Surviving the White Gaze

by Rebecca Carroll

  Sophie and I exchanged letters back and forth for months. She shared difficult, painful truths about feeling left out in the family, being discriminated against at school and her family’s country club, where she knew she was only allowed in because her white family had a membership, her longing to be around other black people, what it meant to be “biracial,” and not knowing how to talk to her mom about these things.

  Sophie wrote to me about another thing that she said was especially hard to share, since she knew how much I loved Wyatt, and she loved him, too, but she needed to get it off her chest. She told me that Wyatt and their brother, Paul, had been cruel to her when she was a little girl, had made fun of her weight, poked and ridiculed her until she cried. This was alarming enough to me that I brought it up with Wyatt, who appeared palpably relieved, as if he’d been waiting to be able to talk about it with someone all these years. Wyatt told me, his eyes brimming with tears, that when he was old enough to realize what he and Paul had done to Sophie, he’d felt sick with regret, and still felt ashamed by his behavior.

  Wyatt explained that he and Paul didn’t know how to accept Sophie, that she was not only black but overweight as well, unlike his mother and sister and other white girls around them, who were all taut and slender, signaling discipline, commanding envy. Wyatt and Paul had both racially and morally judged Sophie, who, before me, had been on her own in navigating her racial identity. “I’m so glad she finally has someone to talk to,” Wyatt said.

  To hear this articulated, out loud, by a white boy who looked like he could have run with Nate and Ryan and Connor from high school was oddly gratifying. Wyatt didn’t know how to talk about race, or his sister’s experience and the ways in which she’d suffered because of it, but he trusted me enough to be honest and speak freely with me, his black girlfriend, about it.

  * * *

  Sophie wrote that more recently, Paul had suggested she “divorce” herself from being black. I was learning my own advice as I was giving it to her, but I wrote back to Sophie and told her that I disagreed with Paul, and that just because she wasn’t raised to “act” black didn’t mean she wasn’t black. I wrote, Actions come from upbringing, as well as soul. I also told her that she could take control of her identity, own it however she wanted to, and that maybe she didn’t have to run that by anybody in her family first.

  I got things wrong in my advice to Sophie, too. I echoed the phrase Tess had assigned to me, “culturally white and cosmetically black,” more than once, inadvertently pushing a mixed message about Sophie’s identity. I tried to help her understand why the few other black kids at her school made fun of her and questioned the authenticity of her blackness, presuming to know what kids raised in black families think. Inevitably culturally black kids are going to pass judgment on your “white lingo,” but the reason why you don’t know what you did to deserve their discrimination, is because you didn’t do anything, I wrote. Black kids are uncomfortable that you and I look like them, but don’t act like them, and from there it’s easy for them to justify meanness and denying your roots. You are you. And you are not at fault.

  I never told her what Wyatt said about the cruelty, but I encouraged him to speak with her directly, to apologize and work it through. I don’t know that he ever did.

  Twenty-Eight

  My friend Beck and I had been splitting driving shifts across the country, and with Beck sleeping next to me in the passenger seat, I cut my wee hours of the morning shift short because I thought I might fall asleep myself. I pulled off the road next to a sprawling cornfield to take a nap. We were off Route 40 somewhere in Kansas or Missouri, and just as I drifted off, Beck nearly bounded awake.

  “Seriously? Are you kidding? What if someone’s out here and attacks us?”

  “Damn, Beck. Jesus, this isn’t Children of the Corn. What are you worried about?” I said, trying to make light of the situation.

  “Beck, we just came up from the South, where you ducked down in the passenger seat when we drove through a couple of towns. I’m just trying to keep us safe,” Beck said.

  It had somehow felt obvious to me to duck down unseen in the rural South, but now, as we drifted into the Midwest, it seemed more like New Hampshire, the home where I was raised, so I could feel safe taking a nap in a car pulled over on the shoulder of an untraveled road.

