, she sent her photos all over New York, and did not care when her mother threw her out for it. Hired in a small way in the late 1950s for feature films and off-Broadway, she soon put her foot down. There were roles she approved of, and roles she would rather starve than take.
Those included all the parts, and they were few enough, customarily assigned to black actors. While the men were con-men, hustlers or drug addicts, the women were plump maids or prostitutes, Jezebels or Aunt Jemimas. Characters like these had no dimension, no complexities or professions or family life, as white characters did.
She especially longed to see black sisters portrayed as they really were: the strength of their race, the ones who held their families together when the men went off, for whatever reason. The role she treasured most came in “Sounder” in 1972, where she played the wife of a Louisianan sharecropper who, when her husband was imprisoned for stealing food, had to run the farm and raise the children alone. It won her a best-actress Oscar nomination.
One day, however, she had seen her mother in a line of black women waiting to be hired as maids. White people in cars drove slowly past, looking them over. America’s original sin of slavery seemed as sharp as ever. Even decades later racism still ran deep in the film andindustries, despite the progress on the surface. In 1977 she appeared as the hero’s mother in “Roots”, aseries that told the story of an African boy, Kunta Kinte, sold into slavery in the South. It made a huge splash for a time.
In 2013, fulfilling a long-standing dream, she played an originally white role, Mrs Carrie Watts, in “The Trip to Bountiful” on Broadway. It won her a Tony award. The story was of an old woman who insisted on seeing her childhood home before she died. As usual she steeped herself in the character, even going to “Mrs Carrie’s” part of Texas to scratch up the earth and smell it. Being ancient herself now, it was not hard to get the moves right.
Now there’s more of us asking for this. So instead of forcing them to finance their wonderful stories so they can share it with us why doesn’t it get financed by larger companies? It needs to happen more than it does now. Not enough representation.