That was what Arthur Ashe said early one morning when he was 6 years old, and his father woke him up and told him that his mother had died. And now it was many years later, last Wednesday, and Ashes own little child was watching all the commotion in their apartment. Her name is Camera, and she’s 5-almost as old as her father was that sad morning in Richmond, Va. Camera’s front teeth are missing, and her bright little pretty face was crowned with pink and yellow barrettes, and if she didn’t know what was going on, she knew it was meaningful. She probably didn’t know that her father was in anguish, because it’s not his style to let on about that sort of thing. But Camera knew something was up. The telephones kept ringing all morning, with people such as George Bush calling, the phone machines kept playing, and her mother and father moved about with dispatch and grim purpose.
Finally, Camera came across the room to her father, and she hugged him around his knees and gave him a present. It was the sweetest thing she could find on such short notice. It was a candy Kiss. And Arthur smiled and accepted it grandly.
A little bit later, he had his blue suit and red tie on, for it was time now for him to go out and tell the world that he has AIDS, and this time he called Camera over and kissed her, and I turned away so they could be by themselves, but I’m sure that what Arthur said to her was: “Well, Camera, as long as we’re together, everything will be all right.”
And then he left home to be a different person for the rest of his life.
It was mostly for Camera that Ashe did not want to reveal that he had contracted AIDS. It came from a blood transfusion, probably after his second heart operation in 1983. When he had to go back into the hospital for brain surgery in 1988, he learned that he had AIDS. Still, in his hospital bed then, he didn’t rail at the fates. He just said: “So, that’s the way it is,” and he never missed a wink of sleep for the next three and a half years until Tuesday night after USA Today told him they’d been tipped off to his condition.
All morning Wednesday, as he prepared for his press conference, the personal concern he expressed the most was for Doug Smith, the USA Today reporter who had been the one fingered to interrogate Ashe. " Poor Doug," Arthur said, “he feels so terrible, and it’s not his fault.” Then he’d return to calling his friends with the news. “Oh now, don’t worry about me,” he said to someone who was bawling on the other end of the line. “It’s all right. Hell, I’ve known this for years.”
The injustice was not that a disease would take his life. That’s the way it is. The injustice was that someone had to “rat on me” and thereby discolor the rest of his life. Ashe wasn’t naive. “Realistically, " he told me a couple of months ago, “I’m afraid someone will blow the whistle on me soon.” But he yearned for the secret to be kept. He grew up in the public eye being officially attached to an apposition: “Arthur Ashe, the first Negro to. . .” And he knew that, once the news was out, he would have a new label forever after: “Arthur Ashe, AIDS sufferer.. . "
I don’t know how many of us knew. Arthur called it a “conspiracy,” and there were at least some of us from the press who were his good friends in this sweet cabal. We were all honored to be a part of it, even though we never knew who else exactly belonged, because, of course, you couldn’t ask without betraying Arthur and his trust.
Arthur made sure not to blame USA Today specifically; it just happened to be the one that fell into the dirty work. And, of course, the editors uttered all the proper journalistic pieties about the public’s holy right to know, although it’s awfully hard for me to appreciate how the benefit to humankind outweighs the hurt to one little girl and her mother and father. But then, I’m not even sure that it’s primarily a media issue; instead, it’s all just more evidence of the decline of discretion and perspective and civility, which were even so recently the stanchions that held up what was our more noble society.
Once the shock wore off, this issue of privacy came to the fore-more so, for example, than how much Ashes presence might help the cause of AIDS. USA Today’s defense-joined by some other editors-was that their reportorial process of trying to confirm the report with Arthur was impeccable. And so it was; so are we all, all honorable men. But to Ashe, and to a public that rushed to his side, bureaucratic niceties are not the issue here; morality and sensitivity are. It matters little to most of us that he was violated by a sterile instrument.
And let me tell you: it takes a lot to make Arthur Ashe angry. His placid demeanor came from his late father, who taught his son to live by two rules in life: treat everybody with the same respect, and don’t sweat the little stuff. Or, for that matter, the big stuff. " You’ll never know the difference a hundred years from today,” Arthur Sr. used to say. Indeed, Arthur Jr.’s dispassionate mien on the court often brought him criticism that he lacked the fire of a champion-which is ironic since his greatest triumph, the outrageous upset of Jimmy Connors in the 1975 Wimbledon final, was achieved intellectually and imperturbably, as Ashe changed his whole game, adopted a whole new style to confuse the invincible Connors.
Ashe has always been a student of himself and his surroundings, a man engaged by the world, sure of himself. He endured much heat in the ’60s for not being enough of a civil-rights firebrand, and then in the ’70s for being the first black athlete to compete in South Africa. The theorists and extremists were all after him. And then: how well I remember when he went to Soweto, and the poor blacks there surrounded him and cheered and one stepped forward and hung an amulet round his neck and gave Arthur a new name: Sipho. It means “a gift.”
That came back to me Wednesday, when Arthur was standing before the press, when he stopped and couldn’t read the part he’d written about Camera. His wife, Jeanne-beautiful Jeanne, strong Jeanne-had to step up and read that. Oh, how much their daughter means to them both. Arthur had his heart attack when he was only 36, not long after they were married. Then they discovered they couldn’t have children, and at last, Camera arrived at their home. And then he found out about his AIDS.
Ashe makes a point of saying “I am not sick,” but even the dimmest bulb in the newspaper business must know that his immune system is held together by bubble gum and paper clips, and the stress of disclosure can’t possibly be anything but damaging. But … that’s the way it is, and now he’s somebody else’s Sipho. Not 24 hours after his outing, Ashe had already made his first public speech for AIDS.
I once asked Arthur if he remembered much about his mother. “Oh sure,” he said. “She taught me to read when I was only 4. " Anything else? “Yeah, I remember two other things. I remember very clearly. She taught me about manners, and she taught me about angels.” He listened to his mother.
