When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

“Soon it was spring break,” Karen wrote, “and she went to Florida with your dad and never returned to school. She was pregnant and I believe they got married in May.”

  Karen told me she knew how frustrating it must be for me not to know more, and she wished she had more information. But her loyalties remained with my parents.

  “I love your mom and dad. They are wonderful people. Please do not mention this to them.”

  I’d been trying to contact Jimmy for six years, but I could never get ahold of him. I had seen that he had an account on Facebook and tried to friend him to no avail. Paranoid, I wondered if he was avoiding me. Now desperate, I tried him via his brother’s email address, whom I’d contacted before. Two days later, I got a message in my in-box that included the lines:

  Hey there Godchild;… the year/season you were conceived I had taken a semester off at WVU and was hitchhiking around our nation. So … I never laid eyes on the individual you’re seeking out. However, a fellow (1974) classmate was there at the time. He knows! I’m not going to drag his name into your “unhealthy” endeavor, but I will contact him.

  In the meantime, why don’t you play P.I. and utilize the power of the internet by pulling up the 1976 football roster.

  The yearbook for 1976 was not part of the university’s digital database, so I tracked down a copy on eBay. I spent more than I should have on something most people probably threw away, reminders of the young people they no longer were, the cringeworthy styles they wore that dated them. They’d become different people with different lives, different needs and priorities. I felt the same way about my old high school yearbooks. Could I look at those photos and see who I was today?

  In combing through yearbooks over thirty years old, I felt like I was chasing a person that no longer existed. Even if I found a name, a photograph, even an address somewhere online, where would that lead? Did I really want to know my biological father or just know about him? Did I prefer reality or fantasy?

  I found the football team photos in the yearbook, but I still didn’t know who I was looking for. Toward the end of the month, I received an email with the subject line: Your request answered!

  Godchild: The name you are seeking is D. B. To the best of my pal’s memory, he attended Valley High School in New Kensington, Pennsylvania (although not positive, 3 decades of rust).

  It had been almost four decades, but I wasn’t going to correct him. Instead, I ran back to the yearbooks and rosters and looked for the name. I found some stats for D. B. matching the years he’d played football.

  I went to Classmates.com and found a Valley High School yearbook that contained D. B.’s photo. I checked back with Karen: Was this the name of the guy everyone knew as the Prince?

  “WOW!” she wrote. “Where did you pull that name from?”

  I told her that Jimmy’s contact had told him, and Jimmy had passed it on to me.

  Karen confirmed that yes, D. B. was the Prince, the same person my mom went to the party with that night.

  I plugged D. B.’s name into search engines, but it was a common name and complicated by the fact that Karen remembered another first name associated with him, too. I tried all the variations I could, but got nothing beyond a high school yearbook photo and a few stats for a defensive tackle. It seemed he only played football for two years, and I could not find his picture among the senior class photos from 1976 to 1979. Could he have dropped out? I couldn’t find a Facebook account or LinkedIn profile; or rather, since he had such a common name, I found too many of them. None matched the description of the person I was looking for.

  I paid money to background-check search engines to see if I could find more detailed information. No hits—or rather, too many hits—in the databases of People Finder and Ancestry.com. Even with the internet’s resources at my disposal, I could not find who I was looking for.

  The next step, it seemed, was to hire a private detective, but I couldn’t afford that and didn’t know where to begin.

  Forty-one

  Susan grew up with my mother but went away to Georgetown for college. Through Facebook, I found out she lived near me in Wilmette, so we met up for drinks. The last time I’d seen Susan was at a Christmas party my parents threw over twenty years earlier.

  She smiled when she saw me. “You look great!” she said. “I’d recognize you anywhere.”

  In the wake of the Rachel Dolezal scandal—the white woman who fooled people for years into thinking she was black—I wrote an article about my own experience with race and identity. I included a childhood photo of my brothers and me (and our cat) that showed our contrasting races.

  When we sat down, Susan said, “I looked at the back page of The Chronicle of Higher Education and said, ‘I know that photo!’ Then I read the article and saw that you’d written it. It was so bizarre! You got your mother completely right—I could just hear her saying those things.”

  Because I found my mother’s personality so combative, I asked Susan how they remained friends for so long.

  “That’s why I like her,” she said. “She knows what she thinks and says it. She’s always been that way.”

  My mother could be cheerful, insightful, compassionate, and funny, but I could never see her through the eyes of a lifelong friend. My mother and I had the same stubborn personalities and held opposing views. We cared deeply for each other, though unlike some mothers and daughters, we could never be friends.

  I asked Susan if she knew that I was African American, and she said, “Yes. We knew from the day your mother brought you home.”

  I asked her, in frustration, why she and my mother’s other friends never said anything.

  “We didn’t mostly out of respect for your dad.”

  So there it was. It had been an open secret to all my parents’ family and friends, and probably all the friends and families I grew up with. Out of respect for my parents, perhaps particularly my father, no one brought it up.

  But what about respect for me?

  Both Karen and my aunt told me they thought I deserved to know. It was the reason they told me things that they did. For years, I was made to feel wrong while everyone around me protected my parents.

