By Victor Greto
She has a problem with her identity.
“Sometimes I don’t want to be mixed,” says Reneé Putman, 41. “You just don’t fit in.”
During middle school, she says, “they beat me up so bad they had to put me in the hospital. They would follow me into the bathroom, look over the stall where I sat, and tease me. They would beat me up on the way home from school, drag me by my hair. One boy put a knife at my back when I refused to speak to him.”
They were the black kids who attended her school. It was only after she transferred to a high school peopled with mostly Italians and Hispanics that the teasing stopped.
Now married to Ronald Putman, an African-American, she says she still doesn’t fit in.
Like other people of mixed race of her generation, both blacks and whites generally look upon her suspiciously.
Even her three children from a previous marriage didn’t want her to go to parent-teacher conferences for fear of being teased.
“They think of themselves as black because their dad is black and mom is biracial,” she says.
Reneé’s face tightens like a fist into both anger and sorrow when she details the times of her childhood, especially when she tells how her mother left the family when she was nine months old.
“I wish sometimes I was either one or the other,” she says.
“I could never choose white because my mom didn’t raise me. Because she left me, I lost a lot of respect for that side. But I just can’t live all one way.”
Raised by her Jamaican father in Hartford, Conn., she lived in a black household — though just about everything and everyone around said she wasn’t black. Not really, anyway.
Even today, when she looks at her husband, thinks about herself, she says, “I’m not really in an interracial relationship.”
But she is.
“You know how many black women want to beat me up because they think I’m a white woman with a black guy?” she asks.
“It happens all the time,” Ronald says.
It happens all the time because the Putmans go out a lot. And yet that’s one of the reasons why they’re together. Reneé answered Ronald’s personal ad in part because he said he loved going out a lot, to the theater, nightclubs and dinner.
Ronald himself had been married and alone for a while when he decided — uncharacteristically — to try the ad.
It took 15 dates with other women before he met Reneé in 1996. They inadvertently dressed alike for their first date — black shirts, jeans and black sandals.
Though Ronald says he hardly notices the comments, once he warms up, he’s got plenty of stories.
About the time a waitress serving them actually wanted to beat up his wife. About tables of black women in restaurants “staring at us, pissed off, saying, ‘You know, here’s another white lady with a black guy. He must be financially secure.’ ”
And then that one time on South Beach, when a person whom Ronald characterizes as a “crackhead,” jumped up and down in front of them repeatedly shouting “Jungle fever!” as they walked by.
Yet because of these things, Reneé says she has begun to understand her mother, whom she talks to now.
“If I’m going through this in 2000, I think about what my parents went though during the Fifties,” she says. “Maybe I understand why my mom left. Maybe society put too much pressure on her.
“It’s just as bad as when my parents were together,” she says of the public perception of interracial marriages. “It’s more accepted, but do they really like it? Are they used to it? I don’t think so.”