Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (4 page)

I told him that his not being afraid to feel, to cry, to care, made him more human, and thus more of a man to me.

Here bare me, I thought to myself, is a wise and sensitive spirit, born in black skin and surrounded by the dirt and sorrow utter poverty and powerlessness. But since the human spirit can have no race or color, he rose steadily and naturally, led not by what others told him he was or was not, but by what he believed himseU to be. He is an admirable, yet most intimidating, companion.

MARK’S VIEW If someone had told me while I was growing up in a South African ghetto that I would someday end up marrying a white woman, I would have thought them insane. For much of my childhood I didn’t know, let alone believe, that whites were even human, capable of emotions such as love, care, and compassion. The only image I had of them was as policemen and soldiers. Akin to predators, they were to be feared and hated. The oppression they daily and ruthlessly enforced robbed me of my innocence and trust by forcing me, in order to survive the raging hell of ghetto life their racist policies had created, to begin thinking, feeling, and acting like an adult while still a child.

I was about five years old when I had my first brutal encounter with the police. They had launched one of their midnight raids into the ghetto. I was awakened from my cardboard bed under the kitchen table by a tremendous din outside our tiny shack. Sirens blared, dogs barked, windows smashed, doors shattered, and children screamed. I instantly knew that the police had invaded the neighborhood. Terror seized me as I recollected that during previous raids my mother and father had to flee their own home to escape arrest because they did not have a permit allowing them to live together as husband and wife under the same roof. Their nocturnal flights always lelt me feeling helpless, confused, and afraid, especially as I had to care for my siblings, Florah, three years old, and George, one year old.

Repeated raids crystallized my hatred of whites. Once I was beaten by the police after they forced their way into the shack, for failing to open the door on time. I had delayed in order to give my parents time to hide or escape. Another time I felt rage and hatred well inside me as I saw them humiliate my father by marching him naked out of bed and interrogating him in the middle of the shack, in front of his bewildered and whimpering children.

For many years of my childhood my only contact with whites continued to be with the police and soldiers. Because of the Groups Areas Act, which mandated rigidly segregated neighborhoods, blacks were forbidden from entering white suburbs without permits. Without meeting whites who were different, I came to regard the inhumanity and bigotry of the police and soldiers as typical of their race.

This stereotypical image of whites was reinforced by, among other things, my father’s virulent hatred of whites, and by a constant diet of violent movies shown at the ghetto’s only cinema.

My father’s emasculation and suffering at the hands of the police and his employers, who confined him to menial jobs and paid him a pittance of ten dollars a week, not only made him a bitter man but he came to hate white so much he would forbid the eating of white bread in the house. As for the movies, I took their violence and mayhem as a true representation of life in the white world I was forbidden to enter by apartheid laws.

The first undermining of this stereotype of whites as all bad came when I was about seven years old. Some black and white missionaries pitched a tent in our neighborhood and invited us to come hear “good news” so glorious, so warming to the heart, so uplifting and comforting to a suffering soul, that our lives, our hearts, the situations in our homes, would be changed forever for the better. The fact that blacks and whites cooperated to spread the gospel, to do good, rather than to infiict pain and suffering on blacks, as the black and white policemen did, made an impression on me. It was an early indication that skin color doesn’t determine the goodness or badness of an individual; it is the color of one’s heart that matters.

Overcoming Stereotypes / Another instance of this maxim came when a white nun at the local health center altered my destiny by helping my mother in her quest to enroll me at the local tribal school. To do so my mother needed a permit from the authorities certifying that my parents were legal residents of Alexandra. They weren’t. The only way I could get around the law was if I had a birth certificate showing that I was born in Alexandra. I didn’t. I had been born, like many black children in the ghetto, at home, my mother having been unable to afford maternity care.

Once my mother determined that the only way to save me from the dead-end life of the streets and gangs was by taking me to school, she went to the authorities and begged for a permit. They told her to bring my birth certificate. She went to the clinic and begged for one.

