It's All Love

by Marita Golden

  God, You knew I wouldn't have cheated on my fiance, but I'm glad You put the temptation there at least. Finally I realized the man I was engaged to wasn't the right one. I mean, if seeing Mike in his coolness could make me dizzy, maybe the man I was about to marry wasn't going to maintain my interest for a lifetime. God, I love Your subtlety.

  Thank You for moving my fiance out the way without drama or trauma for either of us. That was lovely. The way You eased Mike back into the picture was brilliant. Sending Avis to make it plain was a blessing.

  I have been extremely happy with this brother. I mean from the time we started dating in May 2006 till the time we got married seven months later, it's felt like a hot minute. The fact that we met ten years earlier, and have seen each other in so many different situations and configurations, gives what we have now more depth, and we have a more mature perspective on ourselves and our love. Over the years You were preparing him and preparing me, right? I mean, the whole courtship and first year of marriage felt like an extended day at an amusement park. You know I consider this period my hundred days of bliss though technically, it was more than a hundred days. I call it a hundred days because it's been 100 percent fulfilling in ways I had not even imagined.

  God. I used to meditate on Whitney Houston's “One Moment in Time,” and I must've moaned a hundred bars of Sade's “Please Send Me Someone to Love,” but when You were ready to bring it to me, You brought it in a mighty way.

  You know the whirlwind romance was necessary because if I'd thought things through like I usually do, I wouldn't have gotten married before I was about fifty and feeling financially secure. That was my grand plan.

  You remember Mike's response when I told him that plan? “I'll help you get there,” he said. Wow. Here I was explaining why I wouldn't consider a serious relationship with him at the time. I'd wasted too much time dallying around, and now, before it was too late, I would focus all my concentration on my work and building financial security. “I'll help you,” he said, and he meant it! I mean he stepped up offering to help in ways I certainly did not expect. God!

  It totally surprised me how we got to talking about marriage so soon. I remember riding in his car, coming from house hunting in Baltimore one evening, and I was discussing buying a house big enough for both of us in case we found that we'd want to get more serious in the future. Mike had a house big enough for both of us, but I was determined to do my own thing because, still bruised from the past, I was convinced I simply was not good in relationships.

  God, I can still remember us walking and talking around the Lake Arbor Country Club, me telling him, “I'm real good at friendships. I have some wonderful friendships with men, and they're really good men. I'm just not good in the romance department. It never works out.” And he said, “Maybe it's not you. You just hadn't met the right man.”

  You remember the smile that spread across my face as my insides warmed? “Maybe it wasn't me?” God, You were awesome to send such a message at such a time. I remember sitting under the pavilion near the Lake Arbor Country Club pool chatting through the evening like I could sit there forever. I remember feeling like this man was “home.” At that moment I knew I could be anywhere with Mike and it would be the perfect place to be.

  God, it's amazing how You made Mike decide to propose to me on a day of personal significance to me. He called for a date on Wednesday. He had it all planned. We'd go to a fancy restaurant to celebrate my new job teaching journalism at one of the top J-schools in the country. His invitation was tempting because the brother took me to the finest restaurants, but I was sticking to my schedule. I needed to go straight home from my full-time job running a small newspaper, take thirty minutes to eat leftovers, thirty minutes to power walk around the block a few times, two hours to work on the epilogue for my new book, and an hour to work on a syllabus for the class I would begin teaching in a couple weeks. But those were just small details in Your grand plan. He asked about Saturday, and I declined, planning to spend the whole day working on my book. But God, You, in all Your brilliance, You had another plan.

  Remember how I went back and forth from my computer to the window because the weather was too nice to stay indoors? Remember how I frantically called Mike, telling him I could go out after all and telling him I wanted to go to a free concert in the park to hear Blue Magic rather than go out to a fancy restaurant? Remember him asking if this park was safe enough for him to drive his BMW and me telling him to drive the Matrix instead? “I'm not tryna get a brother jacked hanging with me in the hood,” I joked. I'm still impressed he was able to pull together a complete picnic dinner on such short notice. I was glad my big plaid yellow and white blanket was clean for the occasion, since I used it whenever I went to the park to relax with a pen and a pad.

  It brings a smile to my face, God. Just remembering that day makes me smile. Mike came through the door handing me a greeting card, as usual, and I gave him one in return. I remember melting as I read the one he gave me: “Love is a Mess! It messes with your schedule and your personal space (not to mention your house). It messes with your head and your good excuses and your better judgment and all your previous resolutions. Love messes with your hidden stuff and your lost hopes, your common sense and your sense of direction.” Then his scribbled note: “Looking forward to making the mess of a lifetime with you.”

  I remember my surprise when I turned back to face him and he was standing there with a tiny black velvet box.

  “Well?” was all he said. There was a moment of silence.

  Everything was still for a moment. God, You know if there was dust floating in the air between us, it froze. He opened the box. My eyes popped. He extended his hand. I nervously accepted the box and plopped down on the sofa and sighed, “Wow.”

  God, You know why I was surprised. I mean, when we looked at rings that once, I figured he might plan to propose in a year or so, certainly not before Christmas. And You remember, the diamonds I'd asked to try were much smaller than the one he bought. “Wow … um … wow.” I didn't know what else to say.

