Busted in New York and Other Essays

by Darryl Pinckney

  Facing us, on every newspaper kiosk on that wide, tree-shaded boulevard, were photographs of fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts being reviled and spat upon by the mob as she was making her way to school in Charlotte, North Carolina. There was unutterable pride, tension, and anguish in that girl’s face as she approached the halls of learning, with history, jeering, at her back.

  It made me furious, it filled me with both hatred and pity, and it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her!… It was on that bright afternoon that I knew I was leaving France. I could, simply, no longer sit around in Paris discussing the Algerian and the black American problem. Everybody else was paying their dues, and it was time I went home and paid mine.

  Meanwhile, Jackson is speaking over those photographs of Dorothy Counts. We get to look into her face and wonder just how light-skinned she was, but we also can see clearly the faces of the white boys taunting her.

  A few of the images may be familiar from other documentaries: deputies prodding King and Abernathy onto the pavement with batons, probably in Selma; a black man shoved up against a wall in Watts in 1965 gets in a blow at a surprised cop and is answered by three or four wildly swinging batons; they are swinging again in 1992, beating Rodney King, and not just for a few seconds of video either. Then there is Ferguson, Missouri. I Am Not Your Negro climaxes in what are probably mug shots of the Scottsboro Boys from 1931 that lead into recent images of police struggling with black men and assaulting black women. At another point, the faces and names of recent child victims of police killings fade in and out.

  But one of the strongest features of Peck’s film is how much we see of ordinary white people and their violent resistance to integration in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of the film, we see howling young white males, some mere boys, carrying signs painted with swastikas and tracking demonstrators; the National Guard escorting black schoolchildren through the gauntlet of angry faces in Little Rock. One of the most shocking sequences shows white men attacking what must be lunch-counter sit-in protesters. It is color footage from 1960 or 1961. The violence has not been choreographed. It is sudden and raw. The hatred of black people is out there. The unguarded face of the South contrasts with images that play when Jackson is reading what Baldwin has to say about the myths and ignorance reinforced by American cinema.

  The Devil Finds Work is a memoir of Baldwin’s childhood and youth in the form of his reflections on films that made an impression on him or that express something about how dangerous American innocence is when it comes to race. Jackson’s voice-over: “I am about seven. I am with my mother, or my aunt. The movie is Dance, Fools, Dance.” Suddenly, there she is, dancing away with her long legs in that 1931 film:

  I was aware that Joan Crawford was a white lady. Yet, I remember being sent to the store sometime later, and a colored woman, who, to me, looked exactly like Joan Crawford, was buying something. She was so incredibly beautiful … and looked down at me with so beautiful a smile that I was not even embarrassed. Which was rare for me.

  About his schoolteacher, Orilla Miller, as Baldwin recalled her in The Devil Finds Work:

  She gave me books to read and talked to me about the books, and about the world: about Spain, for example, and Ethiopia, and Italy, and the German Third Reich; and took me to see plays and films, plays and films to which no one else would have dreamed of taking a ten-year-old boy.… It is certainly partly because of her … that I never really managed to hate white people—though, God knows, I have often wished to murder more than one or two.…

  From Miss Miller, therefore, I began to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason, and I began to try to locate and understand the reason. She, too, anyway, was treated like a nigger, especially by the cops, and she had no love for landlords.

  While we have been listening to Samuel Jackson, among the images we have also been watching are black-and-white photographs of black children at their school desks; a young Haile Selassie and his court; German children waving Nazi flags; film of Nazi book burnings; and lastly a still photograph of Miss Miller herself:

  It is not entirely true that no one from the world I knew had yet made an appearance on the American screen: there were, for example, Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best and Manton Moreland, all of whom, rightly or wrongly, I loathed. It seemed to me that they lied about the world I knew, and debased it, and certainly I did not know anybody like them—as far as I could tell.…

  Yet, I had no reservations at all concerning the terror of the black janitor in They Won’t Forget. I think that it was a black actor named Clinton Rosewood who played this part, and he looked a little like my father. He is terrified because a young white girl, in this small Southern town, has been raped and murdered, and her body has been found on the premises of which he is the janitor.… The role of the janitor is small, yet the man’s face hangs in my memory until today.

