Lately I've found myself staring at this portrait a great deal as I try to piece together my grandparents’ lives. Although I have no pictures of Edna, the photograph of Jim serves to help me conjure images of her in my imagination, especially since I found that it was taken only a year before Jim married my grandmother, Edna Howell. As I've driven around south Alabama collecting stories about my grandparents, I've learned that Edna was an exotic-looking woman with olive skin and long black hair that stretched down her back. Legend has it that Edna's mother, Adeline, was a Creek Indian. It is more likely that she was a mixture of Black, White, and Native American, as are most people of mixed race in that part of Alabama.
Now that I can bring up pictures of Edna in my mind, I can place her beside Jim each time I look at his photograph. In the picture in my mind, they are a beautiful couple. But I still have more questions: How did they meet? How did they choose to forge a life together, in spite of laws on the books that made their marriage illegal?
People who remain in the small community of Prestwick, Alabama, tell me that Jim probably met Edna through his social network, which largely consisted of Black men who worked in his logging business. Local legend has it that Jim was a fixture at the Friday and Saturday night social functions these men had with some regularity. In all likelihood, one of these men introduced Jim to Edna. But everyone tells me that Edna was a different type of woman: She would not allow herself to be used as a paramour, as many White men treated Black women at the time. She insisted that Jim court her and treat her as he would have treated any White woman in his circle. Edna would accept nothing less.
I also believe it was the life and relationship of Edna's parents that shaped how she chose to forge her relationship with Jim Richardson. Edna's family ties scattered when Edna's mother, Adeline King, discovered that her husband, Gilbert Howell, had another family in a nearby town. After their separation, Edna had few ties with the Howells. Adeline, with the help of her family, the Kings, chose to raise her three girls, Janie, Mollie, and Edna, on her own. Adeline felt wounded and betrayed by Gilbert Howell and consequently taught her daughters to be mindful of men and their promises.
Edna carried that lesson into her relationship with Jim Richardson. Gilbert Howell, though of mixed-race ancestry, lived his life as a Black man. So Edna knew that given the racial politics of the time, a White man would leave her with little or nothing if the relationship did not work, just as her father had left her mother. In her own version of a prenuptial agreement, Edna got a house, property, and household help.
In my search I also encountered a story from a woman by the name of Miss Virginia. Miss Virginia related that as a young man, Jim courted several young women, none of whom met with the approval of his mother. Then he started seeing Edna Howell and became enchanted with her, later telling his mother that he was determined to marry her. Miss Virginia said, “He told his mother he was going to marry this Black girl, and he did. They raised a family. She died as a young woman, and he continued raising the family. Now this wasn't some affair between a White man and a Black woman like you read about in some novel. God knows he loved her.”
In the eyes of Alabama law, Jim and Edna were not married. From what I have uncovered, they had a ceremony, but their marriage was not recognized by the state of Alabama. Consequently, all legal documents Jim and Edna held identify them as “an unmarried woman” or “an unmarried man.” But they sealed their love with a gold wedding band that served as an outward symbol of their love and devotion to each other. As far as I am concerned, that means that they were married.
As I try to paint an image of Jim and Edna's life together, I always come back to my own marriage somehow. Marriages, like people, are not perfect. They all stumble along the way. I know that I will find the imperfections in my grandparents’ marriage as I tell their story, and I am prepared to make discoveries of those failings and shortcomings. Still, I know that marriages also don't survive if the focus centers on imperfections rather than mutual love and respect. In the tough times, it is the memories of the shared history of a life together that can help keep a couple's love alive.
Colleen and I have had our love tested by fire, just like every couple. Just like in my grandparents’ lives, race has played a role in some of the tests we have faced. Yet unlike Jim and Edna Richardson, we're not marooned and isolated, left to push through our life together with little support. We have a shared history that binds us together, one that transcends race while at the same time not ignoring the racial realities of American society. We've worked hard to do that, and we have had help along the way from family and friends. The next generation will not uncover documents near the date of our marriage that legally disinherited us, as I have found for my grandfather.
