Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (35 page)

“Nope, she’s black,” Eric replied.

After a momentary silence his father said, “Oh, really? Well, that’s nice.” Eric describes his parents as “two of the best-intentioned liberals in the world.”

Jackie’s mother accepted the news readily, and her grandfather, though not quite as accepting, only commented, “Oh, he’s white?”

Jackie grew up in an integrated neighborhood in Philadelphia, attended an integrated Catholic school, and was used to being around whites.

When Jackie and Eric moved to Austin, Texas, in 1983, Jackie expected trouble, but they had none. In fact people were so friendly to them they couldn’t believe it. They now live in Manhattan with their son, Jack.

A photograph of the couple appeared on the wedding announcements page of The New York Times while they were honeymooning in Bermuda.

Tourists who had seen the photo shouted their congratulations and waved.

While black women with white men seem to have a fairly easy time as interracial couples, the white women we know who have married black men have often had to struggle against enormous difficulties. Despite the fact that about 75 percent of interracial marriages in the United States involve black men and white women, it is the black man-white woman combination that sparks the most widespread condemnation among both blacks and whites.

Few things can be more difficult for the average white Ainerican than to see his daughter marry a black man. It places even the most loving and liberal white father in an emotional quandary, as it did Spencer Tracy in his role of the white father in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

The desperate despair of a daughter over losing her father’s love and her father’s agonizing disappointment are the painful themes that often surface whenever a white woman marries outside her race.

When our friends Madelyn and Richard Ashley decided to marry, Madelyn had to sacrifice her good relationship with her father. For years after the wedding, Madelyn’s father refused to meet Richard.

One Christmas Eve at her sister’s house, when Madelyn and Richard dropped by without knowing her parents were there, Madelyn’s father ran down to the basement and refused to come upstairs until Richard was out of the house. Madelyn went downstairs to persuade hIm to come up, but it was no use.

uEveryone tells me Richard’s a fine young man,” Madelyn’s father said.

4But I just can’t bring myself to meet him. I can’t. He’s stepped over the line by marrying you.”

Her father, an engineer and a Methodist, was born and raised in Columbia, South Carolina, and her mother, a Baptist, was bornřjust outside WinstonSalem. Though they raised Madelyn to believe in racial equality, they oppose interracial marriage.

“When I graduated from Chapel Hill, my parents did not come to my graduation because they knew Richard would be there. They didn’t even call. My parents raised me to be a broad-minded individual, but that only went so far. I knew they would never accept my marrying a black.”

When they first began dating, Madelyn let her parents believe Richard was white. Because he sounds white on the phone, he was able to develop a good relationship with Madelyn’s parents by having phone conversations with them. Madelyn’s mother even told her, 4Richard must be good-looking, judging from his voice.” Her parents invited Madelyn and Richard to visit them. Richard refused to go unless Madelyn told her parents he was black; he did not want to shock them.

When Madelyn told her parents they reacted with, 4How could you do this?” and retracted their invitation. In the wedding photos, Madelyn’s parents are conspicuously absent. Richard was forbidden to set foot in his father-in-law’s home.

It was not until Madelyn’s mother had a heart attack that her parents had a change of heart. Lying in a hospital bed, confronting the dark abyss of death, and troubled by an uneasy conscience, Madei, rnrtřho tOAd tH her husband and asked, “Why have we done Her father wept.

Fortunately Madelyn’s mother recovered, and as soon as she was home from the hospital, Madelyn’s father invited Madelyn and Richard to visit. When the young couple arrived, Madelyn’s father eagerly shook Richard’s hand, as if hungry for the companionship of the son-in-law he had so long denied. He and Richard talked nonstop and spent the entire weekend fishing together. Both Richard and Madelyn are amazed by her father’s complete transformation, and happy that their baby boy, Colin, has a kind and loving grandfather.

Not all white fathers learn to accept their black sons-in-law, but many of them do eventually come around. It is often a slow, gradual, and painful process, and requires parents to come to terms with their own prejudices and fears.

