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Love in Black and White
Chapter One: How We Met

Mark's View

Gail and I met in 1984 when I was 24 and she 22. We were both graduate students and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. I had just committed what many considered the worst blunder of my life: I had abandoned my scholarship at the journalism school and a possible secure job afterward as a journalist.

I had few prospects except a half-completed, unpublished manuscript about my childhood and youth in Alexandra, a South African ghetto, and how I escaped from apartheid bondage to freedom in America. My leaving journalism school had partly to do with a fervid desire to finish the book, whose story had haunted me for years. A few publishers had expressed interest in the manuscript. But I held out little hope that the book, if published, would change my life - in other words, that it would be any different from the thousands published each year only to fade into oblivion, leaving the author as poor and insignificant as before.

Gail and I were living at International House—popularly known as I-House—on 122nd and Riverside Drive. Situated on the edge of Harlem and overlooking the Hudson River, the 500 rooms of I-House offered affordable housing to students of various nationalities, from all over the world, who were in the United States pursuing advanced degrees or working as interns for multinational companies in New York City. Among them were Germans, Africans, Swedes, Mid-Easterners, Japanese, South Americans, French. Scores of Americans were permitted to live in I-House to partake in the unique cultural exchanges.

I first became aware of Gail at a crowded dance party, hosted by the African Cultural Club, in the main hall of International House, an elaborate room with huge original oil paintings on the walls and French doors opening onto a terrace overlooking a small park.

Attending the party was a fluke. My upbringing and experiences in South Africa (which in no sense was a normal childhood) had led me to believe that life was mainly for working and learning. I had tried since arriving in the United States in 1978 to learn to relax and enjoy myself the way most Americans do, but to no avail. As a result, many women considered me a bore. At this party I merely stood awkwardly and abstractedly beside a pillar, occasionally attempting to engage this and that person in serious conversation with little success.

Gail was joyously leaping about to the reggae music, laughing and clapping her hands as if she had no cares in the world. She was the epitome of a free spirit. Because I frequently brooded over the fate of my impoverished family back home in South Africa, her carefree attitude was like a breath of fresh air in a stuffy hut. It gave me momentary relief from heavy and depressing thoughts.

Gail was dancing with a tall, gangly white fellow. A strange feeling akin to envy arose in me as I saw them sit down on a couch together to talk. I watched them out of the corner of my eye, wondering if they were more than friends. But what reason did I have to wonder at such things? I didn't even know her. Besides, she was white and we seemed to have little in common.

Some of the women I had dated through college had been white, and I had enjoyed and benefited from the experience, but I still hoped eventually to marry a black woman. Repeated attempts to establish serious relationships with a compatible black woman, however, ended in painful failure. Some considered me ascetic, too serious about life and too much of a bookworm. Others thought me too "feminine" because I openly expressed my feelings and disdained a macho image. Still others were bewildered and even ashamed at finding out about my background of poverty, squalor and degradation.

This befuddled me as I thought we had much in common, emotionally at least, given our similar experiences under white oppression and common African culture. But many black women saw themselves as more American than African. They judged me and my worth in American terms, and because I had no prospects, no money, and no status and was a foreign student, I was presumably considered a risky investment for a long-term relationship.

Realizing this, and being somewhat wounded by it, I vowed to stick with the woman, whatever her race or color, who would see that beneath the poverty, seriousness, and lack of material success, there was a feeling, caring, and loving human being worthy of being befriended, loved and depended on.

Gail and I continued to run into each other. At meals I saw her enter the cafeteria carrying her lunch tray, look around for an open table, and sit down at a distance from me. She seemed taller and stronger than other women; she wore her blond hair short and usually dressed in shabby men's clothing. Her favorite outfit consisted of a dark blue men's suit jacket she had bought the previous summer at a yard sale in San Francisco's Haight-Asbury district, denim jeans, army-style boots, dangling earrings and multi-colored scarves around her neck in the bohemian style reminiscent of the 1960s. Her devil-may-care manner of dressing was part of her charm. She would have been out of character in high heels and dresses.

One evening while doing my regular exercise routine of skipping rope and doing push-ups on the sixth floor, Gail happened to walk by. Without warning, she dropped to the floor, did ten quick push-ups, smiled at me, and then vanished behind a closing elevator door.

