Back then, my friends and my school were all within walking distance and so in the evenings, with just a short walk and no bus ride, I was able to get my homework done quickly and get to indulging one of my favorite hobbies. I was probably a little too old for it then, but I still absolutely loved to play with my collection of Barbie dolls. Their pink world, I didn’t mind. Pink just was never the right color for my reality. For those dolls, I had everything, the dream house, the Corvette, you name it. With them, and their pink, anything was possible from one day to the next. I used their thin Barbie bodies to make my own role models who lived the way I wanted to, with their own cars and their own houses that could be decorated as they saw fit. It was a space that I could control amidst the perfectly organized, designed and implemented perfection that surrounded me in every other aspect of our lives as a family. My mother married my father almost directly after college, and as far as I knew, her career focus was my dad, building a perfect life for him and playing the role that she had always believed that she was best suited for—a beautiful, supportive homemaker, and eventually, mother.
On our very last evening as a family, the 9 year old me played in my fantasies, sitting on the floor in clothes still wrinkled and dirty from school recess. I was startled in a moment by what sounded like a roiling piecing wail from my mother coming from the kitchen. I had heard the back door close and thought nothing of it because it was the time that my dad usually came home. Or, the time that he used to return, before he started spending nights away on work trips that had been coming up with increasing frequency. Scared for my mother, I rushed into the kitchen to see her sitting at the table with her head in her hands and my dad standing near the door with his jacket over his arm and the strangest look on his face. They seemed lost in their own moment—my mother sobbing and my father standing there, until they finally noticed me when I managed to get some kind of sound out of my mouth.
“Wha…what’s wrong, Mommy?” I asked. My mother, upon hearing my small voice, took in a sharp breath. I think that she had forgotten that I was in the house. She turned and looked at me—the memory of her usually immaculate makeup running down her eyes today would make me think of a Picasso painting or some real-life version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Her glistening eyes searched for and found mine and she said in a frighteningly serious tone, “Your father is leaving us for his other family.” And there it was, as she turned back to sobbing, this time collapsing in heaves on the table.
“Oh my God Jeanie, I can’t believe that you would say that to her!” my dad shrieked, throwing his briefcase against the kitchen floor. I stood still like a prey animal while my immature mind processed what I had heard. What? My dad, leaving? What other family? Leaving? Where’s he going?
“Daddy, you’re leaving?” was all I could muster as an echo of what I heard. “When?” I started to cry-talk, questioning with escalating panic and heightening tone. My father came over to me, kneeled down and looked me in my eyes.
“I’ll never leave you Tabby. There’s some things your mother and I need to discuss. Can you go to your room and I’ll come see you in a bit? I promise I won’t leave. I promise. Ok?” Something about his reassurance bought a temporary calm that allowed me to break from the sight of my sobbing mother and walk back into my room and close the door. I didn’t want to hear any more of whatever that was going on in the kitchen. I tried to resume my scene—my blond Barbie had been teaching her friends about something that we had learned in school that week—but, suddenly those dolls didn’t seem that interesting anymore. In that instant, their world felt as fake and plastic as their slippery rubber legs. I put them away and tried to keep to my routine, washing up, putting on my night clothes and eventually getting into my bed. I laid on my back, with my hands folded across the top of my entirely flat chest, staring at the ceiling, waiting who knows how long until my door eventually opened, and my dad came in. He walked across my pink shag carpeting to my princess pink bed and finally sat on the edge. It was that conversation that turned that day into my very first “D” day—I learned that there was a Diane and that there would be a divorce and that my dad was eventually not going to be living with my mother and I anymore. So indeed, there was another “D” discovered on that day, deception.
The concept of an “affair,” and the fact that my dad had had one was something I’d learn on a different night—one of the many to follow that my mother sought comfort in the glass after glass of wine that loosened her lips to release the truths I would have rather not known. My mother spoke not one word of it, and neither did my father, but when I finally did meet her, and laid my own eyes on her face smiling to excess, white teeth, rose-colored lips, brown hair and bright blue eyes, it was only then that I realized that Diane was white. It was the stereotypical insult added to injury for my mother. An actual white woman was something that she could imitate, but never be.
The betrayal of Diane was further stinging to my mother because my father’s mother, my grandmother, the other and original Tabitha Abigail Walker, was also white. When my mother and father got married, my mother was under the impression that she would be my father’s choice for his adult life. And not that there was any friction between my mother and my grandmother, but, until I was born, Granny Tab was the only other woman in the world that my mother had ever had to compete with for my father’s attention. When I was younger, I remember Granny Tab’s bright blue eyes and her box-dye brown hair that always bopped just above her shoulders as the perfect bob, and her schoolteacher glasses that sometimes hung on a metal chain around her neck and sometimes perched on the end of her thin English ski slope nose. She spent her career as a teacher in the LA Unified School District and retired while I was in middle school. It was really Granny Tab who taught me how to read, to write my name in cursive and helped me not fail Algebra. Growing up, I never used to think of my grandmother as “white,” really. She was just my Granny Tab, and “hey Mrs. Walker!” to the rainbow of kids in her classroom when I visited. I knew that she was from West Virginia, but she didn’t talk about it much, and we didn’t spend any time with her side of the family. From my understanding, things didn’t go over so well when she married my grandfather, but my grandfather wasn’t someone we talked about much either. All I knew about him was that he was a black man from the same town as Granny Tab; they were married and then they divorced when my dad was little, only for him to disappear shortly after. Sometimes I wondered what could have happened to make someone as warm as Granny Tab turn away and never look back. Those thoughts never lasted long because she radiated enough love on her own to make up for all the missing folks from her side. So, for her, “family” was the family she chose, the family she made (minus the family she unmade), and the family my dad made after that. Up until Diane, my dad’s end of things was mostly black—my mom, and me. He and my mother met at Howard University for goodness sake.
Even with a white grandmother, “whiteness” never played any role in my identity. As far as I was concerned, there was no difference between what my dad was and what my mom was, and by extension, no difference between either of them, and me. Thinking about it, I suppose she could have, but Granny Tab never “wore” her whiteness as if it were a badge or some kind of cape, or default setting relative to my “blackness” or “brownness” so to speak. She just simply was, and I was, and together, we all just were. I would have never dared utter the words “mixed” or “bi-racial” if someone asked me my cultural, racial or ethnic identity. And that wouldn’t be because I was making some kind of political statement or a choice of one thing over another. It just would be most accurate to say that it never occurred to me that I had a choice of it at all. Only on thankfully rare occasions would I ever have to take into account that my grandmother and I were in any way different, because to me, ever since I was a little girl, she had always been my much older “twin,” my adult best friend, and the reason that I was proud to be named Tabitha Walker. But once the Diane thing happened, all kinds of lines that had never existed before started to pencil themselves into our lives and all kinds of questions that we’d never thought to ask needed answers.