Finding Toni

She didn't want to live up to her distinguished family, her father president of an African-American scholarship organization, other relatives doctors and lawyers, one cousin a concert pianist. She would lie on her bed in our dorm room listening to Johnny Mathis and telling me how much she missed her boyfriend Rem back in North Carolina. She had pictures of babies on her wall, and was a dreamy soft kind of girl.

I was not much of a companion. I was so terrified of failure that I was in the Conservatory practicing by 7:30 or 8:00 A.M., in class or studying and back at the Con until 10:00 almost every day. When she asked if I wanted to go to the Student Union, I couldn't upset my rigid schedule, and when I got back to the room she was often asleep.

I would have denied that I was in any way racially prejudiced. When the college asked if I would be comfortable with an African American roommate, I wrote back that of course I would. But I felt kind of proud of myself. My hometown was almost entirely white. It was 1965 in Michigan and segregation and racial violence was for the South and we deplored it. Still, the one black girl in our high school honors classes was mostly alone socially. When a college girl from our town married a black man, the comment was that it wasn't fair to the children. My rebellious middle sister befriended a biracial girl and a little friend told her "We can't associate with you any more."

My roommate covered for me that spring when I began sneaking out at night to see my boyfriend. I spun a romantic story of needing to help him in an emotional crisis, when actually I was losing my virginity. I don't know if she guessed the truth. She may have been too innocent.

After I ran off and married the boyfriend after freshman year, she and I corresponded sporadically. I was so caught up in actual emotional crises that I was very slow to reply to her letters. She dropped out of college for a year and discovered Black History, travelled to Hawaii and had another boyfriend for a while and then returned to school ready to enjoy the experience. My life was so complicated that we finally lost touch.

For a long time she was my touchstone for integration. I did nothing concrete in the turbulent years, never marched or protested, but at least I had had a black roommate for one year. The years went by and when I moved to New York in the 80's, I got an alumni directory and found Toni's name. She had married her "Rem", and he was a lawyer and they lived on Park Avenue. I began to fantasize about getting back in touch but felt embarrassed. I felt guilty about the whole relationship and worried that she would remember me unhappily. Also, she probably was now in a much higher social circle than mine. Finally, in the 90's I saw her father's obituary in the NY Times. It mentioned her, now living in Stamford, Connecticut. I tracked down the address and wrote her a letter of condolence, then continued to say that, now that my daughters were in college, I had been thinking about her and our time together. I suggested that if she wanted to get back in touch, here was my information. I never heard from her.

A few years later I found some of her letters to me. They were full of news and chastising me for not writing back. One hinted at an incident that I can barely remember, but filled me with shame as some of the details came back. She had been taking a course in D.C. and apparently made a plan to come over and visit me at my husband's parents' house. Meanwhile, he and I had gone off to a music festival and I had forgotten she might come. I think she showed up at the door and my father-in-law was mystified and maybe not very welcoming. I cringed reading her saying,"Why do you always leave D.C. when I come down?!" I wished deeply that I could apologize and that I had done so in my condolence letter.

Now she was a symbol to me of my own uneasy race relations, the bump of difficulty still to be overcome in my generation. My daughters are, I think. really color blind, but we older ones are still haunted . When Obama was nominated I could feel a shift in the communal guilt and defensiveness, but the damage goes deep. Once in a while at an opera performance I would see a handsome cafe-au-lait woman who could be Toni, and I imagined her at the pit rail saying, "Mahtha, is that you?" in her soft Carolina accent.

Recently I was temporarily able to navigate Facebook and I happened upon an alumni list for our college. I typed in a search for Toni and three entries came up: first as a writer of children's books on African American themes, next as having headed an organization to promote literature for African American children. Then was her obituary. She had died at 58 of a brain tumor, survived by her husband, who was an appellate court judge, her three daughters and her mother. Sometimes a door closes.