White Girls (32 page)

The church was my escape. That is a convenient phrase. Wait. The church was and wasn’t different from home. There was home, there was the church, and there was the street, all filled with black people. And
how could you not look at them and see Jesus, his Jesus hair, the thorns in it wound tightly in nigger hair piled correct under a picture hat? Negroes high-stepping into eternity, not even seeing the blood dripping before their very eyes? Flies sticking to the blood, can’t wash their face because the Jesus blood has burned a hole in it, Jesus rays of acceptance and sorrow over the acceptance coming out of the hole? You can’t see anything else if you stay, and you can’t not stay, because you’re a child aspiring to be Jesus but yourself, forgiveness gouging out your face. But to say any of that is to be exiled by the very people you love.

Cancer Bitch didn’t think about what he was saying much; some of it was bullshit that she could already find the holes in. His whole thing about exile, for instance; only famous people complained about all that, after they’d achieved it.

Cancer Bitch knew that no matter how many plays she appeared in by people like the man sitting in front of her—ugly in a way that made you feel protective of him; ugly in a way that made you think, Damn, could it be that I’m that ugly, too—she would never be famous like that; she didn’t want fame bad enough. What she wanted was to act bad enough, and when did a bitch ever get famous from love? She had known people like Jimmy throughout her career—they started off as artists with something to say, and they ended up being some cause’s voice, living to tell the story of people who needed them as opposed to needing to communicate something themselves. And the love and attention that their work garnered them—that love and attention stood in equal proportion to their insecurity, their feeling that they would be less without being known, that the next black bitch with a typewriter would supplant them. That’s what drove them: the fear
that they would no longer exist if they were on the level of Cancer Bitch. Or me.

Jimmy drank, I think, scotch in those days. He had many of them, sitting there talking to Diana. If I played her sitting there, in conversation with him, how would I do it? I’d work from the inside out, in that Harlem bar, uptown from where Jimmy, with his playwright’s paranoia, thought Burgess Meredith, the director, was clobbering his play and so undermined Meredith’s authority with You’re white, you don’t understand my characters; I didn’t write this play for you but for my people who are up there on the stage, with their guts and hems showing, the long moan of the writer who has too much mouth left over after the nonwriting is done, so he can’t leave others to the interpretation of it, and besides which, what Jimmy was fighting with was not so much his director as the knowledge, never faced, at least in the press, where he lived by now, that the play wasn’t any good, that he had lost his way as a writer, producing work he was supposed to produce as opposed to the work he was the propagator of, mixing cotton fields and crepes, chitlins and coq au vin—this can appeal to a girl, especially if she feels sorry for you because you’re ugly. And so I’d listen when he said, lighting another cigarette, a little column of white between his two dark columns of fingers, the same fingers that maybe had been inside of Lucien’s mouth—

“And so I learned to perform, because if I didn’t I would upset the needs of the people, the people all around me; I’d be called out as a queer, which is to say a living example of someone who didn’t believe in them and their Jesus need, because after all there I was, godless, because I’m a queen, and a slave to my queen ways, dirty cuffs dragging
in the gutters and bowed down like a dog waiting to be made upright by a word from heaven. Their church was a kind of revenge fantasy—things would turn out better in the next world because Jesus—who was God, too; we didn’t make any distinctions between the two—would allow us to step on white heads to get there. We would win the moral war that our very presence in the world, in our slum, in the church, said we would win because we had worked so very hard at suffering.

“So they pushed out everything that was wrong with their world, which is to say people like me, so it wouldn’t show up in the next. They didn’t want any smart niggers to question how and why they had come to think of themselves as chosen in the first place. They’d bust your ass if you read anything besides the Bible, developed an imagination outside of their imagination, said a thought; because you said a thought, you were white. You sound white—that’s what Daddy and some of my siblings said after I’d discovered a building of lies: the library.

I went to the library and came out white. Only my mother didn’t punish me for reading, because I was her imagination waiting to happen.”

