Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions

by Toni Cade Bambara

  When do you find your tribei?

  Well, I felt very at home in Harlem as a child. I spent the first ten years of my life in Harlem. I had skates and got around a lot and met a lot of wonderful people. I met this one woman who had a tremendous influence on my writing. Dorothy McNorton lived across the street from us when we lived on Morningside. She taught me critical theory … another story for another day. In Mildred Johnson’s school I did not feel at home, but it did teach me a lot about class. I think by the time I got to college I was hanging out in the Village. I began to identify my people as artist types, even though I was a biochem/premed major at the time, and those people were definitely not my people and that lifestyle was not mine. Like being up late at night in the stinky, smelly lab eating weird food out of a vending machine. I would try not to drop and break any test tubes because that was thirty-five cents, and we were on a really tight budget. I felt much more comfortable with art majors and hanging around the art department, so I used to model for art classes.

  That lifestyle was more my thing. I liked the smell of linseed oil and turpentine, mainly because one of my spirit guides comes to me that way, namely my mother’s mother; that is, her “visitations” are heralded by those odors—she painted. I also liked the theater group. Working so seriously on these dumb plays. I loved it! So I hung out with theater folk and art folk. But these were white people at Queens College, and they were not my people either. There were a couple of political types there, like Ellie Hakim, who started Studies on the Left, a journal still around today. This was the height of the McCarthy period, from 1955 to 1959. We had quite a collection of people at Queens. The granddaughter of Robert Ingersoll, the niece of Alexander Woollcott. But hanging out in the Village I got a little closer understanding of who my people were, as I was always looking for a job and I was underage. In the Village I would go over to Montmartre’s Spaghetti House and offer to wash the pots. I would take a big soapy pot and go out in the backyard with the pots because they shared the yard with Café Bohemia. That way I could hear the George Wallington Quartet, who practically lived there. Then I went over to Mona’s on the corner of Sixth Avenue and MacDougal, right across from Tony Pastor’s. My job at Mona’s was to get the exotic dancers cabs. Tango, for example, would shake-dance and sit on the laps of sailors, just do her thing, then rip off the wig and bra and, of course, she’s a dude. People would get really angry. So my job was to keep a cab at the curb. I would get paid two dollars a night for this.

  Another place I worked a lot was the Open Door, where we used to go to hear Miles. I didn’t go to hear Miles; I went to see his wardrobe, because he had gorgeous clothes. He always played into the drapes and showed complete contempt for the audience. In the Village I began to run across designers and theater people, artist types, bohemians who had some politics and kind of knew what was happening. But it wasn’t until the sixties struck that I really finally felt at home in the world. I finally reconnected with a lot of things from childhood that I had lost. I had lost an edge somewhere while doing those college years, hanging out in Flushing. I always take Harlem as my standard of a viable community: a Speakers’ Corner, a place where politics are discussed and where there is critical response so that you do not become captive; a Black bookstore so you do not become captive to schools and other indoctrinating institutions; a library in case you can’t get to the bookstore; a park to sit at and talk (also, the park can be where Pop Johnson and his cronies sit to create community sovereignty; they can check out who is coming up the walk); you have got to have a screening room of some kind so you can know what our cultural workers are doing with our image and our voice; you have to have a press to get the word out.

  Harlem became my standard, and very few neighborhoods fit this. When we moved to South Jamaica, for example, I thought my brain would atrophy. The only thing that came close to a truth-speaking vehicle there was the movie marquee on Merrick Boulevard. The guy who would slot the letters in had a real serious thing about Black stars. So you would get Casablanca starring Dooley Wilson, Pinky starring Ethel Waters, Island in the Sun starring Dandridge and Belafonte, Spartacus starring Woody Strode. That was about it, though. Not enough to keep the mind alive.

  Going into movies, how are movies part of your development, and how do you begin to interact with them?

  Growing up in Harlem, we had five movie houses in our neighborhood. There was the Dorset, where we saw Boston Blackie and the Three Stooges. That was on Broadway. On Amsterdam, it was the Washington, where we saw sepia movies and second-string things. There was the Sunset and the Regal on 125th Street, where we saw race movies. That’s where I saw Herb Jeffries in Bronze Buckeroo. On Broadway and 145th Street, there was the RKO Hamilton, where we saw first-run Hollywood movies, as well as a vaudeville show, as well as a bouncing ball sing-along with the corny songs. I was always in the movie house. I liked movies, and I would sit there and rewrite them. Most of the time the stories were stupid because none of the women ever had girlfriends. I used to think, Well, no wonder. No wonder Barbara Stanwyck is getting thrown off the cliff, or Lana Turner is getting shot, or Bette Davis is having hysterics. They don’t have any girlfriends. When the story was really dumb, I would start looking at the scenic design: I like that ashtray; I wonder where they got that color. Oh, the clothes in Mata Hart. When I first said to myself, I’m going to make movies when I grow up, was in the Apollo. In the Apollo between shows, would be these god-awful shorts with petrochemical eye-stinging colors that blurred outside of the outlines. They were about such really fascinating subjects as the tin can industry. I used to think, Damn, when I grow up, I’m going to make really great shorts for the Apollo. I didn’t understand that they were deliberately chosen to get you out of there. They are called “chasers.” So you would get up, get out, and the people outside on line could come in and a new show could start. I didn’t know that. I just thought somebody didn’t have any taste and were buying these really awful movies. That was the first conscious notion of wanting to become a filmmaker.

