I’m about as white at they come. I don’t mean only skin color—though that shows absolutely no trace of melanin. I’m talking inherited whiteness. And I’m talking acquired whiteness. And, finally, I’m talking about how life hates such neat divisions as black and white—how she loves to confound them.

My family is FFV, which, for those of you not from the upper South, means First Families of Virginia. I’m variously related to Shackelfords, Minors, and Fontaines—caught in the same web of Virginia gentry interbreeding as Thomas Jefferson. We mostly all trace back to Robert “King” Carter, who, at one time, owned most of the state. One of Carter’s most famous descendants is Robert E. Lee, to whom my father always fondly referred as “Cousin Robert.” On a smaller scale than King Carter’s, my paternal grandfather had a 600 acre plantation in Hanover County until he drank it away after the Civil War.

On my mother’s side of the family, I trace my progenitors to Alabama, where my grandmother spurned the proposal of one of the Dukes of Duke University fame, only to fly into a rage when the black maid delivered breakfast along with the morning paper that announced Duke’s effrontery in getting engaged to someone else. My grandmother threw the breakfast tray across the room.

I don’t need to point out how white this makes me—descended on both sides from landowners, blood-tied to the brilliant military strategist who gave his all to preserving the South’s privileged way of life.

There is a contradiction at the heart of being Southern that my father embodied. Though he was raised in a home that was politically conservative, he became a dedicated and active liberal in college. Partly this happened because his family valued individuality in thought, deed, and vote with a passion similar to that which animated the Confederate heart in the Civil War. My paternal grandmother was nothing if not her own woman.

So, when my father embraced pacifism in defiance of his father’s position as head of the Charlottesville Draft Board and later on became active in civil rights—despite threats to his home, job, and family—it was paradoxically a measure of how marrow-deep his Southernness was.

My childhood and most of my adulthood were informed by these strong currents—the generations of paternalism swelled by a wave of passionate liberalism, the intermingling of which led me to see myself as irredeemably white.

In describing myself as irredeemably white I betray the liberal’s prejudice that all things bookish, dull, and restrained are white, while that which is lively and colorful is black. I wouldn’t learn until much later how conservative black culture is, how no single characterization of myself—never mind a race—can ever truly hold.

That was the inherited part.

And here is the acquired part:

I was named for my great-aunt Virginia who died a spinster in her 90s. She could make inhumanly small stitches in her silk chemises, and she also had a distinguished working career. Yet, when my aunt asked her just before she died, if there was anything she regretted doing, she said, no, but there were quite a few things she regretted not doing.

I set out in life to follow my namesake down the same regrettable path. From earliest girlhood I was happiest with a book, even playing school at home when the school day was over. I wasn’t one of the fun girls who had her name on the chalkboard at the end of the day—not the “Hannah” whose name was chalked next to “Sam” and “Christopher” and all the other boys who were unable to stay in their seat, who lived for recess.

No—on the contrary—I was bookish, docile, and obedient for much of my life with a very few exceptions; got a Ph.D. and ended up working at institutions of higher learning virtually all my life. Not for nothing do they call universities “ivory towers.”

As if that weren’t enough to qualify me as white, I wrote a whimsical preface to my dissertation in which I play with the Derridean deconstructionist concepts of whiteness. It’s called “A White Girl’s Apology”—meaning explanation, not regret—but, no, when I re-read it, even I don’t know what I was talking about.

The dissertation itself is a novel called The Algebra of Snow. The central, relentless metaphor is of blindingly white, deathly snow. What’s more, there is only one character—a woman mathematics professor on sabbatical in the Adirondack in winter—and, honest, nothing happens in the novel.

How white is that?

So, naturally, life being as contrary as it is, I ended up teaching at historically black Fisk University. Founded in 1866 by a Yankee general for the education freed slaves, Fisk is one of the oldest Historically Black Colleges and Universities and arguably the most prestigious—home of the world-famous Jubilee Singers and early academic perch for W.E.B. Dubois who argued passionately for blacks to get a liberal arts education—as opposed to a trade—in order to move swiftly onto an equal footing with whites.

