Friends: A Love Story (23 page)

During the late 1980s and early '90s, there had been an exodus of actors leaving New York and moving to Los Angeles. People were starting to make L.A. their base and travel back to New York. I had done all I could do in New York for now. I needed a change of scenery. Since all my buddies and boys were out on L.A., I decided to move there, too. I flew out there and stayed with some friends while I looked for a place. When I returned, I called the Mayflower Moving Company to come and get my things, packed what would fit into my Honda Civic wagon and asked my good buddy Robert Bristol to drive to the
West Coast with Bottom and me. (I flew Robert back home.) Along the way, we explored the country. That was an incredible road trip, a rite of passage of sorts—just the boys: Rob, Bottom and me.

W
hat's Love
marked an incredible milestone in my life. There was the time in my life before
What's Love,
and there was the time after it. After receiving so much critical acclaim, I suddenly didn't have to audition anymore. People just offered me parts; they thought I was the right person for the role. In a way that was kind of cool. I never had really considered before the idea that my previous work was my audition or proved that I was right. But I have to admit there's some security that comes with auditioning and winning the role. You've proven you're right for the part. You aren't showing up on the first day hoping you're giving them what they want.

Although I was being offered a lot of parts, I wasn't sure that they were right for me; I was looking for roles that were equal or better. I didn't think it was right that after being nominated for an Oscar, I should go back to being a guest star on a sitcom. Before
What's Love,
I would have been happy to play those parts. But after you've performed in a role of that magnitude, exactly what do you do next? I didn't know; I'd never been in this position. Did starring in such a successful film now make me a film actress? There weren't then and still aren't many
leading roles for black, female actors. I wanted to do work that would keep me seen in certain ways—as a dramatic actor—in the industry. I knew I couldn't do just anything anymore. But I didn't feel like I had anybody I could bounce my thoughts off of. I had come from a low-income family. No one from my childhood had an entertainment industry background. Other than my management team I didn't have any personal advisers. Even if I did, this was a new situation for a black actress to be in. I'm not sure how much they could have helped me. There are times in this business when you either have to wait for the right opportunity or create the opportunity yourself. I wasn't in a position yet to create opportunities, so I waited. For the first time in my career since graduate school I wasn't working. Fortunately, I was exhausted and needed some downtime anyhow. It was a little unsettling but it didn't freak me out. Plus, it was a good time to immerse myself in and enjoy other parts of my life.

Until this point in my life, I had focused on my work and conducted other things around it. I was trying to work my career and make the most of it. Now I finally felt I had some breathing room in this precarious profession I love, I felt secure enough to breathe a little bit and pay more attention to the rest of me. I began to become involved with causes where my celebrity could help this Ronald McDonald House or that Boys and Girls Club or ACTSO, a major youth program offered by the NAACP, or a pediatric-AIDS initiative. One particularly memorable volunteer experience occurred when Glenn Close called me up during the mid 1990s. Glenn, who has starred in such memorable movies as
Jagged Edge
and
Fatal Attraction,
as well as
101 (
and
102) Dalmatians,
was volunteering at a women's prison located in Bedford, New York. At some point she had asked a group of women, who had sought to further their education while confined in prison, who they'd like to speak at their graduation ceremony. They told her,
“Angela Bassett.” I assume that they had seen
What's Love
and maybe could relate to it. So Glenn reached out to me and extended the invitation. I accepted, but I thought, “Oh, no, public speaking!” Public speaking is the number-one fear of most folk, even actors. Give me some words that a playwright has written or a screenwriter has penned and I can interpret for you six or seven ways—I'm a character then. If I have to get up and speak to you from my thoughts, it's a whole different story. But there are certain moments when you can't say no. You want to say no but very quickly another part of you says, “You cannot say no! You have to come up out of yourself. This is an opportunity to really help somebody else.” You come out of yourself because it's no longer about you; it's about serving others.

