Third Girl from the Left (24 page)

B
Y THE TIME I WAS ELEVEN, THE WAYS I DIFFERED
from my mother were set as hard as stone. My mother loved the surfaces of things, how they looked. I wanted to know about the speed of images, how to capture them and make them mine. She'd live with broken switches and blown light bulbs for months rather than attempt even the simplest home repair. She couldn't fathom my longing to be behind the camera, to be the one who makes the picture, not the one in it. But I didn't mind. I liked to keep things at a distance. Machines were more trustworthy. I always knew what was going on inside them, or I could find out if I examined them intently enough. They behaved the same way no matter what I did. Once when I was six, while my mother was in the shower and Sheila was out, I pulled a chair over to our kitchen counter, dragged our toaster oven down by the cord, and, using a screwdriver I found in a drawer, completely disassembled it before she got her mascara on. As she stepped out of our tiny bathroom, resplendent as always, I looked up from a sea of small metal parts, two gears in my hands. I smiled. I had never been so content; at last I could see inside an object and find out what made it work.

From the time I was about seven, Mama's favorite thing to do was to come home from the video store with a box or two under her arm and announce grandly, “Let's watch Mommy tonight!” The three of us ate pizza and popcorn and drank Dr. Pepper, and Sheila and my mother took turns covering my eyes during the really sexy parts and the worst gun battles. They laughed a lot too, remembering. So much sometimes that they forgot to cover my eyes. And they sat right up next to each other, their legs touching, their eyes shining. It wasn't long before I knew all the films by heart, Mama's favorites of the movies she'd appeared in:
Coffy
(third girl from the left who got her dress ripped off in the fight scene).
Cleopatra Jones
(an extra in the airport scene; “I named you after her, baby,” Mama invariably shrieked as Tamara Dobson, who played Cleopatra, strode onto the screen).
Street Fighting Man
(dancing in a G-string and no top on the bar in the bar scene). No
Way Back
(she was onscreen for almost ten minutes and had a couple of lines). The movies were loud, confusing, and violent. I got used to them, but I never really liked them much. So much screaming and shooting, and the women were always naked. My own mother was always naked. It was embarrassing. I never asked her about that. What was I gonna say? How weird it was to see my mother rolling and screaming, naked, in a movie? Or ask her how it felt to have Pam Grier rip off her dress? I couldn't ask that. I let her think it didn't bother me.

One time as she was putting me to bed after a movie, she sat on the edge of my bed for a minute and briefly ran her hand over my forehead. It made me feel bold enough to ask a question. “Mama?”

“Yeah, Tam?”

“Was my daddy in the movies?”

Her eyes got big and tearful. I was terrified. “As much as I was, I suppose,” she said after a long time. “Not that much.” The tears never fell. “He didn't want to be a daddy. And I . . .” She trailed off. I could have asked a million more questions. They were all in my throat, choking me. She gazed past me, absently twirling the hair at the back of her neck. When she started doing that, I knew better than to keep asking. Here was another thing we'd never talk about. “Well, we do all right without him,” she said eventually.

“Yes, Mama.”

“You go on to sleep now.” She got up and left but paused to look at me again before she went out. “I love you, Tam.”

“I love you too, Mama.”

I probably didn't fall asleep for an hour after that, holding the words in my mouth, hearing them hum in my ears. I could count on one hand the number of times she'd ever said them.

 

