Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (25 page)

I say, Dylan, you can be anything you want to be, as long as you’re proud of who you are.”” One day as Connie drove down a major boulevard in Greensboro with her children, the driver in the next lane leaned out of his window toward her and yelled repeatedly, “You goddamned nigger lover!”

“I was in shock,” Connie said. “Tears gnshed down my face. Long after the man stepped on the gas and took off, I was still in shock.

Another time I was sitting in my car at an intersection, waiting for the light to change, and a pickup truck pulled up in the next lane. I heard someone say, Look at the nigger lover and her baby niggers!’ Then I heard a second voice, “I think I’m going to throw up.”” “How does it make you feel when you hear things like that?” I asked.

“Angry. I hate it. My motherly defensiveness makes me want to beat the crap out of them. I know it’s their problem, not mine, but they’re saying something about my family. But if I’ve had a really good day, I just feel sorry for them and pray for them. God forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” She pushed her thick wavy hair away from her face and watched her curly headed one-year-old daughter, Lily, play with Bianca on the carpeted floor before us.

“To me everybody is the same, they only look different,” Connie said after a thoughtful pause. “I think God created everyone different to see how much love we can have for each other. I believe He intended to find out how much people could love and care about each other even though they’re different on the outside. Your blood is red whether youre green, red, polka-dot, or whatever.”

Having friends in situations similar to mine helped me accept the fact that my daughter did not look like me and never would. But she was my daughter, my own flesh and blood, and I loved her deeply. A white American college student named Marya, whom I met through Mark’s brother, George, was engaged to a black South African and, on seeing Bianca, expressed a strong desire to someday have a little brown baby of her own.

“Do people stare at you at the grocery store when you’re carrying her around?” Marya asked.

“Yes, and they’re probably thinking, Poor white trash.”

Marya fell over laughing. “That’s so funny. It can really make you crazy, Gail. You have to keep laughing. As serious as it is, you can’t let it bother you.”

“They probably think, She must live in an abandoned mobile home on the edge of town. A single mother on welfare with a whole brood of half-breeds.”” “Got raped or something.”

“Poor thing.”

We laugh, and it is our laughter that saves us from being harmed by the venom of racists.

When Bianca began to walk and then run, she would often run excitedly around stores and airports, exploring stairs, escalators, and hallways.

Wanting her to grow up to be adventurous and brave, I would let her wander, keeping an eye on her from a short distance.

Whenever she headed for trouble, I’d run to catch up with her and take her by the hand. When other adults saw me heading toward her they would say, “Are you looking for this child’s mother, too?”

“I am her mother,” I’d say with a laugh and a smile. Because, after a while, I no longer cared that people could not immediately tell I was Bianca’s mother, and such questions began to amuse rather than irritate me. It struck me as particularly humorous whenever someone thought Mark’s little sister Diana was Bianca’s mother.

The more I grew to know and love my baby, the less skin color and hair texture mattered to me. In fact, I began to envy Bianca for her beautiful year-round tan, big brown eyes, and dark little curls. I would take her for long walks in the woods when she was just a few months old, holding her close to my chest in a SnugIi and talking to her about my childhood, my writing, my dreams. I vividly recall one day in late April, when I walked with her in the saturated, dripping, moist green woods around Salem Lake on the outskirts of WinstonSalem.

It was raining, and as I held my child tight against me Inside my windbreaker to keep her warm and dry, I told her of my long struggle to become a writer and why I loved writing.

“A writer uses everything she’s ever known, seen, thought, felt, believed, experienced,” I told Bianca, who closed her eyes when she heard the soothing sound of her mother’s voice. “Nothing lived is wasted. In any other career, the past is only important in so far as it helped you get to your current position. But not for a writer.

Everything in the past and present is vital in creating the future and all its amazing possibilities, every detail and gesture and memory.”