  Forty-two

  It was now more than ten years since I’d learned that the dad I grew up with was not my biological father and that I was a mixed-race African American.

  It took years of costly therapy, antidepressants, and medical care, as well as physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual healing to reconstruct a self that could hold the trauma of transition, the painful incongruities of family and rape.

  Maybe Jimmy was right that my quest was unhealthy.

  My parents did try, in some ways, to adapt to my new sense of identity, but it didn’t feel like enough, and I was angry that they didn’t or couldn’t try harder. When confessing this to Tara, she replied that my parents may not have the tools to deal with my transition the way that I could; that in this matter, they might never be able to give me what I want. She told me to go easy on them, but I was still too hurt. It seemed as though, even though they accepted that I was black now, they still saw our family as a white family; my mixed-race-ness was my issue alone and had nothing to do with them. I knew my transition was hurting them, too. It threw up a barrier between us, but I could not pretend that none of it ever happened, even if that was what they wanted.

  The guilt tore me apart. Thoughts of oblivion crept in. Wouldn’t it just be easier if I weren’t here? I was in too much pain. We’d all be better off. I remembered a passage from David Mura’s novel Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire. Fujimoto plummets through the sky, his shadow looming larger and larger against the pavement as he falls. The only way to survive in this country, Mura writes, is to avoid memory, to live ghost-free. But I wanted my memories and the memories of my ancestors. I didn’t want to survive by forsaking the past.

  I wanted to find the original sickness: what made my mother the way she was; what made me the way I was. What we were experiencing had
to be pathology. How could it be normal? If things were normal, I thought, none of it would have happened in the first place. My race wouldn’t have been a secret. My father wouldn’t have been the bogeyman.

  Somehow, I knew it was all necessary, that I would have to endure the unmaking of myself before I could be whole again—if I even ever was—but I didn’t know how long it would take, or if I could survive the unmaking.

  After seeking multiple treatments without success, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder II, the kind that tends toward depression. Bipolar disorder is hereditary, and in most cases, both parents suffer from it. With proper treatment, I started to feel like myself again: clearheaded and optimistic. I left my job at Northwestern and decided to make a new life for myself. I didn’t know where I would end up, but I was open to all possibilities.

  Forty-three

  My mother’s father died in the fall of 2016, and when I came home for Thanksgiving that year, she was editing together a slideshow of old family photos for the memorial service.

  One showed her and her sister at five and six years old putting fluffy tinsel on a Christmas tree while their young, black-haired father in shirtsleeves sat on a nearby chair, smiling as he watched them.

  “I look so sad in this photo,” she said. I looked closer and saw that, indeed, the child in the photo did not look filled with wonder or holiday cheer. Her face was blank as she looked up at her smiling dad.

  “Why?” I asked. “Do you remember what happened?”

  She said nothing, and then, vaguely, “I don’t know.”

  In another photo of her father as a young man, she cropped the cigarette he was holding out of the photo.

  “Why did you do that, Mom?” I asked. My grandfather smoked through most of his adult life, only quitting when his health required it.

  “Because this is how I want it. This is how it should have been.”

  Back in LA when I began writing a memoir, Claire suggested I read Paul Auster’s memoir The Invention of Solitude. After reading it, I realized how much writing can be about not writing; what happens when we come to emotionally difficult places that make our pencils stop and hover over the paper, our fingers pause above the keys. Those moments make us stand up, get some coffee, look out the window, check emails, clean the kitchen, file papers, pay bills, make phone calls, eat cookies, pace endlessly, or leave us staring off into space until we realize we can’t place the moment our minds began to wander, what we were thinking about, how long we’ve been sitting. We realize we are crying and cannot remember how or why it began.

  We build up fantasies little by little every day until they become a story we can live with. Things are smoothed over, and inconvenient bumps—the ones that lead down roads to things that are even more terrifying—are edited out.

  In Auster’s memoir, he realized his family’s amnesia about his grandfather and how he died was actually hiding a dark family secret—the fact that his grandmother murdered him. His father’s strangely distant behavior became illuminated, if not fully explained, by his role in these events as a boy, who, at five years old, was called to witness in court about his father’s murder. The grandfather’s image had been ripped out of family photos, which were taped back together as if he had never existed. His family altered the narrative of their lives to protect itself, to create a story they could live with. It was never spoken of and was probably carried out in bits and pieces, unconsciously, over time. The subject was ignored until it ceased to exist.

  In 2012, Michael and I traveled to Mantua, Italy, for a literary festival. We flew to Bologna and were met at the airport by volunteers from the Mantua Literature Festival—Franco, a retired driver who we soon learned had been working the festival for fourteen years, and Francesca, an eighteen-year-old who spoke Italian, Spanish, French, and English and wanted to learn Chinese. She chatted amicably with us as we headed north and west and soon we found ourselves traveling through a serene countryside studded with crumbling farmhouses.

  The sunset cast an orange glow over the fields, and it began to sink in that I was in the country of my ancestors. I was surrounded by Renaissance architecture lit up against a blue night sky so that the edge of every brick and dark window stood out. Suddenly, I felt the weight, the urgency, of the past.

