Days of Grace (20 page)

Then someone—Randall, I think—brought us back to reality.

“We are getting awfully excited,” he said quietly, “and yet I keep thinking about one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“For all the changes we have seen, Nelson Mandela still cannot vote in his own country.”

That simple fact made us sober. We became quiet and reflective as our airplane flew on through the darkness toward London.

THE NEXT TIME
I saw Mandela, I had made my announcement to the world about having AIDS. A few months later, at his invitation, I visited him in his hotel suite in New York City, which he was visiting quietly. Our main topic now was AIDS, both as it affected me personally and as an international scourge. I was pleased to see that he knew a great deal about the subject and was free of the prejudices that prevent many political leaders from confronting it. He stressed to me how poor the medical facilities are for blacks in South Africa, and how much help his country needs to cope effectively with its health problems. I told him about my foundation to fight AIDS and the extent to which I hoped it would contribute to the fight in Africa.

Once again, I was struck by Mandela’s courage and wisdom. He faces as difficult a road as any political leader in the world, but I have every confidence in him. To me, he stands with Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia and few other living men and women as my ideal of the political leader today. I hope Bill Clinton does half as well. Compared to Mandela’s sacrifice, my own life, like that of most other people who talk about the need for sacrifice and change, has been one almost of self-indulgence. When I think of him, my own political efforts seem puny.

I am sure I will never know with full understanding why I held back from the fray when I did and why I plunged into the fray, in my own fashion, when I did. All I know is that I have tried at all times to do what I thought was right and appropriate, and that sometimes the effort to do right, and above all not to do wrong, led me into inaction. My only true regret, however, is that now that I see the world more clearly than ever, as I believe I do, I don’t seem
to have the time left to try to translate my vision into action as I would like.

All of us, as I have said, can learn from the example of Mandela. For African Americans, however, he may have a greater lesson. On the most basic level, that lesson is about the need to resist oppression. But his lesson is also something more complicated and challenging. Mandela’s example leads us to ask certain questions, on which I believe our future may depend. Can we African Americans emerge from the prison house of our history with true dignity, as he did—that is, with a determination to remain free but also without bitterness or any other compromise in our moral principles? Can we prevent our outrage at the wrongs we have suffered in America from destroying our spirit, from depriving us of the high moral ground we once held? Can we avoid the temptation to sink utterly into despair, cynicism, and violence, and thus become abject prisoners of our past?

When I was a youngster growing up in Richmond, I could answer these questions boldly and in the affirmative, as our parents and teachers and elders had taught us we must do. Now I grope for a response, which is at least part of the reason I see race as a burden, a grave burden, one that outweighs all others in my life.

I HAD SPENT
more than an hour talking in my office at home with a reporter for
People
magazine. Her editor had sent her to do a story about me and how I was coping with AIDS. The reporter’s questions had been probing and yet respectful of my right to privacy. Now, our interview over, I was escorting her to the door. As she slipped on her coat, she fell silent. I could see that she was groping for the right words to express her sympathy for me before she left.

“Mr. Ashe, I guess this must be the heaviest burden you have ever had to bear, isn’t it?” she asked finally.

I thought for a moment, but only a moment. “No, it isn’t. It’s a burden, all right. But AIDS isn’t the heaviest burden I have had to bear.”

“Is there something worse? Your heart attack?”

I didn’t want to detain her, but I let the door close with both of us still inside. “You’re not going to believe this,” I said to her, “but being black is the greatest burden I’ve had to bear.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“No question about it. Race has always been my biggest burden. Having to live as a minority in America. Even now it continues to feel like an extra weight tied around me.”

I can still recall the surprise and perhaps even the hurt on her face. I may even have surprised myself, because I simply had never thought of comparing the two conditions be
fore. However, I stand by my remark. Race is for me a more onerous burden than AIDS. My disease is the result of biological factors over which we, thus far, have had no control. Racism, however, is entirely made by people, and therefore it hurts and inconveniences infinitely more.

