Dear Teen Me from Author Bethany Hegedus (TRUTH WITH A CAPITAL T)

Hi, Beth.

It’s me, the older-and-hopefully wiser woman you’ve grown up to be. You can call me Bethany. Everyone does, starting the first year of college, but that is years away. You are fourteen going on fifteen and you’ve just moved from the suburbs of Chicago to the suburbs of Augusta, Georgia. You don’t know anyone. Not a soul. All your friends are about to start Bolingbrook High School and you are what feels a zillion miles away, not able to decode the accents you hear in the hallways—the howdy’s and hey’s—that remind you, at every turn, you are an outsider. A Yankee.

Yep, it may be 1986 but Yankee is still a term that is used down here. You haven’t got a clue as to how and why you are here, or what the South will come to mean to you, all you know is you want to get back home. Home is Illinois. You want to audition for the BHS play with your friends. You want to work on the yearbook with Dana and write love letters to James, instead you settle for ten minute phone calls when the rates go down. (This is years before cell phones and unlimited minutes and your dad watches the phone bills with an eagle eye.) There is no email, ims or texting, but there are Blue Mountain Arts cards that you buy by the buttload whenever you go to a Cracker Barrel. You send one to Dana every week and you even send a few to James, your first boyfriend back home.

Twenty-three years later, you don’t remember if you ever kissed James. But you could ask him. He’s your facebook friend. (And get this— somehow through many twists and turns, you have ended up living in the same state as Dana does: Texas of all places!) But what you do remember is that liking James, a black guy, which wasn’t such a big deal in middle school when all you did is talk on the phone for hours and hours and saw each other at movie nights with friends, becomes a very big deal when you begin to like Anthony**, that cute guy with the brown pick-up truck that looks like MC Hammer, now that you are in high school. (**Name changed)

Your dad has what your mom would call a conniption fit. “Black guys only want one thing.” Really Dad and what is it white boys want? Hmmmm…no answer.  So he comes back with, “What will the neighbors think?” You didn’t care then—and don’t now—about what the Jones’s may or may not think about you. Your mom tries the more subtle, “Sweetheart, we just don’t want you to have a harder life than you need to.” And then she follows that up with, “Think of your children.” You want to scream—MOM, I am fifteen. I am not planning on having kids with the guy! And you’re not. You’re nowhere near having sex, though the topic does come up (as do other things) often.

Anthony lives in the same neighborhood as your friend Amy. You sneak over and see him often. You kiss and kiss and kiss, smooshed up against the bricks of his home. When his parent’s aren’t home you go in the TV room, and make out while MTV is on and whenever your parent’s go out for a business dinner Anthony comes over and you make out on the porch swing. You kiss so much and for so long your lips swell.

It isn’t just your parents that have a problem—some of your friends do too. “How can you like him?” “What’s it like to kiss a black guy?” “People think you’re slutty ‘cause you’re dating a black guy.” Anthony gets his kind of flack too, “You must think you’re white.” “What—black girls aren’t good enough for you? Why her?”

It’s strange and kind of surreal. You know there is this color line you are supposed to walk—he on his side and you on yours—but that feels ridiculous. It feels false. You remind your mom she raised you to to treat everyone the same—so why are things different now? You tell your friends, you like who you like and you don’t dignify the slut comment with an answer. When you aren’t kissing, you and Anthony talk about some of this stuff—but it doesn’t come up much. You’re too busy listening to music (2 Live Crew, Paula Abdul, Whitney Houston, Prince, and Terence Trent Darby) and talking about videos and trading homework notes. You are who you are. He is who he is. And, as a couple, you split when your overcrowded high school gets re-zoned into two schools.

This isn’t the last time you will date a guy who isn’t the same race as you are but it is the first time you had to take a stand to like who you care about, regardless of skin color. Later, you meet and make friends with children of interracial marriages, and you do talk to one another about what it is like to be white, what it is like to be black, and what it is like to date someone outside your race. You meet and marry a white guy from Nebraska. You get divorced and move to NYC.  You date someone from Trinidad, New Jersey, Brooklyn, Kansas, and India.  Sometimes you and your partners are met with raised eyebrows, other times you are met with open arms. You attend an all-black church and share the experience with an older white friend who has never stepped foot in an African-American’s home.  You read and write books with a cast of characters, of many races: white, black, biracial, and any combination in between.
You are aware—always of color and race. You think it is a lie and covert way to express racism when people use the phrase, “color blind.” (Still to this day you have never heard anyone of any race use the term “color blind” other than a white person.)

You made a choice when you were fifteen, when others could weigh in on your decision and try to talk you out of how you felt.  You didn’t let them sway you.  Later, you taught high school in a community in the mid-90’s where the Klan was still active and interracial dating was more than frowned upon. When asked questions about your personal life you didn’t say a thing, but you hoped who you were and the respect you showed everyone was an example,  that without your having to say anything, that those teens could be friends with, date, or marry anyone of their choosing. (It helped that you were a Theatre teacher—who played the soundtrack of RENT on your computer and everyone thought you were weird—or a lesbian, because at the time you had short hair. Being in Theatre it was okay to be different, and now thanks to Glee, being a theatre geek is a good thing.)

But what you didn’t know at fifteen is that though your parents were scared— they aren’t hateful.

You are moved beyond belief when, years later, your father hangs a picture of you and the Trinidadian man on the wall of his dining room, alongside the pictures of your married brother and sister. You know you are loved when your mom hugs any man, no matter what color he is, that you bring home.

I want to thank you for the brave choices you made at fifteen. It is because of who you were then that here I am at thirty-eight unafraid to love, unafraid to learn and experience other cultures and communities, and most of all unafraid of what people will say about the choices that I know are right for me.

Thank you, Beth. It is true that you are older, but maybe just maybe…there was always a part of you that was wise. (Though your hair cuts definitely show lack of sound judgment.)

XOXO,

Bethany

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Bethany Hegedus has spent time above and below the Mason-Dixon Line. She cares deeply about kids, having once been a high school teacher and also a youth advocate. She serves as a mentor in the PEN Prison Writing Program and holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Bethany is Co-Editor of the Young Adult’s and Children’s section of the literary magazine, Hunger Mountain and is Austin Host of the popular website readergirlz.com. Her second novel, TRUTH WITH A CAPITAL T (Delacorte/Random House) released in October 2010. BETWEEN US BAXTERS (WestSide Books, 2009) is her first novel and forthcoming is the picture book GRANDFATHER GANDHI, co-written with Arun Gandhi (Atheneum/Simon & Schuster, TBA).

Tags: Atheneum, Bethany Hegedus, Delacorte, MG, Picture Books, Random House, Simon & Schuster, WestSide Books