Love in the Driest Season (3 page)

When I put down my adventure stories and started reading about my home state, books by William Faulkner and Richard Wright and Eudora Welty and Willie Morris, I began to get a sense of where I was. It would eventually form one of the central lessons of my personal and professional life: I had been raised in the heart of the most racist state in America, and as a child, I had accepted the perverse as normal. This is not a happy thing to learn about yourself or about the place where you grow up.

So while Mississippi was changing, I was too, and in ways I couldn’t always name. The small-town lethargy, the religious hypocrisy, the racial chasms and complaints, the numbing poverty—all of this was home, and it came to weigh on me a great deal. I began to drive my beat-up car around late at night, down little country highways and dirt roads and back down shuttered Main Street, and nothing had changed except the night was an hour older, and I would wonder if I was ever going to go anywhere or do anything.

But fate is sometimes kind, and I had the good fortune to meet Willie Morris, the famous Mississippi author, at a college baseball game. He was the first person I ever met who wrote books for a living, and he had made a career for himself far outside the state’s borders. I thought that was the summit of ambition. I told him I would like to write and travel as well. He and a professor named Tommy Miller steered me to a job at the
Oxford Eagle,
the smallest daily newspaper in Mississippi (circulation 2,500). I covered high school sports, murders, child abuse cases, city council meetings, factory layoffs, local elections, and a death penalty trial. I investigated a murder-suicide in a little town called Water Valley with such vigor that Yalobusha County sheriff Lloyd Defer tipped back his hat and interrupted me to ask, “Son, what kinda flesh-eating ghoul are ya tryin’ to be?”

When I wasn’t working, I was taking classes at Ole Miss on a scholarship. (They had the state’s best English program, no matter what I thought about their symbolism, and out-of-state tuition was a number beyond my imagination.) At graduation, I was named the university’s most outstanding journalism student. The stories I wrote for the
Eagle
had won all the regional awards for which they were eligible. I had job offers from something like a dozen newspapers.

It wasn’t difficult to choose—I picked the one farthest from home. This turned out to be
Florida Today,
a little daily on Florida’s east coast. I worked all the time at my new job, seven days a week, and moved from that paper to Gannett’s national wire service to the
Miami Herald
to the
Detroit Free Press,
all in three years. When I wasn’t interviewing people, I was on my motorcycle, or climbing mountains out West, or dancing at clubs until four in the morning. I let my hair grow out into a ponytail. I got an earring, a couple of tattoos, and a new set of clothes. My accent faded. I was out of Mississippi and had my foot flat on the gas pedal, heading anywhere at a hundred miles an hour.

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have a flaw, and mine was so totally conventional, so boring, that I never saw it coming. I fell in love with the girl next door.

It happened when I was living in a loft in downtown Detroit. The six-story building was an old warehouse. It housed a Greek pizzeria on the first floor, a small dance club on the second, and four more floors of unvarnished lofts. A noisy college student lived in the loft next door to mine on the fifth floor for a time; when he moved out, I posted a note on the employee bulletin board at the
Free Press,
mentioning that an apartment was available close to work.

No one responded for several days. Then a clerk in the paper’s library whom I knew slightly asked if she could take a look during lunch hour.

“I just want to see if it’s someplace better than where I’m staying now,” Vita Gasaway explained.

She was a widow, outgoing and funny, a five-foot-two black woman who exuded a certain Motown attitude just walking down the street. She had long braids, pride in her dark complexion, and an easy, infectious laugh. She was eleven years older than me and had come of age in Detroit in the 1960s, when some of the city’s musically inclined black teenagers were revolutionizing popular music. Most any Saturday you could go to the Motown Revue at the Fox Theater, right there on Woodward, and see Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, the Temps, the Four Tops, and, best of all, Marvin Gaye. These many years later, she was bemused by the fact that she lived next door to a white boy from Mississippi. We were friends for two years before we thought of dating. She worked almost more hours than I did—as a paralegal by day, and at the
Free Press
library in the evenings. One Saturday night in the summer, when it was too hot to sleep, I pulled an old chair out on my fire escape. I saw her sitting at her window, taking the breeze too. Her loft had no fire escape, and thus no way to sit outside.

I waved to get her attention.

“I’m not trying to be cute,” I said, “but do you want a drink? It’s cooler out here.”

“Just what a girl needs,” she said. “A fresh breeze and a glass of wine.”

She came over, and I helped her step out of the huge, wide windows onto the steel fire escape. There were crowds of people in the parking lots and streets below, streaming out of the clubs and bars. The lights of the Renaissance Center spiraled up sixty or seventy floors a few blocks over. The Detroit River lay just beyond it. The lights of Windsor winked from across the water.

