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Wesley Snipes, Hollywood's hottest new star talks about: his divorce, his days on the streets and why he doesn't have 'jungle fever.' - Cover Story
Ebony, Sept, 1991 by Laura B. Randolph
Did he turn to other women when it was over to take the edge off the pain? Long pause." Once or twice," he confesses. "Until they'd say, 'Are we going to have a relationship? Hell no. I was always honest to the core."
These days, Snipes says there is no special lady in his life, though he'd marry again "when I understand more about me and the things I need to improve about myself and the type of woman that will work best with who I am."
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This much he already knows. "I like a woman who is aware of her womaness in its universal form; a woman who isn't defined by what she's been told, or what she's been dictated to believe she's supposed to be. Those are the women who attract me. Women who allow that to embody them . . . and at the same time they're not in conflict with you because you're a man. They see the interconnectedness and the necessity of having a man--not a boy or male but a man--in their life. A woman who has that going on, she will grab my attention every time."
And, unlike the object of his onscreen character's desire, she probably won't be White. Though he allows, "If two people love one another that should be all that matters," offscreen, Wesley Snipes definitely doesn't have jungle fever.
"It's more important to me to try and develop a good . . . relationship between a Black man and a Black woman," he says. 'That's the agenda right now and that's totally where my head is -- to redefine the image of Black male/female relationships and how important and valuable they are. We have to work on that tip. Once we work on that and relate to one another on a personal, professional, sexual and social sense, then we can venture out. Until then, we ain't ready for it."
It's that kind of brutal honesty, that gritty, raw tell-it-like-is-even-when-it-cuts-deeply quality that makes Snipe's performances so riveting, so real. To research his role as a paralplegic in the soon-to-be-released film Waterdance, he traveled to rehabilitation centers to interview patients so he could come to understand the limitations of their lives. He even videotaped them, thinking he'd have great difficulty mastering the physical challeges of the role and was shocked when he managed them with relative ease. And then something his manager, Dolores Robinson, a Black woman, said made it all clear.
"My manager said to me it was probably easy because . . . you are a young Black male in society and, like this character, you've always been perceived as an outcast. I said, 'Oh, that's deep.' And I can relate. That's what happens to paraplegics. They're not accepted by society. It's same thing that's happened to me all my life."
And continues to happen despite his celebrity. While shooting The Waterdance, he was manhandled by members of the Los Angeles Police Department who, because of a rental company's mistake, suspected him of driving a stolen car. Arrested at gunpoint ("They came over, threw my hands in a wrist lock, cuffed me, then [one] put his knee on my neck, then put the 9mm to my head"), Snipes says he was handcuffed to a bench and held for hours at the station despite numerous third party attempts to explain the error. "Everybody was coming out looking at me like a monkey in a cage," he says disgustedly of the police. "Walking past me smiling and snickering and shaking their heads like, 'Ump, umph, umph. You see that. A nigger is a nigger. You know you can't give the niggers nothing. He's gonna steal a car and he makes movies.'"
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