Black Widow

Not long after Scott died, I told his best friend Jason, whom he'd known since they were kids and who was hurting just as bad as I was, that I wanted to write a book about this hellish thing we'd been plunged into. He paused for a moment, so long a moment that I was afraid he was going to tell me it was a bad idea.

"I think you should," Jason finally said, the volume in his voice rising just so, "but don't just make him some guy that died. Don't just write about him dying. Write about Scott."

So, ladies and gents—meet my husband. Wish he were here to read along with you. I hope he would have dug it.

As I told you a little while back, Scott was Jewish and white, and I am Christian and black. None of that gave us a moment's hesitation when we got together; there was no movie montage of us in our separate apartments staring into the distance going, "How will I ever bridge these differences? What's it all for? Why am I hearing sad violins and mournful eighties jazz saxophones?"

I'd like to say that we were drawn to each other's pure natures and generosity, but we also shared a love of soap operas, Cheetos, and barely concealed giggling about inappropriate things in delicate public situations. We once found ourselves at a mightily fancy Palm Beach dinner party that I was writing about, something right out of a Marx Brothers movie I would not have been cast in. We were seated at different tables, because I guess that's what fancy people do. There we were, this random pauper couple sitting next to strangers, noticing that the only other black people in attendance were clearing the dishes. We tried to be chill about it, but it's not like we didn't already stand out.

Scott told me later that one of the ladies at his table was going on and on about a trip she'd taken to the Ivory Coast to shoot white doves, and all he could think was You went to Africa to kill the Jewish bird of peace. We cracked each other up, me and that guy.

There were so many fish-out-of-water situations that became the kind of stupid-funny memories the two of you giggle about as you fall asleep at night, your toes touching in the dark and your sleepy love thoughts making it funnier than it probably was. Consider my introduction to kugel at his cousin's Yom Kippur break-fast. I was holding up the line trying to figure out what all these noodle-looking dishes were when I really just needed to move the hell on because folks had been fasting and were getting testy. "It's all just kugel!" one of his exasperated aunts finally shouted. "Pick a kugel and go!"

My dating life had been…interdenominational, but I had always thought that eventually I'd marry a Christian guy, because that's what I was supposed to do. My family thought I would too.

"So, I understand that he's a Jew," my grandfather the Reverend Lester James Sr. said when he called to congratulate me on my engagement to some dude I'd been dating just six months and whom he hadn't yet met.

"Yes, sir."

"I don't suppose he's a black Jew?"

"No, sir. Just a regular white one."

Sigh, followed by a long silence. Then: "Well, they do have black Jews, you know. Just saying."

By the time my granddaddy died, two years later, he and Scott were tight, having bonded over all the things they had in common, like their shared love of reading and movies and hearing themselves talk. Also, they both loved me. That was a small victory, because my mom's side of the family, of which my granddaddy was the patriarch, is very protective and kind of proper in an austere, churchy-suit sort of way. Like the Obamas but with less cash.

My granddaddy had worked very hard to get us as far in life as he could; he and his then-young family, including my mom, literally had to flee South Carolina when his own father was murdered in the 1950s by a white policeman who thought he was uppity. That and the general experience of being a black man growing up during Jim Crow made him understandably wary of some situations. He was mostly cool with most people until they gave him reason not to be, but I don't think he ever considered the possibility that he might one day have a white grandson-in-law. And since he was a preacher, he really wasn't expecting the Jewish part.

By the time Scott and I got together, I'd had plenty of crushes on men of all nations. What they all seemed to have in common was being wrong for me, because it turns out that I have horrific taste in men.

When my extended family met Scott—who was an upgrade in every way—I hadn't brought around a boyfriend in ten years, and the last one they'd met was also Jewish and white. So it wasn't exactly an M. Night Shyamalan movie twist—Bruce Willis is dead and Leslie's dating a Jew! Because they're well-mannered, proper people, my family was immediately hospitable. Maybe they realized that love is love. Or maybe they really wanted grandbabies. I was in my late thirties, and we'd had to buy plane tickets to come meet everyone, and they knew I wouldn't shell out cash money on some fool I wasn't serious about. All of us were on our best behavior, on both sides of the table. If Scott had said something dumb, I know it would have been reported back to me later. In detail.

But everybody liked him, because Scott was really hard not to like. He went out of his way for people—he was always the guy who jumped up and refilled everybody's drink. I knew he'd won over my granddaddy for sure by the time of my sister's wedding, a month after Scott's mom had died. (So much dying.) My granddaddy had lost his mom, too, so they had that in common. And they talked, walking and nodding quietly. Both such good talkers. Also, Scott and I were already married by then, and no foolishness had been reported back to my granddaddy, so he happily accepted that this unexpected but nice not-black Jew wasn't going anywhere, though sometimes he got mixed up and called him Stu.

"It's Scott," I would hiss under my breath, but my husband always shushed me. "He likes me," he'd say. "Stu's close enough. Let it go." (He occasionally called my brother-in-law A.C. "A.J." so neither of them took it personally.)

Granddaddy and Scott's finest moment was one Father's Day when my husband automatically stationed himself next to my stepgrandmother Bernie, who was frail and ill at the time. Scott patiently and lovingly helped her lift her water glass to her lips, gently wiped her mouth, whispered to her which dish was which, and made sure she got the next helping of whatever she wanted. I got up to thank him for being so attentive, but he waved me off.

"She reminds me of my bubbe," he explained. A man who loves his bubbe is a good man. If my whole family wasn't already in love with him, they were sold later in the meal when Scott volunteered to call Red Lobster about getting our massive and expensive takeout order very wrong.

