I stood near the door, where there’s glass, and got a real good look at him. What struck me about him, to tell the truth, is that he looked happy. In fact, he was probably the happiest-looking person I’ve ever seen. You could just sort of feel it rolling off of him. And when he’d paid for the plate of chitlins, all nicely wrapped up and everything, he kind of waved at us back in the kitchen—where I didn’t think he could even see us—and left. And we felt like maybe we wasn’t such dogs, after all, for loving our collard greens, chitlins and hog maws, and our cole slaw and potato salad.
PASSION
There is a languor I associate with being in love, and having satisfying sex. A dreamy look in the eye, a looseness in the joints. A dazed expression, even in the face of danger. And danger that summer was everywhere. Violence, everywhere. Pain and suffering, everywhere. Heroism too, everywhere. Knowing this, we stayed in bed a lot, doing our part to make it all real at the most basic level: making love to each other, we worshiped the miracle of what was possible.
The first time, though, was awkward. And why not? We made love in Carolyn’s apartment, where I stayed, sleeping on a fold-up cot in her small living room. I think it was bad because she was in her room asleep. Or was she? It is hard now to imagine that we were so desperate that we might have done this. Invaded her space in this way. Our only excuse, perhaps, is that in such a violent, racially polarized city we had nowhere else to go. Going with you to your room so shortly after meeting would have felt brazen, presumptuous. You also had a roommate. I was shocked by the intense heat of your body, by the profusion of hair on your chest, your wide shoulders and gentle hands. Even though the sex was off, our breathing together was not, and it was the perfect harmony of our breaths that I fell asleep, after you left, thinking about.
It wasn’t long before we were trying to explain to each other what it was we did. You were taking depositions from dispossessed sharecroppers who’d opposed their bosses and been thrown off the land. I was doing freelance movement work, but really I was writing a novel that required a closer look at the South. You read the writing I had done so far, in a notebook I carried with me everywhere, and became my champion, instantly. Your work, defending and empowering black people who might have been my parents, my family, endeared you to me, effortlessly. We were a couple: black and white to the people who saw us pass by on the street, but already Sweetheart and Darling to ourselves.
It really did seem at times as if our love made us bulletproof, or perhaps invisible. When we walked down the street together the bullets that were the glances of the racist onlookers seemed turned back and sent hurtling off into outer space. The days passed in a blur of hard work, constant awareness of violence, and unutterable tenderness between ourselves. At the end of the long afternoons listening to the sorrows of your clients, we crept close to the cranky air conditioner in your room—just by the bed—and read poetry to each other. Yeats, Walt Whitman, cummings. We spent the humid evenings learning to give pleasure to each other. Soon, our shaky start in Carolyn’s living room was forgotten. One day we made love during a rousing afternoon thunderstorm. Torrents of rain cascaded down the streets; the air was blue with it. Lightning streaked our bodies with silver. Nature supports what is, we felt, as our bodies moved passionately together. We were a part of it, no questions asked. When I left for New York, you promised to join me, later, at the end of summer. Your last year of law school was coming up; I was going back to the cheap, cockroach-infested apartment and typewriter-on-the-kitchen-table life of the beginning writer.
HANDLING IT
I think I am handling it all very well. Preparing to see you again, to actually engage in meaningful talk, after so many years. Our Child has arranged for us to meet with her and her therapist in a brownstone in Upper Manhattan. Because it is the beginning of summer and already quite warm, I am wearing a long, thin cotton dress and a light jacket. Something about the dress feels strange, and I do not realize what it is until I get out of the taxi at the therapist’s door. I have put it on backward. You have arrived early and are sitting in the therapist’s reception room. We say hello, and embrace briefly. I duck into the toilet and swiftly rearrange my dress. When I come out you and Our Child and the therapist are seated, chatting.
For years Our Child has been the only visible, public evidence of our years together. She sits tall and poised. Twenty-five, and used to making her own way in the world. Her only obstacle, she feels, is a certain ignorance about who her parents really are. I ask that the seating be rearranged so that you are seated between us. You are compliant, and as you move across me to take your seat I look at you. You are heavier, your hair is thinning. I sense both weariness and wariness. I believe this is the first time you’ve set foot in a psychiatrist’s office. Your brown eyes smile, and I can now see that it is your eyes that smile in situations like this—that you feel threatened by but are determined to endure—not you. I sense an unsmiling you carefully concealed behind your face. The same unsmiling you who smiled when the racists called you “Jew lawyer,” and reminded you they’d already lynched two “outside agitator Jews from New York” shortly before you arrived to work in Mississippi. In your stylish, rumpled suit and sensible tie, you look like the successful corporate lawyer and devoted nuclear family head in Westchester County that you now are.
