Here's the thing about "If Beale Street Could Talk", a film based on James Baldwin's book of the same name: In its normality, its utter averageness, it defies conventionalities of its genre.
We're quite used to Spike Lee's "joints", as he calls them: stories of black impoverishment, replete with drugs, crime, violence by whites against blacks and horrible prejudice--the depiction of urban life that we understand can only be black by now (though it isn't). It's not as if that is an exaggeration, though, or that it doesn't need to be explained or drilled down into.
It isn't as if we don't need to discuss it, either. We got this. In the sixty years since The Movement had its greatest impact--court decisions and collective action and great speakers and activists galore--the net effects on the worst circumstances stemming from Jim Crow are still there. This is being written in Milwaukee, after all, still one of the most segregated large cities in America: Come and see for yourself.
But something else has happened, so gradually and unspectacularly as to be tragically unnoticed--a growing black middle class. Let's define "middle class", though, the way it should be: Two parents working, a well-used car or two, a place to live (mortgaged or not), furniture that won't get replaced every five years, kids that might make it to college if they get some scholarship money, and going out to eat means hitting the pizza joint around the corner once a month. The kids are being raised with decent values, and though they may indeed rub up against the uglier side of the remnants of rough neighborhoods, they're tough enough to avoid them, and there's an increasing chance that they'll be okay. Too.
Michelle Robinson Obama came from such a neighborhood and home life (She called it a "working class" background, but according to her book, Becoming (terrific book), they were never hurting for life's necessities. Call it, if you will, the lower rung of the middle class ladder.). She escaped it, too, by working her way into a semi-elite Chicago high school and from it into Princeton. Her brother, Craig, became an excellent basketball player there as well. He went on to become a major college basketball coach; she, of course, went on to something even greater.
But "If Beale Street Could Talk" demonstrates that the fates of Michelle and Craig Robinson could have pivoted on a dime, if either had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, had turned the wrong corner, had been in a store or at a concert, or on a bus when the wrong, misleading things happened to brand them with bigoted incorrectness. The young man and woman, Alonzo and Clementine, of "Beale Street" were working to create a life inside a New York world they didn't have a prayer of escaping--but they were in love and were prepared to be a family.
They were happy: Joyous, even, in their expectations of a child and arranging for a rough-hewn but workable place to live. And they were shattered by racism. A white man harassing the lovely Clementine, Alonzo's rage pouring out in putting him in his place; the white cop with an awful mustache who shrugged off an old white woman's defense of Alonzo's character; and the arranged arrest of Alonzo for raping a Hispanic woman on circumstantial evidence at best (this in the days before DNA became a lockdown kind of evidence), if not flat-out lies.
So as happens far too often, Alonzo is forced to plead out and serve time. The child is born and must grow up without a daddy who should be with him, who should guide him, who should help form him into the man he should be. Clementine proceeds alone without Alonzo, without intimacy, without her best friend for untold years. The story itself is fiction, but fiction is often just another way of telling the truth.
Moments of tragedy come and go and we recognize them for what they are. We rally to support the people who must absorb them, but the daily tragedy of normality that people seek, interrupted by jumping to conclusions because that's just the way the other people are, constitute a far deeper, far greater, and far more ongoing tragedy.
So it came visiting, too, to the family of Dontre' Hamilton, here in Milwaukee, in the spring of 2014. Hamilton was shot 14 times (which, as the film demonstrated, can be done in about three seconds with a police weapon) by a white policeman who concluded that he was in danger from Hamilton because, in a scuffle, he had pulled the policeman's nightstick from its sheath. But it didn't happen in the 'hood; it happened in the small, otherwise inconsequential Red Arrow Park, off Kilbourn Avenue and Water Street in the heart of the downtown business district--across the street from the Performing Arts Center, one of the jewels of Milwaukee's culture--where traffic rushes by and important people pace past with important agendas.
The other night, I watched a film entitled "There's Blood on the Doorstep," detailing the incident and its pathetic aftermath from the vantage points of the pivotal people--the policeman, the police chief, the district attorney, the president of the police union, the mayor, the family members. The final results are far too familiar: the fuzziness of the fact-finding; the mayor's attempt to assuage the family; the solidarity of the union, regardless of the facts; the helplessness of the police chief and the district attorney, both of whom know plenty of the facts but probably little of the truth; the policeman who would love to have that moment back but now can't; and the family, searching and finding some justice but nowhere near enough.
In Milwaukee, one of the most segregated cities of America, only one black officer comes to the defense of the white officer. Everyone else in Milwaukee power positions are white. The facts keep accumulating but something about the truth isn't being verified. It's as if the final result was preordained and everyone went through the motions.
Members of Hamilton's family--his mother Maria and two brothers, Nate and Damien--were in attendance at the Waukesha Arts Center and took questions after the film, which played to a full house at the Milwaukee Film Festival in October. There was nothing abnormal about them (as pretentiously as I must sadly add, as if I was looking for abnormalities any more than they might have been looking for mine), though Dontre', apparently, was schizophrenic, which may have led to the outburst which created the circumstances that led to his death. But Damien called him an excellent student in school. Nate, the oldest brother, has formed a group called Coalition for Justice; Maria has organized other mothers with similar tragedies they have had to confront into a group called Mothers for Justice United.
Sounds like something lots of people would do: Make a concerted attempt to make a decent legacy and create positive change in the wake of something terrible. Sounds, well, normal--as normal as its unfortunate futility has become.
Such normality lulls us into a sleep-like trance, much like mass gun murders are creating the same, numbing nightmare-state at present. If democracy hasn't successfully addressed the injustices of race yet, can we be the least bit surprised at our inability to address gun violence? And if so, could the two someday meld into a truly horrible scenario?
Yeah, I know. I don't want to think about it, either. Wouldn't be normal to think about it. The problem exactly.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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