And I like to think we have had some help along the way from Jim and Edna Richardson. Jim, ever present in the photograph in our house, watches over us and protects us. Edna watches over us as well, slowly coming into focus beside Jim.
My Own Happy Ending
MARITA GOLDEN
for Joe
I DON'T TELL the story often. Actually, I usually let it lie secreted away like a precious jewel. I'm content to reward myself with an occasional replay of it. It's a story that is hard to believe, but when people hear it, they know instinctively that it's true. A story more fantastic than any of the fictional narratives I've labored over. It's the story of how I met my husband, Joe. It's such a befuddling mix, charming, whimsical, chilling, affirmative. The tale of how we met is like some talisman, or a reverse hex, that lifted Joe and me from the very start into a realm incandescent and thrilling. We met at a party, and when I saw him walking through the front door, I knew who he was: He was mine. Sounds like a scene from a movie, doesn't it? Well, it is. My own.
I'll start with the day we met. I woke that morning knowing that on that day anything was possible. It wasn't a feeling that set me to trembling or that even filled me with curiosity. I just recall waking to see a slant of late-August sun curving with a precise gleam through the blinds, and feeling that on this day, I was going to meet him. I was a forty-year-old divorced single mother whose twelve-year-old son lay tightly cocooned in sleep in his room down the hall.
And as I turned my back to that slash of sunlight invading my room, I smiled, yawned, and then smiled again. I was due a miracle after a long dry season without love.
On that August morning I was confident that I would meet the man I would marry at a party I was attending that evening. But woven into the seams of my imaginative knowing were certain things I did not know. He didn't have a name. He didn't have a face. But all that was superfluous. I had claimed him. I would know him when I saw him. He would be my psychic twin, the one, but most important, he would be the right one. Because now I was ready for him. He was ready for me. We were ready for each other. Maybe half a dozen other times in my life I'd felt such absolute certainty. And here it was again.
The life I was living that August morning was one in which doubt was a word in a foreign tongue I could not imagine speaking. I felt completely grounded, sure of and quite frankly in love with myself. Because not only was I going to meet him in fourteen hours (as I calculated after looking at the clock beside my bed), but I also felt this subtle rapture because of who I was, who I had become. What was to take place that night was logical, inevitable. A blessing with my name on it was on the way.
I'd been a perpetual victim of a host of mostly self-inflicted love battle scars. But two years earlier, as I contemplated the publication of my third book (a book based on the life of my mother, a book that plays a crucial role in this story of how I met Joe), I knew that my life had to change.
The handsome but hapless live-in boyfriend had to go. Had I really lived with someone so utterly threatened by the books I wrote, my ambition, and my hunger for life? Yes. And now I had decided that I had to find a male friend, a man bosom buddy to talk to (the way I could not talk to the boyfriend) about my dreams and fears, establishing a bond of
emotional intimacy that I could create in the next love relationship I had with a man. I had to figure out why I kept attracting misery, wallowing in it, and calling it love.
As I lay in bed the morning of the day I met Joe, bathed in a rare, giddy confidence, I recalled how my most recent novel, Long Distance Life, had helped me decide that everything in my love and lifestyle had to change. That book, the writing and imagining of it, drove me into a frenzied but focused re-evaluation of my life. Long Distance Life wasn't just the saga of sixty years in the life of a Washington, D.C., Black family. It was my bible. My book of possibilities. And during the long process of its creation, spirits were telling me that I had to grow into the woman who could proudly say, I wrote that book.
While writing that novel and questioning everything in my life, I found a platonic male friend who introduced me to the joys of male-female buddy bonding, an important prelude, I learned, to a satisfying love affair. In a way, it was like making love, a different kind of love with my buddy, a smart, in-touch-with-his-feelings guy who was a computer consultant from New Orleans. I relished being listened to, knowing I was being heard. With my new male friend I was forming a bond of emotional trust and intimacy I was starved for but, I had to admit to myself, I had not normally required of the men I chose. All this was a skill set I had ignored, hadn't valued, preferring to be a high-drama queen, specializing in the following equation, passion + pain = love.