It took nine years for Connie, a lithe and beautiful white woman with high cheekbones and luminous eyes, to win back the affection of her father after she started dating James, now a black service manager in Greensboro. Connie, who is the middle child of seven children, drew a lot of criticism from her five sisters, who always told her she was ugly and stupid and would never amount to anything.

They made fun of her and called her a nigger lover when she started dating James, whom she met at a Greensboro high school.

0My parents hated me when they found out,” Connie said. 4Daddy used to say he was going to shoot him. He said, “I’ll shoot the nigger.” I just sat there and gaped. I couldn’t believe those words had come out of his mouth. When I first started dating James I didn’t really think about how my parents would react. I thought it was no big deal.”

Her father, an alcoholic who used to beat his wife and children, terrified Connie so much that she used to leave the house quietly and meet James at the end of the road to avoid a scene.

0He used to beat all of us,” Connie said. 4He just went down the line.

He beat us over anything, nothing in particular. With belts and sticks. I always thought the reason he drank was because of us kids.

We were pretty obnoxious. I mean, we weren’t the 4Leave It to Beaver” family. He used to beat my brother so bad I had to clean the hair and blood off the bathroom wall. We would run from him. If we saw him coming we’d run upstairs and hide in our rooms. If he got irritated over something he’d just come upstairs and smack one of us upside the head. He’s been sober for more than ten years now, and Of all the girls in the family, Connie was the only daughter who fought back against her father’s violence and rebelled against his authority. Her friends believe that, because of her defiance, Connie is now much stronger than her sisters.

James’s parents did not approve of his dating a white woman, but he was twenty at the time and financially independent, working his way through college, so they had little control over him. Baised in government projects in Greensboro in the late 1950s, James says he lived in a real rough, all-black neighborhood.

“You grew up fast there,” said James, the middle of six children.

“I always ran with boys a lot older than I was. I had to do what they did. Toughened me up. Breaking in, stealing, causing trouble, you know, going into people’s windows and taking stuff, then taking it to the playground and breaking it, just to be foolish. I used to wake up early in the morning and come back when it was dark. I loved to fight.

I fought all the time, every day just about. I’d start fights over nothing, just to fight. It’s just something you did. You didn’t think about it.”

James attended an all-black elementary school, for JIm Crow laws still ruled the South. His father sorted letters by zip code at the post office all day, then worked at an all-black university at night as an assistant programs director. But these two incomes were still not enough to keep the family out of government housing.

Busing began when James entered fifth grade. rnThat first year was wild,” James said. “We more or less just stared at each other, trying to figure out what was really going on. It was the first tIme I?d had contact with white kids. It took me only about three weeks to make some white friends, cause I was aggressive and outgoing from hanging out with those older boys. But after that first year of integration, we came back for sixth grade and it was completely segregated again.

All the white kids had left. They’d gone to private schools or schools across town. By seventh grade there wasn’t even a white teacher left.”

By the tIme James entered high school, attempts at integrating the Greensboro public school system were starting to work. He was bused to a predominantly white high school, and, though he had had very little contact with whites, he began dating white girls.

WcnUt nne to listen,” James said.

“My parents never talked to me about stuff like that. I’ve always done what I want.”

James knew Connie’s father was against him, but he continued to date her. When Connie’s father found out his daughter was still seeing James, he kicked her out of the house. One day her mother came home from work and told Connie, “You’ve got to leave.”

“Why? What have I done?” asked Connie, then nineteen.

“Your daddy just wants you to get out. You’ve got to be out of here by five o’clock.”

Connie, shaken and crying, hurriedly packed her things and, with her mother’s encouragement, moved in with James, who had a job delivering pesticides to tobacco farmers. Her mother, knowing Connie had nowhere to go and no money, pleaded with James to let Connie move in with him.

“Can Connie stay here?” her mother asked James in a hysterical tone, still huffing from carrying suitcases up two flights of stairs.

“She doesn’t have any place to go. Do you mind if she lives here for a while?”

