Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (13 page)

I love you,” he said, taking my hand and squeezing it. “We belong together, no matter how misunderstood we might be. Anyone who truly knows me will know I’m not betraying my people by loving you.”

“I wish you had realized that before I wrote my father that letter,” I said.

“What letter?”

I had kept a copy of the letter I sent my father, so I read it aloud in the angry tone in which it was written while Mark sat on the edge of a chair, head bowed, listening intently. When I looked up I detected tears in the corners of his eyes. He covered his face with his hands.

I told him how my father had called, cried, and begged me to understand him. This made Mark weep even harder.

“My father told me that your fear of him is not paranoia,” I said.

“He says it’s a real reaction to fears created by your cultural background. You’ve been conditioned to fear big white men.”

“Hold me,” Mark whispered.

I could not move. I was still too hurt to reach out to him. Before I reopened a wound that had begun to heal, I wanted some sort of guarantee that he would never again pull away from me. He threw his arms around me and squeezed me tight, burying his face between my neck and shoulder.

“I’m glad you finally confronted your father with your true feelings,” Mark said, “but I wish it hadn’t been so painful. I never thought you could write such a letter to your father. And I believe it’s your love for me that made you write it.”

We talked late into the night, and I told him about the pain and anguish I had felt in the weeks he had withdrawn from me. I explained why I felt like an emotional clam, afraid to emerge from my shell and risk being hurt again. In earlier relationships I had always done the breaking up. It was the first time a man had tried to break up with me, and it shook me to the core.

“You can sleep on the futon couch,” I said, waving down the hall toward the living room.

“All right,” he said. “I need to shower first.”

When I returned to my room from the kitchen, I saw a damp towel hanging over my chair and found Mark under my covers, freshly showered.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I said, trying to sound stern.

He grinned. “I got lost.”

I laughed, shattering my facade. He knew I loved him and so did I. We talked and giggled and held each other until the room grew light. We could hear children calling to each other on their way to school. We finally fell asleep mid-morning. We ate breakfast at four in the afternoon.

MARK’S VIEW For several weeks after my return from the publicity tour, Gail and I were blissfully content. We reflected on the struggies we had been through and drew strength from them. We convinced each other that our relationship would endure, no matter how vilified or isolated or misunderstood we might become. We did our best to shun the frenzy of the outside world, its materialism, its rewards for conformiry We saw everything as so much chaff, seldom leading to true happiness or growth of the soul, that part of ourselves we believed immortal. We vowed to resist, with all the strength our love could furnish us, the pressures and prejudices of such a world. Our spirits yearned to breathe free, to mingle with each other and with all that was True, Beautiful, and Good in life.

“Before, we were trying, without realizing it, to fit in,” I said to Gail one evening as she sat across from me during a candlelight dinner at my Staten Island apartment. “We were attempting to satisly society’s impossible demands. We were obsessed about what people thought of us. You longed to please your family and I wanted to protect my public image. But we can’t hope to change society if we suppress or hide or compromise what we deeply feel.”

Gail looked up suddenly and asked, with a slightly worried expression, “Do you think our relationship will withstand all the pressures?” “Of course it will,” I said. “We must make it work. It won’t be easy. But our love is something worth fighting for, worth dying for.”

Gail raised her wineglass and said, inlill drink a toast to that.” Our glasses clinked.

We slow danced around the kitchen to Fleetwood Mac, talking and laughing as we spun around the room.

“I’ve never felt this happy,” Gail said. “My cheek muscles are sore from smiling. We don’t need anybody or anything else, as long as we have each other.”

For the first time in our relationship, we dared to hold hands and put our arms around each other in public. In the Museum of Natural History, while touring the prehistoric wing and examining the dinosaur skeletons, I kissed Gail in front of a staring brontosaurus.

Stares and disapproving glances no longer fazed me.

But certain obstacles, both internal and external, kept cropping up.

