Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (32 page)

Singer Paula Abdul, whose 1989 debut album Forever Your Girl sold millions, bears the brunt of many such attacks. The daughter of a French-Canadian and a Brazilian-Syrian, Abdul and her style of singing and dancing immediately appealed to African-Americans, who flocked to record stores to buy her music. When Abdul said publicly that she considers herself “Third World”-neither black nor white-many black fans felt disappointed and betrayed.

If a dark-skinned person has an Italian or Japanese ancestor, there is no reason he should deny this fact and focus his entire identity on his African ancestry. Yet Prince, the multitalented musician from Minneapolis, has been vilified by some blacks for mentioning in his press bio that he is, among other things, part Italian.

Actress Jennifer Beals, who starred in the film Fashdance, has been criticized for not claiming to be black. Yet she has never claimed to be white, either. Her father, a black grocery-store owner on Chicago’s South Side, died when Jennifer was nine. She was raised by her mother, an Irish school teacher, on Chicago’s North Shore in an upper-middle-class white environment. Having grown up in both white and black neighborhoods, and having one white and one black parent, why should Jennifer be forced to choose between her father’s heritage or her mother’s?

With the rise of crossover music-tunes that appeal to both black and white audiences-came an increase in the number of female vocalists who cannot be, and who rightly refuse to be, categorized as black or white.

Neneh Cherry, whose debut album Raw Like Sushi was one of the bestselling recordings of 1989, is the daughter of a Swedish woman and an African. Sade, Sheila E, Apollonia, and Vanity are other singers who are either biracial or happen to be very fairskinned and who have been criticized for 0pretending” to be white and “denying” their African roots simply because they look beyond race and consider themselves as human beings first, not as black or white.

MARK’S VIEW One of the things I quickly learned after arriving in America in 1978 was that this nationespite its freedom, democracy, and claims of being a melting pot where differences are not only tolerated but celebrated-was far from the racial utopia I had imagined it to be while I groaned under apartheid oppression. This shocked and disappointed me. Yet it also challenged me. Having witnessed firsthand the bitter fruits of racism, intolerance, and separateness under apartheid, I vowed that, just as I had done in South Africa, I would never allow America’s racial politics to shape my destiny by determining my values, where I should live, what I should believe, what work I should do, whom I should befriend and whom I should marry.

I knew it wouldn’t be easy. Race consciousness was deeply ingrained in the psyches of most Americans. The strength of the tide I had to swIm against to fully realize my individuality, to acknowledge, respect, and share in the cultures of others, was daunting.

Falling in love and marrying Gail proved a formidable test of my convictions that true friendship knows no color and that humanity is one. Another challenge, as the father of two biracial children, has been to raise them to embrace, appreciate, and affirm the best in the cultures of their parents, and by extension the best in all other cultures, against a backdrop of increasing and sometimes vicious racial polarization in America.

The most important thing I wanted our firstborn, Bianca, to know was that she was first and foremost a human being. Her worth and identity should derive from that fact and no other. Whatever she if, does in life should be toward helping her become a better human being-feeling, caring, tolerant, giving, loving. That way, no label can diminish her humanity nor contaminate her soul.

“Your father is black,” I often tell her. “And your mother is white.

You unite the best in both of us. You’re a testament to our belief in the oneness of humankind. Never allow society to force you to choose between one or the other. You’re both, you’re beautiful and be proud.”

The obsession with racial labels and categories is remIniscent of the Nazi era. It can be easily perverted even in modern tImes, as in South Africa where, in an interesting twist, historians and researchers are discovering that many Afrikaners, including architects of apartheid, are not pure white but have black relatIves in their pedigrees, the result of their ancestors’ intermarriage or illicit relationships with blacks.

In America, the irony about forcing biracial children to choose between black and white is that few black Americans can honestly claim to be purely black. Many have European, native Anterican, Asian, and Spanish blood somewhere in their ancestry. Their culture and values are almost entirely American. And few speak an African language, a skill without which it is difficult to fully understand the fundamental tenets of African culture. One of these tenets, African humanism, affirms the universality of the human experience and maintains that a rejection of the humanity of others is a rejection of oneself. This has been the principle behind my condemnation of both white and black bigotry.

