Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (18 page)

The woman was too fat and ugly to get a white man, was acting out against a racist parent, had already been ostracized by white society, or had such low self-esteem that she felt like trash that belonged in a black ghetto.

The black man was denying his skin color and attempting to be white.

He was trying to avenge himself against white oppression by defiling a white woman. The children of such mixed up marriages suffered the cruel fate of being caught, trapped between two worlds, rejected by both races, traumatized by a perpetual identity crisis.

Anger and disgust made me slam shut each book I read. Where was the human story? Why were mixed couples constantly analyzed?

When will they finally talk openly about who they really are and what they truly feel?

Mark and I waited on hard wooden chairs amid smooching coupIes for our names to be called. It was a jovial atmosphere, full of love, hope, and shy joy, though the office was rundown and cluttered and most of the exhausted-looking employees were probably under At the window we had to raise our right hands and pledge that all the information provided was true. Then they sent us away with our typed license, littered with typos, and told us to come back on Monday for the actual wedding ceremony.

Mark teased me as we wandered through Chinatown, calling me “wifey” and “Mrs. Mathabane.” It was all rather surreal and humorous, but it was also a nice, warm, stabilizing feeling. I just turned twenry-five, and I’m about to be marred, I thought to mysetr How strange. In college my friends had predicted I’d be the last one of us to let myself get snared. This made me the first, besides Carol, and she did not consider herself married in the true sense of the word.

That night, as Mark and I sat in my room in Brooklyn eating Ben Jerry’s ice cream and discussing Boris Pasternak’s poetry, we could hear Carol and Robert arguing down the hall.

“He’s jealous of her male friends,” I whispered in explanation.

“That’s not it,” Mark said. “He’s trying to drive her away.”

We were silent for a while, listening to the angry shouts. I felt sorry for Carol. She always did everything she could for Robert, who was ungrateful and inconsiderate in return. He never lifted a finger to help her in the kitchen, he accused her of staring at other guys on the street, he showed up hours late without calling, he wheedled her into borrowing thousands of dollars from her mother to finance his suspicious business ventures. Carol had been giving selflessly up to that point, but she was reaching her limit.

One night Robert called Carol and accidentally asked for Maureen, one of his many lovers. Carol flew into a rage, then, feeling helpless, hung up and wept bitterly. All Robert’s girlfriends, except Carol, were black. It had finally dawned on Carol that Robert, a militant black, was having serious problems dealing with his relationship with a white woman. Whenever Carol referred to herself as white, he would angrily insist she was Lebanese, and Third World like himsetr But he had a hard time deluding himself, so he spent less and less time with her.

Monday arrived. Carol, who had agreed to be our witness, was unable to meet us at City Hall, so I turned to the only other person who knew our secret: my coworker Sandy, from my part-time job. I hadn’t seen Sandy in several weeks. Mark and I waited in a room on the second floor of City Hall, holding hands and nervously waiting embarrassed proclaiming my love for Mark in such a formal and public way. Blushes constantly swept my face. Most of the people around us were speaking Spanish or some other foreign language; some had photographers, bouquets, and families; one even had a veil. For five dollars, it wasn’t a bad place to get married.

Our name was about to be called and Sandy was still nowhere to be seen.

I panicked. We needed a witness, quick. I approached a group of young men and women sitting on a row of chairs.

“Excuse me,” I said politely. “But our witness didn’t show up.

Would one of you mind being our witness?”

“I will,” a young woman replied.

“Do you need a husband too?” asked the young man seated next to her.

At that moment Sandy burst into the room, wearing a tight black sweater, tight red pants, and purple lipstick. She seemed rushed and panicky. I feared she was high on something, especially as she now dressed and acted as if she had slid back to her old life as a streetwalker and addict. Our names were called. Sandy followed us into a dim chapel where we stood before the City Clerk. I showed Sandy how to focus my manual camera.

“Hurry up!” the clerk snapped. “Do you know how many other people are out there waiting to get married?”