Connie began living with James, though neither of them felt ready for such a commitment. They felt the decision had been foisted on them by circumstances. Connie found a job waiting tables at a steak house and, to make their money go further, she and James decided to look for a more affordable apartment. Connie found a one-bedroom apartment on Spring Garden and signed the lease in her name. When James showed up with his belongings, he was accosted by the landlord.

“We stayed in that apartment only one night,” Connie said. “The landlord told us to get out. James came to the steak house and told me what had happened. I was hysterical, crying, mad. We were real naive.

We didn’t know a landlord could react like that.”

They finally found an apartment that would accept them, and after settling in, Connie discovered she was pregnant. She kept this fact from her parents until she could no longer hide it. The pregnancy made James feel restless, uneasy, and trapped. When he began attending college, he stayed away from home most of the time.

James started dating another woman, a blond-haired, browneyed woman he met in his art class. He would spend hours talking to his new girlfriend on the phone in front of Connie and his infant son.

He would take weekend trips with her. Then he left for Chicago.

Connie remained in Greensboro, the unwed mother of a biracial infant she named Dylan.

“I couldn’t go home after James left me,” she said. “I found a roach-infested apartment on McGee Street and moved in with my baby. To pay rent I had to work two jobs, as an aerobics instructor by day and a waitress by night. I never saw Dylan. He stayed in the nursery from eight in the morning until ten at night.”

Connie, feeling deeply wounded and angry at James, tried to go on with her life. -I was so depressed. I wanted to kill myself. I knew I couldn’t work two jobs and raise a child. I never made more than enough money to survive, and I saw Dylan only on Sundays. I was still hurt. I thought, this isn’t right, this isn’t fair. I had his child!

What’s he doing leaving me for her?” I never hated like I hated him.

If I had had a gun, he’d be dead. I’d go through spells of crying and loneliness. It was hard to raise a child when I was so depressed.”

James returned from Chicago after two years of working for an advertising firm there, and tried to make amends. He had had a change of heart, turned to religion, and accepted his responsibility as a father. He was eager to establish a good relationship with his son, but Connie was still too hurt to let him back into her life.

“He’d come over anytime, never call,” Connie said. “I’d try to keep the door shut on him. He would come by to take Dylan to church. He said he was praying for me. I thought he was joking. I didn’t know he’d been saved. FInally he told me he’d been born again. That didn’t mean anything to me. I wasn’t going to church then. I was mad at God.

I was mad at the world.”

Connie confided her problems to her friend Nancy, the manager at the gym where she taught aerobics. Nancy, also an ardent Christian, started ministering to Connie, telling her that religion was the only answer to her problems.

“Every time she said the name Jesus I’d weep,” Connie said, inbecause I knew in my heart that she was right. I knew I had to learn to forgive James and his girlfriend. It says in the Bible that you have to forgive one another, faults and all. It took me a long time to forgive them. It drove me crazy just to think of them together.”

Gradually Connie and James started living together again. They did not sleep together for months. “We had to learn to be friends all over again,” Connie said. “Jj took forever to trust him again. When we Fmally decided we were ready to get married, Dylan was five.

Everyone who knew our story-all the struggles we’d been through-were wild with joy. The wedding was great, a real celebration.”

In the wedding photographs, Connie’s father beams proudly, apparently delighted by the way everything turned out.

After Dylan was born my relationship with my father started to Improve,” Connie said. “I mean, you can’t refuse a child, not a baby, mixed or not mixed.”

Nine years into their relationship and four years into the marriage, James and Connie now have three children and a home of their own.

James works for Connie’s father, and the two of them have become good friends.

The trust between James and Connie grew slowly but steadily.

When Connie was pregnant with her second child, a little boy named Joshua, she awoke from a nightmare, gripped by panic and drenched in sweat. She grabbed James by the arm and whispered, you’re going to leave me again, aren’t you? Just like the first time. I know youwill!fl 0No, it’s different now,” James reassured her. “We both know the Lord and I love you. I’m not going anywhere. We’re married.”