Luther is not Luther yet. Just a man coming out a barbershop saying something to me. I answer as I always do men coming out a barbershop saying something to me. Not like I answer sisters or elders or a man coming out of Jameel’s Natural Connection Restaurant, the Neighborhood Art Center, the Institute of the Black World. My answer pitched somewhere between a man coming out a bar and a man coming out a building unknown. The man says something more; “Miz Nap” is in the man. The man becomes someone from the old days in Brooklyn. I focus. The man becomes Luther Owens, war counselor of the Sovian Lords. (Sovian?! You illiterate motherfuckers better get in here to my program least long enough to learn to spell “sovereign,” shit. You must be the same lames that write “pussey” all over the door with an e. Who’s the nappy-head bitch hollering out the window? The new youth counselor for the center. She don’t talk like a social worker. And somebody need to tell her to pull a hot comb through her hair.)
War counselors are remembered. A deep thing with me that goes back to growing up a girl with two older brothers who didn’t know how to throw down. Definition/function of an older brother: he who protects, who punches open space for sister to move through, who beats back trouble so sister can explore and breathe leisurely. Brothers with no heart and no rep for rumbling were as much use to me as my mama’s fox piece with the glass eyes.
We’d move to a new neighborhood when Mama could stand the old one no longer. First thing Mama would do is put gates on the windows and police locks on the door. Second thing she’d do is find a community center. Made more woven looped pot holders, lanyard key chains, and punch-‘n’-lace leather purses in those days. First thing Charlie’d do is get his can of Royal Crown pomade and a stocking cap. Second, visit the girls in the building. First for Harry is to find a park. Second, sit down and bite his fingernails off. First off, I’d check the graffiti and find out whose turf we’re on. Then I’d check out the war counselor and see if he ran to type.
The main thing I’d do was find the girlfriend and drop her. Easy enough, being new, with no she-said-that-you-said-that-I history. Element of surprise. Out of the blue, hands in her face, fists ripping out hair, nails tearing off clothes, a knee in her chest, her back on the sidewalk. Then I’m the war counselor’s lady, not girl, lady they always said. (That ain’t no miscellaneous bitch yawl, that chick got class. Did you see her mama? Lawdy. Whatcha doing hanging round them thugs, you got more class than that. Say, pretty lady, can I see you safely to the subway? These chumps round here liable not to know you Frenchie’s class A spouse. Hey, Big Stockings! Cool it, Shorty. That ain’t no way to talk to that one.)
War counselors were public tough and secret tender. Not at all like the boys mothers pick out from the choir, the grocer’s son, nephew of some down-home chum. They’d sit on your mama’s sofa and mimic respectability. Jump you on the stairs, mug you in the movies, wrassle with you all the way back home, wanna drag you in the bushes. War counselors took you to see their mama for coconut cake under a dish cloth on top of the refrigerator. Take you to their Uncle Leroy’s for fish sammich and Kool Aid and to the watermelon man who’s got lockets and ankle chains and ID bracelet to put both your names on. Take you to the back of the barbershop to play whist with men with mustaches who say ’scuse me when they curse. Take you to the roof to feed the pigeons and lean you against the chimney talking about their plans in life, if drugs don’t get’m or the cops or the next rumble. Take you to their godmother who tells you he writes poetry and use to play the piano ’fore he started running wild in the streets with hoodlums. Take you up and down the block parting the waters so everybody’ll know—whatever age, color, sex, species—that you are officially not to be messed with cause you are the lady of the tumble war counselor of the turrible Bishops Chapmans Imperial Skulls Jolly Stompers Regal Gents.
Mothers’ picks don’t go on the block; they sit on that sofa and talk scary. Talk about working in the post office and becoming a cop and marrying you and living in St. Albans with kids to take to Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. War counselors give you jewelry and perfume and say how fine it is you’re on the honor roll, bring you fried chicken, a jar of lightning bugs, dance on a dime with you and sweat up your hair and make you swear not to forget the folks on the block.
