Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (30 page)

Knowing that I was loathed by black women made me feel miserable.

Since my days as a minority white student at Pearce Junior High in Austin, Texas, I had admired black women. At Pearce, where I felt insecure and lost, I envied the black girls for their strength, confidence, toughness. They had the courage to challenge teachers, make demands, and speak their minds. I envied them for their hair, all knotted up with colorful beads and transparent colored balls.

I watched in awe and admiration as they danced down the long tables in the cafeteria, where a jukebox belted out Motown tunes in the corner.

They made up the cheerleading squad, the basketball team, the track team. They were full of life and laughter, while I, on the other hand, felt stifled by the puritan streak that deprives so many whites of their vibrancy and emotion, riddling them instead with guilt complexes that make them go through life perpetually in need of shrinks.

When I got to Columbia Journalism School I was sent, along with most of my classmates, into rough New York neighborhoods, often alone, to cover story topics ranging from teenage pregnancy to prostitution and drug addiction. While reporting in such neighborhoods I met some incredibly strong women-all of them black and determined to survive in a cruel, unpredictable world of violence, poverty, and desperation.

One night in a lower Manhattan twenty-four-hour court of arraignments, notoriously known as “night court,” I sat on a hard, wooden bench under buzzing fluorescent lights watching a long line of defendants, practically all of them young black men, stand before a white judge one at a time, with anger in their eyes and their knitted caps baIled up in clenched fists.

Suddenly the young black woman beside me, who appeared about eight months pregnant and with whom I had briefly spoken during a break, burst into tears. I knew she was there to see her boyfriend appear before the judge. Instinctively I slid down the bench and put my arm around her, trying to comfort her. Hot tears rolled down her cheeks.

“He got six months,” she murmured, trying to catch her breath.

“He won’t be with me when our baby is born. He din’t have to do it. I tole hIm I got money. But he be too proud. He say he won’t take none of my money, that I’m his woman and that it ain’t right to take money from your woman. Ain’t that just like a man to be so stubborn?” She looked up at me inquiringly, her large, wet brown eyes gazing directly into mine.

“Just like a man,” I replied.

“Jostling,” she muttered. “What the hell’s that? That’s what they charged him with. Jostling. I swear they come up with the strangest charges, then they never explain what they’s meanin’. I could do a better job than that judge. He don’t know what he’s doing. You got to look them in the eyes. It’s the eyes that let you know. My boyfriend din’t mean nobody no harm. But murderers go free and he gets six months.”

Her anger seemed to dry her tears, and a look of determination came into her eyes. It was about three in the morning when she and I left the court building and headed for the uptown subway. As the train rumbled and raced through Manhattan, she talked openly and quickly about her life in Harlem, her excitement over her coming child, and her boyfriend. The farther we got from night court, the more confident she became.

“I din’t need him anyway,” she said. “He was a pushover. He was always in my face. I guess it’s better like this. I can handle my life on my own, you know. Men just get in the way, always getting’ in trouble.

And it ain’t like I’ll be alone. It’ll be me and my baby from now on.

We’ll be out there together, takin’ on the world.” She looked at me curiously. “You Pisces?”

Her sudden question took me aback, but I replied, “Yes, I’m a Pisces.”

“Yeah, I knew it,” she said. “So am I. I could tell cause you understand. You know what I’m tellin’ you.”

I had to get off at Ninety-sixth Street to change for the Broadway local bound for Columbia. She remained on the train, bound for the darkest reaches of Harlem. As the train pulled out of the station, I saw her wave. I realized then that we didn’t even know each other’s names, yet she had left an enduring impression on my mind: an impression of fortitude, determination, and strength in the face of utter despair and hopelessness. Again I wished I had some of the strength of a black woman like that.

I thought of Mark’s sister lIorah, who is only one month older than I, and how readily we had become close friends and confidantes during the summer of 1987. I particularly remembered her grit when we found out she had the early stages of cervical cancer. “Don’t worry, Sweets, it’s nothing. I’ll pull through,” she had said. And pull through she did.

