I was listening to the NPR news magazine called Here and Now during lunch hosted by Robin Young. She was interviewing a black female journalist from the New York Times about the Oscar nominated film The Help, about a well to do white woman wanting to interview, for a book she was working on, two female domestic employees whom she had known during her growing up. The journalist told Robin Young that she first refused to see the movie presuming that it would be shot in the stereotypical way the Hollywood elite establishment usually portrays black Americans….the stories of black people told by white people who have no idea what they are talking about….She finally decided that if she were to take it upon herself to critique the movie, she best ought to see it…So she did, and her fears and skepticism were confirmed….she said that both the book and the movie were gratuitous and patronizing ways of white people “helping the help;” A sugar coated mea culpa under the fantasy that we, blacks and whites, really all along loved each other in the South, despite the ups and downs of the civil rights movement….Her mother had told her years ago that Porgy and Bess (which is now opening again on Broadway) was at best a caricature of black people; again their story told by three white men, who knew nothing of them.
I thought her criticism a bit harsh, though I have neither seen nor read The Help, but the conversation caused me to remember Azzie Lee, our housekeeper while I was growing up. She grew up in a sharecropping family, gave birth to her first child literally on her knees at age sixteen on the wood floor of the family’s shotgun tenement house out on Spann Farm….she made it through the eight grade….Had two more children….she started to work for our family when I was one year old, she maybe 30…She worked for our family until she died….and I do know this for sure…I loved her and she loved me…we told each other that often….she nursed me when I was sick, and when I grew up I nursed her when she was sick….but still amid this real love, I think she resented her low estate…I’m sure we didn’t pay her much….she lived in the “quarter,” the squalid side of town where black people lived, literally on the other side of the railroad tracks….bill collectors would often call our house asking to speak to the “cook”….I remember her being so embarrassed….When her roust-about husband (believe me, she deserved better) died she buried him and with the remainder of his life insurance proceeds bought the first “new” furniture she ever owned. She lived all her life day to day….luckier than many…I don’t think she ever worried about whether there would be food or not….but to be sure, our love for her, and hers for us notwithstanding , she lived apart, across a great divide, far beyond where the sidewalks ended…..I wonder how she would tell this story I’m telling, as her own story, her words about being a part of our family. I never sensed bitterness in her, perhaps only because of her polite grace, for surely she had the right to be bitter about many things….I wonder how she would tell the story of her twenty five years with us….in her voice.
This is Black History month….I propose that we seek out the voices of our black brother and sister sojourners, who had long been rendered voiceless by established society….seek out their stories….for they are now more and more being told and heard…Read this month the poetry of Langston Hughes; read Beloved, a Noble prize winning novel by Toni Morrison; read the prophetic writings of Martin Luther King Jr.; watch Spike Lee’s remarkable and groundbreaking film, Do the Right Thing; listen to the music of Louis Armstrong or Eubie Blake or Johnny “guitar” Watson, or Sarah Vaughn….there are many many more….voices wishing to tell their particular stories of love and loss, and joy and pain and disappointment and grief…of the beauty of this earth….of their tenuous freedom, and the hard road upon which it was won….of faith….because as in hearing all stories we will be enriched and transformed. Stories have such power…I just wish I could hear Azzie Lee tell ours…perhaps one day in some way I will.
