Deborah Santana talks of her life with Carlos, the parents who inspired her, the guru who failed her and the new memoir that describes it all

BY DAVID TEMPLETON

For 45 years, Deborah Santana has carried two distinct and indelible memories from her early life in San Francisco, one painful, one exhilarating. Both took place when she was a third-grader at San Miguel Elementary School, when she was still Deborah King, the youngest daughter of Saunders and Jo Francis King. It was 1960, 13 years before Deborah would meet and marry Carlos Santana, becoming linked in name and purpose to one of rock ’n’ roll’s most enigmatic and influential musical pioneers.

In the hurtful memory, the 9-year-old Deborah’s identity as the child of an African-American blues guitarist and an Irish-English businesswoman became the subject of playground derision, when a crowd of schoolmates unexpectedly turned on her, taunting her with the words, “You’re mama’s as white as day and you’re daddy’s as black as night!” As she writes in her lyrical new memoir, Space Between the Stars: My Journey to an Open Heart (Ballantine, $24.95), it was a moment of sudden, violent awareness, a turning point as sharp as a slap in the face, as she realized for the first time that the color of her mother’s skin—“Creamy, like French vanilla ice cream”—and her father’s—“Dark like nighttime, the color of songs”—mattered to people, that her own skin color mattered, and that there would be people in her life who would hate her parents for being different, and would hate her for it as well. “I never forgot what those children said to me,” she writes. “Their judgment tainted how I looked at the world and taught me how the world looked at me.”

The other memory is softer and sweeter, but every bit as strong. She was in class, the students arranged in a circle, her teacher poised in front of them, talking about the future; each student’s own individual future. The teacher asked all of the students, in turn, what they planned to do with their lives. When her turn to speak came around, young Deborah King answered without hesitation, “I’m going to write.”

“It’s always stayed with me, that circle we were all sitting in when the teacher was asking us what we all wanted to do,” recalls Santana, soft-spoken and meticulous in her choice of words as she conducts an interview in the conference room of the Santana office building in San Rafael. All around us, hung on the walls, are symbols of Carlos Santana’s achievements, from his various awards and gold records to a replica of the star installed on Hollywood Boulevard in 1998. “I don’t really know how I identified myself as a writer, even back then, but I was always a reader,” Santana explains, grinning when I ask her to name the books that influenced her early on; Freddy the Pig, it turns out, was a major inspiration, and later the Nancy Drew series. “Those books were my introduction to writing,” she says. “Since then, I’ve always written, somehow. I started several newsletters in the ’70s. I did the first Santana Band newsletters, which I always worked to make as very expressive and creative as possible. I’ve written in journals my entire life, writing my way through all the things that have happened to me and all that I’ve experienced. My vehicle of communication has always been writing.”

And yet, with so many words put to the page over so many years, Space Between the Stars is Santana’s first book. It took her seven years to write it, a process she underwent with the help of a writing group that met regularly for years. Now, nearly half a century after proclaiming herself to be a future writer, Deborah King Santana is finally a published author.

“So,” I ask, “what took you so long?”

“Well, I’ve been pretty busy,” she laughs. “I’ve been working pretty hard at the rest of my life.”

WHATEVER ELSE ONE says about Deborah Santana—and thanks to a recent high-profile lawsuit filed by a former Santana Band employee, there are plenty of DJs and freelance cultural critics who have been saying some fairly unflattering things—the woman is inarguably a hard worker. In addition to co-managing her husband’s recording and touring projects, she is the vice president and COO of the New Santana Band, Inc., running the entire business side of a surprisingly vast array of Santana-related ventures. She is also the vice president of the Milagro Foundation, a nonprofit organization formed to aid impoverished children around the world and to help support health, education and arts programs where needed. The Santanas have three children, Stella, Salvador and Angelica, two of whom have recently set out on their own adult careers. In the 30-plus years since she and Carlos married in the living room of her uncle’s house in Oakland, Deborah has launched scores of projects, including Dipti Nivas, a successful vegetarian restaurant in the late ’70s, located at the corner of Church and Market in San Francisco, and more recently, as a Milagro fund-raising effort, a line of Santana shoes. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, during the eight years when Deborah and Carlos were disciples of the New York-based guru Sri Chinmoy, she taught meditation classes for him all around the world.

