AMERICAN DREAMING

A memoir brings readers deep inside the author’s experiences as a White woman married to a Black man in an America bitterly divided along racial lines.

There were serious fault lines in Hagan’s family before she began dating Ronald, the man she has loved for 45 years. Her own parents faced rejection because of their cross-cultural marriage. Her father, Frank, was born into a large Italian immigrant family living in Albany, New York. He married the author’s mother, Ruth, an Australian of Irish descent, in New South Wales during World War II. Frank’s family never accepted Ruth as one of its own. By the time Hagan, the fourth of five siblings, was born, Ruth was already drinking heavily, and the author was cared for by her 10-year-old sister, Peggy. Despite Hagan’s family’s growing dysfunction, her parents evidenced an easygoing acceptance of Black people. One of her father’s best friends was Harold Van Zandt, a Black man who once offered young newsboy Frank a cup of hot chocolate on a freezing day. And her parents stood up for a Black couple when the neighbors on their block in suburban Albany signed a petition barring the newcomers from buying a house. When the author met Ronald in her freshman year at Syracuse University, she relates that she had already “learned skin color is just an attribute like hair and eye color, and it never occurred to me to make such attributes weapons of oppression and inequality.” What she experienced in a hostile backlash from her family—and the world at large—through major and microaggressions directed against the couple taught her differently, and this lesson forms the primary theme of her memoir. In her timely work, which features family photographs, Hagan sorrowfully, angrily, and articulately intertwines her autobiography with Black history. Sometimes her rage spills out in unrestrained bursts, but the disturbing narrative’s great strength is in its descriptions of the frequent personal slights and off-the-cuff remarks from family members, friends, and strangers that create an exhausting unease and a permeating, underlying fear. Still, at its heart, this is a beautiful love story.

A passionate, informative, albeit dispiriting, call for change with only a few rays of hope.