Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (26 page)

Though we behaved normally in public, Gail and I were not reckless. We knew that many people were opposed to our union and that some of them were capable of showing their opposition in violent acts. We were aware of the vicious murders that took place in Salt Lake City on August 20, 1980, when two black men, eighteen and twenty, were gunned down near a city park by an avowed racist while they were jogging with two white girls. The murderer, Joseph Paul Franklin, publicly admitted to the killings in a television inter view from prison.

“I’ll say that it was just because they were race mixing,” said Franklin, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi party.

“Had they not been race mixing, you know, it would have been a totally different story.” Though he claims to spend most of his time in his cell reading the Bible and praying, he said he did not regret the Utah slayings.

In 1986 Frankiin received his fifth and sixth life sentences for killing an interracial couple in Madison, Wisconsin.

One day an old pickup truck pulled up alongside our Honda Accord as we were driving from High Point to WinstonSalem. Gail was sitting beside me in the passenger’s seat. It is interesting to note that whenever she drove and for some reason I had to sit in the back, we encountered almost no stares: I was, perhaps, presumed to be her servant.

The truck kept pace with us, not attempting to pass, which made me turn to examine the driver. I saw a wild-haired, sunburned white man grinning down at the two of us from his bouncing rig. Suddenly the truck lunged ahead, swerved in front of us and slowed down abruptiy.

In a flash I saw the Confederate flag draped across the back window and the chained tailgate heading straight for us. I slammed on the brakes to avoid crashing into it. I stretched my arm across Gail to keep her head from sailing forward into the windshield. The man’s laughing face loomed in his rattling rearview mirror.

“What does he think he’s doing?” Gail cried.

“Don’t ask,” I said, switching lanes and dropping behind to create distance between us and the pickup.

“Did you see the way he Ieered at us? He looked like Mr. Hyde with that maniacal smirk on his face.”

“Just forget about it,” I said. “These people get their kicks out of harassing mixed couples. Don’t get all flustered over it-that’s exactly what he would want.”

We drove on in silence, but I knew neither of us could simply for get the experience. We could not when there were other white men [I in North Carolina who felt the same way about us.

Many of the incidents that once disturbed us now make us laugh.

When we were Ftrst married, Gail and I walked from our apartment to the nearest bank branch and said we would like to open a joint checking account.

I’mm sorry, that’s not possible,” said a well-dressed middle-aged white woman behind a large shiny brown desk, staring at us as if we were a pimp and a prostitute trying to set up a business account.

0Not possible?” Gail said. “Why not?”

“We can only open joint accounts for people who are related by blood or by marriage.”

but we are married,” Gail said.

This news discomposed the bank officer a bit, for she shifted In her chair and shuffled through some papers on her desk. Finally she said, “Well, you have to have at least two hundred dollars to open a checking account.”

I looked down at our clothes, which were casual but neat, and wondered what she took us for.

“Yes, we have that much,” I said.

“I’ll need some identification. Do you both have North Carolina driver’s licenses?” the officer asked.

“I do,” I replied, “but my wife hasn’t yet exchanged her Minnesota license for a North Carolina license.”

“Then I’m sorry, we can’t open an account.”

“Let’s go,” I whispered to Gail. I knew the woman had a problem dealing with us as normal human beings and I did not want to waste our time arguing with her. We went to another branch of the same bank and had no trouble at all opening an account. In fact, the officer at the second branch, a young white woman, said there was no rule that required a North Carolina driver’s license to open an account.

Several humorous incidents involved my sisters Linah and Diana.

Whenever Gail, my sisters, and I went out in public together, people automatically assumed that one of my sisters, not Gail, was my wife.

This occurred quite often in crowds of elderly women who flocked about us after church services.

“So you must be Mark’s wife,” one woman said, clasping fourteen-year-old Linah’s hand with both her own and grinning through her perfume and powder. “We’re so happy to have you living In High Point.”

