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  The world outside his home only confirmed this polarity. His dad owned a small company that built pools for rich white folks, and whenever Kevin tagged along with his father and saw the expensive homes in North Jackson with their manicured lawns and luxury pools, it only reinforced the idea that whiteness equals success. Growing up with hard-packed dirt for a front yard and a house with extreme plumbing issues, Kevin came to see the Black world as something to flee from and the white one as something to run toward. In short, he viewed whiteness as being superior to Blackness. Mental health professionals call this “psychological misorientation,” and those who suffer from it often get called “Oreos”—Black on the outside and white on the inside.

  Equating whiteness with success and beauty, Kevin would have liked nothing more than to live in a white suburban neighborhood and drive a Toyota Camry, a car popular with Jackson’s white population. He also said Black girls were “nasty” and “had attitudes,” and although he’d dated a few of them, he preferred dating white girls. Before me, he’d dated one named Misty, who he referred to as “Spray Bottle.” (Misty, mist, spray, spray bottle—get it?)

  With my light skin and college education, I appeared to be the perfect woman for Kevin, but, as it turned out, I was a little too Black for his tastes. Not only did he discourage me from wearing my hair in braids or other Black hairstyles, he also dissuaded me from sitting in the sun, preferring my skin to be as pale as it could possibly be. He frequently urged me to speak and act “whiter” and often complained about my figure. “You know a white woman ain’t got no business having a big butt like that,” he’d say to me. Nicole Kidman was his standard of beauty, and he encouraged me to do everything I could to look more like her. It saddened me that he didn’t find beauty and pride in Black culture and consciousness, but I was his wife and I’d been raised to believe that I had no choice but to submit to his authority, so that’s what I did.

  Being forced to look white while wanting to be seen and socialize as Black was very confusing for me. I found myself ping-ponging back and forth across the color line based on the perceptions of others while also having to act the part of a proper and submissive wife. Lost in this confusion was any sense of personal agency I might have possessed. Instead of making me feel like I was a part of something, my appearance made me feel misunderstood, alien, other. Learning that a Black man could be, culturally and philosophically, as white as any white man was a painful lesson for me. The momentary freedom I’d enjoyed after distancing myself from Larry and Ruthanne was now gone. As far as the evolution of my racial identity was concerned, marrying Kevin had catapulted me all the way back to square one.

  One Sunday at church we heard a sermon in which birth control pills were referred to as “early term abortions.” Kevin immediately insisted I go off the pill, and before I’d completed my first semester of graduate school I got pregnant. I was very excited, even though I knew it was going to make many aspects of my life much harder. I was prepared for my sleep to be disrupted and for standing for long periods of time to be more difficult. I didn’t anticipate interactions with one of my professors, Al Smith, becoming so awkward. Before I got pregnant, Al was always very friendly to me; after, I felt he became inappropriately so.

  To distance myself from him, I started working at home more often, but running into him on campus was inevitable. As I was walking down the hallway one day, he called to me from his office, “How’s our baby doing?” I stopped and glared at him. “It’s not ‘our’ baby. It’s my and my husband’s baby.” I went out of my way to avoid him after that, but when Winston Kennedy vacated his position as chair of the Art Department during the summer after my first year and Al was named to replace him, that strategy became much more difficult.

  That summer I worked for Howard’s Young Artist Academy, a recruitment effort designed to bolster the university’s art program. It attracted talented high school juniors, who lived on campus the summer before their senior years, studied drawing, painting, and design, and built up their portfolios so they’d be more likely to earn an art scholarship for college. I’d just finished teaching some of these kids the basics of matting and framing in August 2001, when I ducked into Al’s office to double-check that my paperwork was in order for the upcoming semester. I shouldn’t have been concerned at all. I had a 4.0 GPA and had won nearly all the awards at the juried graduate student art show at the end of my first year. But I wanted to make sure all the i’s had been dotted and all the t’s crossed.

  They weren’t.

  I discovered that my scholarship and teaching position had been rescinded. Al told me that because my due date was fast approaching—I was seven months pregnant at the time—I “needed to spend time with the baby” and “didn’t need to be going to school with a new baby.”* I was stunned. I’d been told that my scholarship could only be taken away if I got poor grades, and I’d worked hard to ensure that never happened. My small family depended on my support. Money was always tight while we were living in DC. To make ends meet, I worked a variety of jobs. In addition to my TA position, which was our main source of income, I also braided hair, sold art, and catered meals during the holidays. It still wasn’t enough. I had to take out student loans, which we used to live off of and pay for Kevin’s tuition at Northern Virginia Community College, where he was studying to be a physical therapist assistant. Without my TA job and scholarship, I would never be able to pay tuition, our bills would go unpaid, and I’d be forced to drop out of school.

  In a bid to get my scholarship back and keep my family afloat, I sought the counsel of an attorney, who told me the university claimed that I’d neglected to fill out the proper paperwork to renew my scholarship and TA position for another year. That I had to fill out any paperwork—or that such paperwork even existed—was news to me. I hadn’t filled out any forms prior to enrolling for my first semester, nor, I believed, had any of the other graduate students who’d received similar deals.

