Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (11 page)

Who would protect and support their little ones? I blamed myself.

Perhaps, I thought, my activism against apartheid had led to their untimely deaths. Just a week ago I had published in News day an article critical of President Botha’s much-heralded “Rubicon” speech.

Maybe these deaths were only a warning of what might happen if I continued to write and speak out against apartheid.

Following the tribal custom of my family, I mourned by shaving my head until I was as bald as Yul Brynner. It was a time-honored way of expressing grief and solidarity with the dead. The tighter my heart strings bound me to my homeland, the farther away I felt from America, its frenzied life, its empty materialism.

When Gail called to find out why I had not called lately, one misunderstanding led to another. We could no longer bridge the gulf between our cultures and our races. When I met her at the Strand Bookstore to talk, she was shocked and repulsed by my shaved head, amazed by how much of a hermit I had become. I felt she would never fully understand, no matter how much she loved me. I remained alone in my shell, torn by pain and guilt for being safe in America while my family suffered and mourned.

I had half a mind to leave America, to return home, but I knew that to do so would be tantamount to signing my own death warrant.

The Pretoria regime had made it known that I was its enemy, someone it would dearly love to grab in its claws because I was doing damage to its image by the words, the truth, I revealed in what I wrote and spoke. My passport had already been revoked; the mysterious threatening phone calls hadn’t ceased.

As the publication date of the Boy drew near, I became more and more convinced that I should let the flame die between Gail and me. I should devote all my energies to the antiapartheid struggle.

The only way I could expiate the deaths of my brothersin-law was to do my utmost to bring about the complete destruction of the evil system that had caused their untimely deaths, to help galvanize Western public opinion against apartheid. A serious relationship now, especially with a white woman, would only complicate things.

Kas’fir Boy finally came out and I left on a grueling two-week publicity tour without even saying good-bye to Gail.

GAIL’S VIEW It is very difficult to keep a relationship alive when the souls of both partners are in turmoil. While Mark was mourning the loss of his brothersin-law, I was lamenting the tragic loss of a best friend.

Tvo weeks before Mark left on his publicity tour, my close friend Naomi Vogel died in an auto accident on an interstate while driving from Wesleyan to New York to visit me and her boyfriend, Andrew Hollander.

A toolbox slipped out of the truck in front of her, she swerved to avoid it, and the car broke through the guard rail and tumbled end to end into a ravine. She was killed instantly.

I had met Naomi at the University of Budapest in the spring of 1983, at a time when I was so lonely and overwhelmed with having to speak and think in Hungarian that it was a rellef to meet another American. The year following our adventurous sojourn in Hungary, we had traveled back and forth between Brown and Wesleyan to visit each other. When I was in Germany I visited her in Heidelberg, where she was spending a semester abroad. Less than a month before her death she had spent a week at my place in Brooklyn, and we had stayed up past midnight many times sipping Hungarian wine and reminiscing boisterously over our days together in Budapest.

When Naomi’s boyfriend Andrew called me at work to tell me about the auto accident, I thought he was joking. I laughed. When he repeated the grim news, I was incredulous. When his words finally sank in, I wept uncontrollably. As days wore on I became more and more pensive.

I listened to Pachelbel over and over again, for Naomi had put on the album during her last visit. I stared vacantiy at the wall, with tear-filled eyes, wondering why God had chosen Naomi instead of me. I wondered if Naomi could see me or hear me. She visited me in dreams and told me she was not really dead. Every day was cold, rainy, and dreary.

I could feel Mark distancing himself from me, and it hurt. I felt I had no one to turn to. My novel, the one I had written with such enthusiasm and confidence, was being rejected by publishers who saw no commercial value in a literary work about the search for artistic freedom set in foreign lands. Naomi had read the manuscript and loved it. My descriptions of Budapest and Hungarians, of Eastern European culture, reminded her of our days there. But now she was no longer around to encourage me with her bursts of enthusiastic praise and laughter.

I did not know exactly why Mark had pulled away from me, but I sensed it had something to do with my parents and his commitment to the struggle against apartheid. I had tried my best to make my parents accept Mark without having met him but I made little headway.