I was perplexed. Who is this strange woman? Why is she so independent of societal pressures, especially the pressure many women felt to act weak and feminine? At the time I was rereading John Stuart Mill's classic essay "The Subjection of Women" and was strongly interested in feminism, particularly in comparing the role and struggles of women in South African and American societies.

My early introduction to feminism was through my mother and grandmother. Though the two indomitable matriarchs daily groaned under the yoke of a triple oppression - they were women in a patriarchal culture, blacks in a white-dominated society and unschooled in a world where education was increasingly vital - they remained strong, caring, loving and compassionate individuals, full of earthy wisdom and resolute in striving to better their lives and those of their children. Granny had raised my mother and my mother's four siblings alone after her husband abandoned her for another woman. And my mother, following my father's emasculation by the apartheid system, effectively kept the family together.

My mother and grandmother were the first feminists I knew. Their characters, example and deeds heavily influenced my values and outlook on life. They liberated the other important half of me, the feminine part, and made it grow and fully complement my masculine half. Whereas my father had sought to teach me that however deep the pain, men never cry, ever, and that they should suppress, deny and keep their emotions bottled up, my mother and grandmother taught me that a man can cry, love, care, change diapers, clean house, iron, and still be a man.

Once I came to know Gail well, I saw a lot of my mother in her. Her being white did not obscure the fact that she was intensely human. She felt deeply and cared about others. She possessed in full measure what in my mother's Tsonga culture is called rirhandu ("human love, kindness").

My first conversation with Gail was about women's issues. One day in the hot and humid laundry room in the basement of I-House, I overheard Gail telling Katie King, another journalism student, about her visit to a battered women's shelter in Harlem. I joined the conversation. My sympathy for women's issues and my hatred of male violence against women surprised Gail and Katie. But I was merely speaking from personal experience: my father used to beat my mother for such trifles as answering back when he lectured her, which he called "insubordination unbecoming the woman he bought." At the age of thirty-seven, he had paid about twenty cattle in lobola for my mother when she was seventeen and without a say in the matter. The patriarchal tribal culture at the time invested men with almost dictatorial powers over women. Wife beating was so widespread and accepted that many women considered it a sign of a man's affection. Not my mother. She was a quiet, but determined, rebel.

As I mentioned at the beginning, about the time I met Gail I was leading a life, largely self-imposed, of an intellectual hermit. Having dropped out of Columbia J-School to concentrate on completing the manuscript for Kaffir Boy, I followed a rigid schedule of reading, writing and exercising and spent most of my time in my cell-like dorm room. I only went out to purchase food at a Korean fresh market on Broadway or to browse through my favorite used bookstores on Amsterdam Avenue and downtown at the Strand.

Because I had dropped out of school, my immigration status was precarious. Technically I could have been deported because I had ceased being a full-time student. I was in the process of applying for a green card. If that were denied, I was ready to request political asylum rather than return home, where the Pretoria regime had escalated its repression and killing and detention of blacks. Letters from home brought only bad news and entreaties for money. I had none. I was still unable to support myself and relied on my benefactor, Stan Smith, one of the closest friends I have, black or white.

Shortly after quitting journalism school, I published a few articles in the St. Petersburg Times sharply critical of apartheid and its brutal suppression of black dissent. Soon I began receiving anonymous threatening phone calls in the middle of the night.

I knew it was dangerous to write the truth about black life under apartheid, but I felt it was my duty, having had the rare opportunity of escaping from the bondage of legalized racism and segregation, to inform Americans, in human terms, that blacks in South Africa were fighting and dying for the same rights and freedoms that Americans could not imagine life without: the rights to vote, to live where one wished, to speak freely, to work for just pay, to have equal justice under the law.

One night around three, the ringing of the phone jarred me from a deep slumber. I picked up the receiver.

"Hello?" Silence. "Hello?"

A low, deliberate voice with an Afrikaner accent said, "You'd better watch out, kaffir."

"Who is this?" I demanded.

"We can stop you, if we have to."

"Who is this?"

No answer. The phone went dead.

I dropped the receiver into its cradle, switched off the lamp and crawled back under the covers. But I could not sleep a wink. Fear, doubt and anxiety tormented me.