  Given some of the recent awkward encounters I’d endured on campus with Al Smith, I felt like I’d been discriminated against on the basis of my gender, more specifically my pregnancy, but my attorney advised me to broaden the scope of the lawsuit I was considering to include race because he thought it would be more effective. He also advised me to sue for the loss of a potential postgraduate instructor position, should the suit delay or prevent my graduating from the university. I loved Howard and hated that I’d been forced into the position of having to play the race card and sue the university of my dreams, but I put my family first. In the end I agreed to do it because we were in such dire straits financially and, with me in the third trimester of my pregnancy, we needed all the help we could get.

  Just a few days before classes started, my attorney sent the university a letter stating that it couldn’t prevent me from registering for classes while the lawsuit was being litigated, so I was able to continue my studies. The big question at that point was, who was going to pay for those studies? After a lot of back and forth that included mediation meetings and depositions before my complaint was officially filed in August 2002, I ultimately lost the lawsuit after the judge ruled she could find no evidence that I’d been discriminated against.* But when the university never billed me for tuition for my final year of grad school and granted me another TA position at the start of my last semester, to me it felt like a victory (and an admission on the part of the university that it wasn’t blameless in the matter and hoped it would go away quietly). While I was never able to prove to the court that Howard University had forced me to work in a “hostile work environment,” I know what I felt, and that was that I’d been discriminated against for reasons other than my ability and performance. I knew going in that the lawsuit was going to be difficult to win. Workplace discrimination is often subtle and nearly impossible to prove. If I’d carried a voice recorder on my person at all times and been able to record some of the comments directed at me, things might have turned out differently.

  The lawsu
it added another layer of distance between me and some of my colleagues. My second year at Howard was filled with awkward and tense moments, but my reinstatement allowed me to stay on track academically. To earn my degree, I needed to complete sixty hours of coursework, and nearly all the hours I devoted to painting, sculpting, and teaching during my final semester were spent sitting down. During the first trimester of my pregnancy, the baby had started to separate from the womb, so, technically, I was supposed to be on bed rest. I tried to stay off my feet as much as possible but couldn’t afford to take any time off—not with my scholarship hanging in the balance.

  Franklin was born during the first semester of my second and final year at Howard. He was two weeks overdue, and my labor lasted from Wednesday night to Sunday morning—ninety-four hours! I was unconscious for four hours after Franklin was born, knocked out by sheer exhaustion, and by the time I came around he was in the neonatal intensive care unit. With the long labor and the visit to the NICU, Franklin’s birth cost more than $24,000, and my student health insurance only covered $1,000 of it. I wouldn’t finish paying off the debt until he was six years old.

  Raising a baby while finishing grad school was challenging but, given my proclivity for industriousness, I never let it overwhelm me. By being organized and working hard, I kept up with my schoolwork and soon reached the final step I needed to take before graduating: defending my thesis before a committee. After filing the lawsuit, I’d switched my major from painting to sculpture, and for my thesis I incorporated both art forms as well as drawing and collage. All the pieces I made for my thesis questioned the notion of light being good and dark being bad, particularly when it came to the color of one’s skin. While I was at Belhaven, I’d noticed that the portraits I’d made of Black women and children were more popular with collectors than those I’d done of Black men, and I wondered, as an artist, how I could create more empathy with the Black male figure. To challenge myself and, hopefully, break down stereotypes and prejudice, I used my thesis to depict the inner journey of the Black man and humanize him in a way that would connect with every demographic, white and Black, male and female, young and old.

  The pieces I created were well received by the thesis committee. When I graduated summa cum laude, the idea that I might actually be able to make a living selling my artwork began to seem possible. I’d already begun to be commissioned to create art for various patrons. One of them was Robert, a general in the U.S. Army who I’d met at church. He asked me to make him a drawing illustrating the history of his Black fraternity. Despite the $8.99 Kmart wedding ring I wore on my finger, I began to suspect that Robert was interested in me romantically. My suspicions were confirmed when I dropped off his drawing at the Pentagon and he snuck a kiss in the parking lot.

  When I told Kevin what had happened, he was irate. He talked about murdering Robert and said that we needed to move or else he was going to end up in prison for killing the man. Kevin had been saying for a while that he wanted us to move “away from Black culture” and that he didn’t want Black guys hitting on me, so when Robert kissed me, it gave Kevin the perfect excuse to insist that we pull up stakes and relocate. In the summer of 2003, he found a job working as a physical therapist assistant at the hospital in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, a lily-white town on the banks of the Kootenai River less than an hour’s drive from where I’d grown up. I had no choice but to go. As much as my identity had evolved over the course of the past six years living in the racial diversity of the South, I suddenly found myself right back where I’d started.

