I have seen Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family and I laughed until I almost cried!!! The laughter was very much needed, as with most of Perry's movies, there were some very serious issues permeating the entire movie.
Very interestingly, after considering the recent media attention to Lee and Perry, I paid close attention to the characters and any "buffoonery" and "coonery" that many Perry critics have said they exhibit. Yes, the movie does contain over exaggerations (surely for comedic effect), but I know people and/or have been around people who are just like Perry's cast of characters. I was not offended by the movie nor the real people I know who are like these characters.
Again, I must put forth, if viewers of Perry’s movies are paying attention, they will find the life lessons that are relayed in the plot lines are significant, speak to the reality of our world (especially the state of our young children), offers hope, avenues to redemption, and positive growth of the individual and family.
Mr. Lee, I applaud you for your artistic contributions to the world and the impact it has on society, particularly, your biopic, Malcolm X (for which you should have won an Oscar)! I appreciated your pointed expose on the human devastation in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina in your documentary, When the Levees Broke.
Mr. Perry, I applaud you for your artistic contributions to the world and its impact on society. Your movie, For Colored Girls, invoked a visceral reaction from me which is what I hope to experience when I attend movies. Furthermore, I treasure the laughter from the believable, insane characters in the wonderful world of Madea!
There is room at the table for both of you and I hope that critics of Lee and Perry will come to understand this dynamic.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Tyler Perry and Spike Lee: The Role of Movies in Entertainment & Education
Much has been said of late regarding the controversy of Tyler Perry telling Spike Lee to "Go to hell," after Lee criticized his movies. I find that all too often, on one hand, too much is expected of Hollywood and its relationship in portraying social and moral issues. On the other hand, too little is expected of movie-goers to discern the differences between filmakers' artistry and the realities of the world in which we live. Specifically, there is a place for the works of Perry and of Lee. There should not be a divide and accusations that one or the other is denigrating a race. The question that must be asked is, "Is it the role of Hollywood to educate, entertain or do both?"
Personally, I have never look to the film industry to educate me about anything. I much prefer reading, university classrooms, research, etc. to gain knowledge. When I go to a movie, I want to be entertained, to laugh, to cry, to be spellbound, and ultimately to be excited enough so that I want to find out the REALITY of a movie's topic that I know can never be fully relayed in a Hollywood production. Hollywood can attempt to and sometimes come very close to educating movie-goers, but it should never hold itself as the banner of enlightenment for the social ills of society.
Spike Lee is a very gifted filmmaker and I have enjoyed watching his productions. However, I do not view Lee as a spokesman, ambassador, and/or leader of African Americans. Mr. Lee's films do not speak to every aspect of my life nor do I rely on him to portray African Americans in his films as role models for society.
Tyler Perry is a very gifted filmmaker and I have enjoyed watching his productions. However, I do not view Perry as a spokesman, ambassador, and/or leader of African Americans. Mr. Perry's films do not speak to every aspect of my life nor do I rely on him to portray African Americans in his films as role models for society. Are you beginning to see my point?
As an avid movie-goer, I am very thankful that I am able to discern the difference between fictional characters like Perry's Madea and the real mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and females who inspired his vision. As for the allegations of Perry's characters on television, the Paynes and the Browns, portraying "buffoonery" and "coonery," I find them hilarious and sometimes so close to real people that I know, that I am amazed. Perry's movies and television shows ultimately reveal lessons on family unity, love, redemption and salvation, if you are paying attention. I could also say the same for Lee's characters.
I believe that it is a mistake to believe and rely on filmmakers to define who I am, how I should depict a character, and/or tell me what I should think--about anything! Perhaps too much time is wasted on how Hollywood (Lee and Perry specifically) portrays African Americans on the screen rather than how African Americans (as well as all races) conduct themselves in the real world.
Yes, there is an extremely ugly, uncomfortable, ubiquitous legacy of racism that permeates the world, but being overly critical of entertainers and the mediums through which they tell their stories will never change the hearts of those who hate. Removing the images from the screen will never remove the racism from our lives. Removing these images from how we act and navigate through real-world society will change the hearts of some.
