Confronting Race, Religion and Her Heart

Even before he spoke, I knew. A woman I would meet years later described the sensation as “feeling it in the skin.” I felt the words he was about to say in my skin.

In his “I can’t do this anymore,” I heard what he was really saying. Something flashed red before my eyes. I was shaking, holding the phone to one ear. Screaming, but unable to speak.

I thought maybe the worst was over, but he went on to state the obvious — that I was black and not Jewish. He explained that he was not ready to handle the complexities of an interracial relationship in a country like this, as if it were the 1960s and we were Richard and Mildred Loving. Or as if I had fooled him by making a racial and religious switch midway through our relationship.

My throat closed, my chest tightened, my eyes stung. I heard myself call him a bigot — the milder term — even though what I really wanted to call him was a racist.

He said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

We had been serious, tentatively exploring what our future might look like. I was in my 20s, he in his 30s. He didn’t date casually, he’d told me. At his age, he was always considering long-term potential.

I hated myself for letting him off so easily. It just felt like too high a mountain to climb. As a black woman in America, I climbed that mountain every day. To have to climb it again because of him was too much.

Instead, I spent the days after our breakup replaying his words in my head. I rehearsed for a retake of our conversation. In this imaginary conversation, I was brave and strong. I spoke firmly and clearly. I held a mirror up to his prejudice so he could not help but see himself for what he was and hear his words for what they were.

My feelings were untidy, but I had no time to label. I tried to write, but everything was mush. I missed him but resisted the urge to call. I reminded myself that I was black and not Jewish.

Over time, the details became fuzzy until he was just a blip on my dating screen, a story I told my friends. My black non-Jewishness ceased being my problem and became his alone.

I started dating again. Before him, I had dated only women, so I picked up where I had left off but ardently avoided anything interracial. I wondered what made me think I could be with a man at all, let alone a white one. With hindsight, I saw all the signs that should have tipped me off — dropping my hand when he saw his friends, for example. And with the benevolence that comes from either forgiveness or amnesia, I let it go.

When our paths crossed a year and a half later, the hardest edges were gone, leaving only the pulp substance of shared history. Coffee became lunch, lunch became dinner, dinner became sex.

Something in me raised a hand to object, but I ignored it. I knew what I was doing, or thought I did. I wanted to prove something: that I was still desirable, that I didn’t care. It was just my body, I told myself. My black non-Jewish body.

For him, I imagine the complexities of interracial casual sex in America required a different kind of logic, a different kind of bigotry.

During an inspired spell, I found myself transferring our relationship to paper. What came out was unexpected, fresh. The pain seemed gone, our conversations now comical. I kneaded our story like bread, and it rose. Soon I felt ready to share it with someone, and I was aware I was going to send it to him even before I actually decided.

He responded to the emailed draft immediately, and the affection in his greeting threw me.

He said my draft was “good” and “human” and “filled with conflict,” as though critiquing another couple’s tale, but then admitted that he was embarrassed by the story.

I again saw that flash of red from years before but tried my hand at objectivity. “Thank you for the feedback,” I began. “You raise some good points.” Yet something in me had been unleashed, and I knew there could be no backing away from the mountain this time.

I emailed him again, and this time I did not hold anything back. Calling him out felt both frightening and liberating. I worried about reopening a wound I didn’t have the resilience to mend. I wondered if he would respond but focused on how good it felt to finally say everything I had hauled around for so long. It dawned on me then how much I had edited myself during our relationship, afraid of scaring him off.

Two months later, his name appeared in my inbox. I hesitated, wary but curious.

His response was long yet concise, deliberate and measured. I read it twice, unsure what I was searching for. Maybe I had simply hoped it would end with my letter, with me getting the last word.

Months passed, and I saw him in every season. Springtime, crossing the street. Summer, walking through the park. Fall, in the frozen-food aisle at an organic food store. He looked unkempt and seemed startled to see me, so he filled the silence with nervous chatter: He had a son now. Today was his bris.

Stumped for a reply, I shared that my car loan was paid off.

Over coffee with a friend, his name came up. “Whatever happened with you two, by the way?” she asked, and suddenly words I didn’t recognize as my own tumbled out. I told her about the heaviness I couldn’t quite place. I missed him sometimes, yes. Still felt cheated, yes. Owed, yes. But there was something else I struggled to articulate as she watched me — patient, open, listening.

Parsing emotions that had existed only as masses in my chest was like trying to suppress a gag reflex with a mouth crammed full of marbles. All this time, it had been easier to be angry with him, to blame him. His wrongs were obvious and easy to label. The vernacular for him and those like him already existed; it was nothing new. But in the end, it was my own feelings of shame that were hardest to unload.

The disingenuousness was not, in fact, his; all along, he had been only exactly who and what he was. I was the one who shrank myself. I had tried to whitewash my blackness, polished myself to a colorless sheen, held myself up for his inspection, searching for the best light in which to stand to make him forget. I had so desperately wanted him to find me worthy. To have failed in that at the expense of my integrity shamed me more than any rejection of my black non-Jewishness ever could.

My friend listened as if she were hearing a secret she had long suspected but never mentioned, and I loved her for it. She rubbed my shoulder as I cried, asked the right questions, listened to all of my answers. When she told me, “You didn’t do anything but love, honey,” her words filled the void in me.

Apparently, as every self-help book purports, love really does start with the self. And over the next two years, I went back to basics. It was not smooth, and there were countless false starts, but with each one I learned new lessons while keeping that mantra front and center. I felt like a toddler learning to walk: First sit, then crawl, then stand, and fall. Stand and fall. It felt simultaneously like the hardest and easiest thing, and gratitude started to replace the heaviness that had weighed me down.

When I met a woman who seemed the answer to everything I was ready for, I was eager to test out my self-love sea legs, and all seemed rosy for a time. Soon, however, I realized she was less an answer than a test, and the fact that I could see that so clearly seemed like further proof of my growth.

We parted as friends, and I continued learning, standing, falling.

Waiting at a crosswalk one spring, I saw him in a car stopped at a light. He was in the passenger seat, a woman at the wheel. The years had not changed him, and I recognized him before he saw me. When our eyes met, they held, and I heard in his gaze all the words I had wished for in our ending: I’m sorry. You were right. I wish. If only.

I didn’t know what my own eyes said to him, but as the two restless children in the back bobbed up and down in their car seats, their mother oblivious to her distracted husband, I felt myself soften.

The children waved, and I smiled back. Somewhere on my shoulders, the last of something rose and flew gently away.