25
WHEN RODNEY KING GOT BEAT DOWN LIVE AND in color, I was seventeen. That’s when I started to truly know the power of an image. The tape was everywhere. Everywhere. Mama and Sheila and I didn’t pay too much attention to the news, but you didn’t have to watch the news to see that tape. It was the air we breathed that spring.
The night of the verdict, Mama got home after I did. I was sitting in front of the TV. I couldn’t look away, and I was too scared to move until she came in. As she walked through the door, I jumped up and hugged her like I hadn’t since I was little. “Mama, none of those cops got found guilty and people are burning up South Central.” I was crying.
“What?”
“Come see.” She sat next to me and we watched for a while, the words stricken out of us. “Damn,” she finally said. “Damn. I guess them old folks back home were right.”
“Right about what?”
“Oh, nothing you need to worry about. Something that happened in Tulsa a million years ago. Damn.” She turned back to the TV. The video played silently again. Again. “Mama, didn’t the jury see this?”
“Sure they did, Tam.”
“Well, then how could they decide what they did?”
“I don’t know, Tam. White people . . .” She trailed off. “White people always funny about this stuff. They always stick together. Can’t trust ’em, even when you think times have changed. That’s . . . that’s what my daddy always said.” I knew she was truly rattled then. She hadn’t mentioned her father since that long-ago time when we didn’t go to his funeral.
She didn’t make me go to bed that night. There’d be no school in the morning. When Sheila came home she sat right down without a word next to us in front of the television. We watched the city burn until night eased toward day. Then we fell asleep like puppies, curled up uncomfortably on the sofa, the television’s colored lights playing restlessly across our faces.
I was the first to wake up. There was a slight smell of smoke in the room, not just Mama and Sheila’s old cigs but the smell of buildings burning. My first thought, unbidden, was, I should go down there with my camera. I know, I know, I was only seventeen—but that’s the kind of seventeen-year-old I was. Mama woke up, rubbing her eyes and pushing at her hair, just a minute after I did. “Tam? Tam, baby, you all right?”
“Yeah, Mama. I’m all right. We all musta fell asleep right here.”
She smiled ruefully. “Yeah, I guess we did. Well, I’m glad we were all together.”
“Yeah.” I paused. “Listen, Mama. I want to go down there. Down to South Central and film some of it. I think somebody ought to. Can I take the car?”
Her eyes got huge. “What?”
“Can I take the car? It’s good practice to film something like this, Mama. I’ll be careful.”
“Little girl, you have truly lost your mind if you think I’m gonna let my seventeen-year-old daughter go get shot at by a bunch of crazy niggers while she carries around her little camera. You have truly lost your mind.” She paused, and then her indignation reared up again. “You see they ain’t too discriminating who they beating up. No, honey, your little narrow butt is staying right here today. Out your goddamn mind.” She started digging around in her bag for a cigarette.
“Mama—”
“Not another word. Look. I know . . . people get killed in shit like this. They told me about it. My mama and daddy . . . well, not them . . . but in town, everybody knew. I used to go to the movies in a theater that was built up from where one got burnt to the ground in some shit like this. No. That’s the end of it.” When Sheila woke up a few minutes later, we weren’t speaking.
I was furious. But I knew she had me beat. I could have tried to take the car keys or something, but really, I was scared. There was one little corner of me that was relieved. Finally she was acting like she cared what I did. But after that long day of watching the city burn, I brought my camera out from under my bed where I kept it and I held it and I thought. I thought about what pictures could do. What they could do if you weren’t afraid.
When I told my mother how film school worked, I thought she’d have a stroke. “You pay?” she screamed. “You pay all that money to go there and then you have to pay for everything on top of that? You are out your goddamn mind.” I never did tell her that thesis films can run upwards of $50,000. I never did tell her that if you ain’t got the money, you have to get your friends to crew for you and actors to work for free and eat nasty fried chicken and just save money any goddamn way you can.
And on so many days, I wondered if she wasn’t right, if I wasn’t out my goddamn mind. I had gotten through college (nothing fancy, just a community college in LA) on a scholarship and worked shitty jobs for years and years saving up and borrowed a ridiculous amount of money for NYU and there I was.
My third year began after September 11. Even with the city going insane, I could think only of what it would take to finish. I had to finish. The women were dropping off the directing track of the program like flies. Film school was kicking their asses. They were fleeing to producing, screenwriting, anything but directing. There were hardly any black people left either. Just white-boy filmmakers. They were so sure, so unbelievably sure that the way they understood the world was the way the world was. They were very loud. I had to be small and still and solid just to bear it.
When Colin came in to film production class the first day, we hardly could have missed each other—we were two flies in a sugar bowl, as my mother might have said. He was the last student to come in, and he stood at the door as though he were looking for something special, some particular seat. Then he saw me and came and sat right down. He had dreadlocks the color of wet sand and a scattering of freckles across his nose. “Anybody sitting here?” he asked.