  “Is that a yes?” he asked.

  “What else would I say?”

  God, I get a smile every time I think about that day, him cupping my face in his hands to seal the deal with a kiss, me feeling goofy and giddy the rest of the evening.

  You know I enjoyed more than 100 days of bliss between the time he proposed and the day we got married. And You know in our first 365 days of marriage, I enjoyed more than 100 days of bliss. I cried once or twice—but wouldn't let him see it. And I upset him a few times too. But it's been in no way as tumultuous as in my younger years. God, I'm thanking You for my growth. I've learned to love again, trust again, and bond again. I learned to surrender to Your will.

  Just yesterday I was looking at our wedding photos, amazed again, at how You pulled it off. A destination wedding on an island, coordinated in a matter of months? You really are an awesome God. Bringing his family and friends together with mine for a four-day nonstop party was delightful, but the wedding at the oceanside with sunrays spilling from above and clear blue waters crashing ashore was a blessing beyond my expectations.

  Having my mother sing Barbra Streisand's “Evergreen” for us, then Mike telling me Streisand was his first wife's favorite singer, was added confirmation that You had Your grand design on this union all along. You know, I had suspected something the first time I went to Mike's house and saw that he had kept his beloved late wife's autographed books. Never mind that he simply had not known what else to do with the books but keep them. It appeared to me that he valued books as much as I had. It appeared to me that he had been prepared to be my partner. God, do You remember how delighted I felt learning of his love for jazz since my father is a jazz musician and our relationship had grown apart? Talk about restoration! So much restoration was unfolding here.

  God, You know when love shines in our life, it illuminates our darkest spaces, corners where our valuables have collected dust. With this burst
of love between us, I fell in love with my own family again.

  I was reminded of so many pearls of wisdom from my mother. You know Mother used to tell my sisters and I that we could have a fairy-tale marriage like the ones we watched on The Brady Bunch where the mom and dad never fought, never even fussed. But we'd have to work hard for it.

  God, this first year of marriage felt like a fairy tale unlike any I'd seen on TV or read about in books, and I thank You. I realized Mother was right. I worked hard at settling into Mike's home and adjusting to my new life as part of a couple, but the “work” was so much fun it didn't feel like work at all.

  I knew it would be important to spend quality time together especially in the first years, and I knew I would have to make this marriage my priority, but doing so did not feel like work because it was all so playful.

  I enjoyed the cotton candy—coated banter we enjoyed many mornings.

  “Good morning, my beautiful wife,” he'd begin playfully.

  “Good morning, my wonderful husband, with the deep dimples.”

  “Good morning, my beautiful wife, with the pretty eyes and the skills to run a whole newspapah—even if it's full of typos!”

  “Good morning, my wonderful husband, with the deep dimples and pretty gray eyes who can pay the mortgage laying home all day on his ass—'cause he put in his time!”

  “Good morning, my beautiful wife, with the pretty eyes who can run a whole newspapah—never mind the typos—and be a best-selling aufah cause she gon be on the Ofra show!”

  God, I thank You for the scents of our first year of marriage—the cinnamon or berry air fesheners I used to make our home welcoming as we entered, the smell of his favorite cologne or my favorite scented soap, the scent of waffles or fried potatoes I cooked Saturday mornings or pulled barbeque chicken he prepared for a special occasion.

  I thank You for making our loving more than sexual. Isn't it funny how my attempts at sexiness tickled him sometimes? He laughed at my striptease.

  “You can't do a strip dance cheesin',” he'd say.

  God, I could go on thanking You for days—for small gestures and huge transformations. I could thank You for moving me to a space where I could joke about not having to fight over toothpaste because he could have his on his side of the double sink, and I could have mine on my side. I could thank You for not having to argue about whose turn it is to cook because we can afford to eat out as often as we want or need to. I can thank You for the total transformation in my life.

  I thank You for teaching me to measure a man by the depth of his happiness and the extent of his joy rather than by the size of his professional or financial success or by the intensity of his sexual prowess. You know for the longest time I thought sexual chemistry was sufficient, but Mike came with that and so much more. He makes me laugh ofien and You know the laughter makes me feel better than I have since I was a kid.

  Some days I feel so good, and so blessed with this wonderful man, I want to call his mother or father and say, “You done good.” But I don't call because I don't want to sound like a suck-up. Some days I call my girlfriends to testify, “This brother is the bomb.” I share this joy with them so they can remind me of it when we are faced with the inevitable storms.

  Many days I count the blessings; I write them down too. I used to pray Sade's lyrics, “If it's not asking too much, please send me someone to love.” But God, You sent a lovable man who could also love me! I thank You for our ordinary meals and our birthday feasts. I thank You for the gifts we exchange on holidays and presents we pick up for each other while out shopping. I thank You for our silly mornings and even the somber days that make the other days that much brighter.

  What a mighty wonder You're working in my life. God, You know life was serious business for me up until now since I grew up believing life is one long test of faith in and obedience to You. I thank You for this reprieve. I thank You for Mike, and for a million more days of bliss.

