what a woman who could have joined the D.A.R. has learned about the socially-constructed, political notion of "race" by just paying attention and NOT keeping her mouth shut...
A couple of months ago, I came across "Shell Shocked", a new documentary about African-American youth who are growing up -- and dying young -- in New Orleans. I checked out the trailer, ordered my copy immediately, and then sat on it for months while I was screwing up the courage to watch it.
I could tell by the trailer it had been well done. And I already knew what to expect since I live 45 miles from New Orleans and have taught literally hundreds of students who commute from there on a daily basis. I spend a good bit of time every semester, in fact, working my butt off to help shell shocked Black youth hang in there another day while they're trying to overcome the effects of their experiences, which are sometimes on-going.
Young men come into my office on a regular basis, shut the door, and weep as they wrestle with their pain and their feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and even terror that, despite their determination and their dreams, they won't live to graduate. Some, as they approach graduation, stress about younger brothers and sisters or come in to grieve the loss of yet another family member or friend.
Last night, I got the opportunity to preview a film that debuts on PBS stations nationally tonight. The title is "American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs" and it's only an hour and twenty minutes long, but it took me over two hours to watch it because I kept pausing the film to make sure I didn't miss a single minute while I was writing stuff down. Six pages of stuff. Not so much "notes" for this post as quotes I want to remember. "American Revolutionary" is more than a film; it's an experience. And Grace Lee Boggs is more than a 99-year-old revolutionary. She's a force of nature.
Old Guard meets New Guard. Crone embraces Vanguard. Intelligence and Spirit blends with Intelligence and Spirit. And we get to witness the result. Enjoy.
Originally, I wasn't going to see "Fruitvale Station," the just released film about the last twenty-four hours in the life of Oscar Grant, who was shot to death by a Bay Area Rapid Transit quasi-cop on New Year's Day in 2009. Fruitvale Station is the Oakland, California, stop Grant, his girlfriend, and their buddies reached after a night of New Year's Eve revelry in San Francisco. It was the end of the line for Oscar Grant and I didn't think I could handle it right now.
I had barely crawled out from under the rotted log the George Zimmerman verdict had dropped on my psyche. And I had things to do. So, when a student messaged me on Facebook asking if I was going to see the film, I responded instantly that I didn't have the emotional and psychological cool to go.
Still, as I jogged that morning before the Louisiana heat and humidity descended, I remembered that, if we don't attend films like this, they won't make them. And people that look like me need to show up in particular because (a) it's good for our consciousness (painful or not) and (b) Black people need to know that some of us give a shit. Sigh.
I've seen "Red Tails" now and the Boxer and I give it an enthusiastic four thumbs up. We all watched "Roots" in 1977 and were suitably impressed by the fact that someone would be allowed to portray the nightmare of Black oppression during slavery. Then, in 1985, we all watched "The Color Purple" and were suitably impressed that a movie about Black people surviving their pain could make it to the big time. Now, in "Red Tails," we finally have the opportunity to watch Black people outshine -- and even save -- White people just because they were better at flying and fighting than anybody else doing it at the time. It's a matter of public record, y'all, but who expected to see it done like this?
In the past few weeks, I had read a number of reviews of "The Help" (one of the hot movies of the summer), but nearly all of the ones I saw began with the words, "I haven't actually seen this movie, but..." followed by a castigation of every possible aspect of the film. Reviews without the benefit of reading the book, seeing the film, or hearing the music send up a sociological flag on my analytical playing field. So despite the fact that I thought I'd probably agree with the reviews even after watching the movie and very concerned that I was about to waste time and money on one more flick about how only White people can save Blacks, I decided I needed to see it. Then one of my Black students who is very forthright about pretty much everything -- and especially race -- told me that she had gone to see it twice and loved it. So today, I gathered up my trepidations and went to the theater.