  My grandfather’s family was from a small town called San Pietro, but there are dozens of San Pietros in Italy, and the family’s best guess is that it is the one in central Italy, near Rome.

  I have vague memories of those Italian relatives from the only family reunion we ever had. I was young, maybe nine or ten, and remember people who were very old, especially my Japanese great-aunt, whom my great-uncle brought home from the war. My mother seemed to be there out of a sense of duty. I don’t think my grandfather attended the reunion.

  Even from the family I know, all I have are fragments.

  I’ll never know the whole story of what happened between my mother and D. B. Because my mother was working through long-buried trauma for the first time, every time she told me the story it was different. Maybe she wasn’t drugged; maybe she just drank too much. Sometimes the story had no rape, just a blank page of memory.

  Eventually, she settled on the account that someone wronged her.

  “I realized what it was,” she told me, “when I saw a story on the news about a girl who had been raped while passed out and the incident had been recorded on a cell phone. That could have been me, I thought. If there were cell phones back when it happened, that could have been me.”

  As time went on, I started to understand that the search for my biological father was important to me because I never felt authentically black. I thought I needed him to prove something that the people around me made me question my whole life. I felt like an imposter, and I thought finding my father would cure that. I wanted someone I could point to and say, “See? I was right all along.”

  I came to realize that even with the holes in my family tree, the trauma of my conception, and the feeling of incompleteness that comes from being cut off from half my ancestry, I am enough. My looks, my background, my experiences, and inner world are enough. There is no standard experience of mixed-ness or blackness: there are as many ways to be black or mixed as there are black or mixed people in the world.

  On a recent visit home, I asked my parents what it was like growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, during desegregation and the civil rights movement. Even if they were young, surely they remembered the assassinations of JFK and MLK Jr., the Freedom Riders, the bra burnings, the student demonstrations on college campuses.

  My father said he watched the Watts riots on TV in 1965 and saw black people looting and destroying their own neighborhoods. He was about ten years old. He didn’t understand why they would do something like that.

  He told me about Mr. Good, an old black man who hung out at a café where he played pinball as a kid and who would talk to him and tell him stories. He talked about Greg Morris on Mission: Impossible and Bill Cosby on I Spy, well-educated blacks in the media whom he looked up to.

  “Those were the people who were role models,” he said.

  My mother said that, as a kid, she didn’t pay attention to what was going on around her. She said she vaguely understood that people were being oppressed and that it was wrong. She said she never heard her father use the N-word. Instead, he would talk about the “shanty Irish” and the “lace curtain Irish.” She didn’t mention any specific memories, news, or events from the civil rights era. Because she is a pro-life feminist, I thought she’d mention Roe v. Wade, Title IX, or the women’s rights movement. If she didn’t know Angela Davis, at least she would know Gloria Steinem. I asked her about this, and all she said, shaking her head, was, “I was stupid.”

  It seemed that none of the conflicts of that time touched my parents personally. Racial injustice was something that happened to other people in other parts of the country. I wondered how differently whites and blacks of that generation, the baby boomers, experienced that er
a.

  My father did a DNA test that proved he was 75 percent Irish.

  “More Irish than the Irish!” he said, noting that according to the test, people who have lived in Ireland for generations are only 72 percent Irish. He talked of his desire to take my brothers on a heritage trip to Ireland so they could see where their ancestors came from. He left me out of the invitation, acknowledging tacitly that I do not, in fact, have a genetic link to his family, yet not offering any sign that my past might matter, too.

  The accuracy of ancestry DNA tests became more refined in the ten years since I took my first test in 2006. The results from my recent test from Ancestry.com came back:

  39 percent Italian

  45 percent West and Central African (Cameroon, Congo, Benin/Togo, Southern Bantu, Ivory Coast/Ghana, and Mali)

  8 percent Russian

  8 percent West and Northern European (England/Wales, Baltic and Germanic regions)

  1 percent Native American

  The most recent large-scale migrations for my ancestors, around 1860, were from Southern Italy, Virginia, and the Southern United States. Southern Italians traveled to the United States to escape desperate poverty called la miseria in their newly unified country. At the same time, almost half of all enslaved African Americans lived in Virginia. After emancipation, black families spread throughout the Black Belt, the fertile region sweeping the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas to work the land as sharecroppers. In the Great Migration African Americans moved to the North, Midwest, and West Coast. While I know my mother’s European ancestors came to this country around the turn of the twentieth century, my African American ancestors had probably already been in this country for four hundred years.

  The eight percent Russian surprised me. Maybe, as my grandfather insisted, we do have Cossacks in our family.

  I have been to Rome, the Vatican, Florence, Mantua, Turin, and Palermo, but except for a three-day conference in New Orleans, I have never been to the South. Every week or so, I get notifications about new relatives on Ancestry.com, most of them distant, most of them African Americans. One man was listed as my second cousin or first cousin once removed. His family came from North Carolina. We could not find our common ancestor, but those answers are out there. I still have a long, fruitful journey ahead of me.