My family didn’t approve of Eugene, my future husband, and not because of the content of his character, which my father summarized after our first dinner together as “smart, interesting, and competent.”
The relationship troubled them, my mother especially, and she would get a chance to make her case the first time Eugene stayed at their home. That weekend, he and I took a drive to Watch Hill, a Rhode Island beach enclave with an antique merry-go-round, small ice-cream shops, Edward Hopper coloring, and homes that screamed expense. We paid our twenty dollars to park in a hillside lot so that we could sit on the only beach within miles with actual surf. But on our walk to the water, we encountered a problem: a gaggle of sun-bronzed, white teens in bright shorts. They saw me coming, and one of them called back to a friend who had not yet cleared the bend, “What was that you were just saying?” The poor young man came around the grassy dune with his head thrown back, yelling “Niggers, niggers, everywhere!” I assume it was a song lyric. His friends looked at me and laughed. The kid turned red.
An animal part of me evaluated them, the muscular wall of eighteen-year-olds blocking the pass. I felt, keenly, Eugene’s stuttering silence beside me as they broke and streamed around us. Only after he had steered me down to the beach and made as if to sit down on our towel did I start to cry. And my Eugene, who had never been part of a Black unit before, had the innocence and daring to ask, What did you want me to say?
Well. I have no doubt he would know what to say now, but the moment gave me pause. And it is with a chill that I reflect that had I acted on my fear, I could have lost everything right then: the one I now turn to as a haven, the father of my three babies, my honest critic, my dearest friend.
When we came home still raw from this experience, I looked to my parents for support. My mother instead seized the moment to argue that my relationship was ill considered. Taking me aside, she urged that “there is strength in numbers” and that “Black folk need a tribe.” One day I will surely have enough distance to look back on this exchange and laugh. At the time, I took it as a loving gesture. As with much of my parents’ advice, I thought about it and set it aside.
I did not then appreciate the irony of the situation. How could I? I would not find out until years later that my mother had lied to me about her race all my life. She was not really a very light-skinned Black woman. She was pretending. And that made her marriage to my father an interracial relationship, one that they had successfully kept secret from me, the twentieth-century child of that relationship, well into my adulthood. When I openly, if with some difficulty, embarked on the adventure of starting an interracial family of my own, it upset them.
Why is there so little literature of interracial marriage in the twentieth century? The question, for me, was originally academic: I was invited to a conference on twentieth-century literature this year, and I planned to write a paper connecting Octavia Butler’s Kindred to other books on the theme. But after a careful search, I came up with only a handful. I began to look frantically. The question became personal. Why was interracial marriage treated as a dirty secret until the twenty-first century? And isn’t literature, after all, in the dirty-secret business?
The details of my own story are not generalizable and, as with most family dramas, they are ultimately uninteresting except to the people involved. But there is a theme here, and that’s interesting. In some sense, the silence of the literature is the story of my life.
The paltry library of interracial marriage literature is surprising, if only because by the time Kindred was written, there had already been a century of heated political discussion of the topic. Much of the debate over the Reconstruction-era Civil Rights Act focused on whether it would interfere with state laws forbidding Black and white Americans to marry. Many whites drew the line at giving freedmen what they called “social rights,” in-cluding equality in marriage. One hundred years later, during the Civil Rights movement that historians have called our Second Reconstruction, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would feel compelled to reassure whites that the Black man wanted to be the “white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.” The Supreme Court took a case challenging state laws banning interracial marriage and struck them down in Loving v. Virginia, the landmark 1967 decision. So where is all of the literature wrestling with this persistent national anxiety? Why did it take Octavia Butler, a fantasy novelist writing late in the century, to imagine how one of these marriages would work in practice?
It was not just the small number of literary works on the subject that bothered me; it was also their treatment of interracial marriage. While some of them steal a path down the aisle, none except Kindred spend much time there. At the century’s starting gun, we have Charles Chesnutt’s 1900 The House Behind the Cedars, an anthropological novel of manners; three decades later, there is Nella Larsen’s luminous Harlem Renaissance novel, Passing. But in both Cedars and Passing, a white man does not know his wife or fiancée is Black, and in both the revelation of her race precipitates the Black woman’s death. Likewise, in William Faulkner’s 1936 novel, Absalom, Absalom!, when the mixed-race character reveals his Black heritage, his white half-brother shoots and kills him to prevent his marriage to a white woman.
In the second half of the century, the pattern becomes less violent, but gestures toward the theme remain tentative, unconsummated, or incomplete. James Baldwin’s 1962 Another Country contains much interracial intimacy, but marriage seems insuperably difficult to the characters who contemplate it. In the 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a family discusses an interracial engagement, but the marriage will take place only after the closing credits and in another country. (During the movie, the bride-to-be packs her bags for Geneva with stars in her eyes.) Even in Kindred, written in 1979, the newlyweds get no further than unpacking boxes in a shared marital home before the novel ends. Finally, at century’s end, Danzy Senna’s 1998 novel, Caucasia, has an interracial marriage as the origin story for the mixed-race child protagonists, but the parents’ marriage dissolves within the first thirty pages.