In brief, I give it an eleven on a scale of one to ten with one being "made a White person look like a Savior-figure while making darkies look like sheep" and ten being "made White people in general look like icy-faced monsters who probably deserve to drown in shallow water while being stung by killer bees and eaten alive by starving red ants simultaneously." I have absolutely never seen a better, more nuanced, more ghastly depiction of what real ordinary White people in the U.S. acted like in the 1960s. The fact that many White people still act the same way today is another point and I'll come back to that momentarily. But I kid you not, White folks walked out of the theater after watching "The Help" today veeeery quietly, while Black folks were talking to no one but each other. It's that kind of flick. I give it a "must see" with a warning: if you have any consciousness at all, this one will piss you slap off and if you haven't gotten ahold of your rage yet, you should probably just go ahead and skip seeing it for now.
Okay, so here's the situation: a White woman of a certain age (that would be me) watches a film made by a young White man (that would be Robert A. Clift) about how African-Americans in the hip-hop scene feel about White people who appropriate Black hip-hop images and rap, while claiming they do it for the love of the art form.
With me so far?
It's a complicated dance, made much more complicated by Clift's insistance on leaving no stone unturned. If there's a Black person in hip-hop out there who didn't speak into Clift's microphone, I can't imagine who it was. From DJ Cool Herc to Russell Simmons and beyond, they weigh in one after another without apology, rooted in analysis by a range of heavy thinkers both Black (such as poet-activist Amiri Baraka and the well-known and controversial comedian Paul Mooney) and White (such as Maurice Berger, historian at The New School in New York City and John Leland, author of Hip: the History). Then, to make sure our brains are really fried, Clift adds White rappers -- professional and otherwise, serious and comedic; teen-aged White "wiggers;" White Al Jolson fans; and even Stephen Foster, who is quoted as saying he wanted to be the greatest Ethiopian songwriter of all time (try processing that, why don't you?). If the film wasn't so mesmerizing, it would be utterly overwhelming.
And as you watch the film, which debuted on public television last December 19th, you don't get a minute to catch your breath either. I've watched it four times now, twice with other people and one of those times being with a student of mine who is a knowledgeable young man on the topic of hip-hop history and culture. Rather than this repeated exposure clarifying what I think about the film and its topic, however, each subsequent viewing has left me more disturbed -- and more impressed -- than I was before.
I could shrug my shoulders and beg off by citing my age, my race and my class. After all, how many women like me have a clue about hip-hop in general, let alone an ability to speak intelligently about its nuances and cultural implications?
But you know me better than that. I love to learn. Especially about the socially-constructed, political notion of race. And if I can't learn it all at once, I'll keep chipping away at it until I at least understand more than I did at the beginning. (That's why I called in my student, who graciously agreed to "school" me, knowing it would be, at best, an uphill battle.)
If four viewings, a one-on-one lecture on the backstory, and thirteen pages of notes haven't prepared me to approach this review with confidence, though, why should you rush right out to view and/or buy* "Blacking Up: Hip-Hop's Remix of Race and Identity"? Because if you don't, you've missed it. You're out of the loop. And the finest possible examination of one of the most fascinating questions of our age will have passed you by. But it's up to you.
The fact is White people have apparently always cuddled up to Black folks' culture. Even while darkies were still on the plantations, minstrels were traveling around the country "entertaining" other White people in blackface. More recently, Gauguin and Picasso boldly demonstrated their appreciation for things Black. Hugely popular radio stars Amos and Andy were, in truth, White men pretending to be Black. And Irving Berlin wrote so many of what were called "coon songs," it was said he must have had a little Black boy in a closet somewhere. On this note, by the way, I was horrified to finally realize in a blinding flash of the obvious that "Rufus Rastus Johnson Brown" (a popular song sung around many a campfire when I was but a girl) was blatantly racist. Duh. (One can only wonder what Black girl scouts sing.)
And this is the kind of thing that makes "Blacking Up" such an experience to view. Clift offers no easy answers and no get-out-of-jail-free cards. Articulate, well-meaning White folks candidly confide in Clift their heartfelt attachments to a cultural milieu of which they cannot claim any part. And their yearning writhes before us like a worm on a sidewalk, out of place and hyper-visible in its vulnerability. They not only love the music/the art/the artifice of rap, they could not (it would seem) walk away from it in any case, no matter how they are criticized, ridiculed or punished for espousing it so publicly.
