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Garden of Hope: Autobiography of a Marriage by Maryanne Raphael & Lennox Raphael Hopewell Publications
book review by book review by David Henderson for Tribes.org (excerpted)
"The remainder of the trip trough the South was similar to the beginning: police escorts during rest stops and Bible belt literature on our seats every time we returned... And Maryanne and I didn't really relax until the bus crossed the Mason-Dixon line and passed those WHITE ONLY & BLACK ONLY signs."
Garden of Hope is the frank, endearing story of a black-white couple who travel the world and cross the southern United States by bus at the height of the Civil Rights movement.
The Raphael union began before the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy and at the threshold of Flower Power, Black Power, and the Summer of Love. Lennox and Maryanne met in Kingston, Jamaica. He was a Trinidadian journalist working for a magazine. She had just arrived from Paris where she studied at the Sorbonne. After a whirlwind courtship, they married in Tampico, Mexico. They traveled across Jim Crow America, then went to Brazil where they became well known as poets and painters.
Unfortunately, Maryanne was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown. When she recovered, they traveled to meet his family in Trinidad, then on to Waverly Ohio to meet her family. Then they went to New York City where they focused on their writing and were accepted as they were. Their son Raphael was born in 1968.
Told in alternating voices, Garden of Hope is a dual autobiography, a new genre that may become an inspirational model for future loving couples. The couple broke up but remained friends. Their story leaves you saying: "Yes! There is hope for the human race." Their son, Raphael wrote the forward. Since he was only three years old when they separated, he is grateful to see his parents young and in love.