One evening, while thumbing through The Village Voice, my mother’s eyes lit on an advertisement for a movie,
Black Orpheus, that was showing downtown. My mother insisted that we go see it that night; she said that it was the
first foreign film she had ever seen.
“I was only sixteen then,” she told us as we entered the elevator. “I’d just been accepted to the University of Chicago-
Gramps hadn’t told me yet that he wouldn’t let me go-and I was there for the summer, working as an au pair. It was the
first time that I’d ever been really on my own. Gosh, I felt like such an adult. And when I saw this film, I thought it was
the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.”
We took a cab to the revival theater where the movie was playing. The film, a groundbreaker of sorts due to its mostly
black, Brazilian cast, had been made in the fifties. The story line was simple: the myth of the ill-fated lovers Orpheus
and Eurydice set in the favelas of Rio during Carnival. In Technicolor splendor, set against scenic green hills, the black
and brown Brazilians sang and danced and strummed guitars like carefree birds in colorful plumage. About halfway
through the movie, I decided that I’d seen enough, and turned to my mother to see if she might be ready to go. But her
face, lit by the blue glow of the screen, was set in a wistful gaze. At that moment, I felt as if I were being given a
window into her heart, the unreflective heart of her youth. I suddenly realized that the depiction of childlike blacks I
was now seeing on the screen, the reverse image of Conrad’s dark savages, was what my mother had carried with her to
Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl
from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different.
I turned away, embarrassed for her, irritated with the people around me. Sitting there in the dark, I was reminded of a
conversation I’d had a few years earlier with a friend of my mother’s, an Englishman who had worked for an
international aid organization throughout Africa and Asia. He had told me that of all the different peoples he had met in
his travels, the Dik of Sudan were the strangest.
“Usually, after a month or two, you make contact,” he had said. “Even where you don’t speak the language, there’s a
smile or a joke, you know-some semblance of recognition. But at the end of a year with the Dik, they remained utterly
alien to me. They laughed at the things that drove me to despair. What I thought was funny seemed to leave them stone
cold.”
I had spared him the information that the Dik were Nilotes, distant cousins of mine. I had tried to imagine this pale
Englishman in a parched desert somewhere, his back turned away from a circle of naked tribesmen, his eyes searching
an empty sky, bitter in his solitude. And the same thought had occurred to me then that I carried with me now as I left
the movie theater with my mother and sister: The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was
tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our
demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.
“Kind of corny, huh,” Maya said as my mother went to the bathroom.
“What?”
“The movie. It was kind of corny. Just Mom’s style.”
For the next several days, I tried to avoid situations where my mother and I might be forced to talk. Then, a few days
before they were about to leave, I stopped by while Maya was taking a nap. My mother noticed a letter addressed to my
father in my hand. I asked her if she had an international postage stamp.
barré
(Barré)
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