  Driving shifts and danger zones aside, I knew the minute Beck and I got on the road that there was no way in hell I was sticking with our original plan of staying in San Francisco for the summer. Wyatt and I talked on the phone at every stop along the way, and he flew out to meet us in Santa Fe, New Mexico, during his spring break in March, when we were just a few weeks into the trip.

  * * *

  One night when he was with us, in a funky, cheap hotel outside of Albuquerque, cable TV still new, we landed on the movie The Accused as we were flipping through channels. The evening had been sweet and silly. We ate at a dive restaurant for dinner and each had giant slices of pie for dessert, returning in high spirits to the hotel, where Wyatt and I had one room and Beck had an adjoining one.

  We bid Beck good night and settled into the movie, which I’d never seen before, sitting propped up against the headboard of our hotel double bed. Wyatt had his arm around me when the film began, but by the time the full rape scene played out near the end, through the retelling of a bystander—Jodie Foster’s character, Sarah, in a seedy, dimly lit bar, tipsy on beer, hair loose, tank top tight, denim skirt to her thighs, playing pinball with a couple of guys she’d just met—my entire posture had changed, and I’d pushed Wyatt’s arm off me entirely without even knowing I’d done it.

  “Oh, I love this song,” Sarah says in the scene, and then starts dancing by herself, swiveling her hips, tank straps hanging off her shoulders, snapping her fingers. I started to feel physically ill. Then she’s giggling, in this guy’s arms, thinking she’s still in control, still a human being, drunk or not, when he pushes her up against the pinball machine and lifts her skirt. I thought I might black out. Maybe I did. He starts to smother her, covering her mouth, shoving himself on her and in her, while the other men stand by and watch.

  “Wait a minute, no,” Sarah says when she realizes what is happening. His hands on her neck, he slams her head to the side, the pinball machine lights flashing behind her horror-stricken eyes, and then he rapes her. The camera switches to Sarah’s POV, and we see her looking at the other men as they cheer her rapist on. We see a lone, nerdy, young-looking guy at the back of the room, his face turning from a game smile to terror as his moral compass resets in real time.

  “Hold her down!” one man yells. Now another man is raping her, and then another. By then, I felt like I was floating outside my body. Finally, as the credits began to roll, Wyatt asked, “Are you OK?” No, I wasn’t.

  “That’s what happened to my sister,” I said, still unable to let him touch me.

  I didn’t anticipate having such a visceral reaction to the film, and it was really inconvenient because I was supposed to be having a lot of sex with my first love, who had flown over halfway across the country to be with me. But I couldn’t even let Wyatt touch me, much less have sex.

  The next morning I felt somewhat better and snuggled in toward Wyatt under the covers. “You know I would never hurt you,” he said. “And I’m so sorry for what happened to your sister.”

  When he left after that visit in New Mexico, Beck and I forged on to San Francisco, but I knew that I didn’t want to be away from him for another minute.

  Beck, always game for whatever, among the many things I love about her, was not surprised by my change of heart, happy to see me so happy, and we hatched a plan together to drive back east without stopping or telling Wyatt, so that I could surprise him. Fifty-five hours later, I dropped Beck at her mom’s in Massachusetts and drove another hour to Rye, New Hampshire, where Wyatt was renting a house on the beach with a roommate.

  It was well past dark when I pulled into the driveway, and I could make
out Wyatt’s silhouette in the front door looking out to see who would be showing up to his house at this hour. He was on the phone, holding the receiver to his ear, wrenching his neck out toward the driveway. The ocean sent itself back and forth behind us, into the shore and into the night. I could hear the waves as I opened the door to get out of the car, and the pungent smell of seaweed flooded the air.

  I started toward the house, which was on a slant, and climbed up the driveway, smiling through the splits of my cheeks, giddy that I’d managed to pull this off. When I was close enough that the porch light lit up my face, Wyatt dropped the receiver from his hand, stunned and then immediately elated, like the sky had opened up and started raining fantasies. It was then, and remains to this day, one of the best feelings I’ve ever felt.

