It's Complicated

Greenwood, Mississippi is still largely segregated.  Blacks live on the south side of the river and whites live north of it.  More and more blacks are moving to the white side of town, while many of the whites are moving out of town altogether.  The public schools in Greenwood are about 98% black because most of the white kids go to private schools.

When I went to Greenwood this past summer I expected to feel tension between myself and the white residents I would meet there.  Part of my goal in going was to confront and maybe even deconstruct "the racist".

What happened when I went to Greenwood surprised me and left me feeling conflicted.  Time and time again the white people from Greenwood including those I met in passing, those I interviewed, and those who helped with research wanted nothing less than an opportunity to embrace me.  Some of them felt intense warmth towards me because they had so dearly loved Booker Wright.  Others seemed to be trying to grasp at yet one more opportunity to clean up the image of the archetypal white Southerner.

The time I spent with them has left me in a strange position.  I sometimes find myself defending the white Southerner, trying to free them from the guilt that seems to be passed from generation to generation like an unwanted family heirloom.

I grew up in California and like a lot of people who haven't spent significant amounts of time in the South, the idea that some towns may still be segregated seems like absolute nonsense to me.  I know that most major cities have "bad" parts of town where it's not uncommon for economically depressed people of color to live. That's not what's going on in Greenwood.  Regardless of economics, whites and blacks live mostly apart.

From an outsiders vantage point it appears that whites and blacks are in a simple and seemingly sophomoric stand off that just needs to be done away with.  The idea that a town could have a white side and a black side in 2012 is deplorable to me.

But what if it was you?  Would you take your kids with ivory white skin and clear blue eyes and move them to the black side of town where the roads are so torn up they look like they haven't been serviced in years?  Would you move your kids to a school district in which many of the high school students struggle to read at a second grade level?  Would you move your family to the side of town where most of your city's crimes are committed?

Maybe you would.  I don't know if I could do it.

Many people feel called to change the world in some small way.  They might feed the homeless, take in foster care children, champion causes like autism or childhood obesity.  Clearly many Southerners, white and black, have not chosen to make unifying the races a central theme of their lives.  Does that make them bad people?  Does that make them racists?

If a white person lives in the South does that automatically mean that they need to make solving the race conundrum their sole aim?  Maybe the answer is yes. Maybe being white and Southern automatically means that one is shackled with that responsibility like it or not.  Either they work and work for racial unity or they are held responsible for racial disunity.

I wrestle with wondering whether or not this is fair.  But I also think that if everyone turns a blind eye to the problems in their own communities then the world will never progress.  In the 1960's many whites in Greenwood lived as though they were oblivious to the civil rights movement happening around them.  Booker Wright's words brought the harsh reality of it home to them.  He made them so uncomfortable that they could no longer deny just how unhappy their blacks were.

Maybe that's why so many of the whites are moving out of Greenwood.  Maybe they don't know how to fix the problem, but they also don't want to be reminded of it any longer.

In the midst of this confusing and frustrating situation there is hope.  I met many white Mississippians who are trying to do all that they can to bring Greenwood back together one conversation at a time.

Questions and Answers

After each official Tribeca screening of the film, Raymond, David, and I do a Q&A. It has been truly amazing to hear the immediate reactions of audience members.  I was fearful that the Q&A's would feel flat and that we'd be standing up there waiting for people to ask questions.  The opposite has happened.  The Tribeca moderators usually have to cut the Q&A short because the discussion goes on and on. After each one Raymond, David and I move into the lobby where people surround us and ask questions and often debate different issues surrounding the complications of race.

Tonight at the Q&A someone asked us why the whites in Greenwood were so angry about what Booker said.  I responded by saying that many of them believed that they had true friendship with him.  It never occurred to them that he would've minded some of the sour treatment he had to endure.  Booker mocked them.  He changed his tone of voice and moved his body to actually mimic them.  I said, "Imagine if you thought you were friends with someone and then you saw them on television expressing that you really weren't friends at all and then seeing that person mimic the way you talk."  It would be upsetting.

But there's another side to this coin.  I explained to the audience that in the course of making this film I got to sit down with Karen Pinkston, the current owner of Lusco's.  When she explained how hurt the Lusco's customers were I was able to express to her that Booker probably thought that he couldn't tell his white "friends" how he really felt.  He probably thought that he couldn't say, "Please stop calling me n-----."