  Then in 1964 I refused to go to work. I’m hanging down in the Village in the early morning. I walk by the Greenwich movie house and the guy is up on the ladder putting up the letters and it says, “Two African films by Ousmane Sembene.” I thought, Sembene, I’ve been reading Sembene. I go over and look at the glossies and they are playing Borom Sarret and La Femme Noire. I had never thought about African movies. So I went in to see them, and I stayed and saw them again. I figured I might not see them again, and also my friends haven’t, so I have to memorize every shot, and then I’ll play it out for buddies. Now Borom Sarret really resonated with me because I was working on a story called “Sanitary Belt,” as in “Cordon Sanitaire,” about that hedgerow built as a barrier between European quarters and native quarters. I was playing around with the notion of belt in general, conveyor belt, on the line, worker in the factory, warehousing of Africans, etc.

  In Sembene’s film there is this Cordon Sanitaire, and that sparked me. I came out of there very late at night. I was in there all day studying those movies. I was studying every frame because I did not think I would ever see them again. It was then I thought I might go to Africa and become a filmmaker. Then in 1970, shortly after my Black Woman book came out, and shortly after Chester H. Higgins, Jr.’s first book of photographs came out, we met each other up at the Studio Museum; and we decided to take the film course with Randy Abbott and Ngaio Killingsworth. I wanted to learn editing. Everybody else wanted to go out in the street with equipment. I knew that a film is made in the editing room, and I wanted to be in there. I studied editing under Ngaio and Randy, and we had lots of footage to play with because everybody went out in the street, shot stuff, and gave it up. I could have made fifty movies with all that footage. I was up there having a wonderful time at the Studio Museum learning editing. Of course, by 1970 we’d heard of the UCLA rebellion, the Watts films, Charlie Burnett, and that whole crew. We heard about the overturning of the school curriculum at the f
ilm school. They wanted to make films out in the streets, in the community. I thought that was fabulous.

  On the East Coast there was the war to get WNET on board and for Black folks to get in the door, and there were a lot of documentaries being made. St. Clair Bourne was working as a filmmaker and as editor of Chamba Notes. Pearl Bowser was doing a Black retrospective film festival at the Jewish Museum. The idea really began to take hold. Then I moved to Atlanta in 1974. Louis Bilaggi Bailey and Richard Hudlin (kin to the Hudlin brothers) were programming independent Black films, and every once in a while a filmmaker would come through and we would show films at my house because I had a big old sloppy house and I didn’t care if you moved things around and dropped things. Bailey founded the Atlanta Annual Third World Film Festival, an attempt to program films from around the world. The Festival became a genuinely international event when Cheryl Chisholm took over as director.

  I began programming with the notion that eventually I would get around to making movies, would back myself into it. Then I came to Philadelphia and met Louis Massiah, founder-director of the Scribe Video Center. Louis had just come back from Mali. He had done a lot of videos and was thinking about another one. I suggested he tackle the “Move incident” as a community-voice video. He called me up and invited me to come down and do the narration. I thought, Narration … great. I sit in a booth, like Ernest Hemingway with Spanish Earth, and I watch the film, jot down notes, and then record. He didn’t tell me that I had to write the script, help him devise the film, and narrate! Which was wonderful, actually. So now I am based at the Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia and helping to develop filmmakers. I work as a production facilitator for Louis’s project called Community Visions, where we aid community-based organizations to explore video as an instrument for social change. I also teach script writing there, and every time I teach a workshop I write a script to make sure I know what I’m talking about. By now I’ve got this huge folio of scripts, which ends all excuses, so this spring I will start working on a couple of films.

  We are missing the writing, which is absolutely essential. Could you talk about the genesis of The Black Woman? How did that come about?

  In 1968 I was teaching at City College in the SEEK program.

  What was the SEEK Program?

  The SEEK program was “Let’s get these colored people in here, let them fail and flunk out so we don’t have to be bothered with them again.” But a number of us managed to get up there. The attrition rate at City College was something like fourteen percent, and in the SEEK Program it was less than nine. We were very serious. There was me, Addison Gayle, Barbara Christian, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Larry Neal. It was a heavy bunch of folk up there at that time. Three people got on my case. One was Francine Covington, a student I greatly admired, and a woman I greatly admire today. I loved her style of confrontation. She would say to me, “You’ve been saying this, that, and the other. Why don’t you do a book, damnit?” That made me think.

