Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

by Kathleen Collins

. . . I took to crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in the evenings between six and eight at the time the sun was setting, and in the glow of sunset I relieved the outer edges of my sadness, letting it blend with the surf-like monotony of the cars splashing below and the faint, luminescent splendor of the New York skyline . . .

Damn she had a way with words.

. . . I rode the subway to Coney Island. The cold, lonely stretch of beach, the abandoned amusement park figured in a poem entitled “In the Winter of Our Love”

But I was fascinated by this deepening, perhaps because I was still young enough to be attracted to sorrow.

He utterly honored his sorrow, gave in to it with such deep and boundless weeping that it seemed as I stood there he was the bravest man I had ever known.

I love this.

Only once do you know that kind of man, they say. Only once. But she would know them all her life. One after the other they would turn out to be that kind of man.

It’s 1963. Whatever happened to interracial love?

His letters made me tired. I wanted no news, no information, no pictures. I wanted the connection to slip. Sever itself. Cease to pull and tug at me in a vague, empty way.