It is difficult to believe we were once married to each other. Or that when we were, you would occasionally play poker all night, sleep much of the day, and get to the office just as most offices were closing, at five o’clock. Or that, routinely, you would go to work around noon and stay at the office until late at night. Sometimes I would visit you there, and we’d have a picnic on your desk around midnight. And work together, snuggle and kiss well into morning. Like Our Child, who inherited this trait from you, so that getting her out of bed before noon is a chore, you are a night person. Or you were a night person. Apparently now you are not. You get up, according to Our Child, at the crack of dawn, catch a train and come into Manhattan at an hour you and I would have been still cuddled up together in bed, oblivious of the time. I remember how shocked I was, when she told me this. You, shaved and dressed, on a moving train, headed for New York City, before ten in the morning? Maybe even before nine? My heart ached for you.
The therapist wants to know what it is we want from the two-hour session Our Child has arranged for. I wonder this myself. In my case, it is some kind of closure. My mind flashes on the last brief conversation we had after receiving verification of our divorce. We’d left the federal building in which severance had occurred—whether in Brooklyn or Manhattan, I no longer recalled—and stood, after ten years of marriage, suddenly free, legally, of each other. And, because we were now legally free of each other, I was feeling very close. The humor with which I was able to see so much of our life together, suddenly returned. I smiled at you, gave a sigh of relief and said: “Well, that’s over. Let’s go somewhere and have a cup of tea.” But your face reflected none of my lightheartedness. You were morose. “No thank you,” you said. “I have to get back to the office.” It was a response emblematic of our problem. My face fell. However, still determined to prove to myself at least that divorce need not mean the end of simple civility, I stuck out my hand. You reluctantly, it seemed to me, took it. We shook hands woodenly, like a couple of strangers, and you turned and disappeared down the street. And I must have said, to the emotions crowding around my chest: Get away from me.
Our Child is speaking. What she wants, she says, is to better understand something that has always puzzled her. She has been the go-between all these years. Eighteen, or so. What she has noticed about each of us when we speak of the other is a kind of wistfulness. We seem to her bemused, often. Puzzled, frequently. Not quite sure ourselves what happened to us. The moment she describes us in this way, I see that it is the truth, and I feel an enormous wave of pity for us, her parents. What did happen to us? It seems now a question well worth considering.
You are sitting, still smiling, yo
ur legs crossed. The therapist is looking from you to me. What did happen? she asks. You are silent, waiting, as if you’d also like to know. Two hours will go quickly, I know. I decide to take the plunge.
I tell her about our courtship and early marriage. The sense we both had of finding, and bonding with, a miraculously compatible mate. The long years of trying to accommodate ourselves to a violent, and often boring, environment. The isolation. The racism. The sexism. The slow breakdown of my spirit after I’d finished this novel or that, this story or that, this poem or that, and looked about and found little to amuse, divert or sustain me. Of your retreat into the secluded quiet of your office, night after night. The loneliness. The old conflict resurfacing between loyalty to “other” and loyalty to myself.
It was the same struggle I’d faced with my mother, I said. I always understood her work was important. She had to be away from home in order for there to be a home. It was her earnings that meant food, clothes, a toothbrush. A roof over our heads. I dared not complain. And yet I missed her with every fiber of my being. I died each day she was away. Yet I could say nothing. It was the same in my marriage. Each day my husband went out, often in danger, to slay the dragons of racism and ignorance that proliferated in Mississippi. Many, many people depended on him. More than I did, I sometimes thought. How could I say I also needed him?
