Surviving the White Gaze

by Rebecca Carroll

Over the years, my alcohol consumption had changed since I drank two glasses of chardonnay with Damian at the Cottonwood Cafe. I’d broadened my palate and switched to red, and also upped the intake considerably past two glasses a few times a week. Night sweats and insomnia were among the side effects when I first started taking Zoloft, so I’d lowered the dosage and started pairing it with two or three glasses of wine to help me sleep, sometimes more, which I understood to be a potentially dangerous combination, but it suited me and I went with it.

  Dad’s drink was a dry vodka martini with an olive, and while he was never a blind alcoholic, as his father had been, he imbibed heartily. Dad and I both had plenty to drink when I laid into him for not thinking enough about race and the repercussions for me as a black girl growing up in rural New Hampshire, where we lived only because it suited him and his life and wants.

  It was well past dinner, maybe ten at night. Dad had done the dishes, and was sitting in the living room in front of the fireplace, where the fire had begun to die out, bright orange embers like owl eyes in the dark of night. I was sitting at the kitchen table with Mom, who drank two vodka with grapefruit drinks at cocktail hour, and then never touched another drop during dinner or before bed. She was bearing witness, as she often did, of what I think she saw as art—this emotionally charged exchange between two people she loved, who were so wildly different and yet so strikingly similar.

  I kept pushing until Dad stood up from his chair in the living room, turned away from me. “We have supported you! We have backed you!” he said, as if he were a patron of the arts, and I the art. “When you wanted to meet Tess, we backed you. When you took an interest in studying blacks, black culture, we supported you!”

  “You ‘backed’ me? You ‘supported’ me when I wanted to meet Tess? Parenting is not a gift! And I was eleven years old when you ‘let’ me decide whether or not I wanted to meet her, and how, really how, could you not see how damaging that relationship has been for me?! And ‘blacks’? Really, Dad?”

  “You know what I meant,” Dad said, dismissively.

  “Beck,” Mom said quietly from across the kitchen table. “You’ve had an awful lot to drink. Maybe you should just go to bed.” The worry in her face was eclipsed only by her desire to end this conversation.

  “Why are you always defending him? He can answer for himself, Mom! My God! This whole family, our whole lives, it’s all about Dad and what he wants, like the entire world revolves around Dad! It’s insane!”

  “Your father is tired, Beck,” Mom said. “It’s late, come on now, let’s just go to bed.”

  It occurred to me, maybe for the first time, that the reason Dad had always loved to describe Mom as “the most defiant person I know” was that she was only defiant when it came to defending Dad.

  Fifty-Two

  When I moved back to New York, it felt like starting my life all over again. The private school where I taught for a year did not renew my contract, despite the valiant efforts of my students, who staged their own sit-in during morning assembly to protest me being let go. I hadn’t necessarily wanted to stay, but it was surprisingly difficult to leave. And now I had to figure out what to do with my life.

  I didn’t want to pursue a career in education or academe, but after my experience at Elle, I also felt wary of getting back into magazine journalism. Even with Sugar in the Raw due out for publication in January the following year, I certainly would not be able to support myself as a writer or an author of interview books alone. Not anywhere, but definitely not in New York.

  So it was a major coup to get an interview with Charlie Rose for one of the most prestigious shows on TV—Skip Gates, a regular guest on the Charlie Rose show, had given Charlie my name, and put in a good word on my behalf. Charlie was looking for an associate producer, someone with a fresh perspective to help book guests for interviews as well as panel segments about art and culture. I was super excited because I loved TV and the job sounded like a dream.

  “I like how you are,” Charlie said during my interview, over drinks in a dark bar on East 59th Street, across from his penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side.

  “Thanks,” I said, not really sure what he meant, but also wanting the job so badly I could almost taste it. After doing some research about the show, which I’d never actually watched before Skip suggested me for the job, and learning that it was an interview format, it seemed like the perfect next step and match for me, combining all the things I was good at—writing, interviewing, hosting conversations, looking closely at and interrogating popular culture.

