Days of Grace (49 page)

I am a fortunate, blessed man. Aside from AIDS and heart disease, I have no problems. My stepmother, about whom I care deeply both for my sake and for my dead father’s, is in fine health; my wife is in fine health; my daughter radiates vitality. I have loving friends in abundance. I have the support of skilled doctors and nurses. I need nothing that money can buy. So why should I complain? And beyond them, I have God to help me.

Perhaps my favorite prayer-poem by Howard Thurman is “The Threads in My Hand.” The speaker of the poem says that he holds only one end of a number of threads, which come to him from “many ways, linking my life with others.” Some threads come from the sick and troubled, some from the dreaming and the ambitious; still others are knotted beyond the speaker’s power to understand and unravel. But one thread is different from all others:

BY THE TIME
you read this letter from me to you for the first time, I may not be around to discuss with you what I have written here. Perhaps I will still be with you and your mother, sharing in your daily lives, in your joys and in your sorrows. However, I may be gone. You would doubtless be sad that I am gone, and remember me clearly for a while. Then I will exist only as a memory already beginning to fade in your mind. Although it is natural for memories to fade, I am writing this letter in the hope that your recollection of me will never fade completely. I would like to remain a part of your life, Camera, for as long as you live.

I was only a few months older than you are now when I lost my own mother. Eventually I had no memory of what she was actually like, how her voice sounded, how her touch felt. I wanted desperately to know these things, but she was gone and I could not recover that knowledge. For your sake, as well as mine, I hope that I am around for a long time. But we cannot always have what we want, and we must prepare for and accept those changes over which we have no control.

Some of my most important thoughts about you are in this book, only as far away as your bookshelf. And your mother will be with you, alive and well, for a long time, and she knows exactly how I feel about most matters. If you ever want to know what I would think or say, ask her.

Coincidentally, Camera, I am writing this letter to you on the same day as the inauguration in Washington, D.C.— January 20, 1993—just a few hours after William Jefferson Clinton became the new president of the United States of America. I have been watching much of the pomp and pageantry on the television in my study. I especially loved listening to Maya Angelou, tall and dignified and with a rich, melodious voice, read the poem that our new president asked her to write especially for this occasion.

Tears came to my eyes as I watched her conjure up symbols and allusions generations old in the African American world as she sought to describe the nature of life and to challenge humanity to do better. She spoke of “a rock, a river, a tree” as sites in and of the earth that over time have witnessed the sweep of recorded and unrecorded history. For me, the river and the tree hold special significance as symbols because they are so much a part of African American folklore and history, our religion and culture in the South, where I was born and grew up, and where so many other black folk have lived in slavery and freedom.

When I was a boy not much older than you, one of the most haunting spirituals I heard on many a Sunday morning in church spoke movingly of a “rest beyond the river.” These words and music meant that no matter how harsh and unrelenting life on earth may have been for us as slaves or in what passed for our freedom, once we have crossed the river—that is, death—we will find on the other side God’s promise of eternal peace. The river is death and yet it is also life. Rivers flow forever and are ever-changing. At no two moments in time is a river the same. The water in the river is always changing. Life is like that, Maya Angelou wisely reminded us today at the inauguration.

What is sure to be different for you will be the quickening pace of change as you grow older. Believe me, most people resist change, even when it promises to be for the better. But change will come, and if you acknowledge this simple but indisputable fact of life, and understand that you must adjust to all change, then you will have a head start.
I want you to use that advantage, to become a leader among people, and never to lag behind and follow the selfish wishes and snares of others.

On the other hand, Camera, certain things do not change. They are immutable. Maya Angelou’s tree stands for family, both immediate and extended. She had in mind, I imagine, some towering, leafy oak, with massive and deep roots that allow the tree to bend in the fiercest wind and yet survive. The keys to the survival of this big tree are the strength and die depth of these roots, and especially of the taproot far down in the earth, sprung from the original seedling that long ago gave life to the tree. When you see a magnificent tree anywhere, you know it has had to fight and sway and bend in order to survive. Families that survive are like that tree. Even larger groups of people, such as those of an ethnic group, are also like that.