Long Distance Life played a crucial role in turning me into the woman I was the day I met Joe. The story centers on the life of Naomi Johnson, who migrates from Spring Hope, North Carolina, in the 1920s to Washington, D.C., as part of the Great Migration of African-Americans from the South that so transformed this nation. It is the story of her daughter, Esther, who four decades later goes back to the South to work in the civil rights movement; her grandsons, Logan, who strides into the Black middle class, and Nathaniel, whose life choices are dangerous and tragic. The book covers much of the social his tory of the twentieth century. But more than anything, Long Distance Life is a love story In Naomi Johnson, I honored the tenacious, big-hearted spirit of my mother, Beatrice Golden.
I was writing the book during a time of tumult, yearning, and confusion professionally and personally—bonding with my male buddy and still living with the boyfriend and trying to figure out how to get him out of my life; searching for a university teaching job and trying to figure out why, with two books, I couldn't find one—and my son, Michael, was fraught with emotional needs I wasn't sure I was always meeting.
So Long Distance Life became a life raft. A balm. A prayer. There were the hours spent at the Library of Congress researching the lives of African-Americans in Washington, D.C., during that historical time span between the twenties and the sixties, reading African-American newspapers, poring over oral histories, talking to still-living Black migrants from places like Wilson, Asheville, and Palmer, North Carolina, small, sleepy towns where it seemed sometimes that one morning in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s all the Black folks woke up one day and decided to head north.
Because I felt my own life so bereft of the complete love of a good man, I blessed Naomi Johnson with the relationship I so deeply yearned for. Writing fiction is a form of sorcery, and I was working on two tracks, creating the novel but harboring in my mind a place where a man as wonderful as the lover/friend and husband I gave Naomi Johnson could manifest for me.
Rayford Johnson, in the novel, is the love of Naomi Johnson's life, a proud “race man” who worked with Marcus Gar-vey before coming to Washington, D.C., to teach at Dunbar High School, in the 1930s one of only two high schools for Black students in the rigidly segregated city. He is devoted to Naomi and proud of her business acumen that made her the owner of several boardinghouses (as was my mother). Naomi, after having married and divorced a man too small to march with her into the realm of the big dreams she possesses, knows that in Rayford she has found her matching heartbeat.
As I wrote, I kept thinking that if I could believe a Rayford Johnson into existence for a fictional narrative, since everything wonderful that had ever happened to me had its seeds in my imagination, perhaps I could conjure an actual good man of my own to fill the empty space in the real life I was living.
Writing Long Distance Life was as much spiritual quest as creative endeavor. But the most important thing I did during this time, this pre-Joe phase of my life, was to get help. From a therapist. I tackled my broken heart and the rebuilding of my spirit as if it were my own private Manhattan Project, figuring out how to build a Marita I had never before imagined and the likes of which the world had never seen before.
I had cracked my hard shell of resistance partially open before I walked into the therapist's office. So we moved pretty quickly through the unfinished grief I was holding on to over parents who'd died twenty years earlier, through the jungle of resulting abandonment issues, insecurities, the ocean of self-doubt, the unease with the professional achievements I'd convinced myself deep down that I didn't deserve.
DURING ONE SESSION I moaned, “How can I really master the habit of self-love? Isn't it too late?” And even if I healed decades-old wounds, didn't she know there weren't any good men out there? Even if now I was armed with the tools to become the good woman I always secretly thought I was, how would I avoid picking the wrong man again? I was so good at it.
“The kind of lovers you've been attracting won't even come anywhere near you anymore,” she assured me with an unnerving calm once we felt I was ready to leave her office for the last time.
“What did you do, work roots on me?” I asked.
She just smiled. It was years before I understood how she could make such a guarantee, after only a few sessions, with so much ease. But during years of watching the earth shift beneath her clients as they sat across from her in that office, she'd heard the rumbles and whimpers of new birth, seen the blossoming of self-discovery And she had heard and seen in me what I could not see in myself: that I would be okay. In fact I would be, in the end, just fine. By showing up in her office, I had proven that I was not just ready to continue living my life but eager to create a new one. I could have the kind of man I wanted. I could love and accept myself.
