White Girls (31 page)

       
No spitting or saliva mouth to mouth

       
No food used as sex object

       
No peeing unless in a natural setting, e.g., field, roadside

       
No coffins

       
No blindfolds

       
No wax dripping

       
No two dicks in/near one mouth

       
No shot of stretching pussy

       
No fisting

       
No squirting

       
No bondage-type toys or gear unless very light

       
No girls sharing same dildo (in mouth or pussy)

       
Toys are OK if shot is not nasty

       
No hands from two different people fingering same girl

       
No male–male penetration

       
No transsexuals

       
No bi-sex

       
No degrading dialogue, e.g., “Suck this cock, bitch,” while slapping her face with a penis

       
No menstruation topics

       
No incest topics

       
No forced sex, rape themes, etc.

       
No black men–white women themes

Notice that nowhere on the list is there an edict against the voice—that is, there are no directives against the way the voice can and should be used. Of course, there’s that reference to so-called “degrading dialogue”—e.g., “Suck this cock, bitch”—but when isn’t need degrading? In any case, I get around that particular mandate by making it sound more like a question—“Suck this cock, bitch?”—or punk-ass pleading, and therefore more like love.

Sometimes it’s fun to make shit up. Maybe as a way of getting at myself without having to go through all the boring pedestrian shit you want to hear, like where I was born and what it was like, having a brother. Cancer Bitch made shit up all the time. Acted in plays, acted in movies. I was her paid companion and half-assed dresser from 1961 to 1964, beginning the year I moved to Manhattan from Peoria. Cancer Bitch—that would be Diana Sands.

She and I were friends until her death. Who can forget her? She was tiny, with high, high hair that didn’t necessarily make her appear taller but gave her a kind of heft she didn’t have otherwise. Black hair, shaped like a pineapple; light came through the curls. Bee-stung lips, I guess you could call them. She looked like a light-skinned colored lady of a certain age no matter what age she was. And then there were her eyes—rent one of her movies and see them in close-up. No amount
of pain you’d ever experienced could ever eclipse the sadness in them. She was always alive, even when she had cancer. Not just alive to the scene or character or camera she was playing to, but available to the alchemy that was happening right before you as you watched her watching, holding on to her character’s life with her hands, a character she made live in her admirers’ minds by doing what used to pass as an actress’s work: taking the page and running it through her body, her mouth, her brain. And when you went home after watching her onstage, her character went home with you, too. She was that good.

She stole Jimmy Baldwin’s man in ’64. Most likely he handed his man over to her. Subconsciously. He was that way. I knew all about it. She had a role in one of his plays,
Blues for Mister Charlie;
Jimmy, he of the pop eyes and sense of duty toward the abstraction known as colored people, hadn’t written her much of a part. Or, rather, it was too much of a part: as Yolanda, she was meant to play a slain civil rights leader’s pregnant girlfriend. Yolanda had to deal with a lot of verbal histrionics.

Truth be told, Diana told me, what interested Jimmy more was Cancer Bitch’s part in the drama of his relationship with Lucien. Lucien: Baldwin’s Swiss piece carried over from Paris, where they met in the early nineteen fifties, in the days of cafés and such. And as is the case with most relationships in which queens fall in love with someone so pointedly different—which is to say someone who is essentially straight—Lucien loved Jimmy but didn’t want him. You know the way: after the first seemingly tender kisses, the nose under the armpit, the shock waves of pleasure, toes curled, temples damp with perspiration and the thrill of the mind turning off, blind to any
ambition other than the tactile and the dreams it can lead you to—after the first few times of that, Jimmy perceived—it took him a while, as it takes many writers a while to see that truth has nothing to do with their imaginations—that Lucien really wasn’t in it, and could take the romance away from Jimmy. Which he did.

