When we see Chiron next, in the third episode, more or less in the recent past, he is now known as Black and has become, like Juan, a big, intimidating drug dealer, a taciturn man with abs to commit suicide over, in a subdued vintage car. “At some point you got to decide for yourself who you going to be,” Juan told him. “Can’t let nobody make that decision for you.” It’s interesting that as much of an outcast as Chiron is shown to have been when growing up, Jenkins does not make him an arty type. He has no hobbies. In some ways, he seems harder and more detached as a drug boss than Juan was. He lives in Atlanta, gets a call, and agrees to see his mother. She is living and working in a rehab facility; we’re not sure where. She asks for and receives his forgiveness.
Another call turns out to be from Kevin, who has tracked him down. He apologizes for “all the shit what happened.” Both actors can wait out a silence. The camera can just sit and sit on their faces and we are getting a great deal, reading things into their changing expressions. Kevin works as a cook and waiter in a diner in Miami that has a jukebox of oldies. Some dude played a song that made him think of Chiron.
In the very beginning, even before the credits, in the dark, we hear the ocean and then under that a song by the Jamaican Boris Gardiner from the 1970s, “Every Nigger Is a Star,” used in a Blaxploitation film of the period. The song was rediscovered by hip-hop artists in the 1990s and turns out to be playing on the radio of a blue Chevy Impala we see driven by a tough-looking dude. That rough word in a gentle ballad—this sets up the film’s aesthetic, which is to find new relations for contradictory, seemingly incompatible elements, images, or ideas. Jenkins’s unfiltered background buzz has a Robert Altman–like quality, and several scenes play out in the quiet of the ’hood, sirens and dogs far away, or scenes are filled with an ocean breeze. Passages from Mozart’s Laudate Dominum play over a boys’ soccer game, and Nicholas Britell’s score has a classical aura.
The song Kevin ends up playing for Black, his lost love, is a throwback, “Hello Stranger” by Barbara Lewis. It’s all over YouTube now, as are analyses of the film and its codes. “It seems like a mighty long time / Shoo bop, shoo bop, my baby.…” The song has been performed by other singers down through the years, but it would have been an oldie when Kevin and Black were teenagers, if either of them heard it back then. We have no way of knowing. There is no social life in Chiron’s adolescence, only dysfunction. But the nostalgic tune—from black life before the crack plague—uncovers what is between them, because theirs is such an old-fashioned love story. If Black has denied himself, then the love he accepts in the end was worth the wait.
The film has music that belongs to the characters, and music that belongs to the film, to Jenkins’s choices, a reminder that the film is being carefully composed. (You can’t stop thinking how beautifully Jenkins’s black and brown cast photographs against the colors of Florida and his night walls; just as there is much to admire in every actor’s performance in the film.) But one song totally outside Black’s head is most important to the entire enterprise. After he has forgiven his mother, after we have seen Kevin smoking on a dreamy, slow-motion break at work, after Black has woken up to find that he has had a wet dream, at his age, about Kevin, he hits the open road.
We see his car from slightly above, on a straight highway that stretches into the distance. The music we hear is Caetano Veloso singing “Cucurrucucú Paloma,” an homage to love’s loss. The song has been recorded by several artists and been used in a number of films. But if a gay version exists, this is it. Veloso’s performance features in a film by Pedro Almodóvar, whose films about men in love with men were groundbreaking. It is exhilarating, sad as the song is meant to be, because in that moment Moonlight leaps free of genre.
It’s somewhat analogous to a problem that used to come up in black literature. For so long, the struggle was to be able to tell the truth about the black experience, and those writers who felt constrained by such a responsibility seemed to risk committing betrayal of some deep kind. On the other hand, remember the powerful messages offered by, say, Boyz n the Hood (1991) or La Haine (1995) concerning state-sponsored violence and survival. Maybe the theme of the black ghetto as a cauldron of danger took over, like gangsta rap seeming to push aside other styles of hip-hop. How we cheered gun-toting Omar in The Wire, because he was Robin Hood, righteous and gay.
