Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (36 page)

By the time Connie bore her youngest child, Lily, she knew everything would be fine. “James is such a good father. I mean, he’s wonderful.

He’s the only one who puts up with me,” she says with a laugh.

It is not only white fathers in the South who have trouble accepting their daughters’ decision to marry across racial lines but it happens in the North too. And even the birth of a grandchild is sometimes not enough to move the stony hearts of disappointed fathers.

Our friends Sarah and Amil are a case in po”L Sarah, the daughter of hardworking second-and third-generation Irish Catholics who had settled in New England, was disowned by her parents when, at age seventeen, she fell in love with Amil, a nineteen-year-old black student at Wesleyan University who had grown up in the South.

Twenty-two years and three children later, she and her parents are still estranged.

“It did hurt to be rejected by my parents,” Sarah said. “For me it was like going through a divorce. I went through the same phases: hurt, anger, resentment, fighting, grief, sadness. I wrote letters to them at certain points in my life; I showed an openness to reconcile.

They never responded. It’s been such a long time, I don’t even cry about it now.”

Sarah met Amil in 1968 at a college dance when she was a student at Hartford College for Women and Amil was at nearby Wesleyan. Both of them were very active in protests against the Vietnam War. 0In 1968 young people were very open,” Sarah said. “They spoke their minds.

Amil and I were totally open with each other.

We’re each other’s first loves.”

Even before she met Amil, Sarah, who was living at home and commuting to college, had clashes with her parents over her political activism.

She was involved in a Puerto Rican rights group, had traveled to Puerto Rico, and had tutored impoverished black children in north Hartford for no pay. When she was only twelve and thirteen Sarah would argue with her father as they watched civil rights marches on the evening news.

“He would make some negative comment about blacks and I would disagree,” Sarah said. “It was just something inside me. As I got older I acted on it: I became active in the black consciousness movement.”

The year 1968 was, in Sarah’s words, “a pretty heavy year.” Like many of her generation, she went through that phase of rebellion that created what came to be known as the generation gap. Her parents supported America’s involvement in Vietnam and she opposed it. Parents and daughter were on opposing sides of nearly every politicalissue.

“But our arguments over Vietnam had no deeply personal meaning,” Sarah said. “My relationship with Amil, on the other hand, became a major issue.”

Sarah began visiting Amil at Wesleyan on weekends. Afraid of their reaction but feeling compelled to speak the truth, Sarah told her parents all about Anti! only one month after meeting him.

“They freaked out,” Sarah said. “They forbade me to see him.

They ordered me to come straight home after school. They threatened to take away my car, but they knew I needed it to get to my classes. I was living at home to save money so I could afford to transfer to Mount Holyoke, but I decided to put that goal on hold and move out.”

Her parents told her, you’ll end up in the gutter. You’ll be on welfare. You’ll have lots of children. No one will accept your children. All blacks are in the gutter. Are you going to pull this whole family down into the gutter with you, after we’ve worked so hard?”

Desperate to put an end to their daughter’s relationship with Amil, Sarah’s parents took her to a Catholic priest and explained the whole situation. The priest counseled Sarah to Honor thy mother and father, and told her that this commandment was more rmportant than caring about people of different races.

“I wanted to stick with Catholicism, but it became impossible,” Sarah said. “Priests who counseled me after I moved out always said the same thing: Honor thy mother and father. They didn’t have a world view or a political consciousness.”

Her parents cut off all financial support and all ties of communication. Sarah moved in with a family and worked for her keep, but řcaring for five children and a household, working a part-tIme job, řand keeping up with her studies was too much for her. FInally she found a family that took her in and treated her more lIke a fanilly member than a domestic servant.

Sarah and Amil traveled to Washington, D.C for nearly every major march or political protest; they helped organize student strikes in 1970, educational programs on Vietnam, and black history seminars. At the time many whites actively supported the black consciousness movement, so Sarah was seldom the only white at a meeting.

Sarah started getting feedback from black women who knew she was with Amil. While some of them were supportive, others accused her of tearing the black community apart. They asked, “What do you want with him?”

“When you care deeply about someone and you believe in a world of interracial harmony, it’s not pleasant to be told you’ve stolen a man,” Sarah said. “Sometimes the pressure would make me pull back from the relationship, and we’d let things cool off. We wanted to make sure we weren’t wrong for each other. But we were never wrong for each other.”

Antil was part of that subculture of black intellectuals who did not have the traditional goals of making a lot of money and establishing himself in a career. He let his hair grow into a huge Afro. He had no car, little money, and no concern for material things. He wanted to explore ideas; search for his true identity, spend more years in college if need be. While these characteristics did not attract black women who sought men who could provide them with stability and financial support, they appealed to Sarah and deeply impressed her.

In many ways Amil was more comfortable with radical-both white and black-than with the black middle class.

Yet Amil felt strong ties to his heritage and to the black community.

He believed in the philosophy of black self-help. He felt the African-American community had to unite and work together. At times he felt tremendous pressure coming from within himself to break up with Sarah. He was torn between his love for her and his commitment to the movement, to his people.

In 1871, during one of their periodical breakups, Amil moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to attend graduate school in oceanography. He dated a black woman for a while, but did not have the same feelings he did for Sarah. He and Sarah began writing again and were soon engaged.

After graduating from the University of Connecticut in December 1972, Sarah moved to Nova Scotia to be with Amil. FIve months later they were married by a Unitarian minister in a gathering of adozen friends.

Sarah, with her long flowing brown hair parted in the middle, wore purple and Antil wore white.

One year after the wedding their first child was born, a son.

Sarah wrapped the baby in blankets and put him in an open dresser drawer, for they could not afford a crib and there was not much room in their basement apartment. They were given a used baby carriage that had no tires; only the metal rims of the wheels were left.