  I stayed over that night and never left. Wyatt’s house in Rye was about thirty minutes from UNH, where he was finishing his junior year. Moving in with him was easy enough, since I owned little to nothing and Wyatt’s roommate was very chill about everything so long as he could hear the waves, dude. Finding an apartment together in New Jersey for the summer proved more difficult. I let Wyatt take charge of the search—he knew the areas to look, while I was working a temporary waitressing job near Wyatt’s apartment to save some money toward the move. I was working an afternoon lunch shift when the manager told me I had a call.

  “Hey,” Wyatt said, the sound of defeat resonant in his voice.

  “What’s wrong?” We’d only been together for only a few months, most of which had been spent on the phone, so I’d learned to read his voice even if he’d just uttered one word.

  “So, the landlord on that apartment I thought would be good for us? That I wanted you to see?”

  “Yeah,” I answered, leaning against the wall in the kitchen where the phone was hanging, bracing myself to hear that we’d lost the apartment to someone else because we were too young or didn’t have enough credit or something like that.

  “Well, the landlord, he doesn’t want to rent to us, because, um, because you’re black.”

  “What? How did he even know?”

  “He asked, like, almost kiddingly, he was like, ‘Your girlfriend’s not black, is she? Ha ha.’ Like, jokingly.”

  “Well, that’s bullshit.” I honestly didn’t know what else to say. It was like that moment in high school when word spread that Nate’s dad wouldn’t allow him to take me to the prom because I’m black. Racism was something I was still learning how to feel, much less talk about.

  “No, I know, I totally know. It is. Total bullshit.”

  Wyatt and I ended up in an apartment negotiated by Wyatt’s dad, who was well connected in real estate and owned a reputable BMW car dealership, that Wyatt agreed to paint over the summer to help pay off the loan for the security deposit we needed to borrow. I took on two jobs, one in retail, one as a waitress. Our apartment was just outside of Princeton, New Jersey, in a town called Hightstown, and both my retail and waitressing jobs were centrally located on the main drag near the Princeton University campus.

  We didn’t really have any furniture between us, and couldn’t afford to buy any. We had a double futon on the floor in our bedroom, where Wyatt insisted I have a writing desk. In the kitchen was a small round table, where I’d serve us chef salad and tuna casserole for dinner, all I knew how to prepare, after Wyatt finished a long day of painting and I clocked off at the clothing store or my lunchtime restaurant shift. In the living room we had another futon, plain-covered with a frame, as our couch, and a TV with a VCR, which felt a little fancy. We were playing house and we knew it.

  Wyatt loved politics and satire, windsurfing, his mother, and the music of Steely Dan and Pat Metheny. We both liked to read and consider the fate of the world, but we were not a perfect match by any stretch. Mostly we talked about our families, and the strange coincidence with Sophie. He often talked about how he envied the ease with which Paul, his younger brother, an avid windsurfer like Wyatt, breezed through life. Paul, who was somehow perpetually tan while living year-round in New Jersey, with sun-bleached blond hair and blue eyes, shirked responsibility and hopped from job to job because he could—and practically lived on the beach.

  Examples of “healthy” relationships were scant for me growing up. Dad’s relationships with women were focused around his needs and desires, often making the needs and desires of the women he was involved with, including Mom, seem less important. I knew he loved Mom, but I also could not understand why he would risk, if not losing her outright, then hurting her so deeply, which I witnessed him do through his relationships with other women. Subsequently, I didn’t actually know how I felt about the roles and rules of a relationship, and was generally flying by the seat of my pants.

  Twenty-Nine

  Wyatt’s love felt like a stamp of approval, and provided the same powerful passport I’d felt as a child with my parents. An attractive, wealthy white boy had chosen me, and was willing to walk hand in hand with me in public, take me to parties and restaurants and even his family’s country club. I was once again the special black person I’d been in my parents’ image growing up, and in company with the Tilsons. Not the ugly black girl whom Mrs. Gordon had referred to in the fifth grade, not the nigger like my boss in high school had called me, not the black girl Nate’s father said he wouldn’t want to be seen with in a picture.