I longed for those few weeks when Mark and I had lived together on Staten Island, after he had rescued me from the Stapleton slum.

During those brief weeks in November when we lived together, I would return each evening from the suffocating moneymaking hustle of Manhattan and enter the basement apartment, whose atmosphere Mark kept congenial with elaborate vegetarian dinners; wonderful folk music from Africa and America; and interminable discussions of politics, life, and creativity.

Mark’s companionship had brought peace to my soul and a measure of security to my life. For the first time since I began living in New York, I felt safe, despite the fact that we lived in a crime-ridden and dangerous section of Staten Island. The ferry terminal was home to mental patients, drunkards, and other homeless persons who were sometimes hostile and threatening. But they never bothered me when Mark was near. On one occasion Mark grabbed the wrist of a man who had surreptitiously unzipped my purse and was reaching for my wallet.

Another time he calmed me when I thought my end had come. The trunk of the unmarked cab we had taken would not open, so the black driver hopped out, pulled out a switchblade knife, and, as I tried to catch my breath and convince myself I was not really about to die, he used the knife to open the trunk.

I had grown accustomed to living in. a predominantly black neighborhood. When I entered the nearest beauty parlor and requested a trim, the three black hairdressers stared at me in surprise. It seemed none of them had ever cut a white person’s hair before, but one eventually volunteered. As she snipped away with the circumspection of a brain surgeon, I gazed at posters advertising Soft Sheen, curl activators, Murray’s Hair-Glo, Vita-Gro, and fade creams.

My haircut was terribly lopsided, but it was definitely a unique cut, so I gave her a tip and left well pleased.

Being in love with Mark had filled me with an adoration for black children. I would stare at little girls on the ferry, admiring their tightly woven braids decorated with colorful beads, the way their white clothes contrasted with their eager faces, their exuberant spirits and their energy.

“Look, Mama!” one child cried, pointing to the Statue of Liberty through the crimson evening mist. “It’s the liberty lady!”

At ease in both the black and white worlds, I had felt confident that our relationship would last. Though Mark devoted his life to the fight against apartheid, constantly worried about his family and sought ways to help them, there were moments when he could let go nfhio m,:1ř l, The only disruption of our happiness was the nagging knowiedge that I had not yet found the courage to tell my parents about Mark.

Telling them over the phone seemed inadequate, so I decided to fly home to Minneapolis and have a heart-to-heart talk with them. During the four nights before my flight, I was awakened several times by the image of my father’s angry face.

It was late November 1985, the air was crisp and clear, and the wind gusted across the flat plains of southern Minnesota. My father, wearing a thick coat with broad shoulders, loose galoshes, and a ridiculous hat, picked me up at the airport and drove me directly to a Presbyterian Church in the suburbs for the Thanksgiving service.

During the drive he told me he was still active in the ministry and deeply believed in God.

I gazed out the window as we drove past the neat yards and huge houses of Edina, and wondered if he intended to use religion to force me to change my mind about Mark. As a minister’s daughter religion had always exerted a powerful influence on me. I began regretting having come home. The suburbs of Minneapolis reminded me of the provincialism and narrow-mindedness of Gopher Prairie in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street.

My father was born and raised in Minneapolis, and damn proud of it, so I made no unkind remarks about the Midwest. I had enormous respect for my Iather and had always been much closer to him than to my mother.

But now that I had made a life for myself in New York, had lived in Hungary and Germany, and had fallen in love with an African, the closeness we once shared had begun to wane.

The church had vaulted ceilings, a booming organ, a satinrobed choir, and majestic stained glass windows that made one instantly feel meek and sinful upon entering. As I stood beside my father, singing from the hymnal he held rigidly before me, my hopes for telling him about Mark seemed doomed. I expected a religious browbeating, laced with snide comments about “shacking up”-his favorite expression for living together. I looked about me at the faces of the all-white congregation; I saw smiles and expressions of placid contentment. I told my father everyone looked too happy.

“You’ve been living in New York too long,” Dad replied. “When are you coming home to the Midwest, where the women are strong, he said, quoting his favorite lines from Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” radio show.