Movies as educators, or representative of a race? I think NOT Movies as entertainment that may makes us think and explore new knowledge, I think SO.
Personally, I have never look to the film industry to educate me about anything. I much prefer reading, university classrooms, research, etc. to gain knowledge. When I go to a movie, I want to be entertained, to laugh, to cry, to be spellbound, and ultimately to be excited enough so that I want to find out the REALITY of a movie's topic that I know can never be fully relayed in a Hollywood production. Hollywood can attempt to and sometimes come very close to educating movie-goers, but it should never hold itself as the banner of enlightenment for the social ills of society.
Spike Lee is a very gifted filmmaker and I have enjoyed watching his productions. However, I do not view Lee as a spokesman, ambassador, and/or leader of African Americans. Mr. Lee's films do not speak to every aspect of my life nor do I rely on him to portray African Americans in his films as role models for society.
Tyler Perry is a very gifted filmmaker and I have enjoyed watching his productions. However, I do not view Perry as a spokesman, ambassador, and/or leader of African Americans. Mr. Perry's films do not speak to every aspect of my life nor do I rely on him to portray African Americans in his films as role models for society. Are you beginning to see my point?
As an avid movie-goer, I am very thankful that I am able to discern the difference between fictional characters like Perry's Madea and the real mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and females who inspired his vision. As for the allegations of Perry's characters on television, the Paynes and the Browns, portraying "buffoonery" and "coonery," I find them hilarious and sometimes so close to real people that I know, that I am amazed. Perry's movies and television shows ultimately reveal lessons on family unity, love, redemption and salvation, if you are paying attention. I could also say the same for Lee's characters.
I believe that it is a mistake to believe and rely on filmmakers to define who I am, how I should depict a character, and/or tell me what I should think--about anything! Perhaps too much time is wasted on how Hollywood (Lee and Perry specifically) portrays African Americans on the screen rather than how African Americans (as well as all races) conduct themselves in the real world.
Yes, there is an extremely ugly, uncomfortable, ubiquitous legacy of racism that permeates the world, but being overly critical of entertainers and the mediums through which they tell their stories will never change the hearts of those who hate. Removing the images from the screen will never remove the racism from our lives. Removing these images from how we act and navigate through real-world society will change the hearts of some.
Movies as educators, or representative of a race? I think NOT Movies as entertainment that may makes us think and explore new knowledge, I think SO.
I'm Back!!!!!!
After a long, busy and complicated absence, I am finally back to my blog! Stay tuned!!
Sunday, November 14, 2010
From my book, Echoes and Whispers: The Chronicles of an African American Family in the South
Having seen with my very own eyes some of my family documented in the Federal Census, my longing for more connections began to scream within my veins. At times, the hours scouring the Internet seemed to drag and drag. Glimpses of records holding tantalizing possibilities scrolled down and across the screen, only to end in disappointment after disappointment, as I could not connect with any further documentation, any other record, that would bring the puzzle pieces of my family into a complete and focused view. It was those tantalizing, tidbits of information, and the voices of my ancestors that kept me going. They kept me chipping away at the bricks and mortar that threatened to imprison me on this 21st Century side of history, with only my father’s and his family’s stories as my links to a past, my family’s rich history; a history that lay just beyond a wall constructed with bigotry, hate, and racism.
Driven by the passions of the voices of my ancestors from the Alabama Blackbelt, I continued my journey back through time to 1850. Tensions over slavery in the United States
In the 1850 Slave Records of the Eutaw Beat in Greene Co. Alabama on page 134, I found reference to one Andrew J. Underwood, a white blacksmith; the owner of nine slaves recorded as:
Male Age 35
Male Age 30
Female Age 21
Male Age 20/21?
Female Age 1
Female Age 19
Male Age 3
Female Age 6/12
Female Age 18
The first listing, like Las Vegas
Sunday, August 29, 2010
BROWN SUGAR SKIN
I can still taste
The salty sweetness
Of that Brown Sugar Skin,
Cool and fresh against my lips,
That Brown Sugar Skin.
I can still feel
The satin smoothness
Of that Brown Sugar Skin,
when your body was close to mine
That Brown Sugar Skin.
