dainamartin-blog
Daina Martin
Freelance Writer
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“It’s summer. The ‘negro’ roommate and her young ‘white’ lover are considering marriage. In a while, she’ll take him to the hospital to meet her father (a stroke victim from an overdose of idealism). In a while, her short white lover with the overhung lip (so that he stuttered slightly) will confront the gray-haired distinction of New Jersey’s first ‘colored’ principal. (’I love you,’ he said... her lover, that is... ‘I want to be a Negro for you,’ he said...) Her father will fix his deep gray bourgeois eyes on her and not move a muscle.”
Kathleen Collins, from Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? via Granta
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Pallas Paris (Automne Hiver 2016-2017)
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The desire for reassurance. And, equally, to be reassured. (The itch to ask whether I’m still loved; and the itch to say, I love you, half-fearing that the other has forgotten, since the last time I said it.)”
Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 (Penguin, 2012)
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Georgia Mae Taylor & Chester Graves on their wedding day. October 31, 1952
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GEORGIA MAE
The story of my grandmother.
My grandmother married Chester Graves at the age of seventeen. The year was 1952. Waugh was the name of the farming community where she grew up — Waugh, Alabama.
The town, an unincorporated area of land in Montgomery County, was so small that only six families could fit within its perimeter. The Ellis’s, the Baxters, the Fields, the Tuggles, the Graves, and the Taylors. My grandmother is a Taylor. Third born of seven, Georgia Mae was determined to exist beyond the small okra and cotton farm she had lived her whole life. Often dreaming of journeys to such far away lands as Egypt, she hoped to one day marvel at ancient pyramids on the outskirts of Cairo.
That year, she made a stunning bride and one year later, a mother. Newly married and newborn daughter in tow, by the age of eighteen, my Nana seemed to have a significant head start reaching milestones that take many women of my generation years to prepare for. Love, marriage, and motherhood. Georgia Mae, full of hope and ambition, packed up and moved her young family to the great city of New York with plans to pursue a career and lifestyle that once evaded her in Waugh; population 75. Upon her arrival, she had six more children.
Many years from now, I believe that my granddaughter will write a much different narrative of my life story than I have written of my grandmother’s. What was once commonplace in the 50s, as it pertains to marriage and family, has now become a cultural aberration. While we both had very similar visions for our futures, I have chosen to unapologetically nourish my appetite for life experiences - A decision made by many other driven women that I know.
At times, the decision to pursue careers and certain lifestyles before starting a family seems to create turmoil or discomfort in others struggling to adjust to shifts in modern family structures and societal norms. While privately we second guess our decisions, we find strength in one another, declaring that we are our own women and we make our own choices. We are creating our own codes.
 - Daina Martin, (2016)
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