The Lost Daughter: A Memoir

by Mary Williams

  • • •

  It was at Avalon that Jane and Ted married in 1991. My mom wore an antique white lace wedding dress and Ted sported a white linen suit. It was the third marriage for each. They’d originally planned to wed in a charming little one-room church on the property but plans changed at the last minute due to the paparazzi catching wind of the plan and descending on the site. Instead, the ceremony took place in the entry hall at the bottom of the spiral staircase, where I’d stood alone and uncertain just a little over a year before.

  The holidays were my favorite family times. Best of all was Thanksgiving at Avalon. After a few years most of the Turner kids were dating seriously or married, and divided the holiday between two families. Nathalie, Vanessa and Troy were working or attending school. I was teaching English in Morocco and had several weeks of vacation time. So after nearly a week of a full house, by Thanksgiving morning all of the kids were gone, leaving just Ted, Jane, Ted’s lab Blackie, my mom’s golden, Spencer, and me.

  We’d have a leisurely breakfast, after which Ted and I’d spend the morning fishing. We’d load up the old SUV with our gear and the dogs and head to the lake. The lake was less than three miles from the house but the short trip was elongated by frequent stops. Along the way Ted would pull over whenever he spotted a piece of trash, often left by poachers. Nothing escaped his notice. Not a beer can, a gum wrapper or a cigarette butt. He’d be in the middle of an interesting story when suddenly he’d brake hard and pull over at the same time. He’d hop out of the vehicle, retrieve the offending piece of trash, toss it in the vehicle and resume our conversation exactly where he’d left off.

  At the lake we boarded one of the bass barges, a kind of motorized, floating platform with comfy seating. There was plenty of room for the both of us and the dogs. For the next couple of hours we cruised around the lake catching and releasing brim, crappie and bass. I often got my line snagged in the reeds no matter how many times Ted instructed me how to avoid it. He patiently disengaged my line every time. Sometimes we sat quietly enjoying the fine weather and the beautiful scenery, but mostly Ted was teaching me how to identify the various bird calls pouring out of the forest or quizzing me on the various wild plants. He also told me stories from his early years, stories about his beloved little sister, Mary Jane, who died from lupus at a young age. “I prayed to God every night to save her and when He didn’t, I gave up believing in Him altogether.” Ted wasn’t melancholy very often. He was usually quite optimistic about most things, so those moments when he was emotional really stand out to me. Like the time we were watching one of his favorite films, the documentary series Eyes on the Prize, which chronicles the story of the civil rights movement. Whenever there were any scenes in which the protesters were being hosed or beaten or having dogs set upon them, Ted was reduced to a blubbering mess every time. With tissue in hand, he soldiered on through the entire segment. I also caught him crying during a screening of the Walt Disney animated film Beauty and the Beast. The scene where the beast was transformed into a handsome prince is what sends him reaching for the tissue.

  After fishing, we’d return to the house and I’d spend the afternoon reading and after lunch head out on a hike. The staff didn’t work Thanksgiving Day, so in the evening we’d all head into town for dinner at the only place open on Thanksgiving evening: Hooters. We’d enjoy our meal of buffalo wings and burgers served by nubile young women in tank tops and bright orange shorts before catching a movie at the local movie theater. Those last few days of solitary time with my parents always ended the holidays on a high note and I often returned to school or work feeling loved and quite lucky.

  Being one of Ted’s kids was like living in a whole new world. We flew around on Ted’s private jet, sat front row center at Braves and Hawks games, attended black-tie fundraisers hosted in some of the finest homes and venues in Atlanta. But through it all we were connected as a family. We went to each other’s birthdays, graduations and weddings. There were the Trumpet Awards, the Goodwill Games, fundraisers for the Captain Planet Foundation and for my mom’s nonprofit, Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention (GCAPP). When I had free time, I’d join Ted and Jane on speaking engagements, like an event in which Ted spoke to a crowd of Civil War enthusiasts. I loved to watch Ted speak. He is always unscripted, smart and absolutely hilarious. I had few friends during this time. I didn’t need any, I had my family.

  To give the Fonda side of our family something to work on together, for my mom’s sixtieth birthday, Ted presented her with a $10 million gift to endow the Fonda Family Foundation, of which all the Fonda kids are trustees and Jane our head. It was Ted’s intention that we enjoy the privilege of giving to a deserving organization, and also to experience serving on the board of a foundation, as his own children did for the Turner Foundation. There was a genuine camaraderie in working with each other for the greater good. We come together once a year to provide grants to dozens of nonprofits across the country.

  Our family foundation’s $10 million endowment was nothing compared to Ted’s many foundations, which had combined endowments in excess of $1 billion.

  So despite the vast wealth around me, it was the clear focus on giving that made the Turner kids so grounded and made it easy for everyone to get along so well. Both of my parents spent nearly all of their time engaged in some activity designed to help make the world a better place for others. My mom’s groundbreaking work with teenage pregnancy prevention and Ted’s work in protecting the environment made me immensely proud, and further strengthened my desire to do the same.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE BLACK PANTHERS, the Fondas and the Turners are as different as families can be, but they all had one crucial thing in common: they were not shy about acting on their political beliefs. For decades Jane made headlines for her controversial tours through conflict zones like North Vietnam, and Ted was quite vocal about his opposition to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. For them, the highest form of patriotism was dissent—all in the spirit of trying to make the world a better place.