After the Q&A was over I was in the lobby surrounded by people who connected with the work and having interesting discussions with them when David tapped me on the shoulder.  He pointed to an elderly white couple and said, "These people used to live in Greenwood, used to eat at Lusco's, and knew your grandfather."

I was delighted and horrified at the same time.  Delighted because once again I was given the gift of meeting someone who'd actually known my grandfather. Horrified because I had just tried to express the collective thoughts of their community and their peers.  After exchanging pleasantries I said, "I do hope that as you watch the film and hear us talk about it that we're accurately and respectively representing what was true in Greenwood during that time in regards to the complicated relationships between whites and blacks."  Before I could even finish my statement they were nodding at me.  They didn't feel offended and they felt like we got it.

This was probably one of the highest compliments I've received so far.  I have talked so much about "our national dialogue on race" that I'm practically blue in the face (although as a black girl, I really might be more of a dark shade of purple).  I have felt concerned for years about how difficult it is for people to talk about race.  I don't want to be a polarizing person.  I try to have these painful and difficult conversations in a way that is underscored by kindness.

Today I was asked to explain the position of the people who my grandfather waited on for most of his life.  Many of these people embraced him without ever recognizing how humiliated he felt.  It would've been easy for me to vilify them, but then I'd be a hypocrite.  If I want people to listen to Booker's heartache, I have to be willing to respect that sometimes whites then and now simply don't know what's going on or what to do.  There's no evil in that.

Finding the balance when talking about race is hard.  At least this time, I think I got it right.

The Myth of the Angry Black Person

This past Sunday night I attended the premiere of “Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story” at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.  As I sat there in the dark listening to people react to the film my heart swelled with pride for Booker Wright.  “You did it,” I thought to myself as I watched my grandfather on the screen.

As hard as I’ve worked on this for so many years it wasn’t until Sunday that I finally grasped the true magic of my grandfather’s words.  If we let them, they can reach into our current discussions on race and they can inform, soften, and change our often hard edged views. 

Forty-six years-ago my grandfather risked his life to explain what it felt like to be on the receiving end of racism.  He paid dearly for his words.  His statement aired once, around the country no less, but still only once.  And then it was over.  White residents of Greenwood credit him for bringing the civil rights movement home to them, but I’ll never know if my grandfather was aware of how much of a difference his words made in his town. 

Today, in 2012, we’re in trouble when it comes to talking about race.  Many times if a black person says, “Hey, I think that kid may have been murdered because he was black,” many will accuse the black person of playing the race card, of having some sort of chip on their shoulder, or of simply rushing to judgment too quickly. 

If a white person says about the same crime that they think it had nothing to do with race, very loud voices in the black community will come out and accuse that person of being insensitive to race issues or worse, being a racist themselves.  It’s amazing to me to think that after so many years of dealing with race-based issues in America that it’s still so hard for us to even have the dialogue without hitting below the belt.  We make it personal.  We attack a person’s character instead of their argument. 

Booker Wright went on camera and with detail and vulnerability described the heartache he experienced every time that he went to work in the white’s only restaurant where he was a waiter.  He explained how it made him want to cry on the inside.  He described how when whites got angry with him and hurled racial slurs at him that he simply wondered what else he could do to appease them. 

Sharing our shame can be hard.  It’s hard to describe the moments in life when we’re the butt of the joke.  It’s hard to tell people about how we’ve been abused, demeaned, or disregarded.  Exposing our wounds weakens us, so we don’t do it.  We especially don’t do it on national television.  Booker Wright went against the grain.  In doing so, he debunked the myth of the angry black person.  He is our evidence that before there was anger there was hurt.  Underneath the loud cries and the screaming voices are a people who simply want to be embraced.  

"My wound is geography." - Conroy

Sometimes I don't blog because I feel like I can't tell the whole truth.  I try lots and lots of different ways to write things that are provocative but that won't get me in trouble, but I really don't know how to write like that.

I am leaving soon to go to New York City for 11 days.  Our film is premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival.  I'm doing TV, radio, and more.  I did a one hour interview with the NY Times a few weeks ago and another with the Amsterdam News last weekend.

But there is that pesky little problem, that theme that just won't rest.  Whenever I think I have a handle on it, it snaps back and knocks me in the face.  Family.