The therapist is a middle-aged refugee from Latvia. She has a thoughtful face and a faint accent. The language of her body says: This is a space in which it is safe to express. Her large Irish wolfhound lies in front of the tiled fireplace, asleep. What a difference such a person, such an ear, would have made in our lives all those years ago, I think. And flash on the five-mile bike ride that had taken me for several weeks to the office of Dr. Hickerson, who casually prescribed Valium, and sent me numbly careening on my way. She did not care enough to suggest perhaps we were simply trying to do too much. That we were throwing our young lives against a system that had crushed lovers and idealists for centuries.
I sigh, into the quiet room. I think, I say, that Mississippi, living interracially, attempting to raise a child, attempting to have a normal life, wore us out. I think we were exhausted. In our tiredness we turned away from each other. Next to me on the couch, I feel you relax. Perhaps you anticipated blame.
But how can I blame you for being human? For wearing out. For running on empty eventually. Just as I did. Now you begin to talk. You mention how, in the final days in Mississippi, you became afraid to leave me alone in the house. That one day you locked the door behind you and I accused you of locking me in. That was the day, you say, you knew we had to leave. I don’t remember this particular day, but I certainly do recall the feeling of being incarcerated. Solitary confinement might be ideal for certain forms of mental creativity, but it is horrible for someone who craves a social world, whose spirit yearns for the refreshment of companionship. Between “projects,” my books, there were days that contained only a scream into the silence. I combated this by teaching at two of the local black colleges, for practically no money. I planted trees and flowers. I learned to shop in a way that took hours rather than minutes. I joined an exercise club, to which my slim, bored neighbor Phyllis and I went each week. I quilted, I began making a rug. I actually did needlepoint. I talked to my mother on the phone.
Our Child does not remember any of the happiness that surrounded her arrival in our house. And yet, it is this happiness for which she yearns. It is the security of two doting parents, adoringly attentive, adoringly present, that is the quality of comfort she misses. She has become angry at us over the years because no matter what she has tried, this quality of being completely loved by both of us, together, has remained beyond her reach. I feel sad for her. I see the little girl running to the door at the sound of her father’s car, a huge brown and black Toronado that was always, because of its incongruous stylishness, comical for a civil rights lawyer. I see her father fly out from around the car, running to meet her wet and openhearted kisses, her widespread, chubby arms. I see him down on one knee, lifting her against his chest, his wide face transparent with love. I see myself standing, smiling, in the doorway. In his eagerness to embrace and kiss me as well, his thin lips are already stuck out. He is the only white person in the neighborhood at this hour of the day, but even if I think of this it is with amusement. The three of us collide in the doorway, laughing to think we have outwitted racism and racist laws one more time and lived to love another day.
On such an upbeat day I would have worked well, whether at typewriter, quilting or flower planting. Our Child and I would have played. She would have napped. I would have shopped, driven out for a walk around the reservoir, taught. But most important, you would have come home in time for dinner, and would perhaps spend the evening at home, not, as was often the case, in the office, where one or another case of a black family being terrorized by whites would have called you, immediately after dinner, and compelled you to work on it through the night.
I have a question to ask you. I look at the therapist to see if it is okay. She nods. Why do you work so much? You look surprised by the question. I don’t know, you say. I’ve always done it. I know this is true. I remember how, when we met, you were still selling life insurance—a lucrative job finagled from a friend of the family, by your mother—which you’d done for years, even though you were a law student and so young. You also taught swimming at the law school and took care of the pool. In fact, you were poor. You owned two pairs of slacks, one blue and one yellow, and the shiny hazel-colored suit in which you were married. You owned two ties and half a dozen shirts. Two pairs of shoes. I too could pack everything I owned, including my typewriter, in a couple of suitcases. When we finally moved in together, in your room overlooking Washington Square Park, there was an absence of clutter simply because our possessions were so few. A bedspread doubled as a tablecloth, a folding table doubled as a desk. Your single bed seemed fine and comfortable for the two of us. We shared a bathroom with your suitemate.
I wanted to scream at you, as I’d wanted to scream at my mother: Come back! Don’t go to work! I miss you! I am in danger while you are gone! But now it is too late to scream this, even though I finally understand this is exactly what I should have screamed. We were divorced seventeen years ago. I cannot stop the tears, however, and they roll down my cheeks, just as they did after you closed the door to our house, those lonely mornings so many years ago. I take tissues from the box at my left. Glancing down as I wipe my face, I see your well-shod foot. The cuffs of your designer slacks. We have both done phenomenally well, materially. It strikes me suddenly as astonishing. Because it was never something we set out to do. Today I own large, beautiful houses, overcompensation for the shacks in which I was raised; and when I travel, my hotel suite is nearly as large as our old house. You have a powerful New York law practice, and the best of whatever Westchester County has to offer. There is a rumor that you play golf. I confess that I can’t quite imagine this. Both of us have been hard workers all our lives, and yet much of what we have today—at least speaking for myself—seems to have fallen into our laps. Or do all poor people who become successful in America feel like this?
