Maryland was one of the twenty-nine U.S. states that banned interracial marriage and cohabitation. As their relationship progressed, the obstacles piled up. There were countless restaurants where they couldn’t eat together, theaters where they couldn’t sit together, shops they couldn’t safely enter. They were harassed, yelled at, and spit on when they linked arms or held hands together in Baltimore. It was humiliating and scary but Estela was too grown up to retreat behind the walls of a convent. The city she had loved, where she had found a chosen family and constructed a sense of self and
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