Rebecca Walker writes about her early life moving back and forth over the US, between her african american mother and her white jewish father and his new wife.
"[Mother's] presence at the table would grant me the great luxury of being able to love my family unreservedly, to take them irrevocably as my own. As it is, the specter of my mother, of race, really, and the inability of my relatives to deal with it, leaves me somewhere on the periphery of my own experience, unable to commit to fully being there. Haunted by her absence, I pull back cautiously and feel, even as I laugh and play with my cousins, as if some part of me is alien to the others, as if I am in the family through some kind of affirmative-action plan and don't entirely belong."