Sarah sent her parents a note announcing the birth of her first child.

For weeks she was hopeful that her parents might be gladdened by the news and have a change of heart. When she received no response she went through another period of grief over the rift between her and her parents. When their second child was born, a daughter, Sarah hoped that perhaps the thought of a little girl might make them want to visit. Still, no response, followed by another period of sadness for Sarah.

“It doesn’t matter to my parents that time has proved them wrong,” Sarah said. “They know we don’t live in the gutter. They know I’m a college graduate and a schoolteacher. They know my husband is a successful businessman. They know we own our own home. Yet they’ve shunned their grandchildren. They’re racists. They just don’t like children of different races.

“It’s not sad to me anymore,” she continued. “Time heals the wounds.

It’s as if my parents died a long tIme ago. I regret having fought with them so much. I don’t like fighting and anger. But you can’t divide yourself to please your parents. My parents have a negative world view and no respect for my husband or children. It would be more damaging to have a relationship with them now than not to.

They would have to change.

“You have to make what you can of your llle,” she said. “If you please racist, intolerant parents, does that mean you would then have a happy and successful life? No! You should make a better world with your husband and the family you create. It’s far more important to really love the person you marry than to please others.

You need that rock to make it through the storms of life.”

In “City Lovers,” a famous Nadine Gordimer short story, the South African Nobel laureate powerfully depicts the complexities and often tragic consequences of interracial love affairs under apartheid. In a scene repeated many times in real life, the clandestine affair between a German geologist and a young Coloured (mixed-race) woman is reported to the police by suspicious neighbors and the landlady.

One night, just as the woman is stepping into the bathtub, there, is a loud knock on the door. She pleads with her German lover not to open the door, even threatening to jump out the window if he does.

But, insisting they have nothing to fear, he locks her in his wardrobe and answers the door. A group of police officers, introducing themselves as the vice squad, barge in with a search warrant and begin scouring the premises for evidence, tearing the sheets from the beds and gathering feminine toiletries and underwear. I, 1”We have reason to suspect you are cohabiting with a Coloured female,” the head officer says. “In defiance of the Immorality Act.”

After a tension-filled search, the policemen discover the locked wardrobe and demand the key. The German, acting forgetful, claims to have left it at his office. Their suspicions aroused, the police break the lock and open the wardrobe. The Coloured woman is squatting, naked but for a towel, beneath a row of men’s shirts. One of the officers zooms in with his camera and shoots a series of photos of her in her misery and degradation.

After being taken down to the station, they are led to separate rooms, fingerprinted, ordered to strip, and examined by a physician for signs of sexual intercourse. The moving story, which was made into a fiim, ends with a shot of the Coloured woman’s grimacing face as she lies, naked and humiliated, in a sterile room, her heels in stirrups, as a white doctor prepares to search for further “evidence,” with cold metal instruments, inside her vagina.

This story might be seen in a different light now that apartheid is crumbling and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act were abolished in 1985, but it loses none of its power.

Mixed couples may have become a more common sight on the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town, but their relationships still provoke the same indignation, the same scrutiny, the same sense of tragedy, and the same intense emotions as in “City Lovers.”

One mixed couple in South Africa, a black man named Jerry Tsie and his white Afrikaner liance, Annette Heunis, has drawn so much attention that the story was featured in People magazine in June 1988. Jerry, a security guard at a gold mine who dreamed of coming to America to study martial arts, grew up in a black township outside the small mining town of Odendaalsrus. He met Annette, who worked at a photo shop in the white section of town, when he went there to drop off a roll of film.

Soon he was visiting the photo shop frequently, and the two fell in love. Annette felt confused, for she knew her father and stepmother, Afrikaners who were so strict they forbade Annette to date a white seminary student because she was “too young,” would vehemently object.

On Valentine’s Day 1987 Jerry, then twenty-one and two years older than Annette, declared his love for her. Testing the waters, Annette asked her stepmother, “What would you do if a black man came to the apartment?”

“FIrst I’d shoot him dead,” her stepmother replied. “Then I’d give you the biggest hiding of your life.”

The couple conducted their relationship in secrecy for months, then Annette moved into Jerry’s family home in the black township.

Thrilled to have his palesa-“beloved flower,” in the Sotho language-with him at last, Jerry excitedly told neighbors and friends.

Overnight the pair were local celebrities, and black people stopped by just to see them kiss.

Because it was illegal for whites to live in black townships under apartheid law, their life together was precarious and often terriiying.

Each time a car pulled up outside the house they thought it was the police. They were harassed by anonymous callers. Taxi and bus drivers in the township were not licensed to transport whites, so Annette had to quit her job and tend to domestic chores with Jerry’s mother in the cramped shack, shared by fifteen people, without electricity or an indoor bathroom.

Annette’s parents were furious and refused to accept Jerry.

Despite Annette’s attempts to reconcile with them, they rarely spoke to her.

“I could choose Jerry or I could choose my parents-I could not have both,” she said. “It was terrible, because I love my parents very much.”

At last report the couple was living in Bophuthatswana, a black homeland where mixed-race couples were allowed to live together even before F. W. de Klerk repealed the Group Areas Act in 1991.

Susan Bazilli, a white Canadian lawyer, went to South Africa in 1986.

For two years she worked in defense of black activists from Alexandra accused of seeking to overthrow the apartheid regime.

She has helped hundreds of black South Africans; has become familiar with Alexandra, Soweto, and other black townships; and has won the respect and affection of many families, including Mark’s.

Since her arrival in South Africa, Susan has seen a sharp increase in the number of mixed couples on the streets of Johannesburg. She related the story of an acquaintance, a white South African lawyer we will call Nan, and her black South African boyfriend, ITsepo.