Within a week Jim and Millie were the talk of East Holloman; Patrick and Nessie were inundated with protests and advice from countless relatives. Millie and Jim were an item! A hot item! But how could that be, when each child went to a different school, and their teachers disapproved as much as everyone else? Not from racial prejudice! From fear at potentially ruined young lives. For their own good, they had to be broken up.
The fees were a burden, but had to be found; Millie was taken out of St. Mary’s and sent to the Dormer Day School, where most of the students were the offspring of Chubb professors or wealthy Holloman residents. Not the kind of place parents with five children and a sixth on the way even dreamed of. But for Millie’s sake, the sacrifices had to be made.
An instinct in Patrick said it would not answer, and the instinct was right. No matter how many obstacles were thrown in their way, Millie O’Donnell and Jim Hunter continued to be an item.
Even looking back on it now as he tramped through County Services was enough to bring back the indescribable pain of those terrible years. The misery! The guilt! The knowledge of a conscious social crime committed! How could any father and mother sleep, knowing their ethics and principles were colliding head on with their love for a child? For what Patrick and Nessie foresaw was the suffering inflicted on Millie for her choice in boyfriends. Worse because she was prom queen material, the most gorgeous girl in her class. The Dormer Day School seethed with just as much resentment as St. Bernard’s and St. Mary’s — Millie O’Donnell was living proof that a black man’s penile size and sexual prowess could seduce even the cream of the crop. Girls hated her. Boys hated her. Teachers hated her. She had a black boyfriend with a sixteen-inch dick, who could possibly compete?
The trouble was that their teachers couldn’t protest that the friendship caused a drop in grades or a lack of interest in sport; Jim and Millie were straight A-plus students; Jim was a champion boxer and wrestler, and Millie a track star. They graduated at the head of their respective classes, with a virtual carte blanche in choice of a college. Harvard, Chubb, or any of the many great universities.
They went to Columbia together, enrolled in Science with a biochemistry major. Perhaps they hoped that New York City’s teeming, hugely diverse student population would grant them some peace from their perpetual torments. If so, their hopes were dashed at once. They endured four more years of persecution, but showed the world they couldn’t be crushed by graduating summa cum laude. Patrick and Nessie had tried to keep in contact, go down to see them when they wouldn’t come home, but were always rebuffed. It was as if, Patrick had thought at that time, they were growing a carapace thick enough and hard enough to render them invulnerable, and that included shutting out parents. He and Nessie had gone to their graduation, but Jim’s parents had not. Apparently they had given up the fight, just as strenuous on their side to sever their son from his white girlfriend — and who could blame them either? It takes maturity to know the pain …
The day after they graduated, Jim and Millie married in a registry office with no one there to wish them well. It was near Penn Station; they walked, carrying their suitcases, to board a crowded, smelly train to Chicago, traveling on student passes. In Chicago they changed to another crowded, smelly train that ambled on a poorly maintained railbed all the way to L.A. For most of the two and a half days they sat on the floor, but at least at Caltech they’d be warm in winter.
At the end of the two-year Master’s program Jim was starting to be known, his color beginning to be an advantage north of the Mason-Dixon Line — until people learned he had a beautiful white biochemist wife. However, the University of Chicago was willing to take Mr. and Mrs. Hunter as doctoral fellows — back to cold winters and cheerless summers.
When they received their Ph.D.s they seemed to meet a solid wall of opposition. No matter how much a school wanted Dr. Jim Hunter, it wasn’t prepared to offer employment to his wife, Dr. Millicent Hunter. He was one of the biggest whales in the vast protein ocean, whereas she was a sprat. As post-doctoral fellows or as faculty, the financial outlay for two Hunters was considered excessive. If this was complicated by the inter-racial nature of their union , no one was prepared to say.
After six years in Chicago they were poorer than ever, never having actually held a job. Their grants contained a subsistence-style living allowance, and on that they subsisted, dressing from K-mart and eating supermarket bargains. A Chinese meal to go was a luxury they indulged in once a month.
Then their luck turned.