I’d heard about Fisk University long before I went there, but I had no idea where it was—Nashville, Tennessee—nor that it was just across the tracks (literally) from Vanderbilt University, which also looms large in the Southern consciousness and which I had also not mentally placed in Nashville.

The Vanderbilt campus is almost preternaturally kempt. While Fisk has soaring, historical buildings like the administration building—where the upper floors are made of glass bricks and some of the lower walls have murals painted by the great black painters of the 20s—much is in chronic disrepair and the glass bricks form a roosting place for pigeons. It is routinely on the brink of financial disaster. Even at the beginning, the first Jubilee Singers didn’t graduate because they left school to tour the world to raise funds to save Fisk.

From the outset Fisk had set out to maintain a racially balanced faculty. In the beginning the problem was in finding enough qualified black faculty. But by the 1990s the balance had shifted, and finding qualified white faculty was a challenge.

Along with civil rights upbringing, what qualified me for the job was my scholarly interest in African-American women’s literature about which I had already published an article. More ineffably, for all my polite raising—there was very little liberal in my father’s social code—I had a sprightliness that didn’t fit well into what I would consider standard gentility: a tendency to drink and smoke and take risky lovers which ended in my marriage to a man who, for all his appearance of domestication, lacked a fundamental ability to stay put.

Before I fully understood this, my husband and I had two children. I lost one job through the college’s financial exigency, and found the one at Fisk in the nick of time—one infant on hip, one toddler by the hand, and one All But Dissertation husband in tow.

Despite Fisk’s history of financial rockiness, I made the leap gratefully, from certain financial ruin to the much more desirable possible financial ruin.

By the time I began teaching at Fisk, I’d read Toni Morrison’s Beloved four times, the most recent of which had been while nursing my first-born. The structure and poetry of the book had always impressed me, but that time I was overwhelmed by the emotion in it. With my baby literally at my breast, I felt the powerful love it would take to kill a baby for whom you would do anything—anything, even take his life—to save your nursling from being returned to a slavery that had killed his father and your own spirit.

The mother succeeded in killing only one child, though she’d meant to save all four with the handsaw. Her mother-in-law, who had been bought out of slavery by the son killed by the slave-owner who came to take her daughter-in-law and grandchildren, raised the remaining children while their mother was in prison. Two of the three children were lost to the seduction of the West. After the daughter-in-law was released from prison, the grandmother—who had lived bravely, inspired others, survived even the trauma of her child’s and her grandchild’s deaths, and raised her other grandchildren—finally lay down at the end of her life, too tired to have faith in anything but color itself.

“Bring me some pink,” she asked her daughter-in-law from her dying bed. And the woman would bring her a piece of watermelon, or a scrap of pink quilt fabric, or, with no other alternative, would show her her tongue.

At no time did the losses in my life come close to those suffered by Beloved’s women, yet I came to understand on a personal level how subtractions can mount up so that vibrations of light are the only sure thing, all you long for.

I read Beloved with my students many times over the eight years I taught at Fisk.

There was a point at the beginning of each semester when I would look up from lecture notes or roll book and think, “I am the only white person in this room.”

It was always a fleeting thought, lost quickly in the semester’s immersion in the business of teaching—lectures, papers, exams, office hours, despair, struggle, and, in almost every case, ultimate victory: acceptable grades all around.

I was a tough teacher, known for refusing to hand out unearned grades and, in fact, frequently giving F’s where the work didn’t meet basic expectations. About halfway through one fall semester—when my students had had first-hand experience with this grading method, but not all of them had gotten up to their top speed—I’d just given back a quiz and dismissed the class when I heard a student outside the door sing out, “I got a D!” And she was genuinely delighted.

In that environment not even the bitterest student could claim the grading was racist—the few scattered As also went to black students. It wasn’t that no one noticed our racial differences. In fact, the racial divide was often a genuine part of classroom conversations. There was inevitably a day in women’s studies classes when we got into a good discussion of hair—the similar obsessions of black and white women with their coiffures and the differences between what we each meant by a “permanent”—one straightening, one curling.