My heart still jumps
From that Brown Sugar Skin,
Gone so long
My soul still held within,
Within that Brown Sugar Skin.
The salty sweetness
Of that Brown Sugar Skin,
Cool and fresh against my lips,
That Brown Sugar Skin.
I can still feel
The satin smoothness
Of that Brown Sugar Skin,
when your body was close to mine
That Brown Sugar Skin.
My heart still jumps
From that Brown Sugar Skin,
Gone so long
My soul still held within,
Within that Brown Sugar Skin.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
From my book, Echoes and Whispers: The Chronicles of an African American Family in the South
Chapter 1 continued:
During one particular weekend as I spent hour after hour, after hour, searching internet sites and going over page after page, after page, of federal census reports for Greene County Alabama, I received a phone call from my mother. She inquired about what I was doing and I said,
“I’m off on one of my tangents mom, searching the census for daddy’s people. I don’t know why I’m doing this.”
In my heart and soul, I did know why, but trying to connect the past of an African American is a frustrating, emotional roller coaster ride that can make you question your sanity. But, I continued hearing the insistent echoes of my ancestors and I could not give it up.
My seemingly endless searches of the federal census finally began to reveal names that I had heard from my uncles and daddy all of my life—the Pippens, the Eatmans, the Fulghams, the Cockrells. Page after page of scanned images rolled across the computer monitor, at which I squinted and strained to see, to find a glimpse of my family. My persistence and the insistence of my ancestor’s echoes led me finally to find my family, the Spencers, and at last, I found our patriarch, my great-great-grandpa, John Underwood.
Five years after the end of the Civil War (or as some southerners-at least in Savannah, Georgia-still to this day call it, the War of Northern Aggression), 1870 found the southern states of Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia readmitted to the Union. Carpetbaggers and Scalawags were in their heyday in the south and issues of the war, such as the Constitutional rights of the Negro Freedmen and the disposition of the leaders of the Confederacy, had not been fully addressed. The government ratified the 15th Amendment of the Constitution giving blacks the right to vote regardless of their race or color and irrespective of their previous status as slaves.
In Alabama, former slaves came into a modicum of political power with the elections of the first three blacks to serve in the state’s government while others lived in abject poverty. They were barely eking out enough food for sustenance as sharecroppers and living in shacks while waiting on William Tecumseh Sherman’s promise of forty acres and a mule to spread through the Freedmen’s Bureau to the rolling hills of Alabama. A promise that after 147 years, remains unfulfilled.
The year 1870 was also the Federal Census year in which the Negro Freedmen, Chinese Americans, and Native Americans (not including those living in Indian Territory or on reservations) were enumerated for the first time. At least, some of the disenfranchised people who built these great United States of America were at last being counted in the population as a whole number rather than as a fraction of a man.
It was on the 1870 Federal Census where I found the earliest reference to John Underwood. As my father told me, listed with his name was his wife Lucinda, son George-my great grandpa, and daughters, Elvira, Martha, and Amanda. These names, written in elegant script, were my family. They were real. They were mine. They were me. Which was “Aunt Cuddy?” Which was “Aunt Martha?” Questions bubbled and boiled in my mind. “How did they come to Green County Alabama? What did they look like? Would I be able to find out more?” The more I questioned, the more I thought that I would probably never know with certainty, how, when, and why John Underwood came to be in Greene County Alabama from Virginia.
Between remembering his life on the family’s rural farm in the 1920s and the stories of his brothers and sisters, Daddy recalled:
“Grandpa George told it that his daddy, John Underwood, was taking some fence posts on a wagon one day, going to fix a fence out in the pasture. The wagon was being pulled by two big oxen and when he left the house, you could hear him telling the ox to ‘Ha there! Get up there!’ And the wagon was rattling down the rutted trail. Not long after his voice faded in the distance, they heard loud screams from the direction of the pasture, ‘Ho there! Ho there!’ The oxen were bellowing and then there was the sound of wood crashing into the ground. Grandpa George found his daddy dead, crushed by the grey weathered and splintered boards of the wagon and the hooves of the oxen as they had run out of control.”
