Prologue PASSING OUT Aha! Been "passing," have you? Well, I''ve queered that. --Nella Larsen, Passing , 1929 I was trying to think when I first had a sense of myself as a Black woman; a Black girl. Not when it was first explained to me, the thing in need of explanation being my brown skin and black curly hair and dark, dark eyes in relation to my mother''s pinky-pale skin and blue ones. There was a sofa in the apartment. More of a daybed, really. It was a solid, minimalist DIY carpentry project my grandfather on my mother''s side, a frustrated mid-century modernist, had made, probably originally for his "apartment" in the basement of their modest Park Hill ranch in Denver, Colorado. This was when my grandparents were in the process of divorcing (she claimed it was over Nixon). When the two of them were sharing the same house with my teenage mother and her daughter (me) in the pre-K years before we, too, moved out.

I see it as a glossy-white, twin-size platform whose protruding edge always left a band of red on the backs of my thighs. The explanation took place on this homemade couch. It felt (the explanation) appropriately creative to me, whereas the daybed filled me with ire. Even as a child of eight or nine I was keenly aware of the look of things, of whether their appearance and histories were proper to the settings I might someday be seen to have lived my life in. In a way that must have had a lot to do with books (my mother was finishing her BA in English Lit) and especially with glossy shelter magazines like House & Garden , I formulated a Whartonian worldview while living in a second-floor 1.5-bedroom apartment with an unplanted square of dirt off the downstairs neighbor''s back porch. On one of our thrift store trips, when I was probably in second or third grade, my mother scored a bunch of New Yorkers from the 1940s and ''50s, which, being a good reader, I subsequently pored over as if they were ancient texts. Through osmosis, I became persnickety and old-fashioned, a time traveler dropped into a foreign present.

Little Lady Fauntleroy in the age of the Bee Gees and Logan''s Run . I was an enemy of impropriety. But--and yes, yes, maybe because--I sensed there might be something deeply improper about me. Not having a tastefully upholstered department-store sofa to sit on as I digested my origin story struck me as indecorous. It didn''t bother me that the story came as a drawing. My mother, still in her very early twenties, was an artist. I knew this because sometimes we drew together. Before I let the pen touch my own blank page, I would sneak a look at what she was doing, set up in the part of the living room where light streamed in from double-hung windows, a giant clipboard balanced on her knees.

I learned to copy the way she glanced up every few seconds, even as she was making the next confident mark. The square of brown composite board on her lap had rounded corners and a long slot along one edge for the artist''s fingers, both palette and easel. At the time, my mother preferred fine-tipped German Rapidographs. Their thick, reservoired barrels were refillable. You had to learn to manually siphon India ink into them from a small plastic bottle. With the acuity of an architect, my mother made detailed and accurate yet totally personal drawings of, say, the deco wicker lounge chair that was, to my mind, elegant, our standout piece. The chair was a heavy, substantial article of furniture with a wide, canted back made for sunning, possibly on the deck of a steamship. Like the daybed, it was white.

Painted most recently with thick, surely oil-based, shiny paint. It had a swoopy, wavelike profile. I admired its original vanilla-colored Naugahyde upholstery, box welted and dotted along the sides with small round metal vents for the air to escape through when someone sat down. (As I would later learn, our downstairs neighbor, now an entomologist, had stolen the thing off someone''s porch, leaving it to us when she moved back to Manhattan.) I was proud of that chair. In life and in the drawing, which my mother signed and dated. After, she sandwiched the ruffled sketchbook sheet between some mat board and a raw-edged plate of glass fastened with metal clips and a cord. This drawing would later hang on a wall in our first house too.

One night we''d been sitting on the ersatz sofa watching our small black-and-white television. The aluminum foil balls on the antennae weren''t doing much, so I''d had to jump up to swivel the rabbit ears around for better reception. It was definitely a Shakespeare play-- As You Like It , maybe--performed by grainy bearded men in capes and words I didn''t think were English. It scared me a little. Not unlike Albinoni''s unbearably sad "Adagio," which, along with the chipper fluting of Jean-Pierre Rampal, forms part of the soundtrack of those years. But watching was a way to be closer to my mother, who I knew liked classical things. When at last the imperious strains of the Masterpiece Theater theme began to play, it was bedtime. My mother wanted to talk to me about something first.