  And there is the scene of the janitor in his cell, on his bunk, filmed from above, the white faces looking down at him not visible to the audience. He cringes, sweats, and begs, a scene followed by footage from a silent film of 1927, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Baldwin’s words that because Uncle Tom refused to take vengeance, he was no hero to him as a boy:

  In the case of the American Negro, from the moment you are born every stick and stone, every face, is white. Since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6 or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.

  The photographs of the massacre at Wounded Knee are a surprise when they turn up.

  Before Peck’s film ends, Richard Widmark will scream, “Nigger, nigger, nigger” in a clip from No Way Out (1950), a radical movie for its time, also starring Sidney Poitier, whom Baldwin does not blame for the ridiculousness of the films The Defiant Ones (1958), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), or In the Heat of the Night (1967). A scene from another Poitier film, A Raisin in the Sun (1961), moves into Baldwin’s memoir of the play’s author, Lorraine Hansberry, and one of the last times he saw her on her feet, at a historic confrontation with Robert Kennedy, in June 1963. After a frosty farewell to the attorney general, Hansberry walked out of the meeting. Hansberry was thirty-four years old when she died of cancer. Baldwin remembers how young everyone was in those days, even Bobby Kennedy.

  The use of clips is clever, and they in themselves are often marvelous. We can hear a serious point being made about, say, the American idea of democracy as material abundance, and the screen will fill with something like a mad dance at a picnic from the 1957 musical The Pajama Game. Or Doris Day could be singing along after some sharp analysis concerning America’s infantilism. The clips complement Baldwin’s way of moving from paradox to paradox.

  But American identity and its consequences are not just commented on through Hollywood cliché. Part of what makes Peck’s film visually captivating is how unexpected some of his images are: a Department of Commerce film from the 1950s reminding retailers not to neglect the lucrative market of a new Negro middle class is somewhat bizarre, for example. Color footage of hangar-size supermarkets of the 1950s, of white boys as well as white girls at poolside beauty pageants—a world made possible, Baldwin would say, by the blacks we see working in the cotton fields and in the photographs of the lynched. Whites want to see the happy darkies of their food and appliance magazine and television ads, including Godfrey Cambridge singing the Chiquita banana song.

  Some of the most moving footage in the film captures Baldwin in debate with William F. Buckley Jr. at Cambridge University in 1965. Peck leaves out Buckley’s side entirely. We don’t even see his face. Peck takes what he needs—just Baldwin speaking to the motion before the house: “Is the American Dream at the Expense of the American Neg
ro?” It is footage that Peck returns to in his film, ending with the whole Cambridge Union Society on its feet for a startled Baldwin. Those white British students had probably never heard anyone say such things before. “What has happened to white Southerners is much worse than what has happened to Negroes there.”

  What I Am Not Your Negro cannot do is tell us much about Baldwin’s relationship to Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, or Martin Luther King Jr., because Baldwin couldn’t either, really. He met them, interviewed them, supported them, appeared with them, and loved them, he said. But he didn’t really know them, much as he identified with them, especially after their deaths. Baldwin was probably closer in temperament to Malcolm X, another son of the Harlem streets and renegade from his church, than he was to King.

  Evers, an officer of the NAACP in Mississippi, where he was investigating the murder of a black man in his county, was killed in 1963. “Then the music stopped, and a voice announced that Medgar Evers had been shot to death in the carport of his home, and his wife and children had seen that big man fall.” Malcolm X was killed in 1965. “The headwaiter came and said there was a phone call for me.” King was killed in 1968. “The phone had been brought out to the pool, and now it rang.” The essay No Name in the Street is Baldwin’s attempt to describe, maybe even to cope with, his grief following the chances that were lost to the country after so many murders and so much political violence.