“No.” I was smiling and thinking that his eyebrows were oddly light against his medium-brown skin.
“Then I guess I am.” He swung his book onto the desk next to mine and made himself at home, smiling back at me. I thought about what it might feel like to kiss him and have my tongue tease the little gap between his front teeth. I wondered how we’d managed not to meet each other before. He spoke: “I’m Colin Walsh. Which Imitation of Life do you like better? The Stahl or the Sirk?”
I laughed and said, “I’m Tamara Edwards and I love the Sirk. But I’ve only read about the other. I’m from LA. I’ve haven’t had a chance to go to Yale and check out the Stahl.”
A slight smile crossed his lips. I’d passed the test. “Well, the Sirk’s better anyway. My dad teaches at Yale. He got me into the library so I’ve seen the other one. Fredi Washington’s all right, but . . . you gotta give it up for Doug. That boy was all that and a bag of chips.”
“Sho’ you right,” I said. We grinned at each other foolishly. I didn’t think he was arrogant. I don’t know why.
Then as the professor came in, Colin turned suddenly stern. His eyes were the color of rocks underwater. “Have coffee with me after class.” It wasn’t a question. So I did.
That coffee was the first of a thousand others we had in a thousand coffee shops. All we did for weeks was talk movies, though I never did stop looking at that little gap in his teeth. We talked about Spike Lee and Oscar Micheaux and Dorothy Dandridge and Charlie Kaufman and Martin Scorsese and Jane Campion and Robert Altman and Todd Haynes and Douglas Sirk and what was playing on Fourteenth Street. We talked about the merits of documentary versus narrative. When we weren’t talking we were at the movies and then talking about the movies we went to. One night, we had just come out of Citizen Kane at the Film Forum and we were sitting at the bar at Brothers, nursing beers and arguing good-naturedly about the similarities of the opening shots in Rebecca and Citizen Kane. Our thighs touched under the bar and neither of us moved away. I decided not to acknowledge it. Not to move away, but not to acknowledge it. He was talking and I was watching him talk, his voice velvet in my ear, his leg warm against mine, when all of a sudden he was kissing me and I was free to i
nch my tongue into that little space I’d been eyeing for so long. My hand slid to the back of his neck, his hand slid gently up my back under my shirt—not too far, but enough so that I could feel him touching my skin. After a while, we stopped and looked at each other, our legs entangled. “I was kind of hoping you’d do that first,” he said. “I mean it’s not the traditional way, but I don’t know . . . I thought you might.”
“I don’t start stuff like that,” I said. “Too risky.”
“Do you finish things like that?”
“I try to.” I traced his lower lip with my finger. I want to finish this, I thought. But I couldn’t say it.
“Come home with me.” I leaned into him again, feeling dizzy that someone so beautiful wanted me. We kissed for a long time. Colin finally said, “Let’s get out of here.” And we blew a ridiculous amount of money on a cab back to Brooklyn and made out the whole way, his hand finally, finally sliding under my bra so that I thought I might cry, and when we got in the house it was almost like a movie. He backed me up against the big Super Fly poster on his door and undid my pants and kissed me and did things with his hands until I couldn’t stand it anymore and was grabbing at him and saying his name over and over and that’s when I knew. This was someone I might love, someone who might let me love him. I was petrified.
After a while, we eased up from the floor, laughing, and he took my hand and led me into his room. His bed was made with a beautiful mud print quilt. The room was hung with framed movie posters (one of them from Coffy, which made me think of my mother) and smelled faintly of incense. On the bookcase were a clutter of photographs of him with his smiling brownskinned family. He had sepia and faded black-and-white photos of relatives from way back too. “Who’re all these people?” I said, walking over to the bookcase and picking up a picture of him with a prosperous-looking couple, who must have been his parents. Melted-down candles sat in front of the photos.
“The clan.” He smiled and reached to turn down the sheets. “Going all the way back. I like to keep them around.”
I was silent. The only photo in my room was a still from Sweet Smell of Success. No clan. No history. And I never made my bed. Colin came over and embraced me from behind. My stomach hit my shoes. This wasn’t a moment to talk about our families. He kissed me, hard and longingly. I had never been so happy. Isn’t that corny? It was the happiest moment of my life.
26
TAMARA KEPT HER HAIR IN A SHORT, BUSINESSLIKE natural. She got it cut at a barbershop. She didn’t talk much. And she hated, hated, hated it, when Colin asked her questions. Especially about her family. She had this way of just disappearing. He saw it whenever he asked her a question she didn’t want to answer or asked her to do something she didn’t want to do, like meet his mother or father. She’d close her mouth, that pretty full mouth, and her eyes would grow black and distant and she’d stuff her hands in the front pockets of her jeans and she’d turn into a wall. Colin never understood what she was running from. But he ran after her. He’d never met a woman who knew more about film. After he was with her for a while, though, he didn’t care about that so much. He loved her mind; she was always making connections that startled and pleased him. He loved to stand behind her in movie lines and breathe her in, the softly sweaty odor of her. He loved to make her laugh. He always felt as though he’d won a prize when he succeeded. He loved her. But he didn’t tell her for the longest time. He thought she might run away for good after that.
