The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  That comes from a place of fear, insecurity, and ignorance. When my mother taught school, she had to deal with that all the time. Yes, the world is unfair. There is racial prejudice, and class prejudice, and all kinds of biases in our way. But that doesn’t have a thing to do with whether you got your work done. Two plus two still equals four. Fight those challenges. My mother knew from a lifetime of experience that black kids who believed these lies were sabotaging themselves and their futures.

  It’s not a uniquely black problem. Everybody knows somebody whose friends or family have looked down on them for supposedly getting above themselves. Are some people snobs? Yes. Do some people forget where they came from? Absolutely. Shame on them all. But people who try to destroy an ambitious young person’s confidence by making him think he is disloyal to the tribe are cowards and weaklings who can build themselves up only by tearing others down.

  The fact is, success in any society often requires what linguists call “code-switching.” Successful code-switchers are those who know how to speak the language of the group they’re in at a given moment. I talk differently when I’m having a po’boy with friends in New Orleans than I do when I’m at a business lunch in New York. A white friend of mine from Louisiana who lived on the East Coast for many years noticed his accent thickening up when he came home to visit, the final r’s in his words dropping like leaves from trees in a gust of autumn wind.

  This is not hypocrisy. This is code-switching. It’s the linguistic equivalent of knowing how to dress appropriately for the occasion. This is normal. But that term can be problematic. It lends itself to the idea of a person being insincere. Being truthful to yourself is the goal. Being authentic.

  As an actor, I deal with this when I’m teaching students, especially in New Orleans. In a session I taught at NOCCA a few years ago, I had a wonderful girl, one of the few black students in her class. She was a talented actress, but she had a very strong New Orleans dialect. And I knew that her teacher and her classmates were on her case about it.

  A dialect is the sound created by your experience and region as you speak your native language. An accent is the same thing, but as you speak a language that is not native to you. I hate it when people don’t know the difference. Dialect is so much more personal. When people try to get you to lose it, it can come off as an attack on your identity. She was a young lady of color, so I did not want her to hear that coming from me. That can be damaging, especially when you’re dealing with an actor.

  So I said to her, “You know something? I love the way you sound. You have probably been criticized for it over and over, but I love how thick your New Orleans dialect is.”

  I explained to her the difference between accent and dialect, and told her that people all over America have different dialects. In most New Orleans dialects, we drop consonants when we speak. We don’t go to school; we go to schoo’. This is fine if the only people you ever talk to share your dialect. But if you want to communicate with those who don’t share your dialect, you are going to hit a brick wall.

  “Don’t let anyone make you feel bad about having a dialect,” I said. “But you have to know that not every character you can play as an actress comes from New Orleans. As one of my teachers told me, live in your dialect, but learn how to deliver a script in character. Learn your diphthongs and how to articulate them so you can play any character you want to. That way, you earn the right to keep your dialect, because you have the capability of doing it the other way.”

  She seemed to accept what I was telling her. I suspect that lesson opened up the world for that acting student, because it helped her see that she was not facing an either/or problem—either give up your identity, or give up your hope for an acting career—but a both/and opportunity: You can both keep your dialect identity and succeed as an actress. Gaining the facility to speak the language of the world in which you will move socially and professionally doesn’t take away your core identity; it expands it.

  If that young African American acting student believed the lie that learning how to communicate outside her dialect was a betrayal of her identity, she could not go far as an actress, because she could only play New Orleanians. If she learned how to speak in any dialect the role requires, she would be able to take the part of her that is true New Orleans and share it with the world.

  Those who tell young people like her that the price of achievement is their identity are liars who do not have their best interest at heart.

  It’s hard for many to see this, though, and not necessarily because they are bad people who want to tear others down. When I first articulated to my parents my desire to be an actor, my father came down hard against the idea, not because he wanted to curtail my ambitions but because he wanted to protect his son from failure.

  NOT LONG AGO, a New Orleans parent wrote to me for advice. She was afraid because her daughter was leaving the city for college in New York. “Don’t you think I was afraid, and my parents were afraid?” I replied. “Your daughter is so eager to conquer the world that she’s not letting anything intimidate her into backing away from the chance to get a great education in New York. That’s worth celebrating,” I told that mother.

  Conquering fear of the unknown gives meaning to the artist’s journey. The creative artist gives form to chaos; part of that process is to bind and subdue the anxiety, even the terror, you have in the face of new challenges to your artistic growth—and then, through your art, show others how to face their fears of the unknown and overcome them. An artist who can draw deeply from the particulars of her upbringing and, through mastery of technique and form, can communicate that individual grace universally, has achieved something magnificent and enduring.

  Together, we look for answers to the same big questions. That’s why we go to the theater. That’s why we go to the art museum. That’s why we go to the club or the concert hall. Seeking that moment of connection and collective catharsis with our fellow human beings—that is the magic and the mystery that artists conjure. That is why we become artists.

  When people come away from a performance talking not about the characters they’ve just seen, but about how the play told the story of people in their own lives, that’s when you see the power of art to show you something deeper about life and how to live it, and to command you with the prophetic urgency to change your life.

