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My mother was 19, standing in
the Bishop’s office, respectfully defying his warning that she’d best skip
town and leave Father Atkins alone. She kissed the Bishop’s ring, bid him
farewell, and joined her soul mate at the altar where he had spent half his
life devoted to God—and a vow of celibacy.
Father Thomas Atkins was 44 years old, yearning for the love of a woman, a
wife, and children. He was disillusioned and hurt by the racial and
religious hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic Church.
And emboldened to follow his heart into the arms of 19-year-old Marylin
Bowman. Even though the powers that be condemned them to Hell for sharing
life’s most beautiful gift.
Love, and the desire to twine one’s body and soul with another.
And so, on December 19, 1966, they crossed the Church, strict lines of color
and culture, and their families, by saying “I do” before a black Baptist
minister in Toledo, far away from the naysayers in Saginaw, Michigan.
They bought an ancient, run-down house. But they were so poor, they strung
extension cords into a neighbor’s house to light up the living room, which
had no drywall, just exposed two-by-fours.
Along came me, and a year later, Catherine.
As a little girl, in our mostly black neighborhood, I felt like I fit right
in, until someone always pointed out my blond hair and white-looking skin.
We loved and adored Aunt Ann and Uncle Percy, who took care of us after
school. But why, when we traveled with them on their bowling trips to
Florida and Washington, D.C., did so many people stare and whisper loudly
about the two little white girls with the older black couple?
When we moved to Oak Park, I loved having Jewish, black, Arab and Asian
friends. But when other kids asked why my mother had brown skin and my
father had silver hair, my face would get hot and I would feel uncomfortable
being singled out as different.
I just wanted to fit in. But my kinky curly hair would not flip into the
trendy Farrah Fawcett and Dorothy Hamill haircuts that some of my friends
wore.
And my parents could not afford to buy us the popular Calvin Klein and
Gloria Vanderbilt jeans that everybody else was wearing.
No, their money earned at state office jobs was financing my mother’s law
school education. For three years she took night classes at the University
of Detroit; we hardly saw her, but her struggle and sacrifice paid off when
she graduated and passed the Bar Exam on her first try!
Then, her first job as a lawyer, for the state legislature, prompted us to
move to affluent and mostly white Okemos, where Catherine and I made
friends and excelled academically.
Our parents always made us feel smart, beautiful and capable of anything.
They did not emphasize our differences as an interracial family or
mixed-race children. Instead they taught us to love and appreciate all
people—our white relatives in northern Michigan, our black friends and
family, the Native Americans we knew through Daddy’s position as president
of the Saginaw Valley Indian Association, and our family history through his
work in the Sons of the American Revolution.
Still, our parents told us we would meet people who would not like us
because we’re mixed. And that happened in high school.
“Hey Elizabeth, I heard your mom’s a nigger.” The voice of the cool guy
from my tenth grade government class seemed to shoot through the phone and
slap the puppy love glow off my 15-year-old cheeks.
It was the same sting as when the European exchange student I was dating
left a note on my locker saying his host family did not want him coming to
our house anymore because I’m “mulatto.” Not to mention the other guys who
never called again after meeting our family.
Everything changed, however, when I fell in love with my high school
sweetheart. He, too, was biracial. Our bond and comfort was unspoken and
awesome.
But more bitterness was yet to come, in college.
The University of Michigan campus was tense. A series of racial incidents
had enraged black students into taking over the administration building,
holding rallies and pressuring the school to recruit more minority students
and faculty.
At the time, I dated a black man who wanted me to darken my skin at a
tanning salon. Another said he would not be seen with me, lest someone
might think he was with a white woman.
Then one day in particular, I was in an all-white class when the discussion
turned to race. It was all wrong, and I had to say something as a person of
color. But as I announced to the huge, silent classroom that I am biracial,
my heart was pounding. All eyes turned to me. My face burned. Sweat
prickled from head to toe. How would the professor and my classmates would
react? Would friends turn on me as dates had back in high school, when they
“find out”?
