A smile comes from God. Or it comes from nowhere. I know that now. But for years I flashed a bright smile-in childhood, then into high school, then into the rest of my life-trying to fool myself and my "friends" all of us believing that we were all OK.

 My senior class yearbook confirmed the lie:
 "Keep smiling!" so many people wrote in the pages. " I'll miss your smiling face!" "Keep up that big smile."
 The grin was perfected.
 But there was nothing perfect about a lie-not for me, and not for them. Only now, indeed, can I admit in a book what I didn't see back then-because a smile covered up my terrible truth.
  hated white people.
 Or maybe I hated America.
 Or maybe I hated God.
 Or surely I hated myself. I hated the burden of being "colored" in America and I hated the people who I thought made that burden real. Not individual people per se. But I hated my idea of "white people": their power, their privilege, their wealth, their policies. Their laws, "Whites Only Allowed." And all the rest.
 But I was still smiling.
 And the effort of it-the sheer idiocy of it-left me reeling.
 I didn't realize, as James Baldwin observed, that "it is very difficult-it is hazardous-for a Negro in the country really to hat white people." We're too involved with each other, he said, socially and historically. The pressure of that closeness was a vise, clamping down.
 And I knew I had to escape it. I had to stop hating-because I had to start living. Before I got old and died and my bones turned white, then turned to dust, I had to live at least one day without seeing white and feeling hate.
 So I started to write. I opened a vein and let the words fall down, expecting they'd be angry and hateful. But very quickly the words turned hopeful, maybe because I was searching for the truth. I was looking, indeed, for truth about race in America. And in that search I remembered something that changed my life. I remembered a bright light and her unlikely kindness, and all the things her gestures taught me. so what else was there to do? I wrote her a letter.