Maybe that point has been made, and a film can use the same elements to somewhat different purposes. It’s no surprise that Moonlight is being interpreted as an exploration of masculine identity, a questioning of whether traditional definitions of manhood are part of the trap for black men. But Black learned that in order to survive, he had to be hard. He tells Kevin, still attractive, that he tried not to think about his early days and rebuilt himself from the ground up.
Kevin, like Black’s mother, expresses disapproval that he is still in the streets. As pleased as he is that scrawny Chiron has exploded into Trevante Rhodes, he is contemptuous of muscular Black’s gold “fronts,”’ hood-status mouth guards. Kevin is comfortable saying that he never was anything, never did anything he really wanted to do; he did what others expected of him. He has a terrible job, but he has his son and none of the worry of his bad days, and he lives near the water, and he feels he has a real life. He never really answers the question of why he called Black out of the blue after so many years, and neither can Black say when Kevin asks him why he just got on the highway and came all the way down there.
Moonlight isn’t saying that you can be sensitive and still a man, gay and still a man. It isn’t reassuring anyone about manhood. Black conformed; he and Kevin both did. Life offered them nothing else. Be hard or die. Meanwhile, they don’t lead double lives; they are not on the down low, hiding the fact that they have sex with men. They aren’t coming out; they are being themselves, or are on their way to becoming complete. They are each other’s escape, redemption. Just as the black struggle in the arts was to get the social truth in print, on the screen, onstage, so, too, for gay liberation the sexual openness counted. Though what will happen between Kevin and Black is not in doubt, the audience is not invited to the consummation. The camera lingers on them looking at each other in Kevin’s kitchen, then on Kevin cradling Black in the shadows. They look like they are in the remains of an embrace.
Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) in order to show a black woman capable of romantic love. Black women had long been slandered and libeled in American popular culture as libidinous, close to the earth in their appetites, and therefore promiscuous. The white novelist Julia Peterkin won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), in which the black heroine has eleven children by seven different men. Hurston wanted to say that her heroine was capable of emotional refinement, aware of her feelings, and precisely in those settings where black life was supposed to be animalistic, too basic for reflection on the self.
In a similar way, Moonlight bestows the capability of feeling romantic love onto a figure that has long been a symbol of predatory sexuality: the big, bad, black male. White fear of violent retribution on the part of the enslaved lies behind the stereotypes of black men as either beasts or clowns, studs who needed to be watched or eunuchs who could be trusted. Black confesses to Kevin that Kevin is the only man who has ever touched him and he’s never really been with anyone. His chastity is the essence of the film’s romance.
2017
VIII
MISS ARETHA FRANKLIN
Aretha Franklin was not among my mother’s Sarah Vaughan albums, or my father’s Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington albums. Soul was something else, just then taking shape. “Think” and “Respect” were anthems of a new edgy blackness, and I remember one of my sisters playing “Baby, Baby, Baby” behind closed doors in tearful darkness after an argument with my mother over why she could not get an Afro. In 1970, Aretha Franklin threatened to pay Angela Davis’s bail, saying she understood how you have to disturb the peace when you can’t get any peace.
Gay liberation was new, too, and at my first gay party ever, in Bloomington, Indiana, a white kid with thick brown hair lip-synched in my direction the intro to one of the slower songs from Aretha Live at Fillmore West: “If you came, and didn’t come with anybody, perhaps you might want to turn around and say to the next person, Hey!” We were making out, and she was conceding “If not now, later, some other time” when the alarm spread that the cops were on the way. I lost the guy. A black woman and I held hands on the scattering street, as if we had not been in that packed house of girls wearing suspenders and boys in bell-bottoms getting together thanks to the Queen of Soul.