Clift admits that he was himself called a "wigger" (putting "White" and the n-word together to describe a White person who wants to be Black) when he was thirteen or so, causing him to rip the page from his yearbook. It was this memory and his desire to make sense of his feelings about it that urged him to take on what ultimately became a very ambitious project. Clift didn't just seek out an adequate number to address "each side" of the issue. He somehow identified and included so many shades of perspective that some truly famous people only appear for one short quote. And yet, the tapestry of topical consideration is such that, rather than attempt to convince the viewer of anything in particular, the film outlines and presents a set of ideas simultaneously contradictory and complementary. In other words, it's sophisticated, fearless and in many ways, downright genius in its scope and treatment.
Comedian Paul Mooney kicks things off by pointing out that the White man stole Africans from Africa, so stealing culture from the Africans themselves is no new thing. And Amiri Baraka asks, "If Elvis Presley is king, who's James Brown -- God?" Hip-hop is a way for White people to "be 'hood'" without having to actually do any of the things that earn that right, suggests Power of the Wu-Tang Clan. White people trying to present themselves in what amounts to a modern day form of blackface, adds Mooney, is nothing less than a form of insanity. White "aggression junkies" that were formerly into heavy metal, posits author and cultural critic Nelson George, jumped on the hip-hop bandwagon when it rolled by. "White people should educate White people as to what's going on," asserts rapper M1 of Dead Prez, in giving props to filmmaker Clift and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's commitment to air "Blacking Up."
Then we change skin tones. "Lots of folks are looking for a license to be masculine," counters John Leland (and being allowed to say "bitch" apparently satisfies this for some of them). "I didn't want to be Black," says Andrea Van Winkle, caught in the middle of a White-on-White "race riot" in a Morocco, Indiana, high school in 1993, "I wanted to be cool." "I love Star Wars, but I've never been to space," points out White rapper Aesop Rocks. "We're not just taking; we're giving something back," claims Too White Crew, who call themselves a "tribute" band. "I don't want a box," declares White woman rapper Empire Isis who performs with another White woman in New York City using exaggerated Caribbean accents, "I want a world. It's about letting go of how you perceive identity."
See what I mean?
Still, Amiri Baraka grounds the exploration in his comments throughout the film. Reminding the viewer that White people and Black people have been blending bloodlines since the earliest days of this nation, he suggests that it can all be reduced to something James Baldwin once said: "I'm Black because you're White." In other words, he goes on to say, the working class has been separated through the use of institutionalized racism so we are no threat to the real Powers-That-Be, but we keep feeling the connections, whether we understand them or not.
Nelson George adds, "Black people grew up on this music, but they've always been uncomfortable with certain aspects of it. Now, Whites mimic it under the banner of 'entertainment,' raising the level of Black discomfort. This culture teaches us to like and consume, but not really hear."
My student -- a young man of color who often gets taken for White -- uses the web identity Defiant on his blog and has been involved in the music scene himself as an accomplished musician and rapper since his mid-teens. After bringing me up to speed on the history of hip-hop and "rhythm-applied poetry" (or "rap"), he added his two cents without a flinch.
"Rap is about authenticity," he began. "It's about being real. So White people who grew up in the suburbs and want to talk about the 'hood' are posers. You'll notice, they perform 'Black,' but then in interviews, typically sound 'White.' They use hip-hop as a commodity that can be discarded at will when it's no longer useful to them. It's not part of their past and it's most likely not part of their future either."
"Eminem," Defiant went on, "took rap and sold it to White people. He's a good writer, but who does he represent? Himself and the rich White executives who backed him when he came out of the suburbs. Mimicking is either making fun of something or commodifying it. Some say it's a form of flattery, but nobody likes being mimicked."
Paul Mooney, as quoted in "Blacking Up: Hip-Hop's Remix of Race and Identity," would, I think, agree. He likes it that White people who seemed so dead-set against having Black people in their neighborhoods, now have children who have become walking advertisements for all aspects of Black culture. Still, he's adamant: "When White people get chased by the police and shot in the back just for being White, then they can do all the hip-hop they want."
Until that time, I guess, we can at least watch Clift's film. If we have the nerve and the willingness to face one more difficult and complicated reality related to race relations in America.
