Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (34 page)

Mark’s father was almost left behind. While Mark was in line waiting to check their luggage and confirm their seats, Papa, who was squeezed into a corner with Mhani at the back of the teeming crowd, insisted on going to an upstairs bathroom unaccompanied.

Upon leaving the bathroom, he became confused as to which door he had come through as there were several doors that looked the same.

He took the wrong one and wandered all over the airport, lost, for nearly an hour.

I cannot Imagine how confusing and strange such a modern international airport must have seemed to someone who cannot read, write, or speak anything fluently except a minor African language.

All of us, especially Bianca, missed them as soon as they had left.

“Where’s Grandma go?” she would ask, looking pleadingly into my eyes.

“Where’s Grampa go?”

“They flew away in a big airplane to a land far, far away, but don’t cry. We’ll go visit them someday soon.”

There is a tacit understanding among interracial couples that make friendships between them both natural and spontaneous. They have weathered similar trials, confronted the same prejudices, sought to ignore similar stares and derisive comments. Together they can laugh over the experiences they once found alienating and painful.

Since our marriage we have befriended several mixed couples, řmany of whom are proud of the racial harmony they represent. They have confirmed our belief that there is something profoundly moving řand beautiful in love shared by people from two worlds often at oddsthe black, one white.

The black women we know who married white men are usually řvery upbeat and optimistic about their relationships and what the future holds for their. children. They encountered little resistance from their parents and siblings when they announced their marriage plans, and most were eventually accepted by their husbands’ families, even the most conservative and wealthy of white families.

Evelyn and Rainer Zawadzki say they have always gone wherever they pleased and never encountered any prejudice or hostility against them in their twenty-two-year marriage, despite the fact that Evelyn’s skin is the color of dark mahogany and Rainer is a fullblooded German. They met in Mexico, where Evelyn was teaching English and Rainer was a graduate student in chemical engineering Evelyn was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago in an all-black neighborhood. One year out of high school, at nineteen, she married her childhood sweetheart. The marriage lasted less than two years, but it produced a little girl.

Evelyn supported herself and her daughter, working full-tIme, and taking college courses at night. Eventually they moved to Mexico, for Evelyn had always dreamed of living in a foreign country.

“I met Rainer at a time in my life when I wasn’t interested at all in marrying again,” said Evelyn, a tall, beautiful woman and former model.

“I didn’t trust a man with something as serious as marriage. I didn’t think there was anything a man could do for me that I couldn’t do for myself. Besides, I hadn’t met anyone I really wanted to devote the rest of my life to. But Rainer was totally different from anyone I had ever met before. He made me believe he was interested in me as a human being. He appreciated my thoughts and ideas. We had very nice intellectual conversations.”

“I was fascinated by Evelyn,” Rainer said. “She has a very sharp mind.

I love it. Besides, I’ve always believed the way to a woman’s heart is through her intellect,” he added, smiling mischievously.

“We were at a party, and I was wearing a hot orange minidress,” she said, laughing.

Born in East Germany, Rainer moved with his parents to a German colony in Mexico in 1948 when he was three years old. He attended an elite German private school, reputed to be the most exclusive in Mexico. The Germans formed a tight-knit community and never socialized with outsiders.

“Germans who married Mexicans were ostracized,” Rainer said.

“From society and friends I heard, Don’t you ever try to come here with one of those darkies,’ meaning a Mexican. We had to keep ourselves white-white.”

Rainer was relieved when he graduated from the private school and could enroll in the University of Mexico. “I loved it,” he said.

“For the first time I was free of that German domination. Yet I was cast into Mexican society, which never fully accepted me. I found my German friends too snobbish and discriminatory, so I chose to make friends with Americans. I spoke German and Spanish fluently, but I was still learning English when I met Evelyn.

“I was fascinated by black people,” Rainer continued. “If you’re different from me, I want to find out what makes you tick. I want to know how you feel, and maybe I can share some of my feelings with you.