So I traveled to Bedford, spent the night with Glenn and stayed up until three or four in the morning trying to get my speech ready. What could I tell these women? I wondered. What did I have worthwhile to say? Then I went to the prison and I ate lunch with them. We sat at the table and said grace together. Then we talked and shared. The women were graduating with degrees ranging from their high school G.E.D to Ph.D. They were delightful and beautiful and brilliant and smart, yet whatever choices they'd made—to protect themselves, for instance—had landed them there. Then I got up and said my speech to try to encourage them. I don't remember what I said. What I really remember is feeling insignificant and being encouraged and buoyed and lifted up by them and all they were going through living in that place—not giving up on their children, furthering their education, being strong and determined in difficult circumstances. I remember meeting a little boy there—the son of one of the women.

“Can I give you
my
autograph?” he asked me.

“Of course,” I said. As I left, I watched him standing behind the bars. How could I help but give?

 

I was attending the NAACP Image Awards ceremony in 1994 when one of the actors sitting near me happened to mention a small, grassroots program called Artists for a New South Africa, an organization of artists and actors whose goal was to bring attention to apartheid, which was still the law in South Africa all these years after I had first learned about it as an undergraduate. I thought the organization sounded interesting, so I contacted Sharon Gelman who heads it. Sharon told me about an upcoming trip where a group of artists would tour the different townships and states to help get the word out about voting, since 1994 would mark the first time black South Africans would be allowed to participate in the electoral process. We would show black people how to vote and dramatize mock elections so they could see how the process works. It was a chance for us to bring ourselves and our celebrity to a huge humanitarian issue. To shine a little light—our light—on a human tragedy and help counter misinformation that the “powers that be” were spreading to intimidate blacks from voting. I'd never been to Africa before, but as a black woman it was an important place to me. This seemed like a great opportunity to travel there and work for an important cause.

A group of about seven of us—Sharon, Delroy and his wife, Nashormeh; Danny Glover and his former wife, Asake Bomani; Blair Underwood; actress CCH Pounder; and Alexandra Paul, one of the women on
Baywatch
—traveled to New York, where we held a press conference. I remember Alfre Woodard, who participated in the media event but didn't go on the trip, speaking about the problem so eloquently and passionately. She was just so invested and so heartwise. I admired her. Afterward, the rest of us flew for eighteen hours to Johannesburg. I was surprised to find that Johannesburg wasn't at all like the talk I'd heard about Africa being the “dark continent”—not to mention, the Tarzan movies I'd seen during my childhood. It
is a bustling cosmopolitan city that put me in mind of New York. I didn't expect to see people getting around on buses just like they did at home. I was surprised when I found out that Alexandra had signed up for a spinning class. There was a mall attached to our hotel. I was curious about what a mall in Africa would look like, so I set out to explore it. There was a Gap, a Victoria's Secret and other stores you'd find back at home, in addition to shops selling local and indigenous items like beautifully painted ostrich eggs. Walking around, you saw faces of sho' 'nuff black people who had no white folk in their lineage. You saw mixed-race people. You saw white people. You saw black people who looked like people in your family yet lived on the other side of the world. You saw human beings. I saw how alike we all are—our commonalities. I felt very proud, I felt excited—like I had finally made it home to the “cradle of civilization.”

I quickly learned that one thing we did not have in common with South Africans was the level of danger we lived with. While I was walking around the mall, a bomb alert was broadcast over the intercom. We had to evacuate. My first day in South Africa, I'm in the mall and there's danger of a bomb going off! I don't think there actually ended up being a bomb—if there was, it certainly didn't detonate. But it was a volatile time. So many people didn't want apartheid to end or black people to vote, and they were using scare tactics. I realized that as an American and a black American in the late twentieth century, I certainly took for granted my ability to walk around and go where I wanted to go. Bombs and blatant discrimination were the reality for black and “colored” folks here every day.

