0062268678 _N_ (4 page)

We moved forward with a Farmville wedding, despite these doubts. I joked that it could be the most diverse event ever held in my hometown, a bad attempt at humor to distract from an uncomfortable truth. Deep down, I knew some residents of my hometown would object to my marrying someone of a different race, and this was a sad reality I didn’t want to confront.

But I had to. My grandmother never warmed to Jason. Our friends noticed how segregated the town is. Most of the waitstaff at our wedding was black while our neighborhood was white. The Farmville Herald declined to run a picture of Jason and me in its free wedding announcements, citing a policy to run only brides’ photographs. My mom canceled her subscription in protest, informing the publisher, whose grandfather had publicly opposed race mixing in the 1950s, that the policy had racist undertones. Worst of all, the judge who wed us would later tell Jason, at a Christmas Eve party in his home, to “ride that Indian pony,” implying that Jason had been accepted to business school at MIT only because of his American Indian heritage.

THE FIRST TIME I NOTICED an interracial couple I couldn’t stop staring. My parents had driven my brothers and me to Virginia Beach for a long weekend. I was sitting on a blanket next to my mom, reading a book while my brothers played on the beach, tossing a Frisbee with my dad. I was eleven, maybe twelve.

I glanced over at another young family spreading out their blanket next to ours. I had never seen a family like this one. Black dad, white mom. The three kids looked different from any children I had encountered: creamy brown skin and curly brown hair. Neither black nor white, but both. Finally, I asked my mom about these children.

“It must be hard for them,” she told me.

She said little more, but the message was clear. There was something impractical, maybe even abnormal, about people of different races marrying.

Many Virginians viewed race mixing in a harsher light. After all, the state had spawned the landmark civil rights case Loving v. Virginia. Eighteen-year-old Mildred Jeter, a part-black, part–American Indian woman, and her neighbor and childhood sweetheart, Richard P. Loving, who was white, were living in Virginia when they married in June 1958 in Washington, DC—an act then considered a crime in two dozen states, including Virginia. The commonwealth’s antimiscegenation laws, adopted in 1662, said that any marriage between a white and a nonwhite person was void, even if the couple had wed in a place where the marriage was legal. The Lovings had hoped to go unnoticed when they returned to live in rural Central Point in Caroline County, ninety-five miles south of the nation’s capital, home to a large mixed-race community. Instead, the following month, the county sheriff and two deputies raided their home early in the morning, shining flashlights in their faces.

One of them asked Richard Loving, “Who is this woman you’re sleeping with?” Mildred Loving answered, “I’m his wife.” Richard Loving pointed to the couple’s marriage certificate, but the sheriff told the couple, “That’s no good here.” The Lovings were charged with felony unlawful cohabitation and jailed, and they faced a punishment of up to five years in prison.

The judge in the case, Leon M. Bazile, told the court that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents… . The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” The Lovings accepted a plea bargain that called for a one-year prison sentence to be suspended if the couple left Virginia for twenty-five years.

They moved to Washington, DC, and had three children, traveling back to visit family separately. But in 1963, Mildred Loving had had enough. She decided she wanted to live with her family in Virginia, and, after watching the civil rights movement unfold, she was willing to fight for that right. She reached out to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU took her case to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals and then to the United States Supreme Court. In its unanimous 1967 decision, the high court found that state bans on interracial marriage—the country’s only remaining segregation laws—were unconstitutional.

But perched on the sand, my eyes fixed on the three mixed-race children, I didn’t know any of that. Nor did I know that I had just glimpsed my future.

I AM SITTING IN MY newborn daughter’s tiny nursery in Somerville, Massachusetts, staring at the pale pink walls as I rock her to sleep in my arms.

The October Sunday she arrived was crisp and cold, the night the Red Sox clinched the 2007 World Series. My mom caught a last-minute flight after my water broke Saturday morning, and she accompanied Jason and me to the hospital when we checked in Sunday, supporting me in the delivery room, rubbing my back, feeding me sips of Gatorade from a straw. Moments after our baby was born, she snapped a photo of Jason and me, glowing, holding our tiny daughter, whom we named Amaya.