Gail had a hard time completely ignoring the opinions of outsiders, nor could she cease wondering what people were thinking when they stared at us. She became even more selfconscious after taking a tour of Forty-second Street with a group of women called Feminists Against Pornography. The tour was designed to educate women about pornography by taking them into adult book stores and sex shops, showing them the curtained booths where mini porno films were shown and pointing out the various categories of porn magazines. Gail was amazed at finding a whole rack of magazines devoted to in5altnCppp pornography, showing blacks and whites in all sorts of crude and kinky positions.

Some of the black men were depicted as slaves. The salt-‘n’-pepper section was right beside the sex-with-children magazines.

“I can’t believe people get their thrills from imagining all sorts of horrible things about interracial couples in bed,” Gail said after describing to me what she had seen. “How awful! What kind of perverse pleasure do they derive from it?” “I really can’t tell,” I said. “MyEN their prejudices and the taboo against interracial love combine to conjure up all that trash.” “Do people actually see us that way?” “There are lots of sick minds out there.”

We frankiy discussed our feelings whenever we encountered stereotypes against mixed couples in books, in the news, or in daily life. It was our way of supporting each other through emotionally trying situations, of reaffirming our commitment to each other despite the social pressures against us.

“Listen to this,” Gail said, excitedly pacing my apartment with a copy of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks in her hand. She read aloud from the chapter titled “The Man of Color and the White Woman.” in “I wish to be acknowledged not as black, but as white,’ ” she read.

in Now, who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.”” “What!”

I exclaimed.

“Wait, there’s more,” she said. “CHgAB by degrading ostracism, mulattoes and Negroes have only one thought from the moment they land in Europe: to gratify their appetite for white women.”” “Thats ridiculous,” I said. “CH5BAtly ridiculous.”

Gail went on. in The majority of them tend to marry in Europe not so much out of love as for the satisfaction of being the master of a European woman. And a certain tang of proud revenge enters into this.”” I was astounded by what I heard. “Why do people search for hidden motives when a black falls in love with someone white? No one tries to psychoanalyze why same-race couples fall in love. Yet there are endless theories and psychological studies to explain interracial love.” “And this chapter doesn’t say anything about the feelings the woman may have for her man,” Gail said. “Shes just an object of innocence and purity to be despoiled by black hands. Women are human beings.

They have complex emotions, they fall in love. They don’t just sit around and wait to be conquered by a master.a She looked down at the book. inlt says here they used to castrate black men when caught with white women.”

“In colonial Africa, sure,” I said. “By the way, that was also done by the Klan down South.”

“But why?” Gail asked. “What if they both loved each other?”

0That’s the unanswered question of human history.”

One warm day in May, as we sat on a blanket overlooking Staten Island’s Silver Lake and eating a picnic lunch, I wondered what it would be like if Gail and I moved into one of the apartments above the park.

Whenever I looked up, there she would be. And whenever she looked up, there I would be. We could gaze out the window each mornmg at the seagulls gathering on the banks and skimming the surface of the sparkiing water.

For weeks I wanted to ask Gail to marry me, but I did not know Ihow to say it without frightening her off. Her need for independence, her fear of commitment, and her love of solitude gave me the impression she was not yet ready to make any firm decisions about our future. Then there were her parents.

That spring Gail started going camping alone every other weekend. She would take her backpack, tent, and some food to Grand Central or Penn Station and catch a bus or train to Bear Mountain, the Catskills, or Montauk Point. She would return to the city after a weekend of hiking, reading in her tent by flashlight, and gazing into campfires looking healthy and fresh and alive. But her hours alone only served to strengthen her resolve to be on her own. I, on the other hand, yearned for more stability in our relationship.

Especially because I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the stress of living in New York City. It was making me worry too much about money, distrust people, feel uptight most of the time, and harden my heart in order to rationalize the ubiquitous pain and misery of the homeless and the poor. My health was beginning to suffer from the pollution, the constant noise, the crowds.

