I've been writing this essay for years now, through countless English 101 assignments and womens literature classes. The beginning is firm, the middle is constantly changing, and I cannot find the end. Now another assignment has focused my resolve. Write about themes like affirming ethnicity and culture, I said, and they replied, "You first."

Coming out of the dark subway station onto 135th Street, I kept my eyes down as I headed to the address I had memorized on the train. In the Schomburg Collection of Negro History, a branch of the New York Public Library, I would find rare copies of the novels I needed for a master’s essay on the Harlem Renaissance.

A graduate student fresh from the Heartland, I had lived in New York City for almost a year, but I had never taken the train above 96th Street, the dividing line between the upper West Side and Harlem. Drawing me across that line was a library, and I knew libraries--their musty smells, their high ceilings with filtered light, their stillness broken only by whispers and footsteps on worn, wooden floors. Libraries were my world, the student world, comfortable and comforting places.

Despite my Midwestern naiveté, I knew enough not to make eye contact on the street. On my half-block walk to the library, I tried to ignore the litter, the smells of frying that wafted to the street from a three-stool cafe, and especially the black men leaning against the brick walls. As I clutched my notebook to my chest, I heard two words muttered, just above a whisper: white woman. At first I thought the words were meant for someone else, but what other white woman was in sight? They told me I was out of place, that I had crossed into territory not my own.

Within a few steps I reached the heavy wooden doors of the Schomburg Collection where librarians brought me all the dusty volumes I could possibly read in one afternoon. No one raised an eyebrow at my requests; no one asked me what I was doing there even though I wondered. After filling a yellow pad with notes, I headed back downtown, my eyes still averted but no longer imagining myself invisible.

At age 22, I had begun to understand my place in the world as a woman. I had already been denied a summer fellowship open only to men and admission to a Ph.D. program because women just drop out to get married. I had been struggling with what it meant to be female, but I had never before been conscious of my race.

White students in my classes today often claim they have no ethnicity, that all this color consciousness is false and political. If pressed, they rattle off a string like my own: Irish, Scotch, German, and English. West coast born, they claim no links to the Daughters of the American Revolution. Like some of their families, my ancestors climbed from potato famines, dirt farming, diesel repair, and shirt factories, out of poverty and into the middle class as preachers and teachers, insurance salesmen, and housewives with children to raise. A church-related college was the community college of its day for sons and daughters of rural Indiana.

Five summers ago, I went back to Indiana for a reunion of my mother’s family: her six sisters and two brothers who gave me twenty-two cousins. Less than a week before the reunion, one of the sisters had died. In a small-town funeral home, relatives and neighbors came for the viewing of Aunt Iona and talked quietly in hushed tones. For lunch we ate white bread sandwiches with iced tea at an Amish restaurant. The next day we had an impromptu chapel service at the college that had moved the Harts out of the lower-class. We sang hymns in four-part harmony, led by a cousin, accompanied on piano by an aunt, with prayers given by an uncle. We buried Iona in the Raglesville Cemetery, a mounded hill near a cluster of frame houses surrounded by cornfields.

There in the cemetery I read my roots on the stones, Harts stretching back four generations. My father's ancestors, the McBrides, are buried in a cemetery with GAR markers. On southern Indiana farms and country roads, in the small city of Terre Haute and the town of Washington, both parents had grown up where church ice cream suppers and Ku Klux Klan picnics were the only social life around. Seeing southern Indiana with older eyes, I marveled at the orderly fields, the rolling hills, the well-kept lawns, the limestone houses. This was white, the ethnicity of my parents.

Blacks were invisible in the countryside but not in Indianapolis where I grew up. The city was segregated in the late 1950's and early 1960's, with one all-black high school, Crispus Attucks. My own high school had many black students, especially on the sports teams but not in the honors classes or the cheerleading team. A high school friend did not dare to date the black guy she liked.

Race was familiar but not comfortable. At the age of 12, I spent an uncomfortable two hours in the back of a Trailways bus with congenial black men I did not fully trust. In college I marched down the street of a northern Ohio town protesting job discrimination in the telephone company, but I felt hypocritical singing "We Shall Overcome." I had never felt part of the ruling class, but I realized I had less to overcome.

"White woman" is still not a term I wear easily. A few years after the walk in Harlem, I was mugged by a black teenager as I came out of a Brooklyn subway station; I still hadn't known enough to be wary, known how much I stood out. Then, when asked by police, I hesitated to pick a kid out of the police lineup just because he was young, black and might look familiar. As a liberal, in my first year of teaching, I voted for Dick Gregory rather than Hubert Humphrey as a protest against the Vietnam war. A black colleague confronted me: “It’s people like you who undercut my people, throwing away your vote on a comedian.”

In graduate school I read black literature, but I backed off from African-American studies, realizing the academic life had territorial boundaries, too. As a young woman I read Betty Friedan and felt restless, Ralph Ellison and felt invisible, Tillie Olsen and felt silent. The literary voices I search for today are like the women in Molly Gloss fiction who have an independent spirit and a strong will.

Last year I went back to Indiana carrying a worn quilt that spans three generations. Its black, navy blue, and brown wool squares and rectangles came from my grandfathers pants, the ones he wore to work at the Baltimore & Ohio machine shops and the ones he wore to the E.U.B. church. Its softer, jauntier, blue, green, and red triangles come from his shirts. Although it bears no embroidered patch with her name, the quilt was made by my grandmother, Edna McBride. It had long been the warmest but not the prettiest blanket in the family. Months stuffed in the back of the car, summers of camping, and winters of watching soccer had frayed it almost beyond saving.

It became a project. My mother and I scoured Goodwill for cheap wool and colored t-shirts; I had brought the worn-out pants from my husband's favorite suit, and we bought soft new homespun for the backing. We carefully removed the torn pieces, sifted decades of dirt through the dryers spin, and restrung knots at the corners of the pieces. Why all this trouble for a quilt without even a pine tree or a wedding ring? It embodied values I have come to cherish: the work of the hands, the ethic of saving, and the comfort of usefulness. Definitely working class and Midwestern, possibly white.

Despite this heritage, I cannot continue to claim the underdog status granted by gender and family that started on the bottom rung. In my comfortable middle age I’ve seen parents who never had much money retire to a gated community on a lake. I’m married to a lawyer who bills by the hour and who buys me a soft leather briefcase that doesn’t quite fit my job. I’m the mother of a graduate from an elite college with a fellowship to graduate school and a son who snowboards, wakeboards, and plays golf, sports reserved for rich people in my youth. I’m an educated white woman, with all the guilt, privilege, accomplishments, and angst the label entails. The undercurrent from those two words in Harlem still colors and tests the fabric.

- Judith Bentley