Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (10 page)

Mark believed I was.

“One of the reasons I love you so much,” he wrote, “is that you’re a fighter for your rights as a woman, equal to, and as capable as, any man. Your attitude reminds me of my mother. That is why being with you has made me grow in so many ways. My mother was the first feminist to have a profound influence upon me. Your uncompromising defense of your womanhood is one reason I believe in you as a writer.”

“Oh, Johannes, my love,” I murmured as the plane touched down at Kennedy Airport, using Mark’s middle name, the name he went by in his youth. “I’ve let you down. I wish I had your courage.”

When Gail returned from Germany I sensed that our relationship was poised to enter a difficult phase in which our feelings toward each other would be severely tested. Would our love survive the test?

I heard someone knocking on the door of my basement Staten Island apartment one sultry morning in August. I had just moved into a tworoom apartment, sparsely furnished with a rickety kitchen table, two chairs with torn cushions, the cheapest bed I could find, and disorganized piles of books. The apartment was dark and dismal, crawled with mice and roaches, and cost more than half my monthly budget of nine hundred dollars. But it was home. Finally I had a place of my own where I could read and write and think without interruption.

The day before I had received Gail’s letter telling me she had decided to live with her brother instead of me. This perplexing change had caught me off guard. Was she finally backing off? Had she met someone else? Distraught and confused, I was in the middle of attempting to write a coherent reply to her letter when I heard the knocking. I turned off my typewriter and, looking like a Rastafarian with my uncombed hair and wearing a Free South Africa T-shirt and rumpled running shorts, I went to the door, expecting perhaps a door-to-door salesman or the landlord.

Gail stood there, tan and smiling in shorts, a leopard-skin print top, Yugoslavian sandals, and long dangling earrings made of seashells.

Suddenly I felt almost afraid to hold the woman I had longed to see. I squinted in the harsh summer sunlight and simply said, 0Hello, Sweets.”

She rushed into my arms and we held each other tight for several minutes, too overcome to speak.

“Did you get my letter?” Gail asked.

“Yesterday,” I replied. “That’s why I’m surprised you’re here. I thought it was over.”

0Over?” She cried. “How could it be over?”

“I thought that since you didn’t want to live with me… I thought…

we….”

“Just because I can’t live with you right now doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

At hearing those words I embraced her once more, again without speaking. We stepped inside the apartment, made breakfast, and talked for hours. She asked me endless questions about the state of emergency in South Africa, how my family was doing, how the editing of HA BE was going, how I had survived the summer heaL In turn I qulzzed her on her travels and the novel she had begun. We talked on and on. Finally exhausted, we sat on a couch by the window, wrapped ourselves in a blanket, fell silent, and listened to the falling rain and the footsteps of strangers passing my windows in the night. It was completely dark but for a single candle.

The morning light seeped through the blinds. It was the first morning of a fall that would pass like a dream, as if we were enveloped in a haze that the outside world could not penetrate. Gail and I created a mutual inner world that challenged and inspired us.

The only time I felt fully human, understood, and accepted in all my idealism was when Gail and I were in that dark Staten Island apartment, reading and talking and laughing. We had neither steady jobs nor much money, but we did not feel we needed any more than was necessary to survive. The only thing we had of value was each other.

We typed side by side, read aloud to each other, dreamed together. We often became so excited by our ideas that we would rush about in search of pen and notebook, eager to capture thoughts on short stories, twists in plot, character development, setting up a disciplined reading and writing schedule, themes in Richard Wright’s books, the greater social significance of art, or the individual rebelling against the suffocating demands of custom and authority.

We traveled by ferry and subway to the midtown Manhattan library across from MOMA where we checked out recordings of Shakespeare, Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Milton, classical music, and Russian poetry.

Every day I worked on the ifr BE manuscript, and Gail, on her growing first novel. We dined each night by candlelight while listening to folk music by Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez, and Mahalia Jackson.

