Blacks in the U.

There is a new black woman in the English department. Several people told me about her, that she is extremely nice, and that she looks white-like me. The way they described her, I didn't know what I'd see, though I think I thought to myself, Another "nice" light-skinned girl who knows how to make people like her. I thought, Well, I guess either I've done a great job and they've decided they can get along with light-skinned black women, or well, here is the light-skinned black woman who is still nice, the one coming to take my place.

I was sitting in a colleague's office and a nice-looking young woman stuck her head in the door. My colleague introduced us, This is the new person on staff. She was so happy to meet me, I realized this must be the young woman I had heard so much about-the brilliant, sweet, pleasant, lovely, new black woman who looks white. I suddenly had that feeling that I was looking at her through something-that I had backed up fifty yards to stare at her through a pinhole. Either she was showing something or I was seeing something so much in contrast to what I wanted to see that I didn't want to see it.

I was (1) seeing if she really did look white, (2) seeing if she looked as white as me, (3) saying, She's young, beautiful, charming, I'm on the way out, (4) and I was in love with her, too-she is graceful, (5) saying, She's nice to me now, but I will soon let her down, (6) saying, She's trying to get something from me, she'll use me, hurt me, (7) thinking- Oh my God, they've brought in another one. Then, I really am here, not because of me, but because that's the only skin they can tolerate. And I thought how sad it is that we are here, either because we are the only people they can find, or because they want us to be. I felt despairing and helpless.

Having lunch with her, all the feelings persisted, the fears and attractions. And I realized that something rare had happened when I saw her.

Often, when I see a black person, after having been in an all-white environment like this one for a long time, I experience a kind of shock, as if I've forgotten I'm black, and seeing that person makes me remember. It often comes upon me with a feeling of dread and revulsion, as if I'm looking in a mirror I don't want to see, and I have great shame about these feelings. But when I realized she is black, I felt another kind of distancing-the shock of recognizing what I look like. I said to myself, So this is what it is to look white to others. I felt a kind of disbelief, a lack of trust, as if something about her was deliberately deceitful and I had to watch out. And then I felt great fear for myself, for how I must be judged.

I have written about that sudden feeling of distance and alienation when I see a dark person that has so disturbed me. I had thought if I acknowledged it, told the truth, if I admitted how racism has been internalized, then that awful feeling would go away. I had thought that that reaction was connected to seeing someone dark, a dark man, for that is the one I thought we had been taught mostly to hate and fear. But now I see that that moment of separation and fear can be attached to anyone, that sometimes it is a honey-colored woman or even a child, that just as there is an internalized picture of a hated and feared dark person, there is also a picture of hated and feared light woman, and she looks like me. Perhaps if you are black, no matter what color you are, there is something wrong, there is no safe color. And perhaps there are even deeper structures than racism that keep us from touching the most fearful aspects of our own natures.
 

•    •    •

She did seem well-mannered, considerate, kind, and quick to help. When a waiter broke a glass, she bent down immediately to help him pick up the broken pieces. Instead of thinking, How kind she is, I thought, She's just trying to impress me. Or, Why didn't I think to do that?

Later, we exchanged mother stories and talked about the difficulty of separating, especially of establishing ourselves as our own women, our sexual lives. She is trying to live on her own, to be separate from her mother, and it is very hard, since for years her mother was her best friend. I could tell she feels a great deal of sadness and fear about these changes. I told her that the first thing my mother had said to me when I was born was, I will never be alone again. And how, when I went home this last time and tried to be that "Toi" who entertained my mother, the sweet, funny, good girl, telling funny stories and gossiping, I couldn't do it. (My poor mother, who thought my love would replace the love of the mother who had died when she was eighteen; and me, the poor daughter of a woman who took every hint of separation as a betrayal.) I knew eventually the old partings would come, and that sudden and terrifying feeling of disappointment and separation would come over me. I told her that what I grieved for most was not the relationship with my mother, but the part of me that couldn't go back and be that thing that had tried so hard to please her, to stay connected, the part that now felt so distant and guarded, so isolated and strange. Who am I if I am not the one I used to be?
 