Later, walking across campus, I chided myself for feeling so uncomfortable
talking about this hidden but so important part of who I am. As I passed
the library, the chanting of hundreds of students underscored my anxiety.
“Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Prejudice has got to go!”
Then, beside me, I heard someone spit out these words:
“What are those black students complaining about this time?”
Then, that night, I went to a black fraternity party in my dormitory. When
a man asked me to dance, mean looks came along with a woman’s voice in the
crowd: “What’s that white chick doin’ here?”
I ran to my dorm room in tears.
“Am I a tragic mulatto?”
“Was this what everybody meant when they discouraged interracial couples
with: ‘What about the children?’”
At the same time, I was flunking chemistry and calculus. And without those
classes, I could not complete the pre-med curriculum that would enable me to
live my childhood dream of becoming a doctor. An embryologist,
specifically, to research test tube babies.
During the racial rallies and protests, Librarian Karen Downing called a
meeting for mixed-race students. Turns out she and dozens of other biracial
people were suffering the same sort of identity assault. And getting
together to talk about it became incredibly therapeutic, as if we’d created
our very own rainbow room in a black-or-white world.
For me, those monthly meetings were a tremendous confidence booster. My
cheeks stopped burning with self-consciousness when I talked about being
biracial. And I felt inspired to draw as much attention to the issue as
possible, to help others overcome the loneliness and discord of being
different.
Meanwhile, I changed my major to something that always came to me with great
ease and interest: reading and writing. Now an English major, a friend
recommended I try writing for the campus newspaper.
One article and byline in the
Michigan Daily,
and I was hooked on the high of hearing students talk about my article,
stating the need for more dormitory space on campus!
Then, the epiphany moment:
I realized, if the simple act of talking about being biracial can cool the
embarrassment from my cheeks and fill me with a new sense of confidence and
purpose... and I am blessed with the gift of expressing this through
writing... then I had a responsibility to use this knowledge and skill to
help other mixed-race people who needed to learn this as desperately as I
once had. And I wanted to do this in a way that would make our world a
nicer, more accepting place for the growing numbers of biracial children and
interracial families to live and love.
So... after summer internships at the Lansing State Journal and the
San Diego Tribune, I attended Columbia University’s Graduate School
of Journalism in New York.
There I wrote my master’s thesis on the biracial experience in America. I
shared that my mother is African American while my father traced his
ancestry to English royalty, some of the first French settlers in Québec,
and Native Americans.
Interviews with experts and people across the country helped me express how
we live in a gray area between black and white, often ducking and dodging
slings and arrows from both sides, never fitting in.
I talked with historians about how race-mixing in the United States began
centuries ago in the pain of rape on Southern plantations, when slave owners
took African concubines and enslaved their own flesh and blood borne of that
violence. How, those lighter-skinned children had the “privilege” of
working in the house instead of the field, and sometimes attended black
colleges created just for them when their brethren continued to toil from
dawn to dusk under master’s whip. And how we continue to carry that
horrific baggage today, manifest in that two-way battle between light and
dark skin, good and bad hair.
Still, despite the therapeutic and confidence-boosting value of this
research, and living in the exciting Big Apple, graduate school was a
wrenching period of my life.
Ten days into the intensive program, my father died.
But I found strength in his spirit to carry on this education, this work,
even though I was alone in New York, pinching pennies to make it through,
and missing my grieving mother and sister back home in Detroit.
However, the discipline and determination it took to make it through
Columbia paid off. Thanks to my part-time job at the The New York Times,
I put my thesis in the hands of an editor there. And they published a
portion of it!
The Times article — about growing numbers of groups for mixed race
students on campuses from Stanford to Harvard — landed me on the CBS News
with Dan Rather, Our Voices with Bev Smith on BET, Good
Morning America Sunday, and The Faith Daniels Show.