"Faubourg Treme': The Untold Story of Black New Orleans" has been out since 2008 and appeared on PBS as early as January of last year. So initially, I was befuddled as to why they would offer me a preview copy at this late date. But living only 45 miles from New Orleans myself these days and making it a point to get there as often as possible, I followed through and requested the preview copy they offered, thinking I could at least write about it for Black History Month, mentioning that it would appear on PBS stations nation-wide during February.
As the weeks passed, however, and February came, I thought I had missed the cut and erased the email making the offer, sending only an apology that I wouldn't be reviewing the film as I hadn't gotten to see it. Then it arrived.
And now I find, after watching it three times in a week, that I don't know where to begin. It's beautifully produced and the music alone, heavily influenced and imbued throughout, I suspect, with Executive Producer Wynton Marsalis' genius, is worth the sixty minutes it takes to watch the film. But the story it tells crawled up inside me during my first viewing (after which I stared for some time at the blank television screen) and despite the subsequent viewings and more than three pages of notes, I can't seem to process it the way I normally might. It's more than a film. It's a love song. And if I ever buy a house again in life (which I have said for some time I wouldn't), it will likely be in Faubourg Treme' and I will feel that I've come home.
Films aren't supposed to carry that much weight if you're at all sophisticated. I tend to be, it is true, "an all or nothing kind of person," as my daughter once gently reminded me. That's why I rarely review anything I don't like. Why waste my time? But this is hardly my first time at the Black history party. And I've managed to watch a number of excellent films without wanting to sell the family farm and set up shop in a location with the problems of the Treme' (pronounced Tre-MAY). So why this one?
I mean, it hardly pulls any punches, what with the opening scenes of the destruction filling the neighborhood streets after Katrina, the discussion of how taxi drivers beg not to go to the Sixth Ward (the area's more recent identifying designation), the litany of how death stalks its more poverty-stricken residents, and the description of the wholesale attack on the area in the name of Redevelopment (better known colloquially as the I-10 overpass running right down Claibourne Street -- originally an oak-shaded promenade).
So what about this film is so compelling? The spirit of the tale. And to understand that, you're going to have to watch it yourself. Still, I can share a bit about it to encourage you, I hope, to move in that direction. It should be seen and discussed and heralded and, in truth, its website reports that it has been. So maybe there's nothing left to say except "Ditto." But you know me better than that.
The story interweaves the entire history of the Faubourg Treme' (the word faubourg meaning a suburb divided into small plots and Treme' being the name of the man who originally owned the area) with its more recent evolution. How filmmaker Dawn Logsden and New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Lolis Eric Elie managed to cover it all so elegantly without being confusing or making it seem rushed is beyond me. The film moves back and forth between drawings and old films from the sometimes long distant past (the area was settled two hundred years ago) and the streets and people just pre- and post-Katrina. And some of the connections are downright magical.
Elie, for example, hired 75-year-old Creole carpenter Irving Trevigne to restore an old house in the Treme' a few years before the infamous hurricane hit. Trevigne is charming and real-er than real when he first talks about how "anybodycan build a new house; I like to take an old one and watch it come back to life" and then later describes with bitter and somewhat bewildered sadness what it was like during segregation to always be addressed as "boy," while going home to the Treme' with all its Black and White residents living right next door to each other, sharing their lives, but being separated at school and in church by law.
Irving Trevigne's ancestor, Paul, it turns out, edited the L'Union, the first African-American daily in the U.S. from his printshop in the Treme'. Veteran actor Lenwood Sloane, founder of the Louisiana Living History Project, plays the editor in scenes that thread through the documentary, speaking the words the earlier Trevigne published in the mid-1860's, words every bit as poetic and commanding as those of Martin Luther King, Jr., at his best.
Proclaiming the Declaration of Independence as the basis for their platform, L'Union editor Trevigne demanded full citizenship, including land, education, and the vote for free people of color, a group heavily represented in the area even then because slaves were allowed to make money, buy their freedom, and move around at will in New Orleans. In fact, local African-Americans, under the encouragement of Trevigne and the organizational tutelege of what was boldly called The Citizens Committee, had forced the de-segregation of public transportation in the city by 1867. And over the next decade, a Louisiana legislature that was more than half Black passed the most progressive state constitution in the country. Even the schools were de-segregated. Until Plessy v. Ferguson, that is.
