The truth is, I attract about the same percentage of available white men my age (and far younger!) now as I did when I was thirty and that's not including the unavailable white men who want to play around anyway. It's not me, it's them being the white guys who weren't after me anymore, or so I claimed. Black men are happy to get the babe they couldn't have when she was twentysomething and fertile. She goes younger or ethnic or foreign-born or down the socioeconomic scale or darker or she spends lonely nights at home with her cats. A white woman past forty is often passed over by her white-male contemporaries. I used that paucity-of-available-white-partners rationale to explain my relationships with black men for several years. And I had the socially acceptable explanation for my craving. That phrase, 'Once you go black, you never go back' is all about the feeling of the skin. I craved it more strongly than Carrie Bradshaw craved Manolo Blahnik shoes. The first time I caressed black skin, it felt like a luxury I shouldn't be able to afford. There's only one patch of skin on a white man's body that remotely compares to nearly every inch of a black man's skin. Black skin is thick and lush, sensuous to the touch, like satin and velvet made flesh.
