The first one I remember is of me when I was about 4 or 5 in the early 1950's before integration, playing on the front steps with my first girlfriend, the daughter of my mother's maid. I did not have many friends growing up. After all, who wants to play with the preacher's kid? My father was a Methodist minister and we moved just about every 4 years to a new town. I remember having fun playing innocently with my friend until one day an old white woman who lived next door to us and didn't like our cats saw us as she was returning with a bag of groceries from the grocery store. She yelled out as she passed by: "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You shouldn't be playing with a n-----." I'd never heard that word before, and I didn't know what we had done wrong either. When I asked my mother, to this day I am grateful for her reply. "That woman is just ignorant," she said. My mother had grown up in South Carolina in a wealthy family. Her father was a lawyer and her mother was a school teacher. They had house servants and servants who worked in the fields (I guess that was the modern version of slavery being perpetuated).
The second experience happened during my late middle school years. My cousin, Mary Edith, who was several years my senior, was attending Randolph Macon Women's College in Lynchburg during the time when the civil rights movement was just getting fired up, and I learned at the dinner table one day that she had up and joined other college students, black and white, in the first sit-in demonstration of the lunch counters in Lynchburg and had gone to jail for 30 days as a result. I later learned that she married a man from Lebanon whom she had met during her college years. He was a student then at Virginia Tech. She went on to get her Ph.D. in psychology and became a psychotherapist. She and her husband lived in Lebanon for several years where she taught psychology at the American University in Beirut. They have since returned to the States and live somewhere in California. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to ask her why she participated in the sit-in. She simply said, "When one of us isn't free, none of us is free."
Fast forward to the early 1960's when I was a student at a Methodist college in North Carolina and sang in the concert touring choir along with two students from Africa who were also enrolled there. When Spring concert touring time came around, we visited the town where my father was the Methodist preacher. Members in the church were to host the choir members--all found host families except the two African students. No one would take them in. I asked my father if we could let them stay at the parsonage. He said he might be fired from his position if we did so he arranged for them to stay in a local motel. I remember feeling very angry that they couldn't stay with us because we had plenty of room in that big old parsonage.
In the early '60's I spent a summer in New Orleans in a commune with about 18 other white students from all over the U.S. During the day, we worked with children in the projects off St. Charles providing outdoor activities and arts and crafts. One little black boy wanted to learn how to play the organ so I gave him some free organ lessons. News came about a march in Selma, Alabama that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was organizing. We knew about the police brutality against the marchers, the dogs, hoses and billy clubs, but one of our members was determined to go anyway. The rest of us were too scared to go and just hoped she'd come back alive. When she did, we all thought she was so brave. I wished then that I had had that kind of courage, but I didn't. I think I was about 19 or 20 then, and I was afraid of just about everybody. She is probably a very important person today, a social activist and leader, no doubt.
In my junior year, I transferred to the University of Kentucky to complete my college undergrad work. There for a while I dated a Japanese student studying nuclear physics. I had never dated interracially before. Today he is a neurosurgeon at a prominent university hospital in Maryland.