They told her that they couldn’t issue it without a permit from the authorities. This continued for almost six months, with my mother getting up around three in the morning and waiting in long lines, being humiliated and insulted by unfeeling bureaucrats till the white nun intervened after my distraught mother implored her: “Please Sister, help my child.”

after hearing my mother’s catalog of woes, the white nun, tears trickling down her face, stormed into the office, and briefly argued with the black officer. In a jiffy my mother was called to the window and the birth certificate was thrown into her face.

As we walked back home, my mother singing songs of praises for the white nun and calling her God’s angel, she turned to me and said, “Child, you see, not all white people are bad. Remember that.”

The most indelible image that remained with me of the white nun were her tears. Some white people do cry, I remember thinking; they are human after all. Though I continued to meet and to suffer at the hands of racist whites, the stereotype that whites were all bad had been forever shattered.

At age eleven another milestone was reached in my batlle against stereotypes. Granny took me on my first visit to the white world, to meet the Smiths, a white English family for whom she worked as a gardener. Though paternalistic, the Smiths turned out to be kind, respectful, and loving toward Granny. They had a son about my age.

From this family I began receiving secondhand clothing, toys, and books, which became powerful weapons in my struggle to liberate my mind from mental slavery, an oppression I believe to be most formidable because it had caused me to make peace with my servitude, to accept a racist society’s definition of my humanity.

These revolutionary books had names like TIeasure island and David Copperfield.

It was also from the Smiths that I got my first tennis racket.

Determined to master the sport that had brought world fame to Arthur Ashe, the first free black man I had ever seen, I began teaching myself the game at the dilapidated ghetto sand courts. Soon I became good enough to attract notice. An open mind led me to befriend some liberal whites at a nearby tennis ranch. They invited me to train and play at their facilities. They respected me as an athlete, and I respected them for treating me like a human being. My white tennis partners and coaches gradually became steadfast friends.

I knew from the start that my association with whites would alienate me from black militants. Many of my black peers in the ghetto had an us-against-them attitude that had been hardened by repeated encounters with the police and soldiers. They didn’t believe me when I said some whites were different. They pressured me to cease contact with whites.

One night on my way home from playing tennis at theranch, a black gang waylaid me. I would have been knifed to death had I not outrun them.

A brick that smashed into my face, knocking out my front tooth, reminded me of the risks I was running for my refusal to consider all whites racist and to judge them according to the concept of collective guilt.

Had I done so I never would have had the courage to lean across a fence one hot alternoon in November of 1977, to watch U.S. tennis champion Stan Smith, one of my idols, practice with Bob Lutz, a doubles partner and Davis Cup teammate, during the South African Breweries Open in Johannesburg. If I had been consumed with a blind hatred of all whites, I would not even have been at the tournament.

As it turned out Stan invited me onto the court to hit some balls.

Later I accompanied him and his wife, Margie, to a restaurant where I was the only black. That encounter, that friendship, that human contact, between individuals who had grown up in worlds as different as night and day, led to Stan arranging a tennis scholarship for Overcoming Stereotypes / me to attend college in the United States, at a time when I was at the end of my tether and in danger of being detained by the police as a student activist.

In America I discovered that many blacks believed that all whites were racist. As my South African experiences had taught me otherwise, I was again called on to defend my conviction that there were among whites, as among all people, both good and bad, and that to realize fully my own humanity, it was my duty to acknowledge and respect the humanity of others. This meant judging people as individuals, by the contents of their character, rather than by the color of their skin.

My open-mindedness in relating to whites incurred me the resentment and enmity of militant blacks. My motives were olten misunderstood and I was sometimes called an Uncle Tom. Though these accusations hurt, I had come a long way from the days when rage and hate had consumed and almost destroyed my life. I had acquired values and convictions that my conscience told me had to be defended at all cost, because they were a part of my soul and formed the essence of my humanity. One of these convictions is that neither blacks nor whites have a monopoly on racism or love. Anyone with a feeling heart is capable of love and anyone who is blind to the fact that his humanity is inextricably tied to his respect of the humanity of others is capable of racism.

