Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

Published posthumously, this collection of 16 short stories explores the lives of Black Americans during and after the civil rights era of the 1960s. Set largely in New York City and the surrounding Northeast, the stories examine race, desire, family, loneliness, and the complexity of identity through a range of narrative forms, from interior monologues and film-style scripts to traditional first-person accounts.

The opening story, "Exteriors," is rendered as the voice of a film director giving lighting instructions for a scene in a New York walk-up apartment. The director's cues trace the arc of a young couple's relationship: Tender moments under a blue-and-white comforter give way to restlessness and silence. When the man tells the woman it is over, the director calls for a blue gel and fog, then fades him to black while she remains in shadow.

"Interiors" pairs two monologues from a husband and wife. The husband characterizes himself as moody and restless, acknowledging that his wife loved him devotedly while he loved her very little. He recalls his affair with Ramona as merely a whim, though when he moved in with Ramona, his wife had a minor stroke. The wife's monologue traces her solitary endurance: a cabin retreat destroyed by fire, herbs and collages and walks across the Brooklyn Bridge. Her husband surfaces only in dreams.

In "The Uncle," the narrator recalls her favorite uncle, a light-skinned Black former track star of Olympic caliber who bore a striking resemblance to Marlon Brando. As asthma ends his career, the uncle sinks into depression, crying through the night and refusing all help. He eventually cries himself to death. The narrator drives to his house with her father and weeps in his bedroom, convinced that his total surrender to grief makes him the bravest man she has ever known.

"How Does One Say" follows a young Black woman at a French immersion program in Maine, where she falls in love with an older professor through halting French conversation. On a nighttime drive to the ocean, he kneels before her in the sand. She accepts his awakening, shaking her short hair at the sky and searching for the French words to say thank you.

"Only Once" recalls a daredevil lover through the refrain that a woman only knows such a man once. The narrator catalogues ecstatic fragments: Chianti on the walk home to 135th Street, cartwheels in the street, lovemaking in snow, woods, and a barn. His death arrives as an ambiguous cascade: He fails to clear a subway rail, or mistimes a dive, or shoots himself. The final line reverses the refrain: She will know such men all her life.

The title story, "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?," is the collection's most politically engaged piece. Set in 1963, it centers on an Upper West Side apartment shared by Charlotte, a white Sarah Lawrence graduate and Harlem community organizer, and Cheryl, a Black woman and the only "negro" in her graduating class. Cheryl's white lover, Alan, a freedom rider whose jaw was dislocated in a Mississippi jail, sits at the breakfast table with his mouth wired shut. Charlotte is in love with Henry, a quiet Black poet from Umbra, a collective of Black writers active in 1960s New York.

Cheryl takes Alan to meet her father, a stroke-paralyzed former school principal whose severe eyes convey disapproval. The story traces Cheryl's path from sheltered bourgeois Black girlhood through the sit-in movement to a summer of voter registration in the South, where she realized she could marry anyone, including a white man. A psychiatrist diagnoses her as manic-depressive, attributing the condition to her race. Derek, a West Indian intellectual who frequents the apartment, theorizes that integration is merely imitation; a year later he will shout "Black Power!" from a podium. Late one night, Alan appears crying, telling Cheryl he cannot marry her and can never be "a negro." After he leaves, Cheryl reads the ending of John Updike's The Centaur and resolves to find a sunlit apartment high above the city, believing her depression stemmed from living in a dark room.

"Conference: Parts I and II" presents two monologues by Mildred Pierce, a sheltered Black woman from an elite background. In Part I, she addresses Charlie Jones, a light-skinned, green-eyed freedom rider she chose for her first sexual experience, but the encounter fails physically. In Part II, she recalls a brief, pure connection with a kind, almost albino-pale man named Jason at a student conference, for whom she spontaneously danced one night.

In "The Happy Family," Frank, a white narrator, traces the rise and fall of a Black family: Ralph, a Columbia history professor; his radiant wife Lillie; their fair-skinned daughter Marguerita; and their charismatic son Andrew, who falls in love with Christine at a civil rights rally. The family collapses when Andrew dies in a motorcycle accident, Marguerita makes a bad marriage, Ralph's psychoanalyst dies mid-treatment, and Lillie fades into the past. Frank acknowledges that Ralph might say no white man should tell this story, but he tells it for Lillie, to make the bright moments shine.

"Treatment for a Story" sketches a woman visiting a man in his cluttered room in what appears to be Paris, experiencing moments of happiness when they make love but ultimately unable to return. In "Stepping Back," a Black woman who prides herself on exceptional refinement courts an equally cultivated Black man but retreats at the threshold of intimacy, declaring that no colored woman could occupy his splendid bed tastefully enough.

"When Love Withers All of Life Cries" is narrated by Ricardo, a Latino advertising art director who recounts his intense relationship with Miriam, a widowed artist whose husband shot himself. Despite their deep connection, Ricardo refuses to live with her and takes a job in Japan. He reflects too late that he thought the relationship could wait because it felt so effortless.

"Broken Spirit" recounts the narrator's friendship with a South African journalist studying at Harvard on a fellowship. He rants that America is worse than South Africa because it stripped Black Americans of everything. After the narrator moves to Vermont, she reads in the newspaper that he jumped from a twentieth-story window.

"Documentary Style" follows a Black cameraman, a former navy veteran confident he is the best in New York. He shoots footage he considers electric for a training film, but when a light-skinned, pregnant assistant editor asks to catalog it as part of her routine job, he immediately prejudges her, refuses to surrender the footage, and escalates the confrontation until he karate-kicks her in the stomach. The story ends abruptly after this act of violence.

"Lifelines" follows a violinist with the New York Philharmonic whose husband went to prison on a fraud charge. Their correspondence becomes the fullest expression of their relationship, but after his release, they have nothing to say, and he leaves. A birdlike hairdresser in the Adirondacks describes a vision of a small white house where the narrator will find happiness. Through coincidence, the narrator buys exactly such a house and meets the man the hairdresser described.

"Of Poets, Galleries, New York Passages" gathers three friends for dinner in a Soho loft: Ellen, a painter about to have her first solo show; Mickey, a painter; and Louise, a writer visiting from the country. They dissect their absent mutual friend Edouardo, a minor museum curator who slapped Louise the night before, and the evening dissolves into affectionate teasing and laughter.

The final and longest story, "Dead Memories . . . Dead Dreams," is narrated by Lillian, who traces her family through her dead mother (called "dead Lillie"), her father Josh Edwards, and her grandmother Rosie of the insular, fair-skinned H______ clan, a family obsessed with keeping the race fair. Josh is too dark and too poor; the clan blames him for dead Lillie's death. Dead Lillie died shortly after Lillian's birth, and Rosie took the baby. Through Aunt Gert, Lillian learns that Rosie refused to visit dying Lillie in the hospital out of her aversion to sickness. When the court returned custody to Josh, Lillian would not speak, and Josh nearly gave her back before breaking down and deciding to keep her. Through cousin Rowena, Lillian sees dead Lillie clearly for the first time and feels real. When Daddy Jim, Rosie's husband, dies, Josh takes charge of the funeral, moving through Rosie's home with the certainty of a man who is finally home.