By then, I was a summer intern at The
Detroit News.
And I
realized, I am an expert for a red-hot issue. An issue that had been taboo
for so long, but now America was ready to talk about it, deal with it, heal
from it.
And I had the power to help make that happen.
The Detroit News recognized this too, assigning me to the pioneering
new race relations beat. In my early twenties, it was a thrill-a-minute to
work at a big city newspaper, delving into issues near and dear to my heart,
and provoking new dialogue about how we do — and don’t — get along!
Colleagues and community members alike told me the articles were making a
difference in their understanding of themselves and their interaction with
others. The News even nominated some of my race relations stories
for a Pulitzer Prize!
Then, I took it to another level: at first I interviewed people for a
non-fiction book on the biracial experience. But already bound by the
strict rules of journalism during long days as a reporter, I indulged the
creative abandon of writing a novel.
That way, I could weave all the facts from research and life experience into
the fiction of glamour, passion and suspense.
The result? White Chocolate.
Once I set my mind to writing a novel, it became an obsession. I got up
at 5 a.m. to write before work. I stayed up late writing. Weekends, lunch
hours... all added up to a 400-plus page manuscript within five months!
My mother, Marylin Atkins, is my role model and hero who inspires me to
reach for the stars and know I can reach them. She and my father, Thomas
Atkins, taught us that hard work, unwavering faith that when you invest your
discipline and determination into dreams, it pays glorious dividends.
They taught us this when Daddy worked a full-time job and played Mr. Mom
while our mother worked all day in an office and went to law school at
night. He cooked hamburgers and french fries for us, took us to piano and
ski lessons, whisked us up north to go camping on the weekends, so Mommy
could barricade herself behind those big stacks of law books and study,
study, study.
Because as I worked tirelessly to get White Chocolate published, my
mother was becoming a magistrate, then a judge! Now she is Chief Judge of
36th District Court in Detroit!
And she is my biggest fan, beaming with pride as I dared to make this dream
come true.
White Chocolate is a romantic thriller about biracial TV reporter
Taylor James. She’s a confident, brave crusader against racism. She’s also
caught in a sizzling love triangle between a slick TV executive and her
handsome first love, who’s also biracial. But harassment from a racist
madman threatens to ruin her stellar career and tear her away from both men
who love her.
However, four or five New York publishing houses rejected my novel. I was
so crushed... I put White Chocolate on a shelf until the sting of
rejection cooled.
A few months later, a newspaper strike put my job in jeopardy. I joined
thousands of newspaper workers on the picket lines in July, 1995. But the
effort felt futile. And I realized, that door is closing so that I may dash
through a glorious new archway into becoming a published author. So, I
revisited my literary dream.
And with the help of a friend, Jeff Wardford, I found a publisher who liked
the pioneering spirit and unique voice of my manuscript. I found it no
coincidence that my first book contracts came in the mail just in time for
Thanksgiving.
I spent the next year revising and rewriting White Chocolate. And
when it was published in hardcover in 1998, by the Tor/Forge imprint of St.
Martin’s Press, friends and family celebrated this tremendous accomplishment
of becoming a published author.
We hosted a book party on a huge balcony overlooking an indoor marble
waterfall, as my nearest and dearest purchased 290 copies of White
Chocolate, launching it onto The Detroit News bestseller list!
For the next book, I decided to explore the “what if” rooted in the common
comment that nobody would know I was black if I weren’t always talking and
writing about. So...
Along comes Camille Morgan in Dark Secret. Born Sharlene Bradley to
a 16-year-old black girl, she hates that her mother mistreats her because
she looks like the white father who abandoned them in a Detroit ghetto. So
at 18, she moves to New York and reinvents herself by “passing” for white.
Now a lawyer engaged to the son of a conservative Virginia senator who lives
in a 300-year-old plantation house, Camille’s future is set with all the
love and money she craves.
