Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (23 page)

There was an added dimension to the thrilling news. What Gail and I had long believed in theory-that humankind is one and the races are but individual members of a large family-became reality.

Our child stood to inherit and to benefit from the best of all worlds and cultures because we the parents had worked hard at bridging the gap that separated people from each other on the biologically irrelevant basis of skin color.

With the birth of our firstborn a cycle was now complete. I had grown from a child, to a son, to a parent. I couldn’t help but contrast my own experiences as a father with those of my own father, Jackson.

Though in his own way he deeply cared for my mother, he was never present during the birth of any of his seven children. Tradition forbade it. Even had it not, his strange sense of manhood would have disdained being beside his wife during childbirth.

For my father and most tribal men of his time and culture, the noca nT nhi1nh,r”D w,c atrint]v a Cryaryc atrir It wac tahnn fnr them to be present even in the house. They would be contaminated and their manhood would be weakened by the mysterious, almost magical experience.

All the husband needed to know were the end results: Is it a boy or girl child, is it alive or dead?

The wife’s emotional need for her husband’s presence during the birth of a joint responsibility-her need for his love, his encouragement, and his supportould not be accommodated in a relationship where the husband was master of the house and “owner” of his wife and where society taught him to hide, suppress, and even deny his true feelings.

But as a child I set out to be different emotionally from my father.

My heart yearned to feel, to love, to care, to cry, to laugh. I resisted and endured enormous pressure designed to teach me that boys and men never show their emotions. My father would sometimes beat me for crying when hurt. But his attempts to truncate me emotionally failed. I could not stop feeling. In my mind and heart to feel was to be human.

Each one of my mother’s later pregnancies deeply affected me. I pitied each new child for coming into a world full of pain, hunger, suffering, injustice, and the early death of innocence. I pitied my mother for the risks, the pain, and the difficulties of each pregnancy.

The lack of prenatal and postnatal care, the absence of basic sanitation in the ghetto In which we were quarantined, and her frequent flights from the police (even late in her pregnancies) to escape arrest, endangered not only her life but also that of the growing life within her.

It pained me to see her, when she was pregnant with her third child, set off at dawn, trudging barefoot through the township, begging for food or odd jobs. She even had to beg pennies from neighbors to buy diapers because my father, in a futile effort to drown the unimaginable pain and sorrow of his emasculated life, had squandered his meager ten-dollar-a-week wage on dice and alcohol.

When she became pregnant for the seventh time, I was distraught. Not only had previous difficult pregnancies taken their toll on her body (she was also a diabetic and didn’t know it) but the family’s poverty and miseries had worsened. Food was scarce. The tworoom shack offered neither space nor privacy and my father was in and out of prison for such “crimes” as being unemployed and liar Birth of a Child.

boring illegal aliens in the form of his wife and children.

At school things were going badly for me. I was constantly being whipped and humiliated for lacking books, school fees, and proper uniforms. I had half a mind to quit school and find a menial job somewhere so I could ameliorate my mother’s suffering. But she wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted that I stay in school. “All will be well,” she would say. “God will provide.”

Barely two months after her seventh child, Diana, was born, my mother had the baby strapped to her back and returned to her laborious work cleaning the house and washing and ironing the laundry for a Fifteen-member Indian family. She was paid three dollars a week.

My mother became seriously ill under the straIn. The Infant became afflicted with strange diseases caused by an inadequate diet.

Miraculously both mother and child survived. I remember vowing to my mother that if I ever got married, I would never allow my wife to suffer as she had suffered. I would be by her side at all times, even during childbirth, taboo or no taboo.

“I know you will, my child,” my mother said. “That’s the right thing for a father and a husband to do. God will bless you for it all the days of your life.”

When Gail first told me that she was pregnant, one of the thoughts that came to mind was the vow I made to my mother. It was a lovely spring day in May 1988, nine months after our public wedding. I had just returned home from a long run around Oak Hollow Lake. I pulled off my wet sweatshirt and bounded up the stairs to the small bedroom I shared with Gail. She was in a gray armchair, not reading or writing as usual, but just sitting and staring contemplatively at the budding trees outside our small window, twisting a strand of blond hair with her fingers.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

She glanced up at me with a worried look in her eyes. She let go her hair and clasped her hands tightly together, betraying her nervousness.

