What Happened To Interracial Love?

When the filmmaker, playwright and fiction writer Kathleen Collins died of breast cancer in 1988, at 46, she left behind a wide body of work that’s only beginning to see the light of day.

She was among the first black women to direct a feature-length film. That movie, “Losing Ground” (1982), parsed black intellectual life in New York City; it was about a female philosophy professor and her wayward husband, a painter. It never had a theatrical release. Just last year its premiere was held at Lincoln Center, where it played to sold-out crowds.

She was a feverish artist, working on many fronts. In an essay in the September issue of Vogue, her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, recalls, “When I think back, the dominant sounds of my childhood are of my mother’s IBM Selectric II clattering away behind her bedroom door; film swishing through the Steenbeck editing machine that sat in our dining room; and, occasionally, Tina Turner blaring from the stereo while she danced like a madwoman in the living room.”

Ms. Collins grew up in Jersey City, where her father was a funeral director who became a state legislator. She graduated from Skidmore College and received a master’s degree in French literature from Paris-Sorbonne University. She worked to register black voters in Georgia with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s and was twice arrested. She was a film history professor at City College. Her plays include “In the Midnight Hour” (1980) and “The Brothers” (1982).

If Ms. Collins’s films went largely unseen, her fiction went unread. With the exception of a short story that appeared in a journal, now defunct, she was all-but unpublished during her lifetime. Many of the stories that fill “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?,” the first collection of her work, were pulled by her daughter from a trunk.

The best of these stories are a revelation. Ms. Collins had a gift for illuminating what the critic Albert Murray called the “black intramural class struggle,” and two or three of her stories are so sensitive and sharp and political and sexy I suspect they will be widely anthologized.

If the bulk of the 16 stories in “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” are less fully realized, they point in directions she might have taken had she lived. They have a talky, crackling quality that keeps them afloat even when they veer toward the pretentious.

I felt compelled to provide the biographical material at the start of this review because this collection’s foreword, by the poet Elizabeth Alexander, is nearly fact free and perfectly unhelpful.

This foreword is titled “In Search of Kathleen Collins,” yet Ms. Alexander writes almost entirely about herself. On the back flap, Ms. Alexander’s paragraph of biographical details is longer than the author’s. Ms. Collins deserves a proper introduction to American readers, one she does not receive here.

This collection’s title story gives us Ms. Collins in full flower. It is about two roommates in an Upper West Side apartment. It’s 1963 or, as Ms. Collins declares, “the year of racial, religious, and ethnic mildew.”

One roommate is a white community organizer in Harlem, fresh out of Sarah Lawrence and dating a black poet. The other is a young black woman who was jailed during civil rights protests in Georgia; she’s in love with a white Freedom Rider.

When the young black woman went South, she shed some of her proper bourgeois upbringing and began to feel the shaggy earth beneath her feet. Her father is apoplectic. What’s happened to his perfect strait-laced daughter?

“She had even committed the final sin, the unforgivable sin of (‘negro’) girlhood: she had cut off her hair,” Ms. Collins writes. “‘How few negro girls are blessed with long hair?’ her father had sobbed. ‘How could you go and turn yourself into a negro just like any other negro?’”

This story continues: “At any moment a toothless grin would spread across her face and she would be a walking replica of all his nightmares — she would shuffle backward and grin and her bushy hair would stand on end and she would have turned into ‘a colored woman.’”

The conversation in Ms. Collins’s stories is good, and often it’s about culture and ideas. Her men and women have well-stocked minds. The young black woman in the title story is reading four books at once, including two John Updike novels. She can’t help but repeat in mockery, in a kind of refrain, hapless lines from Updike’s “The Centaur,” which appeared in 1963: “Listen to me, lady. I love you, I want to be a Negro for you.”

These cultural references, which sometimes weigh these stories down, can be admirably catholic. In the story “Lifelines,” a woman’s husband is jailed in Santo Domingo for fraud. She sends him literary care packages that include books by Kierkegaard and Proust, as well as current issues of The New York Review of Books, Le Nouvel Observateur and (because pictures are worth a thousand words) Playboy, Players and Oui.

Another important story in this collection is “The Happy Family.” Told by a young white man, it’s about the black family he meets and falls in love with at a church rally for civil rights in the early 1960s.

The man’s own childhood had been a wreck. This new family is warm and deeply intellectual. (The father is a history professor at Columbia.) Their home is “a happy place where joy and justice meet.”

An unexpected romance blossoms. The narrator observes the beauty of these promising young people but can’t help but intone, “Oh my God, you thought, how life will take them apart.”

Ms. Collins writes in the title story,“We are swimming along in the mythical underbelly of America.” She continues, as if speaking for the entirety of this book, “there where it is soft and prickly, where you may rub your nose against the grainy sands of illusion and come up bleeding.”

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

Stories

By Kathleen Collins, with a foreword by Elizabeth Alexander

175 pages. Ecco. $15.99.

Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner