The Love U Keep

It begins with strings:

Andrew: “Do you mind this music? Do you like opera?”

Joe: “I am not that familiar with opera, Andrew.”

Andrew: “This is my favorite aria.”

A female voice begins to sing “La Mamma Morta” as Andrew tells Joe the name of the singer, the opera, the composer:  

“It’s Maria Callus.

Andrea Chenier

Umberto Giodano”

Callas sings, Joe looks at his watch, and Andrew continues:

“This is Maddalena saying how
during the French Revolution 
a mob set fire to her house 
and her mother died 
– saving her.” 
The music slows. 
“Do you hear the heartache in her voice? Can you feel it, Joe?”

The music reaches a crescendo and Andrew bends from the middle as though wounded by the single cello that echoes Maddalena’s grief. 

The camera moves back and shoots from above Andrew’s head and we see the IV pole he is holding. Andrew is dying. He is emaciated. “I was alone,” Andrew continues, explaining it to Joe (as though he were a two-year-old).

“Surrounded by nothingness.

Hunger and misery.

Until love found me and said

‘Live!

You must live.

Heaven is in my eyes.

You are not alone.’”

There is a fireplace in the room casting light and shadow across Joe’s face until, as we watch, Joe not only feels it, he becomes one with it.

The above is, of course, a scene from the movie Philadelphia with Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, and until last week, it was my all-time favorite movie scene (especially because it is followed by a scene in which Joe goes home, and sees his infant daughter and his wife with new eyes).

I say “until last week” because that was when I saw a scene that rivals the one above as my favorite. The movie is George Tillman Jr’s The Hate U Give, a story about an African American teenager who moves back and forth between her wealthy, white prep school, and her poor black neighborhood and family. Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg) is the daughter of a strong mother (Regina Hall) and a loving father (Russell Hornsby) who teaches his children both black pride and how to behave in case they are stopped by a policeman.

But Starr’s childhood friend Khalil (Algee Smith) has had no such training and Starr is forced to watch as Khalil, who reaches for a hairbrush, is fatally shot by a policeman. At first Starr is traumatized, then enraged, and finally, she is forced to act.  

In the scene I loved, Starr faces her white, prep-school boyfriend, Chris (KJ Apa), who tells her, “I don’t see color. I see people.” 

And Starr, angry now, replies, “If you don’t see my blackness, you don’t see me.”

“I see you,” Chris says gently as he touches his hand to her face.

And with that Tillman tells us that it is not enough to just see "blackness." We must also isolate and recognize its beauty and applaud its courage.  


My memoir, Dear Elvis, a story about grief and loss can be found at amzn.to/2uPSFtE   

BlacKkKlansman, A Review

Imagine that you are sitting at home relaxing. There is a television set turned on in front of you and you are idly watching it when what you see on the screen is an airplane striking the side of a building. You are bewildered. Upset. Confused. There is a commentator in the background talking, explaining, interpreting. But none of it makes sense. Imagine that you have been sitting there for a while when what you see next is a second plane slamming itself into another building. Now you are beside yourself feeling frightened, terrified, terrorized. If you can imagine all of that, multiply it by two and you will know what I felt last week watching the credits roll at the end of the movie on the screen in front of me.

The movie is Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and yes, it is that powerful. A true story, it is based on a memoir written by Ron Stallworth, a Black Colorado Springs police detective who infiltrated the Klan in the mid-1970’s. Stallworth, played by John David Washington (Denzel Washington’s son), initiated contact with the Klan when he responded to an ad in the local newspaper which said the group was looking for new recruits.

Contacted days later by the head of the local chapter of the Klan (and then by David Duke who was the national leader of “the organization” as its members liked to call it), Stallworth managed to convince the Klansmen that he was a diehard racist. When he asked his supervisor for a white officer to play his counterpart in face-to-face meetings while he maintained contact over the phone, the chief innocently asked, “Can you do that?” and Stallworth answered, “Chief, with the right white man we can do anything.”

Movie critic A. O. Scott of the New York Times calls this movie “a furious, funny, blunt, and brilliant confrontation with the truth. It is an alarm clock in the midst of a historical nightmare.” It is also a movie that depicts and reflects white terrorism and racial hatred in today’s America with impassioned honesty, intense drama, and at times, hilarious accuracy. BlacKkKlansman is a movie not to be missed. 

 

My second book, Dear Elvis, a memoir about grief and loss, can be found at amzn.to/2uPSFtE