Bianca had fallen fast asleep. Her soft cheek rested on the edge of the Snugli and her head bobbed slightly with each step. I stood on a jagged rock jutting into the lake. Lightning flashed and thunder clapped and the soft rain became hard, pelting the stony surface of the water. Bianca stirred and awoke, then looked about her with blinking eyes. I bent down to touch the warm water with my fingertips, then sprinkled a few droplets on Bianca’s head, which was still soft and throbbed with each heartbeat.

“I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” I said, repeating the words I had heard my father recite so many times. I hoped my baptizing her might somehow protect her from the barbs and pitfalls she would encounter in life and help her grow to be strong, loving, and hopeful. But baptizing her myself, in the atmosphere that combined solitude and nature-the two elements that never failed to fill me with inspiration and awaken my inner spirit-was more meaningful to me than any church baptism could have been.

When the rain subsided I held Bianca up so she could see the pine trees, the cloudy gray sky, and the silvery expanse of the lake.

0God made all this, Bianca,” I whispered in her tiny ear. “And He made you too.”

Bianca looked about her in wonder during our long walk back home along the winding dirt road circling the lake. I talked to her the whole time, telling her things I probably could never have told my closest friend. I talked on and on, about how secure I now felt in my marriage and how I suddenly felt certain Mark and I would weather all storms, would find our own happiness and purposes in life. In a way, being part of an interracial couple-made me less dependent on society’s goals and rewards for those who blindly obey its authorities and customs. It made me less eager to please, to see my whole life as preparation for subordination to my socially approved husband. It made me look inward, to the spirit, to the heart, to the mind, to the soul.

If at the end of our brief days here on earth, we are able to say honestly, with a clear conscience, that we -have loved, that we have given, that we’ve helped others less fortunate than ourselves, that we have grown, that we have obeyed the golden rule, then our souls will look forward with eagerness to whatever lies beyond the grave.

“I never really believed that before, Bianca,” I said. “Ever since my parents’ divorce, I didn’t believe that love could last. I used to think that people inevitably grow apart, and that it’s only a matter of time before things fall apart. But now I know, deep inside me, that love can last a lifetime. Perhaps I never knew how deeply I could feel attached to someone until you came along.”

My faith in my relationship was strengthened not only by the birth of Bianca but also by the publication of the Boy in America.

Suddenly our marriage was public knowledge, and I no longer felt a need to hide the fact that I was married to a black man from anyone, ever.

Mark, too, began to blossom into a truly dedicated and proud husband, father, friend. When six-month-old Bianca and I accompanied him on much of the promotional tour for his book in June 198Coining him in New York, Long Island, San Francisco, and Minneapolis-I saw a profound change in him.

During a book signing at International House, the dormitory where we had lived as journalism students, Mark did something he had never done before. I stood in the back holding Bianca while Gordon Evans, president of I-House, introduced Mark. Mark discussed apartheid and described the effects of America’s lingering racism and his struggles as a foreign student in America. His tone was gentle and thoughtful.

As he ended his speech, in front of a room crowded with people, he thanked I-House for providing the environment in which he could meet someone “as intelligent, beautiful, talented, and caring” as I. Mark looked directly at me as he spoke, and I blushed. Following the speech everyone congratulated us on our 0beautiful” daughter. Mark and I beamed with pride. We had come a long way from the day we met in this very building, pledged our hearts to each other, uncertain what the future held in store for us.

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MARK’S VIEW.

Not too long ago across the South, interracial relationships were not only forbidden by law but black men were often lynched by white mobs on the slightest suspicion of being involved with a white woman. Even after passage of the 1963 Civil Rights Act, the Ku Klux Klan and its sympathizers continued terrorizing interracial couples and families.

One young man Gail and I met, Trevor Nightingale, was only a toddler in 1974, but he vividly remembers the burning cross. He and his white father and black mother returned to their modest home in York, South Carolina, one night to find a blazing wooden cross in their front yard.

