Couple Out To Show Happy Marriages Do Exist
By Meghan Deerin
Daily Southtown
Monday, March 6, 2000
New Jersey couple TaRessa and Calvin Stovall make their recent book tour sound more like a humanitarian mission than a promotional trip.
The authors of "A Love Supreme: Real-Life Stories of Black Love" (Warner Books $23.95) said, they want to let the nation in on what they believe is a secret-happily married black couples do exist.
"We want to tell the truth about black American," TaRessa Stovall said when she and her husband stopped in Chicago on their book tour last month that took the couple to the Southland. They signed books at a Beverly bookstore and did an interview at AT&T Cable's Oak Lawn studio.
Their book takes a chapter-by-chapter look at 20 black couples. It includes the prominent -- US Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr and his wife, Sandi, retired Army Gen. Colin Powell and his wife, Alma, and former US Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders and her husband, Oliver -- as well as the ordinary.
"It's important for all of America to see a much more accurate picture of successful black married life," said TaRessa, a freelance writer and public relations consultant.
While depictions of happily married white couples proliferate on televisions, similar portrayals of black families are rare, the Stovalls assert.
"Besides the Huxtables on 'The Cosby Show', you find yourself very hard pressed to find black families in the media that have good, ordinary relationships," said Calvin Stovall, managing editor of the Courier Post in Cherry Hill, NJ. "Often the portrayals include drug abuse, domestic abuse, strained financial problems."
"Black men being very hostile in their relationships with women," his wife interjected. Those aren't the kinds of relationships they witness between themselves of their friends, the Stovalls say.
TaRessa said she ruminated about the issue, discussed it with her friends and finally suggested the idea of a book to her agent.
"She loved the idea," Calvin said. "With my journalism background, the agent instantly suggested that I do the book with her." So for the next 19 months, they flew around the country on weekends, interviewing couples they'd located through a network of friends and business colleagues.
Each couple turned into a chapter. "I thought it was a cute idea, a wonderful idea, really," said Sandi Jackson, featured along with her Congressman husband in Chapter 17, "When people turn to television, they see stereotypes that don't represent what most of us African-Americans see and experience everyday."
In their interview, Jesse and Sandi Jackson discuss their courtship (for him, it was love at first sight, while Sandi remembers being unimpressed) and the most difficult trial of the married - the death of their first child, a baby boy born four month premature.
"We've faced some very difficult times, the loss of our son being the pinnacle of it" said Sandi, now in her ninth month of pregnancy and confined to bed rest in their Washington, D.C. home. "We wanted to let people know there's a way to get through when bad things happen."
In fact many of the couples in the book describe overcoming the bad things that happen.
The chapter on Joycelyn and Oliver Elders is a catalog of trials they've lived through, including his depression, their son's drug and alcohol addiction, and the death of a runaway foster child.
"Anyone who wants to read about true love and romance -- people who've faced various traumas and tragedies and come out strong on the other side is going to be enriched by this book," TaRessa Stovall said.
The Stovalls said they looked for a diverse spectrum of couples. Their subjects run the gamut from affluent to impoverished, traditional to unconventional, Baptist to Muslim, professionals to blue collar workers.
"We wanted a wide mix of people in terms of age, lifestyle and what we call 'lovestyle,' TaRessa said. "We've got former college presidents, and we've got folks who are scraping by."
They strove for a blend to show that African-Americans can succeed at marriage, regardless of their social or economic status, in defiance of bleak statistics.
It's very true that a very large proportion of black adults are not married and that the chances of divorce are substantially higher for black couples than for white," said University of Chicago sociology professor Linda White, who specializes in family and marriage.
"About 60 percent of black women and 58 percent of black men are not married," White said.
By comparison, about one third of white men and women are unmarried, White said. Just half a century ago, the proportion of married blacks to married whites was almost equal, White said. "Something's happened to drive black men and women away from marriage, and I don't think anybody knows what it is, the sociologist said.
The Stovalls are hoping that these positive portrayals of marriage will inspire more people to believe in the possibility of a good marriage.
"There are actually blacks who are in situations where they have not seen a successful functioning relationship, and they need hope," Calvin Stovall said.
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