Actually, Plessy v. Ferguson, the famous case that established the legality of separate-but-equal accomodations for White people and all others was initiated in New Orleans. It was The Citizens Committee's response to the White man's boot landing resoundingly back onto the necks of African-American people when the federal troops left the South after Reconstruction. Homer Plessy was chosen for his White appearance and his Black heritage to board the Louisiana Railroad car where he was subsequently arrested because he refused to go instead to the car reserved for Black folks. When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the Justices decided that "separate but equal" accomodations (which were, needless to say, rarely if ever anything close to equal and sometimes garishly and obviously unequal) satisfied completely the legal requirements of the U.S. Constitution related to U.S. citizens of varying skin tones.
The people of the Faubourg Treme' were devastated. Almost over night, 95% of the Black voters in Louisiana were purged from the registration files. Black children were thrown out of integrated schools using physical force and all educational programs for children of color past the fifth grade were shut down. Still, Paul Trevigne was intransigent. "If [our movement] did not succeed," he wrote, "it is because it was premature...Oh, the Courts, it is true, denied the demands of our people, but future generations will remember." And they have.
Lenwood Sloane believes that "New Orleans is living history...the presence of the past." Wynton Marsalis, describing how the heartsick Treme' residents took those feelings and pushed them through a horn, suggests that, for New Orleanians, every improvisational jazz riff simultaneously serves as "a moment that has never happened," even while also being "a moment that has always happened." "Our rich history doesn't shield us from our problems," explains Louisiana Poet Laureate Brenda Marie Osbey, "but it does help us deal with them."
Nevertheless, the bitter sorrow floats to the surface as the film demonstrates how continued legislated oppression, discrimination, and targeted "redevelopment," led only to the final stunning shock of poorly engineered levees creating a disaster of incalculable horror further exacerbated by a severely lacking governmental response. "I sincerely hope nobody ever asks me to say the Pledge of Allegience or sing God Bless America or any of those other dumbass songs ever again," declares trombonist Glen David Andrews. "because I don't feel like an American citizen. I know I'm not a citizen in the eyes of the Powers-That-Be."
Still, Osbey seems to reflect the long dead editor who had such faith in the ideals of the people of the Faubourg Treme' when she says in a post-Katrina reflection: "It's a great catastrophe truly, but it isn't a greater disaster than we are a people. And that's what has to come through -- that we hold onto this city for who we are and what we are and that everywhere we go, we take this city with us. We take the spirit of this city with us, the spirit of this city's heroes with us, and the will to live and fight again."
In doing my homework to write this post, I discovered the probable reason I was offered a review copy of this extraordinary documentary. HBO has sunk serious money into an up-coming series entitled "Treme'" and co-created by David Simon and Eric Overmyer (the pair that gave us "The Wire"). So, if you really want to have a clue when the time comes (projected for mid-April), you would do well to see "Faubourg Treme': the Untold Story of Black New Orleans" first, if at all possible and you haven't already. But I'll warn you now; this is powerful stuff coming out at an interesting time in history. And courage, I think, is catching.
It isn't often that I watch a movie twice. I don't mean to disparage filmmakers. I do own films that I've seen many times for one reason or another. And documentaries, in particular, can bring me back again and again, especially if I decide to show them in class. But Prom Night in Mississippi, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Richard Saltzman's contribution to the HBO collection, available on DVD from Docurama films, is a rare find, indeed. I liked it even better the second time around.
The film, presented with HBO's usual state-of-the-art finesse, is the story of how, on April 19, 2008, the first ever racially-integrated high school prom was held in what Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman calls at one point, "a little bitty burg" in Mississippi. Charleston, Mississippi, with its population of just over 2000 people, where Freeman often visited his grandmother as a child, is now his home. Even so, and in spite of the fact that the public schools in Charleston were de-segregated in 1970, the local high school students had continued to have a Black prom and a White prom year after year where the groups elected separate Homecoming Kings and Queens.
In 1997, Freeman boldly offered to finance an integrated prom and was ignored. In 2007, he resurrected the offer and this time, was allowed by hesitant school administrators and parents to make a proposal to the students who agreed to the idea of having one prom for all of them on Freeman's nickel.
