SALON

Cecelie S. Berry

Monday, May 9, 2005 6:55 PM UTC

Was he black or white?

As a middle-class black woman, I've had to deal with the intricacies of racial consciousness my entire life. Now my sons are part of an idealistic generation that believes race doesn't matter. Which of us is right?

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Was he black or white?

A few years ago, my sons and I were having dinner when Sam, who was then eight years old, told us about Dominick, a second-grade classmate known for his disruptive antics. When the Spanish teacher’s back was turned, Dominick would rise and canter about the classroom, twirling an invisible lasso above his head. A God-fearing child, he punctuated the close of the circle with a rip-roaring “Hallelujah!” My six-year-old, Spenser, and I fell out laughing as Sam mimicked Dominick’s escapades. When the laughter died down, a termite-sized query gnawed at me, so I asked, “Is Dominick black or white?”

Silence. Sam and Spenser looked at each other, a tacit conference. They were closing ranks and taking arms.

“What difference does it make?” Sam asked.

“It doesn’t make any difference. I just want to know,” I replied.

“But everybody’s the same. So it doesn’t matter.” Spenser now.

“I’m just curious.”

“Why’re you curious?” Sam asked.

“Because I want to know.” Great storm clouds thundered across their shared gaze: Mommy is a racist.

“I just want to be able to picture what was happening, that’s all. Now, was he white or black?”

They crossed their arms. I crossed my legs. The stir-fry curdled. Everybody pushed back from the table. I drew the ace card: “I’m your mother. Tell me now.”

Even as the conversation unfolded, I knew that it would change us. It was a turning point in the compass of our relationship: a black mother and her children having careless fun, and then the issue of race spins us clockwise or counter — I’m still not sure which. That night, I stumbled upon the mores of a new generation that believed — they didn’t just say it, they believed — that race didn’t matter. My children’s utter faith in this impressed me. They exhibited unwavering conviction and — warming to a mother’s heart, if contrary to my will — they were fierce allies, utterly united. They fought me (me!) for an ideal world where they were ultimately human, and race was simply not worth mentioning. I had discovered the vast new territory of their idealism, as unspoiled and fertile as the Americas must have been to explorers of yore. Appraising that Xanadu, I stuck my flag of racial awareness deep and declared it mine. Is my influence civilizing or am I — a black woman, the earth’s earth mother — just another conquering barbarian? I wonder still.

Sam, ever loyal to his mother, gave in. “He was black.”

That’s what I thought.

“You see?” I said brightly. “It’s really no big deal.” I shrugged elaborately, but I could see they didn’t believe me. One of the veils from behind which we mothers appear so perfect had slipped away that evening. They saw me a mite more clearly as a flawed and perhaps even dangerous person.

Look, we all do it, don’t we? We take note of who does what and what color they are, comparing them to what we know and expect, sizing them up to our understanding of their kind, the world. My sons felt that the mere mention of race poised one, teetering, on the slippery slope to bigotry. I did not agree. It’s human nature to form some lexicon for understanding other people, and race — a sociological construct, not a scientific term — has traditionally been one. We use it to help us get a handle on the situation, to think we know whom we’re dealing with.

It is how we behave when our attitudes and expectations go unmet — when the person standing before us has defied the rules that supposedly define his or her group — that tests us. It is the line of demarcation between how much we are trying to understand the world and how much we are trying to make it conform to our understanding.

When a white workman I called to fix a broken pane of glass arrives and rings our bell, he stares angrily at me for answering the door. He did not expect me. He has taken note of what is on the news, what he has heard and observed. He thought black people were in the ghetto and laid claim to an assumption that he is not entitled to but made him more at home in the world.

Nobody takes note of race more than we African Americans. A particularly gruesome crime occurs — the killing rampage of the “D.C. sniper,” for instance. The tacit but almost universal assumption among blacks was that the sniper must be white “’cause we don’t roll like that.” The idea that blacks were less prone to this kind of crime made us feel safer, even morally one-up to whites. When the sniper turned out to be black, we found ourselves more vulnerable to the idea that we, too, can produce and be victimized by serial killers.

African Americans feel the loss of these assumptions acutely. Our habits and cultural predilections have traditionally been our fortress, where we could feel at ease in a hostile land. To preserve that sense of security, we can be merciless enforcers of the rules: Our speech, dress, interests are expected to conform to the topography of “blackness” as we know it. In my mid-twenties, I attended the family reunion of a black friend and when asked how I wanted my steak prepared, I requested it medium rare. “Oooooh,” a woman ejaculated, a sirenlike noise assuring that all eyes would turn in our direction. “Only white folks like their meat rare. We black folks like our meat well done.”

My life has been incalculably altered by the fact of race. I am not angry about it; being born black in 1961 to educated, ambitious, and committed parents, I led a life that was in many ways charmed. I was poised to take advantage of the movements — civil rights, women’s liberation, affirmative action — that provided opportunities my ancestors had dared not dream of. From the beginning, I sensed that it would be my generation’s challenge to fully tame the wilderness of race, to build a “settlement” for blacks in America where we could completely embrace ourselves. That step taken, we could stand as equals and embrace others regardless of their skin color. It is a journey that generations before me initiated and one that I continue now as a mother. Having taken up those reins, I have turned often for direction from the map my parents drew for me, veering from it as needed.

