Footnote for my memoir. A visit from my mother’s friends:
The friends were like my mother. They put words together, “d’-ya’-know-what-I-mean-like”, “I-donno”, “bloody-‘ell”, They called the broom a brush, dustpan a shovel, television the “telly”. They were loud, boisterous, familiar. They were white. They had Black husbands. Their children, were “mulattos”. Interracial marriage seems to have been the fashion in late 1950s London where they met.
In 1947 a UK marriage made front page news when Prince Seretse Khama, heir to the throne of modern day Botswana married Ruth Williams a British bank clerk. A white woman. A 2016 movie, “A United Kingdom”, starring David Oyetokunbo, was made about the union and the international uproar. My mother and her friends, in the decade that followed that union, experienced similar backlash. They came to the US for better opportunities and hopefully more acceptance in the early 1960s. It wasn’t much better.
Only one of the five women returned to London to live. Despite the fact that they agreed “the tea just doesn’t seem the same here” and “proper crumpets are hard to find, so English muffins will have to do a turn”, the four became American citizens.
I am captivated by the particulars in your footnote and I guess this is proof positive that particulars are what footnotes are really all about anyway right?
I think many of us, as Americans, tend to only think of the “interracially” mixed marriages (or any relationships that defy “color” lines) in terms of the events within the United States, because so much of the civil rights struggle, (a global struggle across many centuries) is most often told in popular media, and told in history in terms of what is most recent, and most local to ourselves, and related to the struggles and oppression within our borders and culture/society. Your footnote takes an often missed opportunity to, by its very details, relate the repeated failures of our own society by showing the parallels and contrast with the UK, as people moved from one country to another and found “It wasn’t much better. “
I’m really curious about this group of women. They were all friends? How close? Was that a coincidence, or did their marriages somehow lead to it? There’s definitely a situation here waiting for a story.