by Hilton Als
She stole Jimmy Baldwin’s man in ’64. Most likely he handed his man over to her. Subconsciously. He was that way. I knew all about it. She had a role in one of his plays, Blues for Mister Charlie; Jimmy, he of the pop eyes and sense of duty toward the abstraction known as colored people, hadn’t written her much of a part. Or, rather, it was too much of a part: as Yolanda, she was meant to play a slain civil rights leader’s pregnant girlfriend. Yolanda had to deal with a lot of verbal histrionics.
Truth be told, Diana told me, what interested Jimmy more was Cancer Bitch’s part in the drama of his relationship with Lucien. Lucien: Baldwin’s Swiss piece carried over from Paris, where they met in the early nineteen fifties, in the days of cafés and such. And as is the case with most relationships in which queens fall in love with someone so pointedly different—which is to say someone who is essentially straight—Lucien loved Jimmy but didn’t want him. You know the way: after the first seemingly tender kisses, the nose under the armpit, the shock waves of pleasure, toes curled, temples damp with perspiration and the thrill of the mind turning off, blind to any ambition other than the tactile and the dreams it can lead you to—after the first few times of that, Jimmy perceived—it took him a while, as it takes many writers a while to see that truth has nothing to do with their imaginations—that Lucien really wasn’t in it, and could take the romance away from Jimmy. Which he did.
We can not see things on purpose for just so long. Later, Cancer Bitch asked Lucien how he could put his body in a situation that wasn’t exactly what he had in mind, meaning how could he separate his body from his mind, what people laughingly refer to as their desire—how could he put his body, which eventually became her body, in the way of Jimmy’s cock? After all, she didn’t have a cock, or much of one to speak of. And Lucien said, What makes you think any of those things are separate? Jimmy loved me. But then I opened my eyes and there you were. It’s a wonder, the eyes and mind and flesh.
Actually, he didn’t “just” open his eyes. Jimmy introduced them. He had brought Lucien back with him from France with the secret hope that his fame, which was significant for a writer, would somehow keep Lucien in his fantasy of shared love. But it didn’t work.
Blues for Mister Charlie was the old Jimmy exegesis on white on black—the stage was, in fact, divided into “Blacktown” and “White-town”—and Diana Sands, Cancer Bitch, was somewhere in the middle of those towns, bringing to the hackneyed genre Jimmy’s play grew out of—a little Archibald Macleish, a lot of Clifford Odets—her weird naturalism, colored at the very core. No other country could have produced her. The head-snapping. The lies you tell to save your children or get out of mothering them. The little laughter that is like a bulwark against laughing outright in ridiculous white people’s faces because they might kill you if you did. All this Lucien saw in Diana when he attended rehearsals. He saw it without quite understanding what Cancer Bitch meant, because the only colored person he had known up to that point was Jimmy, and Jimmy had lived in France too long, had prettied his Negroness up, thrown L’Air du Temps over the hogmaws.
Jimmy thought he was directing the play—he shouted instructions at the actors over the (white) director’s head, and the director didn’t say shit; Black Power was a new and intimidating language—but really he was directing the path his life would take: to become the child to Lucien and Diana’s parents. Truth to tell, that was all he wanted—someone in his play and someone watching the play he had written involved with each other. His real story was an old one: the terrible father, or rather stepfather—Jimmy never knew his biological father—and the mother whom he adored but resented because he couldn’t save her from Daddy. I say, are all sons born to that? Mother cutting the carrots while Daddy’s twisting her nipples in the dark, telling the little Mrs. that she had to ignore her son, the one who wrote so he’d eventually be acknowledged somehow, somewhere? And what did that mean to the little Mrs., especially with a Daddy Baldwin who couldn’t provide anything but babies, not even the carrots? What kind of Mrs. is that? One who accepts the babies but no food to nourish them with? A stupid one? I say, is this a woman? Didn’t she have any kind of imagination about what a Daddy is supposed to do? Let’s not get into the fact that it was the times, her circumstances, she was black and poor, uneducated, blah, blah, blah. She became a Mrs. so she could have a son who would provide her with something. An imagination. Who could move her into her true glory as a woman.