My parents, who bore the burdens of growing up in segregation, raised us according to the exacting gaze of the white eyeball. They knew that to get ahead, we would have to be fluent in classical music, ballet, everything in the European tradition — to show white America we knew what counted. Fervent integrationists, my parents resembled most ambitious black people of the Greatest Generation. They resented, feared, and always distrusted whites, but noted that the rare black person crowned as worthy was the anti-black, so they poured us into that mold. There were costs in many families. Nightmarish, secret costs: “too dark” siblings being marginalized; the very light ones passing into oblivion as they passed for white. And always, no matter what your shade, there was the pressure to conceal your interest in “black” things: tap dancing, basketball, gospel music.

The pressure to assimilate mounted after we moved from a street of respectable, middle-class Negroes in Cleveland to the predominantly white, affluent suburb of Shaker Heights in 1971. We lived in the center of town, so far from the vast majority of black families that we often felt like exiles in a strange, lovely Siberia. I suppose that is why, on Sundays, my dad would often listen to black gospel music on the radio. It was, in part, the black church and the influence of black music that enabled him to rise from being a poor foster child to a successful internist. While he and Mother knew we had to move up — and urged us to adopt the “white” interests and mannerisms and friends to do so — my dad quietly resented that certain “black” things would necessarily be jettisoned along the way: gospel music and a whole array of high-cholesterol foods among them. That music — like the smell of chitlins cooking — sent us kids diving under pillows. The sound molested us, leaving echoes of guilt and confusion. It made us uncomfortable. The more uncomfortable we were, the louder Dad played it. One day — I might have been fourteen then — a screaming fight broke out between my father and mother because Dad was playing gospel music so loud that it seemed our white neighbors (a Cleveland Clinic doctor, a law firm partner) could hear. Mother marched downstairs, snapped off the radio, and cursed Dad out in tones so voluble, I couldn’t help but wonder why it didn’t concern her that the neighbors might hear that. Eventually, Dad stopped listening to gospel music. Eventually, he stopped coming home. He had a life we children knew very little about — one that included a “blackness” my mother despised and was determined, not altogether without cause, to banish from our lives.

Truthfully, I don’t think my parents ever felt completely comfortable with or even fully recognized the complex duality of our lives, or the toll that never fitting into either world would take on us children. They had tried to give us a better life and were confused by our flailing, identity struggles and discontent. Who and what was responsible for our unhappiness remains a source of division in our family even now. There was then and remains today only one gospel song to which we collectively knew all the words, and sang and danced to with abandon every Saturday night. It was “Movin’ On Up,” the theme to “The Jeffersons.”

As an adolescent in Shaker Heights, I tried to plot some middle ground between excelling like the white kids and being accepted — or at least left alone — by the black kids. At that time, there was no such Promised Land. So I conceived of my survival as a game: the Race Game. You pick up a card, a behavior or circumstance is described, you have to guess the race of the individuals involved. Sometimes I played for fun; sometimes I played as if my life depended upon it. White people often refer to the “race card,” the excuse that blacks supposedly hold at the ready to explain away our failures. But for my generation, the first to embark upon the brave new world of integration, the Race Game was much more complex: an obstacle course, as intricate as chess, more exhausting than Monopoly.

Playing the game, I used my experience to guess not just who was what but how those people might think, feel, react. To hear the silent subtext, anticipate the racial insult that comes seemingly out of nowhere to hijack you, hold you back, put you in your place. Sometimes I still find myself playing it, though I also long for what is instinctive to my children: the freedom to take someone, anyone, at face value.

One day, in junior high school, I hear a group of students enter the school library — cursing, bellowing, cackling — and I don’t even have to peek between the stacks to know: They are black. They won’t linger here, but while they do, I stay hidden.

Years later, in my thirties, I am in a boutique on the Upper East Side of New York, and the well-heeled shop ladies are discussing some missing stock: ankle bracelets, cute erasers, kitschy stuff. I bristle, expecting an accusation. The owner senses this and explains with an indulgent laugh, “This time of year the girls from such-and-so academy come in and take things, a springtime ritual of the senior class.” I don’t have to wonder: These girls are white and rich. The offense that I had anticipated did not come, and the owner knew to explain the situation: move ahead one step. But because these girls are privileged and white, their crime will be dismissed as a prank: move one step back.

That incident recalled a family discussion about race in my own childhood, when my sisters, who were attending the Hathaway Brown School for Girls in the early 1970s, came home with a similar story. They were slightly breathless and impressed with the exploits of the white girls — their friends — who regularly shoplifted at local pharmacies. My parents, astonished by the idea that shoplifting was an amusing pastime and frightened that my sisters were impressed with it, launched into a harangue on how we could not — should never even consider — doing what they did. We were angry at their tirade, an anger that would magnify through the years as we attended schools with well-to-do whites only to be reminded that we did not have their privileges, their safety net, their freedom. Our parents would continue to insist, often at the point where we were our most daring or inventive, to take note of how differently things can be interpreted when color is involved — their message aim high always diluted by the warning but don’t forget that you’re black. It was enough to radicalize many black children like us into the very militancy that our opportunities were supposed to render moot.

This is the part of the game that feels like Russian roulette: participate, work hard, move up, but act too much like everyone else and you risk losing everything. My husband, who was also educated in private schools and colleges, tells me that in the corporation where he now works, black people do not feel they have the same latitude as their white co-workers to read the newspaper half the day or “work from home.” He is ever mindful of the way standards may unexpectedly shift when it comes to him, to us.

When I met him in law school, he was an artful tactician of pleasantness, managing to get along with everyone — black or white, radical or conservative. But after years in the corporate world, I have seen him develop a rigid, potent suspicion and an impatience with the children’s belief that they are no different from anyone else. When our son Spenser wanted to be in the same class as his best friend, Seth (who is white), with a teacher his father and I know to be a racist (though white parents think she is superb), I was astonished when his father exploded, “What works for Seth will not work for you!” Spenser appealed to me with tear-filled eyes.

