Questioning the Segregation of Romance: Ruth Wind's IN THE MIDNIGHT RAIN

The United States Supreme Court's landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case, declaring separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional, was decided in 1954, more than fifty years ago. Racial integration in America's schools reached an all-time high in 1990, giving proponents of integration much to cheer about. But according to Dr. Adriana Villavicencio, senior research associate at the Research Alliance, New York University, segregation, not integration, has been the trend in American public schools since 1990:

In 1988, less than a third of Black and Latino students attended what Gary Orfield, Co-Director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, calls intensely segregated schools: schools with 90-100% minority students. Today, 40% of Blacks and Latinos—and less than 1% of white students—attend these schools. The percentage of white students nationally is only 56%, but on average they attend schools where more than 75% of students are white. At the same time, the percentage of Black and Latino students attending majority white schools has dropped by more than 10 percent.

As in our schools, so in our romance novels: romance publishing is still largely segregated by race. With a few notable exceptions, characters in the mainstream romance lines are largely white; black characters are largely segregated into their own separate (but equal?) lines, such as Harlequin's Kimani and Kensington's Dafina. We could talk ad infinitum about the whys and wherefores of such segregation. Instead, I thought I would honor the day set aside in the United States to celebrate the birth of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King by writing about one of the few romance novels I've read that features an integrated community: Ruth Wind's RITA finalist In the Midnight Rain.

White thirty-something Ellie Connor arrives in Pine Bend, Mississippi on two fact-finding missions. One is public: to research the early years of the subject of her latest biography, Mabel Beauvais, an African-American blues singer who disappeared in 1953, just on the cusp of achieving nationwide fame. One is private: to try and discover the identity of her father, a man whom her wild hippie mother, who died when Ellie was two, never named. When she arrives at the place she's arranged to stay, she finds two men sitting on the porch, one white, one black. By the end of the novel, the two men, and the two searches, will become entangled in ways Ellie, and perhaps the reader, never could have imagined.

Though the novel's action takes place in the present, Ellie's two research projects give readers a sense of race relations in Pine Bend during three different periods in American history: the years immediately before, and immediately after, World War II, when segregation was a given; the late 1960s, when the country struggled against the backdrop of the Vietnam War to figure out how the legal victories of the Civil Rights movement would play out on the ground, in their communities; and 1990, when many overt racial barriers had been taken down, but many racial assumptions and beliefs still attained. Deep into her research, Ellie notices that most of the people she's interviewed are black, and makes a note to herself to talk to white people who were around during Mabel Beauvais' early days, realizing that things then weren't the same for blacks as they were for whites, something she'll need to understand not just on an intellectual, but on a personal level if she is to convey the truth of Mabel's life.

Wind's novel is hardly a didactic tract about race relations; it's a heartfelt, beautifully-written, and in many ways a quite traditional love story. With her penchant for falling for wounded men, Ellie's been down the bad relationship path more than a few times, and spends much of the novel warning herself against succumbing to her attraction to the emotionally-damaged man whom she met via an online blues newsgroup and who, in his hospitably southern way, offered Ellie a place to stay while doing her research in his hometown. And she's not the only one issuing warnings; almost everyone in town, whether black or white, counsels Ellie to stay away from Blue Reynard, since the privileged white boy is known about town as a "dog," a charming love-'em and leave-'em guy who'll only break her heart. But Blue, who sometimes thinks of himself as Job because of all the personal losses he's experienced, can't help falling for his intellectual equal, just as Ellie can't keep her heart free from bad-boy/smart-boy Blue. In traditional romance-novel fashion, each must both struggle to cope with and accept their fears of abandonment before they can find their HEA together.

Yet race serves as the compelling backdrop to this love story, quietly asking readers to consider what race meant in America's past, and what it still means in our present. What makes one person black, another person white? What secrets should one keep to protect a fellow member of an oppressed group? What does an integrated community look like? When is integration a problem? What does friendship across racial lines look like? What does love?

It struck me as significant that In the Midnight Rain was published in 1990, at the height of American public school integration. Can you think of any other romance novels that have been published since then that depict not an interracial romance, but an integrated community against which a romance unfolds?


Photo credits:
Diverse hands: Unity in Christ Magazine

Ruth Wind (Barbara Samuel)

In the Midnight Rain

HarperTorch, 2000