Mrs. Loving’s Overcoat

Mrs. Loving had a cloth overcoat, and it had a fur collar. She wore that overcoat when she took her three children–two boys and a girl–shopping in her local grocery store in Central Point, Virginia, a state she had no business being at that time–1965 or so–but her family lived there, and her husband, Richard’s, family lived there: it was their home. In her overcoat, Mrs. Loving nodded kindly to the people she saw at the grocery as she put this and that into her cart, minding her pennies, minding her children. The children had Richard’s teeth–crooked–and her mouth–long and wide. She loved all her children equally, and Richard loved them all equally, too. But first Mr. Loving loved Mrs. Loving. They had grown up in the same world–small, segregated Central Point–where their respective families had always known each another and there was relatively little trouble about any of that black and white business because that was just the way it was. Sometimes lovers start off loving one another forever by not liking one another at all. Who doesn’t understand that. Love is always trouble. At first Mildred Delores didn’t like Richard; she thought he was a show off, nothing more. But then love happened, and she wanted to live in his smell forever. She was so skinny he called her Stringbean, later Bean, and she called him Richard. They both smoked, and talked about the future. She loved language, and ideas; he was a believer, and held onto his silence. She was a beautiful woman, in or out of her overcoat. And he was handsome in the way of a man who was unmindful of, while living in, his masculinity. The reason they married was this: at eighteen, Mildred got pregnant. But they couldn’t get married in their home state–it was illegal. To do so would be to contradict Virginia’s Racial Equality Act of 1924, which made interracial marriage a crime. So, they became the Lovings in Washington, D.C. The pregnancy was just one reason to get married, really; the others were more important: the way he called her Bean; the way she kissed him when he went off during the day to make a living. After they married, the Lovings returned to Central Point. One night, a jealous person–someone who did not love the Lovings–called the law on them, and they were arrested. (The police busted them at night, hoping to catch the couple having sex, another offense against God, the law, the hateful.) It was 1959. They were sentenced to a year in prison, but the sentence was suspended if they left Virginia. They moved to Washington, D.C., where they began their family while missing their families, the earth. They hated the city and it’s uglier, harder, poverty–it’s meaner segregation. They couldn’t travel to Virginia together. In 1964, Mrs. Loving, soft spoken but practical and determined, wrote to the then Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. She told them her story, and the story of her husband and children. Kennedy referred her to the ACLU; then their case went to the Supreme Court, which, eventually, ruled in the Lovings favor. While their case went through the courts, the Lovings returned to Central Point and lived with their kids as a kind of open secret. In their home town the Lovings lived in cleaner air, and their children climbed trees, and Richard held Bean and all their secrets. After the law changed, the Lovings lived together in full view of people who loved them, and other people who didn’t love them. Sometimes, at night, I like to imagine what they said to one another in the dark, some summer crickets outside making a comfortable racket, as they talked about the future, Mrs. Loving’s overcoat in the closet I turn to now, remembering when I was Mrs. Loving to his loving and attentive Richard.