You must be like that, too, Camera, although your fighting must always be for morally justifiable ends. You are part of a tree. On Grandpa’s—my father’s—side of our family, we proudly display our family tree carefully painted by Grandpa’s cousin Thelma, who lives in Maryland. On that side, we are descendants of the Blackwell clan. Your name, Camera Elizabeth Ashe, is one of the freshest leaves on this old tree. You are the daughter of a tenth-generation African American. You must never forget your place on that tree.

Mommy is a third-generation American. Like nearly all African Americans, Mommy is of mixed background. Her father’s father was born in Saint François, Guadeloupe, of East Indian heritage. He came to America through Louisiana, where he married a black American woman who was herself born in St. James Parish. She was the daughter of a man born a slave in 1840. Then Mommy’s grandparents moved to Chicago at the same time many other blacks in the South did, as part of what we now call “the Great Migration” that changed the North forever. They had children. One was Mommy’s father, John Warren Moutoussamy (“Boompa” to you, as you are “Miss Camera” to him). He
is an architect, so you can see where Mommy gets her talents as an artist. Everyone asks her about her last name, Moutoussamy, which puzzles them. It is only an English version of the Indian name “Moutou-swami.”

Mommy’s mother, your grandmother, Elizabeth Hunt Moutoussamy (some people call her “Squeakie”), was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas. We gave you your middle name, Elizabeth, in her honor. Each of her parents was an only child. Her maternal grandfather was a Cherokee Indian whose ancestors were driven out of Virginia and North Carolina by white men pursuing an idea they called “Manifest Destiny,” which meant in effect their right to take whatever land they wanted from anyone who had it. Mommy’s grandmother is still with us. On March 17, 1993, she will be one hundred years old. Can you imagine living for one hundred years, and having your mind and memory still work very well? She has outlived three husbands and all but two of her eleven children. She is a living symbol to all of us of the strength of families in the face of unrelenting racial discrimination, as well as the other hardships of life.

As of now, you surely do not know exactly what I mean when I tell you about racial discrimination. If I could present you with one gift, it would be a life free of that burden. I can’t, and you must learn to deal with it and remain happy and good. In the past, racial discrimination was especially hard for any black man who aspired to the same heights as any other man in his place. Grandpa, my father, suffered in this way. Like so many Negro men in the South just after World War I, he grew up in a large family but one troubled by poverty and division. He grew up in a place called South Hill, Virginia, on U.S. Route 1. His father, Edward “Pink” Ashe (nicknamed because of his complexion), was born in Lincolnton, North Carolina, in 1873. His mother, Amelia “Ma” Johnson Ashe Taylor, grew up on a farm in Kenbridge, Virginia, not far from South Hill.

Unfortunately, Pink Ashe left his wife and children in the 1920s, when my daddy was not much older than you are now. Sometimes marriages end that way, when one person
or another decides that he or she has to leave. But Ma never forgot Pink, who died in 1949, when I was six years old. In fact, when your mother and I visited her a few months before she died in 1977, she still insisted that Pink had been “the great love of my life.” Her favorite song was “This Little Light of Mine,” which she played for us on her record player as we visited with her. She gently swayed to the music, moved no doubt by her memories of the generations gone by.

I myself loved her very much. As a boy, I spent many summer days visiting her in her big house on the farm in Kenbridge. That’s where I first saw a mule; it frightened me. I remember that if I was a good boy, she would give me tall glasses of cool lemonade in the afternoons. She looked forward to our visits. When it was time for Daddy and my brother, Johnnie, and me to go back to Richmond, she would often burst into tears. We would hear her sobbing as we drove off in Daddy’s car. Love is strange and powerful, the most wonderful force in the world; and family love may be the most wonderful of all.

