Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (6 page)

“Why don’t you give me some?” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“How come you give him some but not nobody else?”

I looked beyond him and saw Tiki and a group of young blacks standing in a circular pool of light under a street lamp. It was then that I realized why Tiki had insisted on getting inside the house, turning on my bedroom light, turning it off and waiting. He had fooled his companions. I slammed the door in the boy’s face.

The summer that followed was painful for me. My friends no longer called, and when they saw me coming they turned the other way. They made jokes about my family, particularly my mother, who subscribed to Ebony so she could better understand her black pupils and would reprimand anyone who used the word tter in her presence. I spent my time alone, bewildered, wondering what I had done wrong. Nothing I said seemed to change my friends’ poor opinion of me for having been kissed by a black boy. I did not tell my parents what had happened out of fear of being scolded: I was not supposed to ride my bike to the candy store after dark.

Fortunately we moved from Texas to Minnesota in August, and I was able to start a new life free from the stigma of being an NL.

We settled in a predominantly white suburb of Minneapolis with the idyllic name of Golden Valley, next to New Hope and Crystal.

Everywhere I looked I saw whiteness: white people, white snow, white sidewalks, Scandinavians with hair so blond it looked white.

Everyone’s last name seemed to end in “son” or “sen”-Anderson, Danielson, Swensen, Erikson. Suddenly there was no “color problem.” I forgot about race. It was taken for granted that whites went to the Dinosaur rollerskating rink on Saturday night and blacks on Friday.

I knew there were sections of Minneapolis where blacks and Native Americans lived, but I was in the suburbs where it is easy to forget inner-city problems like poverty, violence, and racial strife.

The only time I had to deal with black men was in encountering them on my way to Blake School, when I transferred from the suburban bus to the city bus in front of a windowless building on Hennepin and Twelfth called Rap-N-Romp. To avoid them I waited for the Number Six in a nearby post office, but even there I was not safe from the mildly retarded white man who daily tried to guess the color of my underwear.

I had heard of the 4Minnesota Pipeline”-the network of pimps who lure young blonds of Nordic descent from their wholesome lives in the Midwest, make them emotionally dependent on them or physically dependent on their cocaine or heroin, then funnel them into New York City to work as prostitutes. I was wary of all black men, but particularly those in flashy clothes who muttered lewd comments about my “lookin’ good, mama.”

For a long time I succeeded in forgetting that unwelcomed first kiss.

The taboo against associating with blacks was now firmly entrenched in my mind. I thought any white girl who dated a black boy was throwing herself away like a piece of garbage. She was crazy and needed a shrink. Who, in her right mind, would give up all her white friends and the love of her family for a black boy?

I took racial segregation for granted. It seemed only natural that blacks should stay with blacks and whites with whites. People were more comfortable among their own kind, and I was no exception. I did not miss Texas, did not miss the race riots, the “nigger jokes,” the underwater assailants, the terror of being part of the intimidated minority at school. Though I had adopted liberal, democratic political views from my parents and believed in the ideal of racial equality, I saw nothing wrong in having only two or three blacks in my private high school of four hundred. I felt it was justified by the fact that only two percent of the population of Minnesota was black.

I did not become aware of the black population in Minneapolis until I was seventeen. After doing some Christmas shopping downtown one day, I paused in front of the Orpheum Theater on Hennepin Avenue to examine a poster portraying a young white manor was he black? The poster read PRINCE-Live in Concert. I had vaguely heard of the twenty-one-year-old musician, knew this was his home town, and knew he had attended Central High, but I had never heard his music. I had no idea his latest hit album was called DirtyMind.

Curious, I bought two tickets, one for myself and one for a friend of mine, a painfully shy and sheltered Jewish doctor’s son who was cocaptain with me on the Blake cross-country ski team. The concert was like nothing I had imagined. I looked around the crowded concert hall and realized that, as far as I could see, my friend and I were the only whites.