“This isn’t bad at all,” she said, and I relaxed, leaning against the rail.

It became a steady date. In the summers, we would pull a couple of old chairs out there, cook hamburgers on a diminutive grill, sip wine, and watch the people below. In Michigan’s bitterly cold winters, we rented movies on Sunday afternoons and hooted at the screen, throwing popcorn at bad dialogue. In between, we took the motorcycle for afternoon rides to Ann Arbor. There was a jazz dive called Bo-Macs a few blocks from our lofts, a place where I ran a tab. Vita would come in there on a Friday evening, wearing a killer red dress, her braids falling down her back, and say, “Hey, baby love,” in such a way that I would nearly forget my name.

I listened as she told me her family history, which also had its roots in the Deep South. Her father, Phil Griffin, grew up in south Alabama, a postage stamp of a place called Enterprise. There was not much of what you might call upward mobility for a black man in those days. So Phil, already in his twenties when the Depression hit, joined the Great Migration of rural blacks to the urban north. Married, with three children and more on the way, he moved to Cincinnati and then to River Rouge, a suburb of Detroit, before moving into the city proper. He was a painter of cars at a time when almost every other automobile manufactured anywhere in the world came out of Detroit, and he moved his family from house to house as his salary improved. His wife, Ida Helen, was a seamstress of leather covers for car seats and then of softer fabrics for sofa cushions. They had fish fries on Friday evenings, played cards with friends, and kept a small vegetable garden in the backyard.

When Vita was a little girl, they would make the meandering trip down south each summer to visit relatives. Once across the Mason-Dixon, her father would sometimes stop the car when he saw black prisoners on a chain gang. He would offer cigarettes to the boss man, asking that they be distributed to the inmates. He would urge his children to smile and wave at the hammer swingers, offering them some small moment of kindness. He told his children of the injustice that led many of the men to be in stripes. These roadside courtesies ended abruptly at the Mississippi state line. In fact, Phil Griffin refused to stop his car in the Magnolia State at all.

“You had to pee in Memphis and hold it all the way through Mississippi,” Vita remembered. “That place was so bad that, as a black person from Detroit, you were actually grateful to get to
Alabama.
”

It would occur to me, sitting there beside her, that she had been scared of all the people I had grown up with and loved. It was an unpleasant sensation, but we came to share an unspoken understanding that the past did not have to dictate the future. We let our relationship develop—in fits and starts, with breakups and reunions—like most any other couple. Of course, some people gave me grief for dating a black woman—did I have some sort of Deep South fetish? Was I trying to prove something? This bothered me a great deal at first, but I learned to ignore it. Once people know you’re from Mississippi, I discovered, they tend to place you in a box. (The number one thing people have said to me at dinner parties all over the world: “You don’t look/act/sound like you’re from Mississippi.” It’s as if, even in Beirut, people expect me to walk around barefoot in overalls, whistling “Dixie.”) Such generalizations lead to misunderstandings, because most people not from the Deep South assume that white and black cultures there are polar opposites, which is inaccurate. Things were
perverse
for more than three centuries, they were violent and disturbed, but daily life among whites and blacks was and is not in diametrical opposition. In fact, it seemed to me there was a distinct cultural overlap between white and black rural southerners, from the foods they ate to what they did for a living (farm), the land they worked, and the ponds they fished—even to a type of personal warmth that other people in the nation simply didn’t share. Exhibit A in this theory is Bill Clinton, a small-town Arkansas boy affectionately (or sardonically) referred to by black comedians, and even Toni Morrison, as the “first black president.” He’s even in the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame.

I had never really thought about this before I moved to Detroit. But the longer I dated Vita, the clearer it became that I often had more in common with her and many of Detroit’s working-class black residents than I did with most of Michigan’s white folks. What they called soul food in Detroit, for example, collard greens and black-eyed peas and corn bread and baby-back ribs and fried chicken, was the same fare I had grown up on. (The last meal my grandmother cooked for me was pork neck bones and collards; the first dinner I ate at Vita’s mother’s house was fried catfish and collards.) The sense of humor was similar, as was the pattern and pace of the spoken language, something more languid and indirect and expansive than the clipped English of many of my white
compadres.
Baptist was the most common religious affiliation, for better or worse. And I came to notice that black people (particularly those of a certain age) tended to nod or say hello or somehow acknowledge one another in passing, just the same as white rural southerners did. Northern urban whites most certainly did not. In high school, I had worked at our small-town radio station on Sunday mornings, running the control board for black gospel groups who would fill the studio with terrific live music. When I went to church with Vita at Third New Hope Baptist in Detroit, almost always the only white face in the crowd, I didn’t feel as out of place as I might have looked. I already knew almost all of the songs, the arrangements, and the style of preaching.

