MY FAMILY didn’t approve of Eugene, my future husband, and not because of the content of his character, which my father summarized after our first dinner together as “smart, interesting, and competent.”
The relationship troubled them, my mother especially, and she would get a chance to make her case the first time Eugene stayed at their home. That weekend, he and I took a drive to Watch Hill, a Rhode Island beach enclave with an antique merry-goround, small ice-cream shops, Edward Hopper coloring, and homes that screamed expense. We paid our twenty dollars to park in a hillside lot so that we could sit on the only beach within miles with actual surf. But on our walk to the water, we encountered a problem: a gaggle of sun-bronzed, white teens in bright shorts. They saw me coming, and one of them called back to a friend who had not yet cleared the bend, “What was that you were just saying?” The poor young man came around the grassy dune with his head thrown back, yelling “Niggers, niggers, everywhere!” I assume it was a song lyric. His friends looked at me and laughed. The kid turned red.
An animal part of me evaluated them, the muscular wall of eighteenyear-olds blocking the pass. I felt, keenly, Eugene’s stuttering silence beside me as they broke and streamed around us. Only after he had steered me down to the beach and made as if to sit down on our towel did I start to cry. And my Eugene, who had never been part of a Black unit before, had the innocence and daring to ask, What did you want me to say?
Well. I have no doubt he would know what to say now, but the moment gave me pause. And it is with a chill that I reflect that had I acted on my fear, I could have lost everything right then: the one I now turn to as a haven, the father of my three babies,
