Surviving the White Gaze

by Rebecca Carroll

  “Oh,” she said, looking hurt, as if she were the victim here. “He told me it wasn’t that serious with you.”

  “You need to leave,” I said.

  After I shut the door behind her, I fell apart. Heaving and moaning and crying. I couldn’t believe this was happening. After I managed to pull myself together, I was enraged.

  * * *

  Damian and I had plans to meet up later that night. When I didn’t show up for our plans to meet, the phone started ringing nonstop. I let him keep calling three or four times before finally picking up.

  “I know about the baby,” I said, absolutely seething.

  “What baby?”

  “Rachel’s baby.”

  “Listen, Beck, I can explain. It wasn’t like that.”

  I almost laughed out loud at the irony of a Spike Lee reference popping into my brain—Mars Blackmon’s incessant “Please, baby—please, baby—baby baby, please” when he’s begging Nola not to break up with him in She’s Gotta Have It—given that Damian had said on our first night together that the two of us in a dark basement bedroom, half dressed, was like a scene from a Spike Lee movie.

  “Don’t call me again,” I said, and hung up. In my gut, I knew all along that he’d been cheating, and he had not only lied when I asked, but gaslit me every single time as well.

  Forty-Five

  I rubbed my thumbs over the two pictures inside my jacket pocket as Roy and I walked through Harvard Square to the Au Bon Pain on the other side. I brought them in case I didn’t recognize my birth father right away, although I was sure I would. I was anxious, wrecked from the break with Damian, and stunned by Roy’s call out of the blue telling me he’d found Joe and set up a time for us to meet. I’d been in Boston for a year, and this was the first time Roy had contacted me with any kind of lead.

  Past a certain hour, that Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square stopped being the quick drop-in spot for a halfway decent croissant and began its evening run as a gathering spot for the homeless, who nursed cold coffees and, if they were lucky, nibbled on day-old pastries that hadn’t sold during the morning rush. Roy and I stood inside, where the ceiling-wide fluorescent lights gave the feel of a sleazy all-night diner.

  Three black men sat together at one table, all wearing soiled, shabby coats and natty fingerless gloves, chatting in fellowship. I searched their faces until one of the men noticed me staring. His eyes were rheumy and bloodshot, skin dark and slick with sweat, gray sprigs of different-length hair popping out from under a holey wool cap. I looked away, embarrassed by the judgment I felt toward him. My birth father was not among these men, and after twenty minutes, it was clear he wasn’t coming.

  “I’m sure he just got his wires crossed,” Roy said, trying to reassure me. “I’ll try him again. It’s hard to get through to him. You know, he doesn’t have a phone, that’s why I had to call him on the Salvation Army pay phone.”

  “He doesn’t live at the Salvation Army, does he?” I asked. I hoped that my birth father wasn’t homeless—that would maybe be too much for me to handle.

  “I don’t know if he lives there full-time, but you know, better than living among the bourgeoisie!” Roy said, trying to lighten things up and failing. “Let’s go.”

  “That’s OK,” I said to Roy. “You go. I’ll take the train back to Boston.”

  I took the pictures out of my pocket and looked at them. The meeting date had materialized so quickly that it didn’t even feel like he’d stood me up. I hadn’t had time to expect him, or anticipate him, after years of wondering about him, which is different.

  Roy gave my shoulder an awkward pat, and I watched him as he crossed a dark Massachusetts Avenue, passed the wrought iron gates that lined Harvard University, over the cobblestone sidewalk, through the night toward his family.

  A week later, Roy scheduled the meeting, same place. This time I left the pictures at home. I was feeling a different kind of anxiety as Roy and I waited at a table in the back of Au Bon Pain, facing the entrance, while the clock ticked. I was worried that Tess might have been right. That my birth father was “a dog” who wouldn’t follow through. I’d told her about the first meeting when he didn’t show up. “I hate to say I told you so,” she said. I let her know we’d rescheduled. “Good luck with that, and please don’t tell him anything about me if he does show up this time,” she shot over the phone. “I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  * * *

  “There he is,” Roy said.

  My first thought when I looked at the man who had walked through the entrance was, This can’t possibly be the same man from the two pictures I had of my birth father. Where were the chiseled cheekbones? The gabardine suits or even the slick safari-style jacket? The tight, cropped afro, broad shoulders, and long, lean legs? This man now rushing toward us was chubby, wearing a holey red tracksuit and eyeglasses with matching red frames, with an unkempt afro, face drenched in sweat. Roy said a loud and jovial hello, and Joe murmured hello back from the side of his face, unable to take his eyes off me, as if he were looking at something more astonishing than if the seven natural wonders of the world were suddenly lined up, side by side, each right next to the other.

  I stood to greet him in a thick fog of cognitive dissonance. Joe hugged me, stood back, studied my face, tears welling, and then hugged me again. Roy left us alone to talk.

  “This is why God put me on the earth,” Joe said, his hands on my shoulders. “You are so beautiful. You are the reason I’m alive.”

  God? What? We sat down, across from each other at the table where I’d been waiting, and a strange wave of grief passed through me. I didn’t know what I was mourning.