  “You’re different,” Charlie said, enunciating the word “different.” “I like that. Why don’t you come in next week and we’ll try it out.”

  As a writer and associate producer for the Charlie Rose show, and without any former television experience beyond my internship at Blackside, I was thrust into the world of one of New York’s most celebrated and prestigious cultural institutions. And although I loved it immediately, as with Elle, there were no mentors willing to take the time to teach me, no guidelines or formal job description to follow. I led with my interests that I’d shared with Charlie during my interview, and pitched ideas for segments and guests that I thought would bring something unique to the table.

  Straight out of the gate, it was clear that Charlie had hired me as a favor to Skip, and he turned on me pretty quickly.

  Charlie demanded I book the black guests he wanted but had previously been unable to get, black guests of a perceived level of respectability and intelligence, like Sidney Poitier, while dismissing the black guests I pitched whom he didn’t think held the same level of respectability. He constantly accused me of pushing “my own agenda,” notably when I pitched panels on hip-hop and the movie Amistad, while none of my white colleagues ever seemed to receive criticism for pushing a white agenda when they pitched potential guests and segments.

  Charlie also would be openly critical of my work, leaving me increasingly insecure about whatever skill set I had, if any, publicly pointing out errors in my prep work that weren’t really errors. For example, the time he insisted that Kris Kristofferson was not a Rhodes Scholar.

  “This can’t be right!” Charlie fumed after doing the first read of my intro as I watched from the control room. “Rebecca! This is ridiculous! Kris Kristofferson is not a Rhodes Scholar!”

  My gut sank, and my face got hot. Luckily Kristofferson wasn’t in the studio at the time. Charlie often prerecorded his intros. The senior producer standing next to me rushed out onto the set in a panic, grabbed the blue prep pages, crossed some things out, and handed it back to Charlie, then quickly retyped the intro into the teleprompter. He read it again without the Rhodes Scholar part.

  Later I went back over my research and sources. We had the internet by then, if not Google, and I found where I’d read about the Rhodes Scholarship. In fact, Kristofferson did earn a Rhodes Scholarship to study literature at Oxford in London in 1958.

  So while I loved the job of booking and writing notes, meeting and talking to guests, working for Charlie was miserable.

  I held on to the better moments for dear life. It was part of the job to greet guests in the green room, specifically the guests whose segments you were producing, and then see them out after they’d recorded their conversations with Charlie. There were several memorable moments with guests as I waited with them for the elevator doors to open and take them down to the lobby, including the time I asked Quentin Tarantino why he seemed to be so obsessed with black people, and he said, “Because black people are awesome!”

  Another time Fran Lebowitz openly bemoaned the fact that I hadn’t been at a party for Toni Morrison she assumed Charlie would have mentioned to me. “Why weren’t you there? I expected you there,” Fran said, in her clipped, acerbic way. She was appalled when I told her that Charlie hadn’t said anything to me about it, especially since Toni Morrison had just been on the show. Even as I was the only black producer on staff, the only black woman, also the
author of three interview-based books, two of which were about black writers and writing, Charlie would not let me produce the segment with Morrison. When I asked him directly why he had assigned it to another producer, Charlie said I wasn’t ready, and that he needed someone “good” on this one.

  I brought to work with me three of my Toni Morrison books the day she came to record her interview with Charlie—Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and, of course, Sula. I approached her in the green room, where, astonished to be in her presence, I told her how much she and her work had meant to me and presented the books, each of which she signed, With Pleasure, Toni Morrison.

  She was the living ancestor I’d been waiting for.

  Fifty-Three

  “Remember, you said you’d do this for me,” Mateo said, sitting on a tall bar stool, having just watched me hang his stick figure on a napkin for failing to get the eight-letter title for a John Carpenter film.

