Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (7 page)

My parents came to my Brown graduation in May 1984, and I took them to Carol’s cocktail parry My father, using his psychologist’s mind off duty, listened attentively to Carol’s conversations with her mother and carefully watched her interact with Paul.

“I think I know why Carol is with a black man,” he said to me.

“She’s angry at her mother for taking her away from her father in Beirut, and she’s acting out that anger by dating a black man. It’s her way of really irking her mother.”

“Have you ever considered the possibility that Carol simply fell in love with Paul?”

My father merely smiled, apparently amused by my na1vetO about such complex, subconscious, subliminal matters. “There are always hidden motives behind interracial relationships,” he said.

After the graduation ceremony, as we drove to Massachusetts to spend a weekend with relatives near New Bedford, my father again brought up the topic of Carol and Paul, as if fascinated by the relationship. He had counseled mixed couples before, but the fact that Carol was such a close friend of mine may have shaken him up. He seemed to want to convince me that their attraction for each other was unnatural and driven by dark motives.

“Did you hear the way Carol’s mother criticized her hair style?” he asked. “No wonder Carol’s trying to get back at her.”

“Look, Dad, you don’t even know Paul. Maybe Carol sees in him all the qualities she would admire in any man, regardless of color.”

My own words surprised me. There I was defending a relationship that even I had considered strange and unnatural just a few months earlier.

But it was not until I met Mark that I truly began to understand what Carol had gone through. From the moment he sat down next to me in the International House cafeteria and began talking to the Belgian across from him about his struggles growing up under apartheid, I was captivated. As the months went by and Mark and I grew to know, trust, and respect each other, it seemed only natural to express our affection.

One night, two weeks after we began seeing each other, we decided to go out and celebrate the fact that fate had brought us together.We dined by candlelight in a seafood restaurant in Midtown called Pier 52 where a blind black jazz musician played piano, cracked jokes, and reminisced about life in Harlem during the 1920s.

Mark became silent and serious.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“Someday, if we’re still together, I will marry you,” he said. “I want so much to see you grow as a writer and to be with you, as a companion, forever.”

I reacted to his words with a shy smile on the surface and a mixture of love and fear in my heart. Everything had happened so fast. I feared that I might someday hurt him if I could not muster the courage to marry across racial lines, and I also feared that if we married I might alienate my family. The other fear I had was of losing my identity somewhere along the road to his fame. Though he was a poor graduate student when we met, and was still, my instincts told me that he would become a great writer and an eloquent orator. He was a survivor. He had tenacity, ambition, and integrity. I had little doubt that he would succeed in life, especially because he believed in himself.

One Sunday morning Mark and I walked two blocks to Kiverside Church to hear Reverend William Sloane Coffin preach about the injustices of legalized racism in South Africa and the need for sanctuary churches for Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees. As we sat side by side in that cavernous church filled with stained glass and candles, Mark slowly entwined his pinky around mine. For the rest of the service I was happily aware of our embracing pinkies. Touching felt right, and I knew then that our love was nothing to be ashamed of.

That night we stayed up late watching the film Ntcho and Alernndra in Mark’s tiny dorm room, sitting on his single bed and leaning against the wall. Just as the Russian revolution began and Trotsky and Lenin were arguing, my eyes grew heavy and I fell asleep on Mark’s shoulder.

When I awoke a few minutes later and asked what I had missed; Mark smiled at me in the near darkness, wrapped his arms around me, and we kissed.

I awoke with a start as the first gray fingers of dawn touched the window. In the dim light I saw Mark’s face inches away from mine, nestled into the downy pillow. I stared with curiosity at his wide nose, his little ears, the tiny eyelashes that curled rather than lay straight, the contrast between his unblemished black skin and the white blanket draped across his shoulder. I felt warm and full of love.

Then doubts crept in. “What would my parents say if they saw me now, lying in the arms of a black man?” My parents were liberal Democrats who had voted for George McGovern in 1972, but would they understand this? My father, a graduate of Wesleyan and Yale Divinity School who felt no one was good enough for his little girl, had disliked each and every one of my boyfriends. If he did not like those white men I had dated, what would he think of this black man?

