*
He says, “I want to tell you something.” He looks intent, serious. I know that he has seen through the disguise to what I truly am. He is going to leave me. Why would he stay? Why would anyone stay? I am shattering inside when he says, “I love you.”
I burrow against his skin. He needs me; I am special; I am chosen. I feel him move into my body, our blood mingled. The paths of our lives uprooted from their previously separate soils and replanted entwined.
*
Yet here is another and important part of our story. Daniel is white. Creamy skin that tans in botchy spots if he has too much sun, blue eyes, blond hair, a little more than six feet of white man. Here in America, for someone like me, to love someone like him, what ignoring of history do I have to do?
But in love, history can be ignored. Indeed, perhaps, in a love like ours, history must be ignored. What do plantations and shadows hanging from beautiful trees have to do with my lover and me? What does a history of colonialization and enslavement have to do with us? What does a queen’s pounding of her children’s heads in a mortar have to do with us? After all, my past is hidden behind the thick curtains of a different country. I will choose not to part these particular draperies.
Even more truthfully, perhaps, I am secretly thrilled at being noticed and chosen by one of them. As if he makes up for all those white boys in high school who had looked past me. To be desired like this feels like being lifted into the very bosom of America.
We put our arms, one dark, one pale, next to each other and exclaim at the difference. Next to him, I am irrefutably, undeniably dark brown. Such a malleable concept, one’s body. It exists only in contrast to the bodies around it.
*
Then too, we live in a time and place where it isn’t particularly remarkable to be interracial. There are couples like us everywhere in the city, mixed in every variation possible.
But there are also the battle stories. A black nurse who does shifts with me tells me of driving at night with her white husband, their car pulled over at a DUI stop. They had not worried because the husband had been the designated driver and had not drunk at the party. But the officer had shone the light in her eyes and wanted to know what her relationship to the driver was. He had asked questions until they realized he thought she was a prostitute out with her white john. It was only the proof of their shared name, their matched rings, that convinced him and freed them to go. Always between this couple, the way the officer’s eyes had misread love for commerce.
Once Daniel and I drive across wide stretches of land, and in Utah we stop at a motel. I stay in the car looking at a map and he goes inside. After a while, bored, I wander into the lobby and go up to the counter, where the woman behind the desk is talking to him. I enter their conversation and it takes me a while to realize that she is talking to him, but not to me. She is looking at him, but not at me, and nothing I say, no ferocity with which I stare at her face, will make her turn and look at me and admit that I am here with some claim on this man who in her opinion should not belong to me. I am invisible, kicked in the chest by her refusal to see me. When she slides the room key across the counter, it is toward him. It is a gesture marked by an unmistakable ignoring of my outstretched palm. I storm out, and later in the room he says, “Shh, who cares? She’s just a stupid, racist woman. Don’t worry about it.” And I nod and let him comfort me.
*
In the summer he takes me to visit his parents, who are good people living in a good place, a small town an hour out of Charleston. On the drive to their house, I open the window, and it is humid in a way that reminds me of the island. My skin opens up as if I am coming home, the biology in me tricked by the weight and temperature of the air, by the myriad shades of green rushing past.
I say, half joking, “It feels like home. We should move here.”
He grips my knee and smiles, says, “Give it a minute.” We pass a small church with a sign outside that reads, “Jesus, stripped, abused, assaulted, violated for you.” I raise my eyebrows at him. He says, “Yah see? Not exactly home.”