I came back but to a block called Warren Street. Came with memories, with basketballs and leotards, Du Bois and Malcolm posters, equivalency diplomas and my hair au naturel. Hired Luther sight unseen. Saw his name in the school yard, on the police station wall, the Center’s bathrooms, scratched into the piano on the second floor. Saw women reach into their bags at the mention of his name, saw them clutch their tear-gas fountain pens and curse. Saw grown men clench their fists at the sound of “Sovian.” And at “Luther,” get rocks all in their jaws. (Who’s this Luther person? What’s his name doing on payroll and I haven’t even interviewed him yet? We don’t do things that way in this settlement house. Which one is he? He’s an artist. We should hire him when he shows. Artist. Artist. What kind of artist on Warren Street? Artist-type artist. Plus a security artist. When he shows when he shows when he. Goddamn.)
The director of the neighborhood settlement house was Irish and suffering from amnesia, assuming his people ever knew the art of conjuring people up. I doodled, duplicating the extensively embellished signature Luther left all over the neighborhood while the director ranted and raved about policies and procedures and the budget and me keeping my place. A tall, lanky scatter-teeth dude come up to my window asking if I’m the Miz Nap he’s heard about. He ignores the director and challenges me to a game of handball. Not the soft, pink Spauldeen. The mean little hard black ball. Grabbed my gloves from the radiator rung and left the director standing there pondering my “file cabinet”—folders, address cards, program sheets, time sheets, paperback books, plays-in-progress notes, conjuring doodles stuck in the rungs of the radiator. Luther Owens.
“Look here, Miz Nap, I’m trying to get a job at the Butler Street Y. Come talk to the people for me, you always could talk people into things. I was coaching a drill team over on Gordon, but that was temp work for summer. I’m thinking about hooking up with the Shrine of the Black Madonna people, they look after their own, but first I’ve got to find a place to stay.”
We cross the street to the service station for soda. Luther treats me to a pack of peanut butter crackers. Tells me all about reform school, knife wound in leg, 36D Catherine’s babies and the warrant, Brooklyn College SEEK, drugs, jail, Dean Street Doris’s babies and a warrant, some woman dragging him off to Atlanta then dumping him when his car broke down. All the things you tell a social worker friend. I don’t say I am a TV producer now, write plays, wanna make films. Then I’d get his saga all over again packaged for stage and cameras.
“You still painting, Luther?”
The bottle stopping, his lips out like a fish, Luther stock still, staring out beyond the gas pumps to the pigeons fluttering in Big Bethel’s bell tower, remembering the time we took off a hobby store to get him supplies—me, him, Buzzy, 3 6D Catherine and Spyboy the Strong Eater of Just One. (Ain’t this a bitch, a social worker on a heist. You sure you ain’t setting us all up for a bust for a promotion? Awww c’m on, Nap’s alright. I don’t think it’s right. You supposed to set an example for us. I will maybe, tomorrow. Meanwhile, grab that paint set, get them brushes and let’s get out of here.)
“Naaw.” Then takes a drink, holds it in his cheeks for a long time before he swallows. No gasping or sucking for air like I do. And what am I doing here drinking soda, eating white flour crackers out of a machine, being with Luther who’s all about need and you gotta and help me while folks up the block are waiting on me, waiting to make their/our contribution to the acclamation of Auburn, sweet Auburn, that spawned many a musical genius before it fell apart. “Naaw, Miz Nap, I don’t paint anymore.”
“Well I don’t social work anymore.”
“Is that right?” He frowns, blinks, gets a squinting fix on the pigeons through the green
of the Sprite bottle. “That’s a shame,” he says, dropping his shoulders. In much the way the old gent pumping up the tire to our left does when the air seeps out. A metaphor for what has happened to this once vibrant neighborhood.
“But hey, Miz Nap, maybe you could get a job at the Y.”
“I’ve got a job, Luther.”
Stun. Frown. Say what? Big sister. Little mama. Always there. Never off the clock. Not a social worker. What can this mean? Luther thinking with his hands, sloshing soda, licking his knuckles making huhh? sounds.
“How old are you, Luther? And how did the sixties manage to pass you by, you who were in hailing distance of Brooklyn CORE?”
“Thirty-three.”
“I’m thirty-eight. Can you get to that, Youngblood?”