Until her mother gets deathly ill. And her brown-skinned sister comes to
New York, threatening to reveal Camille’s dark secret if she won’t donate a
kidney to save Mama’s life.
Camille refuses. And a huge scandal explodes from there.
Right onto the Detroit Free Press bestseller list for 5 weeks!
Dark Secret is like a modern-day version of the “tragic mulatto” you
may have seen in the 1959 movie, Imitation of Life. In it, a
beautiful young Sarah Jane loathes being biracial so much... she flees her
brown-skinned mother and tries to pass for white. But a boyfriend discovers
her lie and beats her up. Then the film comes to a tear-jerking end when a
sobbing Sarah Jane finally comes home... for her mother’s funeral.
For Book #3, I joined movie legend and icon of romance, Billy Dee Williams.
Our book, Twilight is a sensual, mystical story about finding one’s
soul mate, one’s purpose in life, and happiness. Our collaboration began
when our mutual literary agent connected us in a meeting in Los Angeles.
Our one-hour lunch evolved into a four-hour brainstorm. The goal?
To
create a provocative love story that will inspire a new way of looking at
and talking about race.
And so, just as Taylor James in White Chocolate embraces and
celebrates her dual heritage, and Camille Morgan keeps her black blood a
Dark Secret, Simone Thompson in Twilight does not know the
ingredients of her ethnic mix. The Los Angeles judge has sworn off
committing herself to a man until she knows who and what she is. And she
has to find her father to solve the mystery of her butterscotch skin and
sandy-wavy hair.
But when she meets sexy, suave movie star Sonny Whittaker on a tropical
island in Brazil, she is torn between her pledge to find the truth about
herself, and the undeniable lust and love stirring her very soul. Not to
mention, news that when she gets back to L.A., she may have to oversee his
high-profile divorce trial, which would prohibit any contact with him,
especially romance.
Sonny Whittaker, however, has no idea who this mysterious and beautiful
woman is. But the reformed playboy does know, the moment he sees her
approaching on a sun-splashed yacht, she is The One.
An erotic but anonymous interlude on the beach follows.
And when they return to California, Sonny is stunned to see her take the
bench in a black robe, to rule over the fate of his life and his family, in
his trial.
Sex, scandal and suspense follow. All woven together with themes exploring
the dizzying euphoria of love... the longing and loneliness of forbidden
passion... and the meaning of one’s racial identity.
The title, Twilight symbolizes the blending of day and night into a
spectacular spectrum in the sky, just as the mixing of color and culture
creates a beautiful kaleidoscope of humanity.
Next, we are going to make Twilight into a movie, to bring this
message to the silver screen, premiering at Detroit’s fabulous Fox Theatre.
If I needed any more affirmation that I am indeed following a life calling,
it is coming in the form of this collaboration with Billy Dee Williams. I
remain humbled and awed that a man of his stature endorses the ideals that I
so passionately believe in, and is joining me to give voice to the millions
of mixed-race people who may still feel uncomfortable and alone.
We are also wiping away stereotypes to stop hostility toward interracial
couples. For example, if I’m with an African American man, a lot of
strangers perceive us as a white woman with a black man. We get hostile
glares from white men, along with tooth-sucking scowls from black women. We
hear comments like “sell out!” and “You got jungle fever!” And once, a
white woman in a suburban bar even yelled a racial insult at the man I was
with, then splashed him with a glass of wine!
I believe colorblind love is the best recipe for achieving America’s
ever-elusive melting pot. My own parents had a wonderful marriage for 24
years until my father died. And through them, families, friends and
coworkers have journeyed across the color line to find lasting
relationships. And what more beautiful symbol of racial unity could there
be than a child born to bridge two cultures?
That is the gift bestowed on me by God, through my parents’ legacy. Thank
you for the honor and privilege of unwrapping this gift in the pages of
provocative love stories, to share this present with you.
Copyright
Elizabeth Atkins 2003 |
