Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (3 page)

I should have terminated the relationship much earlier, but I was afraid to hurt him. So I stuck it out, growing more miserable each day, and silently longing for a man who would let me be myself and trust me enough to let me have male friends.

At Christmas time 1984, back in Minnesota, I skied alone through snow-filled woods, sliding silently between evergreens laden with ice crystals. I brushed the snow off a fallen tree and lay down on it, facing the deep blue sky and watching the steam rise from my body.

As I lay there, thoughts came to me that changed my life: I grew convinced that I should develop my talents and creativity fully, let my spirit thrive uninhibited, and avoid any man who sought to stifle and kill that spirit, the only thing that gave purpose and meaning to my life. I would break up with Glen.

The new year came and I returned to New York. I had been back a week when I went for a run along the Hudson River through snow, listening to Corelli and Telemann on my Walkman and watching the sun set in a glorious serenity of colors whose beauty made the heart ache.

I was stretching out in the gym when Mark walked in. My heart beat faster. I could not resist watching in silent awe as he began hitting tennis balls against the wall. He seemed to glide across the floor, like a ballet dancer, as he steadily and gracefully struck the yellow tennis ball, hard and fast against the wall in a lulling rhythm of bounces and swats. His jaw was firm in concentration and his eyes were riveted on the ball. His smooth black arms and legs moved in a synchronized manner with precision and grace. It was beautiful to watch. I was thrilled when he invited me to the tennis match.

But alone in my room, guilt set in. How would I tell Glen I was going to a tennis match with Mark? Did I have the courage to break up with him? When Mark called to confirm the date, I said, “Can I take a rain check?”

“Sure,” Mark replied.

“Who was that?” Glen asked as I hung up.

“That was Mark. He wanted to take me to a tennis game.”

As I expected, Glen flew into a jealous rage. “You were going to go on a date with another guy!” he screamed. “What were you thinking? How would you feel if I told you I was going on a date with another woman?”

“It would be okay with me, because I trust you.”

How We Met/IS a photograph of John McEnroe holding a huge, ornate silver trophy above his head in triumph: He had just won the Grandmaster’s titie. I regretted not having gone to the match at Madison Square Garden with Mark, and I worried that he might have ascribed my refusal to his being black. I wrote a short and honest note to him, explaining why I had decided not to go and adding, in no uncertain terms, that I admired his character. Upon rereading the note, I realized I might be making a fool of myself if he were already in love with someone else.

My cheeks flushed red and my heart pounded as I added a timid postscript: “P.S. Do you have a girlfriend?”

The next day I found in my mailbox a letter written on pink stationery.

It read Dear Gail, Many thanks for your candid letter. I do not know if you expected a reply, but my heart willingly gives one. Bear in mind it is my heart speaking, and as we mortals well know, hearts have a curious language of their own, intelligible only to a select few.

Such persons have about them that rare wonder called 0Beauty of the Soul.” The thoughts in your letter tell me you’re one of them.

They’re spontaneous, down to-earth and unpretentious. Put differently, they’re the essence of you.

They make you extremely attractive intellectually, emotionally, and’ otherwise. It is a joy to know you.

True friends are too hard to come by for us not to open our hearts when someone special comes along. Of course opening our hearts entails risks, leaves us vulnerable to the vicissitudes of human nature.

But I have yet to meet true friends who knowingly hurt one another.

That’s what I believe we have the potential of becoming: true friends.

l:inally, I don’t presently have a steady girlfriend. The reason: I’ve yet to meet a woman who sees me the way you’ve described me; a woman who understands that true friendship is the basis of a relation ship; a woman who accepts the maxim that love is that relation between man and woman in which the independence is equal, the dependence mutual, and the obligation reciprocal.” I hope I’m not looking for an angel on earth.

With love, MA

Like two nervous high-school kids on a blind date, Mark and I met downstairs in the lobby of I-House the next day, bundled up have been spring. We sauntered to Broadway where we boarded a bus for the Cloisters, an old medieval monastery on a cliff beetling over the Hudson that had been converted into an ancient art museum. Mark wore an amusing pinkandgreen plaid tie. We strolled through the warm monastery, discussing unicorns and tapestries, brass statues and carved doors, and much more that was communicated without words by shy, sidelong glances and sheepish smiles.

That evening, alone in my overheated room, I wrote in my journal: “The sun has just set over the Hudson, and I have just fallen in love with another man. He is refined and highly educated though he grew up in a ghetto. He sees with his soul and writes with his heart.

His thoughts sometimes roll by me as I struggle to pursue their meaning, his mind teems with philosophy and noble ideas, his shelves overflow with great literature, his face shines with the radiance of his convictions. He is a great artist, an independent spirit, a rebel in disguise, a believer in truth and right in a world full of deception and cynicism.”

The phone rang, breaking my concentration. It was Glen. I told him I wanted to date “someone.” We argued.

He rode the subway all the way uptown to talk to me in person. I told him I had spent the day at the Cloisters with Mark.

“You two have been seeing a lot of each other lately, haven’t you?” he fumed.

“If you call one day a lot,’ ” I replied.

He paused, then asked, “Did he kiss you good-bye?”

“Yes.”

“On the lips?”

“Yes.”

Glen started trembling all over. Soon he was shaking so violently he put on his coat. “You have to choose between me and Mark,” he said, “and I want the answer right here and now.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Glen hurled his shoulder bag at the wall, then grabbed it and lelt, his face flushed with anger. He called me later to say he was cold, wet, lonely, and terrified of losing me. He said he had been wandering around the city like a madman and had wet feet and was shivering in a phone booth. I felt awful.

“How could you just throw us away like that?” he demanded.

“Your biggest fault is that you can be so damn coldhearted sometimes.

I can’t stand the thought of losing a woman to another man. If you leave me my life is over.”

The next few months my joy at getting to know Mark was overshadowed by my guilt at having hurt Glen. Glen seemed to think I was just going through a passing phase and would soon come to my senses. The fact that I had lelt him for a black seemed to make him even more desperate to win me back. He wrote long, tortured letters.

He called me at odd hours to make sure I was in my room. He composed depressing poems I could not interpret. He waited for me outside my classes with bouquets of flowers.

I wished Glen could just let go. Our relationship was over. All my devotion was now directed at Mark, whom I knew I could never stop loving. I carried my pain over the breakup inside me, and did not share much of it with Mark. But without my saying a word, Mark could always tell when I was upset or troubled. He would stop whatever he was doing to listen to me, comfort me, try to understand.

“I don’t understand why you stayed with him for nearly two years,” Mark said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You’re so’ brilliant, such a free spirit, that it pains me to see you feeling confined and depressed. You deserve all the opportunities to grow. There’s nothing wrong with stopping to ask yourself whether you’re happy and trying to change your life if you’re not.”

I recall these memories not to revel in the pain I inllicted on someone I once cared deeply about, but to address a pervasive stereotyp’e about mixed couples. Many whites believe that a white woman would only stoop to loving or marrying a black man if she were too ugly, too ignorant, or too poor to find herself a white mate.

This could not be further from the truth. I’ve met dozens of bright, attractive white women from respectable families who have fallen deeply in love with good men who just happen to be black.

Another popular theory is that white women who date blacks have low self-esteem and want to degrade themselves as much as possible by prostituting their hearts, souls, and bodies to black men, who will supposedly take them for granted and treat them like trash.

This, too, is a racist stereotype. Most white women I’ve met who date black men are more confident, self-assured, and independent than average. They are strong-willed and openřminded individuals who choose to go against the social grain rather than give in to pressure from parents, friends, coworkers, and society to break up with men they admire, respect, and love.

In my case, my friendship with Mark has been an uplilting experience, not a degrading one. Mark has been unstinting in his support of me as a writer. He constantly encourages me to do my best without fear of criticism or rejection. He has instilled in me one of his mother’s favorite maxims: In life you never fail as long as you keep trying. He was even more of a feminist than I, and convinced me that women, like blacks, should strive to realize their potentials without letting prejudice and discrimination define, rule, and ruln their lives.