Dear Kerry Monroe,
 I had thought you had a white name. Like Weymeyer or Reichert. Or maybe Feinster. A white name. I was looking for a white name-or my memory of a "white" name- when I searched my old high school yearbook.
 But then a page turned and there was your picture. Kerry Monroe. Pretty, smiling. Kerry Monroe, like a movie stars name. And you really were a star. You were a cheerleader. That was sophomore year. Senior year, you were a drum majorette. And nobody, as I recall, thought that was square.
 It was 1964 and we were smiling and still hopeful.
 So you wore your hair in a flip. And you shaved your legs. And at 14 you had boyfriends. They came to your house and sat right in your living room, with your parent's approval. I was awed by their acceptance of hormones and urgency. It was alien. But so were you.
 TV didn't prepare me for my first white friend, TV primed me, in fact, to hate anybody who looked anything like you. But you defied that expectation.
 You walked up to me on the playground a Northglenn Junior High in Northglenn, Colo.-you ignored the nervous stares the other children were grinning at me: a newcomer who was black, one of only a few dark children in a school of several hundred-and you gave me a giggle and a big smile.
 "Hi!" you said.
 The greeting was terror and pleasure in one instant.
 The friendliness disarmed me-but cheered me, because I was so utterly sorrowful on that first day of ninth grade, knowing instead I should have been happy. I was finally an upper-classman in junior high. And I finally looked like it. I wore lipstick and stockings every day. I sneaked on mascara. I was smart in school and my teachers in Denver agreed. I had a mother who bought me pleated skirts and sweater sets and thought I could do anything.
 But I learned that summer that I was not invincible. And that things change.
 We moved. My father uprooted us.
 The pioneer- my father. The crusader. Always seeking, striving, going. So at this juncture in Denver, he noticed that the white men he worked with every day were buying new houses in the suburbs for their families. So he would, too. It was an act of love.
 That's what brought us to the Denver suburb of Northglenn. My father, God bless him, was trying to do a loving thing. He wanted us to taste the American dream, and I love him now for that effort and the sacrifices it cost him.
 But Northglenn was land's end.
 It was the sound of "nigger," the first place I heard it directed at me, for me. A little girl, no more than 6, looked up at me riding my bicycle one day and the word sprung whole without effort from her tiny pink lips. "You're a nigger," she said, pointing matter-of-factly, then she went back to playing. She was too small to hurt, too young to debate.
 So I rode home to the new ranch house and pushed my bike into the attached double garage and went into the kitchen with the new appliances and did nothing. And the nothing got stuck in my throat like a wad of caution: Don't say anything to upset the false picture of tranquillity here. Patricia, don't even thing about saying something that dishonors your daddy's effort to get us out here.
 A 14-year-old's logic struggles to protect a parent's feelings. So I didn't complain. I only pleaded with my father to let me return to my old neighborhood for school. It would be nothing, Daddy, for me to ride into the city when you drive to work. to go back to the old neighborhood. Back to my old friends and teachers. Back to my world. Back to my place.
 No, Daddy said.
 Next day, I walked to the bus stop. And some of the white children there ran around each other, trying not to stand next to me. A few wouldn't sit next to me. Or look at me, except to point and whisper and giggle. The yellow school bus, after all the pickups, would arrive at Northglenn Junior High crowded with children, excited about their new school year, laughing and talking together. And me-sitting alone. so that first week at the Northglenn school lasted a year in my soul.
 I couldn't see then what I know now, that we were all perplexed-because of our age, and because of "race" and because of the era. We were struggling with raw discomfort-at odd understanding that we were in the middle of something new and momentous, but we were too young to understand it.
 Then, Kerry, you walked up.
 Maybe you were wearing a flare skirt with a Peter Pan collar on your blouse. Or a plaid madras jumper. It was prim, at any rate-light years from what kids in Denver were "styling" in at my old school, Cole Junior High.
 At Cole, the hallways were promenades with tight skirts gripping the rear ends and furry sweaters stretched tight over pointy chests. And boys in men's V-neck sweaters.
 Cole was heaven. I soaked in the sound and the fury, and I could not get enough.
 Now in Northglenn, I stood alone on the playground without friends and I couldn't fully believe I was here in this white place. Being at this school seemed like somebody else's script, taken of the TV news. This was an "integration" story, but nobody with cameras was recording this, documenting this day so I'd have proof that this moment was unfolding.
 "Hi!"
 This was you, Kerry, on this day: perfect blond curls bouncing all over your head. Bright blue eyes. Broad smile. Slight overbite, " Are you new to the school?" A quiet lisp, but still that smile. Wide as Colorado.
 I answered something, but my mind had stopped working. You chattered away-a brilliant, shining apparition. So bright-I wanted to hate you. White girl. But you were saving me.
 So I watched you, talking to me and laughing, and I could have knelt down and held you tight. And let the gratitude wash over me, even while I wanted not to need your human kindness.
 At 14, I couldn't admit I needed it. Even now, I'm supposed to dismiss your little niceness. I can even hear in my head, as I did then, the memory of the practiced put-downs:
 White girls-they so phony. We did, at Cole, this mimic thing with bouncy speech and a mock flip of the hair. White girls- they so phony. But, Kerry, here's the thing: You were true, as real as the long Colorado horizon always before us.
 And now, God help me, I have to say thank you.
 Thank you, Kerry Monroe. This thing you did was a full thing. A God thing, maybe.
 Years later, indeed, your childhood kindness stood before me, defying my hate-showing me white wasn't a wrong thing always. And I couldn't argue.
 And that started something in me. Call it trust. Or understanding. But I started to see I could forgive my racial past. Looking back at you helped me understand that the burden of being colored in America could be lifted in part, by recalling the righteousness of somebody like you. But truthfully, I used you. Those first weeks, I stuck to you just like glue. Even though I didn't understand you really. I was grateful for you. But gratitude isn't affection. I used you, Kerry. I listened to your laughter and sopped it up, needing it so much. But later, as the weeks passed, and my strangeness wore off and others warmed up and I actually found a circle of people-girlfriends of a sort-who would sit next to me on the bus, and talk to me in class and eat lunch with me, I sought you out less. I moved on.
 Surely, you were always friendly enough, and I tried to be, too-waving hi to you in the lunchroom and in the halls. But that initial burst of goodwill we shared-most of it coming from you-faded over time. You were just part of the passing crowd, finally.
 In our high school yearbook-the 1967 Trojan Pacemaker - your neat autograph with a short message written in blue ink occupies a corner of the inside front cover.
 Pat, It has been great knowing you these past four years. Stay as wonderful as you are, and I wish you all the luck in the future. Love & luck, Kerry '67
 I penciled in your last name. I put it in parentheses-apparently so that years later, if I looked through the book, I would read it and know.
 'Do you remember Kerry Monroe?' I'm on the phone with an old classmate, a girl named Cathy, who helped organize the last class reunion. I got her number from the high school. I'm hoping she saw Kerry at the reunion party, or knows how to reach her.
 "Kerry Monroe?" Yes, I tell Cathy. I'm looking for her. I have something to tell her.
 "She wasn't at the reunion," Cathy says. " We couldn't track her down."
 That's a shame, I say.
 "Who were her friends?" Cathy asks. "Call one. Find her through them."
 Her friends?
 "Weren't you her friend?" Cathy is trying to help.
 "No," I say. "Not really."
 Cathy is chatting warmly now. But her brightness doesn't annoy me today, in the way white "friendliness" once made me grit my teeth. So much smiling and nodding.
 Me, nodding and smiling in return. "Keep smiling!"
 The grin perfected. She so phony.
 Kerry Monroe? Cathy is certain. "I haven't seen her since we graduated."
 Some people are dead. That surprised me. Cathy is ticking off names. I grab my yearbook and a pen, start writing down names. Later I will look at those names and match their pictures in the book-people dead now of cancer or Vietnam or accidents; some of them brainy kids, or maybe popular, some just ordinary citizens of the world-and experience an odd feeling of loss. These people were hardly people I knew well of fully cared about. We shared the same odd space for a brief time, by coincidence. We sat in the same classes and cheered the same football team and ate in the same cafeteria. I smiled happily at them, but many times I did not mean it. But this hypocrisy felt justified-because, all the time, I never fully believed genuine friendship could happen with most everyday white people. And now these particular white people were gone, and never will return.
 If I could make magic, Kerry, I would wave a wand and send us all back. To wherever we started, so we could try everything over. I would find you. Then I could give us eyesight that lets us see each other without suspicion, devoid of complication.
 You set your example, so long ago. And now it compels me-granting me courage not just to give white people another chance, but to give myself that second chance, too. And look what happens. My hate is cooling down, and fading into the past. And love? It never fails.
 "We are skeptical of kindness so unfailing, sympathy so instant," the writer Wallace Stegner once said. He didn't know your type, and the nature of your gift.
 I'm just understanding it now, that like your face and your skin and your hair-those things I was supposed to disdain and despise-and shining. Maybe it was like a jewel. But maybe it was better than that.
 Maybe it was gold.