There were some unnerving experiences with students which, relative to my encounter-avoiding upbringing, amounted to a walk on the wild side.

One of them happened the day a woman banged through my heavy office door and asked, “What have you got against me?”

Many of the young women at Fisk were middle-class, church-going, second or third generation college girls. They dressed and acted conservatively, for the most part. This woman didn’t look that way at all. She was very physically impressive—older than most other students and edgier-looking. Across her exposed chest lay a chain of complex scars that may have been the result of an accident or burns or some terrible surgery. Or they might have been warrior marks.

I wouldn’t know, having little knowledge of warrior marks beyond what I’d read in Alice Walker novels. But I sure wasn’t going to ask this woman. Such forwardness was nowhere in my upbringing or nature. Plus the woman was genuinely and deeply angry with me, and I didn’t have a clue why.

I don’t remember what my answer to her question was, but I must have disclaimed having anything against her.

“Then why have you been rude to me every single time I see you?” she said. (I’m pretty sure, if I’d been black, she’d have added “Miss Thing.”) “Are you too good to say hello to me?”

“I don’t even know you!” I said.

“I see you almost every day!” she said.

It was early in the semester, and I began to have a terrible fear she was in one of my classes. I was justifiably infamous for forgetting people’s names. This went for white people too, but my students wouldn’t know this. I generally remembered faces, though, and was pretty sure I’d remember hers if I’d seen her in my classroom. Still, there was a possibility I’d gone unconscious sometime that semester.

“You aren’t one of my students are you?”

“No,” she said. She didn’t say anything else and I was momentarily relieved, until I realized, though she was by then sitting in the chair across from me, she was still emitting waves of hostility.

“So how did I offend you?” I finally asked.

“I greet you every time I see you and you have never once greeted me back. Now, where I come from, that’s plain rude.”

“That can’t be true! I’ve never even seen you!”

“That’s a lie! You just don’t look at me.”

“But how could I speak to you if I don’t see you?”

“I said you don’t look.”

She was looking at me at that moment with an intensity that made it suddenly clear to me what she meant by look. It penetrated.

“You mean you actually said something to me and I ignored you?” I said in a small, white voice.

She settled back in her chair. “I didn’t say you didn’t speak to me. I said you didn’t greet me.”

She was holding on to my eyes, now that she had them. She nodded, still holding my gaze, in a way that pulled my head down with hers, a pro forma smile on her face, demonstrating greeting, which about half of my face took a stab at mirroring.

I learned from that woman—whose name I still don’t remember—that black people look at each other when they pass on the street and nod, with or without words. Not doing this, especially repeatedly, is considered rude.

She learned from me that white people would consider it far too intimate and intrusive to have someone enter their visual space that way. It might interfere with some crucial, pale thought.

But after that conversation I tried it out anyway on walks across campus. And thus began several years of walking down the Fisk sidewalk being a sort of pedestrian party—a long series of eye-locks, nods, smile—whether or not I had any idea who I was eye-locking with.

I learned a lot of other things while I was at Fisk—where the local voudon store was (a section of the neighborhood Walgreen’s Drugstore), that black people could be deeply homophobic—which surprised me as much as discovering my gay landlords in Houston were Republicans. I was equally stunned to find out that people who had historically suffered so much physical abuse also routinely spanked their children, anathema to my liberal way of thinking. And that, though they might spank their kids once they got here, they were also deeply opposed to aborting them.

On the lighter side, I learned that you should never leave your pocketbook on the floor.

During one of the first classes of the semester, a freshman visibly fretted her way through class, then came up at the end, picked my pocketbook off the floor and handed it to me.

I was more than a little startled—pocketbooks, in most women’s lives I think I can say with confidence, are part of one’s personal space.

The student said, “Oh, Dr. Moran, don’t you know? You can never leave your pocketbook on the floor.”

I must have had my blank look, holding my bag, because she took mercy and explained: “It lowers your money.”

