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Tuesday, March 27, 2012

The Past, the Present and the Future Met at a Funeral

           “Brenda Susan! What do you think you’re wearing?” My aunt’s voice stopped me from putting down my 20-day-old daughter in her basinet. My senses were dulled from getting little sleep and holding my new life together to think about my wardrobe to even comprehend why she was so upset.  Dressed all in black or gray dresses, the three oldest women in my family surrounded me like traditional warriors.
            I looked down at my white dress, my favorite dress and looked blankly at Grandma Owens, Mom, and her oldest sister. I said nothing, but I turned back to my little daughter, smiling at her sleepy face as I lay her down.
Aunt Dorothy stood at the doorway with massive arms crossed against her chest. “You need to change dresses and put on a respectable dark dress and dark shoes. Everyone is going to see you and think you have no respect for the dead.”
My mother had raised me to “remember my manners and always be polite to my elders,” and I had been all my childhood.  Today, I swallowed my words, and ignored the trio of authority. They did not move. Right now I was too stressed to listen to my aunt’s lecture about proper funeral attire. I had heard it before, many, many times.
“I have to finish getting ready. It is almost time to go.” I tried feebly to encourage them to leave me alone.
But Aunt Dorothy was not done telling me what I should or should not do, “Have you no respect for your husband? Your family? You can’t go to a funeral dressed in white. I’m not going to let you leave this house until you change out of that dress into something respectful.”
Those words burned through my layers of control, and my words and tears flooded over her, “I do not have a black dress. I will not wear a black dress to my husband’s funeral. Ronnie never saw me in a black dress.
 “I paid $12 for this, most expensive dress I ever bought when. But we could not afford that much. We were college students. He asked me to return it for the money. When the store said they would only exchange, not refund it, he said he wanted to see how I looked it in.
“When I modeled this sleeveless, white polyester A-line sheath, all white except for the embroidered roses on the stand-up collar, he smiled and said, “I will never forget how beautiful you are.
“So I AM going to say my last good-by to him in this dress.
I don’t care what people think. If they are coming to Ronnie’s funeral to criticize my clothes, they are disrespectful. I’m the one who lost my sweetheart, my husband. I’m not going to wear black just because it is tradition.
I love you Aunt Dorothy, but If you try to stop me, I’ll knock you on your big, fat butt and never look back.”
I took up my baby daughter, and we stepped toward our future because past traditions had to be broken.  



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2 comments:

  1. CameronMarch 28, 2012 at 7:28 AM

    Funerals really do bring out the best and the worst in people. I can't imagine a loss like that, but a woman strong enough to take on the Aunts and do right by her husband's memory?

    I can more than imagine that.

    Thanks for linking up your story with us.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. BrendaBMarch 28, 2012 at 7:59 AM

      I didn't think of it as a strength at that time, but thanks to your comment I can see that it was.

      Delete

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The Help: the film dividing America