Isn’t it every white father’s worst nightmare to find out his only daughter loves a Negro?

I crawled out of bed in a panic, pulled on my boots and sweater, combed my hair hastily with my fingers, and headed for the door. I hoped no one would be in the halls. Mark’s room was on an all-male wing of the dorm, and rumors spread fast. The hinges creaked. Mark awoke.

“Hey, Sweets,” he said lovingly. “Don’t leave yet. It’s too early.”

“I have to go.”

“But it was so cozy. Is anything wrong?”

“No, it’s just that I … I have to go.” I gave him a quick kiss and left.

The coast was clear. I dashed down the hall and had almost made it to the stairwell when the door of the men’s john swung open and a fellow ournalism student walked out wearing a bathrobe. He was startled to see me in the men’s wing. I smiled in embarrassment and ran up four flights of stairs to my room, locked the door, and faced my sunny view of Midtown, my guitar, my dusty stereo, my stacks of mail, Russian assignments, magazine articles, typing paper.

I immediately missed Mark and became upset with myself. “Why do you care so much what Dad thinks of you?” I said angrily to my reflection in the mirror. “When will you free yourself of your mental enslavement to this patriarchal, bigoted society? Follow your heart and forget about the rest! Think of yourself for once. You’ve fallen in love with a man. If people disapprove, that’s their problem.”

Stating a resolution is much easier than abiding by it. I continued to act paranoid every time I visited Mark’s room. I would poke my head out the door, glance quickly both ways, listen for the sound of footsteps, then scuttle down the hall to the women’s wing as fast as my legs would carry me. I carried my shoes so I could steal silently down the corridor. I always reached the women’s bathroom breathless.

“Don’t you live on the tenth floor?” one woman asked.

“Yes, but I like this bathroom better,” I said.

As I brushed my teeth she looked quizzically at my bathrobe, a brown and red men’s robe that belonged to Mark.

Sometimes I would get exasperated with myself. “Who am I hiding from?

My parents? Myself? A society that sees mixed couples as morally unfit to appear in public? It’s all in my head. I’ll say it now and I hope it sticks: I don’t care what anyone else thinks!”

MARK’S VIEW.

Walking through Manhattan side by side, Gail and I blended into the diverse crowd of pedestrians, who ranged in color from as dark as I to as light and fair as Gail. Moving down the jammed sidewalks of Fifth Avenue at rush hour, we were inconspicuous in a throng that had to walk eight abreast to keep from tumbling off the curb and into the steady, noisy stream of traffic and honking yellow taxicabs. People bumped into each other in their mad dash for a vacant cab or a late appointment.

The smell of hot dogs and pretzels, blended with the malodorous steam rising from manholes, stung our noses; the blare of honking horns and corner evangelists shouting into loudspeakers deafened our ears. In such confusion and cacophony, it was easy to get lost in the anonymity of a crowd and still retain our individuality, without once letting go of each other’s hand.

The subway was a different story. In a crowded train rumbling, rattling, and racing through the bowels of Manhattan, I would cling to the center pole and Gail would wrap her arms around my waist and hold on for dear life. She seemed oblivious to the fact that we stood out, and held onto me with unselfconscious ease. I, on the other hand, was hyperaware of people staring at us. Some would lift their weary eyes, ponder us for a moment, then resume reading the sports pages of the New York Post, The New York Times, or the Daily News. Older women would lean their faces together, gossiping in whispers, looking disdainfully at us from time to time. Others had seen it all before and were too jaded by New York even to cast a curious glance at us.

One evening as Gail and I hurried arm in arm from IftRh Avenue toward Port Authority, we passed two young black men.

“Hey, look at him,” one young man shouted to his friend. “He got hisself a white gin. She be damn good Iookin’ too.”

Such comments upset and saddened me. They reminded me of the pervasive stereotype that all black men are, at least subconsciously, out to “get a white girl.” What did those two young men know about our relationship? Nothing. All they saw was black man, white woman.

