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Two years ago, we buried my grandmother in the family graveyard, in the middle of a cornfield. Overtop of the old Confederate soldier graves, the funeral home director set out rows of folding metal chairs for the relatives, and my cousin mowed down the corn around the graveyard's edge so that friends could stand and listen. Just before the minister began the service, a statuesque black woman with a close cap of hair and platform shoes came through the field and sat down at the end of the relatives' row: the only black woman in a cluster of white faces. I didn't recognize her, until my mother leaned forward and whispered, "There's your sister."
My grandmother always gave special presents to my sister, the odd one out, the child who didn't fit. My white parents adopted my sister when she was three days old and I was almost one. She grew up with European features and dark skin, the heritage of her unknown African American father and her teenaged white mother. We fought all our lives; I was the good girl, while my sister smoked cigarettes, carried on long secretive phone conversations with boys after she was supposed to be in bed, and ignored all the limits my parents set. But I didn't think of our constant bickering as a manifestation of racial tension. She was my sister.
She stopped being my sister sometime in the middle of our college education. At a small Baptist college, she found herself in a militant group of black students who told her that she needed to break the bonds with her white family in order to realize her own black identity. She broke with us: with relief, with joy.
After that I never again had a conversation with her that did not end in race. All of our disagreements became crystallized into this single point: You were happy and I wasn't, because you are white and I am black. You're white, and you will never understand. After one particularly spectacular fight, not long after I got married, I stopped calling, stopped writing, stopped trying. We didn't see each other for seven years, until the day she arrived at my grandmother's funeral.
After the ceremony, I told her I was sorry for my own lack of sensitivity. I apologized for ignoring her difficulties as she grew up in a white family. I apologized for trying to force her into my mold.
I apologized for being white.
For years, I rejected that relationship-killing accusation: Your Whiteness is a wall between us. After all, I am a person of good will who truly believes that all men and women are made in the image of God. I teach African American authors in my American literature classes. I live in a neighborhood which is mostly black. I pick up black hitchhikers, out here on my country road. My sister is black.
And yet, over the past few years, I've begun to realize that something is adrift in my life. I have few black friends; my rural church is entirely white; my immediate neighbors are white; I rarely have a black student in my American literature classes. In my eagerness to demonstrate my lack of prejudice, I find myself reacting to the African American clerk in the drugstore, the housekeeping staff at the university, the black linguistics professor down the hall, with the insincerity that W. E. B. Du Bois chronicled with deadly perception in his 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk:
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my own town … or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested … as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
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