I found comfort only in daylight and in routine. I rose each morning at seven, wrote until noon, ate lunch, read all afternoon, ate dinner, read, then worked out. One evening, not long after sunset, I carried my ball hopper and tennis rackets downstairs to the gym, hoping to bang out my fears and anger by practicing ground strokes against the wall. In Manhattan, tennis courts were scarce and private clubs were prohibitively expensive. To keep playing my favorite sport, tennis, I had resorted to hitting against the gym wall.

The mysterious telephone calls in recent nights had put me on edge. I trusted few people, and those I did trust, black or white, had earned my confidence.

As I approached the gym, I noticed the lights were on. I paused, for I rarely encountered anyone else during my solitary tennis sessions. I opened the door a crack and saw Gail, who was stretching out. It turned out she had just returned from a jog through Riverside Park, in snow and ice. I hesitated. Should I come back later? I decided to enter. I strode in nonchalantly, placed my rackets and ball hopper in their usual spot against the back wall, and slipped the cover off one of the rackets, gifts from Stan.

"Hello," Gail said as she bobbed over an outstretched leg, reaching for the toe of her well-worn, gray running shoe.

"Hi, how are you?"

"All right," she replied, turning to stretch her other leg. "I survived my run. It's too icy out there for running shoes, but the snow isn't deep enough for skis."

Never having skied before, I found this statement intriguing. "Do you ski in New York?"

"Whenever I can," she said. "But the snow is much better where I come from, Minnesota."

Not knowing what else to say, I started whacking tennis balls against the wall. The whole time I was thinking of what a comely, radiant face she had, boyish in shape but feminine in feature. Her shoulders were broad for a woman, probably those of a swimmer, and in her turtleneck, sweats and parka, she appeared rustic, outdoorsy and unself-conscious. Flustered and embarrassed by my attraction to her, which I was convinced was one-way, I concentrated on establishing the rhythm in my strokes and smooth weight transference from the back to the front foot as I struck the ball. I did not look in her direction.

What made me uncomfortable about my attraction to her was that she was white. My predicament was this: Since coming to the United States I had come under increasing pressure to choose sides in America's racial battles. Militant blacks wanted me to prove my solidarity with their cause by disassociating myself from whites and confining my friendships to the black community. My refusal to adopt the attitude that all whites are racist by abandoning white friends who had earned my trust and respect led me to be labeled an Uncle Tom.

To regard all whites as racist by failing to judge them as individuals is as harmful as the white attitude of stereotyping all blacks. But this argument of mine fell on deaf ears. Bitterness, rage, suspicion, fear and hate had largely supplanted reason, tolerance and common sense in America's race relations.

Some whites, on the other hand, also victims of the racism and intolerance that pervaded society, were unable or unwilling to deal with me on my own terms, as an individual, rather than as one of the many stereotypes about blacks they had imbibed growing up self-segregated from black America.

Suddenly Gail jumped up, picked up one of my other rackets and tested the grip size.

"Do you play?" I inquired.

"I used to play a lot when I lived in Austin, Texas."

"Let's see," I said, and tossed her two balls.

She hit the balls hard, stiffly, but with determination. They bounced back to her at odd angles, making her look ludicrous as she lunged and twisted and spun with little success in hitting the balls back. Both of us laughed uproariously. "Hold the racket firmly but don't choke it," I said. "And don't forget to watch the ball carefully. And follow through, transferring your weight forward. Like this." I demonstrated.

She tried again, but control of the ball kept eluding her. I noticed she was frustrated and a bit embarrassed. I took the pressure off her by patiently demonstrating the proper technique. We took turns hitting. Gradually some of her old skills came back. Gail ran nonstop all over the gym attempting to return my best shots. Finally she dropped from exhaustion.

"Don't stop, you're doing great," I said. "You're a natural athlete."

"I'll never be a tennis champion."

"Are you still holding your racket properly?" I walked over to Gail, placed my hands gently on hers, adjusted her forehand grip, and guided her arm through the correct swing. I did not let go of her hand right away. Our eyes met.

To read more click Gail's View

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This site was last edited on
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Mark's View
Gail's View

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