On the Line (25 page)

Finally, I decided to just go for it. I didn’t care if I had to fly directly to Melbourne after the trip to get ready for
the Australian Open in January. I didn’t care if it took me a tournament or two to get my game back after such a long, difficult
trip. It was time. I would not put it off any longer. Anyway, things hadn’t been going all that great for me on the tennis
front: I’d been struggling. I’d been hurt, depressed, burned out. It seemed like the perfect time to go, so I told my mom
about it, and my sisters, and we set it up.

Actually, my mom and our friend Cora Masters Barry did most of the organizing. They even took an exploratory trip ahead of
our visit to make sure everything would go smoothly on our tight schedule. The idea was to tour the region and the schools
and maybe give some tennis clinics along the way. I’d heard that people followed tennis over there, so it made sense to pick
up on that. We thought it would be a great door opener for us. We’d go for two or three weeks, and at the other end we’d have
a better sense of who we were as a people, and who we were as a family. Happily, that was just how it happened, with the added
windfall that I came to some kind of renewed sense of who I was as an athlete and a competitor.

Now, my family history is a little sketchy, going back a few generations. Most African-Americans around my age can’t reach
much past their grandparents’ generation. That’s what centuries of slavery and oppression can do to a family tree, and yet
for some reason I always believed we came from West Africa. I’ve got no documents to back this up, and we’ve lost some key
branches of our family tree over the years that might have offered up some confirmation, but a lot of the slaves who were
sent across the Atlantic to North America were from West Africa. At least, that’s where a lot of them were captured and tortured
and sold before making the voyage. So that’s where we went.

We built our schedule around these tennis clinics we’d set up for little kids in small towns and villages in Senegal and Ghana.
I was amazed at how talented some of these kids were. Really, a lot of them were good! You’d think that in a country where
there’s so much poverty and illness and hardship there wouldn’t be time for a joyful release like tennis, but most of the
people we met knew who I was. And, incredibly, a lot of them played tennis. They didn’t have the latest equipment, but they
weren’t exactly playing with wooden racquets, either. I was surprised. They had decent gear. They followed the game. Those
who didn’t know who I was knew that I played tennis, that’s all. There were public courts, every here and there. The courts
weren’t in the best shape, but they reminded me of the courts I used to play on back in Compton, so I told the kids that I
grew up playing on courts just like theirs. They seemed to like that. We had a translator with us. The kids seemed to like
that, too, that we were making an extra effort to communicate. I told them that if they worked hard at it, like I did, they
could become one of the best players in the world, even on a run-down public court.

We also spent some time giving out polio vaccines, malaria pills, and vitamin A supplements at area hospitals and clinics.
And various types of mosquito netting. This was God’s work, I thought—and a real highlight of the trip. It was impossible
to visit these remote, impoverished villages and not be moved by the plight of the people there. It was such a gratifying
feeling to know we were helping people who couldn’t really help themselves. West African governments have always had a hard
time keeping ahead of epidemics like polio and measles and malaria, and here we were, trying to stay out in front of this
good fight—a truly rewarding experience, I’ll say that.

Through UNICEF, we got involved in a program that distributed bed nets to help cut down on the spread of malaria. A lot of
the people in these villages couldn’t afford the vaccines, so programs like this one were essential. It’s not like here in
the States, where kids are required to get certain inoculations by certain ages. Over there, thousands and thousands of kids
are dying because of these totally preventable diseases. It’s a heartbreaking thing to see firsthand, and yet underneath the
heartbreak there’s an unimaginable sense of spirit and good cheer. I’ll never forget the look on the face of this one young
mother; she couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old, and her eyes just lit up when it was her turn in line.
I thought back to how things were with me, when I was this woman’s age. I’d just started playing professionally. I didn’t
want for much—except, maybe, for a couple close calls to go my way. Here this young mother—a child herself!—had the weight
of the world on her small shoulders. She’d come to get vaccines for her infant twins, and the babies were no bigger than four
pounds each, and the mother was so unabashedly grateful. Oh, she was simply beaming at her good fortune, to be at just that
spot at just that time. She didn’t mind that she had to wait in line, because it was like we were giving her children a chance.
And I guess we were.