  My brother Ron and I once stood next to each other at an emotional ceremony—maybe it was a wedding or a funeral, I can’t remember—and he was surprised at how moved he had been by it. He leaned in to me and said, “So, acting, this is what it’s like all the time?” I said no, it’s not like that all the time, but we actors do it so you can have an understanding of what that moment you just had here was all about. And that is not trivial.

  In American culture, we have turned away from an awareness of the prophetic power of art, of its role as a means of revealing the hidden order beneath everydayness, and its power to transform us and the world. In our schools, we’ve come to see art as mere decoration, as little more than entertainment. We deny its sacred character—and by sacred, I don’t mean only what gets played and heard in church on Sunday morning, but the exalting sounds played and heard in the concert halls and nightclubs on Saturday night. You don’t have to be boring and solemn to recognize that art is sacred, but you do have to understand that it’s serious business. What thoughts are to the individual, art is to the community as a whole: the place where we reflect on who we are, who we hope to be, where we have failed, and where we have succeeded. It is the forum where we declare and define our values.

  I gave the graduation speech to the first class coming out of NOCCA after Katrina. Remember the impact artists can have, I told the graduates, and remember that you have that power. Don’t you remember the first time after Katrina that we all heard Louis Armstrong singing “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans”? I asked them. Those kids were born long after Ronald Reagan’s pr
esidency, but I told them about how the man had a gift for poetry in his political rhetoric that inspired and moved Americans in a difficult time for this country, even those who didn’t share his politics. What did Woody Guthrie’s music mean to people during the Depression? It gave voice to people’s suffering, and it lifted them up to hope for a better tomorrow. Think of how the majestic cadences of Dr. King’s oratory galvanized a nation. It wasn’t just the content; it was his delivery.

  Great art speaks to all people at all times. It is why the imaginative journey a fourteenth-century Tuscan poet, Dante Alighieri, took through the afterlife still speaks powerfully to us today, even though we are seven hundred years and an ocean beyond the world he wrote about in his Divine Comedy. The American abolitionists read Dante’s work for inspiration in fighting to liberate African Americans from slavery. Henrietta Cordelia Ray, a black poet and New England antislavery activist, even wrote a poem about Dante as a medieval abolitionist. We still perform the plays of the ancient Greeks, not because they are Greek, but because they are so profoundly human. Five hundred years from now, men and women will be listening to Satchmo’s “West End Blues” for the same reason.

  What did I, an ambitious kid from Pontchartrain Park, have to add to this legacy of humanity? If I became part of the eternal pilgrimage of artists through history, what would I take from my brief time on that journey, and what would I eventually be able to give to those who would come after me? I didn’t know, but I had to find out.

  I worked on my Juilliard audition pieces every evening with each of the three teachers at NOCCA, each taking another aspect of the work. Bob was literary and text teacher, Elliott was vocal and the emotional part, the emotional connection to the material. Nelson was the movement teacher who explored the physicality of the roles. We rigorously explored all three.

  Oh, man, I thought, I’ve got to go for a week with each one? This is going to go on forever, I’m going to be so tired. But by the end of those three weeks, it seemed like they had just flown by. I learned early, then, that if you want to be a real actor, you can never stop analyzing your work and practicing to perfect your art.

  I understood that my chances of getting into Juilliard were slim, so there was a lot of pressure on me as I approached the auditions. We arrived at the Tulane University theater department to meet with Juilliard representatives and try out. There were maybe ten other graduating seniors there, and I was the only one from NOCCA (all the drama students I started with had gone back to their home schools, one by one).

  I performed a scene from the black playwright Ron Milner’s drama Who’s Got His Own and played Shakespeare’s Clarence in his death scene from Richard III. I committed those lines so deeply to my memory that more than three decades later, I can still recite them. In fact, I didn’t so much memorize them as live them.

  All my hard work of preparation served me well, I thought after I finished, but it was a nerve-wracking experience. The next day, I had two auditions lined up for other schools. Before my time came, Buzz Podewell, then the head of Tulane’s drama department, took me aside and said, “You got in.” But he told me to go through with the remaining auditions as a learning experience.

  In the end, I aced all my auditions. The letters from the schools started coming in. The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee accepted me, as did the California Institute of the Arts. The University of Chicago accepted me, as did Brandeis. But I still had not heard from Juilliard.

  Had Dr. Podewell been wrong? Or had Juilliard changed its mind? I knew that out of the thousands of young actors who audition for Juilliard each year, only nineteen are selected for each class. If they tapped me, I had to go.

  One afternoon, I was sitting on the bed in my room when Tee brought me the day’s mail. In it was a letter from Juilliard. Oh, man, I thought, here it is. My mother shut the door so the experience could be mine alone. I opened the envelope, took out the letter, read it, then went into the kitchen to tell Tee.