We drove to our split-level home on Xerxes Avenue, a few blocks south of Lake Calhoun. Everything was familiar except for a new couch and new paintings: the large living room with the gold-framed fireplace, the stereo cabinet, the piano room that my father sometimes used as a counseling office, the Flying Scot sailboat in the backyard, the skis and camping equipment in the garage. Upstairs in my old bedroom, filled with high-school athletic trophies and textbooks from Brown, I paced back and forth, rehearsing what I would say.

Mom, Dab i’m living with my black boyfriend. I said to myself. No, no! That will never do. I don’t want to give them heart attacks. I tried again, but the news always sounded shocking, no matter how I worded it. I thought of my mother’s mother, Susan Stork Scott, an active member of the Daughters of the American Revolution who was proud that her relative John Hopkins sailed to America on the Mayflower How would my mother’s relatives, descendants of pilgrims and Protestant ministers, react to the possibility that the purity of their English and Scottish line of descent might be “stained” by Negro blood? After all, they had given my mother a hard time just for marrying a German.

In my nervous despair, I believed my parents might disown me for being in love with a black.

“Don’t tell your parents,” a friend from Brown had said to me one evening as she leaned toward me over her cappuccino in Cafe Reggio in Greenwich Village. “You’d have to sacrifice your whole family.

I should know-I had to. My father called me a whore for marrying down’ to someone who was poor and non-Jewish.”

I continued to pace, thinking of Prince Myshkin’s honesty in Dostoyevsky’s novel The idiot. He had kept no secrets and was incapable of lying. I thought, isn’t it better to be honest, and run the risk evokingpain, gri’f, disappointment, and anger than to live a JOe -secrets Iand hatruths, cowering in the shadows like a guilt-ridden criminal?

Tell them now! I said to myself that evening. I was in the backseat of our Volkswagen Rabbit and my parents were in front. Slowly and carefully, I told them about the terrible room I had rented in Stapleton, how my friend Mark had worried about my safety, and how he had been gracious enough to invite me to move my things into his place in St. George. I held my breath and waited for their response.

My father was struck dumb.

“What is Mark’s last name?” my mother asked, breaking a long and uncomfortable silence.

“Mathabane,” I replied.

“What kind of a name is that?”

“South African.”

“Is he of English or Afrlkaner descent?” my mother asked.

Before I could reply, my father asked, “Is Mark an American citizen?”

“No.”

“Does he have any plans to become one?”

“I don’t know. That’s his business, not mine.”

I already knew my father’s suspicions: A foreigner was out to trick his daughter into marriage so he could get a green card. Irom their questions, I could tell the possibility had not yet dawned on them that Mark might not be white.

“Why don’t you go to a local church and find an old woman who will take in a boarder?” my father asked.

I choked on my reply. I realized he would never understand. I abruptly switched the topic.

The next morning I awoke determined to accomplish “Phase Two” of my plan to brief my parents on my personal life: tell them Mark is black.

My mother was alone in the kitchen heating tea in the microwave.

“So, tell me more about Mark,” she said with the curiosity every mother has toward her daughter’s love life. “Where did he grow up?”

I described the ghetto of Alexandra, the shack his family lived in, his six siblings, and how his illiterate mother had cajoled him to go to school because she regarded an education as a powerful weapon of hope and a way out of a dead-end ghetto life. As I described Mark’s mother, she asked nervously, “Oh, you mean, do you mean to tell me-Is his mother black?”

“Yes.”

“And his father too?”

“Yes.”

“Both of them?”

“Yes.”

My mother’s eyes widened with amazement but she quickly smoothed over her surprise and, speaking rapidly and nervously, told me that Winnie Mandela and Nadine Gordimer were to be awarded honorary degrees by her alma mater, Mount Holyoke College. She asked more questions about Mark. I told her how Mark had learned English through reading comic books, how he happened to pick up tennis, how he met Stan Smith at an international tennis tournament in Johannesburg where he was the only black player, and how Stan arranged for him to leave South Africa on a tennis scholarship.