  Then Dan Watts, editor of The Liberator, where I did book reviews and so forth, said, “You have an interesting take on things. You ought to write a book.” Then Addison Gayle would say, “I heard you deliver eight talks. Why the hell don’t you write them down and get them printed?” I thought, Oh, a book about Black women. That would be great. I had read a piece by Rudy Doris about women and leadership and SNCC, so I talked to the women in the Panther party, women in CORE, women in SNCC. They were writing position papers and taking the brothers to task for their foolishness and shit. I wanted to get some papers out of them and put them in a book. But the women said, “No, this is in-house stuff. We are not interested in going public.” I thought that was a shame and I said, “I’ll wait.” So, from 1968 to 1969 I am waiting for this call. Then I began looking around for an agent, and I found Cyrilly Abels, an old European-American leftist woman. We began going around to the publishing houses and I began running into a lot of people I used to go to school with, white folks. They are saying things like, “I’ve seen fabulous manuscripts from Black women, but they wind up on the sludge pile because there is no market for Black women’s works.” So then I got this idea: Never mind the papers from the Panther party women; let me do a book that will kick the door open. I know there is a market for Black women’s work out there because I know 800 million Black women all by myself. Nikki Giovanni gave me a poem, Alice Childress gave me a story. I put together this anthology that I felt would open the door and prove that there was a market. Sure enough, within the second month the book came out, it went into a new edition. That book was everywhere. There were pyramids of The Black Women in every bookstore. All I knew in the beginning was that it had to fit in your pocket and it had to be under a dollar. I didn’t know anything about publishing, but I stuck to that. After it came out, a number of startling things happened. My attention at that time was on kicking the door open so that other Black women’s manuscripts could get a hearing, and they certainly did. People then began calling me to do lectures and workshops on women’s issues. I didn’t know anything so I had to study a lot and call up a lot of people. Alice Childress was very good to me in those years. She was one of the first people who walked up to me, put her hands on my shoulders and said, “You have done something valuable. Now, watch out.” That was very valuable. The Harlem Writer’s Guild gave me a party and I thought that was going to be the end of it. But no, then came all these urgings to be a particular kind of person, an expert, a spokeswoman. I was having trouble being a public person.

  Next, I did an anthology called Tales and Stories for Black Folks that came out in 1971. What I love about that book is that my students are in it. I was teaching at Rutgers in those days, and one of the things I always tried to make clear to students was “Do not write term papers for me. Make sure they are useful for somebody else as well.” People began to write position papers for organizations in their community. A number of people were working at the storytelling library hour, so they wrote stories. I thought that the stories were great and I published them in the book. That book didn’t stay in print very long. I was at the Livingston campus of Rutgers then, and everybody on campus had a copy of the book.

  What was the impact of Gorilla, My Love on your life?

  One of my good girlfriends in those days was Hattie Gossett. In those days we were all piecing a living together. Hattie said, “Hey, let me be your agent.” She told me about a woman up at Random House named Toni Morrison who was very interested in my work. I said, “Oh, yeah?” She said, “Put together a book and I’ll sell it.” So I pulled out a bunch of stuff from under the mattress, from the bottom drawer, the trunks, and I spread all this stuff around and I thought, Ooh, a collection. I thought I would put together stories that show my different voices. It looked good, but it looked like ten people wrote this thing. I went to the library and read a bunch of collections and noticed that the voice was consistent, but it was a boring and monotonous voice. Oh, your voice is supposed to be consistent in a collection, I figured. Then I pulled out a lot of stories that had a young protagonist-narrator because that voice is kind of consistent—a young, tough, compassionate girl. Then I changed my mind because the salesmen at the publishing house will think my book is a juvenile book for a juvenile market only. So I put some adult stuff in.

  Then at that time I was writing a play called The Johnson Girls, which we performed on the Soul! show with Audreen Ballard in the role of Inez. Now it is becoming a film with Barbara O done by Iverson White. I decided to adapt the play as a story, and that became one of the stories in Gorilla, My Love. Miss Morrison didn’t touch anything. She sort of floats a few ideas at you and whispers in that gentle way. Then you go home and think, Oh, brain surgery! Let me rewrite. The book came out, and I never dreamed that such a big fuss would be made. “Oh, Gorilla, My Love, what a radical use of dialect! What a bold, political angle on linguistics!” At first I felt like a fraud. It didn’t have anything to do with a political stance. I just thought people lived and moved around i
n this particular language system. It is also the language system I tend to remember childhood in. This is the language many of us speak. It just seemed polite to handle the characters in this mode. I never knew how to answer, so I would just let people talk about the book. I began to learn what was in that book and what was so different and distinct about it.