The 1970s were going wild in New York City, those pre-AIDS years of strangers and cigarettes. All that time, Aretha Franklin was my late-night and sad-morning soundtrack, a music of desire, consolation, and repair. I’d lift the needle and put it back on the same spot, and then again. Maybe everyone who loves Aretha Franklin feels an intimate relationship with her voice; maybe everyone she moves has a particular period of her career to be passionate about. My Aretha Zone goes from Spirit in the Dark, through Young, Gifted and Black, and Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky), with its coded album illustrations, including a black guy dressed as a matador, a giant syringe sweeping by his cape. I wore out Let Me in Your Life. During a Christmas party in 1974, when our parents were away and we were screaming over bid whist, the last track of that album, “The Masquerade Is Over,” put a stop to the noise. The room folded hands, fell silent, and just listened.
I was into With Everything I Feel in Me. But my alone-with-her zone stops around the recording You. There were the comeback hits of Love All the Hurt Away and Who’s Zoomin’ Who?, then some of her duets with famous pop stars, and the last time I was ever in a gay disco, a quarter of a century ago, in Boston, too old to be there, “A Deeper Love” was on the charts. However, the great voice changed and kept on receding. She had her moments—the gray hat and the intensity at Obama’s first inauguration—but I resisted new recordings by Aretha Franklin, in the way some people find too painful late Billie Holiday or late Maria Callas.
The day I turned sixty-five, I heard that Aretha Franklin had died. The writer and critic Margo Jefferson said she’d expected to feel a certain historical sorrow at Aretha Franklin’s death, but she was surprised by how personally it had touched her. Maybe it’s also a generational thing. I never went to an Aretha Franklin concert, but her voice has gone with me everywhere. The 33⅓ vinyl records long ago turned into cassettes that were then replaced by CDs, which are packed away somewhere, now that everything is on YouTube or Spotify. I never knew much about her. Her vibe was unequivocal: I am not your business. She was our witness, and maybe she didn’t need for us to be hers. She had earned her privacy more than we deserved to know the 411, as we used to say. In interviews, she could display the malapropistic pretentiousness of someone who didn’t get far in school, but the act also held the interviewer at a distance. In that one episode of Murphy Brown, she does not buddy up. Maybe she could act: The Blues Brothers comes to mind. What she couldn’t be was Motown skinny—at least not for very long, so it seemed.
Aretha Franklin had been at the piano, in church, on the road, all her life—gospel singer; club act; Muscle Shoals genius; last stop: legend. When a child star comes of age, beware. Maybe she had a somewhat perverse streak, an imperviousness to advice. She will wear a sleeveless gown at her age if she wants to; she won’t agree to the release of the film of her recording Amazing Grace. She shall not retire.
To sing was to have power, so why not continue? In five decades, she released more than forty albums and just as many compilations and greatest-hits collections and I am forgetting how many live recordings. Maybe there are more treasures in the vaults. She took some songs away from others just by redoing them her way. She left no ballad standing and wrestled even the tenderest lyrics to the floor. And when she was fast, I don’t know what to say about that, except that she stayed in control so that we could lose it.
Many are saying that Aretha Franklin paved the way for a whole generation of women singers, she who famously left the gospel circuit for a secular career. She had a profound influence on rhythm and blues as much as she did on gospel, the magic of her synthesis given enduring expression on Amazing Grace. Released in 1972, it was a two-disc recording of thirteen songs, originally, taken from two nights in a Baptist church in Los Angeles, with the Southern California Community Choir, under the direction of the Reverend James Cleveland, to hold her up in the call-and-response she could get going with her backup. She sang songs from the modern urban gospel tradition, represented by Thomas A. Dorsey, Clara Ward, and Inez Andrews; she sang Rodgers and Hammerstein, Carole King, and Marvin Gaye. The album opens with a deep voice, Reverend Cleveland’s, saying simply, “Miss Aretha Franklin,” and the church is ready to run riot, and so is the band, the bass and the percussion providing the platform she could trust. The film of those gospel sessions in the church has been released since her death. Surrounded by the hot devotion of congregation, choir, and band, she seems so alone, sweating from closed eyes.
