America Behind the Color Line (43 page)

BERNIE MAC
The Chameleon

My focus, man, right now is, and has always been for a long period of time, on the essence of what I do: the humor—the story. I’m a storyteller. I love reinventing myself, especially today, because a lot of people really are just not tuning in to Bernie Mac. They thought Bernie Mac was something, was potent like them, these little things I’ve done. They haven’t even got a fourth of Bernie Mac, and that’s where my focus lies right now. It’s really tuning America more in to that man, to the message.

My message is, I deal with the truth. I try to find humor in the most inopportune places and times. My humor comes from pain, to be able to laugh at your misfortune, to really laugh at your struggle, to really laugh at the trials and tribulations that occur in everyone’s life. It tells the tale about an individual, and I learnt that from my grandmother.

I used to think something was wrong with me because I never understood that I was poor. I never understood that I was having to struggle, because the way I thought, I really wasn’t. I thought I had it all. I was so much at peace and I was so much into the total surroundings of my family, my grandparents, my mother, and the true love, the true essence of the word “love.” I didn’t know what all that other stuff was until they passed. I was twenty-six when my grandmother passed, and I was fifteen when my mother passed. When they left, I saw what this thing, what we call life, is all about. I saw the downside of it and tried to be able to tell the story so many of us live. So many of us, we try to put it on the back burner and block it out from reality. That’s why so many people are really in pain struggle. Being able to find humor in those places, that’s really where my focus is.

Now, what you put on me, that’s your own perspective. But I know what got me here, and it definitely wasn’t Hollywood and it definitely wasn’t whites. Blacks got me here. When they filled those rooms up for me, when they filled those shows up, seven-thousand-, five-thousand-seaters, it was black. When you set up and they ran up and down that aisle and I told stories about what the white folk didn’t understand, they were black. When they sat there, when the television show came up, I was ready. I was seasoned. I was over the campaign. All those people that came and saw me in places where no one ever bought tickets—Meridian, Mississippi; Graysville and Harrison, Alabama—I went to places where a lot of cats never wanted to go because there’s blacks there. It made me. Now I get white people too. I’ve got the biggest crossover program on television. They call that growth. You go from point A to Z, you don’t go from M to Z. I brought the people from Meridian, Mississippi; Detroit, Michigan; Savannah, Georgia—all those places—with me. When they put
that
me on television, the old people knew me. I did the groundwork, and that’s what made the show successful. The audience just travels over.

I think anytime there’s change, it frightens people. Especially in Hollywood, because they’re experts; they’re the geniuses. They want to be responsible for your existence. They want to be able to say, I created that. And when I came in with the story for
The Bernie Mac Show,
with the outline, it really shocked them, for number one, that I had that. They want to be in control of you. They want to be in control of your existence.

They wanted to be able to say, well, this is what we see and we’ll put your name on it. That satisfies most people. We’ll pat you on the knee doggone, that’s what. We’re going to have a little girl here, she’s gonna talk back and she’s gonna shake her head and all that old stereotypical stuff and I was saying, no, we ain’t having that.
This
is what the story is about. I wanted to go back to basics. I wanted to show, hey, it’s time out. It stops with us. A kid is going to be a kid. I’m gonna tell the truth; I’m gonna say what Americans only wish they could say. And you know what, it fit. I took the laugh track out, because I didn’t want to insult my audience. I got tired of that old fictitious, phony-assed ha, ha, ha, telling you when to laugh and how to laugh. I really truly thought that was an insult. I thought, America, it’s time. It’s time for us to go back to basics.

I can’t take credit totally for the success of the show, because it’s so many combinations that are involved. It’s the story, it’s the writing, it’s the acting, it’s the style, it’s the look, it’s the titles. It’s the love; it’s the warmth. It’s innovative; it’s a breath of fresh air; it’s all that. All that combined in one. And I have to give credit to all the people before me that set the precedent for me— from Harrison, Alabama, and all of that. And the word of mouth and how they say, you better watch this guy; this is the guy I was telling you about, and how it was like a snowball effect. And now, when they tap in, the people who did know me, the white audience, the Asians, everyone, they see the Iranian; they see all the different cultures on the show; and they see how that’s real life. It’s real life, man.

