Dear Steele: Part of the problem of love is that we still think about it in terms of measurements, as if the formula for love were determined by figuring out the right amount of sugar or salt or lime or water to add to a fresh jug of natural juice puree. My father makes the best fruit juice, and we always have an assortment of fruits in our backyard to choose from. Cherries are in season now, but it appears our cherry trees have a disease. But we have all the mangos our hearts can desire, sliced and diced and frozen in the back freezer waiting to be juiced. Just like the juice, too much sugar makes love ¼ cup too sweet. Too much lime makes love 1 squeeze too sour. Too much salt makes love 1 teaspoon too briny. Too much water makes love tasteless.
If love were a measurement, what would be the perfect formula? Would it be the taste of Koolaid, or carrot juice; the taste of tamarind or pineapple; the taste of mango or soursop; the taste to Baba Roots or cerasee? Too much love, not enough love, how much love, no love lost: what if love couldn’t be measured in terms of cups or pounds or miles or degrees; what if we were asking the wrong questions about love?
In the 1700s and 1800s, colonial empires measured ‘whiteness’ by degrees of ‘blackness’. There was actually a law on the books in The Commonwealth of the Bahamas, and other territories, to ascertain who was white and who was black by using a measurement of ‘degrees’. The original law of 1756 was quite liberal based on standards later implemented. Originally, if a person was ‘three degrees removed’ from their African ancestry, they were white and received all the civil and political liberties associated with being legally white. In 1802, there was an Act to suspend the 1756 Act and over night people were reassigned races. Under the new authoritarian measurements, even ‘one drop’ of African ancestry was sufficient to afford you the tragedy of disenfranchisement from the ‘white’ race.
I suppose the saying back then would have been ‘black until proven white’. I can only imagine them having a colour wheel, something called ‘Degrees of Blackness’, they would hold up next to the suspected white person to check their skin to see if it had ‘one drop’ of African in it. What if how we think about love is as sordid and twisted and ignorant as that, and precisely because we haven’t figured out how to do love justice is why the misunderstanding of love causes so much hate and destruction in the world, and pain and suffering in our hearts.