Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (29 page)

Sensing that she was the reason behind my strange shifts in moods, Gail started voluntarily staying away from my lectures, even if I were speaking right in High Point. When I was asked to speak in support of High Point’s black library, which the city was threatening to close in order to build a new library in a predominantiy white section of town, part of me wanted her to be there.

Would you like to come?” I asked as I straightened my tie.

“I’d like to, but I’m not going to,” Gail said.

There was a strained silence. I felt torn. She was, after all, my wife. I knew she enjoyed attending my lectures.

you can come if you want,” I said.

“I’d probably be the only white person there,” she said. “They’d resent me. They’d resent you. Not everyone in High Point knows about me yet. I don’t want to turn the black community against you.”

I went to the lecture alone. My speech was well received and many people flocked around me afterward to compliment me on my book and ask what they could do to help blacks in South Africa, but as I signed autographs and answered questions I could not help wondering how different my reception would have been had Gail been there. Would it really have mattered?

In the Limelight: Am I Betraying My Race? I 195

My public image kept growing. In different American cities, large and small, complete strangers, black and white, would accost me, with amazement in their eyes, and say, “Hey, didn’t I see you on the Oprah Winfrey Show’?” They stopped me in airports, grocery store aisles, on the street when I was jogging, at check-out counters, in the post office, in the library. On a visit to Manhattan, Gail and I were stopped half a dozen times as we made our way down Fifth Avenue.

Hey, look! It’s Kaffir Boy!” some would shout.

It startled me to hear those words, for I had not been called a “kaffithe equivalent of the American word nigger-since I was In South Africa.

Whenever strangers engaged me in a conversation, Gail would often walk ahead several paces and wait for me, inconspicuously.

She did it voluntarily, believing that her presence would detract from my popularity. I hated this dual, secretive life and vowed to put an end to it, one way or another.

It was not until 1989, with the publication of my second book KS /r Boy in America, that I finally proudly made my marriage to Gail public knowledge. I insisted that my publisher, Scribners, include in the photo section several pictures of Gail and me, including our wedding photo. I devoted one chapter of the book to the essentials of our relationship. The back flap of the book mentioned that our first child, Bianca, had just been born.

Again friends warned me that the book would never sell, that people who otherwise eagerly wanted to read about what had happened to me since coming to America would be instantly turned off by the sight of the photos.

“There’s no reason you should include those controversial photos,” someone said. “Let people buy the book and Fend out about Gail upon reading it.”

“My love for Gail is more important than the success of the book,” I said. “Those readers who won’t buy the book just because of Gail are probably identifying with me for the wrong reasons.”

In June I appeared with Stan Smith on Oprah’s prime-time special “Just Between Friends,” which was broadcast nationally. Again, rather than have Gail stashed away during the taping, she was there beside me and my siblings, cradling Bianca in her arms. The issue of my marriage inevitably came up.

In one scene Oprah lay on her bed, having one of her regular marathon long-distance phone conversations with her own best friend, Gayle King Bumpus. They were discussing me.

“Mark married a white woman, you know,” Oprah said.

rnOh, really?” Gayle replied.

As Gall and I watched the program, I was sure Oprah’s friend was not the only black woman to express surprise at hearing Oprah’s words. In fact, I felt that many black women across the country reacted with far more than a mere oneline exclamation: Many reacted with shock, disappointment, and outrage.

I had a confirmation of that when I began a nationwide publicity tour for the book shortly after the special aired. During an appearance on a talk show on one of New York City’s popular radio stations, the interviewer, a young radical black man very much into Afrocentricity, surprised me by how he led the program. He didn’t explain KS/r Boy in America nor ask me what it was all about. He simply introduced me and then opened the phone lines. Angry calls from black women poured in.

I suspected a setup. I had half a mind to walk out but decided to stay and state my case, without apology.

rnHow dare you marry a white girl?” someone said.