  “You know, they took you from me,” he said, shaken and emotional. “Tess and her mother and Roy, they took you, just like slave times. I wanted to keep you. I would have raised you on my own, but they shut me out and stole you away from me.”

  “But what happened with you and Tess?” I couldn’t get to the idea of him raising me on his own.

  “I loved her, I did. But her mother didn’t like me,” Joe said. “Her mother was a racist, thought she and Tess and them were better than me, so they shut me out.”

  Joe told me that it had felt especially important to be in my life because his own biological mother, Blanche Calloway, jazz singer and older sister to the better-known jazz singer and bandleader Cab Calloway, had no other choice but to give him up at birth, so that she could focus on her budding career. “It was hard enough for a black woman to even have a career back then,” Joe said. “She couldn’t have had a career and raised a child, too. I don’t know who my father was, so she would have been alone, too.”

  I learned that Joe grew up in and out of foster care, without any lasting familial bonds or friendships, and knew of no other existing biological relatives that he might have. “I hope you’ll let me see you,” he said. “And that you’ll call me Pops.”

  It was a lot to process, but I felt an unexpected affection swelling inside of me. He wasn’t what I’d thought he would be, or look like I’d imagined he would. But he was gentle and vulnerable. He showed up and wanted to be in my life. I didn’t know how to manage one more parent in my already cramped carousel of parents, but I knew I wanted to try.

  Forty-Six

  Just before Christmas, I reached out to Joe at the number he’d given me to invite him to a Middle Eastern restaurant that played live music in Central Square so he could meet my boyfriend. Damian had begged my forgiveness, and I had acquiesced. We were trying to make things work between us. And also, after meeting Joe, I wanted to show him that I had found the blackness I’d been robbed of while growing up in the white family that adopted me.

  Damian and I arrived first, and for a minute I thought Joe might not show up, but then there he was. Now that the weather was colder, he was bundled up in a sheepskin coat with shearling around the collar, the same kind of material Catherine used to make her hats with when I was growing up, and a brown wool hat, with leathe
r gloves, no glasses. He was carrying a tote bag with various-sized objects poking out from inside.

  I introduced Joe to Damian. The two locked eyes and shook hands; Damian put his other hand on top of their handshake, as if to signal some kind of assurance or mutual understanding that they could both be my protectors. Joe joined us at a table.

  “I love this place!” Joe said after he gave me a hearty hug. The place was dimly lit, with a live local jazz band playing in the background.

  “What do you have in the bag there, Joe?” Damian said. “Do you have something in there for me?”

  Damian’s way of disarming people was to play at being devilish, in an almost childlike way.

  “As a matter of fact, I do!” Joe chimed, delighted to have come bearing gifts, even though I knew, because he had told me during our first conversation that he lived on welfare, that he likely could not afford them. He pulled out one clumsily wrapped gift after another, grinning the whole time. A pair of shiny silver candleholders for me and Damian to share, a coffee mug for Damian, and a fuzzy white knit scarf especially for me that I put on right away. Damian ordered us all some food, and we talked, but mostly just ate and listened to the music, feeling like a family.

  A couple of months later, Joe met me at Damian’s restaurant to see where my boyfriend plied his trade. Late on a Sunday, it was in the middle of the brunch rush, but Damian saved us a corner table in front of the window, where you could see the frost begin to melt from the glare of the sun. Joe had on the same sheepskin coat and brown wool hat from our Christmas visit and carried the same tote, this time filled with a few slim, pamphlet-like books sticking out.

  Joe appeared less relaxed than he’d been in December, and kept his coat and hat on, as if prepared to make a quick exit if necessary. He flipped through the pages in one of the books, an illustrated paperback that looked self-published by whoever the author was, and that featured drawings of all the white men throughout history who were actually black. “They had to pass, you see,” Joe said, pointing to a man who looked like George Washington, but whose name I forget. “Because America hates black men,” he said, the expression on his face turning suddenly anxious. “In fact, the government’s been watching me for twenty years.”

  Joe told me he was suing the government for emotional distress, and was seeking thousands of dollars in damages. I was grateful to have my birth father in my life, even if I wasn’t quite ready to call him Pops, as he’d asked me to, but I definitely wasn’t ready for his paranoia—for one, because mental health issues run in the family on Tess’s side, and the older I got, the more I lived in constant fear that one morning I would wake up to discover I was schizophrenic, like Tess’s mother, Lena. If Joe was also schizophrenic or mentally ill, which I was only speculating about based on his behavior, then I would for sure be, too, I thought.

  A month later, I called Joe to tell him that I was moving to New York with one of my best friends, Caryn, and that I got a coveted job at a fancy magazine.

  “You’ll stay in touch with me, now, won’t you?” he said over the phone.

  I pictured him leaning against the wall next to a hall phone at the Salvation Army in Central Square, where he did live most of the time.

  “I will. Take care, Pops,” I said, and hung up.

  Forty-Seven

  I don’t know why I agreed to write the afterword for Tess’s book about us. The one I couldn’t bring myself to even read. I also granted her permission to use my name and publish a few of my letters to her, and agreed to do press after publication, without which, her agent told her, she wouldn’t have had a deal. Or at the very least, a much smaller advance.

