Loving Day
On June 12, 1967, I was on the third leg of my first honeymoon – a tour of the Caribbean. Having done post wedding time in St. Thomas and St. John’s, we were in Jamaica. We went from Montego Bay to Ocho Rios on that day. We arrived at the Ocho Rios Playboy Club at about 4 in the afternoon just as dancing to a live Reggae band and cocktails were being served at the pool. There was a super adorable pixie of a girl with a boyish figure in a modest bikini dancing on the edge of the pool. Mia Farrow cropped hair, Twiggy figure, the energy of a pre-pubescent male. My new husband and I hung for a while enjoying the ambience, rhythms and humidity, went to our room, napped, dressed for dinner.
The dining room was dark and a bit more glittery than most places in the Caribbean – more shady-side-of Chicago than tropical paradise. I didn’t love it, but I was getting anxious to return to New York so I might not have loved it anywhere.
Our waitress approached. You could have opened the dictionary to “Playboy Bunny” and found her photo. She was petite, beautifully shaped, with mid-back length gorgeous flowing blond tresses held out of her eyes with a bunny-eared head band.
“Hi” she said.
“I’m your Bunny Bambi!”
WHAAAAAA??????!!!! It was her! The bouncy little fruge-er from poolside!!! What had happened?
“It’s YOU!!!” I said. “From the pool!” “You didn’t look like this this afternoon!”
“It’s a wig!” she said tossing her locks is a friendly, little-girl manner.
“And…” this part was sotto voce as she kneeled – not leaned, next to my chair, “…the boobs come in the costume!”
What my husband and I didn’t know anything about, was that on the very same day that we were lolling in privilege, flaunting our togetherness, laughing at silly stuff that we would retell for years, we didn’t know that back on home turf two other newlyweds were changing the world in ways we didn’t even realize the world needed to be changed. It was on this day that the Supreme Court struck down a law in Virginia: the decision made in Loving v Virginia made it legal for interracial couples to marry.
There. It was written. People of different races were now allowed to marry in the Commonwealth of Virginia and in ALL of the United States, negating all anti-miscegenation laws. The couple who saw to that were Mildred and Richard Loving.
It hardly seems historic now: people of different tints and hues tying knots and blending voices and any other poorly phrased metaphor seems like a simple given. That seems primitive when people today are wrestling with issues of gender identification, while living in an ever repressive and restrictive society, while the question of whether any children can be safe in their schools or any of us can go to a movie or walk across a parking lot without fearing for our lives. Bullets don’t seem to be aimed exclusively at one color or another. The whole spectrum is at risk, and the reasons for that go deep and dark, past the Lovings’ landmark decision to a time long before that in a world that maybe hasn’t change a whole lot even if the laws have.
And yet the sheer poetry of it – the irony of White Richard’s last name being Loving – perhaps that is what makes this annual day of acknowledgement the biggest multi-racial celebration in the country.
And the irony of Black Mildred’s name being the same as a favorite Aunt’s, well, the whole of it warms my heart on more than one level.
The fact is, the celebration of this day this year fills me with happiness and the kind of hope I need to bathe in during these hideously stressful, vulgar and physically nauseating political times. I want to shout it from the rooftops:
“HAPPY LOVING DAY EVERYONE!!!!” And many more, dear god in heaven. And many many more, with or without a Supreme Court intervention.
All this is happened exactly 23 years minus one month after the day in 1941, July 12tth, when an earlier love story was sealed and officially launched. Perhaps in a month I’ll write about that loving day - when Freda and Bernie Young were married at the Casa Del Rey in Brooklyn, New York. It was almost as historic – a poor first generation American girl from the Bronx marrying a wealthier third generation New Yorker Brooklyn College summa cum laude man. No major judicial decisions marked that day. But it is something worth celebrating on its own merit. With great personal jubilation.