Three times a week we jogged ten miles up Victory Boulevard and around Silver Lake Park. Saturdays we lugged our laundry down the street to the laundromat and Sundays we walked three miles to the grocery store and back, carrying the bulging brown bags on our heads in the same way African women carry jugs of water from the river. Neither of us had a car, and for weeks I had no phone, until my editor and agent insisted I spend part of my advance to get one installed.

Whenever I had to go into the real world, that is, to meet with my editors at Macmillan, Gail would accompany me and wait outside the towering building, leaning against the wall reading nineteenthcentury French novels or books about Indian women in deWos speaking Punjabi.

When I returned I would find her sitting on her knapsack outside the lobby of the publishing house, engrossed in her reading and oblivious to the constant stream of formally dressed men and women flowing through the revolving doors of the major New York firm.

As far as her parents knew, Gail lived at her brother’s apartment on the Upper East Side, but actually she spent most of her time with me.

As pressure grew for her to help her brother Paul and sister-inlaw, Deb, pay the rent and buy groceries, and as her Protestant work ethic began accusing her of being indolent, she started hunting for steady jobs. After a short stint as an intern at Heoith magazine, she landed a job translating, writing, and editing German news stories for the Manhattan-based branch of the German embassy. They paid her a decent wage for a twenty-hour workweek and gave her great benefits. She felt she had imposed too long on her brother and his wife and was eager to find a place of her own.

When Gail called me and said she had found an apartment to rent, I was disappointed. I worried about her safety in a city as large and dangerous as New York and would have felt more at ease if she shared my place. Besides, it would have been less expensive if we split the rent. But I did not want to stand in the way of her independence.

“I’ll help you move,” I said.

When I saw the room she had rented I was shocked. It was on the first floor of a dilapidated house in the slum section of Stapleton, a Staten Island neighborhood of roaming gangs and abandoned buildings used as crack houses. She had a view of the junkyard across the street, strewn with rubble and tangled bedsprings, and of rows of gutted and boarded-up buildings. Exposed electric wires hung from the ceiling.

The doors and windows were flimsy and did not lock. The floors were caked with filth. There were gaping holes in the walls.

The whole apartment reeked of stale tobacco smoke. The white emaciated live-in landlord down the hall, with whom she had to share a kitchen and bath, was a chain smoker. The house, which had been abandoned and boarded up for months, turned out to have been a favorite hangout for drug dealers. Graffiti was scrawled in the closet. When Gail asked why the glass shelves had been removed from the bathroom cabinet, the landlord told her the former tenants had used them to divvy up cocaine.

“What has come over you?” I asked Gail as soon as I had recovered from my speechlessness. “How can you live in this horrible place? Don’t you have any self-respect? Even the homeless wouldn’t touch this dump.”

“It’s the only place I could afford,” she said. “It’s only two hundred dollars a month.”

“Why don’t you sleep on a subway grate?” I asked. “That would be free, and it would be a lot better than this.”

She looked disappointed, then said, “I liked it because I would be nearyou.”

“Being near me is not the issue. You would have to walk through a war zone to get to my place from here. I came to America to get out of the ghetto, not to move back into one. I hope you don’t think I’m going to visit you here.”

Gail and I sat down. I told her that she deserved better, that it was one thing to be independent and another to recklessly endanger one’s life.

“I would never stop worrying about you knowing you lived in this hovel,” I said. “Especially since it reminds me of my family’s shack back in Alexandra. With these differences: We didn’t have to deal with rugs, and our neighborhood, though poor and squalid, had some soul.

American ghettos are soulless, inhuman.”

Alone in my apartment that night I couldn’t sleep. I had nightmares of Gail being raped, forced to take drugs. I had half a mind to wake up and go fetch her.

The next morning I heard a knock at my door. It was Gail, looking defeated and tired. Happy to see her safe, I took her by the hand and led her inside. There was an awkward silence before she said, “I know I’m being bullheaded. You’re right. I don’t think I can live there.

I couldn’t sleep all night.”

“I couldn’t either.”

“The noise kept me awake,” she said. “An old Buick cruised back and forth dragging its muffler; stray dogs barked as they dug through the junkyard; the faucet kept dripping into that stained sink; derelicts outside my window kept laughing and shouting and breaking bottles; the street lamp shot a blinding beam of light straight into my eyes through the uncurtained window.”

