* * *
Wyatt recognized my blackness in a superficial way. We went to see Miles Davis in concert, and Do the Right Thing at the movies. He gave me an Alice Walker book on our first Valentine’s Day together, and made me a tape of Joan Armatrading when I started at Hampshire, but we never talked about any of these concerts or movies or books or the issues they raised, and had no black friends. Apart from Sophie, who was struggling with her own identity, we didn’t socialize with black people. We didn’t even spend that much time with Sophie.
I had no model for how to integrate these two “warring ideals,” as W. E. B. Du Bois referred to it in his classic book, The Souls of Black Folk, until I met Elijah, who introduced me both to Du Bois and his concept of “double consciousness,” which only resonated now that I found myself trying to figure out why I’d never known where all the black folks lived at Hampshire. But then Elijah’s model had been corrupted by Tess. So I continued to adapt, or assimilate, still without the language to express or truly understand what I was experiencing.
Ryan called again and invited me to come back to visit him at Wesleyan. This time, he said, we could talk about my experience in high school—he wanted to understand, and was sorry if he’d come across as ignorant or dismissive during our last visit. We went out to dinner at a nice restaurant off campus, and even before we’d polished off a bottle of wine, Ryan was attentive, intentionally flirtatious with me for the first time in the ten years we’d known each other. And I knew exactly why.
I was wearing a pair of faded, oversized 501 Levi’s jeans, cinched tight at the waist to emphasize how tiny I’d become, and a boxy jade green cropped cotton sweatshirt from the clothing store where I worked. My hair was a cascade of loose curls, snatched back with a band just past my forehead and tucked behind my ears.
I’d been controlling my eating off and on since high school—sometimes I would starve myself; other times I would binge. A sort of cross between anorexia and bulimia. The latter always failed because I only ever binged, never purged. Tess, whose body shape was more pearlike than mine, which turned curveless and rectangular when I got very skinny, insisted that our bodies be in a constant symbiotic dance. This meant that if she thought her thighs were too big, then my thighs were too big. If she wanted to go on a diet, I went on a diet.
I was keenly aware that the ultimate goal was always to be thin, skinny. That’s what beauty meant. That’s what whiteness rewarded. Everywhere I looked. In the months leading up to this visit with Ryan, I’d been in one of my starving phases.
“Why weren’t you this into me when we were in high school?” I asked on our way back to his dorm, when he’d come up from behind me, grabbed my waist, and kissed my neck. He playfully leaned me up against a concrete wall in the quad, and lifted me up to sit, positioning himself in between my thighs. “Is it because I’m, like, fifteen pounds lighter than I was when we were in high school?”
Ryan nuzzled his face further into my neck. “Maybe,” he said unrepentantly.
I was in no way surprised. I’d starved myself to be skinny for the specific purpose of appealing to Ryan, and other white boys.
That night, while Ryan was on top of me, I wondered if he was pretending I wasn’t black, or, worse, pretending I was.
Thirty-Four
I’d walked by the Greenhouse mod a thousand times. It was the mod with the highest profile on campus; everyone knew about the Greenhouse and the residents it attracted—mostly rich, white liberal kids from wealthy towns and private schools on the coasts of the country. It felt enormously familiar to me, and appealing in a Pavlovian way.
Molly, a pretty blonde with glacial-blue eyes whom I’d seen before but never met, was sitting on the front steps of the Greenhouse, in tears.
“Are you OK?” I asked, genuinely concerned.
“Yeah,” she said, laughing through her tears. “It’s dumb.”
“I’m sure it’s not,” I said, and sat down next to her.
“Well, it’s about a guy, so…”
“What’s his deal?”
“It’s not worth it,” Molly said, her red fleece Patagonia zipped up to her chin.
But without much further persuasion, it all came out, all the details about her recent breakup with a guy who sounded an awful lot like Wyatt.
“Oof,” I said, as if falling back into my native language. “I’ve been there. Totally.”