We spent a couple of days in Johannesburg, educating people about how the voting process works. Then we made our way to Durban and Cape Town then Soweto, the black township where little children started the revolution that transformed the entire nation! Everywhere we traveled the people made us feel
welcome, really welcome. They knew that we were Americans and how far we had traveled to help them. They knew our history—they knew that our ancestors had been snatched away from this continent. That they didn't leave of their own volition. They looked at us African-Americans as prodigal sons and daughters coming home, and to the civil rights movement as the model for how they'd transform their society. The fact that our historic struggle was providing them with the template for their struggle and the knowledge that it could be won made me feel extremely proud.

Physically the trip was exhausting. We hit the ground running after flying over many time zones in the course of that week. You talk about jet lag! But we just had to deny that and any other discomfort we may have experienced, given the importance of our work. I would get up in the morning and put on my skirt (it's the height of disrespect for South African women to wear pants), then we'd all pile into a van and drive across the country. The land was lush and green. We traveled from Cape Town, which was on the water where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans meet. It was bright and lovely—a lot like Malibu, California. We also passed black townships and villages where people had very modest little homes—we'd call them shacks over here—with tires on top of the tin roof. (I learned the tires were used to ground the houses during electrical storms.) We saw the disparaging difference between the white “haves” and black “have-nots.” We saw scores of children living on the street. We had been warned that the people didn't have much, and maybe materially they didn't; they might live in a shanty and their outfits might be mismatched. But the women always had on a skirt and everyone was always clean and dignified. The people took pride in themselves and their appearance. They had a clear sense of what was appropriate and what was not. Out in the bush we would arrive at a village that might be marked by stakes in the ground, say, five inches apart, forming a fence.
There would be an entrance in the fence, but according to protocol we couldn't just walk in; we had to wait to be invited. If the chief wasn't there to invite us in, we had to wait. If it took forty-five minutes for him to get back, we waited forty-five minutes. Wherever we went the women would greet us with a welcoming dance.

Many black South Africans' white employers were telling them, “They're going to tell me who you voted for,” implying that the employers would cause black voters harm if the they were to vote for Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress, which is who most of the black folks wanted to win. To say that to someone who doesn't read or spends countless hours working to earn a dollar a day—that kind of story would just break my heart. Our purpose in South Africa was simple: to teach people that their vote was private, that it was between them and God, no matter what people who wanted to intimidate them might threaten. We were trying to squash that fear, that threat. So we would meet people in their community centers, which were often like a big open shed with a floor and a roof but maybe no walls. We taught them “you vote your heart.” Then we would perform mock elections. For instance, I would demonstrate how to vote and then we'd give them paper and have them do it. I didn't realize how many black people had been denied the opportunity to learn how to read or write. So we taught those who were illiterate to make their choice with an X, which was what people did back in the day when your X was your signature. I remember watching one man—he must have been in his nineties or something—all bent over and walking with a cane toward the voting box. As he shuffled forward, I imagined the experiences he must have had during his lifetime of living under apartheid. And still he was going to vote; he was determined to be enfranchised for the first time. He reminded me of my great-grandfather Slater. I just sat in a chair and wept. I saw this kind of thing over and
over. There were lots of young and middle-class people with energy and enthusiasm, but when you'd see a poor, older person—maybe bent with the years but strong—emotionally it would just take you out. I felt like I was glimpsing what slavery or Reconstruction must have looked like. It made me wonder what kind of slave I would have been. In any case, I was incredibly proud to participate. I was a kid when the civil rights movement took place, but this gave me a sense of what it must have been like to be a part of it.

So we would teach them how to vote, then we would rush off to the next town. No matter how we tried not to, we always offended people because we had to leave so quickly. Whether or not they had many material possessions, they expected us to stay and break bread. They wouldn't dare allow anyone travel so far and not prepare a meal for them. Johnny Clegg, a well-known white South-African musician who was accompanying us on the trip, would always apologize in Zulu for our rudeness. Sometimes it would take him forty minutes to make the situation right so we could leave without offending.