I begged Gail not to return to that dreadful place. I prepared her a sandwich; she had not eaten since the day before.

“For some reason I thought having a place of my own was more important than anything, even my safety,” she said. “I guess there are certain limits to a woman’s independence.”

I set the sandwich down in front of her and sat down beside her.

“I think you have to stop and ask yourself what you are doing to yourself and why. What are you trying to prove? And to whom?”

Gail ate in silence, deep in thought. Finally she said, “I’m so afraid of living with you.” She looked up at me with tears welling in her eyes. “I’m terrified of what my parents will say when they find out.

I mean, they don’t even know about you yet. I told my brothers not to reveal anything to Mom or Dad about you, and they haven’t. I haven’t mustered the courage to tell them.”

“You’ll have to Fend the courage, Gail,” I said, “if you believe in our relationship.”

Gail started crying.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

I love you very much,” she said. but I also love my family. My heart tells me I should move in with you. It also tells me that I have to confront my family soon, for the sake of our relationship.”

For three weeks we were happy and secure in our small apartment.

Several times Gail attempted to write a letter to her parents informing them of our relationship but she always ended by tearing them up.

Though I believed in our relationship, this was her battle: If she believed we were meant for each other, she would muster the courage to do it, and face the consequences.

Finally Gail decided to tell her parents in person. At Thanksgiving she flew home to Minneapolis. When she returned to Staten Island, I could tell something was wrong. Her mood had changed.

She resumed searching for her own apartment and announced she would move out January first.

Gail’s parents flew to New York City for Christmas, but I timed my annual visit to Hilton Head Island, where I visited Stan Smith and his wife, Margie, so that I would be out of town when her parents arrived.

I was not ready to meet them. Their opposition to our relationship was clear. And Gail had chosen to heed their advice. I saw no future for the two of us as long as she did what was expected of her, rather than what she truly felt and believed.

Gail shared the third floor of a brownstone building in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with a twenty-seven-year-old graduate student named Michal, a petite woman from Chicago who owned a smug and corpulent cat called Charles. Though Gail was in an adjacent borough, she seemed hundreds of miles away, wrapped up in her job, in freelance articles, in new female friends. I could feel us drifting apart.

That dreaded feeling was confirmed when I met Gail’s mother, Debbie Ernsberger. She had flown to New York in March for a solo visit. Not long after we were introduced, Gail, her mother, and I were riding the subway. In the jostling crowd, Gail’s mother leaned toward me and asked, “So, what is your immigration status?”

The directness of her inquiry put me on guard. Why did she want to know? Had her husband, Gail’s father, requested that she ask this?

Suddenly I felt the sole purpose for Debbie’s visit was to investigate the nature of our relationship. The question made me suspect that Gail’s mother, and particularly her father, regarded me with great suspicion. They seemed afraid some African was out to marry their daughter so he could get himself a green card.

“My application for a work permit is still being processed by the I.N.S” I said.

“Do you think you’ll get it?” Gail’s mother asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a long shot. They have stringent requirements now. I’m hopeful though. It’s my only alternative.”

Gail’s mother looked at me and said, “I wish you luck.”

0Thanks.”

For days after Gail’s mother returned to Minneapolis I was downcast.

My relationship with Gail appeared to have no future. Rather than pretend that her parents would approve, especially after that train conversation with her mother, I started preparing for the worst.

I stopped calling Gail.

it’s better that it end now, I thought to myself. Why continue a relationship in the face such opposition? it wouldn’t be fair to ask Gail to choose betweenyou and herfamilr In the midst of my brooding over the possibility and consequences of Gail and I breaking up, I learned that two of my brothersin-law, the husbands of my sisters Florah and Maria, had been murdered by a policeman one afternoon as they sat outside our shack in Alexandra. A motive for the dastardly killings was never found. I became distraught. I thought of my little niece Angeline and nephew Given, still in diapers. How would my widowed sisters cope alone?