Perhaps it’s because she was writing her way through all of these moments in time that her book is so vividly descriptive of the times and places she has experienced. The Santanas’ one-time devotion to Sri Chinmoy—an experience they now liken to having been members of a cult—and the events that led them to embrace his teachings and ultimately to abandon them, are described in particularly striking detail in her book, which has been receiving mostly positive reviews since its release in April.

Having read my queasy fill of “celebrity memoirs,” I approached this one with some amount of dread, but found Space Between the Stars to be a beautifully written, achingly personal piece of work. Though there are interesting bits and sequences throughout, I most enjoyed the first few chapters, the tale of a girl born into a loving and religious home, to culturally and politically defiant parents. In later chapters, Space becomes a tale of heartbreak and bad choices—her abusive, unhappy early relationship with Sly Stone (Sylvester Stewart) of Sly and the Family Stone forms a large part of these chapters—and ultimately becomes a genuinely moving rock ’n’ roll love story, with her introduction to Carlos and the description of their subsequent (and continuing) 32-year marriage.

The book also serves as a vibrant portrait of the 1970s and ’80s, told from the dual perspective of a music-world insider and a young woman attempting to find spiritual meaning at a confusing and bedazzling moment in American cultural history. Along the way are the expected benchmarks of any story that takes place among rock musicians and artists in the late 20th century—drugs, abortions, infidelity, Bill Graham. The motivation to write the memoir, she tells me, was partly her attempt to come to grips with some of her more painful memories and partly a wish to celebrate the lessons of tolerance and love that she learned from her parents.

Says Santana, “What I tried to do with my memoir was to take the beautiful memories of my wonderful parents, all of those situations that I’ve lived and that other people have lived—especially people of color—and frame them in a way that was like a lullaby. It was an attempt to put a heart to my most personal stories.”

THAT SAID, SANTANA admits that her most powerful motivation for writing the book was a long-gnawing desire, following all those years of being Deborah-the-wife-of-Carlos-Santana, to be seen at last as an individual.

“I was feeling completely overshadowed by Carlos’s life,” she says, quietly. “I’d spent so much of my adult life assisting him in his career, trying to continue his success, that I felt I had lost my own individuality in being seen as a person. What I wanted, when I started writing this book, back when I didn’t know yet if it would ever be published, was for people to say, ‘Oh, she’s not just Carlos’s wife. She’s a whole person, and she has this incredibly darling family, and these wonderful, wonderful parents who were so strong and smart and revolutionary.’ ”

“When one hears the word revolutionary,” I state, “one immediately imagines militant, angry politics, but what you describe in the book are parents, regular people whose one defiant act was falling in love. How does that become a revolutionary act?”

“My parents, when they decided to get married, could not legally do so in California because in the 1940s there were still laws saying that a black person could not marry a white person in this state,” Santana says. “People hated them because they loved each other, but they decided that they were going to live as if they were the human beings they knew they were, that they would live as if they had the rights that this country had not given them. They were the first people who taught me that you have to live your own life, and you have to live with the conviction that what you are doing is right.”

Santana credits her parents’ example for how it has fueled her own activism, her own sense of social justice. “My parents were my role models,” she says. “Growing up with them as my model has made me an advocate for children, for people of color, for people who are being turned against. My parents’ story has led me to a life of activism and support, because you can’t just let people be out there by themselves, thinking they are all alone.

“What happened to my parents is the same thing happening with people fighting against same-sex marriage,” she continues. “The laws against gay marriage are exactly the same thing as the antimiscegenation laws of the ’50s and ’60s. Last year, when Gavin Newsom was allowing all those gay marriages in San Francisco and everyone was talking about it on the news, I remember thinking, ‘This is exactly how it was for my parents in 1947, when they tried to get married.’ My parents were scorned and subjected to all kinds of hate-talk, people were up in arms and full of outrage that a black man wanted to marry a white woman. Now we’ve just shifted it to another part of society.”

Asked how her family, her children and Carlos, have responded to the book, Santana pauses.