Molly and I bonded over our broken, rich, WASPy ex-boyfriends. Even though Molly herself came from rich, WASP heritage, having this experience in common with her reminded me of how I felt when Ella invited me to sit at the popular table in the sixth grade. It was power-adjacent, which made me feel validated, while simultaneously feeling as if adjacency was all I could ever aspire toward.
Molly and I also each had a problematic parent whom we were forever trying to understand, whose expectations we never seemed to meet, but whose love and acceptance we wanted more than anything. For Molly, it was her dad, a brusque businessman who worked in the pharmaceutical industry and frowned on his daughter’s lack of direction or plans for the future.
Mid-semester, Molly invited me to her house in Connecticut to get away from school for the weekend, and I couldn’t deny that a weekend in the country appealed to me. Her house was a lavish single-family colonial with a pool in the back and a long turn-around driveway, set in a residential area about a mile and a half from Martha Stewart’s two-acre estate. Even in late fall, the neighborhood had the feel of a summer resort, with sprawling lawns out front, every house white, surrounded by neatly lined stone walls or well-manicured hedges.
Everything in the house was both neatly organized and overabundant, with piles of freshly laundered clothes and unopened packages stacked up on the stairs, rows of the same kind of chips and snacks on the shelves, and an elaborate antique dollhouse that took up an entire room. Molly’s mother, fetching with soft brown hair and lambent eyes, wore resignation like a weighty antique necklace, beautiful but tarnished, while Molly’s father was, as she had described, hardened and not particularly warm or welcoming.
“So what are you studying?” he asked, not long into my visit.
“Black literature,” I said. “And writing.” Molly was in the kitchen busying herself, which appeared to be the way it went when she visited home—finding things to do to make herself useful, as an alternative to talking.
“What do you plan to do with that?”
I almost asked him if he was taunting me, but decided to be a polite guest for as long as I could. “Well, I’m hoping to change the way people think about race and racism, and especially black women, through writing.”
Molly’s father chuckled dismissively.
“It’s not really funny,” I said.
“You just sound so serious, so angry,” he said.
“Well, that’s because I am angry.”
“But you’re getting the same education as Molly is getting, so what’s there to be angry about?”
“Dad,” Molly interrupted.
“What? It’s true,” he said. His words hurled toward Molly, whose body took the blow and seemed to sink back a bit.
This was now the second time within a year I’d found myself answering to or being judged by the wealthy white parent of someone with whom I’d chosen to be in a relationship. Although Wyatt’s mother mostly filtered her harsh criticism and coded racism through Wyatt—telling him I gave off a “sexually promiscuous” vibe, and that I was too controlling and self-righteous—Molly’s father was openly baiting me.
“That’s a trope, you know,” I said. “The angry black woman.”
“But you just said yourself that you’re angry, and I want to know why.”
“Can we not do this,” Molly said.
“I was just curious,” her father said.
Later Molly apologized on her father’s behalf, and said he didn’t mean to be rude. I didn’t know how to tell her that he hadn’t merely been rude; he’d been racist, presumptuous, and patroni
zing. Even if I had, I’m almost sure she would not have been able to hear it. And for a while, I thought that was OK.
Thirty-Five
Dear Rebecca, you seem unfamiliar lately, almost passive, which I would have never thought you to be… This new attitude makes me think you are trying on different ways to be, and that this way resembles more your parents’ demeanor.
So began a letter I received from Tess after months of no correspondence between us.
Tess’s presumption that I wasn’t able to do anything independent of her without defaulting to the child my parents raised was self-serving and mean-spirited, and I didn’t know what to say anymore. This was happening more and more, and was why I increasingly kept my distance. I wrote back and kept it simple, saying I hoped things were well with her, and that I was busy with school and work, ready to get through the semester. She wrote back right away.