Here’s something else I won’t forget: It was just after Halloween. Candy was on sale and we’d gone out and bought plenty of
it so I could walk around and give it to the kids. I was down to my last piece one afternoon, and I gave it to this little
girl who must have been about five. Just then, she caught the eye of another little girl, and without even thinking about
it she offered her the last piece of candy. The child without didn’t even think to ask. The child with didn’t even hesitate
to offer. I came away thinking you don’t see that type of generosity back home. This little girl had nothing to give, and
yet she was giving. The other girl had so little, it would have never occurred to her to even ask for more. It was the most
amazing, most heartening thing. I wondered how I could be more like that first little girl, how we could all be more like
that first little girl.

In Senegal, I met with President Abdoulaye Wade, and I agreed to help him build a school that young children could attend
for free. The schools over there are set up on a pay-as-you-go model. It costs about ten cents a day to send your child. You
have to buy a little coupon book, which lasts for about a month at a time, so it comes to around two dollars, and a lot of
people can’t even afford that. If you’ve got several kids and you’re hardly earning a subsistence wage, it can run to a lot
of money. It’s such a desperately poor place, so all over Senegal you see these little kids during the day doing these odd
jobs because their parents can’t afford to send them to school. Or maybe there are two or three siblings working just to make
enough money to send another sibling to school. Here again, it reminded me in some small way of how we’d banded together as
a family, back in Compton. We didn’t have much, but we had each other. We picked each other up and carried each other forward.
We rallied. I don’t mean to reach for a clichéd tennis expression, but that’s how it was for us, in nontennis terms. We spurred
each other on and moved about on our shared momentum. Of course, the stakes here in Senegal were completely different from
the stakes back home. At home, we were doing mostly okay, scrambling to get a leg up and improve our circumstance. Here, families
were just trying to survive. It’s so relentlessly difficult for these people just to meet their basic needs, so of course
I was thrilled when President Wade laid out the project for me, and honored to help out. In fact, I couldn’t wait to go back
for the opening and see his commitment to free education for young people finally realized.

I came away from my meeting with President Wade thinking this was how you make a meaningful change, with small strokes. One
child at a time. One village at a time. One school at a time. Anyway, it was a place to start. I was like that first little
girl with that last piece of candy. What I had in plenty I was obliged to share.

Nobody had to ask.

*  *  *

P
erhaps the most personally meaningful stops on that first African tour were our visits to the notorious “slave castles” on
the coast of Ghana. There was one called Elmina Castle, and one called Cape Coast Castle. We also visited a castle on Goree
Island, off the coastal city of Dakar in Senegal, but those castles in Ghana were the ones that kept me up a bunch of nights.

The Cape Coast Castle was built originally by the Swedes as a shipping facility for timber and gold, but it was eventually
taken over by the British in the 1600s and used as a kind of depot for the transatlantic slave trade. It’s this huge concrete
building on a cliff overlooking the water—and, really, it’s such a sad, sad structure, even after all these years. It just
sits there by the ocean, reeking of sorrow and suffering. A lot of the slaves were captured in the interior of Africa and
brought here, and if they survived the weeks-long warehousing and starvation that followed they were packed into waiting ships
and sent off to North America. There was a point down by the water where the slave ships used to dock. Everyone called it
the point of no return, because no prisoner ever came back from there. If they survived the slave castles, they were taken
to the point and loaded onto the ships. After that, no one knew what would happen except that there would be no coming back.

There’s also a “point of no return” doorway leading out to the water on Goree Island, and it’s such a creepy, eerie sight,
to look out through the opening and see nothing but ocean! It was such an emotional experience to tour those dark, dismal
dungeons, where so many of our ancestors were kept and tortured centuries ago. People told me ahead of time that I might not
be able to handle it, but going in I didn’t think it would get to me. I didn’t think I would cry. But of course I cried. How
could you not cry over something like this? How could you help but realize that one of your own ancestors—someone with
your
blood!—survived these tortuous conditions so that you could stand in his or her place?

