In “How Does One Say,” Collins makes use of her Sorbonne education and French proficiency to write about a young black girl who establishes a rapport with the professor of a French immersion program in Maine. Collins, who died of breast cancer in 1988 at the young age of 46, was a playwright, educator, activist and among the first African-American women to make a feature film, the comic drama “Losing Ground.” With “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” she weaves what seem to be autobiographical details into her fiction. This collection of previously unpublished short fiction is long overdue. Collins toys with human beings as shadows, who fade in and out of one another’s lives, and she carefully depicts how abandonment and attachment can be two sides of the same experience.
The last line is this: “Leave her in the shadow while she looks for the feelings that lit up the room.” This three-page section, titled “Exteriors,” can hardly be considered a story it is more like a voyeuristic passage through which the reader can oscillate between being emotionally invested in and distant from matters of love. An unnamed director is giving instructions to someone - a stagehand? a cinematographer? - on how to light a room in which two lovers are suffering the demise of their relationship.
Kathleen Collins’s short story collection, “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” opens with a monologue.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO INTERRACIAL LOVE? Stories By Kathleen Collins 175 pp.
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