“Well, Salvador, the oldest, had a really hard time with the Sly part,” she says. “He wishes he’d never read it. And yet he says he loves my writing and of course he’s a wonderful writer too, and a wonderful musician, a pianist. After reading the book, he told me that now he feels he really has to measure up as a writer—which I thought was really adorable. Stella is 20, and she gave me no feedback,” she laughs. “I called and asked her what she thought and she said, ‘It was good.’ That was it. It was one of her friends who told me how excited Stella was about it. Angelica, our youngest, is only 15, and she isn’t interested in it, and I think that’s fine.”

And Carlos? The book, while undeniably a love story, does not step back from showing some of Carlos’s past faults, specifically a devastating rift in their marriage that came after Deborah discovered, in the early 1980s, that Carlos had been unfaithful. Over the years, she writes, there were other infidelities as well.

“Carlos loves the book,” Deborah says, simply. “He understands the importance of telling the truth. But people ask me about that at book readings, and I get questions about Sly, and people always ask about the guru too, wanting to know how we could have been with that guru for nine years.”

“That’s a good question,” I state. “How could you be with him for nine years?”

“I’ve thought about it a lot,” she replies. “I think we needed the security of thinking we were on a spiritual path, though in hindsight,” and here she starts to laugh again, “we do sometimes look back and say, ‘Wait! How were we there for nine years? Letting someone else control our lives? What were we thinking?’ “

THESE DAYS, AS she describes toward the end of the book, she and Carlos have found a new spiritual home with Unity, a liberally open-minded church in Marin, which she describes as believing that “God, Divine Mind, is the Source and Creator of all and that we are spiritual beings with the breath of God within us.”

Ironically enough, just as Deborah Santana’s book, her attempt to be seen as a strong and independent woman, was hitting the bookstores in April, the Santanas were smacked with a lawsuit that, in part, took issue with Carlos and Deborah’s spiritual beliefs. Bruce Kuhlman, who had worked for the Santana Band since 1988, according to a Reuters report, claimed to have been fired in 2004 for not being close enough to God. In the lawsuit, Kuhlman accuses Deborah of being anti-male, and describes strange practices such as “Neuro-Emotional Techniques” to calibrate the level of enlightenment of all Santana employees. Furthermore, Kuhlman claims that he was fired because it had been determined that at the age of 59, he was too old to achieve enlightenment.

Such stuff is catnip to modern radio personalities, and the news of the lawsuit sparked a storm of public ridicule of Deborah and Carlos. Asked for her reaction to the lawsuit, about which she is legally prohibited from commenting on directly, Santana admits that there is a bit of potent irony in the timing of the lawsuit.

“It’s interesting,” she says. “When I started this process, the process of writing this memoir, I told people that I didn’t want it to be easy. I’ve always said I don’t want things to come so easily to me in life that people will say, ‘Oh, she didn’t have to work so hard for that.’ Carlos and I have had so many blessings, we have so much privilege in life. So when this lawsuit happened, I thought, ‘You know, I was having too good a time, wasn’t I?’ I was enjoying myself on the book tour, feeling the love of all those people coming up to me to say that they were touched by the book.

“Sometimes,” she adds, “just when things are going well, you have to take a few more lumps. I’m taking a few lumps now.”

In spite of that, she says she is enjoying having given birth to her first volume of non-newsletter writing, and looks forward to writing more books. She sometimes imagines herself as that third-grader, and ponders the thread that stretches from that little girl, steadfastly declaring her authorial intentions, to the 54-year-old Deborah Santana, published author.

“If I could go back to that third-grade me,” she says, “and could share some advice from the grown-up me, it would be to say, ‘Dreams can be fulfilled at any time. Trust your dreams.’ But I’d also tell myself that sometimes we have other work to do before we can fulfill our earliest dreams.”

Looking back on the story she tells in the book, Santana insists that if she could go back in time, she would resist the urge to edit and interfere.

“I have no regrets. I have no shame. I have no blame,” she says, smiling. “I really believe that in life we are here to learn certain lessons. Whether or not the things I describe in the book were the lessons I was supposed to learn, they were still the lessons I ended up with. And I did learn from them, believe me. I learned a tremendous amount about human nature, and I learned a tremendous amount about myself. I wouldn’t change who I am or who I have become. My life has made me who I am. I like who I am. I wouldn’t change a bit of it.”