In this rare state of contentment, I met Alan Kaplan, who was 43 and in a state of extreme discontent. We met at his house on a Sunday afternoon, though he didn’t want to meet me at all, let alone on a weekend. He was a white public high school teacher who had become the epicenter of a racially charged controversy at his campus. Because I am a journalist with a particular interest in matters of racial justice, I had been enlisted by an irate group of black parents at the school, and subsequently by my paper, to do a story about it.

According to the parents pushing the story, Kaplan was guilty of racial impertinence. (These parents hoped that, as a black woman, I would be sympathetic to their viewpoint.) They said he was intellectually arrogant in a white-privilege sort of way, eager to overwhelm his black students’ frail sense of self-esteem by, among other things, extending the discussion of slavery to issues of latter-day segregation in his classroom. Kaplan insisted that the system failed black and white students alike, and asked his students to confront the racial achievement gap in his classroom and to question why teachers have different sets of expectations for black and white students.

The parents felt that identifying latter-day segregation was not his business or his purview. According to them, Kaplan’s insistence that he was only trying to do the right thing was merely a cover for the fact that he was improperly fixated on race — he had issued himself a street-gang name, K-Dawg, and even dated black women. “You knowthe type,” the leader of the parent group said meaningfully, and a bit wearily.

I did. This also was not the first I’d heard of Kaplan or his exploits: My younger sister, Heather, had been his student in the ’80s and had complained regularly about his intransigence. Many of her complaints, I vaguely recalled, had to do with race. Heather’s an attorney now, and when I asked her whether she thought Kaplan had been racist she argued vehemently with herself for about 10 minutes before giving something of an answer.

“He was harder on black students than on other students,” she said. “He definitely had issues about race and he wasn’t always diplomatic about expressing them. And he’d get mad with me because he felt I was squandering my potential, not living up to myself. I don’t think thatwas racist per se.”

I thought of all this as I rang Kaplan’s doorbell one Sunday in April. Yet I was more than willing to get his side of the story. I was also intrigued: What sort of white man would keep pushing the racial envelope in this day and age? He was either exceedingly honest or exceedingly boorish, or both. In spite of everything, I had liked his voice on the phone when we talked to arrange this visit — rough-edged, with the nearly unconscious authority of a veteran teacher, but younger than I had expected. He didn’t bother to hide his uncertainty.

“I must tell you, I’m very reticent about seeing you,” he said, already sounding regretful. I gave him my usual pledge of open-mindedness and then said we had to meet right away, as I was on deadline. Sunday, at his place? I heard a startled silence and prayed I hadn’t pushed too far — without him, there wasn’t much of a story. “All right,” he said. “Do you take cream in your coffee?”

It turned out to be the powdered stuff, which I don’t really take but took because he gave it to me. I sat on the floor of his tiny living room because he had no coffee table and I preferred the floor as a writing surface. Kaplan was dressed in jeans and an old T-shirt. He had the resigned look of a man headed for the gallows. He was nothing like the odd, obsessive recluse I’d imagined, the sort who would erect a wall of racial self-righteousness around himself and loudly proclaim himself to be K-Dawg. Instead, he had tousled brown hair, a graying goatee and sad eyes that nonetheless burned bright and curious: He wanted to see exactly how his death would unfold.

I stayed at Kaplan’s house for nearly five hours. Talking to him was terribly easy. He had a native charm that was rooted not in assurance but in attentiveness and honesty, even as he detailed the ugliest moments in his ongoing battles with nervous parents and administrators who objected to his teaching style and his determination to impart the hard lessons of race in American history. (As for the moniker K-Dawg, he said one student had given it to him as a kind of joke, because despite being very familiar with racial issues, Kaplan was as unhip — and un-hip-hop — as they come.)

He sat on the floor opposite me and offered more powdered cream and I said yes. Nearly three hours into our interview, he asked if I was hungry. Did I want dinner? It was my turn to hesitate and his turn to look abashed, afraid that he had overstepped his boundaries. “Dinner?” I asked, pretending to mull it over. “That’d be good.”

He gave me a place setting, salad and lasagna that he’d heated up in a microwave. He didn’t eat because he didn’t have any more, I learned later. I also learned that 364 days out of the year, Kaplan, a quintessential bachelor, never had anything to eat in the house. His refrigerator typically contained nothing more than a couple of jugs of ice water and a pack of batteries; and he used the stove so infrequently that he’d had it turned off several months before my visit.

