When Jim Kelly goes with Marcus to his grandmother’s house in Baton Rouge at the start of Ernest Gaines’ Of Love and Dust, Julie Rand talks with Jim about the plantation and the community after her departure. At one point, she brings up the relationship between Pauline and Bonbon, stares at Jim, and asks, “Do you think there will ever be a time?” Jim, not sure what she is asking, looks at Julie Rand in confusion before she adds, “When him an Pauline will be able to live together like they want.” Julie Rand’s question hangs over Of Love and Dust as the recognition that Pauline and Bonbon, and later Marcus and Louise, will never get to live the lives they want because of the “rules” and strictures that deny any form of interracial intimacy between individuals.

Neither relationship survives the “rules.” The “rules” lead to Marshall playing everyone against one another and Bonbon murdering Marcus. Louise envisions that her and Marcus can leave Louisiana and go north, but even if they made it, Aunt Margaret points out that they wouldn’t be able to exist and live as they would like to live. There would still be “rules,” albeit in a different manner, that would deny them the ability to be their true selves amidst societal strictures that would deem their relationship as an abomination and wrong.

As I read and taught Ashley Hope Pérez’s Out of Darkness, I kept thinking about Of Love and Dust. Just as the couples in Gaines’ novel cannot live their lives away from the “rules” that confine their relationships to open secrets that must remain within the confines of the “rules,” the relationship between Naomi and Wash in Pérez’s can never survive. It can burn brightly then others will come along and snuff it out because their relationship, even though Naomi moves across the color line from Latina to white and back again, moving whichever way suits the white establishment, the white community cannot allow the couple’s relationship to ever succeed because that success would cause a chink in the dam of white supremacy.

Family and the construction of family lies at the core themes of Out of Darkness. Just like Of Love and Dust, Pérez’s novel depicts the realities of interracial intimacy, especially during the mid-twentieth century. Over the course of the novel, Wash, an African American teenager, and Naomi, a Mexican American teenager, form a relationship, and Naomi’s siblings, the twins Beto and Cari, inhabit the relationship as well. In essence, they form a family, “A black-brown-white group,” as we see in Beto’s last section, “on a sandy patch by the Sabine River. . . . A family with a short shelf life.”

There familial bond forms and blossoms over the course of seven months, culminating in the death of Cari and the murders of Wash and Naomi. During the formation of the family, Wash and Naomi talk about leaving New London, Texas, with the twins and heading somewhere where they can live in peace and live their lives as they want to live their lives, escaping the domestic abuse at the hands of her stepfather and the community’s racial abuse that Naomi endures and the racism that Wash endures at the hands of the community. One night Wash comes across an article in the Chicago Defender about a group of African Americans settling in Mexico, and he tells his father about his desire to go the community in Mexico.

Wash’s father knows that a girl is involved, but he doesn’t know it is Naomi. He assumes it is an African American girl. Wash’s father pointedly tells his son that no matter where he goes he will never find an escape. He tells Wash, “There’s no Promised Land, not like the paper makes you think. Not going up to Chicago or Detroit or even Canada. I’ve been to all them places and worked with black folk who’ve gone to more. And there’s nothing to be found going down to Mexico.” Wash’s father tells him the same thing that Aunt Margaret tells Louise in Of Love and Dust, that he can’t flee far enough to escape the shadow of Jim Crow because Jim Crow’s shadow stretches well beyond the confines of the South, albeit in different forms.

Near the end of the novel, the white townspeople attempt to lynch Wash and his father, but the pastor talks them out of it and agrees to let them leave town. On their way out of town, Naomi and Beto join them. Wash’s father asks if Naomi is pregnant before proclaiming, “She’s white.” Naomi corrects him, telling him she is Mexican, but he continues by stating. “That doesn’t fix a thing.” Wash’s father knows that the white community will refer to Naomi as white if it fits their ends, and they do just that in teh official record of Naomi and Wash’s murder when they don’t refer to Naomi as Mexican and continually refer to Wash as Black, accusing him of raping Naomi. However, we know that Henry, Naomi’s stepfather, shot both Wash and Naomi, not out of a form of protection but out of racism and anger.

The novel ends with Henry pulling Wash, Naomi, and Beto from the car, leading them to the forest, and Henry commanding Beto to shoot Wash. Beto doesn’t do this, and Henry takes the gun, shooting both Wash and Naomi simultaneously. Henry passes the gun to Beto telling him to finish Wash off, but Beto turns the gun on Henry and shoots him in the head. After this, the narrator says, “He looked around at what had been his family.” Family, here, carries with it both the biological family of Henry and Naomi and the constructed family of Wash and Naomi. They all existed a part of his family, and that family did not limit itself to biology.

From the outset, as much as I hoped that Wash and Naomi would survive, I knew they couldn’t. I didn’t think both would get killed at the end of the novel, but I knew one had to get killed. They could not, just as Marcus and Louise could not, exist outside the rules that society had set in place for them. Naomi, while Mexican, could be seen as white, and that fact alone posed a problem for the white society. In the epilogue, the narrator tells us why they could not exist: “They had been happy for a time, before the rules found them. Before the terrible price was exacted for their transgressions. For the crossing of lines. For friendship, for love.”

The “rules” told them what they did, their love, was wrong, it was transgressive. However, they knew it was true. They formed a family amidst the “rules,” a family that exemplified life and love. Yet, the “rules” found them, and those constructed “rules” destroyed and annihilated their family, scattering the ashes to the winds. Even though, Beto remembered his family — Naomi, Cari, and Wash, and he tells their story. As the narrator says in the epilogue, “He did not forget.”