The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Joseph and Sallie
Although she was an early-to-bed type, Sallie Mitchell, a schoolteacher, agreed to go to an Atlanta club with her girlfriends. It was the late 1960s. The place was empty except for the owner and Joseph Carpenter, a teacher from Houston County.
Joseph and Sallie danced. (She had to prompt him.) The next night they went to a drive-in movie at the Starlight. The next weekend he came back up from Houston County with roses from his yard, two steaks, and a bottle of Chianti.
“I’m a little country girl. I didn’t know how to cook any steak, and he was a good cook, so he just came into my apartment, and he started cooking,” said Sallie, speaking from the home they share on Lake Oconee. “We had steak and potatoes and salad and the Chianti wine, and roses out of his garden. It was very impressive, and it was, ooh, I need to see him again.” The course of this true love did not run smooth. When a co-worker revealed that Joseph was dating a Black woman, his superintendent in Houston asked him to leave the school. Joseph’s father, Frank Carpen
“He happened to be white, and I happened to be Black. I don’t see it as being that much different from anybody else, other than the color.” Sallie Carpenter
a senior. When they announced the upcoming wedding, her parents, Charles and Diane Bowden, were “not very thrilled,” she said, but not opposed.
On Nick’s side, “my dad (George Illichevsky Garin) basically disowned me. My mom (Mary Ann Garin) stayed with us. But it had a bad effect on their marriage.”
They applied for a marriage license in Dekalb County and did not experience any resistance. “Nobody gave us any grief about it,” said Nick.
Most of her family came to the wedding. Hardly any of his came.
Their ceremony took place Sept. 5, 1970, at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta near North Druid Hills. As they were entering the church, another bride and groom were just leaving, having celebrated an earlier ceremony. The groom was wrapped in a Confederate flag worn as a cape.
It was a strange moment. On their honeymoon, the two drove to New York, where Nick planned to go to seminary, and Gayle had transferred to Barnard.
On the way, they overnighted at a friend’s house in Hendersonville, North Carolina, who told them under no circumstances were they to stop for gas while they were in the area. “You’d better gas up and get through this region without stopping,”
they were warned.
Nick ended up in law school, and the two moved to Poughkeepsie, New York, where Nick worked as an assistant state attorney general, dealing with consumer fraud and other issues. Gayle, certified as an elementary school teacher, worked for not-for-profits.
They have three boys: Scott, Charles and Philip, all of whom live in upstate New York.
Nick said they have found
easy acceptance in New York state. Poughkeepsie is evenly divided between the races, he said, with a growing percentage of Hispanic residents. (The U.S. Census Bureau records the city’s population as 47% white and 37% Black.) “There is no reaction to us up here.”
Distrust comes from strangeness, he said. “It’s only when you don’t know each other. Once they get to know you, all of that racist stuff sort of melts away.”