Since our interview (skillfully presented as a first-person account by me) appeared in
People
in June 1992, many people have commented on my remark. A radio station in Chicago aimed primarily at blacks conducted a lively debate on its merits on the air. Most African Americans have little trouble understanding and accepting my statement, but other people have been baffled by it. Even Donald Dell, my close friend of more than thirty years, was puzzled. In fact, he was so troubled that he telephoned me in the middle of the night from Hamburg, Germany, to ask if I had been misquoted. No, I told him, I had been quoted correctly. Some people have asked me flatly, what could
you
, Arthur Ashe, possibly have to complain about? Do you want more money or fame than you already have? Isn’t AIDS inevitably fatal? What can be worse than death?

The novelist Henry James suggested somewhere that it is a complex fate being an American. I think it is a far more complex fate being an African American. I also sometimes think that this indeed may be one of those fates that are worse than death.

I do not want to be misunderstood. I do not mean to appear fatalistic, self-pitying, cynical, or maudlin. Proud to be an American, I am also proud to be an African American. I delight in the accomplishments of fellow citizens of my color. When one considers the odds against which we have labored, we have achieved much. I believe in life and hope and love, and I turn my back on death until I must face my end in all its finality. I am an optimist, not a pessimist. Still, a pall of sadness hangs over my life and the lives of almost all African Americans because of what we as a people have experienced historically in America, and what we as individuals experience each and every day. Whether one is a welfare recipient trapped in some blighted “housing project”
in the inner city or a former Wimbledon champion who is easily recognized on the streets and whose home is a luxurious apartment in one of the wealthiest districts of Manhattan, the sadness is still there.

In some respects, I am a prisoner of the past. A long time ago, I made peace with the state of Virginia and the South. While I, like other blacks, was once barred from free association with whites, I returned time and time again, under the new rule of desegregation, to work with whites in my hometown and across the South. But segregation had achieved by that time what it was intended to achieve: It left me a marked man, forever aware of a shadow of contempt that lays across my identity and my sense of self-esteem. Subtly the shadow falls on my reputation, the way I know I am perceived; the mere memory of it darkens my most sunny days. I believe that the same is true for almost every African American of the slightest sensitivity and intelligence. Again, I don’t want to overstate the case. I think of myself, and others think of me, as supremely self-confident. I know objectively that it is almost impossible for someone to be as successful as I have been as an athlete and to lack self-assurance. Still, I also know that the shadow is always there; only death will free me, and blacks like me, from its pall.

The shadow fell across me recently on one of the brightest days, literally and metaphorically, of my life. On August 30, 1992, the day before the U.S. Open, the USTA and I together hosted an afternoon of tennis at the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, New York. The event was a benefit for the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS. Before the start, I was nervous. Would the invited stars (McEnroe, Graf, Navratilova, et al.) show up? Would they cooperate with us, or be difficult to manage? And, on the eve of a Grand Slam tournament, would fans pay to see light-hearted tennis? The answers were all a resounding yes (just over ten thousand fans turned out). With CBS televising the event live and Aetna having provided the air time,
a profit was assured. The sun shone brightly, the humidity was mild, and the temperature hovered in the low 80s.

What could mar such a day? The shadow of race, and my sensitivity, or perhaps hypersensitivity, to its nuances. Sharing the main stadium box with Jeanne, Camera, and me, at my invitation, were Stan Smith, his wife Marjory, and their daughter Austin. The two little girls were happy to see one another. During Wimbledon in June, they had renewed their friendship when we all stayed near each other in London. Now Austin, seven years old, had brought Camera a present. She had come with twin dolls, one for herself, one for Camera. A thoughtful gesture on Austin’s part, and on her parents’ part, no doubt. The Smiths are fine, religious people. Then I noticed that Camera was playing with her doll above the railing of the box, in full view of the attentive network television cameras. The doll was the problem; or rather, the fact that the doll was conspicuously a blond. Camera owns dolls of all colors, nationalities, and ethnic varieties. But she was now on national television playing with a blond doll. Suddenly I heard voices in my head, the voices of irate listeners to a call-in show on some “black format” radio station. I imagined insistent, clamorous callers attacking Camera, Jeanne, and me:

“Can you believe the doll Arthur Ashe’s daughter was holding up at the AIDS benefit? Wasn’t that a shame?”

