White Girls

by Hilton Als

  Journalism. Bullshit. If it’s the “truth” about Richard you’re after—haw haw—let me say up front that I’m perfectly aware why Richard is a success and why I am not and why I am not bitter, now, because I am able to understand it: he was able to perform some version of “blackness” and I was not. In the later films—before he got sick—when he was yukking it up in shit like The Toy and whatnot, he was a mass of colored buffoonery and feeling sporting a Jheri curl. If you look at him in that film and others, he starts to bear more than a passing resemblance to Flip Wilson crossed with Stepin Fetchit. That was always his thing—a kind of Negro nervousness that white people in particular were able to feel somewhat comfortable with, no matter how “transgressive” or whatever the fuck his humor was considered by journalists and reviewers and the like, since all he did as far as I was concerned was bug out his eyes in a sketch of colored fear. What a caution. I could never do that. So humiliating. How can you want to be loved so much that you make your race some kind of shtick? I am an actress. I could never wear the head rags and look up pleadingly at master as I dusted the doorstep where last the lilacs bloomed, hoping he wouldn’t rape me again tonight in some shitty teleplay that becomes a hit on ABC, and what have you.

  I’m not a sympathy-getting bitch, I told you from the start. You won’t catch me telling a target liberal audience how we done suffered, and how my cunt was raped by America. And no one would believe me if I was cast in that part, anyway! I’m too much myself, too much of a mind that shows its thinking—which is what acting is, too—to be believed as unschooled in life, let alone books. That’s hard for white people to accept, I’m sorry to say; they wouldn’t know what a colored actress looked like who wasn’t playing a slave. Nothing’s changed. If a colored girl wants to be seen as an actress, she’s gonna have to spread ’em. So what’s there for me? Richard and Halle took it all. It’s a shitty thought, but I’ve said it.

  Actresses—they’re women in search of a self, like all women. But at least a real actress like Diana or myself will admit it. An actress has her eye on you—an audience—while in her head she’s looking for a way to get her proverbial Daddy to pay for a script she can play. No abuse is too great to withstand to make that happen. A black eye as the actress blackens the chicken. An acting bitch can even watch herself as her eye is being blackened, and plan what costume she’s going to wear to go with it. An acting bitch can stand outside herself while working on the inside of her character, which is to say herself.

  I say, isn’t that something? Maybe Cancer Bitch didn’t think like that after a while, given the cancer. But she never did stop acting. Maybe a better phrase is: She never stopped presenting herself. An acting bitch doesn’t stop acting until God yells “Cut!” Toward the end—I saw this myself—Cancer Bitch was up in the hospital bed, shit stuck all up in her, liquid dripping every which way, maybe even out of her asshole, tube stuck up her ass like a plastic Daddy. Her hair was melting against the pillow. Black hair against a white hospital pillow, spreading against a sky of illness. And when she saw me—I had come to visit her—Cancer Bitch pulled the white sheet away from herself, exposing all those tubes, the liquid Daddy in her ass, and said: “Ain’t this some shit?”

  Metaphors sustain us. To talk about Cancer Bitch as she was—the tubes leaking, her ass—is beside the point. Or beside her point. She was an actress, and as such had a fundamental disrespect for “I.” “I” doesn’t take into account all the years a bitch spends on becoming something else. Find the character and you find her. That was Cancer Bitch’s life work—to be something other than herself, in order to talk about herself in terms beyond the kind of shit that biographers encourage: no metaphors but the thing itself.

  I blame Cancer Bitch’s acting for making me an actress. To identify me solely as Richard Pryor’s sister, to ask me what that’s “like,” is a question that strikes me as being as pornographic as my mouth. It’s as greedy and innocent as a child asking his mother to describe what he was like when he was little. I am an actress. And as an actress I’m interested in Diana Sands and emulating the will she exercised to get over herself and into you, whoever you are. What force! By the time Diana said, “Ain’t this some shit?” she knew what she was talking about: acting and dying.

  I am an actress. We find truth—human truth—by pretending to be people we’re not. That frees us to explore the metaphor of being. Okay, so you’ll write that Richard did this, he did that. How will that resonate in the reader’s heart beyond the thrill of gossipy revelation? And as to Richard’s black celebrity: isn’t that an oxymoron? What you want are stories about his black infamy, not a sister. Acting isn’t funny, but being is. Richard was never an actor. All he did was put his being out there. People responded. He became famous. What he did wasn’t as complicated as acting. Diana Sands was an actress. There are no jokes about her.

  “I” is a sitcom. “I,” at best, is a pratfall in slow motion. I am an actress, which is to say a woman who pretends to be something other than herself. Risking exposure and not. Richard would never do that. He could never be someone else’s text. He’d always fight to be Richard instead of trying to inform the part—Hamlet, whatever—with the deepest parts of himself.

  That’s not what I do. Honor that. Honor the fact that you’ll get more of what you want from me by allowing my “I” to speak through other characters, scenes, events. Allow me metaphor even though I’m not supposed to dally there, being colored or whatever. I know, I know, being colored, I’m not supposed to exist in the realm of ideas; my skin would dirty them up. The general audience expects my shit to be black and raw and “real”—like my literal shit. Like Richard’s. Fuck you.

  In fact, I blame Richard and his popularity for helping to formulate the audience’s expectations whenever they see a black face onscreen, or on a book jacket: Aha! the viewer thinks. Here we have more officers in the race-class-gender bores! And with them come whores! Drifters! Pimps! Junkies! Grifters! At one time or another, Richard and I have been all of those things, but why not allow us the flowers, too? You can see them near the footpath I walked past the other day, years ago. This was in 1993. A man is leaning drunkenly against a crooked fence. Flowers at his feet. They call him Gary. Gary’s not drunk, he’s just on drugs. Sometimes his own existence is too much. But he can hold a job. He works at a crab house in Baltimore, separating the big and little crabs into different crates. Gary works in the crab house even though he’s allergic to the things. The money he makes there is just enough for drugs; just enough so that he doesn’t get too sick. It’s the first selfish thing he’s ever done, being a junkie.

  Like all junkies, Gary is a baby; he lives in his mother’s basement, so he doesn’t pay rent. After he gets high, he likes to read his books: books on chemistry, religion, history. Book knowledge has made him feel funny ever since he was a kid, different from everyone else in his neighborhood, most of whom didn’t read and grew up on drugs, including his former wife, Fran, who had a junkie’s contempt for Gary from the very beginning and, also from the beginning, a distrust, a steady hatred for what he tried to give her before he started getting high: love, a bit of security, a home. Which is what Gary knew growing up, before drugs.

  But Fran couldn’t deal. Sometimes, when they were married, she’d grab his cock roughly and sit on it. He would have preferred inserting it into her lovingly, but that journey of love always disgusted Fran, especially since she knew that Gary was always worried about whether or not he was hurting her. Sensing his worry, Fran shat on it, and then she shat on his cock. Gary had a sap’s heart and didn’t know that the worst part of loving those who do not want to be loved is this: denying them the instant intimacy of fucking, leaving, and never seeing them again, so you live on in their imagination without the further burden of touch. Gary never realized that if only he’d thrown Fran onto a pile of empty crab shells from time to time, they’d still be together. Stunned by pain, she’d be too distracted to notice his love, which made her think of pil
es of sick. In the sick, there were chunks of options. That was the worst.

  Gary let Fran have her own life. She had never had that before. Everyone she had ever known growing up—friends, family—lived a kind of predetermined existence: get up and drink and then scramble for the next drink; get up and snort or shoot, and then knock in the head of some old lady with just enough change in her purse so you can have the same day the next day, and the day after.

  They got married in 1983, a few years after they graduated from high school. They were married—or rather, they lived together as Mr. and Mrs. McCullough—for eight years. Then Fran left. In the beginning, Gary gave Fran her own pocket change. After that, he gave her any number of other things: a nice house, a little boy, some nice outfits. In those years he worked security; he always had at least two jobs, plus he invested what he made. Gary thought he and Fran were living a love story.

  Fran never thought so. By giving her everything he thought she should have and more, he opened up the world to her. She had the luxury of picking and choosing what she might like for herself. But what Gary didn’t know was that no one likes living with options. It makes you feel motherless. Everyone looks for someone to tell them what to do. To resist or accept the perfection in that is one way to get through life. That is the work of an actress: No, I will not hold the teacup that way as I walk across the stage. Or should I? Why tilt my head just so to catch that light in this movie scene? But perhaps, dear director, you are right. I am less equivocal than most actors, because I am less interested in the game of approval than most. I never say to the director: If I do X, will you love me? Because I know they won’t.

  Directors used to hurt me. When I worked in front of the camera, I generally disagreed with any and all interpretations of my body, since their interpretations are just that—some white boy saying that the distribution of my weight on a given mark is wrong. When I was younger, I’d shift my weight from one leg to another, stick my left hip out, try not to be obtrusive, someone with flesh, even though I was being paid to be seen. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized my being colored had something to do with my being off the mark; that is, the colored body is a kind of joke, like the kind Richard would tell about black pussy taking a walk in America. He’d say: Say there, labia too plump, clit too long, people drowning in pussy juice, better wrap that shit up and look for Jesus before I throw up. Richard would have said that in any number of his voices—it’s the only way he could make a character, through his voices. Most of the voices he became famous for were just imitations of the people we knew while we were growing up; they weren’t acting. I guess he used his body some, used it to show how ridiculous coloredness looks in the context of America; sometimes he could look like a coat hanger hanging on an empty clothesline blowing around in someone’s front yard and you could see white people looking at the hanger from their living room window all scared and mesmerized. Or sometimes he could look like a hamburger on a griddle with bean sprouts and hairy tendrils sticking out of its burnt surface, assaulting Americans with fat and weirdness—their worst fears. In any case, what Richard was trying to show based on my telling him stories about the unequal distribution of my weight on the set was that by now it doesn’t matter what coloredness looks like, or how it presents itself; it stopped belonging to its body a long time ago, after it was co-opted by Jesus, drugs, biographers, audiences who deluge you with their dreams and expectations—which are, in turn, defined by politics, weather, whatever—and whatever directors have to say about it.

  To compensate, the colored spirit became bigger, as if that would protect us. We empathize with all bodies, not having one ourselves. We empathize with all audiences, always being one ourselves. That can be the making of an actress—accepting that one is everyone and no one. I’ve learned from a brother that, in the end, if you’re colored, your fame makes not the slightest difference in terms of how you are seen or not seen by the world, let alone yourself.

  A friend who edits books told me this story: Once, the music impresario Quincy Jones was running around pitching his life story to a bunch of publishers. His agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, was in tow. So Quincy is pitching his life story to a roomful of editors, and Swifty interrupts and says, “Why don’t you tell that other story about your life, Sidney?” Meaning Poitier. Nothing’s changed much, certainly when it comes to the Negro in Hollywood. If you’re colored, you have to handle things for yourself.

  That’s what I did. I became myself when I began to tell directors that I couldn’t agree with what was being made of me, since I knew they didn’t know what to make of me. So let’s start somewhere else, I’d suggest to these directors, like with the text, a little improvisation, some sense-memory exercises about a brother. As a result of my candor, I worked less in front of the camera, even less onstage, but when I did, I felt my pores open up when I missed my mark. I was alive to myself. Resisting the direction I needed, I became the character I needed to be—for myself.

  Maybe it’s better as a joke, though: the body dragging itself through experiences directed by a reality not your own. If Richard’s life shows you anything, it’s how white people can make you crazy by saying what you are: too fat, too lazy, too loving, too dangerous, too close, too political, too silent, too druggy, too talkative, too generous, too loud, too drunk, too strong, too sensitive, too cruel. That’s what Richard’s success is based on, a little bit if not a great deal: recounting what the body has seen and felt when certain people can’t see or feel you at all.

  The trouble with Richard, though, is that he became rich and powerful doing what he did, which contradicts the beauty he found in his nothingness. If you become well-known because of an act of invisibility, you’re fucked, because your fame makes you part of the quotidian. You can’t really make theater out of these contradictions unless you’re an actor, which Richard never was. An actor can sort all of that out and make it clear to an audience just where the confusion begins and ends. Richard just lived in it—all colored and crazy. Add to that earning a lot of money for being yourself, which makes no sense to the colored soul at all—money as a reward for being nothing?—and you end up a nasty joke, a jogging matchstick. You know how it goes: What does this lit matchstick look like, standing upright and then moving across the counter? Richard Pryor jogging.

  In actual fact, no one can handle vast quantities of power or fame. Richard couldn’t. It nearly burned him alive. He was always looking for something bigger than himself to tell him what to do. We all are. Being an actress is one of the few jobs on earth that tells the truth about this need that exists in humans—to be told what to do. When we were little, Richard looked to me for that—I always thought that was because I was his older sister. But that’s not it, not entirely. You can see it in children and their need to be disciplined. Children stamp on flowers to show the blooms who’s stronger, and then look to their parents for their punishment. It’s the limits we impose on children that help them define who they are.

  Sometimes you can find direction in a marriage. At least, that’s what Fran was hoping for. In order to become herself, or rather, be herself, Fran wanted to be told what to do so she could hate it. She was like that lyric in the song: “You know I do it better when I’m being opposed.” She was my kind of actress.

  For Fran, a day was not a day unless there was a little killing in it, some rip-offs of the jack-offs. In the last years of her brief marriage to Gary—1989 to 1991—she worked as an operator for the phone company, but she partied more than she showed up for work. Mostly she liked to stay at home, snorting whatever and spitting invectives at her kid, whom she would sometimes forget to feed.

  Sitting in the split-level house Gary had bought for her a few years into their marriage (she had covered nearly all the floors in blue shag carpeting), she wanted something to happen—a firm hand across her face, say. Something more directly cruel than the bullshit Gary gave her, something to make their life together seem more real, beat-up, tangible. Gary di
d hit her once or twice when she filled the house with drug trash, but what was that to her when she knew his heart wasn’t in it? He’d never go out into the world and do a little killing himself. And what kind of husband was that? She would have licked his stank fingers if there were little murders on the tips of them.

  The truth of the matter is, Gary was fixed in his dual roles, as a success and as an underdog. He worked hard and did well not only because he wanted to take care of his wife and mother, but because he wanted to wrest from those women all the love they had stored up—the love that he perceived the world didn’t want. It never occurred to him that some colored women can be foul, too, being human.

  Think back to Richard and our Mama. Not our mother, who barely raised us, but our grandmother, who did. She was as ugly as red mud and as tall as a pile of buffalo dung. Richard attached love to that pile; he kept throwing himself onto it, never mind the filth. Gary was like that with any colored person who came his way, especially women, even though the people who knew him made him feel embarrassed by what his love could yield: not love in return, but competition. Generally speaking, people felt morally diminished by his concern—his goodness—and so, fearing that they could not better it, or even live up to it, were compelled to behave as badly as possible in his presence, borrowing money they could never repay, going after girls Gary found attractive, telling him lies, asking for help they didn’t need, telling him he was an ass loaded with books, trashing his secrets. We were a quartet, Gary and Fran and Richard and I.