  “And only for you,” I said, giving him my biggest of big-sister looks. “You’re up.” I flipped my napkin to the blank side and slid it over to him, trying not to think about the dinner I’d agreed to have with him and Tess a few days later.

  “When was the last time you two saw each other?”

  “I don’t know, a while. Maybe a year? We’ve emailed, though,” I said, looking at the blank napkin, waiting for him to draw out the gallows for my stick figure’s neck. “It hasn’t been good.”

  I was specifically thinking of Tess’s last email to me, after the suicide of writer Michael Dorris, when his adopted daughter, one of several adopted children he had with the novelist Louise Erdrich, claimed he had sexually abused her. Tess reiterated her belief that Dad was the source of my trauma, while also suggesting Joe had somehow mistreated me, even though I’d told her next to nothing about our meeting three years before.

  Rebecca,

  I am not suggesting an extreme act of incest on anyone’s part. I am suggesting that your place as daughter-girlchild in your growing was not always that clear—there is a broad arc of incestuous/inappropriate behaviors in families. And I respect your experience, but I think, given my place and interest in you, I see some things different…. I know what I have seen, been told, what I intuit—I have that—and just can’t surf over that truth.

  I feel you have been treated inappropriately by both your fathers and what makes me sad is that you blame yourself…. Like most charismatic men, David C’s ego has been unwieldy at times. I do believe that he loves you, that he would never knowingly hurt you, and that he thinks of you as emphatically beautiful (though I will never understand the relevance of your knowing this and being regularly reminded of it by your male parent—it is the least important, most shallow human attribute).

  Your mother, as you state so wishfully in your dedication, was never fierce during the years after I met you. I think we both wish she were.

  The dedication Tess was referring to is in Sugar in the Raw, which I dedicated to both Mom and Dad, but especially to Mom, who, I wrote, raised a black girlchild in America on sheer conviction and fierce motherlove. I maintain this to be true, but it is also true that Mom’s ferocity shifted and waned after my reunion with Tess, as she and Dad leaned further into being interesting people rather than attentive parents.

  “I wish you two would just get over it, and go back to loving each other. How hard is that?”

  Hard, but I didn’t say that to Mateo. For some time, he and I had been very good at keeping our agreement to not discuss Tess, in particular my relationship with her. But it was hard for Mateo to be both her son and my brother while she and I were in such precarious flux after fifteen years of having been so close. Tess was coming to visit him at his new place in Brooklyn, and Mateo asked me to join them for dinner as a favor.

  We went to a Thai restaurant in Mateo’s neighborhood; he and Tess were already there when I arrived. There were polite hugs and hellos, awkward laughter and palpable tension. Tess looked well, a couple of graying hairs and a few more wrinkles, but the same pretty hazel eyes and soft, delicate lips. We were looking over the menus, Tess asked about Charlie and remarked on how interesting my job must be, when Mateo suddenly blurted out, “Yeah, really interesting. She’s having dinner with that actor from Roc, Charles Dutton, next week.” I felt like smacking him with my menu, but instead just glared at him.

  “Well,” Tess said, before I had a chance to say anything, “Charles Dutton is an ex-con.”

  “That is so typical of you,” I said, feeling my fury start to spike.

  “Oh calm down, Rebecca,” Tess said, folding her menu and placing it on the table, as if she’d been needlessly interrupted.

  “And let me guess, next you’re going to remind me how many black men you’ve dated, right?”

  “I’m sorry I said anything! Can you guys stop?!” Mateo suddenly looked so young to me. It broke my heart how much this dinner had mattered to him, and that I’d probably already fucked it up.

  “Let’s just eat,” I said, preemptively shutting myself down before Tess did.

  We ate pad thai and dumplings, sticky rice and chicken skewers, and talked about the pending holidays and other things as diplomatically as possible. I left them both after dinner and immediately went to a bar to get drunk.