International House was the perfect setting for putting my beliefs to practice. Every day I interacted on a level of equality and mutual respect with men and women of every race and religion. I had friends from the Far East, the Mid-East, Africa, South America, Europe, Australia, the United States, and Canada. In the lounge I saw Indian saris, Muslim turbans, and African tribal dress and heard the babble of a dozen different languages. We partook in each other’s culture and found that we had a great deal in common and that our differences were more enriching than threatening. In such an environment it was easy to forget cultural and racial differences and interact on a purely human plane. It was on that important level that my friendship with Gail began.

GAIL’S VIEW.

The white partner in an interracial relationship usually has ample, if subconscious, stereotypes to overcome. I did. Like Mark, I believe that these stereotypes began in my childhood, as did my battle against their influence on my life. To explain fully the turbulence of emotions I felt when I found myself falling in love with an African, I need to recount a few childhood experiences that shed some light on my past attitudes toward race.

On the outskirts of Austin, Texas, in the early 19705, in a new housing development surrounded by cracked mud flats infested with rattlesnakes and composed of identical $30,000 stucco homes with burglar bars, sunburned yellow lawns, and prickly cactus gardens, I grew from an innocently confident little minister’s daughter adored by flocks of staid Presbyterian churchgoers into a shy and bewildered adolescent who found out she had a lot to learn about race and sex.

In the dry heat of Austin I grew tall quickly, Texas-style, like the wheat in the vast fields I saw stretching out in every direction toward the horizon. I grew wise quickly too. I had to in order to survive as a minority “honky” in an overcrowded junior high school. I watched in jealous silence as gangs of blacks and Mexicans patrolled the school halls and kept the panic-stricken, mostly white teachers in line.

Nineteen seventy-four found me a scrawny twelve-year-old with shoulder-length blond hair that hung in straight, uncombed wisps like straw. I was a fearless tomboy. It thrilled me to wear my brother’s cowboy boots, play capture the flag and soccer and half-court basketball with the boys, and hunt for armadillos at night by crouching on the mud flats in my faded jeans and shining my flashlight between the tumbleweed and cactus plants.

Gnarled, stunted trees lined the banks of the creek where I watched water moccasins glide stealthily in the murky depths. I was stung by scorpions, fell from trees, slid down moss-covered dams, jumped at the sight of black widow spiders, stood frozen while a copperhead snake wrapped my ankle in a slithering embrace as I stood barefoot in the deep mud, watching in breathless fear as his black tongue darted in and out.

The Texas sun beat down on our neighborhood. Every other house had a pool or plastic tub in the backyard, some container large one-hundred-degree heat. Every third house was identical.

The neighborhood was divided along racial lines. White families lived on the hill, up on Greensboro Drive, and blacks were down in the valley, along the streets where smaller homes were still under construction. Black boys sometimes came up the hill to play basketball with the white boys in our neighborhood, slam-dunking balls through dozens of hoops mounted over garage doors. There were three black brothers who always came up the hill together: Dookey, Tiki, and Mojo.

Their names sounded strange to me, and I could not understand much of what they were saying.

“I1s gonna dot yo eye in a minute, boy. I ain’t Lett messin’ witchoo.

I’s fixin’ to knock you flat.”

I was afraid of blacks. For the first ten years of my life I had lived in lily-white communities in Cincinnati and Springfield, Ohio, and knew nothing about the people my Texas girlfriends casually called “niggers.” In the halls between classes at Pearce Junior High School I clung to the walls and tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, tiptoeing away from gang fights with my eyes down and my books pressed against my flat chest. I would try to cling to the walls and glide unnoticed past the groups of tough-looking, weather-beaten students who filled the halls. Occasionally I would have difficulty getting to my classroom, blocked by a massive hall riot of leaping, tangled, thrashing bodies. Whenever I saw blood splattering on the lockers, I would seek an alternate route.