Now, in December, I am waking every three hours to feed her, giving more of myself to another human being than I had ever considered possible. I am physically depleted and sleep-deprived, yet utterly and completely in love, content to be her mother. Holding Amaya on my lap, I caress her chocolate-malt skin. I stare into her almond eyes, with their hint of green, and I tease her smattering of cinnamon hair. I hold her little hands in mine and admire her feet and her impossibly small toenails. I rub her cleft chin, identical to Jason’s, and her generous lips and wide nose that resemble mine. Taking in all her miniature features, I feel a rush of gratitude and love. I would do anything to protect our daughter.

In the weeks after her birth, after my mother flew back to Virginia and Jason’s mother came and went, I have spent most of each day alone with Amaya. Jason is busy in his final year of graduate school, trying to complete two degrees. He hunches over his computer writing papers and works with other students to wrap up group projects. Secluded in our old house, I bundle up Amaya and head outside, meeting with other new moms, stopping by the market, anything to interact with adults. The days are impossibly long.

Jason comes back from school and, taking Amaya from my arms, encourages me to escape the house. He tidies the mess I’ve made of the kitchen and living room and asks about our day, keeping me company until bedtime. But then, during 3:00 a.m. feedings, I am alone again. Other than a few rowdy college kids who stumble down our street, Amaya and I are the only people awake. In these hours of profound isolation, my thoughts turn to my own childhood.

Home is the house where I grew up, the six of us eating dinner together every night around the oval wood table tucked into the kitchen. It is Mom making dinner, and Dad lounging in his green leather chair, describing a story he read in the New Yorker. It’s my brothers laughing, playing basketball on the street, skateboarding down the sidewalk, sneaking out of the house at night. Home is my high school, the pretty downtown streets, the beautiful tobacco and dairy farms that have long sustained my community.

Even during this sleep-deprived new-baby haze, I know I will want to share the story of my hometown with Amaya. My history is her history. It is a part of her family narrative, like the story of her birth, a story I already know how to tell. I imagine myself sharing how excited I was to learn I was pregnant, nudging Jason awake one Saturday morning holding a positive pregnancy test. I will describe feeling her move inside my belly and explain how she arrived two weeks early, before we had installed her car seat.

But telling her about my hometown’s place in history will be more challenging. I already know she will love her grandparents the way I loved mine. I can picture her sitting on my dad’s lap as he reads her a story or playing in the garden with Mom. This part of the story is easy. But I want my daughter to know the whole story, including the town’s tragic past—the one I didn’t know growing up, the one so many of my classmates, friends, and relatives still have not learned. The one that has haunted me for years. Now that I have my own child, I feel an urgency to dig deeper, to unearth the details I have hesitated to uncover.

Since my conversation with Robert Taylor, I have avoided thinking about Farmville’s past. It has become a painful topic for me, a source of shame and guilt. I feel torn between my love for my grandparents and embarrassed by their prejudices. I want to be loyal to them and protective of their legacy. Yet I believe that this story is worth exploring. My discomfort, and others’ discomfort, is all the evidence I need.

THREE YEARS LATER, IN 2010, I am unpacking boxes in our new home in Richmond, the capital of Virginia, already second-guessing our decision to move back to the South. I was tired of being isolated at home in Massachusetts during the excruciatingly long winters, a feeling exacerbated by the birth of our second daughter, Selma, the previous year. We didn’t belong in the North, I decided. Most of our friends from graduate school had left Boston for new jobs. We didn’t have any family nearby. I felt especially cut off from the story I wanted to research and tell about Virginia. I missed home.

The idea of raising our girls in the South, in the part of the world where we both grew up, appealed to us. They too would grow up passionate about barbecue and pickles and tomatoes fresh from the garden. They would learn Southern manners and speak with a Southern accent. We were intrigued by the thought of going back to the part of the country that, for all its problems, for all its racial animosity, contained our roots. Maybe our daughters could be part of a new generation of diverse Southerners that would right some of the past’s wrongs.