  *Earning that distinction would have been impossible anyway. Howard’s founder, General Oliver Howard, was actually a white man, its first graduating class was entirely white, and the university has never rejected applicants based on the color of their skin. If you’re looking for a true pioneer, try the “grandfather of the restorative justice movement,” Howard Zehr, who in 1966 became the first white student to graduate from Morehouse College.

  *As stated in the complaint I eventually filed against Smith and his employer, Howard University.

  *My lawyer filed an appeal in February 2004, in hopes of at least recouping his legal expenses from the original case; unfortunately, the appellate court affirmed the lower court’s decision and dismissed the case in June 2005.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Emancipation

  IN THE ISOLATION OF RURAL IDAHO, the tension between me and Kevin escalated. Early in our relationship, I believed that I could inspire him to embrace Black culture and fall in love with African history and Afrocentric aesthetics, and that in the process he’d come to understand me better and love himself more. But after moving to Idaho any hope I’d once possessed disappeared.

  Our relationship had always been a one-sided affair, with Kevin’s values taking precedence over mine. I was expected to be a submissive wife, while he ruled with an iron fist. I wasn’t allowed to have anything that belonged entirely to me. I didn’t have my own cell phone. I didn’t even have my own email account. He insisted that I share my password with him, and whenever I protested he’d use what happened with Robert, the general who’d kissed me, to justify his need to monitor my correspondence.

  Kevin also wouldn’t let me go out on my own. The only times I left the house were Friday afternoons, when he’d accompany me to the grocery store after he got home from work, and Sunday mornings, when we went to church. “You’re a silly little girl,” he often told me. “Some guy is going to hit on you and you aren’t going to know what to do.” As stifling as this treatment was, I didn’t feel like I had a choice but to bend to his will. After all, he was my husband. Married life in Bonners Ferry soon became every bit as confining and oppressive as my childhood in Troy.

  Kevin’s insistence that I never leave the house alone extended to work. He refused to let me get a job. His mandate was reinforced by my upbringing. Larry and Ruthanne had taught me that mothers who worked were abandoning their children at godless daycares. Careers were for men, and women were expected to set everything aside for their husbands and children. Kevin let me do art as a hobby, but because everything I created focused on the Black experience it was always misunderstood by people who still thought of me as white, including my husband. In Idaho, my creativity shriveled to a husk, and I struggled to produce any work. I’d barely made any new pieces since completing the MFA program at Howard. A year after graduating summa cum laude, I was now a barely coping stay-at-home mom searching for inspiration in the sticks of Idaho, my career path having come to a sudden dead end.

  Franklin, now a toddler at two, helped me keep my head above water. He was the center of my world, the main source of joy in my life, my reason for waking up in the morning. Like me, he was expected to submit unquestioningly to Kevin’s authority, and having to observe that dynamic was difficult for me.

  Franklin didn’t like to eat meat when he was little. His favorite breakfast was “hot leaves”—greens such as rainbow Swiss chard that he’d helped me pick from the garden and that I cooked the way he liked it best, boiled and flavored with just a pinch of salt. One morning I placed a piece of bacon on his highchair’s tray, but he was only interested in tearing it into little pieces. “Stop playing with your food, boy!” Kevin yelled before shoving an entire piece of bacon into Franklin’s mouth while Franklin protested by pounding his chubby fists on the tray. On another occasion Kevin forced a bite of sausage into Franklin’s mouth, and when Franklin refused to swallow, Kevin grabbed a rolling pin and waved it in the air like a club. Terrified, Franklin started crying, and the sausage fell out of his mouth. Hoping to defuse the situation before it got any worse, I removed Franklin from his high chair and told Kevin that Franklin needed to go potty.

  These sorts of violent outbursts were common in our household. When Kevin and I argued, he often threatened to paralyze me from the neck down if I ever betrayed him. I took this warning seriously because as a physical therapist assistant he’d worked with numerous quadriplegics and knew exactly which vertebrae
they’d injured. Adding to my fear, Kevin kept two loaded guns in our bedroom closet, where he could easily get to them if need be. I was so scared whenever he came home my body stiffened, my teeth clenched, and I could barely eat. Anorexia led to bulimia, and I grew precariously thin. I went from wearing a size six or eight to a size zero and experienced an equally extreme nosedive in my health.

  Into this toxic environment stepped Josh. I hadn’t seen him since he’d visited me in DC right after Kevin and I’d gotten married. During that visit he’d apologized for molesting me when we were younger, and I’d forgiven him just as I’d been taught to do in church. Although I was still wary of him, we’d kept in touch, emailing each other every so often. When he mentioned he was going to be driving with his girlfriend Brennan from the University of Nebraska, where he was studying to get his PhD in American literature, to the Pacific Northwest, I invited them to stay with us at our place in Bonners Ferry.

  I was in the kitchen making dinner when Josh’s white Buick pulled into the driveway and he and Brennan stepped out of the car. While I’d been cooking, cleaning, and taking care of Franklin, Kevin, as was his habit, was using the computer in the basement. I called down to him, letting him know that our guests had arrived. He came upstairs to say hello, but it was up to me to show them to their rooms and explain the sleeping arrangements to them.