Is a blow to the imagination the same as a blow to the ego? Maybe to someone like Jimmy it is. To not believe, or have other people not believe, in what he had, made him redouble his own efforts to court Cancer Bitch himself, so Lucien could see how close to a girl Jimmy really was. If she was by his side, Jimmy thought, Lucien wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between them. And whatever Lucien was willing to give up to Diana would be his, too, even just a little bit, which is never a little bit, not really, to someone like Jimmy, who was all heart and theatrical calculation.
Biography explains nothing, but it’s fun to tell these stories.
In an essay titled “Notes on Black Movies,” written in 1972, the film critic Pauline Kael observed:
Peggy Petit, the young heroine of the new film Black Girl, doesn’t have a white girl’s conformation; she’s attractive in a different way. That may not seem so special, but after you’ve seen a lot of black movies, you know how special it is. The action thrillers feature heroes and heroines who are dark-tanned Anglo-Saxons, so to speak—and not to lure whites (who don’t go anyway) but to lure blacks whose ideas of beauty are based on white stereotypes. If there is one area in which the cumulative effect of Hollywood films is obvious, it is in what is now considered “pretty” or “handsome” or “cute” globally; the mannequins in shop windows the world over have pert, piggy little faces.
When I was starting out, there were even fewer black girls on screen than there are now. In the sixties, there was Gloria Foster, and Abby Lincoln, and Brenda Sykes, and the fabulous Judy Pace, who played the first black villainess on TV—on Peyton Place, starring little Miss Mia Farrow. What a voice Judy had! Snide and contemptuous and full of hard, cold luster. All those girls were fabulous, in their way. Glamorous and real, which is one definition of movie acting. Their naturalism didn’t exclude their coloredness or femaleness. They didn’t treat sex as a big deal, either; it was all integral to the inherent humanism of their behavior.
But by 1972, globally, like Ms. Kael says, Gloria, Brenda, Judy, Diana, and not to mention myself were out; movies shifted away from documenting the realism of human interaction to the by-now-predictable surrealism of black bitch in a head rag putting down whitey or an ineffectual husband.
You hear tell now of these actresses like Halle Berry—globally cute and acknowledged as such by picking up an Oscar for it. What Halle wants—what “actresses” of her ilk want—is to be living molds in a global idea of what men are supposed to want: perky-looking chocolate drops that taste like shit and are therefore naughty because black equals shit. Imagine what a black bitch who can actually act feels like when she sits in the cinema of today, recalling the ghosts of the past—Gloria, maybe, and a little bit of me? Imagine what Gloria—who played nearly two hundred characters in In White America onstage, back in the sixties—would have thought sitting through contemporary crap like Juwanna Mann. Imagine what I felt like looking at Halle with her tits out in Monster’s Ball, telling some cracker to “Make me feel good.” How could I have played that part without feeling my mama in the background, about to go upside my head because I’m declaring a need to a white man?
Or maybe the only thing separating us is my fat ass. Having Richard’s face—or his having mine; remember, I’m older—has been a hindrance in my career; people see his fame in me long before they see what I can do as an actress. When people see me, they see Richard’s hilarity. In the old days—the seventies—when there was no black performer bigger than Richard, I’d show up for some movie audition or another and the casting
director would ask me to put a “Pryor spin” on whatever part I was up for. So I’d look up from the script and start cursing the room out. Then I’d throw the script down and walk out the door. That got me a few laughs, but fewer jobs.
