My First Love Letter

I thought we were only tongue-tied kids on a date. But we were unwitting actors in a struggle that defined our time.

How it should have happened: “A Lady Reading a Letter” by Gerard ter Borch the younger, from the Wallace Collection

English class was about to begin when Bradley approached my desk and let fall a clutch of index cards. They looked like notes for a project, secured with a paperclip and typed on a machine with a jumpy keyboard. As the teacher turned to the day’s poem, Bradley slipped away without a word. I stole a glance at the first card: “Dear Rona, I accept the fact that you don’t want to be my girl-friend as I had wishes of… I meant it when I told you how I feel about you and there is no one that can come near to competeing with this.”

My first love letter was supposed to come on heavy paper in a fine hand, correctly spelled. Not like this. And not from Bradley. “I don’t know you well enough,” I had told him, dodging the truth. There were things about Bradley I didn’t dare know.

Bradley and I were spending the summer at Phillips Academy in Andover Massachusetts, alma mater of presidents past and future (JFK, both Bushes). We were scholarship students, enrolled in the drama program. I was playing Ophelia; Bradley ran the lighting booth, a dark world of his own that he liked to share with me. Two kids could not have found a better place to make out, but we didn’t even kiss. I’d never met a boy like Bradley. Not much of a talker, he chose his words with care. He worked the controls with a sure hand and what seemed like ease on the periphery of things.

I don’t have a photo of Bradley, only this letter.

Bradley looked older than 16. He wore his madras shirt with its button-down collar like an extension of himself, not as a badge of belonging. Unlike the other boys, all elbows and horseplay and galumphing feet, he carried himself like a man. There was heft to his shoulders, gravitas in his step. Did he work the lights because of technical inclinations or because he had no alternative? That summer of 1965, color-blind casting had not come to Andover, and we weren’t doing Othello. Bradley was Black, from Virginia—perhaps the only Black person on campus not pushing a broom or behind a steam table in the cafeteria. His quiet watchfulness must have been a survival skill.

Growing up in a New Hampshire college town, I had raged at the Jim Crow South. With a gaggle of Unitarians, I’d sung “We Shall Overcome” to indifferent passers-by, not one of them Black. The Civil Rights Act was one year old, the Selma march a fresh memory, the Voting Rights Act about to be signed into law. I could name the four Black girls murdered in the Birmingham church bombing of 1963, and the three civil rights workers slain the next year in Mississippi. The benighted South refused to understand what I had been taught all my life: People are people. Skin color doesn’t matter. You can choose not to see it. I pitied Bradley for living in his skin but didn’t ask him how it felt. That would have meant seeing the unseeable.

I had never been south of New York. Bradley had never crossed the Mason-Dixon line. Our common turf consisted of Andover’s wide green lawns punctuated by Greek Revival columns. When Bradley asked me out, I said yes out of astonishment. Boys at my school ignored me and I feared this might be a permanent state of affairs. At the rate things were going, I would turn 16 without a date, never mind a kiss.

Sixteen states had laws on the books against miscegenation. Biracial couples were so rare, I could think of only two: Sammy Davis, Jr. and May Britt (not exactly ordinary mortals) and Barney and Betty Hill, who had made a brief splash with their lurid story of alien abduction (weird as all get-out). But this was Andover. At Andover Bradley and I were just a couple of nerds on a date.

Bradley took me to movie night on campus. The Powers That Be had chosen Zulu, Michael Caine's breakout movie. A British take on the cowboys-and-Indians theme, it tells the heavily mythologized tale of a 19th-century battle in which 150 British soldiers, having taken up the white man's burden, repel an attack by 4,000 death-defying Zulu warriors. The movie was shown without context, as pure entertainment, to students ignorant of the history of colonialism and the Battle of Rorke's Drift. I recall it as a blur of spears, war cries and noble savages, with a wedding dance that featured bare quivering breasts.

Of all the recent hit movies I could have seen with my Black date, this one had to be the most disturbing.

“Racist” had yet to enter common parlance (we spoke of “prejudice” and “discrimination”). Still, I couldn’t separate race from the Black youth beside me. On screen half-naked Zulus shook their spears at uniformed British troops. They had the gleaming bodies of Greek gods who happened to be Black. While I struggled to make sense of my embarrassment for Black, oppressed Bradley and white, shamefully desirous me, I felt the warm hand of my date on my leg. Anxiety churned in the pit of my stomach.

Bradley’s hand followed the curve of my thigh and came to rest on the folds of the blue and purple shift that nestled between my legs. Wasn’t he supposed to start with his arm around my shoulder? Seventeen magazine had schooled me hard: I should flatter my date, not hurt his feelings.

When the lights came on, Bradley couldn’t contain his excitement. “Wow! Wasn’t that great?” Perhaps it thrilled him to see a formidably disciplined Black fighting force terrify British troops. We never spoke of what had happened on our only date, nor did he ever touch me again.

If Bradley were 16 today, he might find himself accused of sexual assault. The thought of him facing a tribunal makes me want to shake accusers who never were. “Let him be! He did no harm!” In 1965 we never guessed what might one day befall a boy who got too excited at the movies. Bradley suffered only the dashing of his hope.

To be young is to fall again and again on the spear of your own longing. It burns like the first anguish in the world, and all but stops your tongue. Bradley wrote in his letter, “Maybe you feel the way to cure this emotional chain is to cut off contact with me, but I disagree with all my heart. You can't know the pain that comes when I come close to you and you don't speak." Yet he found it in himself to express a hope for the future: We could “build a friendship that will last.” How many lovesick teens could be so gracious?

Back home in New Hampshire, I mentioned to my mother that I'd gone on a date. She was weeding what passed for our lawn, pressing me for details as she tugged up dandelions. She had an unseemly interest in the prurient, but I would foil her." He’s from Virginia. Goes to a segregated school”

My mother looked troubled. I saw what she was thinking: revered Confederate ancestors, family friends in white sheets, brandishing torches. My mother disdained all things Southern, although she made an exception for Eudora Welty.

I set her straight. She dropped her trowel. "Oh, Rona! Black! What if you married him?"

"Married him? He took me to a movie. You'd never have brought up marriage if he were white! How can you be so prejudiced?”

The last I heard of Bradley, close to 50 years ago, he was studying law at Princeton. I picture him on the bench, not taking any guff in his courtroom but not insulting anyone either. If he’s left any footprints online, I can’t find them. The paper clip on his letter has rusted with age, its imprint a scar on his words. I’ve removed and resecured that paper clip so many times, the first two letters of my name have worn away.

Bradley wrote in 1965, “Someday you’ll know how I feel.” He believed it. The truth is, I still don’t know how he felt. And not only because I didn’t take the chance to ask.

Do you have a story about a love letter—one you wrote or one sent to you? I’d love to know. Whatever this piece brings to mind, jump in and share. Hearing from you is the best part of Sunday.