By the turn of the century, when the United States and the world began the 100 years in which it would see its greatest growth in technology and economics, I found my family on the 1900 census and indeed, there was no mention of John Underwood. His wife Lucinda (Grandma Cindy) was living in the household of my Great-grandpa, George Spencer.
To be continued...
During one particular weekend as I spent hour after hour, after hour, searching internet sites and going over page after page, after page, of federal census reports for Greene County Alabama, I received a phone call from my mother. She inquired about what I was doing and I said,
“I’m off on one of my tangents mom, searching the census for daddy’s people. I don’t know why I’m doing this.”
In my heart and soul, I did know why, but trying to connect the past of an African American is a frustrating, emotional roller coaster ride that can make you question your sanity. But, I continued hearing the insistent echoes of my ancestors and I could not give it up.
My seemingly endless searches of the federal census finally began to reveal names that I had heard from my uncles and daddy all of my life—the Pippens, the Eatmans, the Fulghams, the Cockrells. Page after page of scanned images rolled across the computer monitor, at which I squinted and strained to see, to find a glimpse of my family. My persistence and the insistence of my ancestor’s echoes led me finally to find my family, the Spencers, and at last, I found our patriarch, my great-great-grandpa, John Underwood.
Five years after the end of the Civil War (or as some southerners-at least in Savannah, Georgia-still to this day call it, the War of Northern Aggression), 1870 found the southern states of Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia readmitted to the Union. Carpetbaggers and Scalawags were in their heyday in the south and issues of the war, such as the Constitutional rights of the Negro Freedmen and the disposition of the leaders of the Confederacy, had not been fully addressed. The government ratified the 15th Amendment of the Constitution giving blacks the right to vote regardless of their race or color and irrespective of their previous status as slaves.
In Alabama, former slaves came into a modicum of political power with the elections of the first three blacks to serve in the state’s government while others lived in abject poverty. They were barely eking out enough food for sustenance as sharecroppers and living in shacks while waiting on William Tecumseh Sherman’s promise of forty acres and a mule to spread through the Freedmen’s Bureau to the rolling hills of Alabama. A promise that after 147 years, remains unfulfilled.
The year 1870 was also the Federal Census year in which the Negro Freedmen, Chinese Americans, and Native Americans (not including those living in Indian Territory or on reservations) were enumerated for the first time. At least, some of the disenfranchised people who built these great United States of America were at last being counted in the population as a whole number rather than as a fraction of a man.
It was on the 1870 Federal Census where I found the earliest reference to John Underwood. As my father told me, listed with his name was his wife Lucinda, son George-my great grandpa, and daughters, Elvira, Martha, and Amanda. These names, written in elegant script, were my family. They were real. They were mine. They were me. Which was “Aunt Cuddy?” Which was “Aunt Martha?” Questions bubbled and boiled in my mind. “How did they come to Green County Alabama? What did they look like? Would I be able to find out more?” The more I questioned, the more I thought that I would probably never know with certainty, how, when, and why John Underwood came to be in Greene County Alabama from Virginia.
Between remembering his life on the family’s rural farm in the 1920s and the stories of his brothers and sisters, Daddy recalled:
“Grandpa George told it that his daddy, John Underwood, was taking some fence posts on a wagon one day, going to fix a fence out in the pasture. The wagon was being pulled by two big oxen and when he left the house, you could hear him telling the ox to ‘Ha there! Get up there!’ And the wagon was rattling down the rutted trail. Not long after his voice faded in the distance, they heard loud screams from the direction of the pasture, ‘Ho there! Ho there!’ The oxen were bellowing and then there was the sound of wood crashing into the ground. Grandpa George found his daddy dead, crushed by the grey weathered and splintered boards of the wagon and the hooves of the oxen as they had run out of control.”
By the turn of the century, when the United States and the world began the 100 years in which it would see its greatest growth in technology and economics, I found my family on the 1900 census and indeed, there was no mention of John Underwood. His wife Lucinda (Grandma Cindy) was living in the household of my Great-grandpa, George Spencer.
To be continued...
