“So that's why he's at a second-tier firm?” Kath said, not meaning anything by it, just registering the answer to the question that had bothered us all. But it came out sounding awful, as if she was suggesting Jim's job wasn't worth having.
“But you never told us, Ally,” Brett said.
“Told you what?”
“It's illegal, honey!” Kath said. “A white girl can't marry a dark man.”
“A dark man!” Ally exploded. “He's human, just like we all are.”
And Linda, speaking at the same time, said, “Illegal, Kath? The Supreme Court overturned interracial marriage bans years ago!”
Though Kath wasn't as wrong as all that: at the time Ally had gone to her parents and said she wanted to marry Jim, in states from Texas to her own Maryland, someone who was “white” simply could not marry someone who was not.
It's against God's plan—that's what Ally's father had said when she'd come home to tell her parents about Jim, to tell them he'd asked her to marry him. They sat in the kitchen, at an old wooden table that had been Ally's grandmother's, with a faded black gash at Ally's seat, where her grandmother's toaster had burned the wood.
Ally's response—But I love him, Dad—stuck in her throat.
“He'd be touching you, sweetheart,” her mother had whispered. “Touching you.”
And how could she respond to that? Because she'd thought of that at the beginning, too: how dark his hand would look on her skin. It hadn't repulsed her, not the way it did her mother, but she'd thought of it. She'd wondered how she and Jim could look so different when they were so much the same inside.
She hadn't considered back then how their skins would blend in their children. Their features. She hadn't wondered if her children would look like foreigners, or how she would feel if they did. She hadn't thought at all in the beginning. She hadn't imagined a future with Jim. She only talked to him when he came to the law school library desk where she worked part-time to help with her college expenses. They talked quietly; it was a library. They laughed quietly. He always made her laugh.
She was surprised the first time they spoke outside, on the library steps. He wasn't naturally soft-spoken, like she was. But his voice, not hushed, was even more musical.
“Jaiman,” she called him, the name she'd watched him print on the checkout cards he pulled from the pockets of the law books, his graceful fingers dark against the lined white paper.
He laughed warmly, and said she could call him Jim, everyone here called him Jim.
“Tell me how to pronounce your name properly,” she said. “I can learn.” And he smiled, charmed by her willingness to embrace who she thought he was. But he said he preferred Jim, actually.
“Jaiman, that is another world, another life,” he said. “A whole other set of expectations.” He'd looked out across the campus, bare and dreary gray in the winter light. It made Ally wonder what the world he came from looked like. She imagined it green and sultry, and always warm.
Ally couldn't say when, exactly, she'd fallen in love with Jim. Maybe that first moment she'd heard his lyrical voice—“Excuse me, ma'am”—before she'd even looked up to see his face.
She knew her parents might be reluctant, that they'd worry about the problems she and Jim and their children would face. But she never imagined they would refuse to have Jim in their home, even to meet him. She never imagined that her father wouldn't walk her down the aisle in the end, that she'd be married by a justice of the peace in Ann Arbor, in a dress she'd owned for years.
“I was sure my mom and dad would embrace Jim eventually,” she would tell us later. “You can't know Jim and not love him. I never imagined they never would come to know him, that when I told them we were married they'd hide their goddamned prejudice behind the excuse that Jim wasn't Christian.”
And while we were blinking at that—at Ally swearing and meaning it—she would say, “‘For I, the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.’ Those were the last words my mother said to me, the last time she ever acknowledged I was alive. A quote from the goddamned Bible, from Exodus, for Christ goddamned sake.”
She would start crying then. She would start crying and we'd all try to comfort her, and she'd shrug us off. “I know it's ridiculous. I know God isn't killing our babies to punish us,” she would say. “Jim is the kindest, most loving person in the world. No God would ever punish him even if He would punish me. And I know our children won't be the . . . the mongrels my parents imagine, but a whole of something else, something magical.” But the words were her mother's, the voice the one that had sung to her, and read to her, and taught her right from wrong.