Not long after this, Mama took me to see
She's Gotta Have It
. Typical. The movie is filled with absolutely explicit sex, adult jokes, adult concerns, a rape scene—why wouldn't you take an eleven-year-old? I never questioned her decisions about movies, and after
Raging Bull
when I was five I stopped being frightened by them. Movies were what we did, so I learned to enjoy whatever we saw. I'm grateful now. If I'd been afraid during
She's Gotta Have It
, I never would have learned what I did. If I'd been trying to understand what all the grownups were laughing at, I never would have been able to study the speed of the editing during the men-are-dogs montage. If I'd allowed myself to have any feelings at all when Jamie attacks Nola near the film's ending, I might not have been struck by the beauty of the lighting when Nola sits in her bed surrounded by candles. If I'd given in to my embarrassment as all the lovers in the movie took their clothes off and licked each other in slow (or fast) motion, I wouldn't have been able to admire the full-color ballet in the middle (yeah, it looks ridiculous now, but oh, I thought it was so beautiful then). I was young, but I knew something was going on. I could not have articulated it, but the energy, all the heart that went into making that movie, leapt off the screen, unassailable. All those black peopie the point of the movie, not the sidekicks or the dupes or just plain absent. I'd never seen that before. Well, that's not true. I'd seen it in my mother's old movies, but they were so . . . I didn't know the word. They weren't alive the way this film was. I couldn't articulate it then, but now I know what the difference was. In my mother's movies, no one paid the slightest attention to craft. Everything was just thrown at the lens as fast as possible. Beauty had no place there. Neither did reality. Speed was the only virtue. But there was something in
She's Gotta Have It
that was just plain true. I could tell by all the excited, recognizing laughter of the grownups. And it was beautiful. I could hear it in my mother's laughter. And as Nola sashayed down what I later learned was the Fulton Mall in Brooklyn, hips swinging, Jamie following right behind her, my mother squeezed my hand. Yeah, I knew something was going on. I asked for a video camera, but I didn't get it until a year later, for my twelfth birthday. It must have taken her that long either to get the money together or decide I wasn't getting over this.

I started out filming everything. I tried to create images like those I saw. As you can imagine, this didn't work out right away. But I kept trying. And my moviegoing got a little crazed. Before, I mostly went with Mama to see whatever she wanted. But now I was reading books of film history the way the girls at my school read
Seventeen
. I started making requests—well, more like demands. It wasn't a problem, though. My mother would take me to anything. We went to any old revival that I asked her to go to. I saw
Mean Streets
,
Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Godfather—
everything good from the 1970s—by the time I was sixteen. I made my mother take me to the library every week for more and more complex books about filmmaking. I started wearing a baseball cap my every waking hour. I railed at the limitations of natural light. My mother rolled her eyes, convinced I was a changeling.

When I was twelve, most days I came home after school not to our apartment but to Miss Tillie's house. Miss Tillie was an elderly neighbor who watched me and four other children after school for a few dollars an hour. Boring was not the word for it. It was a desert of tedium that I traversed each afternoon without complaint only because I knew that my mother and Sheila needed me not to mind, and though I never would have admitted it I was a little frightened to stay home by myself. Miss Tillie's smelled like a thousand cats and all the various sweet potions and sprays and failed deodorizers that she had used over the years to make it seem as though there weren't a thousand cats. I spent as much time as possible in the backyard, as did the other children she watched, Tracey, Shakira, LaTasha, and Darnell (the only boy). They were all younger than me, eight and nine years old. They always had runny noses and never wanted to do anything out back except fill their lungs with life-giving, cat-free oxygen so that they could go back inside to watch television. Once I got my video camera, they blossomed, in my mind, into the perfect cast for my first feature. Miss Tillie didn't care what we did as long as we didn't draw blood or break anything. And her backyard, overgrown and full of fruit trees run rampant, was ideal for my script,
The Jungle Chase
. So with Angela and Miss Tillie's permission (and the amused permission of the other children's parents), shooting began on March 15, 1988.

Tracey and LaTasha had to hide behind a hydrangea bush for the first scene. Darnell and Shakira were supposed to chase them. I was forced to referee my first actor's dispute when they fought over who would wear the pith helmet I had picked up at a yard sale. There was only one, which I had thought might be a problem, but I also thought that it gave a nice touch of authenticity to the scene. In the end, I made like a director and decreed that Darnell could wear the hat in the first scene and Shakira would wear it in the second. This led to some pouting from Shakira, but I bought her off with the promise of an extra close-up and two Milky Ways, to be paid the next day. Tracey and LaTasha were inhabitants of a tribe of people who were unaware of the existence of humans beyond their jungle (I had seen a PBS special about a tribe like this, and I was dazzled by the idea).

Darnell spoke first. “Look there, I think I see some of the elusive members of the Hantomami tribe” was what he was supposed to say. What he said was, “I want to wear the hat for both scenes.” I turned off the camera, furious. “Look, Darnell, we've gotta share the hat. It's the only one we have. You getting to wear it now, right?”

