A very wise filmmaker once told me, "Interracial relationships live and die on the dance floor". Or maybe it was, "The dance floor provides the true test of any interracial relationship." Either way, in the case of the Belgian Billionaire, this was almost literally true.
We met at a party hosted by a Jamaican couple in South Florida. He had a full head of silver and black slicked back hair. Tall, buttoned down and jacketed, looking like he came out of an Ocean's 11 remake, I liked him immediately. He acted like I didn't exist. Luckily it was New Year's Eve, my entire family was there, and we had all the makings of a classic night.
I won't apologize for being the stereotype* when it comes to black people, dancing and
sangin'. Especially when I'm all euphoria and loved up and surrounded by other black people. That night I went buck wild like it was '94, and hip hop and dancehall were life. At one point I remember standing at the edge of the dance floor and turning to see my parents in the kitchen, bouncing in unison to some ignorant dirty south song or another. Luke or Lil John. We're not even drinkers. It's all natural crunk.
Bill and I ended up dancing with each other for most of the night, until on a slow roots reggae tune, he tried to kiss me. This was problematic. Yeah, I thought he was cute. And by that point I'd been officially grinding on him for the better part of 2007. But so? Where I come from, you can dance with someone, all night even, without there being meaning beyond the dance. Not so with European men, it seems. As far as they're concerned, you only dance with someone so intimately because you want to have sex with them. This is not as 'rapey' as it may sound. Not like normal guys will force you if you decline. But there isn't this idea that a dance is just a dance. It's normally the beginning of something, not an end in itself.
Barely a year after that night, we were living together in Belgium, being chauffeured to the party where I'd meet his friends for the first time. It was hosted by a couple who lived in a house separated from the street by a moat. A footbridge led you to the main structure; it wasn't really just a house, but something like a complex of small buildings. In the middle, they'd erected a party tent. Couches, candles and tables on one side, a dance floor on the other.
The first Real Housewife of Flemish Belgium I met, a pretty blonde in black cashmere who greeted me with her arms folded across her midsection, said,
"You seem nice. I might like you. But I liked his ex-wife, too". The husbands brought me pink, girly drinks, talked to me about selling rare automobiles and drilling wells in West Africa. Others took turns tossing me around the dance floor. People in Belgium do
the hustle, ballroom-style, like, at parties and in nightclubs. They were highly entertaining. All except for mine. He insisted I wasn't having a good time.
"Why aren't you dancing?"
"Did you not just see me dancing with Husband #5?"
"Yes, but you are not like you were on New Year's Eve."
We had our first real fight that night. Obviously, the spirits of dance are not likely to visit upon one in a house with a moat in Flemish Belgium (not even Brussels!) in the same way as they would at a Jamaican party in South Florida.
Obviously. Either this man wasn't aware of the mysterious ways in which the spirits of dance move, or he didn't know who I was at all. Was it that he was afraid I wasn't enjoying myself unless I was bouncing off the walls? Or was he just craving gyrating exotic girl me? I waited until after we crossed back over the footbridge to ask.
*I don't want to get into any big thing about stereotypes, and "how dare you [I] suggest that all black people can dance!" Because most black people can dance. And if you are black and this doesn't describe you, then this isn't the post for you.
