first person
by
SUSAN FALES-HILL
Why The Help Makes Me Want to Shout Hollywood depictions of African-American women’s lives stubbornly refuse to evolve
M Susan Fales-Hill
Viola Davis deserves more than to amble across our screens in the latest iteration of that ubiquitous black female archetype: the noblehearted, long-suffering, yet dignified domestic who serves as a moral touchstone and conscience for the glamorous Caucasian characters.
y late mother, Josephine Premice, was an ebony-skinned black woman who wore false eyelashes at breakfast, could speak and sing in five languages, dance in any medium, and had by age 32 toured Europe and South America as a chanteuse, brought Calypso to the United States, been nominated for a Tony, and become a muse to couturier, Jacques Fath. When I was growing up, she would walk around the house wryly belting out a song whose lyrics went, “Can’t you see the Bergman in me, and you want me to play Topsy?” It was a way of scoffing at the daily slights she received going out on auditions and being told variously that she was too black (because of her complexion,) not black enough (because of her chiseled features and glamorous image,) or that she could, “Be as black as she wanted,” when she spoke the King’s non-ebonic English she, a child of Haitian immigrants, had learned at public school in her middle-class black neighborhood in Brooklyn. Watching Oscar-nominated The Help, the reductive film version of the layered, megahit novel set in Alabama at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, I wanted to stand up in the theater and yell, “Can’t you see the Bergman in Viola Davis and Cicely Tyson and the other fine women in the cast?“ (One cannot blame these actresses for accepting some of the only roles available to them, incredibly, in the year of our lord 2012.) Tony Award winner Viola Davis has a body that weds Sophia Loren’s hourglass curves to Angela Bassett’s sculptural
Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer in a scene from The Help