Before I left Fisk I would come to know on deeply personal and professional levels how prejudice knows no boundaries, is as fickle, unpredictable—as unpindownable—as just about everything else. All told, the worst of the challenges I had there came from administration, not students.

But one of the most enduring disruptions of my placid pool of whiteness was another confrontation by a student in my office.

This woman was unmistakably my student—it would have been hard under any circumstances not to notice her. She was one of the famed Jubilee Singers—the present day iteration of the group of Fisk students who once performed around the world to save the financially-failing school. This woman had the capacious body of the born opera singer—tall and big around.

We had reached the point in the Brit. Lit. semester when I’d handed back the rough drafts of their final critical paper. Though it didn’t count toward their final grade, the papers carried the grade they would have received if they had been the final version.

This was always a tough moment. By then the students largely trusted me and were invested in the class. But most of them would get a failing grade on this version. Although I had warned them many times that most people would fail because they had not asserted and then proven a genuinely arguable thesis, students persisted in believing that this couldn’t possibly happen to them and would blithely turn in a paper arguing, as did this woman’s something like “Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales.”

Since Chaucer almost certainly wrote The Canterbury Tales, I gave the paper a failing grade. Shock ensued.

I’d learned to ride the wave of indignation, help students re-write (or, more accurately, write for the first time) a truly critical essay. Everyone, generally, survived.

But we hadn’t reached that happy point, and this woman was large and indignant. What’s more, she’d missed class the week before because she’d been in jail. I never knew for what.

She was sprung in time to show up in my office one day, banging that heavy door behind her. She slapped her paper down on my desk and towered.

I was not just a little apprehensive; my puny white self frozen at the keyboard. I must have just looked at her, in my now classic blank mode.

Her Jubilee Singers voice boomed out.

“Dr. Moran, what this paper need is some Jesus.”

I’m pretty sure I just kept on sitting there. I had very little spiritual life then and no grip on the academic uses of Jesus whatsoever.

The student sat down hard in the chair next to my desk, slapped her hand on the Jesus-free paper pityingly, and added, “That, and a critical argument.”

I hope I laughed with her then, as I have often laughed at the memory.

This student ended up doing very well in Brit. Lit. For her oral presentation, she organized other students into an Oprah Winfrey Show on Chaucer, with guests such as the Director of the Kenya Center of Modern Chaucerian Studies. She made a terrific Oprah. She later took several creative writing classes with me, and her voice on paper had the same power as her singing one.

I was numb a lot of the time in those years, as much from circumstances as from inherent paleness of spirit. Among other life-changing events, my mother died the second semester at Fisk. While I was at home at Christmas that year it was clear she was going soon. My father told me he planned to commit suicide when she died. He said it with such rational finality I didn’t question how the courage of his defiant youth had been extinguished by age and love. He was, after all, my great white father.

After he told me that I went upstairs to my by then sexually-estranged husband and my tiny, sleeping children. I told my husband that I thought nothing much mattered at all, except possibly good hair color.

And, then, a couple of failed jobs later, he left me and the only slightly larger children.

I was carried along by my Fisk students through all of this. When my mother died, I got a card from every single student in every class. The classroom was a warm and satisfying refuge when my husband left. And one student or another was on hand at my house many weeknights to help me get my kids through dinner and bedtime all the way through early elementary school.

I stayed married to my husband for four years after he left, but eventually I divorced him. I left Fisk then to return to my ancestral home, an elderly father who had survived a suicide attempt, and a predominantly white university.

I thought I was going home to the light and space my family would provide, but it proved to be an altogether darker time. I saw my father out of this world and endured my children’s struggles through later elementary and middle school while their father came and went in our lives, refusing either to join us or to set us free.

The loss of husband and parents took a heavy toll on my sense of hope. I didn’t know I was going to dive to such depths.

Nor did I know that down there I would find color—a coral reef of small pleasures in my funny sons, my reconnection with brother and cousin, the beauty of light and air in the summery cottage I bought after my father died.

“Bring me some pink,” I might have said.

(You can find the essay as it was published in Oxford American–Take a look at the beautiful pen & ink the magazine commissioned to illustrate it.)