Edwidge Danticat - The Butterfly's Way - Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States

"You know, black Garry, my dad."

Everyone laughed.

So if the sight of a black-and-white couple strolling down the street still offends you, it's your problem. We're busy leading our lives and rearing our children and keeping our love alive.

I am sitting in the home of a gorgeous, famous black actor. A hottie. His skin is ebony and his muscles are toned. There are empty beer bottles everywhere, sultry British music playing. And we're at the point in the interview when we get too much like old friends who used to kiss. We reminisce about Brooklyn and the Haitians we knew growing up. He flirts a little. We spill beans about sex and dating. Then he says something and my knees go weak-for I am self-conscious. He says, "You're the kind of sister that would probably turn her nose up at a brother and not give him the time of day." I don't know how he got my number. But I have a story I wish I'd told him in my defense.

I used to be a strong woman. I even considered myself a modern black woman. But six years ago I had to get stronger over eggplant parmesan. I was sitting at a dinner table with the then love of my life and his Texan parents. We were dining at Santerello on the Upper West Side ogling antipasto and getting drunk on red wine. It was a genteel scene. My mother and father were conspicuously absent- visiting with friends somewhere in Queens, where I should have been. My man and I had just announced that we wanted to move to Texas together. I don't know what I was thinking. It was my Normandy Beach approach to love in full-blown play. So far from East Flatbush where I was born and South Miami where I grew up. Haiti I had buried somewhere just beneath the surface for the night.

These were really reserved Texans, which made the air thick with unanswered questions. We were all laughing in a guarded way. The dining room was claustrophobic in thick red velvets and heavy woods. Still, as I said, I was in love and these were the colors of earth, familiar skin, tall tree trunks, and a dozen red roses. I was wearing a yellow dress to counteract the stress in my face and bring out those undertones people say I glow with. I wanted to be their friendly yellow rose rather than their black rose, in Texan parlance. There's an offensive Waylon Jennings song that goes "The devil made me do it the first time/The second time I done it on my own/ Better leave that black rose alone." Waylon understated, but my boyfriend's mother, under the influence of too much Chianti, would not be stopped. She and her husband began a conversation that went like this. As if I wasn't there:

I ran to the bathroom to cry. Ralph and Linda were their next-door neighbors of Mexican descent who comprised the majority of their ethnic friends. Texas was not New York. Maybe their son and I could live together in New York, or the Bay Area, but not in Texas.

At the time I was not sure just what my parents thought. I never asked because it would have been like talking about sex. In fact, it would have been talking about sex. I presumed that in the Caribbean there was unspoken encouragement of interracial dating. Half Indian, part French, two-thirds Arab… you know the drill. My father stayed silent on the issue. My mother was agreeable. It was generally the same response they'd had to every decision I ever made. Summer college. Columbia. Brazil. Freelance writing.

I was a student at Columbia University, and I loved the anonymity of New York at nineteen. With a lover you could blend into the throngs, virtually unnoticed. Part of the landscape of the city are the lovers that fit like the fixtures of dilapidated city apartments: original moldings, faucets, and such. Lovers fit in so well against buildings and urban decay because they are so oblivious to the sweat, crowds, and screechy-bumpy arrested traffic. In a Woody Allen movie, you fall in love with falling in love in the city at the Museum of Modern Art or in Central Park. You always notice the lovers, often mismatched, happy to sit too close on packed subways. There is certain freedom in the back of a yellow taxi to stare into goo-goo eyes, touch and kiss, not mindful of the meter, drunk drivers, or a cabby rolling his eyes at the window display of complete lack of self-control. I would sometimes look at the Haitian name on the I.D. card and think, This man could be my uncle or my father.

Before I messed with Texas I'd had my first significant romance with a graduate student in Russian studies. I noticed then the ostracism that would come to define my lovelife. I would hold hands with my boyfriend and members of the Black Students Association would trip on me as I tripped over campus cobblestone and he would stop me from falling. It's hard to say that their stares were hateful or judgmental. Maybe it was just me projecting my guilt for not being the black girl every one wanted me to be. I was, for the moment, maybe the one that the boyfriend wanted. Trying to belong to him, to me, to my family as well as the Black Students Association, the Haitian Students Association, and the Caribbean Students Association (only a few of the groups of which I never officially became a member). It was like Woody Allen quoting Groucho Marx in Annie Hall about not joining any club that would have him as a member.

Bedrooms are such sacred spaces because they allow you the freedom to explore the things that are truest about you in dreams and with another body. I couldn't say I saw my reflection in my lover's eyes. But I wondered about his fascination with me. Our skin contrasted as much as our styles did. I had extensions in my hair that he loved to look at-but not to touch. It was hard explaining the hair thing to him when he'd secretly looked as if he wanted to touch something about me that was real. As with my Senegalese twists, the line between real and fantasy somehow was blurred. If I stared at my hand on his stomach long enough it would look like a little brown island on a pale pink sea. I wondered if we could ever disappear into each other. I still think of this rather neutrally. As we do with all private thoughts when we're naked. But outside-if we went too far up the Upper West Side, I would be castigated in a glance or by a declaration. "I can't believe she brought a white boy up in Harlem." As if I wasn't there.

From the time we were eight years old, my best friend from childhood and I would sit around spinning tales and telling each other our dreams. I hate to confess it, but we were expert liars. Still, each day after school we'd report to each other elaborate tales of how we'd look, what we'd wear when we were twenty and courting or married to various rock stars and actors. Barring Prince and Michael Jackson, the list was pretty conventional: Leif Garrett, Andy Gibb, Sting, Rick Springfield, Carey Elwes, and Christopher Atkins. George Michael and Andrew Ridgely from Wham! took entirely too big a chunk of our time and creativity. But it went on for years. Shining white knights who would take us away from our little Caribbean community in Miami. My friend's Jamaican parents and my Haitian parents were always conspicuously absent from our ritual imaginings as were families and neighborhoods, patois, Kreyol , griyo, and jerk meats.

By high school we'd grown apart, but we still got together to talk about relationships-mostly hers. She had a series of sports-playing significant others. And I'll make it plain: Black boys were not into me. I tried to be down and alluring. I sometimes even let the basketball and football heroes copy my homework. Romantically, however, it was no go. I read Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy my first year in college. The main character lives in New York and works as an au pair who sexually crosses racial lines. I got it. It was going to be hard to be any kind of black intellectual as long as you were sleeping with the enemy. James Baldwin wrote about this all the time, making the boudoir the battleground of race war, too.