By Sarah Enelow-Snyder
Holly's family home had a lawn that looked more like a botanical garden.
The house's brick façade had crisp white accents, and inside a staircase wound its way up the middle. I lost count of the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Holly said it was a historical landmark and a regular stop on guided tours of down town Charleston.
Holly and I were juniors at our college in Upstate New York and she had invited me down to South Carolina for spring break.
She was thin with blond hair and big breasts, and jokingly identified herself as a Southern belle, a term we both understood as a funny throwback. Holly felt like a big sister to me, giving me advice about boys and applauding my articles for the school paper.
My first morning in Charleston, I happened to wake up before Holly and her folks, and the house was silent. I poked my head out of the guest room and wandered down the hall.
When I reached the end, I turned around and made a startled gasp. I thought I was totally alone, but I'd bumped into someone, a black woman gathering laundry. She was wearing a black dress with a white collar and a frilly apron. No one in Holly's family had mentioned her.
"Hi!" I blurted out. "I didn't realise anyone was here."
The woman looked at me and then quietly stepped into a closet. I went back to the guest room.
My thoughts began to snowball. Holly and her family were white. Did Holly's parents make this black woman wear that outfit? Did they instruct her not to make conversation? What was her name? Did she live in the house?
I kept my questions to myself. I was a guest in Holly's home and I didn't want to anger her, especially about race, again.
The last time I spoke to Holly about blackness, we were in our dorm sophomore year, and the conversation was a long time coming.
For as long as I could remember, people had commented on my mother's brown skin and our tight, dark-brown corkscrews. In middle school kids started ridiculing my hair, calling me dirty, Brillo-head, or an idiot who stuck her finger in a light socket. Some yanked my hair or just shoved me for fun.
So I asked my father, seemingly an authority on most things, why my hair was like this.
"Curly hair runs on both sides of the family," he said. "Your hair just happens to be a little high-maintenance, you know, lots of tangles."
Soon after I was filling out a form for school and saw the word "Caucasian." I didn't know what it meant, so I brought the form to my father. He said to mark myself Caucasian, which meant white. That seemed logical, judging by my skin colour, which at the height of summer was no darker than caramel. And, my father was clearly white himself.
In high school the bullying continued. Kids stuck pencils in my hair, called me rat's nest, and said I had pubic hair growing out of my head. I was basically undateable. More and more, my classmates asked me, "What are you?"
So I went to my father again, sensing that people were not satisfied with my answer that I was white.
"Well, mum is actually part Cherokee," he said this time. "That's where she got her skin tone ... but don't ask her about that, okay?"
I nodded. That made sense to me. I already understood that race was a sensitive subject, like sex or money. Not polite conversation.
During my sophomore year of college, after dozens more people had plunged their hands into my hair and called me Don King, I suspected my father wasn't telling me the whole truth. People even asked me point-blank if I was black.
So on a trip home to Texas, as my father and I drove around town running errands, I pressed him about mom's race.
"Fine," he said, pulling into a strip mall parking lot. "She's black. We didn't know how you would handle that information, so we didn't tell you."
"That's it?" I asked. "There was a simple answer this whole time, and you misled me on purpose? Why?"
"Well, your mother was never comfortable talking about this stuff," he said. "She was born in Mississippi during segregation. It was not a happy time and she didn't want to revisit all that."
I fumed about being lied to for so long, and perpetuating that lie every time I told someone no, I'm not black, I just have super curly hair.
After a quiet car ride home, my father spoke to my mother in private, and then she came over to me in the living room. She said, "As a black woman, I ... " And whatever followed didn't stick in my brain. I was fixated on this truth. She had broken the ice.
My peers had convinced me that my blackness was a bad thing, and I didn't want to buy into this thinking any longer. I set about embracing my biracial identity, but I didn't have any experience talking about it, and I was nervous. I decided to start by telling a close friend, so I flew back to college and found Holly in her dorm room.
"I found out something when I was home," I said, fidgeting with my hands. "My mom is, like, technically, black. She's a light-skinned black person. That's where my hair comes from."
I didn't like how I sounded, like I was trying to minimise this blackness, like I was worried it would put distance between me and Holly. Still, I hoped for a warm response.
"So??" she barked, scrunching up her nose like she smelled something foul.
"I don't know, I just wanted to tell you," I said.
"Who cares?!" Holly looked away from me and changed the subject.
I slouched in embarrassment, feeling like I'd screwed up my first real attempt to talk about race. Did she feel like I'd tricked her? Was she suddenly rethinking her comments about my hair, that I should straighten it and dye it blonde? I was frustrated and didn't say anything further.
After that conversation, I started noticing the power dynamic between Holly and me. I was the only person of colour in our friend group at school, and I got the feeling that my blackness made me the ugly duckling.
Holly said, inaccurately, that my hair was the colour of fried chicken, and that it made me look electrocuted. When she saw me listening to Snoop Dogg, she made a disgusted face and said he looked like a rat. Holly once planned a trip to Key West with all of our friends and didn't invite me. The same thing happened with an on-campus party she threw.
Every time something like this happened, I felt more excluded, more insecure, and less able to talk about it.
Down in Charleston, Holly took me to the waterfront and pointed out Fort Sumter off in the distance, where the Civil War began. Neither of us mentioned slavery. I thought about what it would feel like to ask Holly if her historically significant house had once been part of a plantation, or if her ancestors had enslaved people.
I imagined that, according to what my father taught me, the only thing worse than broaching the sensitive subject of race was to effectively call someone racist by connecting them to enslavers. So I didn't.
I often wondered what would have happened if I'd asked Holly about the black woman gathering laundry, or why she thought my natural hair was so ugly, or why I ended up at the bottom of our social hierarchy, or why she reacted so defensively to hearing I was biracial.
Back then I'd never heard the terms "microaggression" or "white fragility." Maybe confronting her would have ended our friendship on the spot, or maybe she would have developed some empathy for me and seen me as an equal.
I wish my father hadn't nixed that topic in our house. If he had been honest with me all those years ago, I might have had enough awareness and self-confidence to stand up to my bullies. I might not have bought into the idea that blackness was a problem.
I wish my mother had spoken up, too. She communicated with me about blackness in a quiet way that went over my head when I was younger. She made black-eyed peas on New Year's Day, gave me curly hair products, put on Martha and the Vandellas while reminiscing about her childhood in Detroit, and showed me the movie "Soul Food," whose premise stems from the Mississippi-to-Chicago migration that echoed her own family's journey.
Now that I have two black sons of my own, I'd like to pass on those quiet affirmations. I make black-eyed peas, but I also speak up. Even if they don't understand me at ages 3 years and 5 months, I still tell them that black is beautiful.
Sarah Enelow-Snyder is a writer from Texas, based in New Jersey. She has an essay in the anthology "Horse Girls" from Harper Perennial.