The cross burning was just one incident in a string of harassments meant to drive the family out of town. Trevor’s parents, Charles and Alice, received obscene phone calls and were shouted at from passing cars. Klan members held rallies in a vacant lot near their home.

Charles assured the FBI he would be willing to testify in court, because cross burning without a permit is a federal offense, but the case was mysteriously dropped.

Townspeople spread the rumor that Charles was an ex-convict who had to settle for a black woman when he was unable to get a white wife. When the Nightingales dared to join an all-white square dancing group, they could not find three other couples willing to form a square with them.

When traveling across the state, they were sometimes stopped by suspicious state troopers who asked them questions and checked their identifications.

At that time in York, many businesses illegally maintained separate white and black entrances. York is a small town twenty miles east of Gaflney, the location of Limestone College, the school that I first attended when I arrived in America in 1978.

York was the county seat and had a history of racial bigotry. The races simply did not mix on any level. The only other mixed couple in town could not stand the persecution and fled to nearby Charlotte, North Carolina.

“Believe it or not, my parents actually liked living in York,” eighteen-year-old Trevor said in his deep voice, leaning back in his chair in the Ridgewood, New Jersey, home where he lived with friends of his parents. “My father just laughed at the threats. My parents could not believe people could be so backward and intolerant. My parents were BahT’i pioneers, and felt they were setting a good example for racial harmony simply by being a mixed couple.”

The Bahai Faith is an international religion that strives, through nonracial and nonviolent means, to create world unity and a peaceful society free of all forms of prejudice. It encourages interracial marriage, pointing to it as one of the basic steps toward racial liar-‘ mony and integration.

“As Bahais, we try to love everyone,” Charles explained in a letter to Gail and me. 0Even, at times, the unlovable-the so-called red necks. As a couple these challenging experiences unified and strengthened us. Many fine people approved of what we were doing.

We tried to show blacks that they must forgive, and to teach whites to overcome their inherent but false sense of superiority.”

The couple has since moved to the Bahamas, where they run a BahT’i peace council in Marsh Harbour on the island of Abaco, which was settled, ironically, by white South Carolinians.

Many defenders of the New South would argue that this cross burning incident occurred seventeen years ago in a small, isolated town in rural South Carolina. Such things do not happen anymore, Il they would say. But how much has the South really changed?

Being a Mixed Couple in the South.

The first few months after moving from New York to North Carolina, my senses were keenly on the lookout for the rnNew South.” I behaved with the same tense wariness and suspicion as your average Northerner. When cashiers made eye contact with me, smiled, asked me whether I wanted paper or plastic bags, and told me to have a good day-I walked away bewildered by their congenial demeanor.

Was it authentic or mere show?

Each time Gail visited me from New York, I watched people’s eyes and tried to gauge their reactions to us. In the supermarket Gail would laugh and joke with me, touching my arm affectionately from time to time, talking rapidly about her week in Manhattan, completely oblivious to the eyes of strangers fixed on us. Sometimes I would send her to find an item I knew was on the other side of the store, just to separate us so people would stop gaping. It made me feel denuded. I didn’t know what they were thinking or how they might react. Though I had lived in and traveled throughout the South, Southerners were still foreigners to me. I needed time to feel them out on the subject of interracial relationships.

Gail and I provoked the most attention when we exercised together at a local fitness center, perhaps because there is something erotic about straining, heavy breathing, and stretching and bending one’s body. We went to the gym every other day. By the end of each hour-long workout both of us were usually drenched with sweat. I had nothing on but running shorts, a tank top and a towel draped around my neck. Gail usually wore a Lycra bodysuit and tights. As in most gyms, the walls and pillars were plastered with plate glass mirrors.

Each time I walked over to Gail to correct her technique on a particular Nautilus machine or give her encouragement, I saw, by glancing in the mirror, that nearly every eye in the gym was fastened on us. Some white men occasionally muttered under their breath.

But as time went on and people saw us together often, most stopped staring.