My First African/American Girlfriend

Tatiana Androsov
3 min readJan 20, 2025

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Because it was so cold in Dallas today, walked to the nearby drugstore to get some milk instead of getting the car. As I was nearing the cashier’s desk, a young, beautiful, brown-skinned girl flashed a welcoming smile. Suddenly, almost six decades fell before my eyes and I saw Lee, Leonora. I smiled back and started talking with this young woman, as she remarked that my little carryon bag was cute. I asked her what age she would give me. She looked and started saying, ‘fifty…’ then hesitated and went down to ‘forty?’ I laughed and told her, “Seventy-seven.”

Well here, her surprise was genuine. I continued, “I owe it to Leonora, my first African/American girlfriend, who got me to run, almost forcing me the first she came to my college dorm room and said, ‘We are going around the lake.’” Then I grimaced, just the way I had that day! I have no idea as to whether I’ll ever see the young woman again, but as I walked back to my house all kinds of thoughts came to my head.

Yes, it was Martin Luther King Day, but it was also Inauguration Day for the new but repeat President. However, somehow Lee and what she had done to my life was much more important. I started pondering whether my life would have been the same had I not started running with Lee and continued on my own to this very day.

Would I have gone to work in the field for the United Nations? I thought back to my time as an interpreter and three months I spent in Thailand. My best friend there was from Africa, a Ghanian, a friend, not a lover. He and I shared a love of classical music, something not too common even in the nineteen seventies. When I went back to Geneva, and he was posted there, we used to get together to listen to some great recordings, yes, on the old-fashioned, vinyl disks.

Then my thoughts drifted to Cameroon and how the sweeper in our office, was the glue that held everything together. He is the one real character in my novel Choices. No matter how good or bad a day was, seeing him and talking with him brought a smile to my heart. And there were the shared laughs with local woman colleagues. They were closer to me than the fellow foreign women from other missions and representations.

And Cambodia? Though the eyes and skin colors were different, the local women were much dearer to me than any of the international staff.

How did I do in South Africa? How did I dare cross the country alone in a little car? Was it not partly because I related to the people I encountered, to the faces that brought me back to Lee? I can never forget how my mother who was so anxious when Lee came to visit for a weekend in our neighborhood, where one encountered only light skins, changed in just over forty-eight hours, telling me just before the two of us left to return to college, “I wish you were more like Lee.”

As I reached my house, I felt tears. You see the first of my granddaughters of the heart is Cameroonian. No, I did not meet her there but here when she was studying. She and I are so much alike, from our size to what we see in the world, to how we navigate in that world, to the way we go about trying to contribute to it, that there is no reason for us not to be really related, that is through a different bond — the bond of spirits.

So that, I realize, as I sit putting all of this into words, is my gift from Martin Luther King Day. We are one, we are the human race. Thank you, Lee!

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Tatiana Androsov
Tatiana Androsov

Written by Tatiana Androsov

A novelist on the sea of life coming, cresting and breaking having traveled near & far from a post WWII immigrant childhood to a UN world of poverty and riches.

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