Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (20 page)

Express to take me home to Brooklyn.

That night I watched the reunion on the local news, then crawled into bed, feeling terribly alone. I tried to convince myself that Mark loved his family differently from the way he loved me, that I was still as important to him as they were, but I gave up in despair and fell asleep fearing our relationship would never be the same, fearing he would never again need my love as he once did.

“I’m not surprised you feel that way,” Carol said when I shared my feelings with her. “You’re going to have to live with certain things for the rest of your lifeertain aspects of African culture that are entirely different from American culture. One of those things is big families that are very close and take care of each other.”

I listened attentively to her, for she had done graduate work at Brown in anthropology and had studied Middle Eastern and African cultures closely. Having grown up in Lebanon, she had lived and breathed Arab culture, which in many ways is similar to African culture. Her Lebanese father had always been more devoted to his country and his mother than he was to his American wife. Carol’s mother realized this when he refused to leave Lebanon, even when the lives of his wife and children were endangered by constant bombing and gunfire in Beirut.

Carol’s mother packed up her six children in 1979 and moved back to the United States. Carol’s father stayed in Lebanon.

“How can you expect me to leave my mother and family?” he asked.

“If, after twenty-two years of marriage, your children and I are not your family, then I guess our definitions of family’ will never be the same,” Carol’s mother replied angrily.

“Mark’s mother will always be more important to him than you,” Carol told me. “He owes her his life. Sons treat their mothers with a type of respect that borders on awe and reverence. You can’t compete with that. You’ll just have to accept it. Now that his family is here, everything will be different. It may never again be just the two of you. I bet you anything some of his family members will stay in America. What do they have to go back to?”

I listened to her words with a heavy heart and wondered if Mark and I would ever again be as close as we were when it was just the two of us.

Two days later Mark came to Brooklyn, alone, late at night, to stay with me. He seemed farther away than ever. He would try to kiss me, then burst out laughing and relate yet another tale about his family’s adventures in department stores, elevators, escalators. He fell asleep, chuckling to himself, filled with warm thoughts of his family-a family he hadn’t seen since he left South Africa nearly a decade agwhiIe I sat up in bed, watching him drift away.

In the morning I tried to discuss with him my feelings of being pushed aside, but when I said I feared his family had supplanted me, he became very defensive.

“How can you feel that way toward people who love you?” he said.

“Love me? But they don’t even know me! We can’t even speak to each other.”

“It doesn’t matter. They love you! Unconditionally.”

This statement startled me. Could it be true? Or was Mark simply attempting to molllly me?

We descended the narrow staircase to Flatbush Avenue, squeezed ourselves into a crowded subway car, and were soon entering the Sheraton in Midtown. While Mark went off to talk to George, I was left in a hotel room with Granny, Mhani, Elorah, Diana, and Linah. They were speaking in rapid Tsonga, getting dressed, rearranging their suitcases. I sat in a chair in the corner, feeling out of place.

Mark’s mother patted the bed beside her and beckoned for me to “Come, sit.”

I sat down beside her. Elorah made a list of common words for me in Tsonga so I might learn to understand at least a little of their conversation. Linah and Diana sat on the bed watching me with their large, dark eyes, eager to know me.

Mark and I took his family for a walk in Central Park. As we left the hotel, a black woman ran up to us and cried, “Are you the African family I saw on TV last night? You are! Oh, I’m so happy you’re together again!” She hugged Mark, George, Florah, Linah, and Diana.

She hesitated when she got to me, then said, “Oh, I don’t care if you’re white!” and she threw her arms around me as well. I felt it was one of the nicest things any black woman had ever said to me.

During our walk Linah and Diana laughed at the different shapes and sizes of women’s legs. In South Africa it is a tribal custom for women to dress modestly, so they had never seen grown women in shorts. Diana was accustomed to walking barefoot, so she had difficulty keeping her shoes on. We had to keep checking her feet, and once had to send her back up to the hotel room when we discovered she was barefoot in a fancy restaurant.

