Days of Grace

by Arthur Ashe

  When I left England this time, I did not feel nearly as pessimistic about my chances of returning next year as I had in 1991. Perhaps I will be back next year, and even the year after. Who knows? London and Wimbledon are special to me. In a real way, my first visit there in 1963, to play Wimbledon, was the beginning of my intellectual and cultural growth beyond my schooling in Richmond and Los Angeles, as sound as that was. England broadened my mind immeasurably, and enriched my sense of culture and civilization. I began to see myself as a citizen of the world, and to understand more fully what that concept might mean. It is hard for me to think of never returning to England.

  APART FROM THOSE few days when my medical problems sapped my strength, when my mornings were an ordeal of listlessness and diarrhea, the summer of 1992 was a joy. Of course, my medical problems are seldom far away from my thoughts. I remember last summer for several reasons, but not least of all because I started my treatment with ddI (didanosine), the anti-AIDS drug I am pinning much of my hope on right now, until something more efficacious is discovered. I take it in combination with the more toxic AZT.

  My best days of the summer (and the spring and the fall, come to think of it) no doubt found me teeing off on the golf course, preferably at Sleepy Hollow Country Club in Scarborough-on-Hudson, New York. Sponsored by my good friend Gil de Boton of Mount Kisco, I had been admitted in March, just before my news conference about having AIDS. In the few months I have been a member, Sleepy Hollow has probably given me almost as much pure pleasure as anything else in my life during the same time. I love being able to call up the clubhouse and arrange for a foursome, take my car out of the garage, drive forty-five to fifty minutes north out of the city, and breathe the fresh suburban air while I chase the little white ball over the green grass in the company of good friends such as Doug Stein or Eddie Mandeville or perfect (and imperfect) strangers also out for a game. Although I play at other clubs, I am delighted to call Sleepy Hollow home, as a golfer. Best of all, my game has improved almost beyond recognition.

  I travel a great deal now, sometimes flying three times or even more in a single week. But I seldom stay away more than a night from my family. I cannot bear to be away so long from Jeanne and Camera. For the first time in her life, Camera went away without us to Florida for three days, so that Jeanne and I could have a little time to ourselves; we could hardly wait for her return. On another occasion, in November, Jeanne and Camera went off to Disney World, leaving me behind (I was to join them there in a day or two). I missed them, and I was not happy until I set my eyes on them again. I love getting Camera ready for school in the morning, or helping her go to sleep at night. I love sitting on the floor with her and her coloring books or playing games or simply talking with her.

  I love the pleasure she finds in our outings as a family together—apple-picking in autumn in Bethel, Connecticut, on a marvelously crisp, sunstruck day; or stepping out together, just the two of us. One evening, when Jeanne was not well, I remember taking Camera, dressed exquisitely in a long-sleeved, flower-print dress with a green sash belt, to the annual Essence magazine awards show. Only two days had passed since my AIDS announcement. I entered the hall with her on my shoulders, so she could see everything and everyone, and the crowd kindly gave us a standing ovation as we made our way to our seats near the front. At one point, Denzel Washington, who has four daughters himself, came down from the stage to say hello to Camera, and she slunk in embarrassment to the floor. “Precious,” I told her as I helped her up, “your mother is going to be so jealous that you met Mr. Washington and she stayed at home.” (She was.)

  As Camera grows, I grow; as she lives, I live. I feel strong when I am with her, I feel the power of her youth and vitality. She taxes me at times, to be sure, but I pay the tax willingly. In October, I experienced one of those ordinary miracles of life, an event that left me almost in tears: for the first time, Camera read an entire book to me. She gives me so many reasons to want to live.

