Suza: When the freedom to love is still a dream
Love is amazing.
Like lightning, it strikes at random. Like electricity, it energizes the rhythm of the heart. Yet for many, the path to freedom to love is long and arduous. For many the path is spiked with pain and suffering. How to appreciate the pain and suffering? Let’s hear a story of a forbidden love.
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Julie was fortunate to survive the inferno, but in 1938, life in the Mississippi Delta remained precarious. Sitting in the temporary shelter at the church, anguishing at how to rebuild her charred French Colonial, Julie’s eyes shifted to a metal chest on the floor.
The chest belonged to her late mother, a white woman named Ethel. But because her father, a man named Virgil, was Black, Julie came to be identified as Black. In spite of Julie's curiosity to know more about her father, what Ethel revealed mostly was that Virgil died in the Civil War.
Thanks to Pandora inside Julie’s mind, a story she never imagined existed would have remained untold. Most contents in the chest were damaged, but to Julie’s surprise, a diary at the bottom of the chest was intact. Inside the diary she found a letter tucked between its middle pages.
The letter read.
Dear Ethel,
Many times I have wondered. Do you see the words in my eyes unveiling the times we met in our secret place in the meadow?
Oh how beautiful you looked on those sweltering hot summers, as you ran, in your bright white dress, across the meadow, to the tree atop the hill, hands touching the broomsedge grass. Oh how I had longed to see you. We had many special times there. We had many kisses there. We had many embraces there.
I can still feel your hands around my shoulders. I can still feel your heartbeat against mine. How to feel such a warm heart. How to touch such a beautiful soul. Tears in my eyes spoke more than I could write. You are always the one for me.
I see you, my dear Ethel, yet you are so far. Do you see the deep love in the romantic abyss in my heart? Do you see the deep pain in the hilltop of my heart? I get closer yet the farther you are away. We can’t be together. There is a wall between us. Just like the past that perpetually remains real.
I still remember the day you came to the plantation to live with your uncle. I still remember that brightest Sunday morning. I was with my family in the back of the prayer room at your uncle’s house. There you were in the front of the room, your well-groomed hair fell from your head to the waist like liquid gold. Your voice as you sang the hymn sounded like a house finch singing in the dawn of the day. When service ended, you walked out of the room with such grace, I felt like I had seen an angel descending from heaven to protect God’s saints. I could not look away as I should have.
Mama warned me on our way back to the quarters: “You better not think that. Nothing good happens when people like us mess with people like them.” I wished mama lied, but her words stayed true. Oh how I had feared we might be found out.
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I still struggle with vivid memories of the boy, from across the river, whose skin appeared just like mine. Everyone warned the boy not to walk at night to meet his white love. He believed the white girl was the only one with a heart that could see him as human. When they found the boy, all that remained of him appeared like charcoal and smelled like charred game.
In my sleep I see bleeding backs from whiplashes, screaming mothers from lynched children. Yet you are also in my sleep, still loving me, still forbidden for us to be together, still forbidden for us to be in love.
I still see you. I still miss you.
I am still yours, V.
Julie’s heart sank from the fresh grief for her mother and a father she never met. Imagining her parents' ordeal caused her to sob even harder. She awoke from her dream. It was 1967.
Julie, Ethel and Virgil are fictional. Yet it was no fiction that before 1967, marriage, cohabitation, and sex between members of different races were prohibited in many parts of the United States. Even religion was used to justify the prohibition.
"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." Virginia’s white supremacist judge, Leon M. Bazile, wrote in his 1965 ruling that Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving had violated Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act.
In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that Virginia's anti-miscegenation law, which prohibited marriage between whites and non-whites, was unconstitutional.
That should have been the end of the story. Yet, in 2024, for many, love is still forbidden.
Walter Suza of Ames writes frequently on the intersections of spirituality, anti-racism and social justice. He can be contacted at wsuza2020@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Ames Tribune: Suza: When the freedom to love is still a dream