Most important, we would be closer to our families. I wanted to be near my parents and my brothers, who were starting families of their own. I imagined having dinner with them and still going home to my own bed at night. I could go back to work as a reporter with the support of my close-knit family, calling on Mom to help when Jason was traveling for work or when one of the children got sick at school.

But leaving our home in Boston hadn’t been easy. As the movers arrived to pack up the Victorian we had lovingly renovated—the house where we went from husband and wife to a family of three, then four—regret swept over me. Our girls had learned to crawl on the living room rug, and they had taken their first steps on the hardwood floors. It was the only house they had ever known. Boston, with its own legacy of segregation and racism, had embraced us. I hoped we would be able to say the same about southern Virginia.

But as we stroll Monument Avenue in our new neighborhood, statues of Confederate generals such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson greeting us every few blocks, all my reservations and fears about being back in the South surface. I worry about how my interracial family will be received here in the capital of the Confederacy, where rebel flags flutter in the wind. I’m afraid that Jason won’t feel comfortable and that people will stare at the girls.

I know any discrimination and racism they might face will not resemble what blacks endured in Prince Edward County. I see the numerous ways blacks are still discriminated against in America, particularly the South, and Jason and our children will not face the same kind of treatment. Yet Jason is distinctly not white. He experiences life as “the other,” from being called a “wetback” to being routinely asked, “Where are you from?” We expect our daughters may have similar experiences as brown-skinned children.

Because we want to be closer to family, Jason and I agree that it’s worth giving Richmond a chance. It is the city I grew up visiting. My parents drove the hour and fifteen minutes from Farmville to Richmond to put us on Santa’s lap at the Miller & Rhoads downtown department store at Christmastime. In high school, I rode school buses to tennis tournaments and public speaking competitions. In college, I dated guys who lived here, whiling away winter breaks drinking beer in dark bars. And because a number of my college and high school friends moved here after graduation, I already have a network of friends and acquaintances.

The Fan District neighborhood where we’ve moved is perfectly quaint, a thriving historic district on the edge of the Virginia Commonwealth University campus. Named for streets that radiate, or fan, westward, it is bursting with restaurants and Victorian homes. Jason accepted a job with an Internet start-up in a suburb of Richmond, but we aren’t ready to move to a cul-de-sac just yet. Since we met, Jason and I have preferred to live in more urban areas, first in San Diego, then Somerville.

Richmond is a segregated city—majority black, though just barely—and the Fan is a historically white neighborhood, isolated for the most part from the violence that is routine in other neighborhoods. However, its proximity to one of the most racially diverse universities in the country brings a wide array of people to the area. The Fan reminds us of other communities where we’ve lived—walkable, with a park, a grocery store, restaurants, bars, and a coffee shop blocks away.

Some friends in Farmville consider Richmond unsafe and warn us against moving into the city. But Richmond has changed since I left. It’s not the same city of the 1990s, when the crack cocaine epidemic peaked, the city’s murder rate soared, and residents fled.

It is not the same place where, in 1995, some whites told a mostly black city council that they objected to a statue of the black tennis star Arthur Ashe being placed alongside Confederate heroes on Monument Avenue, claiming it would threaten the avenue’s historic integrity. The city is finally recognizing its black history, and the mayor has even called for public discussion of the historic oppression of blacks. “We must be comfortable in making each other uncomfortable,” Mayor Dwight C. Jones has said. In 2007, a fifteen-foot Reconciliation Statue of two bronze figures embracing was installed to acknowledge Richmond’s role in the slave trade. A slave trail has been established, a slave jail site excavated, a slave burial ground preserved.

Richmond is being revitalized, too, and Jason and I see potential. Old tobacco warehouses have been renovated into lofts, and microbreweries are opening, one after another, in formerly abandoned buildings. New restaurants pop up like weeds. The city is embracing biking and other outdoor activities, particularly along the James River. Residents are arriving from other states, even other countries, to work for one of the universities, a downtown advertising agency, or Capital One, the region’s largest employer, bringing new energy and out-of-town perspectives.