  As a college senior, I was enrolled in a sociology class run by an equally radical Hispanic professor born and raised in East Los Angeles. Field trips included activities like spending the night with the homeless on skid row in downtown Los Angeles in order to get a real-world understanding of the role the Reagan administration’s policies played in increasing the nation’s homelessness. From him I got a more detailed understanding of oppression of women and minorities and the misery derived from American foreign policy in other parts of the world, like Latin America, Asia and Africa.

  In the early 1990s, my disdain for America’s foreign and domestic policies was reaching a high point. Ronald Reagan had been president for eight years, and George H. W. Bush had just been elected for another four. I’d had enough. I started wearing dashikis, headwraps and a huge leather necklace shaped like the continent of Africa. The Michael Jackson poster came down and the Marcus Garvey poster went up. I took a course in African-American literature and started reading Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, the poetry of Langston Hughes and Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece, Things Fall Apart. I began to think that a return to Africa would be the answer to my simmering disgust with the seemingly endless parade of privileged white dudes who had been riding roughshod over the White House since the founding of our nation.

  At this point, I’d never traveled outside of North America and Mexico but I nonetheless held a crystal-clear image of Africa in my imagination that involved regal, ebony-skinned people carrying fresh mangoes and bananas in intricately woven baskets on their heads while garbed in exquisite robes of the finest cotton woven into colorful patterns of significant meaning. I envisioned myself hanging out with African poets and intellectuals, standing on the shoulders of their ancestors who reached back in time before maps, nations, language, race and Ronald Reagan. Back when the whole world was Africa.

  My growing disillusion
ment with my country led to my decision to take a break from the United States altogether. I even entertained the notion of renouncing my U.S. citizenship and moving full-time to an African nation. It didn’t matter to me which nation as long as it was African. So in my senior year of college I decided to do a little reconnaissance and signed up for a semester abroad. My first choice was Senegal, but I failed to meet the French language requirement. The only other African option I was qualified for was Morocco. While not technically black Africa, it would have to do.

  My best friend at the time was a statuesque fly-girl from Inglewood, California, named Shawn. When I told her I was bound for the motherland, she was a bit worried: “Girl, don’t come back with a bone in your nose!” I was undaunted. I played Tracy Chapman’s “She’s Got Her Ticket” over and over in the weeks leading up to my departure. I boarded the plane with the eager anticipation of a bride on her wedding day. A complex of incongruent emotions rushed through me when the plane touched down and I set foot on the continent: joy, gratitude, sadness and, maybe more than anything, the feeling that “I’m home.”

  From the moment I arrived in Morocco, I was charmed. Before I arrived, I knew next to nothing about Morocco or Islam. My perceptions of Arab people and culture had been shaped exclusively by what I saw in films and on the news, in which they were often pigeonholed as religious fanatics. The women were either covered from head to toe in black robes and veils or were fleshy succubi, belly dancing in pasties and jangly skirts. The men usually sported monobrows and were sweaty looking with cruel, pinched faces sprouting long beards or five o’clock shadow.

  In reality I saw that the average Arab person I encountered in Morocco was far better looking than the average American by about a factor of ten. Lean-bodied, olive-toned skin, large dark eyes, long eyelashes, thick, shiny black hair. Moroccans both rich and poor were a great deal more curious about the world beyond the borders of their country. It was not uncommon to meet people who spoke two or more languages fluently. They also had a keen interest in world affairs. Perhaps because freedom of the press was not a fact of life in Morocco, the people went out of their way to gain access to news sources beyond what their government produced.

  I fell hard for the Moorish architecture, the cobblestone streets, the quaint way grown men walked hand in hand. I especially loved the nose-tickling spices that permeated the air in the souq (open-air market). Nothing delighted like the brightly colored and multi-patterned djellabas worn by the women gliding down the streets like Christmas ornaments. No two alike.

  During the first part of the program, nine other students and I traveled as a group to various cities throughout the country—Casablanca, Fez, Agadir, Ifrane, Oujda, Essaouira—where we stayed in hotels. In Marrakesh, however, we had our first home stay: a short weeklong visit before a return to Rabat for our long-term home stay.

  When the Marrakesh families were invited to a small party to meet and greet the students they would be hosting, I saw that my family was rather large. It consisted of parents with five grown children, four boys and a girl my age. They all greeted me warmly, but I spent most of the luncheon speaking English with the daughter, who wanted to improve her language skills in order to study in the U.S. I was disheartened to learn the next day in class from a fellow student that my host mother had told her host mother that she was disappointed because she did not get “a real American.” By real American she meant a white American. Despite the fact that they had to put up with hosting a “fake” American, I was relieved that the family did open their home to me and treated me like an honored guest during my brief stay.