  In the long shadow of the announcement, family is more important to me than ever. They have rallied beautifully to my side; I feel their love as I have felt it all my life. I am proud of the branches and roots and leaves of the family tree. Jeanne shares this sense of family with me; it helps to bind us. On Mother’s Day, she and I went to Chicago to have brunch with her mother, Elizabeth. And on a Sunday in mid-August, we entertained twenty-four members of my family at our apartment, when they drove down from the wedding of one of my cousins in Massachusetts. At first only three persons had been scheduled to come, but the party grew and grew, out of love and caring for me, and I was glad for that. I had no way of knowing when I would see many of them again. My emotions must have been working furiously, because at some point I suddenly became overwhelmed, exhausted. Two of my aunts saw my tiredness; everyone left quickly. But that afternoon was special.

  A few days later, Jeanne, Camera, and I went to spend a blissful weekend with my stepmother, Lorene Kimbrough Ashe, at her home in Gum Springs, Virginia, near Richmond. Although I have never lived in that house my father built, I had helped him build it, and I was moved to be back among some of the scenes of my childhood, with the woman who had been a loving stepmother to me and my brother, Johnnie. Away from the heat and the summer sun, we rocked and reminisced easily on the porch, and I also wrote a little; Camera played happily with Granny Lorene’s dog, Seiko; and we visited the cemetery where my mother and father are buried.

  At Thanksgiving, we flew to Chicago to be with Jeanne’s family, which is also large and loving. Her father’s sister had come in from Tucson, Arizona, and we had dinner at the home of one of Jeanne’s aunts, Bernadette, who is one of my favorite people. I have so much to be thankful for. For someone with AIDS, as with any life-threatening illness, the family is often the main bulwark against embittering anxiety and the darkest depression. On every side, my family supports me.

  However, I have not allowed either my illnesses or my desire to enjoy the comforts of home and family to put a stop to my involvement in politics. A few days after our AIDS tennis exhibition at Flushing Meadows in September, I took part in what might well have been my last protest action, although I make no promises on this score. The cause this time was Haiti. After Randall Robinson of TransAfrica informed me that he and Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP had decided to take the drastic step of picketing the White House, I decided to join them in the demonstration. For months I had been outraged by our national policy toward political refugees from Haiti. Vessels of the U.S. Coast Guard, acting on instructions, were intercepting boats carrying refugees from Haiti and returning those people to Haiti without a hearing. The argument behind this policy was that most of the people in those boats were fleeing economic hardship, not political persecution, and therefore had to be sent home at once.

  The argument incensed me. Undoubtedly, many of the people picked up were economic refugees, but many were not. According to U.S. law, all were entitled to a hearing, and this step was routinely denied them. Meanwhile, Cubans who reached the United States were welcomed like heroes; newspapers regularly published photographs of Cuban refugees beaming in triumph on the decks of refugee boats. I was certain that race was a major factor in this double standard.

  My feelings about Haiti were complicated. I had grown up reading about Toussaint L’Ouverture, Henri Christophe, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and other black heroes of its revolution against France two hundred years ago, and of the mighty citadel at Cap-Haïtien built as a bulwark against white imperialism. Haiti had been the first independent black republic in the world. At UCLA, one of my closest friends, also on the men’s tennis team, was Jean Baker of Haiti. Then, as I grew older, Haiti had become for me a racial embarrassment, a nation known more for its poverty and corruption than its independence. While many black Americans continued to boast about its history, many whites probably saw Haiti as proof that blacks can achieve little on their own. What Jeanne and I saw on our honeymoon there in 1977 only reinforced my feelings of confusion and embarrassme
nt. Our hotel, owned and run by a Frenchman, was lovely. But Haiti in general was a nation in need of help.

  Recently, however, there had been signs of hope. After various despotisms, notably under the Duvaliers, Haiti had held relatively free elections. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, enjoying the passionate support of the black poor, if not of all the mulatto elite, took office as president. Then, before he could consolidate his rule, Aristide had been deposed by the military. Essentially, the United States was supporting the anti-Aristide forces by various actions, including the interdiction of Haitians fleeing their country. I was prepared to be arrested to protest this injustice.

