Ronald and I
watched In the Heat of the Night on
TCM this week. Made in 1967, the year the Supreme Court ruled
anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, it remains a socially important film.
That year Poitier starred in another socially relevant movie, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and a
favorite of mine, To Sir, with Love.
He was the first African-American actor to win an Oscar for Best Actor for his
role in the 1963 Lilies of the Field
(Hattie McDaniel was the first African-American to ever win an Oscar for her
portrayal of Mammy in Gone with the Wind
made in 1939. Halle Berry was the first female of African-American descent to
win Best Actress in 2001 for her role in Monster’s
Ball).
In the Heat of the Night is about a
black homicide detective, Virgil Tibbs, from Philadelphia, who is traveling
back home from visiting his mother in the South. He winds up stranded at the
train station in the small town of Sparta, MS waiting for the next train. He is
arrested for the murder of a northern industrialist based solely on his being a
black man. At the police station Chief Gillespie is sure he’s solved the case.
He says, “Well,
you're pretty sure of yourself, ain't you, Virgil. Virgil, that's a funny name
for a nigger boy to come from Philadelphia. What do they call you up there?”
Tibbs says, “They call me Mister Tibbs.”
TIbbs ends up helping to solve the murder,
but not without feeling the full weight of the hatred and threats of the
townspeople. In one scene TIbbs is questioning a wealthy citizen, Mr. Endicott,
in his greenhouse. When Tibbs suggests Endicott is under suspicion for the
murder, Endicott strikes him across the face. Tibbs strikes him back.
Eric
Endicott: Gillespie?
Chief
Gillespie: Yeah.
Eric
Endicott: You saw it.
Chief Gillespie:
I saw it.
Eric
Endicott: Well, what are you gonna do about it?
Chief
Gillespie: I don't know.
Eric
Endicott: I'll remember that.
[to Tibbs]
There was a time when I could've had you shot.
This movie always hits me hard emotionally. I
see the same attitudes in people, the same shock, when they see Ronald and me
together, as if we are offensive and need to be eradicated.
“Nothing’s changed,” Ronald said. “The
thinking is the same.”
He spent an hour trying to explain to one of
the golf range guys, an older white man, that it would be odd to tell someone
he just met that he has a white wife. He asked the guy, “Have you ever told
anyone your wife is white?”
The guy answered “no” and seemed surprised
that Ronald asked him that question.
“Then why would you expect me to?” Ronald
added. Slap, slap. Did the guy think, “There was a time I could have had you
shot?”
Another Sidney Poitier movie I love and have
watched over and over is Raisin in the
Sun made in 1961. Lorraine Hansberry wrote the play, which debuted on
Broadway in 1959, based on her own family’s suit against the covenants of a
neighborhood that didn’t allow blacks.
She later wrote in her memoir To Be Young, Gifted and Black:
"25 years ago, [my father] spent a small
personal fortune, his considerable talents, and many years of his life
fighting, in association with NAACP attorneys, Chicago’s ‘restrictive
covenants’ in one of this nation's ugliest ghettos. That fight also required
our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile ‘white
neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house… My memories
of this ‘correct’ way of fighting white supremacy in America include being spat
at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I also
remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all night
with a loaded German Luger (pistol), doggedly guarding her four children, while
my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington
court."
In the film version, Mr. Linder, the representative
of the white neighborhood the Younger family has purchased a home in, has come
to offer to buy them out.
Linder:
I want you to believe me when I tell you that race prejudice simply doesn’t
enter into it. It is a matter of the people of Clybourne Park believing,
rightly or wrongly, as I say, that, for the happiness of all concerned, that
our Negro families are happier when they live in their own communities.
The family is
offended by the offer and refuses to sell.
Linder continues
as he gathers his things together and looks at the family who has become
hostile towards him:
Well
– I don’t understand why you people are reacting this way. What do you think
you are going to gain by moving into a neighborhood where you just aren’t
wanted and where some elements – well – people can get awful worked up when
they feel that their whole way of life and everything they’ve ever worked for
is threatened.
Later, after Linder has left, the daughter,
Beneatha, wonders aloud, “What they think we going to do – eat ‘em?”
Her sister-in-law
Ruth responds, “No, honey, marry ‘em.”
Nothing’s changed.
See my post on our housing discrimination experience: The Legacy of Racism:
Speaking of
marrying interracially, I love the film Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner. I remember Ma talking about it when it came out in
1967. She liked it, but she didn’t know then that she would live the experience
in 1976 when I started dating Ronald. Poitier’s character, John, who is asking
his parents and his fiancee’s parents to accept their marriage, says at the
film’s beginning, “After all, a lot of people are going to think we are a
shocking pair.”