  I was the only black student. On the whole my skin color was not an issue because many Moroccans, including the royal family, have family members with sub-Saharan roots. I did get very weird comments, however, that were meant to be compliments but instead were just downright awkward. For example, often when I was introduced to Moroccans, some would greet me enthusiastically and then inevitably tell me I looked exactly like Tracy Chapman, Whoopi Goldberg, Whitney Houston or Oprah Winfrey.

  During these strange encounters I always responded with “Thanks!” It was always one of these four women, I suspect not because I looked anything like them, but because during the late 1980s and early 1990s they were immensely famous, and commenting on some perceived likeness to them seemed to be a good conversation starter and a way to communicate to me that they knew something about African Americans.

  To this day I still get such comparisons when I travel in other countries and even U.S. cities with few to no people of African descent. While traveling in Buenos Aires, Argentina (famous for being the whitest country in South America), I had a waiter tell me I resembled Serena Williams. This time I responded a bit differently. I said, “Thanks! You look like Che Guevara!” The tall, lanky, balding waiter looked at me quizzically for a few moments before switching the topic back to the menu.

  There was a lot that I loved about my semester in Africa, but by the time the semester ended I was ready to go home. Witnessing firsthand the disparities between the United States and Morocco had reignited my patriotism. I was proud to be American again, which wasn’t to say that I was ready to forget about Africa. I would miss many things. The friends I’d made, the food, the architecture, even the plaintive wail of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer that blared through the city five times a day became soothing and familiar. What I’d miss most was my Rabat host family, the Benchekrouns.

  While in Rabat, I lived with a middle-aged widow named Rachida and her daughter, Laila. Laila was my age and studying economics at the local university. The Benchekrouns were not your typical Moroccans in appearance or lifestyle. Rachida, like her daughter, was tall, fair-skinned and blond, unlike most Moroccans, who are medium to short in stature with dark features. It was also unusual that Rachida and Laila were not particularly religious. Like most of the country’s privileged class, they were westernized. Though they were Muslim, they did not pray regularly, they ate pork, drank alcohol and celebrated Christmas. They rarely wore traditional Muslim clothes unless they were going to a wedding, at which point they’d wear the long jewel-toned and embroidered caftans required for such occasions. They loved to dress me up in these beautiful garments and take photos of me resting on poufs, leather-covered pillows, like a Moroccan princess. To which I happily obliged. Laila was educated in the finest schools; in addition to Arabic, she was fluent in French and English.

  Rachida’s husband had been a big deal in Moroccan politics and hailed from a very prestigious family. But after his death a decade before I met them, his widow had lost the income that maintained the lavish lifestyle they enjoyed when her husband was alive. They’d moved from a large house with many servants in a very fancy suburb, into a tiny one-bedroom apartment on a back street near the center of Rabat. Though they were no longer rich, Laila’s father’s family name and good reputation meant that they were able to continue to associate with people in high society.

  They retained the daily services of a maid named Khadisha, who was not much older than Laila and me yet was already married with several children. She was a tiny woman with large callused hands. She had a perfect blend of Arab and sub-Saharan African features reflected in her café au lait skin tone, large almond-shaped eyes and tightly coiled hair, which she covered when she was not indoors. Being quite poor and religious, she wore traditional Muslim dress and the head covering called a hijab. I thought for many weeks that she did not like me because she never spoke to me or even looked at me. I later learned she was extremely shy and embarrassed to talk to strangers because her teeth were horribly rotted. But after a few weeks she grew used to me and even became comfortable enough to share her smiles with me. The third blond in the house was a small puff of a dog named Chloe.

  I shared the one bedroom with Laila, and Rachida slept on the couch in the living room with Chloe. From the start Rachida and Laila embraced me wholeheartedly. With Laila and Rachida I did not have to suffer through an awkward
adjustment. Rachida, who spoke no English, through the use of simple hand gestures communicated to me from the start, “You are my daughter no different from my own.” She took my hand and put it in Laila’s and took my other hand and placed it on her heart, smiling at me warmly. And that’s how it was.

  From the start Rachida and I shared a very close bond. Initially, we were not able to speak the same language—Rachida only spoke Arabic and some broken French—but when Laila went to school, I’d spend an entire day alone with Rachida in the little apartment watching Arab soap operas (Rachida would fill me in on the characters and plot lines) and gossiping about the neighbors. Rachida would often tell me detailed stories about her childhood, her marriage, her desire to go on the hajj to Mecca. Often her stories were hilarious, and we laughed so loud the neighbor’s nosy maid would sometimes come by to see what was so funny.

  Laila would come home from school and find us curled up on the couch like best friends, sipping mint tea and totally engrossed in a television program. When she would ask what we did all day, I’d recount the stories Rachida shared and Laila would stare at me gape-mouthed. “How’d you understand all that?” To this day I don’t know what transpired between Rachida and me during those early, long companionable afternoons in the tiny apartment that enabled us to pass the time in complete understanding despite speaking very little of the other’s language.

  When Laila was not in school, we were inseparable. She spoke perfect English but also encouraged me to use my Arabic. I became the sister Laila never had. We went dancing nearly every weekend at the Cinquième Avenue, a little club down the street from our apartment in Place Bourgogne. Under the strobing lights we gyrated the night away to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Losing My Religion.”