“You must trust us,” I sighed. “We know the score.” By the end of the year, Spenser’s encounters with the teacher at school were enough to make him glad he wasn’t in her class. He came around to our way of seeing things. You cannot win the game with your eyes shut.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Of course, times are mostly better now, so are we wrong to pass down this sensitivity to our children — so ready, willing, and able to greet all with open arms? Am I, mired forever in racialized thinking, dragging Sam and Spenser down with me? If I am on the side of caution, do I err? Will we all ever get beyond race if we don’t stop making so much of it? Isn’t there room for reckless idealism? If the Dominick of Sam’s long-ago story had been white, I would have disapproved, but laughingly, part of me admiring the spirit — and envying the freedom — that it takes to be an irrepressible cutup. But because he was black, Dominick’s bad behavior raised the ante and my antennae. I was less amused, more cautious, afraid for him and my sons and all the black boys who are too quickly discarded as trouble. As my parents had with me, I wanted Dominick to march boldly into the world, but not to take too many liberties, not to go too far. I’ve decided that a rigid, unedifying color blindness cannot reign in my house. It is by taking note of race and all that accompanies it — the assumptions, the stereotypes flying to and fro like flaming arrows — that we can achieve a transcendental compassion, a unifying respect for the power of experience. People are people, there’s no doubt about it, but you have to understand why things are the way they are. Not to take note of race or, more important, discuss it, would leave my sons in the dark. They must know where they stand and what to look out for, welcoming the surprise of those who reject the rules attached to skin color because to cleave to them would frustrate their inner truth. Luckily for my children, those rules are eroding, but they will endure if not consciously challenged.

Now twelve, Sam attends a summer camp for the academically gifted. He asks me, “Why are so many of these kids Asian and Indian?” The first time he asked, I ducked the question, not wanting to deal with all that it dredged up — the unpleasant racial competitiveness (we were here long before them), the bitterness of the black bourgeoisie toward blacks who, for myriad reasons, languish. But the second time he asked, I knew he wanted an answer, and why not? I have taught him to take note, and the exercise does not end with the observation. So I said, “In Asian and Indian cultures, learning has always been an activity for the elite and revered, and in America they know it is the key to upward mobility. For African American slaves, it could mean death, and until my generation, many blacks considered education worthless, since blacks were excluded from most gainful employment. Even today, higher education can have the effect of isolating many blacks from their community, leaving them to exist on the margins of a white society that is not yet fully inclusive.” We talk and talk about the cultural differences, values and attitudes that are inculcated over time and passed down to one generation from the next. And the talking continues.

The years since our conversation about the unruly Dominick have fermented deeper queries, ones that I also struggled with while growing up, playing the Race Game. Who does what and why? And, most critically: Where do I fit in? The last question is the toughest to answer. Are you going to cling to the status quo, internalize the stereotypes and traditions? To be “truly black,” will you avoid sushi, decline steak tartare? Or, because they symbolize the “non-black,” dine on them until you are nauseated? To racially deny or neuter oneself, even to get ahead, exacts too high a price. I have searched for some compromise that embraces the reality of race but that challenges it too; one that leaves my children and me free to pursue a personal dimension but that sustains a keen political awareness of who we are, where we come from, and why.

I despised my parents for their mixed messages, the sleight of hand that always left us looking for the kernel of who we were under the shell of who we would never be. But now I appreciate that born of my parents’ insistence on “white” things came a sense of new possibilities for me (proving, I suppose, the bromide that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger). Without their passionate, demanding myopia, I don’t think I could have seen that I didn’t have to wear the straightjacket of my color. Even as I sputtered and floundered in synchronized swimming and ran half-heartedly across the tennis court, I grew more confident in my determination that I didn’t have to cast myself according to “script”: to be a bump-dancing, loud-talking, finger-snapping black girl. If I could endure the unavoidable discomfort, the never fitting in or measuring up, I could go anyplace, learn anything, pick and choose from a constellation of behaviors and interests. I was free to explore my own way to becoming me.

For a while in college, I slipped and slid between an angry, brittle exclusion of white folks and a keen desire to find in my black compatriots — smart kids who, in private schools and tony suburbs, were often lonely like me — a sense of racial and personal unity. But I grew uneasy when my roommates, bourgeois black girls from nice homes, joined a black pride organization that required them to do penance for their light skin and privilege. It seemed plain crazy when they complied with the demands of the grand poo-bah to shave their “damnable” processed hair to “make up for” their tawny skin and privileged backgrounds. I believed that the people who ran this group were angry and disenfranchised. They were manipulating my roommates not because they were believers in black power, but because they were jealous and insecure. I had noted that even with whites out of the equation, the issue of race still dogged us: What was “black enough”? Who was “black enough”?

I slowly emerged from the cocoon we black students had created for ourselves in the misguided belief that we’d be safe from prejudicial judgments. I moved into a different suite and began talking to white students again. In time I realized that many people could teach me about who I was, and with that knowledge I shaped my future. To exclude anyone along the way would be to limit my own journey. In the end, it was at Harvard, ironically, that I enjoyed being black more than I had since I was a child in Cleveland. I had fun — lots of heartfelt and genuine fun, with Donna Summer, Aretha Franklin, Sister Sledge, and Parliament Funkadelic providing a background beat. I tap-danced in my clogs across the Yard without guilt or embarrassment. I even grew to like gospel music, thanks to Kuumba, the black gospel choir. And from white students — some friends, some passing acquaintances — I learned about people I’d never heard of: Otis Redding and Stan Getz. I took quiet pride in the fact that nobody quite got me, but I was gradually getting me.