  On the morning of September 9, I flew from New York to Washington. The demonstration had been planned meticulously. Every detail was known to the police in advance, because the last thing we wanted was disorder. We understood that one hothead—or saboteur—could transform a peaceful demonstration into a melee. At Shiloh Baptist Church, one of the biggest black churches in America, we received our marching orders. We then rode in vans to Lafayette Square, across from the White House, for the main rally. About two thousand people took part in the march, with another three or four thousand standing behind police barricades on the sidewalks. The most dramatic moment was the arrival in a wheelchair of the choreographer Katherine Dunham, who had lived for many years in Haiti and had been on a hunger strike to protest the U.S. actions. I was also glad to see that a large number of Haitians were present. Haitians and black Americans generally do not mix; in fact, this demonstration was probably the first major show of unity between black Americans and an immigrant community so clearly connected to Africa.

  Following rules for demonstrations codified mainly during the civil-rights era, we proceeded with our plan. As we knew, our demonstration violated the law forbidding demonstrations within a certain distance of the White House. When the police ordered us to disperse, we refused. After several minutes, they again ordered us to disperse, and again we refused. They then began to arrest us. I was handcuffed and put into a police wagon. The police did their job efficiently and well. I was pleased when a few of them, out of earshot of their officers, told us that we had their support. We were then taken to the U.S. Superior Court in southwest Washington. There I was fined fifty dollars, which I paid. We were detained for about an hour, then released. From the courthouse, I went directly to the airport and took the shuttle back to New York.

  The next day, around seven in the evening, I was sitting on my living-room couch watching a newscast when I began to feel a pain in the center of my sternum. The show ended and I started my dinner, but the pain kept coming. Although I did not think that I was in the middle of something serious, I took no chances. Reaching for some nitroglycerin lozenges I keep close at hand for emergencies, I put two or three under my tongue over a five-minute period. Nothing happened. I had kept the lozenges too long; they were outdated and useless. I bit into a Procardia, the football-shaped pill that I take regularly as a vasodilator, to expand my arteries. For about four or five minutes, the Procardia helped me. Then the pain returned, stronger than before.

  The sensation of a heart attack, at least of mine, is of a burning, searing, viselike grip in the center of the chest. It feels as if your chest is imploding, that there is a black hole into which some force is trying to pull your entire corporeal being. It leaves you short of breath. It leaves you sweating. It leaves you very frightened.

  I still did not know if I was having a heart attack, but I could not take a chance. Back in 1979, I learned that many deaths from heart attacks are caused by the self-delusion of people who take a chance and wait for the pain to pass. Jeanne and I quickly headed for New York Hospital, where I was admitted as a patient. At once, through three intravenous lines, I was fed nitroglycerin, lopressor (to lower the heart’s need for oxygen by making it beat more slowly), and morphine for the pain; a fourth line was installed in case I needed a clot-busting drug. I was also given an electrocardiogram, which showed acute ischemia (lack of blood to the heart muscle), but none of the classic telltale signs of a heart attack.

  The next day, I was given another test, this time an analysis of enzymes released by the heart when it is damaged. This test revealed that I had indeed suffered a heart attack, the second of my life. It was a very mild version of a cardiac attack, but an attack nevertheless. However, an angiogram, in which a catheter was slipped into the femoral artery in my groin and snaked up to my heart, showed virtually no new damage. This was excellent news.

  I had many visitors in the hospital. One day, Jesse Jackson came with his son Yusuf, who had just graduated from law school at the University of Virginia. I told Yusuf how proud of him I was for his success at the distinguished university, where he had also been an undergraduate. When I was growing up in Richmond, I could not think of attending the University of Virginia, a state school, because of segregation. Virginia and the world had changed for the better, and continue to change for the better in so many important ways. I take comfort in that fact.

  In the room with the Jacksons were Jeanne, Yannick Noah, and Carole Dell. Before Jackson left, he made us all form a circle and hold hands—Jesse, Yusuf, Yannick, Carole, Jeanne, and me. He asked God to tend to my illness; God could cure me. Jesse spoke of the woman (Mark 5:25–34) who suffered for twelve years from an issue of blood that no physician could stop: “She had spent all that she had and was no better, but rather grew worse.” Then she touched the hem of Jesus’ garment, and “immediately the fountain of her blood was dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of the affliction.” Jesus had said: “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace, and be healed of your affliction.” Jesse Jackson prayed that, in these hard times, we might find the faith in God that would guide and shepherd us.