Maybe some low blue lights here, or red. And many cigarettes leading to other cigarettes. Jimmy and Diana smoking and smoking in a bar in Harlem after a particularly frustrating rehearsal. Maybe a little discussion about the play, mouths sticky with cocktails, and Jimmy’s black, black skin—an arm—resting on the table, Diana’s light, light skin in a sleeveless shift made blue or red by the overhead lights, lights flickering through the holes in her pineapple hair. She’s an actress. She says: Well, I don’t know if my believability is up to the play. But what she means to say is she isn’t sure if the play is up to her believability, the lyrical naturalism in her work, which made of each prop, each wearing of a costume, the very thing you would have worn yourself and done and said yourself, were you not in the audience yourself.
“Oh, baby,” she said, “the part,” she said a little tentatively, drawing her audience of Jimmy in, “it’s a great part, that’s not what worries me, what worries me—”
“Yes?” he inquired, never taking his eyes off her. The famous Negro concern overlaid with an analytical listening quality. “What’s wrong, baby?” His mouth split, revealing the famous space between his upper teeth. She had a smile, too, and she used it.
“I’m not at all sure I get all of these characters; I mean, I’m not at all sure I’m accessing my character properly. Can we break it down?”
This was the kind of conversation his egotism could bear, since it was not “just” about his work, but about how his work had become her world and thus transformed her into someone he could recognize: a character expressive of his thoughts and feelings. Aren’t actresses fabulous? They may know in their minds that they’re acting, but their bodies don’t show it.
In any case, in that bar, lighting another cigarette in his high faggot style of physical expression—talkative arms and hands that cut the air, leaning forward in his chair to his interlocutor, touching her shoulder with one arm and his heart with another—Jimmy said: Chile, chile, chile. Did I ever tell you about the time when I was a chile—this was when I was in the church—and I was preaching then, preparing one sermon a week? I stood before the people, a nigger Ezekiel, and I preached not because I had the word—I had many—but because I wanted to escape, and because I was in love.
The church was my escape. That is a convenient phrase. Wait. The church was and wasn’t different from home. There was home, there was the church, and there was the street, all filled with black people. And how could you not look at them and see Jesus, his Jesus hair, the thorns in it wound tightly in nigger hair piled correct under a picture hat? Negroes high-stepping into eternity, not even seeing the blood dripping before their very eyes? Flies sticking to the blood, can’t wash their face because the Jesus blood has burned a hole in it, Jesus rays of acceptance and sorrow over the acceptance coming out of the hole? You can’t see anything else if you stay, and you can’t not stay, because you’re a child aspiring to be Jesus but yourself, forgiveness gouging out your face. But to say any of that is to be exiled by the very people you love.
Cancer Bitch didn’t think about what he was saying much; some of it was bullshit that she could already find the holes in. His whole thing about exile, for instance; only famous people complained about all that, after they’d achieved it.
Cancer Bitch knew that no matter how many plays she appeared in by people like the man sitting in front of her—ugly in a way that made you feel protective of him; ugly in a way that made you think, Damn, could it be that I’m that ugly, too—she would never be famous like that; she didn’t want fame bad enough. What she wanted was to act bad enough, and when did a bitch ever get famous from love? She had known people like Jimmy throughout her career—they started off as artists with something to say, and they ended up being some cause’s voice, living to tell the story of people who needed them as opposed to needing to communicate something themselves. And the love and attention that their work garnered them—that love and attention stood in equal proportion to their insecurity, their feeling that they would be less without being known, that the next black bitch with a typewriter would supplant them. That’s what drove them: the fear that they would no longer exist if they were on the level of Cancer Bitch. Or me.