I asked the caller if she knew what sort of person Gail was. She didn’t. But that didn’t matter, she said, the fact that Gail was white was enough to make her an enemy” I told the caller that all whites were not my enemies and that I judged them as individuals. Failure to do so, I added, was not only wrong, it was racist. It made it easy for white racists to rally whites behind their pernicious agendas in the name of us against the’em.

dour marriage to a white woman is an insult to your mother and every black woman in this country,” another caller said.

I responded that the last person to blindly hate whites or anybody because of the color of their skin was my mother. She valued her soul too much to harbor hatred in her heart.

My forthright answers surprised many. But I was fed up with playing games with my emotions, with hurting a woman whose love of me was unqualified, with apologizing for a friendship that was above reproach and that people had no business prying into. Just as I had opposed tribally arranged marriages in South Africa, I opposed racially arranged marriages in America. I could never live with myself knowing that I had married someone not because I loved that person, but because society approved of the match and it was the politically correct thing to do.

The next day I was to appear on the uToBy Show.” I awoke early that morning in a New York hotel room to find Gail fast asleep beside me, her head resting on my shoulder. Bianca slumbered in the crib next to our bed, a five-month-old bundle nestled in a soft pink blanket. I slipped silently out of bed, showered quickly, and dressed In a dark blue suit.

Watching my two darlings asleep, I wondered if I would, once again, have to defend my love for them, this time on national television.

I kissed both gently and left the hotel room. The cab pulled up in front of NBC and I got out. The studio was brightly lit and buzzing with activity. I was taken to the powder room and received facial makeup. From there I returned to the greenroom and waited, reading the morning papers and watching other guests grab a hurried breakfast of doughnuts and coffee. I was informed that my interview had been shifted to the next segment.

This is the “Today Show,” I thought, the number one morning program in America. How will this important interview go?

Finally I was led on stage. Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley greeted me cordially. During a commercial break I was miked and Bryant took a seat beside me and we chatted. The cue came on that all was ready.

Bryant’s questions came in rapid succession, for we only had a few minutes. I answered them clearly and succinctly.

bat expectations did you have of America before you arrived?” bat parallels do you see between the lives of black South Africans and American blacks?” dour parents and other family members are still in South Africa.

Has their situation improved at all?”

The interview ended without Bryant once alluding to my marriage to Gail. He had stuck to the issues raised in the book. I shook hands with him warmly. He had won my respect for his sensitivity and professionalism. Off camera he did ask me, with an unassuming air of friendly curiosity, how Gail was doing and what it was like to be a new father.

One afternoon in the fall of 1989 I received a small package postmarked Jamaica, Queens. Its contents jolted me. They consisted of a gruesome photograph of a lynched black man dangling, bloodied and beaten, from a tree limb. His neck was broken, his legs and arms contorted. On the back someone had scrawled, “This is what happens to traitors of the black race!!!”

The photo and note horrified and frightened Gail. My editor at Scribner’s, Ned Chase, suggested I contact the police for protection, but I decided against it. I refused to be intimidated.

Yet it pained me to think that there were blacks in America who used the same tactics that the Ku Klux Klan used to intimidate, harass, and deprive blacks with whom they disagreed of their civil and human rights. To me both attitudes were racist and to be condemned.

More evidence of black prejudice came in letters. A woman from PIano, Texas, wrote that she enjoyed reading my second book until she noticed it contained photographs. When she saw the wedding pictures, she immediately stopped reading.

“Seeing you married to a white woman was shocking,” she wrote. “The problem I have with you and others of your kind is that in talking Black and sleeping White, you betray your audience.”

Someone sent me an article that appeared in The Black American that was supposedly a reprint of a speech made by South African President P.

W.