  He had chosen his scriptural passage well. It was a touching moment, which I appreciated and fully accepted. Over the years, I have shared in several moments of prayer with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and even though I am often skeptical about what he says and does, I know that his faith is real.

  Whatever the cause of my heart attack, I left the hospital inclined not to curtail my schedule in any way, provided that I could carry out my duties well. I was discharged on September 16. I was at my desk at home that night when Bill Clinton telephoned to wish me well and express the hope that we might meet soon. As I sat in my office after hanging up, I thought of him and Hillary Rodham Clinton and the grueling, sometimes humiliating, and still unfinished campaign they were pursuing simply to have his message heard and believed and his integrity accepted, and I was encouraged to continue to carry on my own campaign. I decided to strike nothing from my schedule but to plunge ahead. Four days later I flew to Atlanta to speak to a gathering of officials of community health centers on “Health Concerns of the Uninsured.” Just after my return, I engaged a lively call-in audience on WLIB, the New York radio station. I then flew to Gainesville for a lecture at the University of Florida. The next day I was in Hartford, Connecticut, for an Aetna board meeting, then dined on September 24 at a fund-raiser in Manhattan for Governor Clinton, where I had the opportunity to meet and talk with him. The next day I returned to Hartford by company helicopter for another Aetna meeting, then I flew to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh to give a speech. The last day of September found me in Richmond, discussing with the mayor of the city a project dear to my heart—an African American Sports Hall of Fame to be located there. Then I returned to New York to attend a special showing of the Matisse exhibition at the Museum of Modem Art before heading out that evening to Baltimore, where I was to speak the following day.

  All my engagements were satisfying in one way or another, but some were especially appealing. In October, for example, along with Donna de Varona, I was master of ceremonies at a fund-raising awards dinner sponsored by the Women’s Sports Foundation at the Marriott Hotel in mid-town Manhattan. I was happy to see all the athletes there, and especially in the areas, such as fencing, that give so little back to the women i
n terms of money and recognition but call for at least the same degree of sacrifice as the major sports. In sports, men have many avenues to big money and fame; for women, tennis stands out almost alone in this respect, although other sports allow a few women a decent financial return. Because I want to see women athletes gain the recognition and prizes they deserve, I was honored to be invited to take part in the event. Among the tennis players, young Lori McNeil was there, and my pal Billie Jean King, whom I had not seen since Wimbledon, and who has done at least as much as anyone else to raise the morale and the prestige of American women athletes. Billie Jean sometimes used to tease me about being too undemonstrative, but this time I gave her a long, close embrace that Jeanne noticed and commented on approvingly.

  Tennis, and my own part in its recent history, were very much at the center of a weekend soon after in Jacksonville, Florida, when Jeanne and I attended various events, including a gala dinner, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Association of Tennis Professionals. In 1972, I had played a leading role in its formation, and I had served for one year as president of the body that helped to reconstitute tennis in the open era. The event brought together some of the leading names of the past thirty years of the game, including Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, Stan Smith, Charlie Pasarell, Eddie Dibbs, Bob Lutz, Jaime Fillol, Bjorn Borg, and Ilie Nastase. I could not help notice, after a while, that I was obviously one of the special attractions of the hour, that my old tennis comrades were seeking me out and spending time with me; I seldom sat down without a small group gathering around my chair. The companionship of these men meant and continues to mean a great deal to me. I remember one night during my Davis Cup captaincy, about ten years ago, when I spoke at a gala dinner in Portland, Oregon, and broke down in tears talking about the Australian players and my feelings about them as individuals and as a group. I feel that way about so many of the men with whom I battled during my career. I love them for what we have been through together, and for sharing with me so many of the finest moments of my life.