Saturday, August 14, 2010
From my book, Echoes and Whispers: The Chronicles of an African American Family in the South
Chapter 1
From the Alabama Black Belt…
Echoes insistently whispered. They called to me from the red clay of Alabama; from the rolling hills, dirt roads, honey suckle-grape-magnolia scented air, and jade-hued Kudzu vine cloaking the lands of Greene County and Tuscaloosa, Alabama. They still sing a calling, constant song in my mind’s ear and invoke a restlessness that overcomes me with longing, a longing to find and know my history. These echoes are the ancestors I only know from my father’s stories. And, like needles pricking at my soul, they call and demand of me to find and tell their stories.
When my father, the Reverend Doctor John Herbert Spencer, began to approach his death, he started to share with me his family’s history. During summer visits and other times when I would travel to Tuscaloosa, he shared the stories that he remembered of his father, mother, brothers, sisters, Grandpa George, and Grandma Cindy, and his life in rural Greene County Alabama—a poor Negro farmer boy, raised with old fashioned country values and a call to serve the Lord as a preacher. I wrote all that he told me to record my family’s legacy and within me was born a passion to know more, to find out all the history that molded my daddy into the man that he was, the minister of the gospel, the chauvinistic and domineering husband of my mother—the daddy who loved me.
To be African American, Black, Negro—because I am all three and more—and to dare to explore your history in the U.S. is to eventually face the impenetrable wall of slavery; to struggle for glimpses beyond the tangled blinds of bigotry for a fleeting glance of the deep rich blood ties that echo in my veins, calling for just a moment in the light of remembering, truth, and revelation. For me, the truth of this story is in my father’s retelling of memory and stories passed to him by my ancestors that now breathe and whisper to me; voices and echoes that capture me for a journey through time—a journey of finding family.
Just when Alabama became a territory in the United States, somewhere in Virginia, a male child was born into slavery and it pains me that this is all that I know of the birth of my great-great-grandfather. The patriarch of my father’s family was a slave, one John Underwood, who was born approximately in 1817 in the state of Virginia. How he came to Greene County Alabama is left to theory, but it can be safely assumed that he was either sold to an Alabama owner or migrated to the state as chattel of a slave trader or a white family. Daddy remembered the story that his great-grandpa had been owned by a white Underwood who worked as a blacksmith in Greene County, and when he told me this story I began a long journey on twisting, turning, overlapping, rutted roads of rediscovering and exploring my family’s genealogy.
Limited by a lack of money, my journey along these roads consisted of many, many hours sitting at my computer and scouring the Internet for genealogy websites and information. With my appetite, whet by glimpses of my family’s names on Federal Census from the 1930s and 1920s, I continued to search backwards in time, trying to connect the past with my present existence, my reasons for being. Anger and frustration laced and interwoven with an impenetrable sadness, were constant companions as I read the records of slaves; “3 male slaves, 4 female slaves, male slave age 7 or 8, Negro boy sound body and teeth.” I continuously read how people of an entire race were reduced from African kings, queens, princes, and princesses, to items for sale to the highest bidder. Men, women, boys, and girls, stripped of their pride; stripped of the knowledge of their family; forced to forget their native languages, and denied the memories of their homeland; that black, ebony, chestnut, honey colored Africa, motherland of all people. How would I, could I, bridge the past with the present, connect my existence with the memories of family that echoed their being so strongly in my veins?
Daddy told the story of our family as,
“I’m not sure whether Grandpa George said our people came from North or South Carolina, but what I do know is that my great grandpa’s name was John Underwood, my Grandpa George’s daddy, and he was a slave owned by a blacksmith named Underwood in Greene County. We got the Spencer name when Grandpa George and his mother, Grandma Cindy, were sold to some Spencers. Grandpa told us that some of his brothers and sisters were sold off too. When the Civil War broke out, John Underwood made a vow to find all of his family and he did.”
I wanted to know their names and daddy could only remember the names from childhood memory, Grandma Cindy, the wife of John Underwood, and the children of their marriage, Aunt Martha, Aunt Cuddy, DeWarren, Sim, and George. I didn’t doubt my daddy’s stories, but I needed, I hungered, my soul and blood ached to know that these people, my people, really existed and were not the invention of memories passed down through generations of story telling and my family’s desire to connect with a history that was stolen from them by the chains of slavery.
