Later that evening, I meet Dan’s stepsister Emily for the first time.
Emily, a fourteen-year-old white girl not very comfortable hanging out with the Manhattan socialites filling her mother’s foyer and living room, is hiding out in her bedroom. That’s where, after a half hour of knowing each other, Emily confides a story to me.
“I was raised by a Black nanny named Cathy,” she begins. “And one day when I was in kindergarten, I got sent home early…”
For her entire young life Emily had attended elite independent schools on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. One day when she was in kindergarten her teacher had asked the children what they wanted to be when they grew up. “A fire truck,” Emily answered. The teacher explained to Emily that she couldn’t be a fire truck, she had to be some kind of person. “Okay, then I want to be Black.” The teacher said that wasn’t possible. “Then I want to be a boy!” The teacher pointed out that this too was impossible. Five-year-old Emily was inconsolable over not being able to achieve any of the things she wanted to become, and the teacher called home. Emily waited on the little cot in the nurse’s office. Cathy appeared and held her tight.
In an American literature class at Stanford that fall, I’d read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I’d related to the little Black girl protagonist who was intrigued by white dolls with blue eyes, but I’d had trouble with the scene about a little white girl seeking refuge in the arms and body of her Black housekeeper. A white girl finding succor in a Black mother figure? I had never heard of such a thing. Could not even imagine it. Before reading Toni Morrison, I had never even read about it in fiction.
Now I’m sitting in the bedroom of a real white girl—a white girl who’d grown up amid considerable privilege in New York—who wanted to be Black? What can this white girl see about Black people that I can’t see? How can she want to be me more than I do?
I had never felt the embrace of a Black mother.
I knew of no comfort like Cathy’s arms.