My uncle used to come over to the house, and we used to love this cat to come over because he was real. He would turn and say something unexpected, offensive, maybe rude, but he got it. He knew what was happening. It wasn’t so much what he said as how he said it. But he told the truth, even when he lied. He’d be sitting out at the table with his fork in his hand and he’d be like, now you pray for that. Do you want me to feel sorry? I’m not feeling sorry for a goddamn thing. If you went there with him, you kept on getting nothing. And he used to just sit there.

He only came once, twice a year, but he knew what everybody did wrong. He knew and he told it. My grandmother would sit there and she would go, that’s right, that’s right, I keep telling them. But when you heard it from somebody else, it registered, versus coming from her, because she was too close.

My auntie, she was so phony and everything. She would go, don’t say that. Because she always worried about what other people thought, what other people said, and how they feel about it. My grandmother and my uncle, they were what you call real. My grandmother could always tell you the truth as she saw it, even when she was wrong. She could say, I apologize for that. She’d say, when you’re wrong, you’ve got to stand up and look the person in the eye and tell them you’re wrong. She could say, I didn’t use good judgment on that, but because I didn’t use good judgment doesn’t mean you do the same. She always broke it down like a fraction. She was always honest, and that was unusual for adults in those days.

And I had my brother. I used to watch my brother. He was my role model. He was one of the first blacks at First National Bank of Chicago. I was so proud. He was a hell of an athlete, and I watched how, man, everybody kept trying to put us under here, his standard. We had to mimic what Mitch did. Mitch was this, Mitch was that, he was, oh, the academic, while I was thinking, I can’t follow those shoes, man. And I saw how he got a little bit cocky. He was a hell of a baseball player. He went to the St. Louis Cardinal farm system and he got cocky. I saw how his head got big and I saw how all his hard work just dropped, because he got too much into the moment, and I said, I’m not going to do that.

I watched how my sister was the queen of Chicago, how she used to sing all the radio jingles, and how she’d sing in the background with Aretha Franklin. She found out who the real queen is, and she had to come back home with her head between her legs. And I said to myself, I’m not going to do that. I saw how you go from one level to the next, and how you do things for the wrong reasons, and how you lose everything overnight. You never know. We don’t know what tomorrow brings. That’s why I can’t get excited about what’s happening, because I’m not done. When I’ve done thirty years in the business and I’ve done exactly what I wanted and I set a look, a tone for the thing, and I can reflect back and hopefully in my old age sit somewhere with grandkids around, then I can say, thank you, Lord. That’s when I’ve done something. I ain’t done nothing.

In our show, people are incidentally black. I mean they’re black, but people can identify. We bring out their humanness. It’s 2002. I’m trying, baby. We have done it, almost to death. We have killed it. I want to show the human side of us, man. It’s good to be upper middle class. We are that now, would you know; and we still got our roots. There’s a time and a place for everything. My grandmother, she was great, man. That’s something we don’t have today— manners. What you talk—yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am—and we sat there, me and my brother, and she would sit there, and we get in the car. I’m kicking your ass a bit. You know damn better than that, embarrassing me in front of those people. What the heck’s wrong with you? I’m gonna tear your behind off. You’re doggone right; she didn’t play with you. We grew up on manners. I miss that. We had manners; we don’t have that anymore. And if I’m wrong, you tell me.

Our mentality, and not just blacks, but a lot of minorities, has fallen. It has fallen from where we were. The spiritual guidance has gone and left us, for number one, and that’s a very dangerous thing. And the mentality in terms of microwaves has risen. We want things overnight. It’s a fast-food, instant-gratification, efficiency-not-quality society. We hate ourselves. Oh yes, we hate ourselves. We hate anything that has uplift in it. It’s just constructed that way and I see it in everyday life as I talk to the schools. I see it in our young people. I see it more and more in our society, whereas our desire to be more and to be better has just disappeared.

