Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo by Mark Mathabane, Gail Mathabane
Authors: Mark Mathabane, Gail Mathabane
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couch by the window, wrapped ourselves in a blanket, fell silent, and listened to the falling rain and the footsteps of strangers passing my windows in the night. It was completely dark but for a single candle.
The morning light seeped through the blinds. It was the first morning of a fall that would pass like a dream, as if we were enveloped in a haze that the outside world could not penetrate. Gail and I created a mutual inner world that challenged and inspired us.
The only time I felt fully human, understood, and accepted in all my idealism was when Gail and I were in that dark Staten Island apartment, reading and talking and laughing. We had neither steady jobs nor much money, but we did not feel we needed any more than was necessary to survive. The only thing we had of value was each other.
We typed side by side, read aloud to each other, dreamed together. We often became so excited by our ideas that we would rush about in search of pen and notebook, eager to capture thoughts on short stories, twists in plot, character development, setting up a disciplined reading and writing schedule, themes in Richard Wright’s books, the greater social significance of art, or the individual rebelling against the suffocating demands of custom and authority.
We traveled by ferry and subway to the midtown Manhattan library across from MOMA where we checked out recordings of Shakespeare, Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Milton, classical music, and Russian poetry.
Every day I worked on the ifr BE manuscript, and Gail, on her growing first novel. We dined each night by candlelight while listening to folk music by Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez, and Mahalia Jackson.
Three times a week we jogged ten miles up Victory Boulevard and around Silver Lake Park. Saturdays we lugged our laundry down the street to the laundromat and Sundays we walked three miles to the grocery store and back, carrying the bulging brown bags on our heads in the same way African women carry jugs of water from the river. Neither of us had a car, and for weeks I had no phone, until my editor and agent insisted I spend part of my advance to get one installed.
Whenever I had to go into the real world, that is, to meet with my editors at Macmillan, Gail would accompany me and wait outside the towering building, leaning against the wall reading nineteenthcentury French novels or books about Indian women in deWos speaking Punjabi.
When I returned I would find her sitting on her knapsack outside the lobby of the publishing house, engrossed in her reading and oblivious to the constant stream of formally dressed men and women flowing through the revolving doors of the major New York firm.
As far as her parents knew, Gail lived at her brother’s apartment on the Upper East Side, but actually she spent most of her time with me.
As pressure grew for her to help her brother Paul and sister-inlaw, Deb, pay the rent and buy groceries, and as her Protestant work ethic began accusing her of being indolent, she started hunting for steady jobs. After a short stint as an intern at Heoith magazine, she landed a job translating, writing, and editing German news stories for the Manhattan-based branch of the German embassy. They paid her a decent wage for a twenty-hour workweek and gave her great benefits. She felt she had imposed too long on her brother and his wife and was eager to find a place of her own.
When Gail called me and said she had found an apartment to rent, I was disappointed. I worried about her safety in a city as large and dangerous as New York and would have felt more at ease if she shared my place. Besides, it would have been less expensive if we split the rent. But I did not want to stand in the way of her independence.
“I’ll help you move,” I said.
When I saw the room she had rented I was shocked. It was on the first floor of a dilapidated house in the slum section of Stapleton, a Staten Island neighborhood of roaming gangs and abandoned buildings used as crack
The morning light seeped through the blinds. It was the first morning of a fall that would pass like a dream, as if we were enveloped in a haze that the outside world could not penetrate. Gail and I created a mutual inner world that challenged and inspired us.
The only time I felt fully human, understood, and accepted in all my idealism was when Gail and I were in that dark Staten Island apartment, reading and talking and laughing. We had neither steady jobs nor much money, but we did not feel we needed any more than was necessary to survive. The only thing we had of value was each other.
We typed side by side, read aloud to each other, dreamed together. We often became so excited by our ideas that we would rush about in search of pen and notebook, eager to capture thoughts on short stories, twists in plot, character development, setting up a disciplined reading and writing schedule, themes in Richard Wright’s books, the greater social significance of art, or the individual rebelling against the suffocating demands of custom and authority.
We traveled by ferry and subway to the midtown Manhattan library across from MOMA where we checked out recordings of Shakespeare, Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Milton, classical music, and Russian poetry.
Every day I worked on the ifr BE manuscript, and Gail, on her growing first novel. We dined each night by candlelight while listening to folk music by Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez, and Mahalia Jackson.
Three times a week we jogged ten miles up Victory Boulevard and around Silver Lake Park. Saturdays we lugged our laundry down the street to the laundromat and Sundays we walked three miles to the grocery store and back, carrying the bulging brown bags on our heads in the same way African women carry jugs of water from the river. Neither of us had a car, and for weeks I had no phone, until my editor and agent insisted I spend part of my advance to get one installed.
Whenever I had to go into the real world, that is, to meet with my editors at Macmillan, Gail would accompany me and wait outside the towering building, leaning against the wall reading nineteenthcentury French novels or books about Indian women in deWos speaking Punjabi.
When I returned I would find her sitting on her knapsack outside the lobby of the publishing house, engrossed in her reading and oblivious to the constant stream of formally dressed men and women flowing through the revolving doors of the major New York firm.
As far as her parents knew, Gail lived at her brother’s apartment on the Upper East Side, but actually she spent most of her time with me.
As pressure grew for her to help her brother Paul and sister-inlaw, Deb, pay the rent and buy groceries, and as her Protestant work ethic began accusing her of being indolent, she started hunting for steady jobs. After a short stint as an intern at Heoith magazine, she landed a job translating, writing, and editing German news stories for the Manhattan-based branch of the German embassy. They paid her a decent wage for a twenty-hour workweek and gave her great benefits. She felt she had imposed too long on her brother and his wife and was eager to find a place of her own.
When Gail called me and said she had found an apartment to rent, I was disappointed. I worried about her safety in a city as large and dangerous as New York and would have felt more at ease if she shared my place. Besides, it would have been less expensive if we split the rent. But I did not want to stand in the way of her independence.
“I’ll help you move,” I said.
When I saw the room she had rented I was shocked. It was on the first floor of a dilapidated house in the slum section of Stapleton, a Staten Island neighborhood of roaming gangs and abandoned buildings used as crack
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