Nothing’s changed.
We shock a lot of people.
One film
starring Sidney Poitier still has the power to make me cry. Patch of Blue made in 1965 is about a
blind white girl who sits in the park stringing beads to escape her prostitute
mother and her drunken grandfather. She meets Gordon, an educated black
professional. They fall in love. At the end of the film, Selina asks Gordon to
marry her, and he tells her there are many kinds of love. He is concerned that
she does not realize they are racially different, and how difficult it will be
to stay together. But Selina surprises him.
Selina: I know
everything I need to know about you. I love you.
[touching
Gordon's face]
Selina: I know
you're good, and kind. I know you're colored and I...
Gordon: What's
that?
Selina: ...And I
think you're beautiful!
Gordon: [smiling]
Beautiful? Most people would say the opposite.
Selina: Well
that's because they don't know you.
Nothing’s changed.
I feel that about Ronald: so many white people think of him first as black and
not as a retired fire lieutenant, an artist, a musician, a dedicated husband
and father, and a man. To them he will always be a black man, and the prejudice
and stereotypes they carry inside color their perceptions about him. They don’t
know him, and they don’t want to.
Sidney Poitier
made some important films in the 1960s that made social commentary on the Civil
Rights Era. Today those films are just as important because we have a long way
to go on the journey to understanding race in America. I told Ronald while we
were watching In the Heat of the Night,
“They ought to show this movie in every classroom in America.” The surface of
race relations may look different, but I know that nothing’s changed.
I’ve included an
excerpt from my memoir. It’s one of my Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner incidents.
(Excerpt from Chapter 5, Why You Gotta Be
Jerkin’? Shades of Tolerance: A
Biracial Love Story)
Dad looked
gray, and he sat quietly in his chair. He laid the newspaper on the floor in
front of him, and held his chest as he leaned over and read, just as he had
when he had his first heart attack. This time he did not wait the entire
weekend to go to the doctor.
Frank
drove us to see Dad in the intensive care unit. I sat in a chair by the window,
the sun falling on my hair, lighting it up like a red flame. Ma always told me
she thought I would be the one to have red hair; she hoped for it, for a child
that looked more Irish than Italian. But I was not that child.
I did not
know what to say to Dad as he lay in the bed with tubes and wires connected to
him. I could not think of anything to make him feel better. The hospital smells
and the beeping of the heart monitor made me anxious.
“Your
hair is red,” Dad said, “You dyed it, didn’t you?”
“No, it’s
just the sun,” I said.
“Yes, you
did. I can tell,” he said, laughing a little, but I knew he was upset.
“It’s the
sun, Dad. If I move, you’ll see. I haven’t touched my hair.”
I stood
up and moved to the end of the bed, away from the sun, so he could be sure.
I called
Ronald the next day from work on the Watts line.
“Are you
okay?” he asked.
“No,” I
said. I wanted to run back to Syracuse.
Ma
started in on me minutes after Steve dropped me at home that evening.
“You were
my princess,” she said.
“What?”
“I had
every hope for you,” she said.
“Ma, I
don’t want to talk about this.”
“You
caused your father’s heart attack. You might have killed him.”
I stopped
breathing. The room swirled around me.
“Ma,
don’t say that!”
“You’ve
thrown your life away!”
“Stop,
Ma, just stop!”
“You’ve
broken my heart! I want to die!”
“Ma, why
do I have to choose? I’m happy. I love him!”
“Your
children will be hated. You’ll be ostracized. My princess,” Ma said. She
moaned. She began to sob, and I joined her. “Aunt Josephine cut you out of her
will,” she continued.
“So
what?” I said, “What’s that supposed to do? How would that change my mind?”
“You’ve
cut yourself off.”
“Ma, what
if I choose you?” I said, the words thick in my throat, “You won’t be here
forever. You’ll leave me alone.”
I cried.
Ma bawled. I pleaded. Ma accused.
The next
morning, with no sleep, I showered, dressed, ate some breakfast, and left the
house at 11:15. My eyes were swollen and dry – I had no tears left. I walked
down Locust Park toward Central Avenue to the bus stop.
Steve
pulled up beside me in his brown Pinto.
“Hey,” he
called out the window.
“I feel
like shit,” I said, “Ma and I fought all night.”
“Over Ron
again?”
“Yes, I
don’t have time to tell you about it. I’ll tell you later.”
“Want a
ride?”
“No, I
need to walk,” I said. He waved and drove off.
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