•    •    •

It's funny. Seeing her begins with race and color and ends with us talking about our mothers, about separating and being a grown-up, and I wondered if that great grief of separation is connected to all these other moments of space between us-even the spaces of race and color.

Sometimes I think that eventually every identity breaks down to some self that has to learn to live between loneliness and connection, stuck in some primal way in a spot one cannot retreat from. I don't mean that being black can ever be a lost identity in this racist world, or that it should be. I don't mean anything like those people who say, I don't see color. But that in some way even our connections to the ones most like us become unsolid, unreal, and, though there is a necessity for trust and commitment, in another way we are nothing more than some kind of spirit-movement walking through the world clothed in a certain story of its life.

Perhaps this revulsion for the other is really a revulsion for my own self, my own fears of being "other," separate and alone. Perhaps accepting this distance, even from the ones most like me, the ones I love and would like to be closest to, is really the way I will finally see us as we truly are, all of us "other," frighteningly distant from each other, and yet needing and loving each other.
 

•    •    •

I remember a game I used to play in childhood, it was one of my favorite games and I played it for years. I would put myself in my grandmother's pantry behind the gate where they locked the dog, and I'd play "elevator," closing the gate, going up, opening. It may have been enacting a fear, for my grandmother was terrified of elevators and wouldn't go into a store or building if that was the only way she could go up, and it has been a fear of mine, too. For years I wouldn't get on a plane, and I was terrified to be on a bridge that was crowded and I couldn't get off, to be somewhere, anywhere, where I couldn't have access to something, somebody who loved me, who would save me from feeling alone. The anxiety was unbearable. I couldn't stand to be cut off and left to my own feelings of distance and terror.
 

•    •    •

I hear the dogs whining next door. Maybe they are locked up. I think of but can't imagine that feeling of being shut away again and again, weeping and begging, humiliated and in incredible pain, and going through it every day, every day forgetting what it felt like and coming out and loving those same people again, as if every day the part that loves is regenerated and then torn off again, like people coming back to live the same life over and over, and you can see it from a distance and know that every day they are going to have to live that same pain.

Or perhaps being alone you make up your mind to like it, to be in there thinking or talking to yourself or looking out the window or making up a game or a poem, and suddenly you're glad you're alone, you don't want them to come anywhere near you, and you feel like only if you're alone can you have your own life, write your own poetry, think, be, and hating the fact that maybe they might want you, call you, expect you to pay attention.

And then starting to like being with them, starting to trust that they can listen to you, that you can orchestrate the space between you so that you don't feel destroyed, taken advantage of. You can do it the other way, you can have your own separate and isolated life, but still, for a moment, here, it almost feels as if someone understands you and you understand that person, and you begin to think, Well, why not want everything different, why not begin a new way? and you think, Well, now maybe forever.
 

•    •    •

Race isn't a metaphor. Color isn't a metaphor. It doesn't feel like a metaphor. It hurts as if it's my skin. I feel sick. I hate myself. I make you hate me. I separate. I come back. Forgive me. This is the best I can do.
 

•    •    •

What I discovered when I saw the other white-looking woman in my colleague's office was that I loved her, was that going down into any "other"-as I might now be able to go down into my own self's "otherness," I find everything intact I was made to put out of me. Not just the dark person, but the light one, too, and the colors between, and the too fat and the too skinny and the frightening, dangerous father, and the weak, depressed one, and the huge white God with his head like a smokestack, and the beaten dog, and the mother scrubbing the tub out with a rag, and the grandmother in her quilted death, and the other mother with her long black hair braided on top of her head like a crown, and the poor boy standing over me with a knife who stank of pee and nearly took my life, and my own beautiful son, and my gold grandson, and the white and black of what we have all been called, and, even deeper, that blank moment of nothingness and separation that I fear more than my own death.
 

•    •    •

Never show your fear, my father always said when we'd see a big dog, they can smell it. But it is fear that I have acknowledged and taken in.