Iinah and Diana stared in horror at the salad placed on the table before them. “How come it’s not cooked?” they wanted to know. Back home, with their scanty diet, they had never had the luxury of eating salads. The only vegetables they ate and could afford were boiled greens called murogo. During hard times, poignantly described in KrBoy, the family even drank boiled cattle blood as soup, and ate prickly worms called sonjas along with the staple, pap (cooked porridge).

The next day Mark and his family flew to North Carolina, and I remained in New York to continue my job as an editor at the German Information Center. His mother and sisters simply could not understand why, in a free country like America, two people who love each other have to be separated. They thought it was only in South Africa, where black workers must leave their homes to seek jobs as migrant workers in distant gold and diamond mines, that couples and families are torn asunder.

Mark called me when he was at his wits’ end. “Everyone keeps asking me, Where’s skwiza? Where’s skwt:a?”

“he said. (Skwl::a is an affectionate term for “sister-in-law.”) “I’m getting jealous. They didn’t come to America to see me. They came to see you! All they can talk about is you and the wedding. Please come down this weekend.

They’re all eager to see you, and… so am I.”

That weekend I experienced more love than I had ever known in my life; not only from Mark, but also from his family. Just as my own family was falling apart, sparked by my parents’ divorce and the fact that we children were now grown and going our separate ways, I found this new family-a tight-knit and loving group of people with deeply genuine emotions, no facade, and nothing to hide; with immense patience, compassion, and infinite understanding. They accepted me without the slightest reservation, without giving a moment’s thought to my race, color, or social class. To them I was simply human. I now understood the powerful forces that had shaped Mark’s character, especially his open-mindedness and lack of bitterness and hate.

Florah, Linah, Diana, and I spent hours in the apartment complex’s swimming pool, laughing, and splashing, playing keep away with a pink plastic ball while Granny and Mhani watched from the deck. I had noticed over the months I had been visiting Mark that most of the white sunbathers, who lounged about the pool takIng only occasional dips to cool down, would abruptly leave whenever one or more blacks entered the pool. It seemed some sort of unspoken rule.

“You see what I mean by white attitudes not having changed much,” Mark said to me one time. “And yet these same people who can’t stand swimming alongside blacks will self-righteously condemn apartheid. It is interesting that when they point two fingers of a hand at white South Africans for being racist, three fingers are pointing straight at them.”

As I entered the pool with Mark’s sisters, I always felt the eyes of white strangers on me, filled with what I imagined was curious disdain or disgust, as they grabbed their towels and left.

But I tried not to let such things bother me. I was part of a new family now. tinah and Diana both hugged me and hung all over me.

The whole family began calling me “Sweets” in imitation of Mark.

One night we ate a Southern dinner of biscuits and beans and fried chicken at the home of a black woman named Edmonious, who had befriended Mark’s mother and Granny. As we sat in the living room after the mial, discussing racial tensions in the North versus the South, I was aware that I was the only white in a room filled with blacks. But I felt, to my amazement, completely at home. Diana was fast asleep with her head in my lap and Florah was leaning against me.

Every morning Granny would greet me with a long, drawn-out “Kunjani?”

(“How are you, my dear?”) And I would reply with an equally slow, “Nikone Kokwana.” (“FIne, my beloved Grandma.”) Hearing me speak Tsonga would send Granny into paroxysms of laughter; she would clap her hands together, making her bracelets clink and clang, then heave a deep sigh of contentment after her laughing had subsided.

Mark’s mother, when she was not playing cards with Granny or reminiscing about her life, would sit on the living room floor studying an ABC book. “A-apple,” she would say proudly. She listened attentively to English conversations, and by the end of her threemonth visit she could speak English tolerably well. Her dearest wish as a child had been to attend school, but as a girl, she was dissuaded from such a pursuit. Women at that time were regarded largely as the possessions of their future husbands and, therefore, not worth educating. When I realized that she used the word she to refer to anything from he, she, it, and you to they and these, I was able to get her meaning.

“She’s toooooo big,” Mhani told me, pointing to a box I just brought into the room. It took me a few minutes to understand that she meant, “That’s a very big box.”

