Mildred Loving Followed Her Heart and Made History

Well, briefly then:

She was 11 and nicknamed "Bean." He was 17 and didn't say much. They noticed one another in tiny Central Point, about an hour north of Richmond. There wasn't much to it then, and there isn't much to it now. But it was home, whites and blacks tended to mix more there than in other places in segregated Virginia, and the pair began to date.

She became pregnant at 17 or 18 -- the date is unclear in press recountings -- and the pair, fearing social ignominy for an unmarried pregnant woman (yes, children, that used to be a social stigma, too), drove up to the District to get married. She would always say that she didn't know they were being subversive; she only thought that Washington had less marital red tape.

Back home, they were rousted out of bed at 2 a.m. a few weeks later by a sheriff who carted them off to jail for "cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth."

Court cases, victories, nine years.

And yet there wasn't much of a happily ever after.

Richard Loving died when a drunken driver plowed into their car in 1975. She lost an eye in the accident.

"Physically, it was pretty much downhill from there," said Bernard S. Cohen, the attorney who took their case from the beginning and helped argue it before the Supreme Court. Loving's life was neither pretty nor comfortable. Hollywood finally got around to making a movie about the marriage in 1996, Showtime's "Mr. and Mrs. Loving," starring Lela Rochon and Timothy Hutton. It was entirely for the money, Cohen said.

"She was very poor. I mean, poor. . . . We got her money for some siding for the cinder-block house that Richard put up with his own two hands. It got some dental work done. It was that kind of situation."

By the end, Loving, 68, had terrible arthritis. Cohen said that when he saw her on Friday a few hours before she died, "I didn't recognize her."

Her last hours were of very labored breathing.

None of this is fair, none of it is as it should be. Perhaps, all fairy tales aside, love doesn't conquer all or save anybody from anything that life and fate have in store.

But we never really want to think so; life is just too unhappy a picture for that. So maybe somewhere there is a love song left, something in a minor but romantic key, and Mildred and Richard Loving can have the floor to themselves in the half-light of memory. It would be merciful if, in the quiet of their passing, two people who changed so much and asked for so little were able to find one another once more.