Describing the segregated festivities as "idiocy," Freeman was confident that the problem did not belong to the young people, but rather demonstrated a need to change the parents and school officials that teach them. The youth -- by and large -- agreed.
Jessica, a young European-American woman with close friends on both sides of the color line, is most direct: "Mississippi needs to get over its racism. And all the country/redneck/hicks can kiss. my. ass." Her White fiance, wearing longish hair and a cocked Dobb, was quick to articulate the same attitude. But not everyone interviewed expressed similar opinions.
Some of the school administrators almost immediately raised their concerns about "safety," assuring the young people (who had asked for no such reassurance) that there would be rules to "make sure you're safe," that they would "watch out for your best interests," and that they would be prepared to "deal with situations."
The first such "situation" occurred shortly thereafter, when a White girl made some flat statements in a classroom about her displeasure over the decision and a Black girl defended it. The altercation escalated until the White student finally made an unsubstantiated claim that the African-American had brought a gun to school. White parents opposed to the idea of "niggers rubbin' up against my daughter," declared that they intended to have "no mixed babies up in this house" and resolutely planned a separate Whites-only "prom" for their children anyway.
Nevertheless, Freeman called it his "prayer" that the youth would be allowed to have social contact, sure that given the chance, they would take it. And in truth, the students articulated very well the difference between being "raised racist" and "being racist." Still, with the very real specter of being disowned hanging over their heads, even a boy nicknamed "White Chocolate" -- the only European-American on the basketball team -- agreed to attend both events, to assuage his parents.
The most poignant story line concerns high school seniors Heather, with fair skin, and her boyfriend of five years, Jeremy, who is African-American. The couple, despite the White supremacist stance of Heather's step-father and the obvious fears of Jeremy's parents for his safety, are almost classically Romeo and Juliet in their camera scenes. Utterly committed to each other and full of maturity and reason, they make most of the rest of the town characters -- students and adults alike -- appear somewhat silly by comparison.
While much of the movie is conversational, it manages never to be sluggish or flat, maintaining a steady pace from start to finish and moving from point to point in such a way that the viewer can see how interwoven human community -- especially in a microcosm like Charleston, Mississippi -- really is. Juxtaposing the drama of parents and students trying to block social change with the drama of young people excitedly planning for their senior prom maintains a delicate tension throughout the film and is one of the primary reasons I enjoyed it even more the second time. The nuances are so many in number, it simply isn't possible to catch them all the first time. White Jessica with tears in her eyes as she recounts what her anti-racist stance has cost her, Black Calvin describing how the police officers who made him drop his pants on the side of the highway in an ostensible search for drugs speak to him on the street as if nothing had happened, or a White lawyer announcing in a lawyerly fashion that his "clients" (the parents who bankrolled, planned and held the Whites-only "prom") refuse to be interviewed for fear they'll be "thought racist" -- the film is loaded with sound-bites that carry the story along.
Still, Saltzman keeps the ultimate focus on the pride the students felt in, as one of them put it, "a few kids from our town changing a little piece of the world." One boy, who chose to speak only anonymously and behind a blurring screen, added: "This generation is gonna do what makes them happy...People that try to stop that are gonna be sadly disappointed in the long run." And I would argue, not just disappointed, but pushed aside and left behind. This is made particularly clear when Chasidy, the Black girl who missed being Valedictorian by a controversial ruling, announces confidently to the camera with a sly grin that her dream is to "come back and take over the high school, the whole school system, and make a difference in the world."
Here's to Chasidy, to the students of Charleston High School who attended the integrated prom in 2008, and to those responsible for bringing us this presentation so resounding with honesty, hope and joy. Because -- one way or the other -- we all live in Charleston. And that's a fact.
Once in a while in life, for whatever reason, you get to be at "the spot." You know what I mean: "the place to be," where something so extraordinary occurs that you walk away knowing you've been touched by The Force. Last night, the spot was in a Canal Place theater auditorium in New Orleans and I was there, along with Danny Glover (one of the executive producers of the film being shown), Carl Deal (the director of said film), and two bonafide heroes and stars, Kimberly Rivers and Scott Roberts (seen above with Rivers holding up the photo of her deceased mother, a photo miraculously spared by the floods after Katrina). The film? Trouble the Water. It already won the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at Sundance, among other awards. And if it's not about to open in your city in the next month or so, you might want to make it a point to approach your local theater post haste with enough information to change that. This is the real deal.
