Loving Day

The title of Mat Johnson’s 2015 novel Loving Day refers to Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court case that legalized interracial marriage in the U.S. Satirical and funny, the story, nevertheless, tackles thorny questions about racial identities in twenty-first-century America. It is also about love, including self-love. The novel’s first-person narrator, Warren Duffy, is conflicted and self-deprecating, but just when his outlook is bleakest, surprises from his past set a new course for his future.

Warren considers himself a confirmed failure. Although only in his thirties, he has already botched his marriage and career. Moreover, born in Philadelphia to a black mother and an Irish American father, his fair skin makes him feel inadequate as a “black” man, an identity America’s historical construction of race encourages him to own.

After his parents divorced, Warren lived with his mother in Germantown, one of Philadelphia’s impoverished African-American neighborhoods. His mother died, and he went to Wales to study art, pursuing his dream of becoming a comic book illustrator. Success on this front eluded him, but he did marry a Welsh woman and open a comic book shop.



At the beginning of Loving Day, Warren has just weathered a very hostile and expensive divorce, and his shop has folded. His estranged father dies, leaving Warren an eighteenth-century mansion located on seven acres in Germantown. He returns to his native city planning to boost his flagging finances with a lucrative real estate deal, but his hopes sink when he sees the estate. Surrounded by the Germantown “ghetto,” as Warren calls it, the long-neglected mansion has nearly no roof and buckling floors. He immediately decides his only recourse is to burn it down for the insurance money.

Warren soon discovers that apparitions haunt the mansion. During his first night there, he sees two figures on the front lawn through the window. They’re “staring at the house, walking backward. […] Until they reach the fence to the street and float up, and over.” Although rattled by the vision, Warren persuades himself that the intruders are just crackheads who hijacked the property while it was abandoned.

When Warren attends a local comic book convention, his wayward life goes entirely off the rails. Relegated to the “Urban” panel with “three other black guys,” despite protesting that his book takes place in the rural South, Warren tries to offset his fair skin by using his “black voice” to speak with the other panelists. However, his efforts to shore up his black identity trigger a backlash. During his presentation, a woman in the audience asks him to address his experiences as a biracial artist. Warren rebuffs the question, declaring American society doesn’t recognize biracial identity, “There’s black, and there’s white. That’s it.” She accuses him of denying his mixed heritage.



Another confrontation at the convention unexpectedly delivers Warren a daughter. As a teenager, Warren had had a short fling with a Jewish girl, which, unknown to him, resulted in a baby named Tal. Tal’s mother died, leaving her in the care of her grandfather, Irv. Now Irv is eager to hand off the seventeen-year-old to Warren, insisting she needs parental guidance because she has sidelined school to become a dancer. In short order, Tal moves into Warren’s mansion, settling into a tent in the drafty front room.

Raised in a Jewish family, Tal is shocked when Warren informs her that, despite appearances, “You’re not white anymore. You never were. Sorry.” Because the historical “one drop rule” assigning minority status to anyone with any African blood persists in America’s construction of racial categories, Warren sees himself and his daughter as black. Tal doesn’t welcome the news, and Warren decides she’s “casually racist.”

Warren’s next step as a new father is to ensure that his daughter finishes high school. The Mélange Center for Multi-racial Life is a private school that strives to “overcome the conflict of the binary” racial divide between black and white. Housed in trailers illegally set up in a city park, the very structure of the school reflects its anti-establishment thinking. Warren is offered a job teaching illustration at the school, but he must take a test with questions such as, “What are your feelings about mayonnaise?” and “Was O.J. Simpson guilty?”



Warren, who is strongly “black-identified” (according to his test results), is dubious about Mélange, but Tal loves it. Moreover, the vocal, biracial woman from the comics convention is a teacher at Mélange. Her name is Sunita Habersham, and Warren finds her irresistibly attractive. Tal enrolls in “Mulattopia,” as Warren refers to the Mélange Center.

Warren continues to imagine setting his mansion ablaze, but when the Mélange Center migrates to his lawn after being evicted from the park, he has to adjust his arson fantasies accordingly. He begins an affair with Sunitra and develops friendships with other Mulattopians, including a guy named One Drop. Roslyn Kornbluth, Mélange’s founder, considers purchasing Warren’s estate, and they negotiate on a price.

Meanwhile, Warren’s childhood friend and one-time crush, Tosha, expresses her dismay that he’s hosting the Mélange Center and appears to be falling for its multi-racial rhetoric. Tosha, who self-identifies as Black, condemns claims to mixed racial status as an abandonment of Black social justice struggles.



The ghostly couple Warren glimpsed when he first moved to the mansion still visits occasionally. Tal holds a séance, and the man and woman appear outside the bathroom window, seemingly floating as they make love. Thrilled to witness a clearly interracial sexual union, the Mélange tribe dubs the spirits the “first couple.” Tal uploads a video of the spectral lovemaking to YouTube, and it goes viral, drawing attention to Mélange and its upcoming festival.

On June 12, Mélange holds a “Loving Day” festival to celebrate the 1967 Supreme Court decision. Protesters line the streets while the Mélange students stage a Miss Cegenation pageant. Having concluded the center is a cult, Warren surreptitiously stacks propane tanks as part of his plan to rid himself of the mansion and the Mulattopians. The arson plot goes awry, however, when Warren inadvertently explodes his car instead of his mansion. He goes to jail for “Burning without a Permit.”

After his release, Warren returns home to find it’s gone. Tal tells him she sold the mansion to the Mélange folks, and they moved it to Maine. The ghostly couple reappears on the lawn, eliciting Warren’s final verdict: “I see what they are, or what they were. Just lovers. Just people.”



The light-skinned product of an interracial marriage, author Mat Johnson once self-identified as Black. He calls Loving Day “my coming out as a mulatto.” It received the 2016 American Book Award.