Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (22 page)

“you have to pay to rent one of those,” he said.

UHow much?” Mark asked.

uTen bucks. But these ones aren’t for rent. You can take one of those,” he said, pointing to the last row of umbrella chairs nestled close to the sand dunes, far from the water, with broken handles and missing slats.

“What about this one?” Mark said, pointing to the one on which Granny was resting.

“These are reserved,” he said.

We spent several hours at the beach that afternoon, and no one came to claim the ureservedtt chairs, which were in much better condition than the ones Mark ended up renting near the sand dunes. My senses having become keen to the subtlest discrimination, I burned with anger and resentment, ashamed that members of my own race could behave so abominably to my new family, or to any blacks for that matter. But like Mark and his family, I was learning that such discrimination was too subtle and pervasive to fight. Granny, who, to appease an irate bus driver in South Africa, had once wiped the steps of an all-white bus onto which Mark had innocently clambered as a child, gathered her belongings in silence and moved to the last row of umbrella chairs.

The typical Southern atmosphere of Hilton Head made me more aware than ever that I, now a member of a black family, had forfeited my rights and privileges as a white person. I could no longer ignore the fact that racial prejudice exists. The predominantly white plantationthe retention of this name from a master-slave past seemed more than a coincidence-with their elegant ocean-front mansions and summer homes were worlds apart from the rvndown shacks where the black natives of Hilton Head Island lived. Also, the smooth, clean beaches with golden sand were paradisiacal compared to the rocky beaches strewn with trash and broken glass, where blacks swam. To enter the white plantations and swim on their beaches one needed a permit. There was apartheid again, without the name.

By the end of our trip I was fed up with plantations and permits and eager to return home to North Carolina. Being checked by guards in booths every time we went anywhere reminded me of the months I spent in Budapest in 1983, when it was still under Communist rule, and reminded Mark of his days in South Africa, when he had to show his passbook on demand to the police and anytime he left the ghetto and entered the white world.

In late August Linah and Diana wept at the Piedmont International Alrport in Greensboro when Florah, Granny, and their mother boarded a plane to return to South Africa. A few days later Linah and

Diana headed for Long Island to live with our friends Marty and Anita, a childless white couple who were eager to educate and support them.

George moved into a room on the bottom floor of a large rambling house in High Point, belonging to a Christian ministry, while Mark and I packed for our move to Ithaca, New York, where Mark had accepted a teaching fellowship at Cornell University.

Mark, who had always been close to his family, had serious reservations about their being so scattered. He wanted to be there when they needed him in their difficult task of adapting to American society. But our financial situation made that difficult. Also, we had our own lives to live, our own careers to pursue.

The day we were supposed to leave for Ithaca, he changed his mind. His siblings needed him, he explained. It would be selltsh and wrong for him to abandon them at this time.

but what about us and our needs?” I said.

“Sweets,fl he said, “I know the sacrifices we’ll be making. But I need your support in this. Please try to understand.”

I gave the issue more thought. The rental truck was already loaded, we had already been to Ithaca and rented and paid for our new apartment, and the fellowship was important for Mark’s career. But his family was more important. I relented.

We immediately began looking for another apartment In High Point. Mark called the English Department at Cornell University and explained his decision to the people who had ollered him the fellowship. They were very understanding. We found a vacant townhouse after three days of looking and moved in.

After only one week of living together, just the two of us, as a typical newlywed couple, George had problems with his housemates and moved into our apartmenL A week after Thanksgiving IItiah and Diana left Long Island and moved in with us as well. The apartment, which had seemed enormous at first, now felt crowded.

“What’s it like to have three grown children just a few months after you marry?” people would ask me. inlt must be terribly hard on you.” “Poor girl,” said another.

inlf I were your mother, I’d be very angry,” said a middle-aged white woman. “It’s unfair for such a young woman, newly married, to have to assume such a heavy burden.”