There is something oddly familiar about our being apart… comfortable even. Perhaps being separated, yearning, quietly, from time to time for each other is our natural state… Life is good in NBPT. Uncomfortably perfect, in fact. The house is an amazing gift; large, colorful, comfortable, begging to hold lots of people (which it has and continues to)… The economy is a mess, but people are buying books and we are without much worry.
The kids are blooming, blossoming, adjusting so well. Sebastian had Little League tryouts for next year and was first pick of 45 boys. He’s my most favorite athlete to watch. One of the coaches said he was “smooth” and that’s exactly what he is. He’s taking saxophone lessons and looks tremendously sexy with the alto sax slung around his neck, perched on his hip. He gets his braces off in five weeks, and I think then he will be too beautiful.
Mateo is at his best. He’s found his stride, it appears. He is a super student—all A’s and B’s…. Also, he is, apparently, dreamboat extraordinaire among 7th and 8th grade girls… We were grocery shopping the other day, and this blonde number (like long curls and tight britches), oh about 5ft-two, kept yelling his name and waving, and I thought, Oh, one of his teachers. Well, no, boys and girls, it was an eighth grader who has been asking him out since the beginning of school… Another girl followed him home yesterday.
The way she described the boys was absolutely nuts to me, not least of all because of how explicitly and harshly she had judged my parents for telling me I was beautiful as a child. But the way she sexualized my brothers, at eleven and twelve years old, was deeply unsettling.
* * *
I put it all out of my mind and was happy to have both mental and physical distance from Tess. Three thousand miles to be exact. Moving to San Francisco was a fresh start I needed. I was thrilled to start a spring internship at Mother Jones, and excited to dig deeper into the idea of becoming a writer.
It was an amazing opportunity to work for the progressive magazine, but it paid only a very small stipend, and I was constantly trying to make ends meet. I lived in three different apartments over the course of four months, starting with an apartment on Lombard Street with Wyatt, who drove across the country to try to make things work with us again. He seemed conflicted, desperate to come, but it wasn’t the same. It would never be the same.
Wyatt and I lived together in a newly rebuilt, post–1989 San Francisco earthquake apartment with shiny hardwood floors and tall windows for two tumultuous months before he decided to drive back East. He hadn’t been able to find work, and was running out of savings; we fought all the time and didn’t know what we were doing. Wyatt decided that he would go back home, work for his father to make some more money, and then we could decide what we wanted to do next.
But a month later, Wyatt called from his mother’s house in New Jersey and broke up with me for good over the phone. He was tired of me, he said. And I could understand. I was tired of me, too. Tired of wanting and wishing I could be the kind of girlfriend that Wyatt didn’t have to figure out why he was attracted to. Tired of feeling like a fraud in khaki pants worn low around my waist like the models in J.Crew catalogs, when I could get skinny enough. Tired of being the black woman deemed valuable only because I was in a relationship with a white guy.
“Just think about how awful it was when you were living together and fighting all the time,” Mom said, on the other end of the phone when I told her about the breakup. She was right. Wyatt and I had spent the two months together in San Francisco fighting about money and work and time spent together and the future and our families. But in between his leaving and his calling to break up with me, we wrote each other long, detailed love letters. Wyatt didn’t know why he loved me, and all I wanted was to be loved. He couldn’t understand my racial anxiety, and I couldn’t see past his powerfully white indemnity.
After Wyatt left, I moved to another apartment, in San Francisco’s Mission District. My two roommates were the owner, a white woman juggler with the famed Pickle Family Circus, and a nice young white guy who was getting a master’s at San Francisco State. I walked the mile or so to the Mother Jones offices in South of Market every day and passed a health food store in between, where I stopped frequently enough to meet and befriend Ellis, a black actor, producer, and writer working at the store to support his art.
Ellis invited me to see him in a stage performance of Dutchman, by Amiri Baraka, the Black Arts Movement poet and writer formerly known as LeRoi Jones. I’d never seen or read the play before, and it blew my mind. Baraka wrote it in 1964, when the idea of a black middle class was still nascent, Martin Luther King was more prevalent than Malcolm X, and three years before Loving v. Virginia, the landmark Supreme Court decision that made interracial marriage legal.
