Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages between the Two World Wars

5 LOVE AND TROUBLE IN INTERWAR MARRIAGES

As the Curwoods experienced conflict over economic roles within their marriage, they also confronted the intimate and emotional tasks of maintaining a marital relationship. Their beliefs about romantic love and men’s and women’s roles— ​in terms of economics, power, and sex— ​ grew intertwined with their tumultuous personal relationship . Still, while their historical context played a part in their marriage , so too did their individual temperaments and psychologies. This chapter seeks to demonstrate how history and individuality became entangled in their story, supported by the “love and trouble” framework that black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins has proposed and by observations of how other couples handled both love and trouble in their marriages. Their private history vividly illustrates how important and useful it is to study black people on their own terms.1 Very little historical scholarship exists on any aspect of the personal relationships or intimate lives of African Americans. It often seems as if African Americans drop o∏ the scholarly radar screen if they are not positioned either as exploited, victimized people or as triumphant warriors in the struggle against racism. Literary scholar Claudia Tate noticed this phenomenon in 1998, naming it the “racial protocol.”2 Within U.S. history, scholars have been unwilling to deal with subjects that Love andTrouble in Interwar Marriages 5  140 love and trouble in interwar marriages include race as one factor among many, preferring either to write as if race were invisible and irrelevant or to make race the single most important feature. Histories of African Americans’ private lives do not fit into the racial protocol, because in family life one’s primary identity is not race but kindredness. By the same token, histories of white marriages have been simply histories of marriage; the fact that these people are living an identity of whiteness along with their identities as husband or wife is ignored. I do not mean to suggest that no histories have overcome this divide, as several have done so quite admirably, but overall the trend is still very clear.3 As historians, we have not paid enough attention to intimate lives. The study of intimate relationships, with attention to gender, takes us another step away from thinking of black people merely as units of race. My analysis reveals a pattern that reflects Collins’s “love and trouble ” tradition. Across time, couples have experienced tremendous love as well as sadness and anger. Quoting Gayl Jones, Collins suggests that this “simultaneity of good and bad” characterizes a blues aesthetic of concurrent emotions: love is bittersweet. Much of this bittersweet quality comes from grappling with gender expectations: African American women have wished to be supportive of their husbands, but when husbands have used gender politics to oppress wives, women have faced the choice of either submerging their own needs or having to defend themselves in conflict with their husbands.4 Therefore, this chapter will focus on these gendered pressures within intimate relationships. Also, rather than taking either love or trouble as the definitive aspect of African Americans’ married relationships, I show that both are relevant. Then, in the second half of the chapter, I show how James and Sarah Curwood experienced love and trouble in their marriage. Love Between the wars, African Americans held hopeful dreams of love and romance that echoed those of many Americans in the twentieth and twenty-­ first centuries. These included the idea that love was the overriding reason to marry and that it trumped other concerns. For 141  love and trouble in interwar marriages example, when Gladys “Sister” Walton met her future husband in 1937, she saw it as self-­evident that she must drop her longtime suitor for the new man she had fallen in love with. Furthermore, she could not wait to marry until her father, Lester Walton, returned from abroad: the couple was too much in love to endure the long geographical separation that this would necessitate. Her fiancé had to return to his hometown of Houston, but it was inconceivable for her to go with him if she were not yet his wife. Protocols of proper sexuality made it imperative that she be released into his company only if they were married, but their intense love would make the separation unbearable . Therefore, the couple successfully begged Sister’s father for his blessing to marry before he returned, as I described in Chapter 4. The story suggests that romantic love was...