I showed Carmina how to make Moroccan tea with mint and other flavorful shrubs. And a native woman friend cooked us big bowls of cous-cous in olive oil with the tenderest pieces of lamb and chicken. The Aframerican honeymoon in Africa was quite happy, until Carmina announced that she desired to marry me. But I couldn't because I wasn't divorced and I expected some day to return to America.
And now there was no peace between us. Carmina insisted she had to marry, to satisfy her mother, who was a Christian church-loving woman. In anger I said indiscreetly: "Why didn't you marry your white man in Paris." She said she would show me she could marry him. And one day she announced that her former white lover was coming to Morocco to marry her. I said I thought that that wasn't a bad idea, since she had to be married. I meant it. But my attitude turned Carmina raging. She said the right kind of man would be jealous. She was right, I suppose. But even from the angle of pure passion only I couldn't imagine myself being jealous of Carmina's white lover. And frankly I was interested in seeing her marry her white man from a social point of view. Because the story of Negroes in civilization is one of white men loving black women and giving them mulatto children, while they preferred to marry their own white women. Carmina said she was a modern woman and that if I were truly a radical and bohemian, I would not have such reactionary ideas about marriage. I asked her why she was not modern enough to live with a black man as she had lived with a white man. Also I said I was thinking in black-and-white, and that as marriage has a social value and her white man was of the better class, I'd like to see her marry him. Mixed marriages were mostly one-sided, colored men marrying white women; I'd also like to see white men marrying colored women, I told her. White men must have some social reason for not marrying the Negro women in whose flesh they find delight.
My reasoning infuriated Carmina, and our relationship became intolerable. She left me. Perhaps Carmina's white mouse had his special white fascination. I have known women who used to be afraid of mice and who in later years made pets of rats. Carmina's Nordic came, but he didn't marry. After being surfeited with loving, he left her still a spinster. I suppose it is easier for some women (like some men) to have than to hold.
I have read white writers and heard white men who romantically said that Negro women will not be faithful to white men. And there are Negro writers who write vicarious tales of colored girls ditching rich white men for black sheiks. I wonder what actual experience such colored writers have. All bunk. And my experience is not limited to just one. I know that in the West Indies the black and brown women become the faithful mistresses of Europeans.
So Carmina left me for a white skin. I don't think because it was so hot and I so cold. But the white skin is a symbol of money and power. In North Africa the native social system holds out against the European assault simply because the native women are confined in their harems. To modern thinking minds this is objectionable. Yet it is the native fanaticism in sex and religion which makes North Africa a little more wholesome than the rest of that fatal continent.
Some folk's remedy for lost love is immediately to love again. But if it is a big love, that remedy is like swilling beer to get rid of a champagne hangover. For if one has a passionate love in his system, I don't think indulging in lesser and indiscriminate loving helps to rid one of it. At least not for me. My way is to face it and live it down in hard work, sweat it out of my system. And so to get rid of the feeling and the odor of lost love, I gave up the little house and went for a few months up in the mountain fastness of Xauen in Spanish Morocco. There I finished my book, Gingertown.
When I came back I leased a little house in the country by the sea, about three miles out of Tangier. I found a little brown native girl to take care of the house. She brought her mother along, so that she could look her own people in the face without flinching. There also was a boy on a bicycle to run errands. And we all cultivated the garden and lived comfortably on twenty-five dollars each month.
One day when I was not at home, Carmina rode out there and pushed herself into the house. Both mother and daughter were very nonplussed by the American brown girl, who looked exactly like their own people, yet did not dress like them nor talk their language. Nevertheless, undaunted, they barred the way to my workroom. Carmina fired a volley of Americanisms and departed. Some days later it was reported to me in the Petit Socco of Tangier that she said she had told the woman she ought to be horsewhipped. Also, she had read a great book called Mother India about those awfully uncivilized Asiatics, and she wished somebody would write a Mother Morocco about the barbarous Africans.
Twice a week I tramped into town and spent the night in the native cafés listening to the alluring singing of Andalusian songs to the accompaniment of lute and mandolin. It was interesting to note that Spanish and French words and musical phrases were slipping into the native melodies. Some day a wonderful new music is destined to come out of North Africa.
The life was a little lazy. I did not plunge deep enough down into the native ways to touch the depths of that tribal opposition to other opposing groups which gave strength and meaning to their common existence.