Kathleen Collins

Now available in Ecco’s Art of the Story series: a never-before-published collection of stories from a brilliant yet little known African American artist and filmmaker—a contemporary of revered writers including Toni Cade Bambara, Laurie Colwin, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, and Grace Paley—whose prescient work has recently resurfaced to wide acclaim Humorous, poignant, perceptive, and full of grace, Kathleen Collins’s stories masterfully blend the quotidian and the profound in a personal, intimate way, exploring deep, far-reaching issues—race, gender, family, and sexuality—that shape the ordinary moments in our lives. In “The Uncle,” a young girl who idolizes her handsome uncle and his beautiful wife makes a haunting discovery about their lives. In “Only Once,” a woman reminisces about her charming daredevil of a lover and his ultimate—and final—act of foolishness. Collins’s work seamlessly integrates the African-American experience in her characters’ lives, creating rich, devastatingly familiar, full-bodied men, women, and children who transcend the symbolic, penetrating both the reader’s head and heart. Both contemporary and timeless, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? is a major addition to the literary canon, and is sure to earn Kathleen Collins the widespread recognition she is long overdue.

Stories

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

Marion

The wide old-fashioned bed where he’d lived dominated the room, stood there like a monument to his perverse pursuit of humiliation and sorrow. It was surely perverse, surely bound to the color of his skin and its bastard possibilities. But his weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth brimmed potent to overflowing in the room, and I began to weep for him, weep tears of pride and joy that he should have so soaked his life in sorrow and gone back to some ancient ritual beyond the blunt humiliation of his skin, with its bound-and-sealed possibilities; so refused to overcome his sorrow as some affliction to be transcended, some stumbling block put in his way for the sake of trial and endur-ance; so refused to strike out against it, go down in a blaze of responsibilities met and struggled with. No.

He utterly honored his sorrow, gave in to it with such deep and boundless weeping that it seemed as I stood there he was the bravest man I had ever known.

Our minds are intricate. Our desires are complex. We are gorgeously contradictory in our epistemologies. We were not invented yesterday.

‘It’s the year of “the human being”. The year of race-creed-color blindness. It’s 1963.’

Their sons will go to jail for freedom which in their parents’ minds is no different from going to jail for armed robbery, heroin addiction, pimping, and other assorted ethnic hustles.

But I have always been fascinated by the idea of a happy family, that remarkable collision of personalities: father, mother, offspring who sometimes fortuitously click; that collision that creates an awe-inspiring environment for the young to radiate, grow, test themselves against a solid, loving rod that does not disappoint. To be so nurtured; to know day after day only comfort, love; to feel your home a happy place where joy and justice meet-this has always seemed to me the greatest gift imaginable. My own nostalgia for it is very great indeed, and I suspect this is true for most of us who remember our childhood only as a long series of sharp private wounds covered with shame, anxiety, embarrassment

I'm not trying to flatter myself, but I was the first colored woman he ever seriously considered loving. I know I was. The first one who had the kind of savoir faire he believed in so devoutly. The first one with class, style, poetry, taste, elegance, repartee, and haute cui-sine. Because, you know, a colored woman with class is still an exceptional creature; and a colored woman with class, style, poetry, taste, elegance, repartee, and haute cuisine is an almost nonexistent species. The breeding possibilities are slight.

There had been white women, of course. But that was too obvious. A too-vulgar form of compensa-tion. He did not like subjecting his cultivation to such overly sympathetic, such ingratiating discernment.

The pain could destroy him, the humiliation crush a spirit already amputated by this reincarnation as a Ne-gro. (Is it possible to imagine any greater amputation, any greater karmic debt, than reincarnation as a Ne-gro? And to make matters worse, a Negro with aristocratic tendencies, left over, of course... there is always some residue carried over from life to life...) But white women were out.

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