A lot of what my therapist taught me was straight-up old-school, lessons we learn at home from parents who love us. I had to forgive the boyfriend, whom I asked to move out after the second session. I had to stop dissing him with every breath. If he was so awful, why had I chosen him? He had loved my son and me the best way he knew how. I had to take responsibility for bringing him into my life, my bed, and my heart. I had to forgive and forget a period I looked on as wasted because it had been so difficult. I had to move on.
So on the morning of the day of the party where I met Joe, all that was behind me. That evening I strode into the home of the friend who was giving the party, sublime and content. Unperturbed. Then, at ten forty-five, I glanced at the front door where I saw Joe entering with a friend who was tall and ebony-hued and had an open, friendly face. But it was Joe who caught my eye. I looked at him, and my heart didn't skip a beat. It didn't need to. I knew that I was looking at my man. I nudged my friend Louise, who had come to the party with me, and whispered, “There he is.” Earlier that day I had told her about my premonition, my certainty that I was going to meet him at the party that night. She had warily accepted this possibility with a stunned, breathless “Oh” when we spoke on the phone that morning. But I suspect that she still thought maybe I had lost it.
Joe entered the house joking, smiling, and hugging Tina, the hostess, who was an old friend. Tina was a member of a single parents’ group I had started, and I later learned that Joe wasn't even supposed to be at the party. He'd bought a ticket to the Dominican Republic, but when Tina playfully threatened never to speak to him again if he didn't come, he canceled his trip. Despite the handshakes and greetings offered to those he apparently knew in the room, Joe had seen me, for only a few minutes after entering, he made his way through the c
rowd to the corner where Louise and I stood. He and his friend Issa, a jovial Senegalese, introduced themselves. But really, no introductions were necessary for either of us. That's how it felt, as I basked in his clear-eyed appreciation of what he saw when he looked at me. I was drawn to how comfortable he seemed in his own skin, how easy he was with everyone around us. His humor and laughter were genuine and sprang from a place of integrity I felt inside his soul. Soon we were dancing. And talking. In the next hour, in Tina's blue light—lit basement, I learned that Joe was Rayford Johnson come to life. He taught math and computers at Dunbar, the same school where Ray-ford Johnson taught. Like Rayford, Joe was a proud race man. We talked about everything from Jesse Jackson to our concern about Black youth, to his travels in the Black world, from Suri-name to Brazil, and my four-year stint in Nigeria.
He asked for my phone number, and the next morning I called Tina to get a “background check.” I knew Joe was mine, but I still wanted to tread carefully, and checking with Tina, who also taught at Dunbar and had known Joe for over a decade, was even better than enlisting the services of the FBI.
Tina said simply, “Marita, Joe is one of the best men in the world. You could not do better.”
In the coming weeks we didn't date so much as slip into the fold of what we had both been waiting for. Joe was a forty-four-year-old bachelor who had decided three years earlier that he was ready to get married. Joe told me he had nearly given up on finding a soul mate in the United States and had concluded that his life partner might be in some Black country overseas. When I met his family, I knew I had come home. Joe had long-standing and deep friendships with men in which they offered each other the kind of emotional support I had only seen women offer each other. He had female friends with whom he had established relationships of respect and support, and he was enormously proud of my accomplishments, bragging about my books and writing to everyone he introduced me to. Joe's dreams were as big as mine. On our first date he took me to see the shell of a house he had just bought and told me of his plans for renovation of that house and several others he was thinking about purchasing, as a down payment on his future. I was drawn to his steadiness. I felt within days of meeting him the stirring of a quiet love that ran deep. I didn't fall into it as much as claim it. I could tell Joe everything and I wasn't judged. When I told him about the sessions with the therapist and my love demons, he just kissed me and said, “The next time you talk to that therapist you tell her thank you from me for getting you ready to be my wife.”
It's All Love Page 6