Cancer Bitch adjusted her brassiere strap. It was maybe a little dirty; sweat from the rehearsal and a little baby powder coming down the inside of her armpits, little crumblings of baby powder like butts of wet chalk or pumice stone. She was a little uncomfortable. I say, is this a woman? Diana couldn’t act any of this, but I can.

Women lie. An actress lies even better. I don’t mean all of that “let’s pretend” shit, either, although that’s precisely what I mean, too. An
actress will believe anything, including herself. They convince their bodies of something and then it exists.

For instance: It’s Dover, 1943. Twelve seagulls circle four American servicemen who sit on a cliff. They are picnicking with four English women wearing flower-print dresses and cardigans made at home in front of an electric fire long before they knew the Americans, knitted by the Philco, a little red dot of music in the gloom.

Maybe one woman has red hair, and she longs for the Negro American soldier but is too shy to imagine anything but his tongue on the red tongue between her legs. Those are the clues a director or script might give, and a real acting bitch will say: Got it. And then she’ll try to represent the foregoing.

I have never been to Dover, but I could play that place. I could also play that white woman. I could have red hair if I dreamed about it long enough. Long, flowing shit.

Despite her fear, the English girl—myself—went for a walk with the Negro American. They—we—went and sat somewhere near the cliffs, and he kissed her. I know that kiss; those were the first fat lips I ever licked. The kiss is a little dry because you’re outdoors, and a little salty because you’re near the sea. The kiss is not a kiss on the brink of catastrophe, like the beginning of every love story I’ve ever known, which goes from hope to boredom to disaster in an instant.

Later in the story, my best English girlfriend tries to fuck him, but I find out. I cry. I love to cry. (A producer friend of mine once described an actress as a woman who feels the need to cry in front of three thousand strangers. Too true!) As the red-haired English woman, I trusted too much. I loved the black American too much,
and in a fit of anger I say to my former best English girlfriend: You should get cancer, bitch, and die. Maybe that last line isn’t in character. You see, I need a director. If I had a director, he could show me where the hair falls on my shoulders and I could take it from there. As much as a bitch needs dick sometimes, she needs a director more, just as she needs a writer’s language in order to be someone other than herself. I wish someone would hire me apart from voice-overs.

Journalism. Bullshit. If it’s the “truth” about Richard you’re after—haw haw—let me say up front that I’m perfectly aware why Richard is a success and why I am not and why I am not bitter, now, because I am able to understand it: he was able to perform some version of “blackness” and I was not. In the later films—before he got sick—when he was yukking it up in shit like
The Toy
and whatnot, he was a mass of colored buffoonery and feeling sporting a Jheri curl. If you look at him in that film and others, he starts to bear more than a passing resemblance to Flip Wilson crossed with Stepin Fetchit. That was always his thing—a kind of Negro nervousness that white people in particular were able to feel somewhat comfortable with, no matter how “transgressive” or whatever the fuck his humor was considered by journalists and reviewers and the like, since all he did as far as I was concerned was bug out his eyes in a sketch of colored fear. What a caution. I could never do that. So humiliating. How can you want to be loved so much that you make your race some kind of shtick? I am an actress. I could never wear the head rags and look up pleadingly at master as I dusted the doorstep where last the lilacs bloomed, hoping he wouldn’t rape me again tonight in some
shitty teleplay that becomes a hit on ABC, and what have you.

I’m not a sympathy-getting bitch, I told you from the start. You won’t catch me telling a target liberal audience how we done suffered, and how my cunt was raped by America. And no one would believe me if I was cast in that part, anyway! I’m too much myself, too much of a mind that shows its thinking—which is what acting is, too—to be believed as unschooled in life, let alone books. That’s hard for white people to accept, I’m sorry to say; they wouldn’t know what a colored actress looked like who wasn’t playing a slave. Nothing’s changed. If a colored girl wants to be seen as an actress, she’s gonna have to spread ’em. So what’s there for me? Richard and Halle took it all. It’s a shitty thought, but I’ve said it.