Prince strutted around the stage, nude except for boots and leopard-skin bikini bottoms, moving his narrow hips back and forth like a piston. His bare-chested guitar player wore skin-tight black leather pants. The crowd was shouting something in time to the music, and I strained to hear what it was. With amazement I realized they were shouting, “Head!” and that the entire song was about oral sex.

I could not comprehend the blatant passion, the explicit sexual vibrations emanating from the stage that ran like electricity through the sweating, clapping, chanting crowd. My Jewish friend gasped, blushed, and covered his face with his hands in embarrassment. He could hardly wait to get out of there. I, too, barely out of puberty, felt overwheimed by the bold and bacchanal celebration of sex, by the primal beat and hip thrusts, by the chanting and moaning that filled the cavernous theater. That night I concluded that blacks burned with superhuman sexual urges that made them dangerous, threatening, and far more capable of rape, incest, and adultery than whites.

The image of the black rapist, influenced subtly by TV images of black violence, became embedded in my mind. Like many white women, I began to see black men as predators, capable of horrendous acts of crime and passion. Many white women become paranoid around black men after they have been mugged, held at gun point, attacked, or sexually threatened by one; others grow to fear them simply out of rumors, the whispered warnings of their mothers, spouses, or boyfriends, and social innuendoes. Try as we may to be open-mmded, liberal, and accepting, I doubt there are many white women who can honestly say they have never felt uneasy or terrified at finding themselves alone in an elevator with a black man.

When I attended Brown University in the early 1980s, I never wondered why blacks sat on one side of the Ratty (the cafeteria) while whites sat on the other. I never considered taking a course in Afro-American studies; those, I thought, were for blacks. Only once did I set foot in the Third World Center, and I quickly retreated when I saw black faces look up and stare at me, as if demanding an explanation for my intrusion. I was intimidated by militant black fraternity members who marched single file around campus and had orders not to speak to whites. When I became interested in feminism and started using the library at the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center, I did not question the absence of black women.

It surprised me that so many students were arguing, shouting, gesticulating, and generally getting themselves all worked up and angry over the debate raging on campus about Third World Week-a special orientation week for minority students held at Brown each fall before white students arrive on campus. Many white students argued that Third World Week was unnecessary and contributed to campus segregation by allowing minorities to make friends with each other before whites arrived. Blacks retorted that they needed the extra week to prepare themselves mentally and emotionally for life at a predominantly white institution. I did not take a stand one way or the other. I was convinced that whites would inevitably befriend whites and blacks would stick with blacks, regardless of Brown’s orientation system.

Segregation was too deeply ingrained in all of us, both black and white, to be removed by eliminating or lengthening something called Third World Week.

I had many friends, but none of them was black. When one of my best friends, Carol Abizaid, told me she was attracted to a black man, I was horrified. Carol was a beautiful young woman of seventeen when I met her, the daughter of an American woman and a Lebanese businessman who had met at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She had the looks and build of a high-class model. She was raised in a huge house in Beirut until she was fourteen, grew up amid the booms and blasts of bombs and machine guns, and was often protected by armed guards. She spoke English to her mother, Arabic to her father and his friends, French to the maids, and Spanish to several of her relatives. When I first saw her she was driving a jeep around the Brown campus with a black Labrador puppy in her lap and her long brownish blond hair flying in the wind.

We became close friends. She lived with me at my parents’ home in Minnesota the summer after our freshman year. We roomed together sophomore year. The summer following our junior year, after I had spent a semester at the University of Budapest, I visited Carol in Paris, where she was livIng in the plush apartment of a vacationing couple. Carol wanted to be a professional dancer and was doing all the things such aspiring performers often do: She deprived herself of food, trained vigorously throughout the academic year, and took classes in Paris during the summer.

One day I was resting in the apartment after a tour of the Pom padou Art Center when Carol came home from dance class, threw herself onto the couch, gazed up at the ceiling and murmured, “He’s gorgeous.” She grinned.

“Who’s gorgeous?” I asked.