I do the same thing when I see a Japanese or Indian. I wonder, What do they think? How do they perceive things?” rinding out what the difference is between us shows me something about myself I hadn’t known before. The only way you can find out about yourself is by contrasting your experiences with some one else’s. It’s incredibly fascinating.”

Evelyn’s daughter liked Rainer immediately. When Evelyn and Rainer decided to marry and move back to the United States, she knew her parents would accept him, though it might take some tIme for them to get used to the idea.

“I was very close to my father, and I knew that if he didn’t approve of my marrying Rainer initially, he would at least be very kind and polite to him,” Evelyn said. “That’s exactly what happened.

But about one year after our wedding, when we were visiting my parents, my father came into the room and invited Rainer to go out and have a beer with him. I started to get my shoes, but my father gave me a look that said, “I didn’t mean you could come too.” I knew then and there he had accepted Rainer. I knew it was okay. From then on they were almost inseparable.”

Rainer had more difficulty convincing his family to accept Evelyn.

“Evelyn’s parents may have had as many doubts as mine, but unlike mine, they did not voice them. My family pitched a bitch. But my decision to ask Evelyn to marry me took race into account. I had no illusions.

I knew what I was getting into. I knew she was black, I knew I was white, I knew we’d live in the United States, I knew I was going against everything I had been taught.”

“His sister had just become Catholic,” Evelyn said, “and she went to the priest to confess OUR sins. The priest told her we had committed a moral sin, a social sin, and a racial sin. If the priest had told me that, I would have told him what he could do with his sins.”” Despite opposition in Rainer’s family, Rainer and Evelyn have had few, if any, problems as an interracial couple. They don’t even mind the stares.

“When we go out, we know people are going to look at us because we’re a good-looking pair,” Evelyn said. “We dress and look the best we possibly can. It’s only sometimes that I wonder, Why is that person staring? Is something wrong? Is my blouse unbuttoned?”

But for the most part I want them to look. We’ve had a lot of peopleboth white and blackome up to us and say we make a striking couple. We were in Penn Station one day and a black man asked Rainer, Excuse me, but is that your woman? She’s so pretty and chocolate.

You’re all right, man, you’re all right.”” Vickie Nizin, another friend of ours, is married to a white surgeon named Joel whom she met when they were both students at Howard University in Washington, D.C. They are members of the BahT’i Faith. A petite black woman and the mother of two young girls, Vickie says she and Joel have encountered no problems as a mixed couple and actually enjoy the stares.

“I love having attention, because I feel it’s an opportunity for me to provide a fresh, more wholesome, healthy perspective. We’re setting a good example. It’s a chance to say, Yes, we’re a mixed couple and we’re healthy and happy, we’re not suffering and crazy and weird.

We’re not hiding. We’re not freaks.”

Vickie was born in Richmond, Virginia. The state’s governor, Douglas Wilder, is her father’s relative and, as a child, played with her father, Ellsworth Johnson. Though historically the maternal line of Vickie’s family had been very lightskinned and well-off by black standards, the wealth was dissipated in one generation and her mother and nine siblings grew up in poverty in Richmond, under the unpredictable tyranny of an alcoholic and abusive stepfather. Vickie’s mother was sent to live with relatives, who were well educated for blacks at that time.

Vickie’s father, a brilliant man with a master’s degree in zoology who yearned to be a physician, tried for fourteen years to get into a Virginia medical school, but it was closed to blacks. Frustrated, he gave up and studied dentistry instead. Her mother was trained as a secretary, but no one would hire her. Desperate for work, she eventually pleaded with a Jewish doctor, who trained her to prepare slides in a pathology lab. From there she went on to the National Institutes of Health and became a specialist.

Before moving to Washington, the Johnsons had three children: Vickie and her two brothers. A refined female relative made sure Vickie took ballet, wore beautiful clothes, sang in public, acquired poise and sophistication, and understood how to behave “properly.”