How could you not be changed?

I walked through those big, cavernous rooms, and I could
feel
all this trapped power, all this short-circuited energy, all these lives cut down by oppression. It was awful. There was
no light, no ventilation. Incredibly, you could still smell excrement in some of the rooms, and where the women were kept
there was a slightly stronger, almost sour smell, which our tour guide said was from their menstrual cycles. In some rooms,
they put all the women together. They kept them there for up to three months. Infants and children were placed in a separate
room. Their mothers were held in the room next door, and they could hear their children crying and crying on the other side
of the concrete walls, until eventually they weren’t crying anymore.

It’s a wonder anyone survived, but a great many did, and for their troubles they were sold into slavery. Literally, only the
strong survived. If you didn’t die in the castles, you probably died on the slave ships from dysentery or some other disease.
The slave traders didn’t want any weak slaves. You had to be pretty strong just to make it across the ocean—and then, when
you made it to North America, you had to be stronger still. The irony of the struggle was huge. I mean, to survive all that…
for what? To be beaten into the ground on some other continent. To be further stripped of your dignity, your individuality,
your freedom.

I came away thinking I was a part of the strongest race in human history. That was the takeaway lesson for me, and I looked
on it as an uplifting one. Someone else might have been depressed by what I’d just seen, and it certainly was depressing,
but I chose to find the power in it, to be lifted by it. After all, if we weren’t strong, I wouldn’t be here. My ancestors
would have never made it to the United States. My grandparents wouldn’t have had my parents. My parents wouldn’t have raised
five powerful young women. Because, let’s face it, only the strong survive. A part of me knew as much going in, but it took
walking through those castles for me to sign on fully to it. It took smelling it and feeling it and touching it in just this
way for me to own it, and to know it in my bones.

Really, my entire mind-set changed as a result of that trip, and I hate to discuss something so deeply moving in terms of
tennis, but the truth is my approach to the game was changed as well. The very next time I held a racquet in my hands I thought,
There’s nothing that can break me. On the court. Off the court. Anywhere.

It was an incredibly empowering experience, and an equally empowering realization. If you could see what I saw, feel what
I felt,
smell
what I smelled in those slave castles, you would not be denied. Also, I was on my way to Australia right after that. I had
a tennis tournament to win. It was a big deal. No, it wasn’t any kind of big deal next to the centuries of oppression and
degradation and persecution of my ancestors, but it was a big deal to me. I hadn’t won a tournament since 2005, and here it
was January 2007, and I was thinking,
I can do anything. There will be no stopping me. Nothing can break me.
And the moment I stepped onto my first practice court in Melbourne, I closed my eyes and imagined myself back in one of those
dark, dank rooms of the slave castles, and I imagined my ancestors before me in those same dark, dank rooms. Then I drew a
line that ran from Ghana to Michigan to California to Florida to Australia, and it was on that line that I hung my hopes and
dreams, and the hopes and dreams of my parents, and their parents before them, and on and on.

No,
I thought.
We will not be denied.
I
will not be denied. I can do anything.

I
went back to Africa in November 2008—this time to South Africa and Kenya, before returning again to Senegal. For this trip,
I was in a completely different frame of mind: I was going to give something back, not to take something away. This time,
it wasn’t so much an escape from the pressures and difficulties of tennis, or a search for identity and purpose that might
help me lift my game. This time it was more of a celebration, an affirmation. My thinking was, it had been such a gratifying
year on the court, it seemed only fitting to finish it off with a meaningful homecoming. Plus, logistically, it made a whole
lot of sense. I was scheduled to be in Qatar, on the Persian Gulf, competing in the season-ending WTA Tour Championships in
Doha. I figured since I was already going to be halfway around the world, and since I’d have those few weeks of off-season
coming up, I might as well slot in this second African tour before heading back to the States.