I ran and took my place beside Mark. There was no introduction, no organ, no choir, no sermon. He got right to the point. After asking the empty room if anyone had any objections to this marriage, he said, “Do you, Mark Mathabane, take this woman I watched Mark as he said, “I do,” then turned to listen to the clerk say, “Do you, Gail Ernsberger, take this man Sandy ran around taking photos from all angles. The ring she had loaned Mark to give me got stuck on my knuckle, and as I wrenched it on the rest of the way, I heard the words, “You are now officially man and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

“Oh, wait, wait! Hold that kiss!” Sandy cried, snapping away.

After the clerk had wished us well and complimented Sandy on her camera work, the three of us stumbled out into the hall. A black woman smiled and said, “Congratulations!”

I was in a daze as we descended the spiral steps. Sandy wished us well, kissed us both, and disappeared as suddenly as she had “Are you sure you don’t need a husband?” the young man yelled to me aswe left City Hall.

That afternoon, as we lay reading side by side in my Flatbush Avenue apartment, Mark said softly, “It’s begun to rain. Do you hear the tires whirring on the pavement?”

I nodded. We were enjoying our first lazy afternoon as husband and wife. He reached over and stroked my back lightly, unconsciously, still concentrating on his book by John Dewey.

I felt different, somehow, unexpectedly. I told Mark so as we sat across the table from each other, having our wedding feast by candlelight. The whole time I sat there, spinning the borrowed gold band around my finger, I felt very much in love, rooted, calm. The bubbles in the champagne were too much for us, so we added orange juice. Unaccustomed to too much alcohol, the champagne knocked us both out. We fell asleep on our wedding night fully clothed in a happy embrace, on top of the covers.

In the morning Mark’s first words were, “I forgot to brush my teeth!”

Nothing ever turns out the way you expect it to. As a girl I had imagined a tall white groom, people throwing rice, a black limousine with streamers, and a three-week honeymoon on a tropical island. I cannot say I missed any of that, because this wedding was more real, private, honest, and based on love, not show.

The shop windows on Forty-second Street are filled with diamond rings and wedding bands. We stared at them one by one, shook our heads at the exorbitant prices, as we moved slowly down the street with our arms around each other. FInally we entered a jewelry store and asked for service. I felt vulnerable, as if we were shopping for condoms, not wedding rings. Marriage, in my mind, was like publicizing your sexuality, which the church and my upbringing had taught me was dirty, vile, low-down, and unacceptable. Mark bought me a diamond ring-the diamond was so tiny one needed a microscope to see it. I bought him a gold band. Both were under one hundred dollars.

“Do you think I should send out wedding announcements?” I asked Mark as we left the jewelry store.

“Not yet. Let’s savor the privacy of our marriage a little longer.

We don’t want to shock people. We have to think of a way to tell them get some money, I can bring my family over for the wedding.”

This suggestion sounded so absurdly far-fetched that I simply smiled.

How in the world would we ever get that kind of money? And why would the white South African regime issue passports to an impoverished black family it does not even regard as citizens in the land of their birth?

Because I was in no hurry to upset my family and friends, I let the marriage remain a secret. Being legally married prepared me mentally for confronting life as a mixed couple and standing up to the opposition of family members, which I knew was inevitable. I was the youngest of all my cousins, the youngest child in my family, and the only girl. Everyone was used to guiding and protecting me. It would take a lot of strength to stand up to all those people who cared about me, had watched me grow, and felt they knew me more than I knew myself.

Carol congratulated me on the marriage but couldn’t understand why I wanted to keep the news a secret when Mark and I had such a solid relationship. She had kept her marriage a secret from her parIents and friends only because she didn’t know where her troubled relationship with Robert would lead.

“Why don’t you just tell people you’re married,” she said.

“The idea of saying I’m married makes me uncomfortable,” I said. “I’m afraid of what people would think.”

“But you married because you love the man!”

“Yes, of course.”

“What then are you afraid of?” Carol asked.

I was afraid of my father. I could not even imagine telling him that I was married, let alone to a black man. He had never even met Mark.

Yet he was flying to New York to visit me and my brothers in one week.