Taken as a group, these entries in the twentieth century’s small catalogue of works show us why they could not go further in imagining interracial marriage. Individually and collectively, they stagger under the weight of the fact that Black and white people have been having sex in this country for four hundred years, often in shared households, but usually while ruled by the master-slave relationship. The result has been alternating literary strategies of denial and despair.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner chooses denial. The film is caught in a dream world in which there is a pristine separation between the categories “Black” and “white.” All of the forced intimacy of the plantation, the heinous history of masters bequeathing their own brown offspring to white heirs, the generations of intimacy without which the “one-drop rule” would hardly be necessary—this is all washed away. In the film, a woman brings her Black fiancé home to meet her liberal parents. The daughter is enraptured and the parents feel ambushed. The fiancé, played by Sidney Poitier, turns out to be a sort of djinn, a creature of terrible power capable of fitting into tiny spaces—here, the exact parameters needed to test the parents’ principles. He fits the requirements of upper-class respectability because he is a handsome, successful, Johns Hopkins–trained doctor—and, by the way, the parents learn that the couple has not yet had sex, and so nothing has happened that cannot be taken back. Poitier’s character even draws the parents aside to privately inform them that without their wholehearted agreement, he will not go through with the marriage; he will, in other words, disappear in a puff of smoke. The real question this movie therefore poses is whether the white parents are ready for a new society in which racial mixing will happen.
Black Americans, James Baldwin recalled, hated the movie, because they felt that it used Sidney Poitier against them. Indeed, all of the Black characters become either weapon or victim, as the hottest moments of the film take place between them, with an anger that seems displaced from the mannerly interracial scenes. Poitier’s character rages at his own father, for instance, asserting that the older generation of Black men is holding him back, wanting him to be a “negro” when he wants to be “a man.” It’s a preposterous statement, given that the whole problem of the movie is that Poitier’s character is Black. The resolution of the film will come only because the white parents find it within themselves to choke down this difficult fact.
In another scene, Tillie, the family’s Black maid, calls Sidney Poitier’s character a nigger and accuses him of trying to worm his way into the white family for money. Here comes the mammy figure, transported straight from Gone with the Wind and ready once more to assure the white viewers that they are not racist because she is there, the adamant, loving guardian of the retrograde. “Civil rights is one thing,” she muses to herself, shaking her head in disgust. “This here is somethin’ else.” In a marvelous bit of having one’s cake and eating it, after the white father has resolved the movie at great and sonorous length by demonstrating enough moral growth to give his blessing to the interracial union, his final words—indeed, the closing words of the film—are “Well, Tillie, when the hell are we going to get some dinner?” The white man has evolved, but Tillie exists to reassure the viewer that this moral evolution has come at no cost to his place in the social hierarchy.
One reason we don’t have more literature of interracial marriage is because an entire generation of white authors shared the fantasy at work in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. This fantasy is what the great Southern historian C. Vann Woodward called “strange” in his book The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Americans had forgotten how recently the laws separating the races had been erected, how closely Black and white people once lived under slavery and during Reconstruction, and how easily Jim Crow regimes could be brushed aside. White Americans of the 1960s really believed that “Black” and “white” were separate peoples and that the destruction of Jim Crow, and any new intimacy that resulted, would be a frightful new step. This fiction also permitted the diminution of Black Americans to caricatures like Tillie and the half-man, half-djinn fiancé that only an actor with Poitier’s talents could have humanized.
This false consciousness does not characterize the other works in my small collection. Their problem is very much the opposite—the inability to see beyond the trauma of the violently intimate past. The drama and tragedy of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! comes out of interracial family ties rooted in plantation slavery. The characters in James Baldwin’s Another Country are also haunted and hounded by history, both personal and national. His character Ida explains that, yes, it is because of race that she cannot marry Vivaldo, her white lover: he’s “too late.” And he would have been too late, Ida goes on, “no matter when he arrived…because too much had happened by the time you were born, let alone by the time you met each other.” In two sets of interracial pairings in Baldwin’s novel, characters yearn toward true emotional intimacy (“I’d give up my color for you,” thinks Vivaldo, “I would, only take me, take me, love me as I am!”). But that intimacy, and any talk of marriage, cannot happen, most clearly because of the Black characters’ pain, rage, and mistrust stemming from how deeply they have already been injured before each relationship began.
This injury is quite real. Growing up, I knew that my paternal grandmother, who took me during the summers, had been raised in part by family members who had once been enslaved. I knew few things about the matriarch of her family, my great-great-great-grandmother, but I knew she had gray eyes. The implication of this family lore was that she had been her master’s relation, perhaps even his daughter. This explained his decision to give her a dowry, a small parcel of land granted after emancipation. That land, which my family held on to, gave them a fragile independence. Part of the land boasted timber but, according to my father, my great-grandfather was pragmatic enough to lease it to a white-owned timber mill and to go to work for that mill as a humble employee. He also farmed part of the land he owned, but he was always careful to call the white children in the area “Mr. This” and “Mr. That.”