From the Alabama Black Belt…
Echoes insistently whispered. They called to me from the red clay of Alabama; from the rolling hills, dirt roads, honey suckle-grape-magnolia scented air, and jade-hued Kudzu vine cloaking the lands of Greene County and Tuscaloosa, Alabama. They still sing a calling, constant song in my mind’s ear and invoke a restlessness that overcomes me with longing, a longing to find and know my history. These echoes are the ancestors I only know from my father’s stories. And, like needles pricking at my soul, they call and demand of me to find and tell their stories.
When my father, the Reverend Doctor John Herbert Spencer, began to approach his death, he started to share with me his family’s history. During summer visits and other times when I would travel to Tuscaloosa, he shared the stories that he remembered of his father, mother, brothers, sisters, Grandpa George, and Grandma Cindy, and his life in rural Greene County Alabama—a poor Negro farmer boy, raised with old fashioned country values and a call to serve the Lord as a preacher. I wrote all that he told me to record my family’s legacy and within me was born a passion to know more, to find out all the history that molded my daddy into the man that he was, the minister of the gospel, the chauvinistic and domineering husband of my mother—the daddy who loved me.
To be African American, Black, Negro—because I am all three and more—and to dare to explore your history in the U.S. is to eventually face the impenetrable wall of slavery; to struggle for glimpses beyond the tangled blinds of bigotry for a fleeting glance of the deep rich blood ties that echo in my veins, calling for just a moment in the light of remembering, truth, and revelation. For me, the truth of this story is in my father’s retelling of memory and stories passed to him by my ancestors that now breathe and whisper to me; voices and echoes that capture me for a journey through time—a journey of finding family.
Just when Alabama became a territory in the United States, somewhere in Virginia, a male child was born into slavery and it pains me that this is all that I know of the birth of my great-great-grandfather. The patriarch of my father’s family was a slave, one John Underwood, who was born approximately in 1817 in the state of Virginia. How he came to Greene County Alabama is left to theory, but it can be safely assumed that he was either sold to an Alabama owner or migrated to the state as chattel of a slave trader or a white family. Daddy remembered the story that his great-grandpa had been owned by a white Underwood who worked as a blacksmith in Greene County, and when he told me this story I began a long journey on twisting, turning, overlapping, rutted roads of rediscovering and exploring my family’s genealogy.
Limited by a lack of money, my journey along these roads consisted of many, many hours sitting at my computer and scouring the Internet for genealogy websites and information. With my appetite, whet by glimpses of my family’s names on Federal Census from the 1930s and 1920s, I continued to search backwards in time, trying to connect the past with my present existence, my reasons for being. Anger and frustration laced and interwoven with an impenetrable sadness, were constant companions as I read the records of slaves; “3 male slaves, 4 female slaves, male slave age 7 or 8, Negro boy sound body and teeth.” I continuously read how people of an entire race were reduced from African kings, queens, princes, and princesses, to items for sale to the highest bidder. Men, women, boys, and girls, stripped of their pride; stripped of the knowledge of their family; forced to forget their native languages, and denied the memories of their homeland; that black, ebony, chestnut, honey colored Africa, motherland of all people. How would I, could I, bridge the past with the present, connect my existence with the memories of family that echoed their being so strongly in my veins?
Daddy told the story of our family as,
“I’m not sure whether Grandpa George said our people came from North or South Carolina, but what I do know is that my great grandpa’s name was John Underwood, my Grandpa George’s daddy, and he was a slave owned by a blacksmith named Underwood in Greene County. We got the Spencer name when Grandpa George and his mother, Grandma Cindy, were sold to some Spencers. Grandpa told us that some of his brothers and sisters were sold off too. When the Civil War broke out, John Underwood made a vow to find all of his family and he did.”
I wanted to know their names and daddy could only remember the names from childhood memory, Grandma Cindy, the wife of John Underwood, and the children of their marriage, Aunt Martha, Aunt Cuddy, DeWarren, Sim, and George. I didn’t doubt my daddy’s stories, but I needed, I hungered, my soul and blood ached to know that these people, my people, really existed and were not the invention of memories passed down through generations of story telling and my family’s desire to connect with a history that was stolen from them by the chains of slavery.
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