I never would have survived the horrors of apartheid with my soul intact had I been forced to choose between the culture of my father, who is Venda, and my mother, who is Tsonga. My father - sought to mold me after his image, as a man devoid of feelings. My mother taught me that to feel is human. Interestingly, apartheid, in pursuit of its divide and conquer strategy, wanted me to believe that the Vendas and Tsongas were sworn enemies, that I had nothing to gain and everything to lose by claiming to belong to both, just as the purveyors of racism in America want biracial children to believe that the black and white cultures are antagonistic.

True culture, I believe, encompasses what has preserved and nourished the best in a people: spiritually, intellectually, artistically.

And taken collectively, the cultures of the world are what has preserved and nourished the human race since time began. Thus as human beings we all have a claim and a stake in each other’s culture.

Aware that the identity and well-being of our children, their capacity to weather the misunderstanding and accusations of society about who they are, will ultimately depend on the sort of home they were raised in, Gail and I have sought to provide a loving household in which they can grow up secure and confident, at ease among both blacks and whites.

Gail and I would have had a hard time creating this nurturing environment had it not been for our decision to involve both our families, especially both sets of grandparents. Because Gail and I live in America, it has been easy for Bianca to be with her maternal grandparents. Gail’s mother visits us regularly at Thanksgiving and Easter, and we see her father at least once a year. From both she regularly receives letters, phone calls, gift subscriptions to children’s magazines, stuffed animals, books, and even biracial dolls.

Though Ilnah, Diana, George, and I have done a great deal to expose Bianca to the richness, beauty, and complexities of the Tsonga and Venda cultures of our parents, she had the greatest exposure when Gail and I decided to bring both my mother and father to the United States.

What I wanted Bianca and Gail to know were not only the traditions and customs of my parents, but also their characters and the complexities of their emotions, especially my father’s. I had not seen my father since I left South Africa twelve years before, and our relationship had been a difficult and painful one. Memories of the verbal and physical battles between us during my teenage years, of his hatred of white people, were still vivid in my mind. I wondered how he would react to my new life, wife, and child.

On August 12, 1990, Gail, Bianca, Linah, Diana, and I welcomed my parents to North Carolina. After a grueling seventeen-hour flight from Johannesburg, my seventy-two-year-old father, Jackson, a short, gaunt man with wisps of gray hair, stepped off a USAlr flight from New York holding hands with my fifty-two-year-old mother, IMagdelene. Seeing them together brought tears to my eyes. It Iseemed an appropriate symbol of how much their relationship had grown, of how they had stood by each other through the trials and tribulations of thirty-seven years as a black couple under apartheid.

My father first hugged and kissed Linah and Diana, his two youngest daughters whom he had not seen in more than three years.

Much to my surprise, he then hugged and kissed Gail and nineteenmonth-old Bianca. As I embraced my father he felt warm, gentle, accessible, and human. His eyes glistened with tears of joy as he muttered, “My son, my son, God is alive, God is alive indeed!”

His words took me aback. The father I knew back in South Africa had seldom referred to me as his son, and he used to scoff at Christianity as a ploy through which white people had stolen land from black people and enslaved them. The father I now beheld was a far cry from the tormented soul whose twisted life I chronicled in the Boy and its sequel. The changes that had occurred in his character were remarkable. His affectionate holding of my mother’s hand, his public display of emotion, was something new. Even the smile that lit up his brown eyes and softened his hardened face was new. I was amazed and delighted to confirm the news I had been hearing from home about the miraculous transformation of my father from an alcoholic, chronic gambler, and wife batterer into a loving father and husband, a respected member of the black community in Alexandra, devout Christian, and church deacon.