  Even after thirteen fraught years, during which I had felt crushed and judged by Tess at nearly every turn, I didn’t wish her any ill will. We had a very complicated relationship, I reasoned, which was also extraordinary. I was an adult now, and an aspiring writer myself. I could be gracious enough to help her share our story without having to go in all the way—a story that very well might, as she had suggested, help other people trying to navigate the emotionally turbulent maze of adoption and reunion.

  In my first draft of the afterword, I tried to tackle the subject of adoption from an objective point of view, which was naive, but also such a clear indication that I wasn’t ready to write about it from a personal place.

  Tess sent the following notes back:

  I’m thinking you may not be an “issues” writer—or that you’re just not old enough to be one. Essayists are at their best, and the best in history, are all firmly middle-aged and over (G. B. Shaw, D. Parker, etc.). Sitting back and opining is very hard to do while still in the grip of growing and self-actualization, tho, ironically, an intrinsic part of it.

  After that, I surrendered to her, another successful coup of hers in what continued to feel like an endless war of attrition between us, and agreed to a heavily edited afterword. I still couldn’t bring myself to read the manuscript all the way through, and moved to New York wishing I could just forget about it and focus instead on my new job and life, and the publication of my own book, I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like, in the coming fall.

  * * *

  A few months later, after I’d said goodbye to Joe, and Damian, too, and settled in New York with Caryn, my book was published to some acclaim—Whoopi Goldberg gave a blurb, saying she found its “eloquent elegance breathtaking,” and Skip Gates called it “a stunning achievement”—but I was more depressed than I’d ever been in my life, and could barely enjoy its success.

  At Elle, where I’d been hired as an editorial assistant, surrounded by near replicas of the pretty, thin white girls I’d been tormented by throughout my life, I felt inadequate both in terms of how I looked and what I hoped I could bring to the table. Who knew there was such a thing called imposter syndrome? I certainly didn’t, and so continued to feel like I simply didn’t deserve to be at such a high-profile, mainstream publication.

  I did, though, push hard for coverage of black women in the magazine, and wrote short pieces on Edwidge Danticat, Thandie Newton, and Jada Pinkett, and did a feature-length Q&A spread with bell hooks, but I felt unwelcome and unseen. Like the editors I worked with at Mother Jones (other than Kim, who was black and had hired me for the internship), my editors at Elle were all white. Unlike my Mother Jones editors, though, my Elle editors weren’t especially interested in mentoring or helping me grow, speeding through edits and then rewriting the piece themselves rather than showing me how to be a better writer.

  “This is not working,” one editor said, about the piece on Danticat, a black woman author, a subject I felt reasonably confident about.

  “What do you mean?” I admit to being defensive, but I also genuinely wanted to know what wasn’t working—I wanted to learn.

  “I don’t have time to explain, I’ll just fix it myself.” This stung, not least of all because it was so dismissive, but also because of the implication that I couldn’t write.

  The magazine ran an excerpt from my book in the fall issue, but then treated me like an afterthought in the office. I knew that starting out in the magazine industry would be challenging, and that I’d need to put in my time, but this was Sisyphean. It seemed obvious to me that white women with the same title and position as I were given more bylines, and editors went to them with story ideas first.

  I pitched Mother Jones an interview with the poet and writer Ntozake Shange, and they accepted. I had read For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf some years before, but revisited it as I slipped deeper into depression. Although Ntozake had a new novel out, Liliane, which I used as the peg for the pitch, it was For Colored Girls that resonated with me the most at the time, because when I stepped outside of myself, it looked like I might be dancing around the idea of suicide myself.

  I’d published a companion volume to my first book, Swing Low, with black men writers, which went entirely under the radar, particularly as it coincided with the publication
of Tess’s book. But I’d also sold the proposal for a third book, another collection of interviews, this one about the experiences of young black girls in America called Sugar in the Raw.

  I took the train from Penn Station to the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, where Ntozake then lived. She greeted me at the door with her long, multicolored braids and divine smile, welcoming me inside after giving me a warm hug. Inside, her house was crowded with art and books, ashtrays everywhere, and she lit one cigarette after another as she showed me around her modest-sized home. The smoke from incense and cigarettes lingered around us, colliding with the smells of aloe plants, chamomile tea, and lentils cooking in the kitchen.

  We settled in on the couch to talk, and Ntozake’s voice was low and raspy as her answers flew out of her mouth like carrier pigeons. I felt honored to be in her presence, but she also felt kindred. For a period after that, she would call just to talk, sometimes late at night, and we would reflect on our lives, the different generations of black women we embodied, and how to stay sane. In our interview for Mother Jones, she’d given an answer that resounded in my head over and over again: “I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think.”

  This was the answer, the line of thinking, that inspired me to ask her to write the foreword to Sugar in the Raw, which she agreed to immediately.

  Forty-Eight

  Under the hot lights on the live set of Good Morning America, Joan Lunden asked me and Tess how we felt our relationship was now that it had been fifteen years since our reunion, and Tess had published her book.

  “And what does it feel like to be a black woman, adopted by white parents, with one white biological parent as well?” Lunden asked.