Our first major evening out in public was to attend the 1985

Front Page Dinner Dance thrown by the Newswomen’s Club of New York.

Because she usually wore jeans and owned a scanty wardrobe of formal wear, Gail had to go out at the last minute and buy a new dress and shoes in which to receive her $2,500 Anne O’Hare McCormick scholarship.

The dinner, an extravagant affair held in the Empire State Ballroom of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, was followed by an award ceremony for top journalists from NewsY, New York Times, Tie New Yorker, ABC News “Nightline,” and “20120.” I was the only black in the ballroom except for those stacking the dirty plates and clearing the clutter from the tables, which gave me a disquieting feeling of being back in South Africa, where blacks toiled as servants while whites were lavishly entertained. What was I doing in such a place?

But I quickly remembered my reason for being there when I watched Gail ascend the steps onto the stage to receive her scholarship award. I felt proud: That was my “Sweets” up there. The president of the Newswomen’s Club, Joan O’Sullivan of King Features, made a short speech about Gail’s off-beat accomplishments: mastering Hungarian, German, and Russian; traveling alone to Budapest and talking her way into the university there; graduating from Brown; and writing for Minneapolis City Pages.

Few couples were dancing, but Gail, in her exuberant mood, dragged me onto the dance floor. We must have looked strange, a black man and a white woman, dancing together in the middle of a high-ceilinged ballroom while the white faces of the American media’s movers and shakers looked on. I had been the only black in a room filled with whites many times, but never when I was dancing with a white woman.

Some people gaped at us, a few with bemused indifference. I did my best to forget them and to focus on Gail, her happiness at receiving the award, and our joy at sharing a special moment.

Whenever I traveled to Long Island to lecture on South Africa and apartheid before various groups, Gail would accompany me.

During these trips, we would never let on that we were anything more than friends. We wanted to keep our relationship private and, therefore, kept it a secret. It was easier to pretend to be platonic friends than to deal with people’s prejudices. When we spent the night at a white minister’s home, we requested separate rooms, despite his wife’s attempt to coax us into revealing the true nature of our relationship.

“You do want to stay in the same room, don’t you?” she said insinuatingly. “It would be fine with Us, you know. We understand.”

We insisted we were just friends and wanted separate rooms. In the morning at breakfast the minister spoke to me, in a confidential and fatherly tone, about the problems mixed couples confront and how difficult it is to stay married.

“I had a good friend once, a black man like yourself,” the minister said. “He wanted to marry a white woman. Oh, I assure you I warned him against it. But no, he wouldn’t listen to me. He went ahead and married her. And you know what happened? They’re divorced now I knew it would happen all along.” He looked hard at me, then at Gail, then back to me, as if to say, “Don’t make the same mistake.”

Spring arrived and the weather grew warm. Gail and I went for regular runs along the Hudson River through Riverside Park, past rotting benches, screeching seagulls stained by the polluted air, and I, graffiti-covered stone walls. Whenever the exercise and warm weather made me sweat, I would peel off my shirt to cool down. Peo pIe often stared at us, but we never heard a negative comment. Many were simply curious. Almost nothing can shock a New Yorker, not even people with pink hair, black lipstick, painted faces, or safety pins in their cheeks.

I felt completely natural around Gail when we were alone together, but as soon as we stepped out the door I became acutely sensitive to the way people regarded us. It was difficult for me to regard our love as an aberration in social norms. Only when people stared did I remember how deeply race as an issue still permeated American society. At times it seemed that the only difference between white attitudes in South Africa and America was that white South Africans had made the mistake of institutionalizing their racism.

It seemed half the audience turned around whenever we sat down in a movie theater or concert hall. When we asked to be seated at an elegant restaurant on Fifty-second Street, the waiter led us to a bad table directly in front of the kitchen’s swinging doors-there were a couple of empty tables in nicer locations-next to the only black couple in the restaurant. Gail was outraged and wanted to insist on better seating, but I was so accustomed to prejudice that I saw no point in arguing. We left without ordering.

“Racism makes me so mad,” Gail said, still upseL “Why do people do this to each other?”