Dealing with race — experimenting and exploring it, embracing and rejecting it, playing with it, parsing it — turned it into so much more than a game. That was my adolescent way of experiencing my dilemma, of coping with the feeling that I had to manipulate people to see me the way I wanted them to in order to matter, to succeed. The Race Game was a necessary stage, a kind of puberty in itself. But my journey with race has, in adulthood and certainly with motherhood, eclipsed the metaphor of gamesmanship. It has helped me achieve something larger and far more important. My race has expanded the contours of my world and myself. My journey is inextricable from my race, and my race will be bound always to the journey. They are one. That, I think, is the way it’s supposed to be.

My understanding of my parents, which grew with time and the forgiveness of one’s parents that accompanies it, are gifts that I hope that Sam and Spenser will offer me. If I am wrong, and race doesn’t matter to the extent that we should banish it forever from our conversation, I hope they’ll understand why I thought it did. But for now, we routinely integrate race into our discussions. What I care about most is that these discussions are honest. Race doesn’t determine the way my children see people — I am proud that they continue to give everyone a chance — but it is too potent to pretend it doesn’t influence situations or alter lives. To grapple with it makes us better. My children and I don’t always agree on what is racist, and they are free to say when the mere mention of the issue feels knee-jerk or inauthentic. When it is irresponsible not to discuss it, we face it together.

I have taught my children to note that other people — white or black — may think that being black means acting this way or that, but it doesn’t have to mean that to them. I have exposed them to many things and have allowed them to embrace what they love. They have discovered that they prefer playing basketball to tennis or swimming, and that is fine with me.

I have dealt in the palindrome that race is involved in everything, but not everything is attributable to race. My theory is this: To realize how some people are likely to see you is an essential step to discovering and defending who you really are. I believe that I am, then, less a colonizer of my boys’ impressionable minds than a tour guide to the world as it is, and it has been my job, in these formative years, to point out the major attractions, the time-wasting distractions, on the trip. Race is so many things along the way: a distorted fun-house mirror of misperception and depravity, a monument of cruelty and oppression. One must be familiar with the signposts of one’s heritage — to measure the progress made, avoid the mistakes of the past, and, ultimately, move to higher ground. So I stand by my flag of racial awareness — an obstacle to progress some might argue, but perhaps I point the way. In either case, history cannot condemn me because, in the final analysis, I am a mother and I have only the best intentions.

Excerpted from “Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves,” edited by Kate Moses and Camille Peri, former editors of Salon’s Mothers Who Think. Copyright (c) 2005 by HarperCollins. Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers.

Friday, Apr 27, 2001 7:25 PM UTC

The wrong kind of black

Since high school, white liberals have told me that the authentic black experience is brutal and victimized. What does that make me?

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The wrong kind of black

Mr. Swenson was a favorite English teacher among the collegebound, Advanced Placement students at Shaker Heights High School. He was a tall, lean man, with sandy brown hair that tumbled into his eyes when he spoke excitedly about Melville or Hemingway. He had an air of gentleness that engendered trust. He seemed like one of us.

He taught Advanced Placement American literature in my junior year and when I entered his class in the fall of 1976, there was, typically, only one other black student there, another female. That, too, was typical. But that’s how it was, even in integrated schools like Shaker High; blacks just didn’t take advanced classes. It was normal.

Nor did anybody question the fact that in the entire year of studying American literature, the class was not assigned a single book by a black author.

About midyear we were given an assignment in which we could write on a topic of our choice and read one of two books — one was by a white author, the other was “Native Son” by Richard Wright. I had enjoyed Wright’s novel “Black Boy,” which I’d read independently, so I chose “Native Son.” I was the only student in the class to do so.

For a teenage black girl thirsting for some reflection of her own reality in literature, “Native Son” was a disaster. I was outraged by the story of Bigger Thomas, who kills two women in the novel, and is executed. I had some difficulty writing the essay, which I mentioned to my friend Ruth. Our friendship was rare in a high school where racial boundaries were rarely crossed, but she was from a liberal Jewish family for whom my race was not an issue. With Ruth, no topic was beyond debate. We discussed everything: race, books, boys and our impending literary greatness. She told me something I didn’t know: The essays would be used to determine who in our class would be invited to compete in a national writing contest. She suggested that I discuss my writer’s block with Mr. Swenson.

I delivered my conclusions in dramatic fashion to Mr. Swenson the next day. “The book is full of stereotypes; there is no context to Bigger’s murdering rampage, no motivation for his brutality. Bigger Thomas is a caricature.”

Mr. Swenson grimaced and I thought he understood my frustration. Then he said: “Don’t you know what it’s like in the ghetto? Don’t you have any idea what it means to be black in America?”

I blinked, floored by the sheer absurdity of the question. Mister Rogers was telling me that I didn’t know what was going on in my neighborhood. Like he did.

I told him that of the many blacks I’d known who were from the ghetto, exactly none had become double murderers. Doctors and lawyers and teachers, I knew, along with funeral directors, musicians and librarians, but not one homicidal maniac. I laughed, this seemed so obvious. We stared at each other, each of us convinced that the other was unreachable.

To Mr. Swenson, “Native Son” represented the entirety of black experience, a story of unexpurgated violence and tragedy. How did he see me then, brimming as I was at 15, with the expectation of having it all? A mutation probably. Doomed to be a genetic blip on a black screen. As my Advanced Placement modern European history teacher predicted, “Keep getting those A’s my dear, and you’ll never get married.”