  Fifty-Four

  Charlie fired me after two years. “I can’t keep carrying you while you try to launch your writing career,” he said. I was paid an annual salary of $38,000 for what was often a sixty-hour workweek, in a hostile, racist, and misogynistic environment where my aptitude and intelligence were constantly questioned; if that constitutes being carried, then we need to talk about what “carrying” someone means.

  Several months after the release of Sugar in the Raw, which had garnered the best reviews of my book-writing career, an agent from a well-established literary agency reached out and offered to poach me from Lila, who had her own independent boutique agency, with the promise of getting me a six-figure advance for a memoir if I’d agree to write it as a direct response to Tess’s book. I thought about it, and even drafted a proposal, every sentence of which felt forced, contrived. But I wasn’t ready, and moreover, I didn’t want to write a direct response to Tess’s book.

  What I really wanted was to write screenplays, and so when Tess came back to me for the fifth time in five years about signing off on the movie rights to her book, I put a very big bluffing chip on the table, and she called it. The only way I’d agree to sign off on the film rights was if I wrote the adapted screenplay.

  “I just want to go to the Emmys,” Tess said. “So do a good job.”

  The deal with Hallmark paid me a flat fee of $50,000, and gave me membership into the Writers Guild of America. I moved into my third loft in New York, second in Brooklyn, this one in Gowanus, where I lived by myself, and settled in to spend a year writing a screen adaptation of my life through the lens of my white birth mother, who had consistently manipulated my emotions and erased my blackness, sabotaged nearly every meaningful relationship I’d ever had with a black man throughout my life, and suggested that my white adoptive father had molested me as a child. What could possibly go wrong?

  That was the year I started drinking whiskey. And martinis. I’d work all day, reading passages from Tess’s book, hearing her voice saying them, trying to write cinematic scenes that didn’t break my heart, and then stop in the evenings, pour myself a glass of whiskey neat, and try to forget what I’d been reading all day. Up until then, I’d been a fairly strict wine drinker, but this enterprise called for something stronger, even though I didn’t really like the taste of whiskey. Other nights after writing, I’d go to a bar and drink martinis, which also weren’t that tasty to me, until I started to slur, chatting it up with the bartender or whoever else might be sitting next to me.

  Almost everything I read in Tess’s book made me want to inflict more pain on myself, just to keep it going. I started to bring home random men I’d met at whatever bar where I’d been drinking, tempting fate, just waiting t
o pick the wrong one, enacting the self-fulfilling prophecy I knew all along would one day play itself out. If I didn’t meet anyone to bring home with me, I’d take a cab or walk home, and call Mom or Monique or other friends late into the night, desperate for them to help me understand this new and inescapable riddle of agony. I’d wake up hungover and need a few hours before starting the cycle all over again.

  It was the first time I’d finished Tess’s book all the way through, and then, pretending it was an effort to maintain some semblance of professionalism, I read it again. But I wasn’t reading it the second time as a screenwriter; I was reading it as the daughter she used to reconcile herself to her own pain. It was almost surreal how clearly she’d laid it out, how glaringly simple the answer was for why she had been so judgmental and emotionally manipulative to me for all those years. I felt like such a fool.

  * * *

  When Tess discovered she was pregnant with me, she thought having a baby would bring her mother, Lena, back. Lena, who had fled south after spending several months in a Massachusetts institution, told Tess from a pay phone in New Orleans that she would come back to Boston so that they could raise the baby together. Frances gave her blessing, but Roy, the more practical one in the family, thought it was a bad idea. Tess, though, ignored her brother’s concerns, and deluded herself into believing that their mother, no longer institutionalized but still mentally ill, was lucid enough to make such a commitment. In the days following, Tess set about knitting baby booties and thinking about names.

  “It will be hard to find work,” Lena said, in a subsequent phone call to her daughter. “I don’t think we can do anything for her.” By “her,” Lena meant Tess’s baby—a girl, Tess had learned at a recent doctor appointment, news she had shared with her mother. Less than a month after she’d made the promise to help raise her granddaughter, Lena resolved that she couldn’t do it after all.