Jimmy drank, I think, scotch in those days. He had many of them, sitting there talking to Diana. If I played her sitting there, in conversation with him, how would I do it? I’d work from the inside out, in that Harlem bar, uptown from where Jimmy, with his playwright’s paranoia, thought Burgess Meredith, the director, was clobbering his play and so undermined Meredith’s authority with You’re white, you don’t understand my characters; I didn’t write this play for you but for my people who are up there on the stage, with their guts and hems showing, the long moan of the writer who has too much mouth left over after the nonwriting is done, so he can’t leave others to the interpretation of it, and besides which, what Jimmy was fighting with was not so much his director as the knowledge, never faced, at least in the press, where he lived by now, that the play wasn’t any good, that he had lost his way as a writer, producing work he was supposed to produce as opposed to the work he was the propagator of, mixing cotton fields and crepes, chitlins and coq au vin—this can appeal to a girl, especially if she feels sorry for you because you’re ugly. And so I’d listen when he said, lighting another cigarette, a little column of white between his two dark columns of fingers, the same fingers that maybe had been inside of Lucien’s mouth—
“And so I learned to perform, because if I didn’t I would upset the needs of the people, the people all around me; I’d be called out as a queer, which is to say a living example of someone who didn’t believe in them and their Jesus need, because after all there I was, godless, because I’m a queen, and a slave to my queen ways, dirty cuffs dragging in the gutters and bowed down like a dog waiting to be made upright by a word from heaven. Their church was a kind of revenge fantasy—things would turn out better in the next world because Jesus—who was God, too; we didn’t make any distinctions between the two—would allow us to step on white heads to get there. We would win the moral war that our very presence in the world, in our slum, in the church, said we would win because we had worked so very hard at suffering.
“So they pushed out everything that was wrong with their world, which is to say people like me, so it wouldn’t show up in the next. They didn’t want any smart niggers to question how and why they had come to think of themselves as chosen in the first place. They’d bust your ass if you read anything besides the Bible, developed an imagination outside of their imagination, said a thought; because you said a thought, you were white. You sound white—that’s what Daddy and some of my siblings said after I’d discovered a building of lies: the library.
I went to the library and came out white. Only my mother didn’t punish me for reading, because I was her imagination waiting to happen.”
Cancer Bitch adjusted her brassiere strap. It was maybe a little dirty; sweat from the rehearsal and a little baby powder coming down the inside of her armpits, little crumblings of baby powder like butts of wet chalk or pumice stone. She was a little uncomfortable. I say, is this a woman? Diana couldn’t act any of this, but I can.
Women lie. An actress lies even better. I don’t mean all of that “let’s pretend” shit, either, although that’s precisely what I mean, too. An actress will believe anything, including herself. They convince their bodies of something and then it exists.
For instance: It’s Dover, 1943. Twelve seagulls circle four American servicemen who sit on a cliff. They are picnicking with four English women wearing flower-print dresses and cardigans made at home in front of an electric fire long before they knew the Americans, knitted by the Philco, a little red dot of music in the gloom.
Maybe one woman has red hai
r, and she longs for the Negro American soldier but is too shy to imagine anything but his tongue on the red tongue between her legs. Those are the clues a director or script might give, and a real acting bitch will say: Got it. And then she’ll try to represent the foregoing.
I have never been to Dover, but I could play that place. I could also play that white woman. I could have red hair if I dreamed about it long enough. Long, flowing shit.
Despite her fear, the English girl—myself—went for a walk with the Negro American. They—we—went and sat somewhere near the cliffs, and he kissed her. I know that kiss; those were the first fat lips I ever licked. The kiss is a little dry because you’re outdoors, and a little salty because you’re near the sea. The kiss is not a kiss on the brink of catastrophe, like the beginning of every love story I’ve ever known, which goes from hope to boredom to disaster in an instant.
Later in the story, my best English girlfriend tries to fuck him, but I find out. I cry. I love to cry. (A producer friend of mine once described an actress as a woman who feels the need to cry in front of three thousand strangers. Too true!) As the red-haired English woman, I trusted too much. I loved the black American too much, and in a fit of anger I say to my former best English girlfriend: You should get cancer, bitch, and die. Maybe that last line isn’t in character. You see, I need a director. If I had a director, he could show me where the hair falls on my shoulders and I could take it from there. As much as a bitch needs dick sometimes, she needs a director more, just as she needs a writer’s language in order to be someone other than herself. I wish someone would hire me apart from voice-overs.