I walked down the hall chuckling (“Doomed, I’m doomed”) when Ruth came up accompanied by Peter, her latest crush, and asked how my conference had gone. Not waiting for my answer, she beamed at Peter, “Isn’t Mr. Swenson the greatest?” Peter nodded soberly.

Eventually, I handed in my paper on Bigger Thomas. I wasn’t picked to participate in the English contest, but I had kind of expected that. That honor went to Ruth and Peter. They both won.

Through the years, I have often recalled my conversation with Mr. Swenson. In the late ’70s, black culture in white classrooms was reduced to one novel, or one historical event — slavery — that held up black people as victims and their experience as one of unrelieved degradation.

Although black culture today is accorded more respect, the tendency to view blacks principally as victims persists. It is part of the symbiosis of white and black cultures, in which the belief is asserted (by whites) and internalized and acted out (by blacks) that black suffering is “authentic” and black success is “selling out.”

It’s like the call and response that I imagine might have been echoed between an overseer and his slaves, or that which a sergeant and his new recruits might share. The call is “You are doomed, oh yes you are,” and the response is “We are doomed, we sure ‘nuf are.”

Over time, this call and response becomes a silent racial dynamic: The rhythm comforts and the words hypnotize and black students succumb to the Pied Piper’s lure of low achievement. In doing so they are answering the call not of black authenticity, as they often believe, but of white racism.

At Harvard College I remember a bitter argument with a Jamaican student who told me that to understand the black experience, I had to be poor. In effect, he was telling me the same thing that Mr. Swenson had: Without failure — because that’s what poverty is in this society — you are not black. Our identity lies in our powerlessness. Success makes you something other than black — but not white. And over the years it has surprised me less that, perceiving this, many young blacks choose hell over purgatory. It’s still a shame, though, because it keeps black talent mired in low standards, which become low expectations, and the cycle continues.

Recently, a young black mother, educated at MIT, reassured me as our children played in the park that the public schools in our integrated town, Montclair, N.J., were much better than those in New York City. I laughed, “That’s like saying purgatory is better than hell.”

Her response floored me: “Well, it is,” she said.

We do not even think of heaven, much less reach for it.

In the mid-1980s, I attended Harvard Law School, and I remember an impromptu gathering of black students to watch the new, controversial “The Cosby Show.” Afterward, one woman proclaimed the show “unrealistic” because the mother had bought her daughter a new dress for a party. Others disagreed.

“Now, you know black people be buyin’ a new outfit for a party, whether they have the money or not,” someone shouted to general laughter.

I believe that the source of the woman’s objection was not that Clair Huxtable had bought her daughter a party dress, but that the Huxtables were a functioning black family, portrayed in celebration and not in crisis. This woman’s understanding was that this was, simply, impossible.

Over time black culture has become more enamored of black oppression than of the struggle against it. Black oppression is an important part of our history — not to be denied or apologized for — but I’ve learned it’s not the whole story. Our successes have too often been overlooked, hidden in the lush tapestry of suffering that seems to pacify blacks and reassure whites.

As a law student, I attended a class in civil rights law taught by a black professor, Randall Kennedy. One day, visibly upset, he informed the class that a new book that listed the most influential lawyers of the 20th century failed to mention Thurgood Marshall, the legal architect of the civil rights movement. The class fell silent, shocked by the monumentality of the oversight.

Mainstream white culture has always circumscribed what black culture is, and often blacks have bought into this narrow version that celebrates failure and delegitimizes or ignores black success, frustrating it when possible.

Ten years after graduating from high school, I was planning my wedding when I again had occasion to reflect on my conversation with Mr. Swenson. Ruth flew in from Europe and we went for a fitting of her bridesmaid’s dress. Afterward at a cafe, she told me that my paper on Bigger Thomas had impressed Mr. Swenson after all. But there were only two spots for the competition. Ruth was in. So it came down to Peter or me. Mr. Swenson had asked Ruth to choose. Ruth explained that while she knew I was the better writer, she was in love with Peter. She hoped I could understand.

“I do indeed. You got to cozy up with Mr. No Talent and Swenson got to keep his contest an all-white affair. And there was no racism involved because the person who made the decision, the love-starved, 16-year-old girl who was permitted to decide, was reputedly a friend of mine.” I hissed, “Yes, I understand.”

Ruth reddened. She was an avowed feminist and she’d held onto this because she was genuinely ashamed. I stared at the foam on my cappuccino, which had nearly sunk into the espresso beneath, and took a sip. Still bitter. I wondered if she could ever understand that I was as much in love with the idea of being in that contest as she had been with Peter. Probably more. But I just said: “I could have won, you know.”

She snapped, “It seems to me you did just fine.” Then she looked away.

I surveyed my past and future. Mr Swenson hadn’t stopped me then, and he surely couldn’t stop me now. Not without my cooperation. So I said: “You know, you’re absolutely right.” I tore open two packets of Equal and poured them in my cup, laughing. It all seemed so terribly obvious. “What matters is, now I know the whole story.”

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Friday, Feb 11, 2000 5:00 PM UTC

United nations of nannies

I wanted to be Lady Liberty, but my nannies from foreign lands never became part of the family.

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I didn’t intend to hire nannies from so many different
countries. I started out believing in the perfect nanny just as I
had believed in the inevitability of true love. And I pursued my
nanny just as vigorously, bringing to my search optimism,
determination, perseverance and, perhaps most important, an open
mind. Unlike some mothers, I didn’t have a preference for, say,
West Indian or European nannies. There was no continent or region
that I wouldn’t consider. My only criterion was that the nanny I
hired come highly recommended.