  My relationship with Wyatt was significant in a lot of ways, like most first loves, but perhaps more important, it gave me my first real glimpse at independence from Tess, who had initially been happy about Wyatt, but was also quick to remind me that first loves rarely last. “Your happiness,” she said to me just before Wyatt and I moved in together, “only makes it more poignant for me that it will eventually end between the two of you.”

  The more I told Wyatt about my relationship with Tess—the backstory, the adoption and reunion—the more he thought the whole situation was unhealthy. I told him he didn’t understand, protecting Tess instinctively, but also knowing somehow that he was right. “You need to figure this relationship out, Beck,” Wyatt said one night when we were lying together on our modest little futon couch after dinner, one standing lamp nearby, mugs of tea in front of us on the rickety coffee table that we’d found at a flea market. “Because this is going to affect both of us, and our future together.”

  Hearing Wyatt talk about a future together made me feel emboldened, and forced me to examine my relationship with Tess more closely—especially after the first letter I received from her when Wyatt and I moved in together, which came with a xeroxed copy of a print interview with Toni Morrison and started like this:

  I am sending the uppity, very uppity Toni Morrison interview. She comes across as arrogant, thoughtful, and seriously pissed off… I like her uppity answer to teenage pregnancies. I think I almost agree with it.

  I had fallen in love with Toni Morrison after reading Sula in Elijah’s class at UNH, after which I went on to read everything of hers that I could get my hands on. Tess was well aware of this, and it seemed thoughtful at first that she was sending me the interview, despite the blatant racism of describing Morrison as “uppity.”

  Tess’s letter continued:

  Saw Elijah the other day at the A&P. His wife was driving the car and he was a passenger. She parked and I parked near his car (I know this is childish, but I couldn’t resist seeing him squirm)… and squirm he did. I got out of the car, he stayed in his, and I pranced my broadened hips past him, being tan in minimal summertime dress, knowing I was looking and seeming just fine. So I go into the store and come out, and look over to his car, and there he is… just about on all fours on the floor of his car. Well, not exactly. But what he had done was put the seat in a reclining position—his neck and head unnaturally poised flat against the horizontal seat, so he wouldn’t see me and I wouldn’t see him. Ha. I saw him, and I looked at him, and I kept seeing him, and he looked very close to paralyzed, because what if he moved or something? This, I can tell you, was fun.
r />   Neither of us had mentioned Elijah again—the incident in the dean’s office or that he even existed—until now.

  Wyatt was absolutely floored when I showed it to him. “What the hell is wrong with her?”

  That letter, Wyatt’s concern, and the physical distance from her made me start to question everything about my nearly decade-long relationship with Tess in an even more rigorous and intentional way than I had been. Because what the hell was wrong with her? And perhaps even more pointedly, what was wrong with me for staying in this relationship with her, and still allowing her to hold such a powerful sway over me?

  Thirty

  Wyatt drove me to Hadley, Massachusetts, known as the Pioneer Valley, to start my first semester at Hampshire College as a transfer student in the fall of 1989. I was assigned to Dakin, one of the two flat, square dorms on campus, although most second- and third-year students lived in “mods,” two-story apartments spread across campus in various clusters, each with its own title and identity. It didn’t matter to me; I was primarily focused on getting what I had to get done to graduate, and taking care of my relationship with Wyatt, who drove the four hours from UNH almost every weekend to be with me during my first semester.

  Hampshire was a tenth the size of UNH, and statistically not that much more diverse in terms of black students, but the size made black students more visible to one another, and although Dakin was mostly white, my classes, which included African history and Adoption and Society, were not. Two of my classes were taught by black professors, one of whom, Fred Brown, who was head of the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural studies, became my advisor.