By Philip Sherwell 7:30AM BST 23 Oct 20115 Her book has sold 1.3 million copies in Britain and 10 million in the States, the film adaptation has already earned $160 million as the movie hit of the summer in America, and now Oscar buzz is mounting ahead of its release in the UK this week. These should be heady days for Kathryn Stockett, author of bestselling debut novel The Help, a publishing phenomenon that earned the devotion of book clubs and legions of predominantly female fans on both sides of the Atlantic. The Help is the emotive story of black maids in the segregated world of Sixties Mississippi at the height of the civil rights struggle – their narratives recounted by a sympathetic, young white woman who rejects the virulent inbred racism of her old school friends. There are clear autobiographical parallels with Stockett, 42, herself, a blonde Southern belle raised by a beloved African-American nanny in Jackson, the Mississippi state capital where the story is set. And her success is all the more remarkable, as the manuscript, five years in the writing, was rejected by some 60 literary agents (she stopped counting at 45). The Disney film version is being marketed as an inspiring mixture of chick lit and civil rights, based on a heart-warming sorority between the races. And there is growing speculation about Oscar nods for Viola Davis (who plays the central character, Aibileen Clark), Octavia Spencer (her feisty friend, Minny) and newcomer Emma Stone (as white socialite Skeeter Phelan). But not everyone in the US is feeling so good about the “feel-good” juggernaut that is The Help. Certainly not Ablene Cooper, the black housekeeper for Stockett’s brother, who brought a lawsuit against the writer, claiming she was the unwitting and humiliated model for the similarly named lead figure. Nor a leading black actor, or the commentators – many of them also African-American – who view the book and film as patronising portrayals that sugar-coat one of the most violent eras in modern history. Those visceral responses reflect deep and enduring fault lines about race in a country where the horrors of segregation, a painful living memory for many, were not washed away by the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president. In Mississippi, the scene of some of the most brutal acts of the freedom struggles five decades ago, those sensitivities are particularly raw. And that violent past reared its ugly head again recently when a black man was viciously beaten up by a gang of young whites and then mowed down and killed by a pick-up truck in what prosecutors claim was a racially driven hate crime. Against that turbulent backdrop, Stockett was perhaps always courting controversy. Most poignant among the objecting voices is that of Mrs Cooper, who sued the writer for $75,000, a humble sum by America’s litigious standards, for using her likeness without permission. She said she was distressed that in the book Aibileen lost her son – just as she had – and that in one exchange the maid said her skin was blacker than a cockroach. The case was thrown out under the statute of limitations, as Mrs Cooper failed to lodge it within a year of being sent the book. Still, she was not alone in her complaints. Wendell Pierce, New Orleans-born star of The Wire and Treme, launched a blistering attack on the film after watching it with his mother, who told him afterwards for the first time that she too had once worked as “the help." In a series of scathing tweets, he called the film “passive segregation lite that was painful to watch”, said his mother thought it was an “insult”, that it was a “passive version of the terror of the South” and a “sentimental primer of a palatable segregation history." Mr Pierce was at pains to praise the cast, particularly Davis and Spencer, but added that Hollywood often seeks films with black actors as long as there is also a “great white saviour." The most damning verdict on its allegedly saccharine version of reality was delivered by Max Gordon, an African-American, New York-based writer, who described his outrage as he watched the film. “The phenomenon of The Help is so depressing, as it undercuts the real heroes of the era by ignoring the real horrors,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “This is not the South of lynchings and beatings, it’s the comfortable Hollywood take of the civil rights era. “I don’t think you can compare suffering and oppression, but what would people say if there was an executive decision to make a movie about the Holocaust and the Nazis without brutality, featuring only German officers’ wives and Jewish women, with no concentration camps or trains to Auschwitz?” But the two black stars are defending the film. Spencer, a friend of Stockett, was particularly combative. “We’ve gotten so PC and we’ve gotten so weirded out. We start labelling. You have to be a black person to write about black people, you have to be a white person…” she bemoaned in one interview, not needing to finish the thought process. “I have a problem with the fact that some people are making that an issue.” The book also received the imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey, the Mississippi-born talk- show queen whose views carry great weight with her overwhelmingly female and African-American audiences. The Help was described as a “favourite book” on her website. Stockett, a recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old daughter who worked in the magazine industry in New York before moving back to the South, is now working on her second novel, another tale of women, this one set during the Great Depression. The writer addresses some of the criticisms of The Help in a newly published version of the book. She denied that, despite the coincidence of names, her brother’s housekeeper was a model, saying she had barely met the woman. Rather, she wrote that the inspiration for the character was Demetrie, her beloved childhood maid who largely raised her after her parents divorced when she was six. “The Help is fiction, by and large,” she continued. Yet as she wrote it, she wondered what her family would say – and also what Demetrie, by then long dead, would have thought. She acknowledged that she was breaking what some have seen as a cultural and literary taboo. “I was scared a lot of the time that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person,” she said. “What I am sure about is this: I don’t presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the Sixties. I don’t think it is something any white woman at the other end of a black woman’s paycheck could ever truly understand.” But, she concluded, “trying to understand is vital to our humanity”. Loyal readers and cinema-goers might agree with these motives. Her critics, as adamantly, do not. As British box offices prepare for a lucrative new release, the polarisation shows no signs of abating. 'The Help’ is released on Wednesday in Britan.