Nonfiction by Margo Sanabria
HARD TIMES, RACE, AND CLASSIC MOVIES

By the time I was ten I was a classic movies devotee. It still makes me smile to think of  an African-American child with cat-eye glasses, three pigtails, two in back and one hanging to the side in front, being able to recite such lines as “Mr. Rochester, you are a boor and a cur,” (what the character Blanche Ingram says to Edward Rochester – played by Orson Welles, in the 1943 film version of Jane Eyre). The one constant in a childhood marred by economic stress, racism, and instability was a black and white TV set that came along with us wherever we went. For a couple of hours, encompassed in the TV’s blue light that both figuratively and literally soften the surrounding darkness, my mother who was usually abrupt and distant with me, became my close and loving travel companion to distant lands, other times, and other people’s troubles.

The genre most favored by my mother was the literary classics made into film. Examples of our movie staples were such films as Wuthering Heights (1939 – Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, William Wyler, David Niven, Geraldine Fitzgerald); Les Misérables (1935 – Fredric March, Charles Laughton); Jane Eyre (1943 – Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine, Agnes Moorehead, and child stars Peggy Ann Garner, Margaret O’Brien, and Elizabeth Taylor), and Captains Courageous (1937 – Spencer Tracy, Freddie Bartholomew, Lionel Barrymore).

Although, the main characters in these films were white, their status as outcasts resonated with the both of us, and for my part, many of the main characters’ stories often started in rough and troubled childhoods. I was in turns Heathcliff, the street foundling, separated from the middle class life his foster father had intended, and made into a stable boy, by his jealous foster brother; Cosette the French orphan Jean Valjean rescues from poverty and abuse; Jane Eyre the pauper child, cruelly treated by her aunt, who survives mental and physical abuse in a harsh boarding school, and the rich spoiled brat, played by Freddie Bartholomew, transformed to his better self, by his relationship with a Portuguese fisherman, played by Spencer Tracey.

Another reason for my easy identification with these classic movie characters was brought to light when I was six. At that time, my mother and I were living in a rooming house about ten houses down from where my aunt and uncle lived. My maternal grandmother, my mother, her sister, my two cousins, and I were standing on my aunt and uncle’s porch, in preparation for my uncle to snap a picture of our three generations. At that time, my cousin Cheryl and I were attending the same grade school. Because perhaps it has some bearing on the psychology of the situation, I will mention that like my mother, my cousins and uncle are very fair. In fact, in skin tone and features my uncle was often mistaken for white. My grandmother, my aunt, and I are brown. 

I remember my aunt asking if there were any white children at our school. I remember answering immediately and with confidence, As far as I know, Cheryl and I are the only white ones there. One of the adults, I do not remember who, explained what I truly was. Something bright went out of me.

I used to feel so ashamed of that little girl, but now I say the only shame belongs to the country that created her. My mother could not shield me from the knowledge that a white person could hurt me and even murder me, and get away with it. In the fifties, the primers that taught me to read were the Dick and Jane series of picture books that depicted an all-white world of people who were fully vested with their humanity in appearance, in their civilized American middle-class surroundings, and their relationships. There were no such counterpoints of African-American community and family life. 

The only widely available representations of blackness for children, were the stories featuring the not quite human-looking Tar-Baby and Little Black Sambo, whose locus were in the wilds, and whose prime interactions were with animals. Their locations and interactions signaling they were not fit for civilized society.

When black characters appeared in films, they were usually visible just long enough to open a door, take off a coat, or serve food to white people. When they were allowed to be the prime characters for longer periods of time, they often were used as comic relief. Their uncouth clownish antics highlighting black laziness, stupidity, dishonesty, and cowardliness. White movie characters suffered because of circumstances and transcended those circumstances through hard work, character, and intelligence. Black characters were portrayed as bringing suffering upon themselves because of their “innate” stupidity.

The classic movies that I loved so much were part of a media landscape bent on my psychic demise. And yet watching classic movies gave me those rare, much needed, moments of closeness with my mother. They whispered to me that the world was so much more than a rooming house on a Midwestern city block, or a sixth-floor unit in the projects, or a dark cockroachy, three-roomed rental on Ashland Street. They encouraged me to seek out their literary counterparts and to become a strong reader. They gave me a clear and usable code of ethics. They made me aware that I was part of a much larger human pattern than my race, and that troubles could be overcome by resourcefulness and planned action. Most of all they introduced me to the power and elegance of language well used, and inspired me to later seek out that elegance in a wide universe of writers of varied cultures and races.

Even today, in the inhospitable places of life, I remember the words of John Dall, in the character of Morgan Evans, a young Welsh miner writing about working underground in the mines: “… in the dark, I can touch with my hands the leaves on the trees … underneath where the corn is green,” (1945, The Corn is Green).


Margo SanabriaMargo Sanabria has an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. She has worked as a reporter for the Arts & Entertainment section of The Connection Newspapers, McLean, Virginia, and as a researcher/annotator on the William Steinway Diary Project, for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, DC. Her poems have appeared in Arkansas Review and Berkeley Poetry Review. Her writings often explore issues of familial, ethnic, and cultural dissonance and dislocation. She currently works for a non-profit in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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