My husband is black; I'm white. He has this dark, rich, chocolaty skin; I'm a creamy vanilla. Our kids are this beautiful mix. If you ask them what color they are, they will say, "golden," and it's true in every way.

Mark and I met in college. Before that, I lived in all-white suburban neighborhoods or small towns, and I never ventured beyond the confines of my own little known-world. I formed opinions of race based on TV, and mixed those with impressions of the few black people who chanced to fall into my life.

Bobby entered my second grade class in the middle of the school year; his mother dragged him into the class screaming and thrashing and crying. I imagined he didn't want to be there with all of us white people, maybe he even said so. He certainly cried (at the top of his lungs) over and over that he didn't want to go to this school, that he didn't want to join this class. I thought we were probably scary, like a room full of ghosts. (Something I picked up from watching high quality television like "The Little Rascals.") Bobby seemed as exotic and different to me as if he had come directly from Africa itself. I used to look at him, furtively -- his wrinkled palms, his large dark eyes, his kinky hair.

I was fascinated by the fact that he was as deeply in love with Cheryl Ladd (one of the stars of "Charlie's Angels") as I was with Shaun Cassidy. Before that, it had never occurred to me that a black person could be attracted to a blonde like me, or that I could be attracted to someone who wasn't white. At age 8, I thought we were all attracted to those who looked the most like us, which is why, aside from Shaun Cassidy, I was in love with Brad, the handsomest blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy in my class.

One day we were playing Seven Up, where seven people are "it" and they circulate through a room of closed-eyed classmates, choosing one person by touching their hand. When all seven have chosen someone, each of the chosen classmates has to try to guess who touched them. I had my head down and felt a soft, dry palm touch my hand. I knew it was Bobby; the touch felt the way his hands looked. So, when my turn came to guess, I confidently said his name. And when I did, he got angry, hugely, stormily angry. Angry the way someone gets in a courtroom drama when a lie is going to allow a murderer to go free -- or cause someone to be hanged for a crime he didn't commit. He boiled up with rage at the injustice, stomped his feet and shook his finger at me, yelling that I was cheating, that I had looked, that I somehow knew it was him. And I stood frozen, and pale, at my desk.

In a way it was the truth, but I couldn't say it. I couldn't say that I knew him because his hands looked different from the hands of all the white kids. I couldn't say that I had been studying him -- his hands, his face, his hair, his voice. I knew this was something I ought not to have noticed, something I ought not to have done. Like when I was about 6 or 7, in the locker room at the Y with my mother, and I saw a black woman undressing. Her nipples weren't pink like mine or my mothers', they were a dark purple. And I pointed it out, and was shushed. We were different, but we couldn't say we were different, shouldn't notice that difference.

I moved away at the end of third grade, a little over a year after Bobby moved in, and I didn't see another black person until junior high school. Like Bobby, Dawn moved in from Somewhere Else, but she was gone again in a year, which my friends said was good, because they liked her and wanted her to live someplace where she would be able to get a date. None of the white kids would ask her out, they said, no matter how sweet and how pretty she was, because she was black. No one in our little town would want to date someone who looked different.

When I first started dating Mark, I noticed the differences: his eyes were so dark that it was hard to tell iris from pupil, it was all one lake of liquid fire; he smelled strong and musky and more masculine than any of the sweet-scented white guys I had been with; his lips were lusciously soft; his body melted into the nighttime, like I was making love to the dark itself. And every difference was beautiful and intoxicating. But it doesn't hurt, after all, to notice the differences and to love them, even to covet them, the way I do my son's and daughter's curls or my husband's dark eyes. It doesn't hurt to notice the difference and love ourselves, the way I love being able to hang my long, soft, straight hair in front of my face and puff it away with my breath, making babies laugh. It hurts to be scared of the difference and to shush ourselves in the face of it.