We sat at his dining table, and the climate between us shifted as the sun shifted and day lengthened into early night. He leaned forward on the table with his hands clasped tightly together, as if in prayer or anticipation. I noted that he smelled faintly woodsy, that he wore a diving watch and no other jewelry, that the fluorescent light above the table revealed his eyes to be perhaps more green than brown.

He cocked his head and furrowed his brow in mock gravity and asked me about myself: How did I get started as a writer? How was my sister doing? Did I work out? “Nice arms,” he said as decidedly as he had said anything all day. He didn’t look abashed now. I thanked him, feeling inexplicably delighted, because I didn’t work out at all and knew somehow that he knew that.

As a reporter, I was somewhat used to this kind of intimate rapport. He was trying to save his skin, and I must say I have always been prone to falling in love with my subjects — for an hour, or a day or two at most — taking the prolonged conversations and forced intimacy to heart before writing a story that either favored them or did not, and then filing it all away in my professional memory.

I welcomed such encounters because they stood in — briefly — for genuine love and connection. I could believe what I wanted about my subjects in my mind’s eye, without ever crossing a line or committing my prejudice to paper. My professional encounters serviced my romantic ideals, illuminating them briefly, sometimes even brilliantly, before I moved on.

In such a context, I could allow that Alan Kaplan was sweet, affecting, a perfect gentleman, a wonderful listener, good-looking even. If he was a villain, I could still give him the due afforded by my writer’s license and the vast but inconsequential space between interview and story.

At 10 p.m., he walked me out to my car and stood at the curb, waving until I was out of sight. I felt less like I’d had an interview and more like I’d been on a date.

I’m still trying to sort out what happened next, though admittedly, I’m not trying very hard. The skeletal sequence of events goes something like this: Kaplan and I talked some more; I interviewed more people, wrote a story in the span of about five days and published it. The story sympathized with the racial inequities in public education, but disagreed with the black parents’ indictment of Kaplan. I never heard from them again.

Kaplan and I never stopped hearing from each other. He showed up at my door, unannounced, with flowers, a thank-you for the story, he said. I got more flowers. We began meeting regularly on weeknights at a coffeehouse to unofficially confirm that we had to keep meeting. We talked on the phone one night from midnight to 6 without saying anything of consequence, hanging up bleary-eyed but completely bewitched by the fact that we had staggered through the strangest and most intimate hours of the night together.

His eyes began looking less sorrowful and more hopeful. He talked about his frustrations with racial dishonesty and he told me scores of other things about himself as well — his romantic failings and underdeveloped ambitions, his passion for jazz, guitars and baseball.

This time, I didn’t write anything down. I didn’t want to. We were so obviously in love that neither one of us bothered to say so. We did wonder aloud about the propriety of a reporter falling for a source, but we couldn’t do anything about it except keep a low profile for a while. On our first official date beyond the coffeehouse, we thought we’d go to a movie, but instead we wound up driving around Los Angeles to avoid being seen together. We sat in his big old Lincoln on a road high up in the Sepulveda Pass, among the hills that divide L.A. from itself, and talked for hours more.

There was never any question that I would marry Alan. I did, in October, roughly a year and a half after we first met. My sister is still flabbergasted that I married the teacher who loomed the largest in her adolescence — she sometimes slips and calls him “Kaplan.” There is and always will be the race issue — the raised eyebrows on both sides of the color line, the people who question our ethnic loyalty and politics. This is no surprise, especially considering the ethnic rancor that brought us together in the first place.

We understand the questions others may have about our relationship, and we often raise them ourselves. The concerns we each had about race before we met remain firmly in place, perhaps even more firmly than before. We do not want to be poster children for interracial marriage or the latest diversity campaign. Love for us is a triumph not of integration but of imagination, the wild-card coupling of a pair of resolutely lonely hearts who chose to navigate the same rough, but potentially magical course.

Never before in history have blacks loomed so large in the public imagination and popular culture yet been granted so little space as real people. And, by no accident, never before have they experienced higher rates of depression, homicide and suicide: Black youth in particular have watched their suicide rates explode at millennium’s close, increasing 114 percent in the past 20 years.

What gives? More to the point, why isn’t anybody asking what gives? If we are truly the nurturing, pro-young-people nation we claim to be, why aren’t our political leaders sitting up nights wondering why black men between the ages of 20 and 24 are now killing themselves at 10 times the rate of their female counterparts?

In their new book, “Lay My Burden Down: Unraveling Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis Among African-Americans,” veteran psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint and journalist Amy Alexander give us the painfully obvious answer to those questions: lingering racism that translates into a general political disinterest in the fortunes of black folk (except as they relate to crime and other issues that might infringe on the white population’s hermetic sense of social security).