  “I did it! I got in! Yeah!” I whooped. We hugged and kissed. The good news thrilled Daddy when he came home from work. Dinner turned into a celebration that night, but my parents immediately began thinking of the practicalities. Juilliard doesn’t have dorms, they said; maybe you can live with Tee Mae in Crown Heights, just like Daddy had done when he went to New York for photography school.

  When I was a high schooler, Daddy had never discouraged me from pursuing acting, but he had never encouraged it, either. Now that I had been accepted to one of the most prestigious acting schools in the world, he was behind me all the way. The Juilliard letter confirmed the confidence I had in myself and my artistic future. Now I had it on paper that I wasn’t crazy, that I wasn’t an old Spaniard tilting at windmills. This young black kid from Pontchartrain Park who loved to play football but who thought he had it within him to become an artist—that kid was onto something. My heart had spoken to me, and it had not lied.

  The weekend before I left New Orleans to start my Juilliard training, I went to a Saturday vigil mass with Tee. At the end of the service, the congregation was singing the recessional hymn, and I lost it. This was the last time I would be going to church with my mother as a boy who lived in her home. All the daily rituals of life in New Orleans, the family, the friends, the mothers and the fathers of the Church—all of that would change. They would always be there, of course, but I would not see them for a long time. Maybe I would never live here again. The weight of what I was about to do fell upon me, and I cried and cried.

  Suddenly I saw that Tee and I were surrounded by people from the church. “Oh, Wendell’s going off to school? Baby, we have your back, don’t you worry.” My church community, men and women who had seen me grow in that parish from a little boy, offered some version of this benediction over and over that heartbreaking afternoon. And it made everything right. I left mass that day swaddled by so much love and support that I had no doubt, no doubt at all, that if I fell, those good people would catch me. I had no fear of leaving home. All of that love and support went with me.

  I left for New York City on August 19, 1981, age seventeen, thinking that I was about to conquer the world. I had no sense of limits whatsoever. I was completely free, knowing that every obstacle I would face would only make me stronger. My mother and father, my teachers at NOCCA, and my community at church and in Pontchartrain Park had given me all the skills I needed to overcome.

  I expected Chet again, but I also knew that thanks to all that had been won for me and all that I had been given, Chet could no more beat me now than he could that day at Osborne. That was the legacy I brought with me to New York City. It’s the legacy I still carry with me. Once you realize what a sacred trust it is, you would never dishonor it by letting it run through your fingers.

  I moved in with Tee Mae in Brooklyn. She lived in a predominantly West Indian neighborhood. For the first time I heard soca, calypso, and hardcore reggae. People sat on their stoops on a summer night, just like in the movies. We had crawfish boils in New Orleans, but I had never seen people cooking on a street corner like they did in Crown Heights. It was a world of sound, color, smell, and delirious chaos. It felt like Mardi Gras every day.

  Taking the subway into Manhattan was a new experience for a kid whose closest prior experience was the St. Charles Avenue streetcar. It was so hot and humid on those trains that summer and early fall. I would see young guys standing between the rushing subway cars to cool off, and despite the danger, I had to try it once. There I was, standing between cars with just a couple of chains between me and the tracks, barreling toward Lincoln Center at seventy miles per hour. It was exhilarating. I felt so free.

  But there were some difficult cultural adjustments. In New Orleans, everybody says hello when you pass by, even if you don’t know them. And if you do know them, even slightly, making conversation is just what you do. In New York, I had to unlearn the habits of what down South is considered to be civilized behavior. Don�
�t look people in the eye. Don’t engage strangers in conversation. A friend from Louisiana’s chatty mother came to visit him in New York for the first time, and as they were exiting the subway, he leaned back into the car and told the puzzled Manhattanites, “She’s not crazy, she’s southern.”

  Like many New Orleanians, I would call both men and women “baby” as a term of endearment. It’s common to hear one man say to another, “Hey, baby, how you doin’, man?” And if someone uses it with a person of the opposite sex, that doesn’t necessarily imply sexual interest. It simply means that the New Orleanian is trying to be nice.

  That first semester, I frequently greeted both men and women at Juilliard as “baby.” I didn’t realize it, but in that first semester, I developed a reputation for being a ravenous bisexual—the “Hound of the Hallway” as one woman called me. A male student finally stopped me and said, “Wendell, I just want to tell you, I’m not a homosexual, I’d appreciate it if you would stop hitting on me.”

  My jaw dropped. I had no idea that’s how my commonplace Crescent City charm was being received. I dropped the “baby” talk, and I learned how to be harder and more closed. I knew I was picking up a New York state of mind when Tee chastised me in a phone call for being snippy with her. “You are just so mean and cold,” she said. “You need to be nicer to people.”

  At times, the sense of liberty I felt being alone in the big city turned into feelings of intense loneliness. I barely knew anyone my age in the city, and because I wasn’t on a college campus, there was none of the regular sort of social opportunities a college student would traditionally expect. There were only eighteen others in my Juilliard class, and because most of them had gone there after earning a four-year college degree, they were significantly older than I was. Fortunately, I didn’t have time to dwell on my isolation because acting school was so demanding, and the Juilliard experience was so awe-inspiring to seventeen-year-old me.