That was when I really got to know the deco chair. While she spoke in simple terms of complicated matters, I mentally deconstructed the scaffold of painted reeds twisted and bundled in various thicknesses like so many fasces. The previous Christmas I''d been given a tastefully illustrated book entitled Where Do Babies Come From? and it had definitely given me pause. I''d like to see that book again because in my mind it''s all slender White hippies in bell-bottoms, painted in the style of Rossetti. The author didn''t mince words, but inasmuch as I looked nothing like the lithesome Pre-Raphaelite children who emerged from their mother''s WOMB as a result of SPERM and EGGS and LOVE, I must have felt the need for additional details. My mother got one of her smaller spiral sketchbooks and sat back down beside me. She unscrewed the cap of her Rapidograph and opened to a fresh page. Gradually, three small, near-perfect circles appeared in a horizontal line.

I watched intently as she left the first circle blank and skipped the middle one. She colored in the third one until the paper warped from the ink. Next, she filled the middle circle with parallel lines. The pen moved from edge to edge, first in one direction, then perpendicularly. This was the beginning of a densely hatched grid. The more lines she made, the grayer the circle became until its tone was somewhere roughly between the empty white circle and the dark, black, saturated one. If there was a verbal accompaniment to this visual aid--and I''m sure there was since my mother was, in those years, what she always said I was to her, my sunshine--I don''t remember a word of it. I remember that chair, in whose complex design and mysterious advent I took comfort.

And I can picture the diagram with its three circles, in which I found none. At the same time, the diagram feels like something I would make--have made, in fact--to explain Renaissance intaglio printmaking techniques to students. It was a perfect illustration that might have provided answers to a child who already wondered why she stood out and if she would ever belong. -- But it didn''t. My mother''s drawing did not help me understand myself. On the contrary, it seemed to raise previously unconscious concerns about my being (in some way) Black. The drawing may have made me aware, however dimly, that there was more to the story. A blacked-out, redacted more, about which I knew absolutely nothing.

Because we didn''t talk about my father. I might as well state, right now, that I wasn''t conceived in violence or without consent--except that of my parents'' parents. That we didn''t talk about my Black biological father in my White family when Loving v. Virginia had been decided just two years before I was born, is, I suppose, not all that surprising. In 2000, when I was thirty-one, Alabama became the last state in the US to abolish anti-miscegenation laws. I grew up in the West, in Colorado, where Black communities tend to be much smaller than on either coast or in the Midwest or South. For now, just know that my father didn''t come up. Ever.

As a result, I had no rehearsed response when strangers asked what I was--which they did almost daily until sometime in my forties, when my age, or possibly the antagonistic roadblocks I vibe when I can see a stranger heading in that direction, largely seem to have put a stop to the unwelcome inquiries. Back in my thirties, before I dropped myself into the legendarily diverse stewpot that is UC Berkeley, I had already vowed that my reply to "What are you?" no matter who asked--and BIPOC people rarely do--would be "Oh, I never answer that question." Although I''ve always made an effort to toss off the phrase in a firm yet playful manner, as if being pressed to reveal a secret recipe, my rebuff generally dissatisfies the inquirers. Their typical response is defensive, dismissive, or scolding: "Oh, come on. It''s not a big deal. I''m just curious." I, too, am curious. About a lot of things--why those jeans, why this husband, or that third glass of wine--but self-control prevents me from asking questions others might deem rude and invasive.

If you''re ever about to ask someone potentially not-White (which is probably why you''re asking) that question or a variation thereof, just don''t. If they want you to know, it will come out organically. If it doesn''t, consider why it feels so important; what will that information get you? Writers of color keep explaining how offensive and unsettling it is to be asked to disclose or document our ethnic or racial makeup in the course of a casual conversation. Diversity trainings discouraged s.