She was black America coming of age, the sexual beat set free, the price of love always needing to be paid. She had her own percussive style on piano and organ, but she had a voice like no other in gospel, R & B, pop, soul, or funk. Her range was tremendous, and her top notes reached toward the heavens. It was the sheer beauty of her voice, the tone and quality of it, the gift of it, that told us how acquainted with grief Aretha Franklin was.
2018
NOTES
Foreword
1 A fact perhaps worth offering to any young person who fears excessive reading is somehow “not black.”
2 This simple but important point reminds me of a conversation I had about Black Panther not long ago with a Ghanaian friend while we sat at a table full of Americans. Asked what she thought of it, she smiled and said, “Imagine a film featuring a fictional European country in which some people dress like Kenyans, some like Ghanaians, some like Nigerians, some like Ethiopians, and so on, and then everybody has the same ‘European’ accent somewhere between Spanish, French, German, and Polish.”
Chapter 5
1 See Robert Charles Smith, We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post-Civil Rights Era (State University of New York Press, 1996).
2 On Father’s Day, Obama gave a stern speech about absent fathers and family values at the Apostolic Church of God, a huge Pentecostal church on Chicago’s South Side that is steeped in the strict traditions and powerful music of the black urban sanctified church. His appearance at a church that is more conservative than Trinity perhaps underlines his determination not to have any more trouble on that front.
3 Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Creative Conflict in African American Thought: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Chapter 8
1 See Charles J. Ogletree Jr.’s All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education (W. W. Norton, 2004) and his contributions to Beyond the Rodney King Story: An Investigation of Police Conduct in Minority Communities (Northeastern University Press, 1995).
2 See for example Angela Davis’s excellent Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003).
Chapter 14
1 Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle (Haymarket, 2016).
Chapter 15
1 See Alberto Bachmann, An Encyclopedia of the Violin (1925; Da Capo, 1975), and H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, Volume II, Haydn at Eszterháza, 1766–1790 (Indiana University Press, 1978).
2 The Chevalier J.J.O. de Meude-Monpas, about whom little is known, apart from the fact that he died in Berlin in 1806, may not have been black, after all.
3 The Avenira Foundation in Switzerland issued in 1997 a series of five CDs of Saint-Georges’s work, symphonies, violin concertos, and symphonies concertantes recorded by the Radio
Symphony Orchestra Pilsen, under Frantisek Presiler Jr. In 2005 they released the Apollon Quartet’s recording of six of Saint-Georges’s string quartets. Forlane and Naxos are said to have plans to record all of Saint-Georges’s quartets and his symphonies concertantes for violin. A search on amazon.com tells us that several of the recordings of Saint-Georges made only a few years ago are already out of print, among them the Naxos 2001 recording of three of Saint-Georges’s violin concertos, made by the Cologne Chamber Orchestra, under Helmut Muller-Bruhl, with Takako Nishizaki as soloist.
4 Alain Guédé, in Monsieur de Saint-George: Virtuoso, Swordsman, Revolutionary: A Legendary Life Rediscovered, translated by Gilda M. Roberts (Picador, 2003), says that Saint-George [sic] was born on Guadeloupe in 1739 and that his father was Guillaume-Pierre Tavernier de Boullongne. His power to advance his black son’s career was derived from his family’s intimacy with Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s ruinous mistress. A distant cousin who acted as head of the family became controller general of finances. This would mean that Saint-Georges’s uncle rose to the post of farmer general (or chief tax collector) and his father to treasurer general in the event of war. Banat says this line of paternity is favored by those who want to explain Saint-Georges’s career as a result of patronage and court connections. Odet Denys, in Qui était Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1739–1799)? (Paris: Le Pavillon, 1972), gives 1739 as his year of birth, while Emil F. Smidak’s Joseph Boulogne, called Chevalier de Saint-Georges, translated by John M. Mitchell (Geneva: Avenira Foundation, 1996), favors 1748.
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