I realized it was an issue of honesty. How would I feel if I found myself in the position of having to lie? Wouldn’t it be easier to Ibe honest, proud of the marriage, proud of my husband? The only thing I needed was courage.

My mother called, asked how Mark and I were doing, and, as if the words came of their own accord, I said, “We’re engaged!”

Mark turned toward me, his eyes and mouth opened wide in amazement.

“Oh, conGratulations!” she said excitedly “Let me speak to I handed the phone to Mark, who cleared his throat Then pressed the receiver to his ear, and greeted my mother. She w’ and on about how happy she was for us.

Before long various family members knew of the engage and called to congratulate us. I was taken aback by their p response. Maybe I had been mistaken in my judgment of my 1

But there was still my father. I still hadn’t heard his reaction news of our “engagement.”

Carol’s father, a wealthy Lebanese Christian, flew to Nev from Beirut to visit her. Carol’s older sisters were all married Carol had always been her father’s favorite daughter. Cart father, and Robert went out to dinner, then father and da’ returned alone to our Flatbush Avenue apartment. The d Carol’s room was open, and I could hear her father gentiy exp her that she must lead her own life, separate from Robert’ become self-reliant.

“How can you sit here and tell me this?” she cried. “I tru person in this world, and that’s Robert. Now you’re telling to trust him! But I do, and I will! It’s true I had no interest if ness before I met him, but it’s something I’m willing to try, a as much my thing now as it is his. But now because you’v these things to me I’m going to look at him twice, I’ll be doubt him.”

“I didn’t say you had to doubt him,” her father said gentiy.

“Yes you did! And you know how much influence you have me. I rely on you more than Cindy or Allison or Linda does. œ all married and have husbands to turn to. But I turn to you it port.”

“And I give that support gladly,” he said softly.

“I know! I’m not questioning that. But you have a lot of inf over me, and it’s not fair for you to use it this way. If you told C: divorce her husband, she would do it in a second!”

“I never told Cindy to divorce her husband.”

“No, you didn’t. But I’m just telling you that what you say ences me-influences all of us…” She wept when despair c: her voice.

“I’ve invested a lot in my relationship with Robei now you’re telling me to throw it all away and not trust him because of his wife. I don’t care about his wife!” let myself out of the apartment quietly, wondering if what I had overheard was a dress-rehearsal for my own confrontation with my father over Mark. My father was arriving in New York in a week. He still didn’t know that Mark and I had announced our “engagement.”

MARK’ $ VIEW I rode the subway to Central Park, where I would meet Gail, her brothers, and her father. Her father. I tensed at the thought How would this complex man receive me? What were his true feelings about my love for his daughter?

Was his tearful response to Gail’s letter genuine, or was there latent racism in him, carefully masked by his intelligence and urbanity?

But Gail had had lunch with him the day before and told him of our engagement and showed him the ring. He had responded not angrily and suspiciously, but with congratulations and he seemed ready, enthusiastic, to meet and to accept me as a future son-in-law.

I could understand how, looking at our relationship from the outside, from a psychologist’s point of view, Gail’s father could have doubted its staying power, especially against deeply rooted prejudices. He knew the depth of racism in white society. He knew that the attitudes of many Americans had changed very little from those that thirty years ago condoned segregation and the dehumanization of blacks. Yes, the laws and institutions had changed, but few hearts had changed with them.

At times it seemed to me the attitudes of many whites in America were little different from the attitudes of most whites in South Africa.

White Americans were simply more adept at hiding their true feelings.

Crude, apartheid-style racism was not their preferred weapon of keeping the black man down. It was in the subtle kind of racism, often hidden by a veneer of liberalism and tolerance, at which they excelled.

This type of racism was more insidious because not only did it continue to deny blacks equal opportunity in housing, in the workplace, in schools, and before the law but it had blacks constantly wondering how many of their problems were due to racism and how many to their own failings.

If black and white Americans had not yet learned how to get along, how to respect cultural differences, how to talk to each other rather than always about each other, what chance did mixed couples and their children have of being accepted, let alone understood?