My grandmother grew up on that land, on that farm. I would sometimes ask her to talk about what her grandmother had told her about slave days, but she’d usually say no, with a disgusted twist of her lips. No point in talking about “that stuff.” I saw the same lip-twist when I first showed her a picture of Eugene.
Octavia Butler’s Kindred, a work of speculative fiction, asks what it would take to move beyond this injury so that an interracial marriage could work. Her answer is that the only way out of the pain is through it. The novel is about Dana, a Black woman who marries a white man in the late 1970s. Just as they are unpacking boxes in their first shared home, Dana is forced back in time to the plantation-era South. She learns that her time travel is triggered whenever a white male ancestor is in mortal danger. Instead of setting up her own household in the present, Dana becomes intimately enmeshed into the brutal interracial household of her slave-owning and enslaved ancestors.
Thrust back in time, Dana suffers physical traumas and witnesses horrors. She watches her ancestor grow up to be the man who will enslave and impregnate her many-times-great-grandmother—a woman with whom Dana shares a twin-like resemblance and, over time, a complex sibling-like intimacy. At one point, Dana’s husband seizes on her as she fades from the present and travels back with her during one of her trips. He gets stuck in the nineteenth century, enduring his own difficulties and witnessing atrocities that scar him, before they are finally able to come back to the present together.
In this respect, there’s a brutality and one-sidedness to Kindred that has not matched my lived experience. Eugene didn’t have to become traumatized for us to grow close; he just had to be interested, persistent, and sincere. He read Du Bois and Ellison, and we talked. He came with a family heritage of his own, of nobility and exile, that I didn’t understand. I had to learn to see as precious the things he valued, too, and learn to be tender with the things that had marked him. In the meantime, the world did not leave us alone, and we grew strong together.
When I started working on this essay, I realized that I had turned Kindred’s scenes over in my head until I had outgrown them. In Kindred’s prologue, for instance, Dana wakes in a hospital bed, her arm having been severed during her final journey forward to the twentieth century. In the book’s symbolism, she has chewed off her own limb to escape the trap of the past’s trauma and thereby free herself for the possibility of her relationship in the present. In these opening pages, Dana must exonerate her white husband to the police, who are certain that her injury is the result of domestic abuse.
When I first read it as a child, I found this opening scene romantic. The couple had witnessed plantation slavery and no longer needed to wonder whether their relationship echoed it. This stood for the idea that we may come to each other with scars, but that does not necessarily mean those scars are the other person’s fault. As an adult in an interracial marriage, I see this scene differently. The prologue imagines that it is in the Black woman’s hands to condemn or exonerate the white man. Agents of the state ap-
proach Dana and ask whether she commands mercy or justice. Certainly this is a fantasy, but it is a violent fantasy. That’s not romantic.
I can now second-guess this scene, but what a privilege it was to have had this one book to live with as a child, and to look back on with mature reflection. Kindred is actually about interracial marriage—not time travel, not slavery, not any of the other tools it uses to explore its theme. And it is the only book on the subject with which I have any history. I needed this, as a child, learning how to be. In fact, as a kid who learned cadence from memorizing Countee Cullen and Claude McKay, and carriage from watching and rewatching old movies, I needed so much more of this. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner has the scene in which the parents meet the Black lover, but that movie didn’t help me, and not just because the sexes of the lovers were flipped. That movie wasn’t written with me in mind and the fiancé wasn’t allowed to be human. James Baldwin’s white character, Vivaldo, suggests that he is going to take his Black lover, Ida, home to meet his folks. But we don’t get that scene, because Ida breaks every dish the couple owns, to show Vivaldo just what she thinks of his idea of parading her in front of his estranged white family. It’s an amazing scene, and healing to anyone more familiar with the saccharine behavior of Poitier’s character, but it was no schoolhouse for the life I would lead.
In the end I got there. I realized that when you find someone generous, tender, and surprising, someone who loves it when you’re winning, you’re not going to find him again in a different color. And, after all, marriage is not the total intimacy implied by Christianity’s “one flesh” or the old legal notion of coverture. Marriage involves risking the violence in each other, of which we remain capable. It’s a decision that although we will continue to hurt one another, and though the world will not leave us alone, but will add in its provocations, we will continue to face each other across the inescapable mystery of the self and engage in the difficult work of diplomacy. But it took so much courage to get there, and against such headwinds.
My family lied to me about who we were, about who I was. One day, I may have enough distance to look back on this anger that mires me. But who can trust Mom and Dad about such an important question? Parents may say some things that sound right, but in the end the house will take its cut. And of course the world lies to all of us about who we are, because it speaks in demeaning generalities. But there is no excuse for art to have failed me. The literature of my century should have had more in stock to hearten me for the journey my life has taken. To see ourselves as we are, to learn that what undeniably exists is permissible, is possible, and, moreover, is worthy of chronicle or epic: it is not too much to say that this can be a matter of life and death.
Farah Peterson’s writing appears in Ploughshares, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She is Professor of Law at the University of Chicago.