She didn’t have the money to do what she was doing. She was getting most of her degree on sheer will and extensive loans. He loved that about her too—she was so damn stubborn. They were in bed at his apartment, talking about their movies, which was all they ever talked about anymore. At least they were talking. When he found out about her mother a week ago, he thought she was going to dump him. It wasn’t even something to be ashamed of. But she was so mad. He found out when he came home one night with the DVD of Coffy. He knew it was crappy filmmaking, but he loved its energy—and he didn’t mind Pam Grier too much either. Tam came over and they made dinner. Afterward he held the DVD up to her, grinning. “I ain’t seen this in years,” he said. “Let’s check it out tonight.” He thought he saw her stiffen, saw her eyes go briefly black, but she didn’t say anything, just sat down on the couch, ready. The silence roared from her side of the couch until it was halfway over. He thought maybe she was offended because it was so sexist, but then the fight scene came on and she said, “That’s my mother.”
Colin laughed and turned toward Tamara. He didn’t understand what she was saying for a minute. “Right. Pam Grier’s your mother and you never told me.”
“No, not her. The third girl from the left. That’s my mother.” Tam’s face was coated with tears. He’d never ever seen her cry before. He wanted to reach out and rest his hand on the back of her neck, but something told him not to.
“What?” he said.
“That’s my mother. She was in a lot of these movies.”
Colin pressed a button and froze Pam’s image in midspeech. “Are you kidding?”
“No.”
He wanted to comfort her, to tell her she didn’t have to be afraid of him. But she also looked so angry that he didn’t want to move closer unexpectedly. And he had the undeniable impulse to go back a few frames and see the naked image of his girlfriend’s mother in a movie. The impulse to ask a million questions. He couldn’t help it. So what he said came out all wrong. “Really. Really? That is cool. Very cool.”
“You think so, huh?”
“Yeah. I mean, think of what she saw. Think of what she did. Did she ever talk to you about it? About working in the movies back then?”
“No, not much.”
“She doesn’t like to talk about it, huh?” The image on the DVD was frozen and silent. It was very loud. “You should ask her. You might want to know sometime.”
“Maybe.”
He was silent a moment. Then he took her hand reflectively, looked down at it for a moment. “What other movies was she in?” he said.
He could have bitten his tongue off as soon as the words left his mouth. The look on her face hit him like a kick in the chest. She yanked her hand back and stood up. “You know, that’s why I never told you. Because I knew you’d just want to know all about her. And it would be like she was practically living with us. I came to New York so I wouldn’t be living with her. I . . .” She ran out of the room. Colin followed her. They talked for a while that night. She cried a lot but didn’t say anything he understood. He didn’t see what she had to be ashamed of, or angry about. He loved her. He wanted to know where she came from. And she wouldn’t tell him.
They made up. They didn’t have time to keep fighting anyway. That was the other thing between them; the money and the time. They never talked about it. He was able to get enough money from his parents to hire a professional cinematographer. And she couldn’t. She didn’t have anyone to shoot for her. She had grubbed every grant possible, begged for every loan imaginable. Nothing had come through. She could not afford a crew. They were talking about it again on this night. Colin knew she was upset, even though her eyes were resolutely dry. He sometimes had the feeling that she had decided not to cry in front of him anymore since that awful evening with Coffy.
They were silent for a long time. But finally, he thought of how he could reach her, how he could love her. “I’ll do it,” he said.
“What?”
“I’ll shoot your movie. Mine’s just about wrapped. I can edit at night. I want to help you.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“But you know how people fight when they do this together. Even friends.”
“We’ll work it out.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.” He stopped. “I love you.”
She lifted her head and looked at him. “Thanks,” she said. They kissed. He hoped she would say something more. She didn’t. They started shooting two days later.
Colin was surprised by how Tam acted on the set. She was so stubborn in class and in life, he’d thought she’d be the same way on her film. But she was petrified—you could smell it on her. He imagined that if he placed his hand on her heart while she was directing, he’d feel it beating like a hummingbird’s. Sometimes he saw her making mistakes, doing things that were too expensive or weren’t going to come out or mishandling the actors. But he didn’t dare say anything. After the Coffy thing and a few days of shooting, he knew his safest course was to keep his head down and his camera up. She didn’t even ask him to come over anymore at night. And while he still loved to watch her hands move as she worked, he found himself reluctant to push. She was so scared, and he couldn’t help her. One time, when she left her backpack open at his feet as she went to go talk to the actors he spied an old battered copy of Spike Lee’s Gotta Have It in there. He had to swallow hard and wipe quickly at his eyes with the backs of his hands. But there was no time for crying, or making love, or talking about anything. They were losing the light and he wasn’t even done setting up. He ran through his check of the lenses very quickly. The magic hour was almost over.
Third Girl from the Left Page 20