I wanted to leave New York, and I wanted Gail, if she loved me, to come with me. If we were to get married, we would definitely not want our children raised in a place where they could not afford to be children: innocent, trustIng. I had already been down South on a visit to High Point, North Carolina, and found the Piedmont area congenial, more humane than New York City, despite its lingering image among many Northerners as backward and racist.

How can you ask for a commltmentm Gail when her heart is still torn between her love for you, her family, and her need for lndependence? I asked myself. Yet I knew we had to choose a course and follow it, or our relationship would just flounder and cease to grow.

One afternoon Gail and I had just returned from a long run when the phone rang. It was my sister Florah calling from a neighbor’s house in Alexandra, where most of my family had gathered to speak to me. They told me that a day ago the police had opened fire and hurled tear gas into a crowd of blacks gathered at a mass funeral for victims of a previous police massacre. Children were among those injured and detained but fortunately my siblings were among those who escaped. My father had fallen ill from some undiagnosed ailment that was thought to be tuberculosis. My mother got on the phone.

“Hello, my child,” she said in Tsonga in her caressingly sweet voice.

“Hello, Mama.”

“When are you getting married?”

I smiled and looked at Gail, who had taken off her running shoes and was stretching out.

“I don’t know, Mama,” I said in Tsonga. “Maybe in three years.”

0Three years! But I want grandchildren right away!”

“Okay, one year,” I said.

“So I have to wait that long before coming to America?” my mother said, sounding disappointed. “What’s wrong? Don’t you have enough money to pay lobola? How much do Gail’s parents want?”

I laughed. “Mama, men don’t have to pay for their brides in America.”

“What, no lobola!” my mother exclaimed. “How do Gail’s parents hope to get back the money they’ve spent raising such a beauty? If there’s no lobola required, don’t wait that long to get married. She may change her mind and leave you, you know.”

I looked at Gail and laughed heartily. My mother knew from previous conversations that Gail was white, but not once did she make her color an issue. This hardly surprised me. Her judgment of people had always been based on one criterion: their character. As long as Gail was a good human being, was not lazy, did not smoke or drink, was respectful and compassionate, and loved me as much as I loved her, my mother unreservedly approved of our relationship. Each time I spoke to her on the phone she kept reminding me that there African ghetto and a few black-and-white photographs of me alone was no longer any “apartheid in marriage,” by which she meant that the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act had been repealed. and with Stan Smith and his family. It was an odd feeling to pass a Gail looked up. “Why do you keep looking at me and laughing?

What is she saying?”

“She wants a big tribal wedding, and she wants it soon,” I said.

“And, oh, she also wants a tribe of grandchildren.”

Gail groaned and rolled her eyes.

We had now been together for one and a half years. At the end of June, after hinting about living together for several weeks, I finally sprang my version of “the big question.” Gail was working in her office at the German Information Center when I called. She had found out two weeks earlier that her parents were getting divorced, but I did not think their divorce would have much of an impact on our relationship.

If anything, I thought, she might be more ready for some stability in her life.

I asked if she were ready to live with me.

“I can’t make that decision right away,” she said. “I need time.”

“But we’ve had plenty of time,” I said. “This should have been uppermost in our minds. I want to be able to say, this is my wife,’ and I want you to be able to say, this is my husband,’ and I want us to be able to say, this is our baby.”” “Are you asking me to marry you?”

“Yes.”

There was a pause, as if my words took her by surprise.

“Mark, I want you to know that I love you very much. But marriage is such a big step. You’ll have to give me a little time. I’m only twenty-four.”

“It’s not age but maturity that counts.”

“Still, I’d like to go home and talk to my parents about it. Not to ask for their advice and then obey them, but to discuss it openly with them. Besides, tonight is the last night they are staying under the same roof. I want to find out what has happened between them and if they can be reconciled.”