But didn’t you think it might be important if you were raising a black child for her to see other black people?”
“Mom and I both really thought the world was changing, and that people were coming toward each other,” Dad said. “We really believed what Martin Luther King was saying. And, you know, we had those wonderful years on the Hill together and all. And this beautiful house we have now. I mean, how lucky are we?”
I didn’t show the two pictures I had of my birth father to Dad. Instead, I kept them, and him, and us, to ourselves. Like the black kids he’d described in his high school.
Twenty-Two
I had started working any job I could as soon as I was hireable, because I wanted things, and Mom and Dad couldn’t afford to buy them for me. I liked nice clothes and shoes and bags and jewelry—Tess said I was too materialistic—and so I had to make my own money in order to get them.
When I was seventeen, I worked at a local oil company, a small and disorganized office. Everything felt shoved into the one room, with two chairs for customers waiting for service; a front desk, where I sat; a smaller desk behind me, where Joyce the accountant sat; and a tiny bathroom squeezed in between both our desks, but closer to Joyce’s. Dennis, who was my boss and also the guy in the family who drove the oil truck, was probably 250 pounds of anger and bitterness. He liked to demean me in front of customers, or just Joyce if there were no customers waiting, which was often the case. “Yuh think yuh so smaht, goin’ off to college. Yuh ain’t that smaht. Yuh workin’ here, ain’t-cha?”
Dennis often asked me to do things that weren’t actually part of my job. “Run up the staw-uh, get me a sandwich.” This time it was cleaning the bathroom. We actually had a cleaning person who came in to clean the office during the weekends, but that day, after Dennis came in from a delivery and took a humongous dump in the toilet, he decided that he wanted me to clean the bathroom. He left the door open after so that we could smell it, looked at me, and said, “Clean it up.”
Joyce, a chatty twenty-something whose life revolved around her job, Weight Watchers, and her boyfriend, just sat there, pretending she was adding something up on her desk calculator. “I am the secretary, not the cleaning lady,” I said. Dennis stood at the corner of my desk, reeking of oil and shit, his brown uniform disheveled, gut hanging out over his belt. “Lazy nigger,” he scoffed, and walked out the door.
The bells on the door of the oil company, intended to announce a customer’s arrival, didn’t so much ring as crash against the door when Dennis slammed it shut behind him. I looked behind me at Joyce, who kept her head down and punched numbers into her desktop accountant’s calculator. “Did you hear that?”
Joyce said nothing.
I stood up from my desk and walked out of the office, up the hill to the local grocery “staw-uh,” and applied for a job as a cashier. A couple weeks later, Joyce came through my line. She bought a 3 Musketeers bar and a Coke, giving me a meek smile as she paid, before whispering, “Good for you.”
Perched on the lip of the tub that night, I looked at myself, hair still in a cropped afro, the style I’d kept since Tess took me to the fancy 210 hair salon two years before. And then I started to have a conversation with myself.
“I mean, these are the people,” I said to my reflection, affecting the tone of a commentator or talk show host, “who are out here, owning local businesses, who are responsible for the town’s economy. What do you make of it, Rebecca?”
I was less Oprah, whom I loved and rushed home to watch at four p.m. every afternoon before I started working after school, even though her audiences were always overwhelmingly white back then, and more like Phil Donahue, whose Donahue Show I also watched religiously.
I shifted my posture, picked my head back up, looked straight at my reflection. “Honestly, I wish I knew. I would say that he’s probably quite pathetic,” I said, trying to come across as both indifferent and brilliant, in jeans and a T
-shirt with the face of China Girl from David Bowie’s video for the song on the front.
“And are you sure you heard what you think you heard? He used that word?” I questioned myself.
“Yes, I am. I mean, how do you mistake that word for any other?” I responded, unable to say it out loud myself.
* * *
When it came time for college, no one was less interested than my parents, which Tess found utterly unacceptable. As far as she was concerned, I was going to college. “I haven’t worked this hard on you for this long for you to just throw it away, Rebecca,” she said.