“I’m Mark’s sister,” Linah said, glancing at Gail and trying to contain a fit of laughter.

But the woman was apparently hard of hearing, for she continued her speech, informing Linah that “you and your husband” would make wonderful new church members.

These incidents were not confined solely to the South. Whenever we traveled in the North we encountered similar obstacles.

When I traveled to Philadelphia during a book tour, Gail accompanied me and checked into the hotel room with our suitcases in the afternoon.

Because I was the scheduled guest on an evening call-in talk show, I was unable to join her at the hotel until later that night.

When I arrived at the reception desk, I identified myself and requested a key.

“I’m sorry, but someone named Mathabane has already checked into that room,” a clean-cut white man, not long out of college, informed me.

“Yes, that was my wife,” I replied.

The young man looked puzzled, then suspicious, and I knew he was wondering how a black man could be connected with the tall blond woman who had checked in hours earlier.

“May I see some identification?” he said.

I showed him my driver’s license, which he examined carefully.

He conferred in whispers with two other employees behind the desk, both young white women, then picked up the phone.

“Hello, Mrs. Mathabane?” he said. “There is a man here who claims he is Mr. Mathabane.”

“Great. Send him up,” Gail said.

“Well, you see, uh, there might be some mistake here and I wouldn’t want to … I mean, just as a precaution, uh, could you describe your husband for me?”

“He’s wearing gold wire-rim glasses and a suit, and he’s black!”

“Oh, all right, ma’am, I’ll send him right up.”

The young man, with reddening cheeks, apologized profusely for the inconvenience and handed me the key without delay.

Once I reached our hotel room, Gail and I fell into each other’s arms and laughed over the incident, but we also knew that we never would have experienced that insulting scene if she had been black or I white.

Gail, who had never been discriminated against because of the color of her skin, was getting her first taste of racism and it bedeviled her.

I wished I could protect her from it, but I knew this was only the beginning of the trials she would have to confront for being married to a black man.

These trials of the white partners in interracial relationships, though just as frustrating and dehumanizing as those experienced by the black partners, are seldom acknowledged. Black critics of mixed couples especially fail to realize how much the white partner has to endure, has to sacrifice, to remain true to his or her beliefs.

When Gail and I moved to Kernersville in June 1988, it was a small, rural town twenty miles north of High Point. Sandwiched between WinstonSalem-home of BJ Reynolds Tobacco Companyand Greensborsite of the first civil rights sit-In at F. W. Woolworth’s downtown lunch counter-Kernersville had slowiy evolved from a town of small tobacco farmers into a bedroom community for people who commuted to work in the larger surrounding cities.

Despite an influx of corporate Northerners into Kernersville’s new housing developments, the town retains much of its provincial Southern feel. Barefoot children still play in the yards of large dilapidated farm houses along winding country roads; white-haired men with weathered faces and faded bib overalls still gather at Farmer’s Feed and Seed to shoot the breeze in their drawling North Carolina dialect; flocks of blond children and their parents still crowd the Moravian and Methodist churches on Main Street every Sunday; loyal citizens read the biweekly Kernersville News cover to cover and keep up with the latest weddings, church picnics, and high-school sports scores; groups of shirtless young men still harvest the tobacco fields and hang the leaves to dry in fragrant bunches; old women In floppy hats and gardening gloves still prune their meticulously groomed flower beds at dawn; horses and goats graze peacefully in the pasture around the corner from our home.

“What is it like living in the South as a mixed couple?” Scott Ross, host of CBN’s “Straight Talk” asked me on camera in his Virginia Beach television studio.

I explained, just as I did to all our Northern friends, that despite having to sometimes deal with remnants of the Old South, we liked the slow pace of Southern life; the friendly politeness of strangers;

the abundance of fresh air and trees; the low cost of living; the tranquility in which one can relax, read, think, and write; and the strong sense of community among neighbors indispensable to raising healthy children.

Many people, particularly Northerners, seem disappointed when we cannot relate harrowing stories of persecution at the hands of hooded Klansmen.