"I'm Jewish and negotiating is my thing," he said, smiling, and my family, well versed as we are in the art of the Strongly Worded Letter, were amused enough to let him try, politically incorrect stereotypes notwithstanding. By the end of the phone call he was explaining in a raised Al Pacino tone of voice that not only was our order wrong, but the tartar sauce was expired.

"We have elderly people here! My wife's grandmother is sick! You want her to eat expired tartar sauce?" Over the top? Sure. Effective? You know it! Red Lobster did not, it turns out, want my elderly stepgrandmother to consume expired seafood condiments, so they refunded more than half of the meal to my aunt's credit card. By the time Scott hung up, he was the family hero.

"Stu! Stu! Stu!" they chanted in celebration, because we are all tacky and think we're clever. This confused my dad, who was just coming in at the time and had missed the whole thing.

"Why is everybody calling Scott 'Jew'?" he asked.

By then, it seemed like Scott and I had known each other forever. Technically, we almost had, if knowing each other means "I used to sit behind you in Humanities class and know everyone you know but not quite you." Scott and I actually met in high school in Baltimore in 1985, although we barely spoke to each other back then. He'd gone to college with my twin sister, and I'd kept vague track of him in that "How's that dude we went to high school with?" sort of way.

If you're only hip to the very white John Waters retro version of Baltimore or the crime-laden The Wire version, here's a thing you should know: it's a very ethnic city, specifically a very black one, or at least it was when I was growing up.

Dig: I had a black pediatrician, a black dentist, and black teachers. I also knew the black men who clung to their paper-bag-wrapped bottles in front of the liquor store down the street from my house, which was also a few blocks away from Morgan State University, the historically black college where my parents started dating.

My experience is a black experience, not the black experience. The black experience is not a thing. Some of the unenlightened might describe twerking and pimping and Good Times–like stuff as "black." Those things are, indeed, a part of black culture. But when I and most of the people I grew up with describe things as "super-black," we're talking about highly educated people with dreads or Afros who protest everything and call each other "my sista" or "my queen" and who got arrested for demonstrating against apartheid in the 1980s and '90s. Black Panther is super-black. Harvard's Professor Skip Gates and the mannered, casual way he calls celebrities "my brotha" is super-black. What's Happening!! was as black to me as The Cosby Show, which was the closest thing I had to watching myself on TV growing up. Given what we now know about Bill Cosby, that seems unsettling, but it wasn't in 1984. I'm not a wizard.

There are myriad ways of being black, just like there are myriad ways of being white, Latinx, Native, Asian, and anything else one identifies with. I'm not sure why this is still so hard for people to get. Scott grew up in Baltimore at the same time I did, so our personal experiences were both similar and foreign to each other. His neighborhood was historically Jewish, but by the time he came around, it was somewhat black-speckled. That gave him an advantage that most white people do not have, in that the whole spectrum of blackness was not a mystery to him. (Some might not think that's an advantage, but screw those people.) He had black teachers, black bosses, a black Little League coach. He also got mugged by a black guy who tried to jack his leather coat at the bus stop on his first day of high school; Scott lied and said it was really pleather. (The guy let him keep it.)

Scott was more into some things considered culturally black than I was. For instance, while I was headed to Lilith Fair and sobbing along to Jewel songs, he was a classic-hip-hop fan who worshipped KRS-One and NWA. But he never claimed to be black, or blacker than me. I have deleted people on Match.com who claim that shit. If your profile says that you think quoting Snoop Dogg or having always had a crush on Janet Jackson is equivalent to being black, then you can go sit down somewhere.

Scott understood that and understood parts of my culture while passionately embracing his, because he was smart enough to recognize where the boundaries were fluid and where there was ebb and flow. He felt deeply Jewish, more than he felt just white, even though he also acknowledged that he carried the privilege of being white and would be seen as such where I…would not. He was also white enough that sometimes restaurant hostesses assumed we weren't together even when we were literally holding hands and had been sitting next to each other in the lobby for fifteen minutes.

As much credit as we gave ourselves for being aware and appreciative of each other's cultures, that shit became real real when we married into them. I remember going to his cousin's house not long after our wedding, already self-conscious about being the only non-Jewish and black family member. (And, yes, as my granddaddy said, there are many black Jewish people. I just am not one of them.) There was a Hasidic rabbi there who had straight-up told Scott not to marry me because I wasn't Jewish. I felt like the heroine in some overwrought 1980s movie of the week called The Color of Love or The Price of Love or some clichéd thing with Love in it.

When the rabbi and his family rolled in, I decided to be the bigger person and offer him my hand, which he declined. I was about to get all "We Shall Overcome" about it until Scott reminded me that Hasidic men can't touch women they aren't married to, and I felt kinda stupid. I'd been two seconds from causing a scene and looking hella ignorant. Whoops.

Our respective faiths were huge to us, both religiously and culturally. Over time, I came to understand what being Jewish meant to Scott, and he came to understand more about what being black and Baptist meant to me. We learned these things because we loved each other enough to learn. Note, young people—anyone who doesn't love you enough to do that doesn't love you.

Scott was raised by Reform Jewish parents but had an Orthodox grandfather, so he was very into social justice and also read Hebrew really well. He had been through eleventy-three years of Hebrew school and said he used to go to hours-long Orthodox services where you couldn't leave, eat, drink, or see any girls. (He was one of the only people I ever met who found your typical black Baptist church service, which is so long you wish you'd packed a lunch, breezy and short.)