Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
By Kathleen Collins
192 pages;
Ecco
Before she died in 1988 at 46, Kathleen Collins was a trailblazing
activist, playwright, and filmmaker; her 1982 movie,
Losing
Ground (finally released in 2016),
was one of the first
feature films directed by an African
American woman. Nearly 30 years
after her passing comes
Whatever Happened to Interracial
Love?, a
collection of short fiction recovered from Collins’s
unpublished archives by her daughter. It’s a triumph.
Collins’s prose is fluid,
touched with a lyricism
untainted by affect. Her stories are
brief but charged; her characters
tragic, urbane, and aware,
especially about their skin color. The book
opens with
“Exteriors,” a two-page stunner in which a narrator
describes
the end of a relationship using nothing but set and
lighting cues: “Now
dim the light.... Now, how about a
nice blue gel when he tells her it’s
over. Good. Now
go for a little fog while she tries not to cry.” The
technique, heartbreak as stagecraft, produces an uncanny
intimacy. In
“Documentary Style,” Collins
lets us imagine the frustrated ambition and
resentment that
culminate in a black cameraman’s shocking act of
violence. “Of Poets, Galleries, New York
Passages” sparkles with such
captivating
conversation, we feel grateful to have a seat at the dinner
table where it’s taking place.
The titular
story charts the romances of
two young interracial couples. Here again
Collins proves
herself a deft cartographer of love fallen victim to
circumstance, sundered by history, family, and doubt.
“The year of
race-creed-color blindness,”
she writes. “It’s 1963.” As the plot
unfolds, that observation becomes a refrain, its chiding humor
curdling
into caustic irony (“It’s 1963:
we’re in the year of prophetic
fulfillment”) until at last, when the paramours have
failed each other,
we read, “It’s 1963.
Whatever happened to interracial love?” With that
mordant closing line, Collins assumes the oracular high ground,
seeming
to peer through time at our own troubled
“postracial” present. What a
gift now, to
discover this nearly lost American treasure.
— Dotun Akintoye