“She’s washing,” she said to me, handing me some dirty clothes when I was loading the washer. She meant, “These need to be washed.” Her pidgin English, however, masked an astounding Intelligence. I was awed by how much she knew of life, especially about human nature and emotions. Mark credited her mesmerizing storytelling with inspiring him as a writer. “The way she weaves a story and infuses it with all the elements of tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, and morals rivals anything I have read by Shakespeare, Homer, and Plato,” he once said.

The family laughed and teased me about the approaching wedding. Iinah and Diana serenaded me with a song in Tsonga about how sisters-in-law cook and clean and wash for the husband’s entire family. After much insistence on my part, Florah translated the song for me.

“Is that song designed to praise sisters-in-law or degrade them?”

I asked.

George burst out laughing.

“It’s a terrible song,” Florah said. “No woman wants to do all that work.”

Granny came out of the bedroom carrying a traditional tribal wedding dress and tied it around my waist. It looked like a big bush of colorful yarn and sat on my hips like an innertube. Then Granny wrapped a huge piece of colorful cloth around me so I looked like an enormous bell.

George was dying of laughter. “She says you must wear that on your wedding day!”

I danced around a bit, making the big bushy dress jiggle. Granny clapped her hands in delight and exclaimed in Tsonga that I reminded her of herself as a young woman on her wedding day.

When we were together in Mark’s apartment, I felt like one of the family. But when we went out in public, especially in the South, I often felt uncomfortable. One Sunday morning we went to services at an all-black AME Zion Church in High Point. When the minister called Mark into the pulpit and asked the Mathabane family to please stand, everyone rose except me. I sat in the rigid pew petrified, never having been the sole white in such a large crowd of blacks before. I thought they would soon sing “We Shall Overcome” while glaring at me.

“Come on, Sweets, get up!” FIorah whispered, hauling me by the arm into a standing position. We stood there in a row, being introduced one by one.

“That’s my mother, Magdeline,” Mark said. “Next to her is my sister FIorah, and next to her is my fiancEe, Gail.”

I felt dozens of black faces register looks of shock. I felt my face flush crimson. I could not wait to sit down. The service dragged on for two hours and I almost passed out from hunger, heat, and boredom.

The music was a motley mixture of Mozart and gospel, and the minister delivered a sermon on marriage.

“You shouldn’t marry for looks,” the minister bellowed from the pulpit, beads of sweat glistening on his forehead. “Looks can’t cook a meal.”

“Amen,” the black women around me murmured.

“Looks can’t clean the house!”

“Praise God,” they muttered, fanning themselves with their bulletins.

“Looks can’t do the dishes!”

It depressed me that the only prerequisites for marrying, as cited by the minister, were good looks and domestic abilities. “What about love?” I whispered to Mark. “He said nothing about love.”

“That’s reality,” Mark replied. “Many people don’t have the luxury of falling in love. They have to think of necessities, of survival.”

At long last the service was over and we were invited downstairs to a reception in honor of the Mathabane family, where we were fed fried chicken, black-eyed peas, cornbread, squash casserole, collard greens, and peach cobbler-traditional Southern soul food.

The wife of a prominent black businessman walked up to me and said, “I hear you’re from New York. Have you ever been to the South?”

I made a polite reply, but in her question I heard another: “Don’t you know it’s rather unusual down here for a white girl to marry one of our boys?”

As my last day of work and the day of the official wedding approached, I tried to erase from my mind all thoughts of black and white opposition to interracial relationships. I wanted it to be a beautiful wedding, a celebration of the love that different cultures and races can have for each other. I did not want to reflect on why the KKK lynched black men accused of raping white women or on black militants’ opposition to one of “their men being snared by a white Circe” or on mixed couples being victimized by the growing racial polarization of Northern cities.

Like most brides-to-be, I spent a great deal of my time tryIng to coordinate all the arrangements for the flowers, wedding invitations, music, catering, church bulletins, ceremony details, bridal registry, reception hall decorations, plates, and utensils. I had my mother’s wedding dress altered to fit me better and searched for a veil.