  A Shared History

  W. RALPH EUBANKS

  WHEN A RESTAURANT on the Eastern Shore of Maryland made an attempt to refuse service to my wife, Colleen, and me less than twelve hours after I slipped an engagement ring on her finger, the message was clear: A Black man and a White woman should not be together. The White waitress's pursed lips could barely disguise her disdain. The Black kitchen help shot stern “You should know better” stares with their folded arms. A deafening silence hovered over the room.

  In spite of it all, we demanded service that morning, and we got it. That moment served to bond our love rather than fulfill its intended purpose, which was to chip away at our relationship or at least make us question moving forward with it. Years later this incident is part of our shared history, something remembered on anniversaries or recounted to our children. Someday I hope to tell our grandchildren about that experience to remind them of the strength of the love my wife and I have for each other.

  The slings and arrows faced by my wife and me pale in comparison with those faced by my own grandparents, who were also an interracial couple. The assumptions, accusations, and stereotypes were stronger and more dominant in American culture in 1915 than they were in 1988. On that steamy July morning of our engagement, at least we had the right to demand service in that restaurant. Faced with the same circumstances, my grandparents probably would have faced jail or a beating. In spite of it all, the marriage of my grandparents, Jim Richardson, a White man, and Edna Howell, a Black woman, endured for over twenty years. Now, two generations later, I'm trying to figure out how their love survived, what bonded them to each other given their life in the Jim Crow South.

  Jim and Edna's story is one I want to know better and want my children to understand. They need to know that their parents didn't get the freedom to marry on their own. There were people like my grandparents, their great-grandparents, who paved our way. But no love letters or diaries survive that document their life. It's through family stories and oral history that I have begun to piece their life together. As I stitch together the stories, at the same time I have to pick through the judgments made by those who tell the stories, since remnants of the cultural labels of the past are still very much with us.

  Until I decided to find out more about them, I knew my grandparents only through what I overheard family members say about them. My grandmother died when my mother was seven, and my grandfather left this world exactly six months before I was born. For most of my life, my grandparents were spirits rather than flesh-and-blood people with day-to-day lives. Consequently, the stories I overheard spoke of these two people in deified tones. They weren't real. With no pictures to imagine them, I made up my own. Of course, in my mind both of my grandparents were Black like me, perhaps one light and one dark, like my own parents. Then something happened that made my vision of my grandparents change.

  Late one Friday night, when I was sixteen, when my parents thought I was asleep, I heard my father say to my mother, “The hardest thing I ever did was to ask a White man to marry his daughter.” Then there was a pause, as my father took a drag on his ever-present Salem cigarette. “And I'm not sorry that I had to do the asking. It's all been worth it.”

  The two of them laughed tenderly, which I felt in their voices since I could not see the expressions on their faces. At the time, I was an innocent sixteen-year-old, lying awake in a room filled with boyhood toys, model airplanes, and blanketed by naivete. Though I tried to listen in as my parents talked into the night about how they had forged ahead with their marriage in spite of different backgrounds, I remember almost nothing of their Chivas Regal— and nicotine-fueled discussion. Rather, puzzlement filled the air of my room like the smoke from my parents’ cigarettes and crept into my brain as I attempted to process that my mother's much-loved father was a White man.

  My puzzlement that night more than thirty years ago led me to make assumptions about my grandparents and what their life and relationship must have been like, much like the people I encountered in that restaurant soon
after my engagement. And like those people on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, I based my assumptions on the racial lore of the South: stereotypes of White men who held Black women in subservient positions and sexual bondage, Black women who were victims, and the “tragic mulatto” children born from that relationship. The traditions of the South were molded by the dominant White culture and passed on to Black culture to instill fear. Up until that moment they were tightly instilled in me, though in my innocence at the time I did not know it. Even as elements of cultural imprinting flooded my mind, somehow I knew none of those assumptions that sprang to mind about my grandparents’ life were true. The truth lay somewhere in the stories I had heard while I was growing up.

  All my life I had always heard about how much my grandfather, Jim, loved my grandmother, Edna. And I knew that when Edna died, Jim held the family together in the best way that he could. When I learned he was White, the same cultural code I had been taught told me that my grandfather could have easily escaped his responsibilities to his children. Instead Jim broke the code. Out of love for Edna, he stood by his children and brought them up to adulthood.

  Today my grandfather Jim Richardson stares at me from a hand-painted photograph that hangs in my house. When I was a child, this same portrait was kept in the closet of my parents’ bedroom, since keeping it out in the open in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s could have led to questions about my mother's racial identity. Sometimes I think my mother gave it to me in an act that spoke of her desire for me to feel some pride in this mysterious man and the life he lived. But perhaps I have this image of Jim so that I can piece together the puzzle of his life with Edna that still lies unfinished in my mind.

  In the photograph, Jim is dressed in a blue serge suit, with a fedora tipped back on his head at a rakish angle. To judge from his unlined face, he is all of twenty-one years old. Yet his facial expression says he's a man who knows exactly where he's going and what he wants. Don't get in his way or stop him. And as I track down stories about him and my grandmother from the few people left who knew them, I'm learning that that's exactly the type of person he was.