On our first date, Vita was charmed when I opened the car door for her, pulled back her chair at the restaurant, and helped her with her coat. Nothing fancy; just the old-school southern courtesies, but a manner of respect that resonated with her.

This didn’t mean I was entirely aware of what was happening between us. I had to move forty-five hundred miles away to discover that the girl next door was the one for me.

The
Free Press
named me as their European correspondent, and I moved to Warsaw. As I wandered Europe, Russia, and the Mideast, traveling alone from one city or conflict zone to another, the loneliness that accompanied me made it clear—I missed my best friend and next-door neighbor. She had become, in so many ways, the love of my life.

While I was stuck for several weeks in Sarajevo during the blistering summer of 1993, when the Bosnian war was at its height and the city was under a vicious siege, I ran over to the Associated Press office during a lull in the shelling and the shooting. I peeled off my flak jacket at the door and, sweating profusely, picked up the satellite phone. I caught Vita at her office.

“Name the most romantic place you can think of,” I said.

“Right now? I’m in the middle of a meeting.”

“The line is eighteen dollars a minute, baby. Now would be good.”

“Well—wait—okay, the Greek islands.”

“When can you meet me there?”

“Are you serious?”

“I suppose I could call somebody else if you’re busy. What was that girl’s name? You know, the one who lived down the hall—”

“September,” she said, laughing now. “Just after Labor Day.”

“Great. I’m a working man, you know. You’ll have to fly coach.”

“
Coach?
You mean as in economy? All my other international suitors send me first-class tickets. With champagne.”

“What was that girl’s name again? The one who stayed down—”

We met at the Athens airport in mid-September. We took a steamer out to Santorini, which was nearly empty in the off-season. The hotel we found was perched on one of the island’s famous cliffs. We soaked up the sun each day, ate fresh fish each night, and forgot the rest of the world.

One night just before we were to leave, we took our rented motorcycle for a ride after dinner. Vita climbed on the seat behind me. It was late, and we swept up the empty roads alone, the moon breaking out of the clouds, the pale light floating across the cliffs. I pulled to a stop in the gravel on the side of the road, the ocean hundreds of feet below.

“I think,” Vita said over my shoulder, into my ear, “that I could stay here for the rest of my life.”

We were married at our house in Poland the following September.

My family boycotted the ceremony—they didn’t approve of our marriage, to put it mildly. Vita’s father had died, her mother was too old to travel, and her brothers and sisters sent their regards. It was her second marriage and seen as something of a lark.

“What does she want with that little white boy?” Vita’s mother, Ida Helen, asked Kathie, Vita’s youngest sister. “Is the girl just lonely?”

“Mama,” Kathie sighed, “black people do not move to Poland because they’re lonely.”

We jumped the broom in a rollicking party in our backyard, on Warsaw’s Pilicka Street, Al Green’s chorus from “Let’s Stay Together” on the invitations and twenty-eight guests from eight countries on four continents jamming to what sounded like a Belle Isle street party back in Detroit. The house came down when Patricia Wicks, Vita’s best friend from childhood, showed the inebriated Polish wedding photographer how to bend over and dance to “Shoop.”

I wasn’t bothered by my family’s snub of our wedding. In fact, very little bothered me anymore. I had developed a certain harshness after leaving Mississippi, a play-it-as-it-lays mind-set that was attuned to the bitterness in the world. I had the working idea that there was a higher form of truth to be found in the world’s most impoverished and violent places, a rough-hewn honesty that could not be found elsewhere. Life had a tautness to it there, a sheen that seemed to say something about the way the world was, not how anyone wanted it to be. That was what seemed true and honest, and that was what I tried hardest to write about.

Given that, I found myself in the world of foreign correspondents and roving reporters. It was the first time in my adult life that I felt like I was where I belonged. I loved it—the travel and challenges, the friends flung out in a wide orbit of countries, getting on a plane time and again to write about the most compelling international events of the day—and at the end of each trip, there was Vita, my best friend, wife, and confidant. We went dancing till the clubs closed, had champagne brunches with friends that lasted all afternoon. So when Nancy Laughlin, the
Free Press
foreign editor, called our home in Warsaw one snowy evening and asked if I’d like to take the paper’s Africa posting, I said sure. It was the most wide-open job in journalism as far as I was concerned. To Vita, the chance to live on the mother continent was irresistible. We had all of our belongings in storage back in Detroit shipped to Zimbabwe.

We had no intention of returning to the United States.