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Catholics didn’t count—only Mexicans were Catholic and it wasn’t proved that they had a soul—and the other denominations weren’t worth talking about because their rites were satanic, as everyone knew. Alcohol, dancing, music, and swimming with anyone of the opposite sex were forbidden, and I think that was also true of tobacco and coffee, but I’m not sure. Tabra completed her education at Abilene Christian College, where her father taught, a sweet and open-minded professor enamored of Jewish and African-American literature, who navigated as well as he could through the censorship of the college authorities. He knew how rebellious Tabra was, but he had not expected her to elope with a secret boyfriend when she was seventeen, a Samoan student, the only person with dark skin and black eyes in that institution of whites. In those days, the youth from Samoa was still slender and handsome, at least in Tabra’s eyes, and there was no doubt about his intelligence; up to that time he was the only Islander to have received a scholarship.
    The couple ran away one night to another city, where the justice of the peace refused to marry them because interracial marriages were illegal, but Tabra convinced him that Polynesians are not Negroes, and furthermore, she was pregnant. Grumbling, the judge agreed. He had never heard of Samoa, and the hapless little mixed-blood creature she was carrying in her womb seemed reason enough to legitimize that disgraceful union. “I feel sorry for your parents, girl,” he said instead of giving them his blessing. That same night the brand-new husband pulled off his belt and lashed Tabra until he drew blood because she had gone to bed with a man before she was married. The indisputable fact that he was that man did not in any way minimize her status as a whore. That was the first of countless beatings and rapes, which according to the church she had to endure because God did not approve of divorce, and that was her punishment for having married someone who was not of the same race, a perversion proscribed by the Bible.
    They had a handsome son named Tangi, which in Samoan means “cry,” and the husband took his small and terrified family back to his natal village. That tropical isle, where Americans maintained a military base and a detachment of missionaries, welcomed Tabra. She was the only white person in her husband’s clan, and that afforded her a certain privilege, but it did not impede her husband’s daily beatings. Tabra’s new family consisted of some twenty dark-skinned giants, who lamented in chorus her pale, underfed appearance. Most of them, especially her father-in-law, treated her with affection and reserved for her the best bits of the communal dinner: fish heads with staring eyes, fried eggs enhanced by embryos, and a delicious pudding they prepared by chewing a fruit and spitting the pap into a wooden vessel they then set in the sun to ferment. Sometimes the women succeeded in picking up little Tangi and running to hide him from the fury of his father, but they were unable to defend his mother.
    Tabra never grew accustomed to her fear. There were no rules regarding punishment; nothing she did or didn’t do prevented the lashings. Finally, after one Homeric beating, her husband was sent to jail for a few days, a moment the missionaries seized to help Tabra and her son escape to Texas. The elders of her local church repudiated her. She couldn’t find a decent job and the only person who helped her was her father. A divorce concluded that relationship and she didn’t see her torturer again for fifteen years. By then, after many years of therapy, she was no longer afraid of him. Her former husband returned to the United States and became an evangelical preacher, a true scourge to sinners and unbelievers, but he never again dared bother Tabra.
    I N THE DECADE OF THE ’60s, Tabra could not bear the shame of the Vietnam