Vickie was aware her family tree included Irish ancestors and native Americans as well as Africans, but she quickly learned that nothing mattered to strangers but the fact that she had brown skin and kinky hair. To the world she was simply black. She shopped at segregated stores, lived in an all-black, inner-city neighborhood, and attended segregated schools. As a student at Roosevelt High in Washington, D.C in the late 1960s, she saw many of her classmates come to school high on marijuana or heroin. Only a handful went on to college, but Vickie, who expanded her world by reading voraciously, went on to Oberlin College in Ohio, then transferred to Howard.

“I am by nature friendly and outgoing, but at that school I belonged to no group,” Vickie said. “I belonged to myself. I found that was the only way to survive.”

Growing up in a segregated world and hearing her parents ths-.

cuss civil rights and social justice, Vickie was aware of racial tensions from an early age. “My parents did not want us to hate anybody, but we could see and feel how wounded they had been by racism.”

There is one story Vickie heard quite olten. When he was fourteen her father happened to be in an all-white neighborhood right after a robbery. A police officer saw him and, because “all blacks look alIke,” gunned him down. Her father lay in a coma for a week, then his heart stopped. On the way to the morgue he groaned, startling everyone around him. He had a long difficult recovery, but he made it.

“You can imagine my father has no reason to love anybody who’s white,” Vickie said. “And yet my father is a man of great vision.” He accepted Joel, and if he has any reservations, they spring not from the fact that Joel is white, but from the fact that Joel attended medical school and is now a practicing physician: He is doing all the things Vickie’s father dearly wanted to do but wasn’t allowed to do.

Joel’s parents, Conservative Jews from the Bronx, urged Joel to break up with Vickie and, for a month, succeeded in making their son have second thoughts. They wanted their son to prosper more than they had, to marry a woman who would advance his career and raise their grandchildren in the Jewish faith. They arranged dates for Joel with Jewish women. They did not even want to hear Vickie’s name.

“The first time they met Vickie they liked her, because she’s a very likable person,” Joel said. “But as soon as they realized we were talking about marriage, their attitude switched one hundred and eighty degrees.”

“They thought it was okay as long as he didn’t marry me,” Vickie said.

“He could have lived with me, and disgraced me, and it wouldn’t have mattered. It would have been okay as long as he didn’t marry me.”

During a long separation, when Joel was in New York doing his internship and Vickie was still in Washington, D.C finishing her college degree, Joel realized his feelings for Vickie were more important to hIm than his parents’ disapproval. But Vickie insisted they not marry until his parents gave their consent, which was required under BahT‘1 Law.

“I wanted very much for us to be married,” Vickie said. “I couldn’t Imagine going through life without Joel. Yet I didn’t resent his parents. I wanted them to accept me, and there was no way I’d let hostility come between us. I went out of my way to be pleasant and loving toward them. His parents are truly good, kind, generous people , and I could tell it bothered them that they couldn’t find it in themselves to accept me.”

Realizing how committed Joel and Vickie were to each other, his parents finally gave their consent. “We were very strong,” Vickie said.

“People could sense it. Our relationship grew very solid from all the tests we were put through. We could sustain.”

When Joel’s father fell ill from cancer, he gave up the last of his reservations and treated Vickie as a daughter. They’re now grateful they waited for his parents to come around, for it gave them time to get to know each other better, in hard times as well as good.

“I think you have to be very sure that what you are doing is right,” Vickie said. “You really have to believe that we are all one people, and that interracial marriage is a very positive thing. It’s more than just two people who find one another and fall in love. By your marriage you are saying, We are all one humanity, and we can grow closer together, even to the point of marrying. And our children will be the fruit of that common humanity that brought us together.”” L.

“People don’t bother us because we don’t present ourselves as meek little wlinpettes,” Joel said. “We don’t ask for anybody’s permission.

We are accepted because we accept ourselves. We’re here to accept you, we’re not asking you to accept us.”

Though white parents usually resist when their son announces his intention to marry a black woman, one couple we know has had no problem at all. When Eric Asimov, nephew of science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, told his father he had a girlfriend named Jackie Lee whom he’d met at Wesleyan University, his father asked, “What is she, Chinese?”