“Is that brother sick or what? Somebody ought to teach that poor child about her true black self!”

“What kind of role model is Arthur Ashe if he allows his daughter to be brainwashed in that way?”

“Doesn’t the brother
understand
that he is corrupting his child’s mind with notions about the superiority of the white woman? I tell you, I thought we were long past that!”

The voices became louder in my head. Despite the low humidity, I began to squirm in my seat. What should I do? Should I say, To hell with what some people might think? I know that Camera likes her blond dolls, black dolls, brown dolls, Asian dolls, Indian dolls just about equally; I know that for a fact, because I have watched her
closely. I have searched for signs of racial partiality in her, indications that she may be dissatisfied with herself, with her own color. I have seen none. But I cannot dismiss the voices. I try always to live practically, and I do not wish to hear such comments on the radio. On the other hand, I do not want Austin’s gift to be sullied by an ungracious response. Finally, I act.

“Jeanne,” I whisper, “we have to do something.”

“About what?” she whispers back.

“That doll. We have to get Camera to put that doll down.”

Jeanne takes one look at Camera and the doll and she understands immediately. Quietly, cleverly, she makes the dolls disappear. Neither Camera nor Austin is aware of anything unusual happening. Smoothly, Jeanne has moved them on to some other distraction.

I am unaware if Margie Smith has noticed us, but I believe I owe her an explanation. I get up and go around to her seat. Softly I tell her why the dolls have disappeared. Margie is startled, dumbfounded.

“Gosh, Arthur, I never thought about that. I never
ever
thought about anything like that!”

“You
don’t have to think about it,” I explain. “But it happens to us, in similar situations, all the time.”

“All the time?” She is pensive now.

“All the time. It’s perfectly understandable. And it certainly is not your fault. You were doing what comes naturally. But for us, the dolls make for a bit of a problem. All for the wrong reasons. It shouldn’t be this way, but it is.”

I return to my seat, but not to the elation I had felt before I saw that blond doll in Camera’s hand. I feel myself becoming more and more angry. I am angry at the force that made me act, the force of racism in all its complexity, as it spreads into the world and creates defensiveness and intolerance among the very people harmed by racism. I am also angry with myself. I am angry with myself because I have just acted out of pure practicality, not out of morality. The moral act would have been to let Camera have her fun, be
cause she was innocent of any wrongdoing. Instead, I had tampered with her innocence, her basic human right to act impulsively, to accept a gift from a friend in the same beautiful spirit in which it was given.

Deeply embarrassed now, I am ashamed at what I have done. I have made Camera adjust her behavior merely because of the likelihood that some people in the African American community would react to her innocence foolishly and perhaps even maliciously. I know I am not misreading the situation. I would have had telephone calls that very evening about the unsuitability of Camera’s doll. Am I being a hypocrite? Yes, definitely, up to a point. I have allowed myself to give in to those people who say we must avoid even the slightest semblance of “Eurocentric” influence. But I also know what stands behind the entire situation. Racism ultimately created the state in which defensiveness and hypocrisy are our almost instinctive responses, and innocence and generosity are invitations to trouble.

This incident almost ruined the day for me. That night, when Jeanne and I talked about the excitement of the afternoon, and the money that would go to AIDS research and education because of the event, we nevertheless ended up talking mostly about the incident of the dolls. We also talked about perhaps its most ironic aspect. In 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation in
Brown
v.
Board of Education
, some of the most persuasive testimony came from the psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark concerning his research on black children and their pathetic preference for white dolls over black. In 1992, the dolls are still a problem.