Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins

Author:Kathleen Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

STEPPING BACK

I’m not trying to flatter myself, but I was the first colored woman he ever seriously considered loving. I know I was. The first one who had the kind of savoir faire he believed in so devoutly. The first one with class, style, poetry, taste, elegance, repartee, and haute cuisine. Because, you know, a colored woman with class is still an exceptional creature; and a colored woman with class, style, poetry, taste, elegance, repartee, and haute cuisine is an almost nonexistent species. The breeding possibilities are slight.

I myself have never known another one like me, not one with my subtle understanding of art, music, drama, food, people, places, ambience, climate, dress, timing, correctness . . . whatever. As if all forms of cultural underdevelopment had somehow passed me by. As if I took my racial heritage (so to speak) and molded it to my spirit . . . Then I emerged out of my cocoon like some new breed of butterfly.

I don’t mean to go on like this, but when people say to me, “You don’t know yourself to be colored! Don’t you ever remember that you’re black?” it makes me pause. I turn to my journal and devote pages to reminding myself that I am a colored lady. I try to bring myself up short. But again and again I am astonished at how uncolored I really am.

So I know it astonished him even more. At first he kept setting little traps for me. He would rattle on about Baudelaire and expect me to sit blankly by bobbing my head. He would lay out his best china and silverware and watch while I set the table for a formal dinner. He took me to chic little intellectual gatherings and watched for signs of slovenliness: overindulgence in laughter, incorrect pronunciation, insensitivity in a delicate and nuanced situation. Always in the end he was baffled and enchanted by the effortlessness of my style, its unself-conscious elegance and glow, fitting so neatly into his mid-Victorian life, fitting so undemandingly into his careful cultivation of an elegant colored life.

There had been white women, of course. But that was too obvious. A too-vulgar form of compensation. He did not like subjecting his cultivation to such overly sympathetic, such ingratiating discernment. The pain could destroy him, the humiliation crush a spirit already amputated by this reincarnation as a Negro. (Is it possible to imagine any greater amputation, any greater karmic debt, than reincarnation as a Negro? And to make matters worse, a Negro with aristocratic tendencies, left over, of course . . . there is always some residue carried over from life to life . . .) But white women were out.

Instead he cultivated a kind of boyish asexuality, charming to men and women alike. At our first meeting he charmed me, too. Adolescently debonair with his clear, lightly colored skin and his soft eyes . . . We lunched on the terrace of the Museum of Modern Art, allowing each other to perceive our distinctive tastes in books, films, music, theater, whatever.

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