What is this road on which there is so much beauty and so much pain? So much love and so much suffering? Such surprise. How can it be that we have lost each other all these years? That even though it took my mother thirteen years to die, you never sent her a card. It would have been easier for me to believe you murdered someone than that this could happen. Was it because, on meeting you, she hurt your feelings by identifying you with the only label her fundamentalist Christian upbringing gave her for Jews: Christ-killer. Or that she said, even though she knew better, because I had told her you were only twenty-two, that you seemed like an old man. Once again I look down at your stylish Italian leather shoes. Even your feet have changed, I think, recalling the black “space” shoes you used to wear because your Pisces feet (fish feet) were so tender and often sore. You appeared to roll a bit
as you walked, in an attempt to alleviate the discomfort; perhaps this is what struck her as odd, as old. An old man’s walk. But it was like her, in any case, to be critical of whomever I brought home. Except for Porter, the young man I fell in love with when I was six and became intimate with when I was sixteen. This was her son-in-law, the one she chose, the one she wanted, though he and I separated as friends when I was eighteen. She never said about him, as she did about every other boy or man: He has a homely face, you will soon tire of it; his feet are slightly splayed, his wrists are too thin, he will be bald before he’s thirty. I was dismayed, of course, that she could not really see you. That my father could not. My whole family could not. To them, you were for many years merely a white male blur wearing clothing. No matter how gentle you appeared, you struck an ancient terror in their hearts. To them, all white people had a vampire quality, they were seen as people who devour, who suck dry. They waited for this to happen to me. And there was the awful history of black women and white men.
Our Child is curious about her birth, though I have told her about it many times. She turns to you and says: I understand you were away somewhere when Mama went into labor. You tell her the story of being in court, when the word came. Of arguing a school desegregation case before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. Of being told by one of the judges that having planted the seed, you didn’t have to be present for the harvest. But that you hadn’t listened, but hastened home, to accompany me to the hospital. And that, while I was still in the hospital, your mother also came, and set up camp in our house. At last accepting that there was another woman in your life. But there was no one but you to visit me in the hospital—or am I forgetting someone? Perhaps our friend Barbara, perhaps the secretaries from your office? In any case, I only remember you. Your pale, stricken face and fear at the sight of blood. Your apparent helplessness. My attention so focused on the pain that seemed about to drown me, that I could not offer anything except muffled silence. For my gynecologist I had chosen the only woman doctor—it was rumored she was lesbian—in the hospital. Her bedside manner turned out to be chilly and abrupt. She waited until the last possible moment to relieve me of pain—at the precise moment I felt the pain might be turning into its opposite, a completion for which my body has never ceased to yearn. Her hands had not an ounce of gentleness. Her episiotomy unnecessarily savage. No one could believe we were there together, married, to have our neither black nor white child. We were a major offense. And yet, the side of this experience that I have consciously remembered all these years is the look in Our Child’s eyes when she emerged into our world: a long, searching look at you, then an equally inquiring glance at me. It shocked us; it felt so much like an old acquaintance reentering a room we happened to be in. And I remember the red roses, dozens of them, behind which your beaming face, later in my room, appeared. The black nurses delighted in the discomfiture of the white ones, who could not, as the black ones could not, fathom such behavior. Most white fathers of black children in the South never even saw the mothers pregnant, not to mention actually saw the child after birth. The white nurses were soon captivated by your charm and good looks, casting you in the role of a contemporary Rhett Butler, but of course bemoaning the fact that you had chosen the wrong Scarlett. We were the nightmare their mothers had feared, the hidden delight generations of their fathers enjoyed. We were what they had been taught was an impossibility, as unlikely as a two-headed calf: a happy interracial couple, married (and they knew this was still illegal in their state), having a child, whom we obviously cherished, together.