I cannot deny that it was, at first, difficult to give up my dreams and expectations of having my new husband all to myself, of feeling free to dance around and act silly together in privacy, of being able to run downstairs in the middle of the night for some juice without having to pull on a robe or worry about tripping over George, who slept on the fold-out couch in the family room.

Mark and I could no longer fall asleep together under an afghan on the living room floor while watching old black-and-white movies.

No more romantic candlelight dinners with beading goblets of white wine. No more spontaneous tackling or surprise kisses.

Suddenly we were surrogate parents. I had to take on roles I’d never known. I became role model, teacher of English as a fifth language (after Tsonga, Venda, Zulu, and Sotho), homework tutor, house chef, and family accountant. To make the situation even more unusual, I was not only part of a mixed couple, I was now the only white member of a five-person family, a wife and “mother” of three.

Of course, Mark shared in all responsibilities. Also, he not only supported the five of us but he also supported the rest of his family in South Africa. All this without a steady income but that of a freelance writer and lecturer.

At times I would go into the woods behind our apartment complex, sit down to listen to the rustling leaves, and weep. Though I had no hard feelings against George, Linah, or Diana, it took a lot of time and effort for me to come to terms with the changes in my life, to realize that I had to give up certain expectations in exchange for new, and perhaps better, realities and sources of happiness and fulfillment.

For as long as I could remember, way back to my childhood in Ohio, I had always had a room of my own, privacy, independence, and a great deal of freedom and security. I was the youngest child, so I never learned to reprimand, teach, or guide a younger sibling. Taking on so many adult responsibilities, and so suddenly, made me fantasize about packing up a few necessary items and hitchhiking to Alaska or Sante Fe or California, wherever I could find peace in solitude and nature, set down new roots, and live a life of my own.

I recalled how much Frau Lange, the mother of the German family with whom I had lived outside Hannover in the summer of 1985, had envied my freedom to travel around Europe. The day I returned from a week in Vienna, she cried, Ach, WAn!” and explained how she had longed all her life to see the famous city.

“Then why don’t you go?” I asked, perplexed.

“Meine Pflichte! Meine Pflichte!” she cried despairingly. “My duties! My responsibilities!”

At the time I was twenty-three and single and could not imagine that any human being could be so tied down by circumstances that they could not fulfill their lifelong dream of seeing a city that was only six hundred miles away. I vowed I’d never let myself get so burdened with duties that I would not be free to travel and explore.

But an hour or so of reveling in such memories, or imagining future travels and adventures in foreign lands, inevitably ended as soon as I heard Mark’s gentle voice or Diana’s laughter or Linah’s excited chatter emanating through the open windows, beckoning me to leave the dark woods and come into the warmth of a loving home.

Mark and I, twenty-seven and twenty-five, respectively, were In many ways still kids ourselves, often casting off our robes of parental authority and simply becoming big brother and big sister. In the spring Mark, George, Linah, Diana, and I would play baseball In a nearby field with a horde of neighborhood kids. We would pack up the grill, Frisbee, hamburgers, potato salad, and neighbors and have picnics at Jamestown Park. We played practical jokes on each other, like the time Linah fell asleep in a chair while reading and Mark tied her shoelaces together and turned her book upside down.

We laughed over the mistakes Linah and Diana made while struggling to learn English. For instance, Linah always talked about the “disgusting” questions they talked about in school, not knowing how to pronounce discussion. She often sang songs she heard on the radio, and went around the apartment singing, “Every time you go away, you take a piece of meat with you.”

“No!” I exclaimed, laughing. “The words are you take a piece of me with you!”’ When Mark said grace before a meal, he often ended with, “And provide food for those who lack it.” When it was Diana’s turn to say grace one evening, she ended with, “And provide food for those who like it.” She was bewildered by our laughter.

Iinah and Diana sometimes ran into trouble when they used South African words to refer to American things: they used the word cocks for “soccer cleats” and rubber for “eraser.”