Cars roll over the hose and set off the bell. The old gent’s assistant gets up slowly, gas wanted or just a U-turn? Slumps down again to stare, weary, still waiting for the promised transformation of Auburn. Across the way, the students are streaming out of the church, exchanging numbers, shaking hands, looking pleased with their work. I wish I’d kept the camera crew. Long shot of stairs cluster—an in-the-flesh refutation of the apathetic myth, the movement-is-over propaganda.
“Thirty-eight? No shit?”
“No shit, Luther.”
“I heard that,” he says, turning slowly the way he used to set up for a hook-shot. “I heard that,” his shoulders in a slump, ramming his empty bottle in the rack.
ESSAYS AND CONVERSATIONS
READING THE SIGNS, EMPOWERING THE EYE
Daughters of the Dust and
the Black Independent
Cinema Movement
CULTURAL WORK AIN’T ALL ARTS AND LEISURE
In 1971, Melvin Van Peebles dropped a bomb. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song was not polite. It raged, it screamed, it provoked. Its reverberations were felt throughout the country. In the Black community it was both hailed and denounced for its sexual rawness, its macho hero, and its depiction of the community as down-pressed and in need of rescue. Film buffs vigorously invented language to distinguish the film’s avant-garde techniques and thematics from the retrograde ideology espoused. Was Sweetback a case of Stagolee Meets Fanon or Watermelon Man Plays Bigger Thomas?
Hollywood noted that Van Peebles’s Sweetback was making millions and that the low-budget detective flick Shaft by Gordon Parks, Sr., also released that year, was cleaning up too. By 1972, headlines in the trade papers were echoing those from the twenties—“H’wood Promises the Negro a Better Break.” I could wallpaper the bathroom with Variety headlines from the days of Hallelujah, through the forties accord between Du Bois/NAACP and Hollywood, through the “Blaxplo” era, to this summer’s edition covering Cannes and the release of works by Lee, Rich, Vasquez, Duke, and Singleton and still ask the question: Never mind occasional trends, when is the policy going to change? Some fine works got produced despite the “Blaxplo” formula: revolution equals criminality, militants sell dope and women, the only triumph possible is in a throw-down with Mafia second-stringers and bad-apple cops on the take, the system is eternal.
Nowhere would the debate over Sweetback prove more fruitful to the development of the Black independent sphere than at the UCLA film school. By 1971, a decentering of Hollywood had already taken place there, courtesy of a group of Black students who recognized cinema as a site of struggle. A declaration of independence had been written in the overturning of the film school curriculum and in the formation of student-generated alternatives, such as the Ethno-communications Program and off-campus study groups. The significance of the LA rebellion to the development of the multicultural film phenomena of recent years has been the subject of articles, lectures, interviews, program notes, and informal talks by Sylvia Morales, Renee Tajima, Charlie Burnett, Julie Dash, Moctesuma Esparza, and most especially, most consistently, and most pointedly in connection with the development of Black independent film, by Clyde Taylor. Some of Sweetback’s techniques and procedures were acceptable to the insurgents, but its politics were not. The film, nonetheless, continued to exert an influence as late as 1983, as is observable in Gerima’s Ashes and Embers, in which an embittered and haunted ’Nam vet is continually running, finding respite for a time with folks in the community. The film closes not with “The End,” but “Second Coming,” as in Sweetback.
The Black insurgents at UCLA had a perspective on film very much informed by the movements of the sixties (1954-1972) both in this country and on the Continent. Their views differed markedly with the school’s orientation:
accountability to the community takes precedence over training for an industry that maligns and exploits, trivializes and invisibilizes Black people;
the community, not the classroom, is the appropriate training grounds for producing relevant work;
it is the destiny of our people(s) that concerns us, not self-indulgent assignments about neurotic preoccupations;
our task is to reconstruct cultural memory, not slavishly imitate white models; our task leads us to our own suppressed bodies of literature, lore, and history, not to the “classics” promoted by Eurocentric academia;
students should have access to world film culture—African, Asian, and Latin America cinema—in addition to Hitchcock, Ford, and Renoir.