After graduating from college, I moved to Atlanta, Georgia in 1967. I began attending a church there where I met a well-spoken, well-dressed, pleasant, handsome and very friendly African-American male. He had graduated from Oglethorpe University, a private white school, and was one of only 6 black students in his graduating class. He was the first African-American to graduate with a business degree there too. He would call me sometimes just to talk when he was travelling on his job as a district supervisor of an oil company, and I would continue to see him at church. He introduced me to his parents, both of whom had college degrees. His mother was a school teacher in Atlanta and his father worked in the post office. I was teaching English in an integrated school on Atlanta's southside at that time so I invited him to come to my class and speak to the young people about his career. It wasn't long before we were dating. Eventually we married in the Spring of 1974. My father did not come to our wedding, but my mother did and my sister was my maid of honor. My brother and his wife were also present. David's family members--his mother, father and sister--were all present. That following summer we decided to visit my sister and her husband who were living in Lafayette, Louisiana. We had to drive through Alabama and part of Mississippi as I recall, and I hid under the passenger seat so I'd have a husband still alive when we got back home from visiting my sister. It was dangerous, even life threatening in those days, for a black man to be seen with a white woman in some parts of the South. In fact, it hadn't been too many years since the Loving case had been decided by the Virginia Supreme Court which basically said that forbidding interracial marriage was unconstitutional. We lived in Atlanta for another year until we were transferred to Richmond by Philip Morris. I was 8 months pregnant when I first arrived in Richmond and gave birth to our only child that following Spring. During our first years of marriage, we were often harassed by the Richmond police. They would stop us and demand to see my husband's driver's license and glare over at me sitting in the passenger seat as if to say, "Woman, have you lost your mind?" Of course, the police weren't the only ones who glared. Everywhere we went, people stared at us. David seemed to take it in stride but it annoyed me. "What are they looking at?" I wondered until I finally accepted that we were just different as a couple because we were interracial and I was going to have to get used to the stares. I never did.
When I decided to return to work, I had a hard time finding child care. None of the white women I contacted wanted to keep "a black baby" although my daughter was very fair skinned. Finally, a friend of David referred us to Mrs. Ridley, who had a waiting list a mile long. She had a recently retired friend who might be willing to keep our baby. When I met Mrs. Shepperson and told her about the other women I had contacted, she replied, "Well, I'm a Christian, and I don't feel that way. You can bring her to me." I was grateful to be able to return to work and work in peace, knowing that our daughter was being cared for by a very kind person in a Christian home. We were good friends until her death in 1993.
In the early 1980's I attended a parent support group where I met Eunice Wilson, who would become by best girlfriend for the next 18 years. Cancer took her life just 2 years ago, but I think of her often. We were runnin' buddies and we took a lot of trips together. She was my very own Whoopi Goldberg and she could make you laugh so hard that your stomach would hurt and you'd be out of breath. She was with me when my daughter graduated from college in 1997. She rode with me to my father's funeral, and she was with me at the military funeral of my daughter's godfather who is buried in the military cemetery in Amelia County. We had many hilarious times together. In a way, I felt God had given me back my childhood girlfriend.
In the 1990's I worked in a large law firm in downtown Richmond, and I knew of a white male attorney there who had married interracially so I decided to tell him of my experience. One day he approached my desk and thanked people like my husband and me for making things easier for his wife and him. I thought that was a nice thing to say. He now works in the same building as I do and we often see each other on the elevators and give each other a big smile. He is a very spiritual young man and now has at least 3 sons, I believe, maybe 4.Today I am the proud mother of a grown daughter who is part Cherokee Indian, part Caucasian and part African-American. She is a beautiful blend of these 3 cultures in our country's history. I love her very much. My interracial experiences have been a tremendous blessing in my life. I feel that God has given me another set of eyes in which to view this world. I understand so many things I would never have had the opportunity to know about without my interracial life style. I think I'm a much better person for it too.
I thought my daughter had had a fairly easy time of it as a biracial child growing up in Richmond until I flat out asked her recently. Boy, was I wrong! She explained that one of the reasons she hated middle and high school so much was because the girls were so clickish and tried to force her to choose either to hang with the sistahs or be with the white girls. She refused to choose. That's why she was a loner most of those years as her teachers often commented to me on her report cards. She said the black girls were jealous of her fair skin and white textured hair. It was "total hateration," she said. But there was a Puerto Rican student named Lisa who was also light skinned and she and Juanita started hanging out together and became friends. "And it's still going on in corporate America," she said, explaining that she gets a "weird vibe" from a black sistah who she senses feels awkward when she sees Juanita with one of her Italian or Chinese friends. Juanita attends an interracial church "up North" and I have found one "down South." We visit often by telephone and spend vacation time together.
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