Friday, 18th September pm, Culver City: 50 Saturdays
Our next interview is with a couple in Culver City: Dr Lula and Carl Ballton. They have been married for 40 years, and we managed to get hold of them through their church. After we spoke to Hill Harper about the decline in black relationships, we wanted to talk to a happily married black couple to get their views on the matter. We arrive an hour late, which means that I am extremely tense, overly apologetic, and the Balltons, justifiably, are dubious about what awaits them. Never the best start to getting people to open up.
It turns out that it doesn’t matter at all. They talk at length about their relationship – they met young, married quickly because Carl was in the draft for the Vietnam war – and have been very very happily married for 40 years. When Carl heard that he was going to be posted to Delaware, he realised that he had to propose to Lula quickly – he did and they were married a week later on Thanksgiving. The entire community chipped in – making the food, the dresses, the ornamentation – and they ended up having 300 people to their Chicago wedding.
Again, they are a couple with a great dynamic. I have had feedback from discerning readers who would like a bit more criticism in this blog, but genuinely – and I apologise! – that’s not really the nature of our interactions with people. They open up their homes and their hearts to us, and we take inspiration and advice from them for our enduring relationship.
The most extraordinary coincidence about meeting the Balltons is that Lula has just published a book of advice to her daughter on her wedding day, advice designed specifically to aid matrimonial harmony, called 50 Saturdays Before You Say I Do. Lula had no idea that we were coming to talk about their love stories and advice, we had no idea that she had just had the book published.
She wrote the book as a present to her daughter, and gave it to her a year before she got married. Each Saturday has a different piece of advice for how to make the marriage work. When her friends saw it, they loved it and wanted a copy – and so it was that Lula, and her daughter, decided to publish it. I can safely say, of all the books that I have read on the subject of marriage, all crammed with advice and ‘How to’s, this is the most charming, wonderful and sage of them all.
She has written in the most charming and motherly way – so that the advice is not cold, hard advice from a PhD who, in general, has been through divorce or is quick to make a self help buck, this is written with all the love of a mother to her daughter on her wedding day – from the point of view of a woman who has had a very very happy marriage, through good times and bad, over 40 years. As soon as I can access the server with all our footage on it, I’ll copy up a couple of the “Saturdays” advice.
When asked about what they thought about the decline in black relationships, the couple became animated. They said that it is entirely natural that the poorest segments of society suffer a higher rate of divorce because of adverse external factors, and when black people are given opportunity – like the Balltons themselves – they are in a much better position to be able to buck the statistical trend. Fair enough point, but I wondered whether we should have found a black couple who had made it work from a generation below. Once again, despite the fact that we work all the time, I regret not being able to work a bit harder to find a younger black couple to interview alongside the Balltons.
