Meghan Misunderstood. Sean Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ ease with everyone, whether giving a warm hug to a young African boy in the crowd or having a laugh with Graça Machel, the widow of Nelson Mandela. Only Harry came close to demonstrating such rapport.

      So much positivity turned to dust, however, when she was reunited with Harry in Johannesburg. His return coincided with their announcement about her legal suit and the unequivocal statement from Harry released on their website in which he said his wife had become ‘one of the latest victims of a British tabloid press that wages campaigns against individuals with no thought to the consequences.’

The legal action, he explained, involved the ‘contents of a private letter’ being ‘published unlawfully in an intentionally destructive manner’. He also referenced Princess Diana: ‘I’ve seen what happens when someone I love is commoditised to the point that they are no longer treated or seen as a real person. I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces.’

      It was strong stuff but it did not seem to be met with anything resembling contrition or apology from those ‘powerful forces’ – far from it. The general consensus was that Harry’s outburst, for that was how it was viewed, had ruined the tour. The couple had made it all about them. The wish-you-were-here postcards home, designed to depict a wholly varnished scene of local life and typify the self-congratulatory royal tours around the old Empire had been replaced with a giant slice of bitter reality.

      Meghan, it seemed, was not playing the game as the media wanted her to do. But who are the so-called royal experts and columnists shouting the odds about how she should behave at every opportunity? And what exactly is this media invention of a ‘royal expert’ – someone who knows the correct way to bow or curtsy when you meet the Queen? It strikes me as a truly meaningless label, especially since Harry and Meghan were shining a light on such important global issues.

      What, I wondered, had Meghan done to deserve all the negativity – the ‘bullying’, as Harry called it – that surrounds her? Was she really a victim of rampant racism, sexism and xenophobia because she’s American, or was it just old-fashioned British snobbery at her being an actress?

When I had watched Harry and Meghan’s wedding in May 2018 – less than eighteen months earlier – the most memorable elements for me were her mother Doria’s quiet grace, the exquisite playing of cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the Kingdom Choir singing ‘Stand By Me’ acapella and the long, passionate sermon by the Most Rev Michael Curry on the power of love. As he spoke, the reactions from the Royal Family that we were allowed to see were priceless: Prince Charles read and re-read the order of service as if it was the latest fascinating issue of Country Life magazine; his wife Camilla and Kate Middleton were desperately trying not to make eye contact with each other; Prince Andrew looked as pompous as ever. Prince William adopted a superior smile, Princess Beatrice seemed to be on the verge of laughing out loud, while, best of all, Zara Tindall appeared gobsmacked. The Queen had the familiar look of grim determination that was never going to waver. Harry, meanwhile, held Meghan’s hand.

      Meghan, it seemed, had been determined to recognise her heritage as a woman of colour on the most important day of her life so far. So, was the Royal Family itself fundamentally racist or just bogged down with stuffy traditions and protocol? And as a society, are we, the UK, really as tolerant as we like to proclaim?

      There seemed so many questions for me to answer on my Meghan adventure. In particular, I wanted to find out more about her quest for female empowerment. Was feminism of fundamental importance to her or something she had adopted as a fashionable cause? And what about racism? How badly has she been affected by prejudice in her life? Watching Tom’s documentary a second time, I was struck by the words of a biracial woman in Cape Town: ‘It is quite a struggle when you grow up as a mixed-race child – either you are not white enough or you are not black enough, so you are in the middle; and you have to find your identity based on the middle – and with Meghan creating awareness about this, it makes people feel that it’s ok to be me.’

      For me, that begged the question: did Meghan have that same struggle with identity growing up in Los Angeles? I wanted to follow her journey from Hollywood to the balcony of Buckingham Palace and back again and answer the questions, is she misunderstood? And if she is, why?

PART ONE

1

       Moments of History

      The eyes of the entire world were on Meghan Markle as she walked serenely and gracefully down the aisle of St George’s Chapel in Windsor. They have remained on her ever since.

      Her wedding to Prince Harry was an occasion of great joy, representing happiness at last for the Queen’s grandson, who had captured the hearts of the nation when he disconsolately but bravely followed his mother Diana’s coffin on that eternally sad day twenty years earlier. Now he was marrying a breathtakingly beautiful woman in a story that the screenwriters of Hollywood, where Meghan had made her name, could scarcely have imagined.

      At least her mother Doria was there, the only member of her family to take a place at the ceremony. She had sat beside her daughter in the Rolls-Royce as she set out on the nine-mile drive that would take her from the luxurious Cliveden House Hotel to the steps of the chapel. They were two strong women strangely unsupported in a foreign land on this grandest of May days. As always, they had each other, sharing an unshakeable bond.

A crowd estimated to be in excess of 100,000 had poured into the Berkshire town to celebrate the day with flags, bunting, laughter and cheers. Doria could have been forgiven for punching the air with exuberant joy as if her beloved daughter had just won an Olympic gold medal.

      Instead of drawing attention to herself, though, Doria sat quietly in a pew across from the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Her eyes glistened with pride and excitement but she stayed composed, watching a woman of colour, her ‘Flower’ as she still called her, hammer loudly on the door of stuffy tradition and protocol.

      There is nothing traditionally royal about Doria Loyce Ragland, memorably described by her daughter as a free spirit with dreadlocks and a nose ring. Her yoga class back in Los Angeles would scarcely have recognised the demure, stylish lady in a pale green Oscar de la Renta dress and coat. Her long hair was styled and partly hidden beneath a matching hat.

      What a journey it has been for a family that historians and genealogists have eagerly traced back to the shameful days of slavery in America’s Deep South, where the persecution of the black population did not stop with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865 that officially freed all slaves. Meghan herself has admitted that trying to unravel her family tree is a bewildering task but she is intensely proud of her biracial heritage, describing herself as a ‘strong, confident, mixed-race woman’.

      Her maternal ancestors continued to face poverty and persecution for generation after generation, battling against the oppression of the Jim Crow laws, the legislation that enforced racial segregation in the southern states until 1965, two years after Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Then, he implored, ‘My four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.’

The first known records of Doria’s family show that they were slaves working on the plantations of Georgia around the town of Jonesboro, the setting for the epic novel Gone with the Wind and the famous film of that name. Fittingly, perhaps, Hattie McDaniel won Best Supporting Actress at the 1940 Academy Awards for her role as the maid ‘Mammy’, the first black winner of an Oscar.

      While that was a win to be celebrated, the ceremony itself was, in retrospect, an appalling indictment of racism and segregation at the time. Hattie would not normally СКАЧАТЬ