SPECIAL TO THE DENVER POST
https://www.denverpost.com/2008/06/11/its-loving-day/
June 11, 2008 at 1:00 p.m.
To paraphrase Dinah Washington, what a difference a week makes.
In 1967, Pete Bryson and I were students at Georgetown University. He was studying at the medical school while driving a taxi, and I was in my last year at the School of Foreign Service while working part-time for the Catholic Church.
We were quite a contrast. Pete was the son of an interracial couple. He had been raised in a progressive political community in the Bronx. I was the youngest daughter of a Catholic Italian musician and an Irish farm girl, raised in the D.C. area, where I lived at home until I was 21.
Pete and I met on a Student Peace Union picket line while protesting the war in Vietnam. He said he fell for my green eyes and I fell for his folk singing. Six months later we wanted to marry, despite my parents’ profound objections.
Pete would be leaving soon for California for a summer job in the federal anti-poverty program, and we wanted to go together. But where to get married? Washington, D.C., had a waiting period due to blood testing, and I can’t remember now why we didn’t consider Maryland. In Virginia, social custom and law prohibited interracial marriage. The slave laws had written that 1/32 part black blood meant you were the master’s property, and Jim Crow titrated blood along similar lines. The law was frustrating us each way we turned.
But then, the next week, on June 12, a date now known as Loving Day, the law was liberation. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving vs. Virginia, struck down anti-miscegenation laws, starting with the one in Virginia.
Aware of the historical moment we occupied, Pete called ahead to let the court clerks know when we were coming. The person he spoke with was flustered and said that they were not ready. That we should wait. They had not yet received the court’s order back from the attorney general. So Pete replied that if that were the case, we’d be bringing a reporter from The Washington Post with us.
So four days later, on Friday, June 16, 1967, Pete and I probably became the first legal interracial couple in Virginia (and perhaps U.S.) history. At the Arlington County Courthouse, they asked about our bloodlines, and in the box marked “race,” Pete wrote “B” for black. I wrote “H” for human. I felt the past — dissolving like notes from the cup of my father’s saxophone — come out from hiding, like the Jewish children of the pogroms, as my new mother-in-law had been, and hanging like clotheslines outside a Mississippi kitchen, where my new father-in- law’s mother had cooked for white folks.
The justice of the peace, who was also a Baptist minister, seemed to be excited to perform the ceremony. He told us he had written an ecumenical service for a couple the following week and he’d like to practice his new ceremony on us.
It was a short ceremony in chambers with four of our friends, where the judge said something about Adam and Eve and a babbling brook and we suppressed giggles, rolled our eyes, and tried to get out of there as fast as we could.
The next day, we loaded up a blue Ford Falcon and left for San Francisco. After all, it was the Summer of Love.
• • •
Postscript: Pete and I separated five years later. We had a son and daughter together and managed to raise Chris and Dana jointly. Today we are old friends, still family.
Our children are magnificent. As their mother, it took me a long time to face the facts of legal history — that under Virginia’s racial laws, our children were “quadroons,” a term used to define a person with one-quarter “black blood,” a badge of inferiority that signifies that in that place, but in another time, these precious children would have been slaves. And so their children. And their children’s children. And their grandchildren’s children. In that time, all my relations would have been enslaved, yet I would have been free.
So “quadroon” was a word I never wanted my children to hear because it divided me from them — the ones who, when they were brand new and someone laid them across my belly, carried the blood of all their ancestors, pulsing in our strong cord.
Jacqueline St. Joan of Denver was recently elected as an at-large delegate for Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention.