I liked Brian and thought he was treated unfairly by Kenya. But I do have to say that she was in uncharted waters. Things white people take for granted are not a black person's reality. We learn to deal with prejudice and being looked down on and being treated with mistrust. My family came to the America in the 1950's. I am from a family of professionals and medical people (dentists, architectural engineers, pharmacists, and my own dear mother a classically trained concert pianist, bilingual like all her family, with her Bachelor of Science and was a teacher in her native Dominican Republic, who, when she came to America in the 1950's was referred to maid positions when she applied for work commensurate with her skills).
I never grew up speaking slang or ghetto. But white people would speak to me as if I were illiterate and say ignorant, stereotypical things to me. This was regular. I remember we went to Maine twice (we lived in Brooklyn, NY). I remembered enjoying Maine when I was younger. We went when I was 13 years old. That was when I first became aware of prejudice. Everyone in this mostly white town stared at us when we went into town. Literally everyone. I never wanted to go back to Maine. I was just old enough to notice the second time.
Kenya was used to getting things off her chest with other black people who needed no explanation to know where she was coming from. We all need that. As a black woman, she had to work twice or three times as hard to make it in her profession. So to work that hard and be treated like "the guy who brings her coffee" was hitting home hard that day. She wasn't a hothead. She didn't disrespect the customer or complain to the boss. But Brian was her lover. He was the one she WOULD have opened up to to vent. And it was the first time she realized he didn't relate, didn't understand.
A white reporter named John Howard Griffin wrote an expose called "Black Like Me". He took special pills and tanning to color his skin dark and went underground as a black man in the deep south in the late 1950's. He said he realized black people were treated much worse than a second class citizen. So imagine the frustration of having to deal with prejudice deep in our culture every single day of your life. Whites will never walk in those shoes unless they are in a similar situation of oppression.
I don't think everything is about Kenya. I think Kenya just had never been in a relationship with a man like Brian, or someone who didn't fundamentally relate to her anxieties. Every intimate relationship will involve venting. For them, it was a learning curve.
Brian was the one who taught her that what they had was all that mattered, the others be d@mned. She finally stopped caring about what others thought. That was what the funky get up he wore represented. Brian obviously didn't care. He was there for her. And she learned to be there for him. And I think even the crap in the world was going to start taking a back seat as she gleaned true love and acceptance from her husband. She was going to learn that not all white people were bigoted bums. YUM! Love a good romance!
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