White Like Me. Tim Wise

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СКАЧАТЬ work the lights, pull the curtains, or just hang out and perhaps help the actors run lines, or maybe just quit theatre altogether and find something else to do.

      Having an actor for a father pretty well assured me of a prominent role in whatever production was chosen as our annual play. Ms. Moore could presume my talent, and although that talent may have been genuine, there were certainly no cold readings or auditions. A few of us would pretty much rotate: I would be the male lead in one play, and in the next production that honor would go to Albert. The female leads would also pretty much rotate between two of the girls in our class, Stacey Wright and Shannon Holladay. It was a fairly closed circle.

      In sixth grade we would switch from Shakespeare to You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which, given that it’s a musical and neither Albert nor I could sing, should have guaranteed that it would be our turn to pull curtains or some such thing. But despite our lack of ability, we were cast as Charlie and Linus, respectively. In my case, Ms. Moore actually agreed to take the song “My Blanket and Me” out of the play altogether, because I made clear that I was terrified to sing a solo in public.

      My ability to force script changes was not about race of course, but my ability to be in the position I was, and therefore to make that kind of demand and gain the director’s acquiescence, most assuredly was about race, at least in part. Had I been anything but white, it would have been highly unlikely that I would have gotten the parts I landed in any of the productions done at that or any other school. These were roles written for white actors. Shakespeare’s work is not, to be sure, replete with black characters, and there are only so many times a school can do Othello. Likewise, You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown was written before the introduction of the comic strip’s one black character, Franklin. Although Ms. Moore added a few lines to the script and had a black kid deliver them in the person of Franklin (and created an entirely new character for Carol Stuart, one of the few black students in the theatre class), this hardly altered the racial dynamic at work.

      To be white at that school, as in many others, was to have a whole world of extracurricular opportunity opened to oneself—a world where if you were a mediocre student (as I was), you could still find a niche, an outlet for your talents, passions, and interests. To be of color at that same school was to ensure that no matter how good an actor or actress you were, or were capable of becoming, you were unlikely to be in a position to avail yourself of this same outlet for your creativity. Unless a theatre teacher is prepared to violate the aesthetic sensibilities of the audience, which is rare, and cast a person of color in a role traditionally played by a white person (like Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, or Snoopy even), black, Latino, and Asian kids are just out of luck.

      This, it should be noted, is no mere academic point. Theatre was a life raft for me in middle school, without which I might well have gone under altogether. My ability to access it, and the whiteness that granted me that ability, was no minor consideration. By the time middle school began, my home life was increasingly chaotic. My father’s drinking had gone well past heavy, on the way to serious alcoholism. Though he was still technically functional—and would remain so, more or less, right up until he got sober eighteen years later—his addiction propelled his internalized rage and sense of failure forward, which would explode time and again in our small apartment, always aimed directly at my mother. Though she absorbed the nightly verbal blows and tried her best to shield me from the damage, each fight, each hateful word, each guttural expression of unhinged contempt cut deeply into my sense of personal security.

      I took to closing myself off in my room after school most days. When he was around, I would only come out to eat dinner, always making sure to be back in my own personal space shortly thereafter, as the drinking continued and the fights were sure to begin. Then, on those occasions when he would go out to a bar to drink more, I would force myself to stay up late until I could hear the hall door open at the far end of our apartment building, followed by the sound of his heavy drunken footsteps moving closer to our unit, and I could know that at least for that night he wasn’t going to kill himself while driving. I could go to sleep.

      Things got so bad at one point that I began to keep track with hash marks on a page the number of days in a row that he had been drunk: twenty-one on the day I stopped counting. Though I longed for a closer relationship with my dad, I also breathed more easily whenever he was in a play out of town. By then I had learned that quiet loneliness is always preferable to amplified togetherness when the cacophony to which you’re being exposed reverberates with the blaring notes of marital discord.

      Only by escaping into the world of acting (a strangely ironic choice, I realize) was I able to make it through those grades at all. It was my refuge. I could lock myself in my room with a play script, avoid my father, escape the smell of Canadian whiskey or bad vodka on his breath, and avoid the verbal battles that were the hallmark of his relationship with my mother. The only times I would come out of my room were in those moments when I honestly felt that if I didn’t he might kill her. Although my home was not one characterized by physical abuse—thankfully, my dad only struck my mom once (which of course was one time too many) by pushing her into a wall outside my room—when you’re ten and eleven your mind has a hard time processing the distinction between verbal and physical violence, and knowing where that line is, and just how much it might take for the abuser to cross the metaphorical Rubicon. During this period, although I never had friends over—mostly because I didn’t want them to see my father drunk—I also refused to go to their homes, at least not past dinner, feeling that I needed to be in the house as a way to deter my father from the inevitable leap to assault or even murder.

      No matter the infrequency of physical abuse, in my mind the threat always seemed to hang like a thunder cloud over our home. At one point, I was so sure he would kill her that I began planning an escape route. If I could intervene and save her I would, but if it became apparent that I wouldn’t be able to do much good, I knew how to get my bedroom window open fast, and exactly where I would run to get help, or to borrow the weapon with which I would end my father’s life.

      That my dad was not going to kill my mother was hardly the point. When you hear him say that he’s going to—like the one time he said it with a steak knife held three inches from her face, while I watched from perhaps seven feet away—and you’re a child, you are in no position to deconstruct the context of his words. All you can do is spend precious moments of your youth trying to figure out ways to save your mom’s life, or at least your own, on that day when your father has one drink too many and burns dinner because he wasn’t paying close enough attention, or can’t find his keys and flies into a rage, and reaches into the utensil drawer—and not for a spoon or salad fork.

      So when I say that theatre was a life raft, I am not engaging in idle hyperbole. I mean it literally. Without it, I would have had no escape. While my physical existence may have continued—after all, my father never killed anyone in the end, and had he meant to, it’s doubtful I could have dissuaded him with a sonnet—my already fragile emotional well-being would have likely taken a nosedive, with dire consequence in years to come. Theatre was how I released my frustrations; it was how I avoided falling into clinical depression; it was how I got my mind off other things, like killing my father before he could harm my mom, which I did contemplate in my more panicked moments.

      Without theatre, which I could only access the way I did because I was white, it is a very open question how my life would have gone. If all the other variables had been the same, but I had been anything other than white, and thereby bereft of the diversion offered by acting, I feel confident that things would have gone differently than they did. As for my father, he should be grateful that we were white, and that I had an outlet.

      NEXT TO THEATRE, my other obsession as a kid was sports. When I wasn’t working on lines for whatever play we were soon to be performing at school, I was likely to be practicing either basketball or baseball.

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