My mother’s side of the family was a little more fortunate than my father’s. Her parents, Johnnie and Jimmie Cunningham (we called her “Big Mama,” but her real name was Jimmie), came to Richmond from Oglethorpe, Georgia, and settled in Westwood, a small enclave of blacks on the western fringe of the city. Johnnie died in 1932, leaving Big Mama ten children to bring up by herself. With dignity, faith, and discipline, she did the best she could. In 1938, their daughter Mattie (nicknamed “Baby”) and my father, Arthur Ashe, were married in Big Mama’s living room, and they even lived for a time with her.

I will never forget Big Mama. A deaconess at Westwood Baptist Church, she proudly wore her starched and immaculately white uniform with white shoes and a lacy handkerchief in her left breast pocket. I also remember the daily dollops she took of her beloved snuff, a kind of powdered tobacco, which she slipped under her bottom lip, and the empty Maxwell House Coffee can she kept close by to use
as a spittoon. We all loved her. At her funeral in 1972, Uncle Rudi called out, “Goodbye, Mama,” as her casket went by up the aisle. Then something in me simply burst open and I cried uncontrollably, as I had never cried before or have cried since. Her grave is only about a hundred yards from my mother’s grave at Woodlawn Cemetery in Richmond. You must visit it some day.

I saw my father lose his own father and his wife—my mother—in less than one year. Those were terrible blows, and ever since then, family has meant more to me than you can imagine. When I think of the many horrors of slavery, the destruction of the family strikes me as probably the worst. We are still facing the consequences of that destruction. What excitement there must have been in 1863 when word arrived that President Lincoln had freed the slaves. Historians tell us that thousands of black men then took off on journeys to find members of their family who had been traded away or sold like cattle. Can you imagine the depths of joy or of sorrow when these searches proved fruitful or fruitless? Suppose you and Mommy had been taken from me, and I had tried to find you for ten years, only to discover in the end that you had died of typhoid fever and Mommy had simply disappeared.

Stories like this were true of many people. Maybe now you better understand why Grandmother Elizabeth and Granny Lorene send so many cards and presents to you. Or why Uncle Johnnie volunteered for a second tour of duty in the war in Vietnam, where many people died or were seriously wounded. He went again to Vietnam not simply because he was a brave and dedicated Marine but also so that I, his brother, would not have to go there as a soldier.

In all likelihood, you too will one day have your own family, which will enrich your life and bring you so much pleasure in knowing that the tree is still alive, still growing. Marriage will probably be the second most important decision of your life. The most important, I think, will be your decision about having a child. Today, about half of all marriages end in divorce, which is a sad and frightening
thought. This means that you must choose a husband carefully, Camera. Two parents are usually better for a child. If you had children out of wedlock, as an increasing number of women have chosen to do, I would not be pleased, although I would still love you.

I only wish that you could be as fortunate in your choice of a spouse as your mother and I were when we chose each other. No marriage is without problems, as two individuals learn to adapt their ways for the sake of harmony. But your mother and I loved one another passionately; and we were never more in love than when you came into our lives to enrich and complete our sense of family.

Nowadays, people break up marriages over the slightest of differences, which is a pity. On the night before your mother and I were married; Jean Young, the wife of Andrew Young, the minister at our wedding, gave us some good advice. The most important ingredient in a marriage, she said, was forgiveness: the willingness of each partner to forgive the other. Forgiving takes courage, but it is the key. Now, every time I see Jean, I say, as we part, “Let’s hear it for forgiveness!” No marriage or truly important human relationship can survive, let alone flourish, without both partners willing to forgive.

A marriage needs some basic principles upon which it can grow and blossom. When I was a boy, my father was the head of the household, without question. The man of the house made the major decisions; his wife was, as the Bible tells us, his “helpmate.” Some wise, brave women in the 1960s and 1970s challenged this attitude, and now many people are confused, and others are experimenting with new roles. Mommy and I agree that my primary role is to protect and provide for the three of us. Her primary role is to see to our welfare, including her own. When you are a little older, and she has more free time, she will become even more involved in her profession of photography. You and your husband, if you choose to marry, must agree on the right formula for both of you.