The story opens with Kimberly trying out her brand new Sony movie cam in the hours before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. She and Scott were living in the lower 9th Ward at that time and as she talks to the neighborhood children about who's going and who has to stay for lack of money, the audience, of course, already knows what's about to happen and views the bright young faces through the window of that knowledge.
Through the next few weeks, Kim Rivers continued to film the incredible story of survival from inside the skin of the survivors. You're with them up very close and personal when the water begins to rise, forcing them into the attic ("I can't reach it...Gimme your foot..."). You hear the stark reports of dwindling supplies. And in seamless continuity, Deal and his technical crew intersperse other film and audio clips. You see the devastation from the air. You hear the voice of a woman telling a 911 operator she isn't strong enough to break through the ceiling in her attic and she's going to drown. She isn't screaming. She's just telling someone. You hear a young Black man's voice talking to another operator, dropping into sadness with lost hope as she tells him with unemotional finality that no one -- no one -- is coming.
I've seen some hellified thrillers in my day, but it would be very difficult for a fictional presentation to reach the level of tension Rivers, Deal and the film editors produced with Trouble the Water. You watch a Black man named Larry in water almost to his shoulders making trip after trip to move others to higher ground ("I'll take two at a time," he shouts up at the folks in the window. "Bring me two at a time.") and you have no way of knowing whether he's going to go under in the next frame. You see Scott somehow -- incredibly -- maintaining his patience and his dignity while trying to negotiate a space to spend even one night out of the ruins in an abandoned naval station the military was ordered to keep the weary citizens from entering.
"How about just the women and children?" Scott says without a shred of the rage in his voice that anyone in the audience would surely have understood.
"Get off this property or we'll shoot," the soldier barks at gunpoint. You could almost feel the theater audience recoil.
A fading clip shows a weakened survivor scooting across a bridge on an office chair with wheels, pushing along with one foot as if this is the most natural thing in the world to be doing. The unfolding weeks of struggle, of relocation, of returning give not the least relief of tension to either the viewer or those being viewed. The dance with FEMA is punctuated by an understated, but stunning series of silent faces looking dead into the camera without blinking, waiting for anything to happen.
Then, completely unexpectedly, in Memphis, where the couple had escaped for a time, Kim hears her cousin thumping a CD she had made in New Orleans and thought she'd never see again. Without introduction, she jumps off into a rap that produced a spontaneous burst of applause in the theater. Not only is she really, really good, I mean seriously talented, but the story of her life as she tells it in the rap she titled "Amazing" is...well...amazing.* And the viewer is forced to realize, gasping, that these people have been surviving one Katrina or another all their lives. With all that talent. With all that strength of personhood and determination and the solidarity and kindness and respect they had evidenced before the cameras for weeks under the most mind-numbing duress -- they've been hanging by their thumbs year after year after year while the rest of the population sails blithely by, acting as if they don't exist.
Later, on the way home, the woman I was with said she was disappointed that BlackKoldMadina (the name Kim uses as a rapper) isn't a star now. Apparently, my friend wanted to see Kim and Scott living large with the rich and famous by the end of the movie, above the pain of their former lives and the terrible ordeal they somehow survived.
"But she is a star," I countered.
I mean, sometimes, being a star is having the courage to lift a camera at a time when most people would be too panic-stricken to move. Sometimes, being a star is walking through hell and still finding the strength to call yourself "Amazing." Sometimes, being a star is having a husband whose face absolutely radiates his pride when he looks in your direction. Sometimes, being a star is pushing your baby down the aisle in a theater while your hometown stands to its feet. We should all be so lucky.
___________________________________________________________ *If you doubt my judgment on the matter of BlackKoldMadina's talent, I invite you to visit Born Hustler Records to find out for yourself. "Amazing" doesn't come across quite as strongly on that site, in my opinion, as it does in the film and on the cd. Still, there's no doubt about her talent and I'm very glad I bought the cd last night, unashamedly asking for an autograph while Sky, Scott and Kim's new baby girl, sitting in her stroller at my feet, played with the cuff of my brightly colored sleeve.