So come they did. There was Loretta from Panama, Sophie from
France, Georgette from Ghana, Samantha from England, Yasmine from
Sweden and on and on. Looking back on it, I must have felt like
Lady Liberty and perhaps went on a suitably sized ego trip.

Yes, ego too was involved. I didn’t just feel I needed a nanny,
I felt I deserved one. Even now, having been around the block a
few times, I feel envy toward the professional mothers who have
their nannies call me to arrange play dates. My thinking was: If
I’ve got the most important job in the world, where’s my
secretary, my girl Friday? It seemed to me that a nanny was an
indispensable accouterment of accomplished motherhood.

My competitive streak made me a ready patsy in the nanny shell
game. But there was also inside me the girl from Cleveland who
had never convinced herself that she was a woman of the world. I
remember hearing one mother rattle off a list of the countries
from which her nannies had hailed: Turkey, Italy, Greece — a
veritable travelogue of exotic locales. She sounded so
cosmopolitan, so superior, and it seemed that the next best thing
to visiting those countries was having a nanny from one of them.
Maybe better. After all, this approach saved time and money.
There was no jet lag and no need to pack light. I imagined her
children as little polyglots who, having soaked up all that
culture, would be advantageously situated for 21st century
globalization. And I thought: If she can do it, so can I.

When Yasmine came to us she seemed fertile with cultural
provenance. She had been born and raised in Sweden by her Swedish
mother and Nigerian father. Although they divorced when she was
5, she seemed proud of her mixed heritage. Yasmine was 13 when
her mother remarried and moved the family from Stockholm to a
small northern town close to Finland. There, Yasmine and her
sister would negotiate the difficulties of growing up
half-African in a world almost entirely blond and blue-eyed.
Their little half-brother, Peter, would have none of these
difficulties; he not only “looked Swedish” but was also blessed
with a family more stable than Yasmine had ever known. (Peter was
about the same age as my oldest son, Sam.)

Yasmine chatted nervously in the car on the trip to our house.
She had heard of lots of successful black Americans, like Oprah
Winfrey and Bill Cosby. Did I know any of them? I laughed. It
seemed that the cultural education would go both ways. She showed
me a picture of her mother. “She is not a blond,” she said. “I
want her to dye her hair, but she won’t. Don’t you think she’d
look better if she were a blond?”

“I think she looks great as she is,” I said.

Perhaps I should have taken the next U-turn back to the airport.
But I didn’t. I expected Yasmine to have insecurities. I know too
well what it is to grow up not being anybody’s idea of
perfection. And I know what a great opportunity that can be, with
the proper support. I thought I could actually help her, that we
could help each other.

Then we passed a local college. “I was never much good in school.
My brother is very smart, everyone says. And my sister is
pursuing her studies.”

I brightened. “What is she studying?”

“Makeup artistry,” she said.

In time, Yasmine introduced me to Swedish “culture,” as she
experienced it. She showed me photographs of a favorite
springtime activity. The teenagers in town would each climb on a
huge floating piece of ice in a nearby lake. Using
gondolier-style poles, they would ram these small icebergs into
one another. “It’s slippery, so you have to be careful, but it’s
so much fun.”

“Yasmine,” I breathed, “that sounds so dangerous.”

“Yes, if you fall between the icebergs, they won’t find you until
late summer. Maybe never. There isn’t a lot to do there, though.
That’s why I’m here.”

With every nanny I hired, there was the Story, one they mentioned
in casual conversation, in a perfectly normal tone, that chilled
you to the bone. It’s not a story they include in their
curriculum vitae or even, I suspect, one that they tell their
other employers. The nannies I’ve had are more open with me
because I’m a black woman; they assume I’ll understand and,
probably, that I’ve even been through worse. In their eyes, what
I might think or feel doesn’t really count.

My invisibility makes the Story a double-edged sword: If the
nannies are more likely to share with me the true elements of
their experience — the neglect, abuse, self-destructiveness –
they are also more likely to act out their anger at my or my
children’s expense, with the expectation that I will understand
and forgive.

Yasmine herself was double-edged: She had the yin and yang of
someone who never fit in anywhere. Her cheerfulness hid her
anger; her friendliness disguised the withering contempt she held
for everyone; her acts of thoughtfulness masked a desperate
selfishness. Yasmine had been betrayed by everyone; of course,
she would betray us.

I was putting away laundry one day. My baby son, Spenser, was
asleep, and Sam was jumping up and down on the bed. Yasmine was
out of the house and I was basking in the sense of relief that
always accompanied her absence. I was putting clothes in Sam’s
drawer when he stopped jumping and said, “Yasmine calls me
stupid.” I looked at him. “She calls me Sam Stupid.”

I thought of all the times she had said she wasn’t smart. I
thought of how underneath the admiration she’d expressed for
Peter’s abilities, I sensed her jealousy. I thought of all the
times I’d been in the house with her and Sam, and that she had
never, ever called him such a thing when I was around. I knew
that she was more than wounded: She was sneaky and dangerous and
determined to demean my son, as she had been demeaned. I didn’t
understand. I didn’t feel compassion. I wanted to kill her.

In the fall, Ruth came. She was Israeli, in her early 50s, and
her nearly grown children were well-situated: one in medical
school, another in graduate school studying physical
rehabilitation. She valued education, seemed practical, confident
and mature — the antithesis of Yasmine.

But then came the Story. After a couple of weeks, Ruth told me
that her mother had been a Holocaust survivor. After the war,
whenever Ruth came home just five minutes late from school,
perhaps without a button or a handkerchief, her mother would lock
her in the closet beneath their staircase for hours. As a result,
she told me she was a claustrophobic and couldn’t play with Sam
and Spenser in their tent.