I realized in that bookstore in Philadelphia, with a sinking heart, that it was going to be far more difficult to make friends with

African-American women than I had anticipated. The twisted history lips,’ a friend once told me. His hair smells like a wet dog.” of America’s race relations, the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, all kinds of things like that when I was growing up.” made them see me as the enemy. By marrying a black man I had Sylvia came to a book signing at a High Point bookstor stepped over the line, I was suspect. And the fact that Mark was in afternoon and, while Mark was talking to fans and signing the public eye, a powerful writer and friend of Oprah Winfrey, only graphs on the title page of the Boy in America, she walked seemed to exacerbate their resentment of me, “the white woman.” me, asked if I were Gail, and introduced hersetr She talked rc Over the years I have come to understand why my marriage to as if eager to express myriad ideas at once. Several weeks Mark has so deeply wounded, disappointed, and angered many black Sylvia called me and we had a long phone conversation. She ta women. I read the grim statistics about the rising death rate of young what it felt like to find out I was white.

black males, but I did not make a connection between them and my mamage to Mark until I was confronted by the anger of black women. Their anger reached me through anonymous hate letters to “I knew Mark was married, but I didn’t know you were N she said. “I found out when I read an article in the Greensboro Record. For a while I was just stark raving mad. That was my Mark, through the questions they asked Mark during call-in radio natural reaction. And I have to tell you, a lot of other black wo shows, through phone calls made directly to me.

I opened my eyes, I know felt the same way. I don’t know if it’s good for me to listened, I struggled to understand their feelings.

incredibly honest, but there it is. I have to get it out. I was torn.

One of these women was a Greensboro professional in her thirties, whom I’ll call Sylvia. After years of striving in vain to find an eligible black man, Sylvia chose to remain single rather than accept I dinner invitations from white men who showed a strong interest in ” her.

Having grown up black in a small town in eastern North Carolina, and acutely aware of enduring taboos about interracial relation- “I still go through struggles when I see a black man with a ships, she grew irate when a white man asked her to dinner.

cially since Mark is successful. The more successful the black the greater the resentment among black women. My friends were extremely stunned when we found out you were white, I passed. We shrugged, shook our heads, and said, He’s just ai black man with a white woman.

woman,” she continued in her urgent, rapid style of speech.

“I was so mad at him,” Sylvia said. “The nicer he was, the mad-are over a million more black women in the United States than der I became.

I didn’t go to dinner with him. I thought he really wanted sex, and my mind went back to slavery days. Few white men back then married their black mistresses. They just wanted casual sex and often took it by force, as if it were their right. I felt safe conversing with him on the phone, but if I saw him I’d get mad. He had men, and a lot of those black men are in prison or living streets. My attitude is based on statistics. It may also be the ‘forbidden fruit’ syndrome: that the black man wants a better’ womar “Do you still hate me?” I asked.

“Not really. You see, I assumed, at first, that you were a Soi blond hair, which made it worse.

“I was raised in the Deep South, where racism is ingrained into just about everybody, black and white,” she said. “I grew up in a Icounty that is reputed to have the highest number of KKK members in North Carolina. You had your place. You could live only in certain areas.

I believed in separate but equal.” It didn’t matter to me that in school we got used books from the white schools.

“When I was coming up, everyone made sure I knew to avoid white men.

We were told the white man was no good in bed anyway, (I that he had no penis. A white man’s penis is as pitiful as his thin belle. But when I found out you were a universal person, that traveled, that you were worldly and probably open-minded, was able to understand a little better. But it still hurts.”

“In what way?”

“In every way. Slavery-time notions are still so deep. In Bt hurst a black teenager was killed just because someone thought he was going to see a white girl. Hey, he was just looking at a used car! In America, people, both black and white, can’t st see a member of their race cross the color line. Those feeling: die. They just don’t. Some ideas in the South are as old as Con the Wind. People still hang up their Confederate flags, which to me is a symbol of slavery. Those attitudes are classic, just like the film.”