I likely would not have gone without her insistence.
Neither Riana nor Sean went to college, which Tess posited was a Machiavellian tactic on Dad’s part, a way to elevate his star child, me, as a peer, while keeping his biological children lowbrow and in awe of his genius. I wasn’t ready to decide whether I agreed with her assessment, but I had certainly begun to question how Riana and Sean had veered so wildly from the direction of books and art.
Sean married young at twenty, like Mom and Dad had, to an older woman with a six-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. He found steady work as a carpenter, welcomed a son, and built a gigantic house on the top of a small knoll for his new family just outside of Warner that featured turtle tanks and aquariums, a live, rooted tree that grew up through the living room floor, and a screened-in porch, all reminiscent of our first house on Pumpkin Hill. Sean had also taken charge of upkeep on our house, often in need of repair.
Sean’s wife, Mary, was intense, capable, and direct, and she made Sean happy as the day was long. My brother and I had nothing in common whatsoever, but I was very glad for his happiness, glad to share a beer with him when I was home, even though I hated beer. Glad to go out in a fishing boat with him on the pond or lake near Warner in an attempt to bond, although I hated fishing almost as much as I hated beer, and he never asked me questions about my life or college or what I was interested in.
Riana married one in her string of abusive boyfriends she’d started seeing when she was a teenager, and moved to northern New Hampshire, where she worked as a prep cook at a place called the Buck Rub Pub. She also gave birth to twin boys born with a rare neuromuscular disorder called multicore, an aggressive disease that causes a lack of muscle tissue, delayed motor skills, and curvature of the spine inward toward the chest cavity, and results in respiratory issues.
The initial diagnosis for the boys was that they would never walk on their own, and likely wouldn’t live past ten. It was touch and go for a few days after they were born, and I remember being home with Mom and Dad at the end of the summer before my senior year, waiting by the phone to find out if they would be all right, worried about Riana, thinking about how sweet and silly she’d been when we were kids, how wild and radiant her laughter had been. And then, after that night, how she had become someone else, and dropped out of high school for several months before ultimately returning to graduate.
* * *
I was a decent student, but not a great one. I did well in English, literature, and writing, but failed repeatedly in math and science. My PSAT and SAT scores were abysmal, which the guidance counselor at Kearsarge told me would limit my options considerably. “Maybe consider a community college,” he suggested. Meanwhile, all of my friends were applying to Dartmouth and Wesleyan and Bates and Middlebury—all of New England’s finest liberal arts schools.
“You could probably get into Dartmouth just based on, you know, being black,” Nate said one day when we were talking about colleges in the school resource center. “I mean, that’s like a thing.”
In retrospect I think of how appealing I would have been to the admissions board if I’d written about how my friend, a popular white boy who bought me as his slave in middle school, and whose racist father taught social studies at our high school, had then suggested I take advantage of the practice or policy of favoring groups of folks who have been discriminated against based on their skin color. Now that would have been a college essay.
In truth, I don’t remember what I ended up writing my college essay on, though almost certainly it had to do with getting out of Warner. Frankly, I wasn’t that enthused about college at all. I still aspired to become an actor, even though I did only one play in high school, because theater in high school was for theater geeks, not the popular crew I ran with. And despite Tess’s condemnation of acting as a career pursuit, I applied to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, among half a dozen other schools that didn’t appeal much.
Weeks later, when all the applications were in, I sat on the toilet seat in the bathroom upstairs next to my room, and talked with the Tisch School dean of admissions about my chances in an informal interview. He was impressed with my writing, but feared the financial aid offerings might be too bleak. “New York is very expensive,” he said with a patronizing chuckle.
* * *
I did not want to go to the University of New Hampshire, less than a hundred miles away in Durham. I wanted to get out of New Hampshire, and move to New York. And I wanted to be around black people. But nobody asked me about that, and I didn’t know to ask anyone. Nobody suggested an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), something I’d never even heard of, or asked how I felt about seventeen years in a small rural town, engulfed by whiteness, quietly amassing and internalizing moments of targeted racism.