1. Raybon begins this article by writing that "A smile comes from God. Or it comes from nowhere. I know that now." Why and how is this effective in setting up the story that develops in "My First White Friend?"
2. Given the sensitive, often painful, nature of the memories that her subject for writing is built around, how would you describe Raybon's tone in this story? Give at least two examples that indicate the tone.
3. Based upon your reading, how would you describe Raybon's character as a young person? Do you believe, as she writes, that Raybon truly "hated white people. Or maybe I hated America. Or maybe I hated God. Or surely I hated myself?" What examples are there in the article to support your characterization? Finally, does her character grow or develop at all from the one we are initially introduced to?
4. What role does Kerry Monroe fulfill in this story? Using examples from the text, describe her character in contrast to the author's and the other people in Raybon's life as a child growing up
5. Raybon writes that, "I had to stop hating -- because I had to start living." If this can be accepted as the author's thesis or main idea in this story, then how does she develop it? From what you have read, would you want to read the book? Does this remind you of any similar stories that you may have read?

Key Words and Concepts

The words and concepts below come from the Raybon short story "My First White Friend." You are to first define the word. Having done so, you are to then use the word correctly in a single, complete sentence containing a subject and a verb.

1. burden
2. hazardous
3. gesture(s)
4. disarm(ed)
5. invincible
6. juncture
7. tranquility
8. perplex(ed)
9. momentous
10. apparition