There have been times, though, when I have wondered just how tolerant people truly are in the South. One Sunday morning in 1990, two days before Christmas, I took a stroll alone. Dressed in a white jogging suit and a heavy winter coat, I went farther than usual, into a new housing development, absorbed in listening to poetry on my Walkman and admiring bare tree branches against a leaden sky. As people drove past me, dressed in their Sunday best and on the way to church, I would wave and cast them a neighborly smile.

I had walked nearly half an hour in the new development when a sheriff’s patrol car suddenly pulled up beside me. The deputy, a large mustachioed man in a blue uniform, rolled down the window, and said, “You live around here?”

“No,” I replied. “I live just beyond those trees.” I pointed in the direction of our home about a quarter mile away.

The policeman stepped out of the car and hovered before me.

0Three people have called the police station to report seeing a suspicious man,” the policeman said. “You fit their description.”

“Really?” I said, startled.

“May I see your ID please?”

“I don’t have any with me,” I said. “I usually don’t carry an ID when I go for a walk in the neighborhood.”

The officer continued looking at me, presumably baffled by the accent, the self-assertiveness. I saw the confusion in his face. I proceeded to explain who I was. There was only one South African black writer in Kernersville.

The officer, apparently recollecting my name (I had been featured several times in the local media), said in an apologetic tone, “Listen, I was only doing my job. I was told to come out here and find out who you are.”

“I’m curious-who called?”

“There goes one of them right now,” the officer said, nodding to a white man driving past who stared straight ahead. It was a man I had waved to and smiled at as I walked past his home.

I returned home, upset and shaken by what had happened.

uSee what I mean about white stereotypes toward blacks?” I said to Gail. “Those three whites who reported me to the police thought of only one thing when they saw me: thief. They hardly gave me the benefit of the doubt. To them every strange black man in their neighborhood is simply a robber scouting their homes. This is what I mean when I say there’s little difference between white attitudes In America and in South Africa.

“And to think that some of those whites saw me on their way to church!”

I continued. “They presumably called about me from the church phone, just before singing all about loving one’s neighbor and being followers of Christ’s teachings. What hypocrisy. And, Sweets, it’s two days before Christmas!”

After my anger subsided, I attempted to come up with other explanations for the incident. I always did this to avoid seeing racism behind every white man’s wrong action against blacks. Homeowners, I reflected, are always worried about theft, about the safety of their homes and families. Strangers-regardless of race-walking through their neighborhoods are bound to raise suspicions.

I recalled that on two separate occasions I had seen strangers walking through our neighborhood-in one case a white teenager and in the other a young black man. I had felt an urge to notily the police immediately as part of the community watch program, but I did not. Instead I approached the young black man and spoke to him. He turned out to be an ambitious entrepreneur selling home cleaning products. But when a neighbor and I approached the white teenager, he panicked and fled.

The police caught him as he headed for the highway. He turned out to have a police record for burglary.

There was an interesting twist to my encounter with the police.

Three days after the incident a white man approached me in a department store and introduced himself as one of the people who had called the sheriff on me.

“I’d like to apologize,” he said. “Someone broke into one of the houses in our neighborhood recently and I guess all of us are a little on edge. I didn’t mean any harm. I hope you understand.”

“I do,” I said, shaking his proffered hand. The man ended by inviting me to visit his home.

GAIL’S VIEW When Mark said he wanted us to move to the South, I thought he was deranged. The race riots I had witnessed in my junior high school In Texas remained indelibly in my mind, and I was as well versed as any Northerner about the Klan and its persecution of blacks and mixed couples. Under no circumstances could I see myself settling In the South.

“The South has changed, Gail,” Mark said, trying to convince me to move with him to High Point. “When I was in North Carolina I saw more progress than up here. You won’t believe some of the things I saw.”

“Yeah, like Ku Klux Klan rallies full of Confederate flags, rednecks, and racial slurs.”