“Yeah, but I like it. I want to be like Indiana Jones, where it never comes off.”

“Well, this isn't Indiana Jones,” I said. I felt tears, sharp and vital, at the back of my eyes, but I'd be damned before anyone got to see them.

“Well, I'm not going to be in your stupid movie, then. I'm gonna go watch cartoons. Come on, y'all.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
is on anyway.” They all followed Darnell into the house, LaTasha throwing a quick apologetic look my way.

I stood clutching my bulky camera at my side, staring at the space where my cast had stood. Being a director was going to be considerably harder than I had imagined. But there had been that crystalline moment when I was looking through the camera, and LaTasha and Tracey were still, clutching each other's hands. The light filtered through LaTasha's hair and it looked as though it was lit from within. The image was under my control. I could make them look as beautiful or as ugly as I wanted to. My heart hammered behind my breastbone, and then they dropped hands and the moment was gone. But I'd held them in my hands for that minute. And they were perfect. I sighed and followed everyone into the house, my heart slowing as I walked. I felt a little better when I remembered that I had my copy of
Spike Lee's Gotta Have It
with me. I thought maybe I'd read that.

This story makes me sound like a real film geek. Here's a secret: most filmmakers are kind of geeky, even if well dressed. I include myself in that, of course. For all the cultural currency of the job, most of it is an incredible obsession with ridiculous amounts of detail, an ability to watch the same thing over and over and over and over without the slightest lessening of interest, very neat handwriting, and a love of machinery. Look under Steven Spielberg's cap, and behind the dollar signs, and what do you see? A lonely suburban kid with thick glasses and a bad haircut who sat in the back of the classroom, doodling in a notebook. And Spike? My man Spike? Do you think anyone that short, wearing those glasses, with those skinny, skinny legs, ever—I mean ever—had a date at Morehouse? You do the math. But we see things. Other things. The elongated, odd angle of Anthony Perkins's neck in that scene in
Psycho
as he leans over the desk to talk to the private detective played by Martin Balsam. Or the glow of the boxing ring in
Raging Bull
, that the soft gray against the knife-edge black against the pure white of the floor in the foreground. Or those hayfields of light in
Days of Heaven
. I wanted to be one of the company who saw things, even if they were a bunch of nerdy guys.

But I was only twelve. And black. And a girl. A girl not much like the other girls in my middle school. And you know that's never good. West Hollywood Middle School in 1988 was in the grip of what was left of
Flashdance
fever. All the girls had enormous hair and sweatshirts falling off of one shoulder and leg warmers covering tight Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. They chewed a lot of gum and thought Scott Baio was the cutest. We weren't separated by money. Most of the other kids' parents had jobs like my mama's and Sheila's; they were the valet parkers, the hospital workers, the waiters and waitresses, the hotel clerks. Like my mama, they were gonna be something else once, a long time ago maybe. But not anymore. Part of the problem was that I was one of very few black kids in the school; it was mostly white and Hispanic. Whether it was race or just my stubborn difference, I don't know. But they wouldn't leave me alone.

I talked to my mother about it only once. It hadn't been a particularly bad day—it was just the day I couldn't take any more. It was just the day I couldn't keep my mouth shut and my head up. Mama picked me up from Miss Tillie's in the little orange Volkswagen that she and Sheila had owned since before I was born. My chest was tight from the sobs squeezed beneath my ribs. They leapt out of me as soon as I got into the car. I didn't even push aside the gum wrappers and pot seeds and rolling papers that always littered the front seat. I sat on them. My head was on fire.

“Baby, what is it? Somebody do something to you at Miss Tillie's today?” My mother got out a cigarette quickly. She always did that when I needed something. I grew up with the smell of smoke in my hair. I still kind of like it. I hitched and sobbed and snuffled a few times and finally choked out the story of how Toni Evans and Diana Perez had knocked over my lunch tray not once but twice and said my mama was a dyke and I must be too until it became apparent that I simply wasn't going to be allowed to eat lunch and so I was starving and if I cried in front of them they'd be even meaner and the teacher wouldn't do anything and I was so hungry and why were they so mean. Why were they so mean? I couldn't stop crying.