“A black dancer in my class.”

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know his name, but he’s exquisite. Huge, really built. I’ve never seen a finer specimen of manhood. You should see him move.

You can see every muscle in his legs, arms, abdomen… . And he speaks perfect French.”

I laughed and rolled my eyes. “You’ve got the hots for a black man?

Come on, Carol. You must be kidding.”

Carol had just broken up with the prototype allAmerican white male: an extremely handsome football player from Ohio with dark curly hair, a strong chin, and brown eyes capable of melting any woman’s heart. He had been the star running back for the Brown team, had been drafted by the New England Patriots, left football after a knee injury, and became a professional model for the Ford Agency in New York. He wrote long and heartfelt letters to Carol in Paris begging her to come back to Providence eariy My friend was beautiful, rich, and self-assured enough to have her pick of white men. Why in the world would she choose a black?

“He’s really beautiful,” Carol repeated, still gazing rapturously at the ceiling. “If you don’t believe me, stop by the studio and watch our dance rehearsal.”

Curiosity lured me to the dance studio. I walked through narrow streets in a section of Paris where stone buildings might have toppled over if they had not been so tightly wedged together, found the dance studio, and ascended a flight of dimly lit stairs. The smell of sweat and the rhythmic thudding of feet guided me to Carol’s class. I watched her bend, stretch, and leap with dozens of other dancers in time to piano music as the teacher shouted directions in French.

I spotted the black dancer. He was indeed a perfect example of physical fitness and moved with remarkable grace, but I still did not understand how Carol could find him sexually attractive. The energy he exuded and his dark skin made him seem alien, intimidating, and untouchable. I could not imagine kissing those big African lips or touching that wiry hair. As Carol and I walked toward the Metro, I teased her mercilessly for having a crush on a black man.

A short discussion I had once had with my father had deepened my aversion to black-white mixed couples and made me think Carol’s attraction to the dancer was perverse. One day in Minneapolis I asked my father about the mixed couples gathered at one end of Lake Calhoun.

The black men were thin, wore flashy clothes, and drove large cars like Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals, while the women were usually large peroxide blonds with big hips and double chins. My father told me the women were most likely prostitutes and the men were probably pimps or drug dealers.

This made me hope that Carol would forget her strange crush and return to “normal” once we got back to Providence. But upon her return to Brown, Carol became completely infatuated with a tall and muscular biracial student named Paul.

“Why do you find black men so attractive?” I asked.

“Because I admire blacks,” Carol replied. “They have to struggle a lot harder than whites. They have more strength of character. They weren’t fed from silver spoons all their lives like so many students here. But don’t get me wrong-I don’t feel sorry for them. A lot of whites go out with black people because they pity them and want to fix their lives for them. It puts the white partner in a position of superiority. It’s racist. That’s not what my relationship with Paul is about.

I feel I can relate to him because we both live in two different worlds.

He’s both black and white. I’m both American and Lebanese. I feel closer to people who have multicultural backgrounds. We share a bicultural experience, which is both a strength and a struggle.”

I scrutinized Carol from a distance. In a matter of months her boyfriend, roommate, and friends were all black or biracial. She often loaned her Toyota to her friends, and since I was accustomed to waving whenever I saw her car approach, I found myself greeting a car filled with blacks I did not know. I wondered why she let people take advantage of her and her possessions. Carol and I had been very close our first three years at Brown, but her attraction to blacks drove a wedge between us. I thought she was just going through a phase and would soon come back to the white world, which was safe and free of conflict and oblivIous to racial tensions. I thought she was dating a black just to get back at her mother, with whom she constantly argued.

As graduation neared I spent more time with Carol and her boyfriend Paul. As I got to know her roommate Ellen, a kind and sensitive young biracial woman, I understood how Carol could feel very connected to her. I admired Carol for bridging the gap between the races with such honesty of emotion. She stayed in Providence to do graduate work in African cultures and be with Paul, and I moved to New York to attend graduate school at Columbia.