Of course, I understood — or tried to. It must be both a miracle
and a curse to have had a mother who was brave enough to survive
the horrors of a concentration camp, yet remained so haunted and
fearful from the experience that anything less than perfection in
her daughter deserved cruel punishment. I am amazed by what a
strong chain cruelty is, how it can create a hidden culture of
its own. The abused become abusers, that much is clear. In the
back of my mind, I knew my sons could easily become a link in the
chain that had imprisoned Ruth.

So I worked from home, slipping downstairs at intervals to peek
and to listen. Then, one day, as she was leaving, Ruth suggested
that maybe Sam was experiencing some separation anxiety at
nursery school because he was a manic-depressive. She adjusted
her glasses like Freud in discourse. “These things run in
families,” she added.

I laughed, “I think it’s just a stage.”

The next day she tried again. “You should have him looked at,”
she said. I assured her that I had nothing but the utmost
confidence in both of my children.

But she wouldn’t drop it. She was angry because I wouldn’t listen
to her. So she went to a white neighbor of mine, who later told
me that Ruth had said my 3-year-old was having a breakdown. “She
obviously doesn’t have the qualifications to make that call,” she
added.

I fired Ruth. I suspect that she was the manic-depressive and
that she was projecting her own emotional crisis onto my son. She
was also trying to isolate him from me, to get me to reject him.
Then she would have been free to inflict on him abuse similar to
that which she had suffered.

“There is nothing for us in France, no work, so my father got me
a job with a family here.” Sophie spoke matter-of-factly, with
such self-possession that the Story was hard to identify. I think
it lay behind what she said next, with a frisson of emotion. “But
that family was terrible. They treated me like nothing. The
father would walk into my bedroom while I was dressing.”

With the help of a French couple she’d met, Sophie had left her
first job and eventually found a nanny position in a nearby town
known for its affluence. She seemed to have recovered from her
initial experience and was happy with her current family.

We hired Sophie for the two-week Christmas break. Initially, the
children enjoyed playing with her. It irritated me that she often
bragged about her other family’s wealth, as if she had to let us
know that they had more than we did. I didn’t get too concerned
though. I was impressed that she was so active with my sons,
helping them construct the toys and puzzles they received during
the holidays. She had constructed a 3-D Eiffel Tower. I asked my
sons, “Wow, did Sophie do that with you?”

“No,” they said, “she did it for us.”

That bothered me. Then I found a K’nex model, a Lego set, a
Robotics toy, all done by Sophie — alone. “I’m going to have to
talk to Sophie about this,” I said aloud.

“Yeah, right,” Spenser, just 2, said.

It dawned on me that he’d been saying that a lot. “That’s not
very nice, Spenser. Where did you hear that?”

“Sophie says it all the time,” Sam said.

I didn’t have to fire Sophie. She just didn’t show up one night.
Later, with impressive sang-froid, she called to ask if she could
come baby-sit the next day. I said, “Yeah, right.”

It’s still hard to look back and to realize how dangerous these
women were. People think that nannies pose only the threat of
physical violence or sexual abuse, and beyond that, you’re
home-free. That’s not so. There are many kinds of abuse; violence
lives in many forms all over the world. This is the understanding
that I lacked, the sophistication I wanted and now have.

Cultural exchange is a marketing tool employed by agencies. Among
bourgeois mothers like myself, worldliness exists as a value unto
itself, making us easy targets. But when it comes to caregiving,
the strength of the individual is all that counts. It’s easy to
imagine spending a lifetime looking for that needle in a
haystack: the one perfect person of all those who apply, the
person who is most capable of caring for one’s family.

I’ve stopped looking for that person. Now I am strangely
possessed by a need to advise other mothers: Hang out with the
new nanny for a couple of weeks. Listen for the Story. Then
you’ll know what scars you’re dealing with.

Most of the time they ignore me. They write me off as bitter: I
didn’t luck out; I’m probably a victim of my own bad judgment.
And I suppose I am still bitter. Because when they tell me
that their nanny is “wonderful,” a “dream,” a “member of the
family,” my eyes flash darkly as I hasten to inquire: “Where’s
she from?”

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Wednesday, Sep 29, 1999 4:00 PM UTC

Home is where the revolution is

When they forsake the revolution to raise children at home, smart women fear they've made a stupid choice.

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Home is where the revolution is

We sit in a circle of secondhand chairs. My book group consists of
two lawyers, two psychologists and a social worker. Once determined
careerists, we are now at-home mothers, each of us with at least two
children. We feel
splintered and disenfranchised from the culture of paid, working parents who, whatever they say, think we have it easy.

Today we are discussing a novel titled “Persian Nights” by Diane Johnson. It is the story of Chloe, a surgeon’s wife and at-home mother in Southern California. Chloe is an arranger of activities for her husband and children. Like many such mothers, she has begun to feel like a bit player in others’ lives. Her husband plans a trip to Iran in the weeks preceeding the Shah’s downfall, and, ever the accessory, Chloe finagles an art-history fellowship from a local museum so that she can accompany him.

In Iran, Chloe experiences an awakening of her political self. At personal risk, she helps the “Westernized” wife of an Iranian doctor to flee the country with her children. But Chloe is unable to sustain her newfound activism. As the assassinations and arrests increase, she takes a lover and establishes a domestic routine similar to the one she left in California. Ultimately, she returns home facing divorce, the possible loss of her children and no way to support herself. Not exactly like the women in my book group, perhaps, but Chloe is still too close for comfort.

