Elizabeth's Story

     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.