She paused for a moment before whispering, “I’m pregnant.”

“Really!” I exclaimed. “Are you sure? How did you find out?”

She pointed to a white box on the dresser that read, “Home Pregnancy Test Kit.” I qulckly picked up the box and read the Instructions: a blue stick indicates pregnancy. The stick in Gail’s hand was blue.

“Oh, Mark, I’m so scared,” Gail said. “I know we don’t have any health insurance and we’re financially strapped. I know we weren’t planning for a child so soon. Please don’t be angry.”

“Angry?” I cried, dropping the box and rushing toward her. “Me angry?

How could I be angry? I’m thrilled! I’m so proud of you, Sweets.

Remember, there’s never a perfect time to have baby. Money or no money, this is our baby, our firstborn.” I threw my arms around her, pulled her up from the chair, and we danced.

Though both Gail and I are pro-choice, we never once discussed having an abortion, despite our precarious financial condition and our fears that an unexpected pregnancy might drown our career ambitions in a sea of diapers and baby wipes.

Over the next several months I shared every strange phase of emotional and physical change Gail underwent. I was alternately in awe, fascinated, and bewildered. My life became transformed as I strove to understand and contribute to the joy Gail felt as a motherto-be. Once so full of energy and eager to get up and write at seven each morning, Gail now slept until ten, dragging herself from the warm bedclothes only at the prompting of hunger pangs. I made her elaborate meals, only to see her sicken at the smell of food, become nauseous at the sight of fish or salad, push her plate away after forcing down only a few bites at dinner.

In the first two months she lost ten pounds. Worried that her weight loss would endanger her and the baby, I constantly begged her to eat-to no avail.

It was the summer of 1988: hot, humid, and muggy. In June, to have some room for the additional member of the family, we moved from our apartment in High Point to a fartnhouseur first real home-in Kernersville. It had a long front porch, sat on a huge lot filled with trees, perfect for a child to grow up loving the outdoors.

George, Linah, Diana, and I did the moving. Our belongings filled a U-Haul truck. I was unable to drive a stick shift; George tried and stripped several gears. Gail, despite my protestations, drove the rumbling truck the twenty miles up Highway 66 to Kernersville. “I may be pregnant,” she said, “but I’m not an invalid.”

Exhausted from our efforts, the five of us collapsed amid the piles of moving boxes and furniture, wolfed down a bucket of fried chicken, and fell asleep on hastily assembled beds.

As winter approached, Gail’s stomach resembled an eggplant.

The baby was fully formed and near term. Gail left her temporary job at RJR Nabisco in WinstonSalem. By now the slight rumblings within her belly had become vigorous kicks and punches. Several times a day I would pause to press my ear against the little creature and tap.

My light knockings and words of greeting were always answered with a powerful punch to my head. Each night we read to the baby.

Gail and I attended childbirth classes in the basement of an old church in High Point. We were the only mixed couple and I was the only black.

We were always the last ones to arrive, shuffling into the large, brightly lit room wearing winter jackets and clutching pillows.

The female instructor would pause to smile at us as we made our way to the back of the room, past the two dozen or so couples seated in folding chairs.

Sometimes the husbands and wives were told to split up for group discussions. I found myself sitting in a circle of white Southern men.

We were asked to come up with a list of emotions we felt at the prospect of becoming fathers.

“I feel excited,” one said.

“I feel scared of the responsibility,” said another.

“I feel so goddamned horny all the time I don’t know what to do,” said a third.

The men broke out laughing, nodding their heads in agreement.

I made a comment about how close to Gail, and more respectful and proud of her, the pregnancy made me feel. Everyone stopped talking and stared at me with curiosity, either because my accent took them by surprise or because they were unaccustomed to hearing a black man express his opinion, especially about such an intimate matter.

I’m certain some of the men felt I had no right to be there, or worse, but most of them were open-minded and regarded me only as a fellow daddy-to-be.