  Many people had become more militant in the years between the March on Washington in 1963 and H. Rap Brown’s assertion in 1967 that violence was as American as cherry pie. I Am Not Your Negro reminds us of King’s opposition to the Vietnam War. Baldwin sometimes talked about the thin line between being an actor and a witness. As a survivor, he became a kind of keeper of the flame himself, but at a cost. He wrote, “‘Vile as I am,’ states one of the characters in Dostoevski’s The Idiot, ‘I don’t believe in the wagons that bring bread to humanity.’” It’s interesting that Peck has assembled his script not from the early essays—“classic” Baldwin, so to speak—but mostly from the spleen of Baldwin’s late work and articles that were once dismissed. You didn’t have to be a Marxist or a black cultural nationalist to be radical. Peck’s film, based on one of Baldwin’s unrealized works, is a kind of tone poem to a freedom movement not yet finished.

  Twenty-five years ago, when Spike Lee released his film Malcolm X, which was based, in part, on the screenplay Baldwin had given up on around the time King was killed, articles appeared expressing worry that the film might incite black youth to violence. But Black Lives Matter can do without the macho. It represents a generation in agreement with Baldwin when he said that he no longer believed in the lies of pretended humanism. Activists today start where he ended up. At the core of his message was always the assertion that there was no Negro problem; there was the problem of white people not being able to see themselves, to take responsibility for their history, and to ask themselves why they needed to invent “the nigger.” “I am not a nigger. I am a man,” Baldwin says toward the end of the film, his cigarette smoke escaping.

  2017

  MOON OVER MIAMI

  The Oscar-winning film Moonlight (2016) gives an impression throughout of being tinged with the color blue. Already in the beginning, after a blue car, its blue interior, white T-shirt and pillow tinted blue by morning light, blue sneaker soles, and blue plastic trash cans at the beach, comes an extraordinary scene of a black man holding a black boy’s body on top of the ocean, the camera lowered until it is fractionally submerged, enclosing the baptism-by-swimming-lesson in pale sky and rolling water.

  “So your name is Blue?” the boy, Little, asks after he has learned that he can be free in the waves. “Naw,” Juan, his savior, answers. He has told the troubled boy that black people are everywhere, that we were the first people on this planet. He is from Cuba, where there are also black people, though you wouldn’t know it—to look at the Cubans in Miami, he means. Juan tells Little that he used to be a wild little shorty like him, running around with no shoes when the moon was out. An old woman saw him “cutting a fool”—it’s not always possible to get what he’s saying—and told him that in the moonlight “black boys look blue.”

  Moonlight is a love story in a place where we don’t usually find a gay one, and at the same time it’s very different from other black films set in the ’hood, mostly because of what it doesn’t focus on. We don’t hear gunfire, and there is no pounding soundtrack, just as it has no bohemian artists or middle-class triumphalism about family. It’s about a homo thug from that street world of the fatherless where masculine pride is supposedly all and tests of manhood are brutal. But Moonlight isn’t trying to be realistic about anything, even as it confounds what we expect from stories about young black men, starting with the film’s texture, its intricate soundtrack, tantric pace, and beauty frame by frame.

  An elliptical growing-up-lonely story, the film concentrates on three stages in a gay man’s life—the chapter titles say, “i. Little,” “ii. Chiron,” “iii. Black”—each episode separated by a decade or so. The film begins maybe in the early 1990s, when Little is a bullied, neglected schoolboy. Juan, a drug boss, rescues him from a boarded-up apartment in a block of “dope holes.” A solitary kid tormented between school and a home where he is not wanted is drawn to a protective stranger. But even as a refuge from Little’s crack-addicted mother, the nobility of surrogate fatherhood doesn’t overcome what could be called modern puritanical society’s disquiet at the homoerotic scene of a dark-skinned black man cradling his miniature in the vast blue.