It’s the fault of the individuals and it’s the fault of the system. It’s a combination. You can’t blame one without the other. We’ve just gotten away, man, from the spirituality part, which is really the main focus. It’s gone. I mean, that’s what kept me safe. I knew God; I know him. I don’t want to say “knew” in the past tense. I know him, and that kept me out of a lot of things. Big Mama, man, she is still there. I had a tight family unit, a network, and oh man, oh man, respect. Respect is on the back burner now. We’re just a selfish society now. No deferred gratification; just give me, give me. He got it, I want it. Doggone, I’m better than him; how come I can’t have it? I had no mother, man, my father left me. You’re forty-seven. Let it go.

And don’t forget slavery. Oh, man, we were slaves. I heard something that kind of flipped me out and I had to really just shake it off. A lady said, God paid New York back because slaves was traded on Wall Street and they built the trade buildings on top of a black cemetery. We put the Lord in it. This is 2002, man. You know, we still talk in the same old, same old way.

I’ll give you a perfect example. If I were to tell you how tight I was in 1974—that’s the year I was a junior in high school and that’s the year my mother died. Man, I had women; I had, excuse my French, the bitches. First thing you would tell me, man, is let that old shit go. Am I right or wrong? I mean, get away from that old antique stuff; nobody wants to hear that no more. But we constantly keep on. I know it, I get it, I understand it. I know what we were about, but here we are right now; what are we going to do about right now?

Another thing is that we think we’re the only ones that have suffered. We think we’re the only one that has struggled; we think we’re the only one that has been dealt a bad hand. We think we’re the only one that is perfect people, you know, but yet sometimes we come off as the most prejudiced.

If you say that, people get mad, but it’s true. It is very true. And we do a lot of stuff that’s responsible for our own repression, no question. We don’t want to get the noose off our own neck, because we’re not comfortable. It feels good. Because if you take it off from around your neck, you feel naked, you know? Where’s my noose? We say that. You get mad, but see, I learned from a very wise woman, Mary McCullough, my grandmother. She taught me how to deal with the truth, and I was symbolic of that stigma too. Don’t say that, don’t say that, Mama, don’t know what you mean, like that. I used to get tight. And she taught me how to deal with what was in front of me and analyze it for what it is. I mean, the world don’t mean nothing. Every day, every day under the struggle, you know what? If I reflect back to my childhood from one of the rough days that I thought was rough, I ate every day. I might not ate what I desired, but I ate every day. When I looked to that beer, or I said the lights seemed ready to go off, or that gas was kind of hot, you know what? For some kind of reason, my father got paid. I don’t know how, but he got paid.

And I’m here. I made it; always found a way. All of us have experienced, man, I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow, I don’t know what the heck, and you go to the mailbox and you got a surprise check there from somebody. What the—but you still don’t appreciate. You were gratified for that second, that moment. And then we always go back to that old, same old messed-up ways. It’s like the doctors tell you something and all of a sudden you’re meek now, but as soon as you get better, you start back the same old, same old ways. Yeah, I’m all right now. I’m okay, I’m okay. You know what, man? My blood sugar’s good. I’m going to have the bacon now.

I’m still in the appreciative stage, and I’m still glad that I never left that. I don’t want to leave that. And if I don’t, maybe I’ll continue to be successful. That’s why I stay where I am, because I have a life. Everybody say, well, you know, you’re doing so well now, you’re doing this. I’ve always been doing well. Now the only thing that’s different, for me, from my perspective, is I’m doing what I really choose to do. And that, right there, is of the elite. You take away all the material things, I’m doing what I set out to do. From Wonder bread to here. Oh yeah, all those humble beginnings, man. And I think that’s something I don’t ever want to lose. I don’t want to lose the appreciative stage I’m in. I don’t want to lose that.