A grave silence settles over the five of us, smart women who fear we’ve made a stupid choice. The possibility of widowhood seems distant compared to the threat of divorce. Feminists warn us that, in either event, having stayed at home is economic hara-kari. And three of us, including me, who still navigate the detritus of our parents’ divorces, have intimate knowledge of its costs.

Fueling our discomfort is the perception that staying at home with our children is a betrayal of our professional training. After all, you don’t need a degree to be an at-home mother. We all encounter those who assume that we were never serious about doing anything else. I’ll never forget the parting comment of one of my Harvard Law School classmates: “Don’t worry about which area to practice,” he said. “Soon you’ll be home changing diapers.”

Culturally, the skewed attitudes about at-home motherhood seem to proliferate. Though politicians bemoan the decline of family values, there is little support for parents who curtail their working lives for their children’s benefit. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have published articles referring to at-home mothers as executive “status symbols,” a label that demeans the work we do and the sacrifices we make. In movies like “One True Thing” and “Stepmom,” the mother who raises her children at home fades away, swanlike, stricken by cancer, while the younger career woman flourishes. These movies function like health warnings: Work makes women stronger; stay-at-home motherhood is carcinogenic.

I pose this scenario for the group: “Maybe we are like Chloe, seeking shelter from social change in domestic routine. The majority of mothers work outside the home now. They’ve stayed true to the cause of the sexual revolution. Maybe we wimped out, sold out.”

Before I finish, the group shouts me down. As usual, our monthly meeting veers into the One True Discussion: How to balance parental duty with personal ambition. The others counsel patience; they still believe that, after years at home, they can return to meaningful careers. I am buoyed by their optimism, but not long after they depart, and I gather the fruit salad and coffee mugs, the doubts return.

I know they mean well, but they just don’t get it. My life is a revolution, interrupted. When the civil-rights movement told me that I was somebody, implying that I could be somebody greater still, I took that message as a calling. When the women’s movement threw down the gauntlet and challenged me to have it all, I went for it. I believed in those movements; I was a part of them.

And now I am supposed to wait? For what? To sell real estate at 50-something?

The ideals of feminists and civil-rights activists were respected in my home. My father and grandfather fought Jim Crow and poverty to become doctors. While the black nationalists marched up Euclid Avenue in Cleveland in the late 1960s, my sisters and I were headed downtown in pink tights and slippers for ballet and piano lessons. If the style was different, the spirit was the same. It was expected that I would take the privileges that so few black children around me enjoyed and, with them, Do Great Things. In my world, that meant becoming a doctor or lawyer. “Mother” wasn’t even on the list.

But a mother is what I became, and what I learned from my mother and grandmother is this: When it comes to raising the children, the buck stops with me. I’ve hired help here and there, but no full-time third-party parents, no surrogate moms. Returning to a part-time position with a law firm a year after my first son, Sam, was born, I made the mistake of proclaiming to my mother that the Panamanian nanny I’d hired was “wonderful.” There was a dark pause on the line before she tartly replied, “Well, she couldn’t be as wonderful as you.”

So I’m riven by the conflict between serving my children and serving the movement that gave birth to me. I can’t escape the sense that, like Chloe, I abandoned the cause. In time, I found I wanted the safe harbor of a husband and children, not just to have, but to experience and enjoy. I wanted a home where I had nothing to prove and nothing to fear. I realized that I could not live up to the demands of the revolutionaries I so admired.

This revelation produced guilt as well as anger. If I was formed, in part, by political movements, I am also their prisoner, unable to make choices uninfluenced by the dynamics of race and gender. Unlike the white members of my book group, I am judged harshly for every choice I might make. When people discover that I, an Ivy League-educated black woman, have stayed at home to raise her two boys, they are smug, as if I am proof of the failure of affirmative action. I believe they assume that I probably don’t work because I was never really good at anything, not because I chose to put my children first. It infuriates me.

Even worse is the knowledge that by staying home I have undermined the ideals of the movements I hoped to serve. Catching sight of myself cleaning out the garbage disposal or plucking action figures from the floor, I feel like a Backlash poster child. “Look at this woman,” the caption might read. “She didn’t need that fancy education; she doesn’t even need the vote!”

An educated mother at home has no peer in the contempt that she can heap upon herself. There is something about taking care of children that appears to wither the self. That’s why patience is so dangerous: It’s so easy to become Chloe, who will fight for a cause only to the limits of her personal safety.

There are some who protest that mothers are authentic revolutionaries. This is true. As mothers we make our most lasting mark. I believe — with ruthless, irrepressible urgency — that I count in the world, not less because I’ve been a mother at home, but more.

One day, Sam came home from kindergarten and asked what I did for a living. He was anxious because his class had discussed other mommies’ jobs and he was a little embarrassed that he didn’t know what to say about me. Ashamed, even. So was I — shamed into silence.

That evening, he called me excitedly to the television: “Mom, if you call this number,” he said, “you can study for a career in your own home!” The next morning he awakened me: “Mom, I have an idea: Why don’t you be Dad’s secretary!” Wisely, my husband refrained from comment.

After breakfast the next day, I sat Sam down and tried to explain to him what I had done and why. As we walked to the bus stop, he reviewed: “So you’re a lawyer and a writer, but mostly you just take care of us, right?” He looked at me with such genuine concern that suddenly I laughed. “Just say it’s complicated,” I told him.

He climbed aboard. I waved to the departing bus. Inwardly, I shook my head. I thought about my own mother and how long it took me to realize that she was a revolutionary.

It occurs to me that I will feel doubt again, shame even, but I will always be loyal to her cause.

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