  In Jenkins’s film, the homoerotic moves the story, including the quickly established bond between the physically powerful man and the vulnerable child. “What’s a faggot?” “A word used to make gay people feel bad,” Juan answers. And it might say more about us than it does about the film that we are surprised that a gangsta character gives a child a thoughtful explanation. Or maybe Juan is touched by the boy’s suffering when he asks, “Am I a faggot?” After all, we know nothing about Juan other than what we have seen. His girlfriend is gorgeous. He tells Little that it’s okay to be gay, he’ll know when he knows, and he doesn’t have to know now, but he can’t let anyone call him “a faggot,” in the same spirit as teaching him not to sit with his back to a door—a call to Little’s sense of self-preservation.

  The film may not depict the territorial violence of the crack trade, but it does not shy away from showing the effects over time of both the drug epidemic and the war on drugs in a black community such as Liberty City, in northeast Miami. When we first see Little’s mother, she is wearing a badge and maybe the uniform of a low-level health care worker. She goes downhill fast. Little comes home to find that the TV has vanished. In one scene of no dialogue, we see him pour into a tub a pot of water he has heated on the stove. He takes a bath in dishwashing liquid. He must like the suds and ignores the bar of soap. In another silent scene, we don’t hear what his mother—played with grit by Naomie Harris—is screaming at him; we only see her terrible face and his expression of bottomless misery.

  But the film’s originality isn’t just in what Jenkins turns the volume way down on. It’s what he makes room for. Little has a cute buddy, Kevin, who tries to look out for him. Kevin advises him that in order to get people to stop picking on him, it is not enough not to be soft; he has to show them that he isn’t. Kevin also vouches for him when Little happens on Kevin with four other boys engaged in a schoolyard rite: comparing dicks. We see Little dancing seriously by himself among other girls and boys, all dressed alike, in some school exercise. But on the playing field he is the boy outside the scrum, the boy backing away from the rag ball.

  In the second episode, “Chiron,” the boy and his mother live in a different, much more untidy apartment, and he can’t defend her reputation as the crackhead whore in the street. She blackmails him out of the money Juan’s girlfriend gives him. Juan is dead. We last see him hanging his head in shame after Little has walked out because Juan admi
tted that he sold drugs to people like his mother. We assume his death was drug-related, though nothing of the kind is suggested in the film. We know from his girlfriend that he and Little remained close, after all, and it seems clear that he didn’t put the boy to work for him.

  Little is by now in high school, still bullied but valiantly insisting on his given name, Chiron. Kevin is still cute. He gets detention for having sex with a girl in a stairwell, a session he describes to Chiron in raunchy, turned-on slang. Chiron has a wet dream about Kevin banging a girl doggy-style at the beach. “You all right, Black?” Kevin turns and smiles at him in the dream. It is Kevin who gives Chiron the nickname “Black.” One night when he himself has fled to the beach, Chiron meets Kevin; they share a blunt, have sympathetic but awkward conversation: “You cry?” “It makes me want to.” The kiss is tender. Kevin undoes Chiron’s belt and gives him a hand job, then wipes his palm in the sand. He doesn’t ask for anything reciprocal. Or what he needed was a chance to heal or at least comfort someone else as lonely as he was. Kevin drives Chiron home, and they part with a democratic handshake.

  But the next day he has to beat the shit out of Chiron, or the pack will beat the shit out of him. Jenkins is all too good at indicating what a futile place the classroom has become at this income level, however prepared the teacher is to explain the structure of DNA. Chiron soaks his face in a sink of ice water, and when he goes back to school rather satisfyingly clobbers the instigator of the beating with a chair. He looks out at Kevin from the squad car about to take him off to the urban black youth’s fate of being sucked into the penal system. The sounds we hear are those of an orchestra tuning up.

  Kevin, the love Chiron seeks and finds, the boy who had the imagination to show him physical affection, tells him at one point that he got sent up for some stupid shit, the same stupid shit they all got sent up for. Once again we take that to mean a reference to the drug business. Incarceration has taken place entirely offscreen. Yet the film conveys how pervasive the justice system is in black lives.