“So, are you saying that you still feel blacks and whites shouldn’t be together?” I asked.

“You know, there’s an interesting twist here,” Sylvia said. “In a way, black men and white women naturally belong together. They’ve never really had any power. They’ve both served the white man, either as slaves, domestic servants, or duty-bound wives with no legal rights.

And, in a way, black women and white men belong together. They are both dominant and strong. Black women had to be incredibly strong during slavery. Their husbands and children were auctioned off and they had to work hard in the fields to survive.

They were poor but they still had power, pride, and dignity.”

“So you still wouldn’t date a white man?” I asked.

“Right now I just couldn’t. But maybe I will in the future. For now I’ll keep looking for that special black man.”

One year later, Sylvia began dating a white man-a divorced professional. It was not an easy decision for her to make, but she had grown tired of waiting.

“I’m still going through what I call a metamorphosis stage,” she said.

“I feel like a hypocrite-but it was just a matter of numbers. I m doing this because there are more available white men and I wanted to expand my options. It’s so hard to find eligible black men, and the competition for them is unreal.”

When she and her white friend go out in public, Sylvia can feel the disapproving stares, especially from black men, but she sees it as just one of the many pressures of being black in America.

Sylvia was not the only black woman to express her strong, and rather mixed, feelings toward me. June Steward, a black woman living in Oakland, wrote a review of Mark’s second book for the San ncilco Post, a black newspaper, and sent hIm a copy of the published piece: I was delighted to see Mathabane’s tln’ely sequel, ifr BE in An’erica, displayed among the new arrivals in the bookstore. I immedi lately scanned the photos and saw… to my amazement and, I must adniit, horror, a photo of his wife, Gail, a white woman. Stunned, I turned through the pages thinking, “It just can’t be.” Bui there she was, blonde and probably blue-eyed as she could be. I put the book back on the shelf feeling betrayed. How could he have done this to us? How could he, in the most intimate sense, take up with the very race whose brutality he described so clearly and convincingly In the Boy?

For days I was angry. I refused to buy the book and I felt that I had learned as much as I wanted to know about Mark Mathabane. I hate racism and its simple-minded tenets and those people who uphold them, but I am not a black racist. I do not hate white people. So why did 1 feel betrayed? Because after luring me into the unutterable horrors of apartheid and making me weep and angry and determined to lIght racism and all its ugliness until the day I die, he seems to turn around and embrace the Nordlc Ideal. He seems to be saying white South AIricans are right. The blonde ideal is superior, It Is the one worthy of his love, not the lowly black, kinky-headed race.

All of this simplistic thinking soon gave way to a more complex view.

We are not simply black or white, we are human beings with thoughts, emotions, and spirituality that make us who we are. Indeed, we are part of a group, a family, but most importantly, we are individuals and it is to this that we must be true no matter how out of step we may be with others.

Moved by her frank discussion of her feelings toward Mark’s marriage to me, I wrote a letter to June asking her to explain to me why so many black women feel betrayed and angry when they discover I’m white. June replied, The female ideal in this country has always been the nubile blonde, girl-woman. Black women always took a back seat to this image.

Our beauty, no matter how spectacular, could never stand up to the blonde goddess. So for Mark, one of the most inspiring black writers of the decade, to embrace that Ideal was for me, and apparently other black women, an insult. It took a bit of personal grappling for me to get over it.

I am sorry that you have had to experience all the hatred just because of your color. You don’t deserve it. None of us do. What is important Is that you maintain your dedication to your ideals, be true to the love that you share, and use that love to give you courage to lIght this nonsense. As James Baldwin said, “From my point of view, no label, no slogan, no party, no skin color and indeed no religion, Is more important than the human being.”

Having spoken to Sylvia, exchanged letters with June, and communicated with other black women who had the courage to be can did with me, I learned to be sensitive to the feelings many African American women have when they see me with Mark. But I did not feel right forcing myself to feel guilty for having fallen in love with him. After all, Mark is far more than a black man and I am not simply a white woman.