The father I remembered was a distant, stoic, inscrutable, and menacing stranger. His emasculation under apartheid had poisoned his hIe and turned him into a tyrant. His seven children tried desperately to love him but found his heart cold and unreachable. Whenever he came home drunk and started physically abusing my mother, I would intervene. He would turn his wrath on me, beat me, and threaten to kill me. I hated him for being so unfeeling, and he detested me for challenging his authority in the house.

But the day I left for America, something happened to make me believe that despite all the shocks my father had subjected me to, he loved me.

He cried. For the first time in my life I saw tears in his eyes. He wished me well and asked that I write often and remember the family.

Little did I know how hard my father would work, during my twelve years in America, to mend his life and regain his dignity and humanity. As we caught up with our lives during long conversations on hot afternoons in Kernersville, the story of his transformation unfolded.

After I escaped from apartheid through a tennis scholarship, my father began realizing he had been wrong in disparaging my love for books and tennis, and in belittling me as “a woman with a penis.”

“I found myself taking pride in what you had done,” he said one evening as we took a walk around the quiet neighborhood. “I even claimed credit for it, though I knew it was mostly your mother’s sacriflces which made everything possible.”

My mother had never been one to bask in the limelight. She let my father boast that “a son who had inherited his brain is now a famous and successful man in America.” Never one to miss an opportunity, my mother seized the moment to convince my father that his behaviorrinking, gambling, and abusing the family-was incompatible with his claims to being my father.

“You should stop drinking and come to church with me,” she said. “Then people will believe that you’re indeed Mark’s father.”

My father had angrily rejected such invitations in the past, but this tIme he relented. He began attending the Twelve Apostles Church of God in Alexandra, where my mother had been a member for many years. At first his attendance was sporadic, but in the last three years his faith has strengthened. He is now a deacon and helps the minister counsel church members with their problems. His enthusiasm and proselytizing have brought dozens of new members into the church. And his strong will to live-a will that enabled him to bear so much misfortune and suffering under apartheid without breaking-helped him effectively fight alcoholism.

Bianca took an immediate liking to my father. She constantly followed him around our four-bedroom farmhouse, its wraparound porch, and the yard, calling him “Dada” and conversing with him in baby talk while he responded in pidgin English and various -African languages. Whenever he called her name she would run to him, and he would teach her African games and songs in his native Venda.

Each evening as we sat down to dinner, my father and Bianca would sing a little song in Venda, clapping their hands and patting their foreheads to the rhythm of tutu na-nana, tutu na-nana.

Because my father hates being cloistered indoors, he would pace the yard or shovel mulch in the garden, even in ninety-degree heat.

Bianca was right there at his heels, picking up clods of dirt to give him as gifts.

My mother adored Bianca, the first grandchild born to one of her sons.

Under Tsonga tribal tradition, only grandchildren born to sons are considered true grandchildren. The children born to daughters are considered the grandchildren of their husband’s parents. For this reason Bianca holds a special place in my mother’s heart, though my three sisters still living in South Africa-Ilorah, Maria, and Merriam-all have children who are deeply loved by my parents.

My mother would take Bianca’s hands and sing and dance with her in the kitchen to African songs about the joys of childhood. Bianca, sucking her thumb and playing with the smooth hem of her pink blanket, would snuggle up against my mother on the couch as she sat knitting sweaters and caps for her, studying the alphabet, or watching television with my father. And the two often took Bianca along on their marathon daily walks.

As the weeks passed I began to see that Bianca was comfortable in all four worlds that make up her identity: white, black, American, and South African. She was growing up without stereotypes against race or culture, completely open and trusting of new people and kind strangers, unafraid and self-confident, candid in her expression of feelings.

For months her favorite phrase was “I love you,” and she says it not only to Mommy, Daddy, Grampa, Grandma, Uncle George, and her aunties Linah and Diana but also to her little girlfriends at play school, her teachers, and other relatives who call and ask to speak to her. She’s been maturing into a beautiful, trusting, tolerant, nonjudgmental, happy child popular among the neighborhood children, both black and white. I have no fear that she will be “caught between two worlds,” as so many opponents of interracial marriage argue. Instead I’m confident she will be a much better person from growing up amid so much diversity.