As the weeks went by I lost much of my selfconsciousness. I would be down on the floor with the rest of the young fathers in the class, holding Gail’s ankles, stuffing pillows under her at the appropriate places, counting aloud for her as she panted and breathed, telling her when to take her deep cleansing breath, and diligently studying the handouts we were given on relaxation techniques and different breathing rhythms.

I spent a good deal of time wondering what our child would look like.

Would it have a big blond Afro and blue eyes? Or would it look more like I did as a child, with chocolate brown skin, nappy hair, and large brown eyes? How would Gail feel carrying around a biracial child? How would I feel carrying a child lighter than myself? What kinds of stares and comments would we get when we appeared in public with our baby?

CAlLS VIEW Ever since those troubled nights before our public wedding, when I tossed and turned in a restless sweat in my bed on Flatbush Avenue with my mind full of wild visions, I had dreamed many times of giving birth. In one dream I was whisked from the chapel in my white satin wedding dress to a delivery room across the hall, where I promptly gave birth to a small brown baby amid the shouts, hoorays, and champagne toasts of all our wedding guests.

And now, as I lay on the hammock strung between two towering trees beside our home in Kernersville, a mug of steaming Ovaltine balanced on my rounded belly, I recalled all the recent dreams I had had of childbirth. As if my subconscious mind could not decide whether my child would be black or white, I dreamed I bore a little panda bear: pitch black in parts and snow white in others. Besides a mother’s natural curiosity to know whether she will have a boy or girl and whether it will have all ten fingers and toes, I was dying to know what strange combination of pigments and facial features was forming within me.

Whenever we spoke on the phone with Mark’s family in South Africa, they were full of suggestions for what we should name our baby, which everyone assumed would be a boy. Mark’s mother insisted we call him Lazarus, after the biblical character who arose from the dead. His sister Merriam urged us to call him Remembrance.

The naming of a child in Mark’s culture was a major affair. Relatives often competed with gifts for the right to give a child its seldom used, sacred, African name. Such names always stood for something.

One of Mark’s grandparents won the right to name him and called him 7hanyan which means “The Wise One.” George was named Ndwakhulu, which means “Big Wars,” because he came at a time when Mark’s parents were constantly fighting and argning. Elorah was named ondeleli, which means “Endurance”; she was born at a time when the family was experiencing hard times.

Whenever Mark and I went for walks at night down a lonely dirt road between open grass fields at the edge of which were fish hatcheries, breathing in the misty, fresh North Carolina country air, I loved the feeling of his warm hand gently holding mine, and of the baby stirring within me, hard, bony, and substantial. Sitting on the front porch, wedged together on a narrow wicker loveseat, we would talk hopefully about our child and the future, watching the winter rain pelt the brick steps, soaking into the moist earth, enriching it.

Mark was convinced our child already loved classical music and African folklore, so he would pop a Bach cassette into the stereo and press the headphones against my rounded belly or relate one of his mother’s stories. Each day he would kiss my stomach good morning and good night, usually when I was half-asleep and unaware that he was having a lengthy conversation with the baby.

About one month before the baby was due, Stedman Graham came to our house for lunch. Mark had been playing tennis with him regnlarly since he moved down to High Point to head a public relations firm, but I had not seen him since June 1987 in New York, when Mark’s family arrived.

He was much taller than I remembered, and he smiled down at me, shook my hand, and said, “Been a long time.

When’s the baby due?”

“January twentieth,” I replied.

By the time we sat down to eat, Mark and Stedman were engrossed in a discussion about South Africa, life, and acting on one’s instincts. As they talked, Stedman kept looking at me as if he wanted to say something.

At last he paused and, after a great deal of hesitation, said, “I have to confess something to you, Gail. When I first met you at JFK that day Mark’s family arrived, and I saw that you were white, it really upset me. It upset me so much I couldn’t even finish reading Mark’s book. I kept asking, Why? Why does he want to blow his future by marrying a white woman? He could have so much more power and credibility if he focused on his role as a black leader in the struggle against apartheid.”” He paused and waited for my reaction, but I was too surprised by his straightforward admission and frank manner to say anything.