We can not see things on purpose for just so long. Later, Cancer Bitch asked Lucien how he could put his body in a situation that wasn’t exactly what he had in mind, meaning how could he separate his body from his mind, what people laughingly refer to as their desire—how could he put his body, which eventually became her body, in the way of Jimmy’s cock? After all, she didn’t have a cock, or much of one to speak of. And Lucien said, What makes you think any of those things are separate? Jimmy loved me. But then I opened my eyes and there you were. It’s a wonder, the eyes and mind and flesh.

Actually, he didn’t “just” open his eyes. Jimmy introduced them. He had brought Lucien back with him from France with the secret hope that his fame, which was significant for a writer, would somehow keep Lucien in his fantasy of shared love. But it didn’t work.

Blues for Mister Charlie
was the old Jimmy exegesis on white on black—the stage was, in fact, divided into “Blacktown” and “White-town”—and Diana Sands, Cancer Bitch, was somewhere in the middle of those towns, bringing to the hackneyed genre Jimmy’s play grew out of—a little Archibald Macleish, a lot of Clifford Odets—her weird naturalism, colored at the very core. No other country could have produced her. The head-snapping. The lies you tell to save your children or get out of mothering them. The little laughter that is like a bulwark against laughing outright in ridiculous white people’s faces
because they might kill you if you did. All this Lucien saw in Diana when he attended rehearsals. He saw it without quite understanding what Cancer Bitch meant, because the only colored person he had known up to that point was Jimmy, and Jimmy had lived in France too long, had prettied his Negroness up, thrown L’Air du Temps over the hogmaws.

Jimmy thought he was directing the play—he shouted instructions at the actors over the (white) director’s head, and the director didn’t say shit; Black Power was a new and intimidating language—but really he was directing the path his life would take: to become the child to Lucien and Diana’s parents. Truth to tell, that was all he wanted—someone in his play and someone watching the play he had written involved with each other. His real story was an old one: the terrible father, or rather stepfather—Jimmy never knew his biological father—and the mother whom he adored but resented because he couldn’t save her from Daddy. I say, are all sons born to that? Mother cutting the carrots while Daddy’s twisting her nipples in the dark, telling the little Mrs. that she had to ignore her son, the one who wrote so he’d eventually be acknowledged somehow, somewhere? And what did that mean to the little Mrs., especially with a Daddy Baldwin who couldn’t provide anything but babies, not even the carrots? What kind of Mrs. is that? One who accepts the babies but no food to nourish them with? A stupid one? I say, is this a woman? Didn’t she have any kind of imagination about what a Daddy is supposed to do? Let’s not get into the fact that it was the times, her circumstances, she was black and poor, uneducated, blah, blah, blah. She became a Mrs. so she could have a son who would provide her with something.
An imagination. Who could move her into her true glory as a woman.

Is a blow to the imagination the same as a blow to the ego? Maybe to someone like Jimmy it is. To not believe, or have other people not believe, in what he had, made him redouble his own efforts to court Cancer Bitch himself, so Lucien could see how close to a girl Jimmy really was. If she was by his side, Jimmy thought, Lucien wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between them. And whatever Lucien was willing to give up to Diana would be his, too, even just a little bit, which is never a little bit, not really, to someone like Jimmy, who was all heart and theatrical calculation.

Biography explains nothing, but it’s fun to tell these stories.

In an essay titled “Notes on Black Movies,” written in 1972, the film critic Pauline Kael observed:

Peggy Petit, the young heroine of the new film
Black Girl
, doesn’t have a white girl’s conformation; she’s attractive in a different way. That may not seem so special, but after you’ve seen a lot of black movies, you know how special it is. The action thrillers feature heroes and heroines who are dark-tanned Anglo-Saxons, so to speak—and not to lure whites (who don’t go anyway) but to lure blacks whose ideas of beauty are based on white stereotypes. If there is one area in which the cumulative effect of Hollywood films is obvious, it is in what is now considered “pretty” or “handsome” or “cute” globally; the mannequins in shop windows the world over have pert, piggy little faces.

