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  • Danzy Senna (bio)

When I married Hewitt, I didn't realize—amongst other things—that I would become a member of that mewling and defensive group of people known as Interracial Couples. And who could fault them their mewling? Everywhere I went with Hewitt, strangers commented—in subtle and not so subtle ways—on the fact of our unlikely union: me, a white woman, married to him, a black man.

The world, it seemed, though not united in their opinion of our kind, was united in their awareness of our kind, and by extension, their need to remark upon it—the fact of me, a white woman, married to him, a black man.

The only problem, of course, was that it wasn't true. Any of it.

I was not a white woman and Hewitt was not a black man—at least not technically speaking. We were both of mixed-heritage. That is, we both had one white parent and one black parent. We'd just come out with enough features of one parent or another to be placed in different categories. Hewitt had come out looking to the world like a black man and I'd come out looking to the world like a white woman and so when we got together, it was like we were repeating our parent's history all over again. We were supposed to be the next generation, all new-fangled and melting-potted, but instead I felt like a Russian nesting doll. When you opened our parents' bodies you found a replica of their struggle, no matter how hard we tried to transcend it.

In any case, I was passing as a white woman and Hewitt was passing as a black man when we moved into The Chandler that July.

Did I mention I was nine months pregnant with our first child? I was huge, but I felt strangely light, as if I were floating in water all the time. Pregnancy was a state of permanent romance. I was waiting, breath held, to meet the great love of my life. We both were. We held hands everywhere we went, me a white woman, him a black man.

The Chandler stood out on an otherwise historical strip of buildings from the golden era of Hollywood. The Chandler had been built a year before we moved in, despite protests from the old guard who said it was tacky, would ruin the row of buildings that had been built in the Thirties and Forties, buildings that had housed the likes of Mae West, Ava Gardner and Cary Grant.

The Chandler was ugly and new and sat at the edge of the country club, with a banner waving in front that read: "NOW LEASING—THE CHANDLER—AN ELEGANT APARTMENT ENCLAVE."

As you walked up the ramp to enter the building there was a small encouraging sign that said, "You're almost home!"

The people who lived there were an odd assortment—every variation you could think of on new money: yuppies and film executives and starlets-in-training and people awaiting [End Page 769] renovations on their houses in the hills and foreign business men who must have liked the sterility and convenience of hotel living.

It was also populated, as it turned out, by an inordinate amount of interracial couples and their offspring. Hewitt and I hadn't realized this when we moved in. I'd simply wanted to live there because I was scared of the chaos that would come with having a baby and I was drawn to the cleanliness and orderliness of the building, the gleaming new appliances, washer and dryer, stainless steel stove and refrigerator. I knew that motherhood would bring plenty of mess—shit and spit up, diapers piled up to the ceiling, stretch marks on my body where there had been none before. The old me would have wanted to live somewhere crumbling and old, with the charm of gilded-era Hollywood. The new me wanted a sleek, modern hotel suite with centralized air-conditioning and no history and no dirt.

* * *

It was only after we moved into The Chandler that I noticed all the interracial couples traversing the...

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