“Most obstacles to sellactualization can be overcome,” he said.

“If I did not believe that, I would still be in South Africa.”

Mark was all the things I had ever hoped for in a man-an intellectual, a lover of books and philosophy and classical music, an athlete, a fellow writer, a sensitive and compassionate human being, and a loyal friend. To be honest I had not expected my ideal man to be black, but the fact that he was did not keep me from falling in love with him.

That spring Mark and I spent hours in one of the soundproof study rooms off the library, facing each other across a huge table covered with books and papers. We talked deeply and intensely about topics ranging from injustice, fate, and the Cold War to apartheid, history, and writing. He would read me Dover Beach, prelude, he RubGird! of On!ar KhdJyam, Ado nail, and other favorite poems. He shared with me the history of Africa’s contributions to literature art, music, dance, science, religion, and warfare so that I gained a greater respect and sensitivity for truly one of the world’s great civilizations.

I heard so many tales of his painful childhood that I knew his life story by heart long before the Boy was published. On my part I told him what it was like growing up in the Midwest as the daughter of a Presbyterian minister: how I always had a congregation of adoring faces smiling down on me, how my father would take us sailing every Sunday, how I spent my summers MOUNTAINCLIMBING in the White Mountains, and several of my off-beat adventures.

“What a vivid storyteller!” Mark exclaimed. “You’re the writer, I laughed at his childlike enthusiasm and wished I had half the confidence he had in my potential.

Mark heightened my desire to write and made me regularly think about life’s deeper meaning. I thought of all the people who toil through life, suppressing their emotions and ideals, forsaking or shunning those eager to love them, single-mindedly pursuing their careers up some mythical ladder with blind persistence, only to grow old and die, leaving nothing behind but a hole in a corporate structure. I realized that the importance of life lies deep in one’s relationship to others.

People make our lives meaningful. Human interaction is the essence of our being. When we die, we are kept alive only by the memories of those who loved us, only by those whose lives we touched.

When Mark and I talked about writing we sometimes whipped ourselves into amazing states of optimism and euphoria. Writing, to us, was a religion. Great writers were our prophets. We modeled our relationship after that of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecralt and the author of Eanketein, whom we saw as two perfectly matched nonconformists and free spirits.

I admired Mark’s discipline so much that soon I acquired many of his habits: I drank no caffeine, ate no red meat or sugar, woke up around seven and typed journal notes or articles, ate piles of fruits and vegetables, and worked out every other day. We went for runs together through Riverside Park from 122nd to 72nd and back up again.

Mark, in turn, wanted me to share elements of my life with him. I was doing my master’s thesis on foreign artists living in the East Village.

I took him to a few art openings packed with artists with spiked hair that had been dyed fluorescent pink, in galleries reached only by passing prone derelicts, drug dealers, and rotting garbage. The paintings on the walls burst with color and expression, but neither of us could make any sense of their meaning or relevance to reality.

One winter evening, after hearing the New York Philharmonic play Stravinsky and Debussy at Carnegie Hall, Mark and I walked to a rustic restaurant crowded with heavy wooden tables on which burned thick white candles surrounded by piles of dripping wax. The place reminded me of the wine cellar under the Budapest Castie.

–-I–––––––––––––––––––––— –I-.“shirt with his gold necktie pin, telling me about his childhood and youth. Neither of his parents had gone to school, yet he consistentiy came out Iirst throughout primary and high school, which he attended after winning a government scholarship. after a childhood deprived of books, he fell in love with English, his fifth language, and by his early teens books had become his only solace, his best friends, the liberators of his mind and soul.

My eyes filled with tears as he spoke, but I tried to hide them so he would not see my distress. His eyes too seemed glazed with tears at bringing overpowering memories back to life. He had once told me that he had trouble finding the right woman because many women thought him lachrymose, mistook his sensitivity for a sign of latent homosexuality.