Actresses—they’re women in search of a self, like all women. But at least a real actress like Diana or myself will admit it. An actress has her eye on you—an audience—while in her head she’s looking for a way to get her proverbial Daddy to pay for a script she can play. No abuse is too great to withstand to make that happen. A black eye as the actress blackens the chicken. An acting bitch can even watch herself as her eye is being blackened, and plan what costume she’s going to wear to go with it. An acting bitch can stand outside herself while working on the inside of her character, which is to say herself.

I say, isn’t that something? Maybe Cancer Bitch didn’t think like that after a while, given the cancer. But she never did stop acting. Maybe a better phrase is: She never stopped presenting herself. An acting bitch doesn’t stop acting until God yells “Cut!” Toward the
end—I saw this myself—Cancer Bitch was up in the hospital bed, shit stuck all up in her, liquid dripping every which way, maybe even out of her asshole, tube stuck up her ass like a plastic Daddy. Her hair was melting against the pillow. Black hair against a white hospital pillow, spreading against a sky of illness. And when she saw me—I had come to visit her—Cancer Bitch pulled the white sheet away from herself, exposing all those tubes, the liquid Daddy in her ass, and said: “Ain’t this some shit?”

Metaphors sustain us. To talk about Cancer Bitch as she was—the tubes leaking, her ass—is beside the point. Or beside her point. She was an actress, and as such had a fundamental disrespect for “I.” “I” doesn’t take into account all the years a bitch spends on becoming something else. Find the character and you find her. That was Cancer Bitch’s life work—to be something other than herself, in order to talk about herself in terms beyond the kind of shit that biographers encourage: no metaphors but the thing itself.

I blame Cancer Bitch’s acting for making me an actress. To identify me solely as Richard Pryor’s sister, to ask me what that’s “like,” is a question that strikes me as being as pornographic as my mouth. It’s as greedy and innocent as a child asking his mother to describe what he was like when he was little. I am an actress. And as an actress I’m interested in Diana Sands and emulating the will she exercised to get over herself and into you, whoever you are. What force! By the time Diana said, “Ain’t this some shit?” she knew what she was talking about: acting and dying.

I am an actress. We find truth—human truth—by pretending to be people we’re not. That frees us to explore the metaphor of being. Okay, so you’ll write that Richard did this, he did that. How will that resonate in the reader’s heart beyond the thrill of gossipy revelation? And as to Richard’s black celebrity: isn’t that an oxymoron? What you want are stories about his black infamy, not a sister. Acting isn’t funny, but being is. Richard was never an actor. All he did was put his being out there. People responded. He became famous. What he did wasn’t as complicated as acting. Diana Sands was an actress. There are no jokes about her.

“I” is a sitcom. “I,” at best, is a pratfall in slow motion. I am an actress, which is to say a woman who pretends to be something other than herself. Risking exposure and not. Richard would never do that. He could never be someone else’s text. He’d always fight to be Richard instead of trying to inform the part—Hamlet, whatever—with the deepest parts of himself.

That’s not what I do. Honor that. Honor the fact that you’ll get more of what you want from me by allowing my “I” to speak through other characters, scenes, events. Allow me metaphor even though I’m not supposed to dally there, being colored or whatever. I know, I know, being colored, I’m not supposed to exist in the realm of ideas; my skin would dirty them up. The general audience expects my shit to be black and raw and “real”—like my literal shit. Like Richard’s. Fuck you.

In fact, I blame Richard and his popularity for helping to formulate the audience’s expectations whenever they see a black face onscreen, or on a book jacket: Aha! the viewer thinks. Here we have more
officers in the race-class-gender bores! And with them come whores! Drifters! Pimps! Junkies! Grifters! At one time or another, Richard and I have been all of those things, but why not allow us the flowers, too? You can see them near the footpath I walked past the other day, years ago. This was in 1993. A man is leaning drunkenly against a crooked fence. Flowers at his feet. They call him Gary. Gary’s not drunk, he’s just on drugs. Sometimes his own existence is too much. But he can hold a job. He works at a crab house in Baltimore, separating the big and little crabs into different crates. Gary works in the crab house even though he’s allergic to the things. The money he makes there is just enough for drugs; just enough so that he doesn’t get too sick. It’s the first selfish thing he’s ever done, being a junkie.