When Diana asked her male history teacher for a rubber, he stared at her in shock and told her to sit down. She went back to her desk without the much-needed eraser. When Linah asked the soccer coach, “Don’t we need cocks to play on the team?” he replied, “No, we have a girls’ team too.” Of course Mark’s sisters had no idea their words had a double meaning, and they would ask me what their teachers meant.

“Never mind,” I said, stifiing my laughter. “Just call them erasers and soccer cleats from now on.”

Diana, Linah, and George usually spoke to each other in Tsonga, and aware that I sometimes felt left out of the conversation, Mark would often translate for me. He was also teaching me the language.

But translating from one language to another was usually not enough to close the vast gulf that separated my white middle-class background from their lives in South Africa. One Saturday morning when I entered the kitchen I found Mark making omelets for everyone and reminiscing with his siblings about life in Alexandra. I caught snatches of what they were saying because, though most of it was in Tsonga, they threw in enough English words for me to follow.

“Remember that fat man who wanted to marry our sister Merriam?” tinah said. “He would get Dad drunk instead of paying lobola.

Each time Dad went over to his house to drink, the fat man was getting closer and closer to paying off the lobola and getting Merriam for his wife. Boy, Merriam was so mad when she found out! It turned out the fat man.already had two wives. Merriam screamed at Daddy, What do you take me for?!”’ They laughed uproariously, interrupting each other in an attempt to relate yet another story.

“What happened to that studious boy who lived near the bus stop on Fourteenth Avenue?” Mark asked. “The one with the older brother who was knifed in the shebeen?”

“He was run over by a truck,” Diana replied. “He was helping it backup.”

“Didn’t the driver see him?” Mark asked.

“He did, but he was jealous of him because he made more money than he did, so he ran him over.”

They talked about how Florah and Maria used to cheat at card games and gamble, how their mother was poisoned by a neighbor who was jealous that her children were all so intelligent and studying in America, how mean older boys used to rob children on their way to the store, how certain migrant workers would take new wives on coming to cities, leaving behind in the homelands large families starving and struggling, and how young men known as Thotsis and Comrades harassed those who defied the school boycott and often killed each other in senseless disputes over girls, money, and turf.

Mark stopped the conversation and said, “Okay, Gail. Now that you’ve heard all about Alex, why don’t you tell us all about your home town?”

I thought of the happy hours I spent in my sandbox outside our duplex in Green Hills, a suburb of Cincinnati. I thought of rollerskating down Brookhollow Lane in Springfield, Ohio, past mowed lawns and freshly painted homes and well-fed pets. I thought of the pleasant faces of the old ladies who smiled down at me on Sunday mornings at church, and the way my father would step into the pulpit in his long black robe, open a huge Bible, and clear his throat before delivering the day’s sermon.

“There’s not much to tell,” I said. “At least, not compared to your stories.”

While George, Linah, and Diana were at school, Mark and I would write, sharing the same cramped study, reading each other’s work and making suggestions. I was working on my third and fourth novels simultaneously, while Mark worked on if Boy in America.

We were at our computers by seven every morning and, pausing only for breakfast and lunch, would write until two or three in the afternoon, then go to the gym together to jump rope and lift weights. At night we read like maniacs, going through several books a month, underlining, writing down ideas, discussing them, just as we used to do on Staten Island.

We had plenty of time to ourselves, and we also had the satisfaction of knowing we were sharing our good fortune with Mark’s sibIings, who were trying their best to master English and do well in school. The violence and unrest in the black townships, which disrupted schooling and every other aspect of black life, would have made it impossible for them to get a decent education in South Africa. The more Mark and I helped them with their homework;

made them aware of the dangers of too much television and materialism; and reminded them of the importance of retaining the values of responsibility, respect, discipline, and hard work they had been taught back home, the better we felt.

Each day I realized the truth of the adage: It is in giving that we receive.

MARK’S VIEW Few events have enriched my life as much as fatherhood.

From the instant I learned the surprising, joyous, and bewildering news that Gail was pregnant, I made the leap from being a friend and husband to the exhilarating position of a father-to-be.