GWTW to 12YAS- The Long Walk to the Back of the Bus

Watching the Oscars was something I did with my grandmother. We talked about the nominations, discussed the clothing, whether or not she could remake them (she was a professional seamstress), and how wonderful they would look on me, if I were old enough to wear them and walk down the red carpet. She taught me from birth to assume that I would walk the red carpets of the world, not sweep them when I grew up.

When we watched, the red carpet was just that, a rug to keep the Hollywood heels from getting dirty. It was not an event, just ground cover.

We watched in tandem for many, many years, until she died, our viewing fueling conversations in the days that followed, until something else caught our attention. My music tastes and movie preferences closely mirrored my grandmother's so much so that when she died, I stopped watching the Academy Awards for a while.

Other things were expanding my consciousness by that time. I had grown up and had ripped off the blindfold that had been installed at birth. Instead of ignoring white people and their very obvious obtuseness toward people of color as I had been taught to do, for the sake of survival, I looked at the world in it's phoney pale glory and got angry.

My anger wasn't a nuclear explosion. It was more like lighting a fuse, a long fuse to a dynamite bomb, that took some time, and traveled some distance, before exploding, with only the sizzle noise of the fuse speaking of the coming danger.

Detonation time was 1968 when I was taken from school to view the movie, Gone With the Wind, at the Valley Theater in Roselawn. The mini shopping mall is still there on Reading Road, but the Theater is long gone replaced by a liquor store, while Roselawn flipped from a Jewish neighborhood to a Black one. No traces of the theater exist today, except in my mind's eye as I drive past sometimes.

GWTW was a big deal in 1968 because it hadn't been seen in a couple of decades, the negative destroyed by fire or some catastrophe. Most people alive at the time had never seen the movie, and only knew of it from the Hollywood hype machine, the surviving snippets shown during Oscar ceremonies and the memories of the film from those old enough to have seen it after release in 1939.

Restoring and re-releasing Margaret Mitchell's masterpiece was a very big deal. It was the biggest and best of blockbuster cinema, we'd been told.  GWTW became a field trip for my high school, considered a history lesson of the the way we were for real.

I honestly couldn't wait to see it, movie and history buff that I was and remain.

Seated midway back in the dark, I remember going from jubilant anticipation to feeling like somebody was making me suck lemons. The rest of the audience was silent, remaining jubilant, cheering and talking back to the screen, which I thought was funny, since I had been led to believe that only happened in colored theaters. Some girl sitting down front was so overwhelmed at the sight of Scarlett O'Hara that she cried out hysterically, causing the rest of us to laugh out loud.

We quickly returned to quiet so that the historical narrative of the vibrant Old South could continue.

I felt like I was drowning. My anger was simmering, choking me, not that I could do anything about it. I was the only colored female in the graduating class of 1968. There were only 4 of us out of 293 seniors.

I don't remember if the other 3 were there that day. We didn't sit together, so I was uniquely aware of being the only Black female in the Valley Theater that day watching Gone With the Wind. I went in happy and came out pissed off, and there was no one to talk to about my feelings except my grandmother. Later that night after her long day at Tall Fashions fitting taller than average white women in tailor made dresses and suits downtown, she listened while I vented and then told me to be cool and to stay “lady-like.” It would pass she always told me. She probably used the word "calm" instead of "cool." Cool was not in her vast vocabulary.

But it didn't. I tried reading the book thinking maybe the people in Hollywood had gotten it wrong by interpretation. Couldn't get past the nigger, nigger, nigger litany on the first page. Still haven't read it to this day.

Seeing Gone With the Wind changed a lot of things for me. 

By the same token, 12 Years a Slave changed nothing except it made me wearily angry. I haven't seen the movie and honestly don't know if I will. I have read the book. It was a difficult read. It was journey that I could not make in just one sitting. Had to read and then cool off.

By now, I am numb in my readings be they fact or fiction, because I've covered a lot of ground in my personal search for my peoples' history. An American story that should be learned in school, but is still omitted purposefully from public curriculum. Our history exists in special museums or special displays in public libraries, in special order from bookstores, or in badly made Hollywood spectacle where magically, the white guy somehow ends up becoming the Darkie Savior by the time the credits roll, The End.

In my adult mind, I know that white Hollywood makes Black movies to make white people feel good about themselves and I assumed that 12YAS was just another example. It was, on one level.

But it was something else too, a movie about slavery, directed by a black man, with a screenplay adapted by a black man, with black people in the leading roles who really were black. Not African American black, but close enough. All Black people born in the western hemisphere fall from the same slavery tree anyway, so no biggy.

Hollywood stayed true to form about being by and for white people with 12 Years a Slave because they would only hand over the money to a white man to get the movie made. Enter Brad Pitt as the money man and bit part player in the film. No Pitt, no 12YAS.

The whites started bad and stayed bad, as in monstrous, to the point that some people said it was too brutal to be real. Personally I don't think Hollywood can make a movie that is brutal enough to show the true story of slavery in America. The real story still waits in the wings.

In the afterglow of the Oscars, !2YAS was named best picture of the year, and Lupita N'Yongo was given the Oscar as best supporting actress, and belle of the ball.

At least for this year, Hollywood swapped out Scarlett, a ballsy, man-pleasing southern belle ready and willing to do anything to save her plantation for Patsy a small colored slave woman trapped between her deviant white owner and his very jealous and vicious wife.

It's official...Hollywood is no longer racist..

Truth..or some of it anyway.