* * *
We held my high school graduation party on the patch of green grass in front of the first of two gardens behind the house. Tess, who drove from Portsmouth with the boys, sat on the ground casually, legs crossed, with Sebastian in her lap and Mateo hanging over her shoulder, relaxed and carefree with the children she kept attached to her body, while Mom hustled about making sure everyone had food and drinks, taking pictures and making conversation.
A handful of friends from school came, along with my brother and his family, but not my sister, who lived too far away. Leah was still away at private school, and Dad didn’t come either; he had other things to do that day. It was an informal gathering hastily thrown together by me the week before, when I’d decided I wanted to feel celebrated for making it through high school in one piece. But now it felt ill-thought-out and weirdly disjointed, as my French teacher, whom I loved, tried to make small talk with my brother, and everyone pretended it was completely normal for my adoptive mother and my birth mother to just be hanging out together.
In reality, it was the first time that Mom and Tess had been in the same space for any length of time, or together in a social setting at all, and as I watched Mom rush around in her pretty floral dress and black pumps, all smiles, hosting the party with everything she had, while Tess sat relaxing on the grass, literally wearing her young children, I suddenly felt gutted. I felt sorry for Mom, and envious of my brothers. Then I felt ashamed for pitying Mom, and for wishing Tess had kept me so that I could be one of her young kids curled up in her lap, hanging on her shoulder, skin to skin with the same body we were born out of.
I moved from friend to friend, trying to feel celebratory, but instead feeling caught in the crosshairs of where unconditional love met conditional love. It was like being simultaneously owned and disowned—pushed over an edge and scooped up just before hitting the ground.
Twenty-Three
A couple of months later, I arrived in Durham, a town that, despite having spent most of three summers adjacent to it, I knew little to nothing about. There was a main strip where all the frats were, known as Frat Row, where boys would hold up score cards when girls walked by, a large books and supply store, a diner, a bagel shop, and a CVS. Two big twin dorms that stretched toward the sky were set back from town, on the far end of campus. I was assigned one of those dorms, which I hated on sight. I counted four black people on registration day.
Girls on my floor with frosted hair and blue eye shadow spoke with loud New Hampshire and Massachusetts accents, wearing their acid-wash jeans tucked into their little white socks.
&nb
sp; The one bright spot at UNH was Sarah. She was a friend from childhood, an upbeat, whip-smart beauty who had moved away in middle school, and showed up at UNH begrudgingly, like me. Sarah also had been relegated to our state university for financial reasons, and as a dual citizen of France and the United States who spoke three languages and had seen the entire world over, she found UNH as glaringly provincial and limited as I did. We ended up in the same dorm together, and picked things up where we’d left off in middle school. Sarah was not preppy or moneyed; she was cultured and self-aware, raised with a black stepmother who was from Guadeloupe.
If the first semester at UNH was miserable, the second semester was a marked improvement. I applied and was accepted to move into Smith, the dorm for international students, which wasn’t limited to international students, and was really more a safe house for folks who might be perceived as other. As such, it was the most diverse space on campus, and soon after I moved in, I lobbied for Sarah to get a spot as well—Sarah, who was, at least by half, actually an international student.
We roomed together on the top floor of Smith’s four stories, and plastered our walls with posters of David Bowie (Sarah’s longtime obsession), shared clothes, and laughed a lot. It was a balm for me, but also an opportunity to establish a healthy, compatible friendship with someone who had traveled the world, whose perspective was global, far beyond the confines of lily-white New Hampshire.
Sarah studied international politics, while I shifted toward literature after trying and failing to keep up in the university’s esteemed politics program Sarah was enrolled in during the first semester. The idea of politics appealed to me partly because it seemed like a sophisticated thing to know about, to be learned in, but mainly because I didn’t know what else to study at a place that felt so insanely banal.
Surviving the White Gaze Page 11