But Poussaint and Alexander are more interested in dissecting the complicated dynamics that underlie not just the current Negro problem but the current Negro success. The bedeviling paradox of the past several decades is that as the black middle class has exploded, so has the suicide rate (to say nothing of the homicide rate) among young black men and teens across the economic spectrum. The reluctance to examine — or even acknowledge — the connection between our rising prosperity and declining mental health cuts across color lines.

Poussaint and Alexander break the taboo and speak out, albeit carefully, about the possible causes of the current mental health crisis. They theorize that, among other things, the much-publicized split between the black poor and the black middle and upper class in the last generation has engendered a collective, free-floating anxiety and dispiritedness in the black community that are wearing down everybody’s well-being.

The spiraling suicide rates, especially among the young, sound a warning bell we have not heard before: Blacks have historically experienced very low suicide rates, despite having endured years of far more blatant discrimination than they endure now. But the self-reliance that has long been the core of black culture and survival — think blues, black power, gangsta rap — may now be blacks’ undoing.

The psychological effects of what Poussaint and Alexander call “post-traumatic slavery syndrome” that blacks have managed to hold at bay for so long may finally be catching up to us in 2000, 135 years after slavery’s end. Add to this a potent legacy of dehumanization, including diehard stereotypes about blacks as “cool,” intellectually lacking and emotionally uncomplicated creatures — expressed today in UPN sitcoms and BET videos — and mental breakdown seems all but inevitable.

“Undoubtedly, great strength allowed black people to survive slavery and discrimination, but the notion that black men and women can easily handle burdens that would psychologically crush other people has been oversold,” the authors write. “The emotional price that they have paid in enduring incredible stresses has been too often dismissed or ignored, and this has hindered the development of mental health services for the black community.”

If all this sounds a bit dry and removed, it is at points, but there’s no mistaking the passion behind Poussaint and Alexander’s quest for a kind of equity that has always been most critical to blacks but has always been hardest to attain: psychological equity.

“Burden” points out that shamefully little research has been done on cause and effect between the state of black mental health and the numerous historical, economic and psychosocial factors that have shaped and continue to shape the black psyche. It is a psyche partly fashioned from neglect, including neglect from a white medical establishment that long viewed blacks as unsentient beings who hardly deserved psychiatric consideration.

As a black woman thrashing with the new class divide and an intermittent but chronic depression that feels as old as rivers, I found the book a relief, an assured voice in a wilderness of purpose and identity I felt I was essentially wandering alone. But the question — the eternal question — is whether the issues raised by “Burden” will only circulate among African-Americans. If they do, the problems detailed in the book will compound: Blacks will once again feel the pinch of isolation and most of America will miss the point. At its measured heart the book is asking that we all care, not in order to be altruistic or democratic but to be practical — black self-regard ultimately and intimately affects everybody else’s.

While we all contemplate taking such a big step, here are a few points in “Burden” to tack onto our refrigerators: With middle-class success has come the loss of a segregation-era “social equilibrium” in which everyone in the black community was on the same emotional and expectational plane and thus harbored more collective hope about the future. For cultural and religious reasons, blacks have been historically reluctant to admit to depression and the other d-word, despair, though they have been better acquainted with them than any other group. Our individual state of mind is continually affected by the state of the black nation, which at this point is dominated not by hope and the rising expectations of the middle class but by skyrocketing rates of imprisonment, drug abuse and unemployment.

And guess who has the highest rate of imprisonment, drug use and unemployment? Black young men, of course, the soldiers of the hip-hop nation who amid the distressing statistics are still expected to carry forward the dreams and expectations of the black community. The reality is that far too many of them fail to fulfill these expectations — or find that even worldly success fails to mitigate their despair — so it is hardly surprising that it is they who are suffering most acutely in the current mental health crisis. It is they who bear the brunt of America’s eternal unease with blacks in general, they who see images of themselves plastered on billboards with lackluster eyes and brooding menace. I see those billboards and feel a direct hit of anger, repulsion, empathy. I feel every bewildering thing at once. To me, and to many others like me, any image of a black person feels like a representation of all black people — at this point in our evolution we are still not at the point where we can comfortably separate symbol from self.

If that isn’t madness, nothing is. Poussaint and Alexander don’t fully explicate the nuances of this madness, only because they keep the book to a status report. But it’s a start, and despite the sobering picture the book paints of our bruised and once-infallible hope, it’s the most hopeful thing I’ve read in a long time.