I saw the movie "Loving" yesterday and wept at the end. Not only is it a beautiful film, and well acted, but it is a true story. My weeping also had to do with the realization that I had been shut out from Virginia in that era by my own interracial marriage. I knew I didn't dare take my husband to see where I'd spent the longest period of my childhood, even though I wanted badly to show him the beautiful spot where I'd lived. We were rural Virginia, in the Tidewater region, and as children my brother and friends and I had complete freedom. We could bike to the Rappahanock River ten miles away, and my mother would simply tell us to be home by dinner. We wandered in the woods alone. In the movie, Mildred Loving yearns to be back in the country with her family, and I understood immediately that longing. I married my husband at nineteen, and when my best childhood friend's husband was killed in Vietnam I was in Fiji, but when she remarried she wanted me at the wedding, but I couldn't bring my husband and baby there. Too dangerous. We knew we couldn't be seen in a car together in that area.
And after my husband died, I still had two mixed race children I did not want exposed to that kind of hatred. So I stayed away, though we visited my friend and her new husband in Indiana where they settled on his parents' farm.
Yesterday, I thought of the loss. The fear. The shame of being different. The trips I did not make to Virginia or Missouri, where my parents' were from. I thought of how much it hurt me then and still hurts now.
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