The off-campus study groups, which included cadres from two periods—Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Ben Caldwell, Alile Sharon Larkin, and Julie Dash—engaged in interrogating conventions of dominant cinema, screening films of socially conscious cinema, and discussing ways to alter previous significations as they relate to Black people. In short, they were committed to developing a film language to respectfully express cultural particularity and Black - thought. The “Watts Films,” as their output was called in the circles I moved in then, began with Gerima’s 1972 Child of Resistance, in homage to Angela Davis, an instructor at UCLA before the state sent her on the run, and his 1974 feature Bush Mama. Both starred Barbara O (then Barbara O. Jones), an actress who hooked up with insurgents early on and has been with the independents since, working as performer, technician, and now as filmmaker (Sweatin a Dream).
In 1977, the insurgents’ thematic foci became discernible: family, women, history, and folklore. Larry Clark’s Passing Through, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, and two shorts by Julie Dash—Diary of an African Nun, based on a short story by Alice Walker, and Four Women, based on the musical composition of Nina Simone—made it a bumper-crop year. The edible metaphor is deliberate, and ironic. Proponents of “Third Cinema” around the world were working then, as now, to advance a cinema that would prove indigestible to the imperialist system that relentlessly promotes a consumerist ethic. And the works of the LA rebels reflected radical cultural/political theories of the day. The Black-community-as-colony theorem, for example, informs Burnett’s portrayal of both the protagonist’s family and Watts. The omnipresence of sirens, cruisers, and cops defines the neighborhood(s) as occupied territory. The family is portrayed as a potential liberation zone. In Bush Mama, the besieged Dorothy comes to consciousness through her daughter’s questioning. While filming, Gerima’s crew became the target of the LAPD, who equate Black men with expensive equipment with criminality; the attempted arrest was filmed, and the documented incident on screen in the fictional feature provides a compelling argument. This treatment of family and setting continued to inform the later films of Gerima, Burnett, and Billy Woodbury.
Alile Sharon Larkin’s treatment of terrain in her 1982 film A Different Image is the same. She uses the landscape (billboards and other ads that commercialize women’s images), though, to highlight the impact sexist representations have on behavior in general (passersby who regard the heroine as a sex object) and on intimate relationships in particular (the heroine’s boyfriend fails to see the connection between racism and sexism). Larkin’s film demonstrates the difficulty in and the necessity for smashing the code, transforming previous significations as they relate to Black women.
Thr
ee shorts by Julie Dash—Diary of an African Nun, Four Women, and the 1982 Illusions—are in line with this agenda. We note four things in them that will culminate in her more elaborate text of 1991, her feature Daughters of the Dust: women’s perspective, women’s validation of women, shared space rather than dominated space (Mignon Dupree in Illusions presses for the inclusion of Native Americans in the movie industry, and she stands in solidarity with Ester, the hidden “voice” of the Euro-American movie star), and glamour/attention to female iconography.
In Daughters of the Dust, the thematics of colonized terrain, family as liberated zone, women as source of value, and history as interpreted by Black people are central. The Peazant family gather for a picnic reunion at Ibo Landing, an area they call “the secret isle.” It is “secret” for two reasons, for the land is both bloody and blessed. A port of entry for the European slaving ships, the Carolina Sea Islands (Port Royal County) were where captured Africans were “seasoned” for servitude. Even after the trade was outlawed, traffickers used the dense and marshy area to hide forbidden cargo. But the difficult terrain was also a haven for both self-emancipated Africans and indigenous peoples, just as the Florida Everglades and the Louisiana bayous were for Seminoles and Africans, and for the Filipinos conscripted by the French to fight proxy wars (French and Indian wars). Dash’s Peazant family is imperiled by rape and lynch-mob murder (whites are ob-skene in DD), but during their reunion picnic they commandeer the space to create a danger-free zone. Music cues and resonating lines of dialogue in DD link the circumstances of the Peazants at the turn of the century to our circumstances today. Occupying the same geographical terrain are both the ghetto, where we are penned up in concentration-camp horror, and the community, wherein we enact daily rituals of group validation in a liberated zone—a global condition throughout the African diaspora, the view informs African cinema.
Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions Page 7