When I was starting out, there were even fewer black girls on screen than there are now. In the sixties, there was Gloria Foster, and Abby Lincoln, and Brenda Sykes, and the fabulous Judy Pace, who played the first black villainess on TV—on
Peyton Place
, starring little Miss Mia Farrow. What a voice Judy had! Snide and contemptuous and full of hard, cold luster. All those girls were fabulous, in their way. Glamorous and real, which is one definition of movie acting. Their naturalism didn’t exclude their coloredness or femaleness. They didn’t treat sex as a big deal, either; it was all integral to the inherent humanism of their behavior.

But by 1972, globally, like Ms. Kael says, Gloria, Brenda, Judy, Diana, and not to mention myself were out; movies shifted away from documenting the realism of human interaction to the by-now-predictable surrealism of black bitch in a head rag putting down whitey or an ineffectual husband.

You hear tell now of these actresses like Halle Berry—globally cute and acknowledged as such by picking up an Oscar for it. What Halle wants—what “actresses” of her ilk want—is to be living molds in a global idea of what men are supposed to want: perky-looking chocolate drops that taste like shit and are therefore naughty because black equals shit. Imagine what a black bitch who can actually act feels like when she sits in the cinema of today, recalling the ghosts of the past—Gloria, maybe, and a little bit of me? Imagine what Gloria—who played nearly two hundred characters in
In White America
onstage, back in the sixties—would have thought sitting through contemporary crap like Juwanna Mann. Imagine what I felt like looking at Halle with her tits out in
Monster’s Ball
, telling some cracker to “Make
me feel good.” How could I have played that part without feeling my mama in the background, about to go upside my head because I’m declaring a need to a white man?

Or maybe the only thing separating us is my fat ass. Having Richard’s face—or his having mine; remember, I’m older—has been a hindrance in my career; people see his fame in me long before they see what I can do as an actress. When people see me, they see Richard’s hilarity. In the old days—the seventies—when there was no black performer bigger than Richard, I’d show up for some movie audition or another and the casting director would ask me to put a “Pryor spin” on whatever part I was up for. So I’d look up from the script and start cursing the room out. Then I’d throw the script down and walk out the door. That got me a few laughs, but fewer jobs.

Maybe some low blue lights here, or red. And many cigarettes leading to other cigarettes. Jimmy and Diana smoking and smoking in a bar in Harlem after a particularly frustrating rehearsal. Maybe a little discussion about the play, mouths sticky with cocktails, and Jimmy’s black, black skin—an arm—resting on the table, Diana’s light, light skin in a sleeveless shift made blue or red by the overhead lights, lights flickering through the holes in her pineapple hair. She’s an actress. She says: Well, I don’t know if my believability is up to the play. But what she means to say is she isn’t sure if the play is up to her believability, the lyrical naturalism in her work, which made of each prop, each wearing of a costume, the very thing you would have worn yourself and done and said yourself, were you not in the audience yourself.

“Oh, baby,” she said, “the part,” she said a little tentatively, drawing her audience of Jimmy in, “it’s a great part, that’s not what worries me, what worries me—”

“Yes?” he inquired, never taking his eyes off her. The famous Negro concern overlaid with an analytical listening quality. “What’s wrong, baby?” His mouth split, revealing the famous space between his upper teeth. She had a smile, too, and she used it.

“I’m not at all sure I get all of these characters; I mean, I’m not at all sure I’m accessing my character properly. Can we break it down?”

This was the kind of conversation his egotism could bear, since it was not “just” about his work, but about how his work had become her world and thus transformed her into someone he could recognize: a character expressive of his thoughts and feelings. Aren’t actresses fabulous? They may know in their minds that they’re acting, but their bodies don’t show it.

In any case, in that bar, lighting another cigarette in his high faggot style of physical expression—talkative arms and hands that cut the air, leaning forward in his chair to his interlocutor, touching her shoulder with one arm and his heart with another—Jimmy said: Chile, chile, chile. Did I ever tell you about the time when I was a chile—this was when I was in the church—and I was preaching then, preparing one sermon a week? I stood before the people, a nigger Ezekiel, and I preached not because I had the word—I had many—but because I wanted to escape, and because I was in love.