The Times reporter wanted to interview my Tornado.  When I called to ask her if she was interested in helping tell the story of the first man to ever love her, the man who met her every day when she walked home from school and swooped her up and swung her around and around in the air, when I asked her if she wanted to tell his story to the Times she said no and hung up on me.  Last summer she learned for the first time that I was molested.  Her only response was to accuse me of using that revelation to tarnish her image.  I know, she's broken.

It's always been like this.  I've had years and years of counseling over this.  It still hurts like hell.

So, why am I downcast tonight?  Because I am going to the premiere of my movie alone.  None of Booker Wright's children are coming.  I tried.  I cajoled.  I was turned down.  Dateline will be there to film me walking into the theater......alone.

This is the story, right?  It's because of stuff like this that I have a story at all.  My family is broken.  I honestly believe that members of my family experienced horrors in Greenwood that left them almost beyond repair.  By all appearances they look fine.  We all do.  But there is something in our family that alters us, traveling like a mark on an unsuspecting chromosome.  It makes us act like enemies when really we desire nothing more than one another's company.

Over and over again I ask myself if I'd lived their lives and the lives of my ancestors, what kind of a parent would I be?  If I was a man who knew that he could not protect his wife from rape or his children from being sold into slavery, could I ever give my heart to them?  Would I ever look into their sweet, unknowing eyes?  Would I ever even smile at them?  Would they be able to give their hearts to their own children? How many generations would have to pass for this to heal?

What if I was a black woman living in Greenwood where the only way out was for the right man to get me pregnant?  What if romantic love was a luxury that only white people got to indulge in?  What if I couldn't look for love, I could only look for economic security?  What kind of a family would I form with that man?

What if I lived in Greenwood in the 1960's as a sharecropper with too many mouths to feed?  My oldest children miss school to work the fields, their younger siblings miss school to care for their even younger siblings.  It's all I can do to make it through the day before falling into bed each night.  Every morning I wake up in a panic, wondering how I will feed my children.  I don't read books to them at night. We can't afford books and I don't have the energy.  When they do go to school, I don't understand their homework.  I don't think about how to create complex, deep character in them.  I don't teach them to love Sinatra or fret over which piano teacher will be best.  I just pray that the boys don't end up in jail and that the girls don't get pregnant.  That's all I've got, because I'm black and I'm from Greenwood.

This is the mark that stains us.  There's more of course.  Alcoholism, incest, and the like.  Children robbed of the innocence of their childhood, only to have it replaced by fear.  Then they grow up and have children of their own.  But no matter how far we stray one thing will always be true: We started out in Greenwood.

I left there when I was two, but I still seem to wear the mark.  Will my children wear the mark?  Will they read this and understand that each day that I parented them I was inventing it out of thin air?  Like trying to write a symphony with only a few music lessons to call upon.

Most of us have never contemplated or meditated on what it would feel like to be a grown black man who is called "boy" by a white child.  Most of us have never considered how a black waiter might feel every time he adopts an awkward high pitched voice and smiles the smile of the jolly negro so that he can keep his job. Consider this:  How does one live a humiliated life and then go home and give gifts of love and character to their children?

When I first learned that my grandfather was an unacknowledged civil rights figure, the first person I called, with tears and excitement, was someone in my family.  The next call was someone else in my family.  So was the next one and the one after that.  I felt so excited and so honored to be able to gift my family with a kind of celebration of him.  I felt like I had been called to tell his story.  Last year when we started making the film it felt like something bigger than me was making this whole thing possible.

For months I have imagined attending the premiere.  I always, always, always imagined that my dad, my mom, my aunt, my brother, and my children would all be there with me.  I imagined that we'd be high and giddy with joy - unable to contain our smiles.  I imagined that we'd feel special, together.  I am trying to hold onto the specialness of this vision, while letting go of everything else.  It's in moments like this that I wish celebrity and media meant more to me.  But they don't.

I long for my family.  I am 37 years old and I am still listening like an eager child for their congratulations.  But they won't be there.  I will be alone to celebrate a man that I never met who loved them desperately.  I guess it's fitting.  Booker and I started this journey alone - no one in my family knew about his appearance in Frank's doc - so, I'll finish it with him alone.  I will imagine myself holding Booker Wright's hand, while he whispers his thanks and congratulations to the little girl in me.

But this is the point, right?  This is the story, right?  It's entertaining, right?