In Dutchman, a one-act play set in a New York City subway car, Clay, a middle-class black man, is seduced by fellow passenger Lula, a white woman who intentionally provokes Clay to anger and then kills him. It illustrated to me, in one fell, trenchant, and vicious swoop, the insidious nature of anti-black racism, and the protected, vaunted purity and power of white women in America. To me, Lula, the white female protagonist, represented not just America, in that her sole purpose in the story is to seduce, corrupt, and destroy Clay, the black male protagonist, but also Tess, in her endless attacks on my psyche as a black girl and now woman. The play articulated for me through Clay’s character how I had been complicit in what I now understood to be Tess’s seduction and psychological manipulation.
Ellis, average height, with deep, chestnut-brown skin, and a comely face, gave a pulsating, nuanced performance as Clay. Clay is drawn to Lula immediately, because proximity to her whiteness and femininity is, to his mind, the crowning achievement of his assimilation as a black man on America’s terms. But his proximity also induces fear in Clay, given the brutal, bloody history of black men looking at white women, much less sitting and chatting with one.
I was captivated by the actress who played Lula, as she baited and dismissed and poured herself all over Ellis, both actors giving such strong performances that in one instance, I had to stop myself from running up onto the stage to shake Ellis out his trance, yank him out from under the white gaze. To save him. To save myself. Lula was Tess. Tess was Lula.
Ellis and I stayed up late that night talking in his apartment about the play, and how great it would be if we could collaborate on another adaptation, but this time for screen, and I would write the screenplay and direct, and Ellis would star. The warm light of yellowed lampshades, little and large jade trees lining his apartment windows, ’70s beaded doorway into the kitchen, and worn, light brown leather couch made it all feel like a theater set, and we laughed and dreamed and drank our tea.
I told Ellis about my forthcoming piece for Mother Jones, my first for the magazine, an interview with Talking Heads front man David Byrne, about a world music label he was launching, Luaka Bop, and we talked about writing.
“It’s everything,” Ellis said. “Everything.”
“I know,” I said, now thinking steadily about all the things I would write. “My head is exploding! Let’s collaborate on
everything!”
“Yes! You’ll be an amazing writer, and we’re going to be a marvelous team!”
* * *
In an entirely coincidental turn of events, a few months after Wyatt left San Francisco, Ryan flew out to visit me and other friends for a few days and to interview for a job working with special needs kids. We spent a day together at the Exploratorium, the city’s public laboratory of science and art, listening to music made from spools of thread and paper clips, staring through telescopes and making strange recordings of our own voices. We didn’t bring up sleeping together the fall before, or the conversation at Wesleyan about the black choir and reverse racism.
I didn’t want to talk about anything serious. I didn’t want to think about race. I just wanted to hold hands with my crush from the sixth grade and walk around an enormous space with high, arched ceilings, like the inside of a parachute, feeling the way I used to feel when I was little and Mom and Dad would carry the dining room table outside and we would eat our dinner under the night sky.
Thirty-Six
Shortly after the internship ended, and I returned back East, Ryan moved to Northern California for the job he’d applied for when I still lived there. He’d been in Berkeley for less than a month when I asked him to come back to the East Coast, because, I wrote, I might be in love with him. I couldn’t stop thinking about that day we’d spent together at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, holding hands, playful and sweet, his full attention like a familiar balm, a gift, what I’d been waiting for since I was eleven years old.
I want to fight for us, I wrote. Like I wanted to in high school after you started dating Bliss, but I was too angry and hurt. I have dreams where we see each other from afar and run into each other’s arms as though it’s been decades, as though our lives and the beat of our hearts depend on us finding and holding each other in that moment.
Surviving the White Gaze Page 16