Botha to his cabinet. The following paragraph was underlined: Our Combat Unit is now training special White girls in the use of slow-poisoning drugs. Ours is not a war that we can use the atomic bomb to destroy the Blacks, so we must use our intelligence to effect this. The person-to-person encounter can be very effective. As the records show that the Black man is dying to go to bed with the White woman, here is our unique opportunity. Our Sex Mercenary Squad should go out and camouflage with Apartheid FIghters while doing their operations quietly, administering slow-killing poison and fertility destroyers to those Blacks they thus befriend. We have received a new supply of prostitutes from Europe and America who are desperate and too keen to take up the appointments.

No letter accompanied this unbelievable article. I assume the In the Limelight: Am I Betraying My Race? I me that Gail was a spy hired by the white South African regIme to kill me or weaken my resolve in the fight against apartheid.

Not every black woman who read the Boy in America responded this way.

Some wrote me and said that after initially being angered and embittered at learning that I had married a white woman, they later, after their visceral reactions had subsided, found it in themselves to accept us and respect our feelings for each other.

Dothula Baron-Butler, a black writer in Richmond, Virginia, who raised her two teenage sons alone, wrote to tell me about the evolution of her feelings toward my mixed marriage. “I understand the criticism and ridicule you may have received for marrying a white woman,” she wrote.

“I must admit that when I first heard the news, I felt like many others-that you had been tempted by the forbidden fruit.” But after reading your book [the Boy in AmerIca], I understand. You and Gail are truly soul mates. It just so happens that one of you is white; the other black. True love knows no color.”

GAIL’S VIEW.

When Mark and I first married, I knew nothing about the shortage of available black men or the pain my love for and commitment to Mark might cause some black women. I thought the most vehement opposition to our relationship would come from whites. Once I convinced my family that I was doing the right thing by marrying Mark, I believed I had overcome the greatest hurdle I’d ever have to face.

Having been warmly and lovingly received by Mark’s family, I assumed the African-American community, too, would see and judge me as an individual.

It was not until I accompanied Mark on a publicity trip to Philadelphia that I realized that I-an individual-was regarded as “the white woman” who stole a black man. I was made to feel that I had committed some sort of unspoken crime against the black community, particularly against black women, by marrying Mark. I felt it as soon as I followed Mark into an all-black radio station. The faces I saw did not greet me with smiles but stared at me coldly, with an air of revulsion. Mark must have sensed it too, for he quickly went into the sound booth with the radio technicians without a word or glance For Black Women, the Pain Runs Deep The term militant black took on a threatening new meaning for me. For the first time I felt like an intruder, an enemy, who had wandered into hostile territory, surrounded on all sides by people who hated the color of my skin and all it represented. No one spoke to me, not even to tell me where I might sit down and wait. I found an empty conference room in the back, cluttered with dusty equipment and stacks of paper, and collapsed in an ancient overstufied armchair. The minutes crawled by like hours. I longed to be black, if only to save myself from such torment.

Later that day, while Mark was doing another interview at the student radio station at the University of Pennsylvania, I crossed the street and entered a campus bookstore to kill time. My interest in the 1960s led me to pick up a thick book of black-and-white photographs and thumb slowly through it, studying pictures of hippies, yippies, political activists, and riots. Paging through a section on civil rights, the image of an angry, defiant black woman caught my eye. Reading the caption, I realized what had provoked her anger: Black men were “turning against” their black sisters, “abandoning the struggle,” and “betraying their race” by sleeping with white women. I imagined the furious black woman leaping from the pages of the book and shaking her fist in my face. “You honky bitch! You slut! White trash!” I could almost hear her shout. “Why don’t you leave that black man alone?

Mark is one of US. He should belong to a BLACK woman! You stole him!

You had no right!”

I slammed the book shut, shoved it into the row of books lining the shelf, and hurried back to the radio station, shaken and bewildered. I was so upset I could barely articulate my revelation to Mark.

When I finally did, he seemed surprised.

“Didn’t you know?” Mark asked. “Of course black women are going to be upset at you, at us. I know it’s unfair. But we just have to get used to it. Maybe someday, when they get to know you as an individual, they’ll think differently about us.”