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Transcription: [00:34:50]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
That's mother and dau— mother and son you got in that cabinet.
[00:34:54]
Um, and then here you are migrating to the city. You don't know who's who.

[00:35:01]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Mm-hmm [[agreement]]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
You don't know nothing. You just know he looked fine, and you goin' go for that.
[00:35:09]
[[silence]]
[00:35:12]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
After reading that novel, or rather after talking with Toni and she was gettin' ready to break that novel, we drove this country crazy.

[00:35:21]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
In what sense?

[00:35:23]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
That's what jazz is. All them songs, all the messages, all that talking we would, all that singing we were doing at each other. Come over here and don't shake my peaches if you can't— y'know, y'know?

[00:35:34]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Right.

[00:35:35]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
We drove this country crazy. I mean, they had a— I'm not surprised them people bound up their dress and bound up their heads with the, with the— they always looked like bandages to me, those head bands.
[00:35:49]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
And jumped out there talking about bitch-ass crazy, and drinking gin, and dancing, and jumping in pools, and climbing in, um, phone booths, and eating gold fish, and goin' over the falls. I think we drove, I think we drove this country crazy.

[00:36:03]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
And even the mid— like when you think of these mid-westerners, like I'm thinking like all these folks I've been talking to, people like Marvel Cooke and Louis Thompson Patterson, that, y'know, knew that they were moving to New York, as soon as they got to be grown.

[00:36:17]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
So like at age 21, they moved to—
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
Of age. Right, yeah. Going to the city.

[00:36:21]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Good old Harlem Renaissance. And they talk about drinking gin. Louis Thompson Patterson was saying, was despera— y'know, drinking gin was a big deal. Y'know.

[00:36:31]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
But y'know, the, the press plays an interesting role in this. When we look at the newspapers from um, African American newspapers, um, y'know the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier and others.

[00:36:46]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm [[agreement]].

[00:36:48]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
How they translated stories from one— I mean they reported stuff that was happening in, y'know, almost every city where there was a black population.

[00:36:57]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Right.

[00:36:59]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
And it was, it was like feeding, um, people who were not there, who were not in the know, so that they could become a part of the know, or could search and become, y'know seekers after, after that.
[00:37:13]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
And I mean, it's interesting. You relate it to freedom, in a sense. I mean that freedom to choose, and that freedom to choose also translated in terms of people uprooting themselves

[00:37:28]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
[[cross talk]] Freedom to move.
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
and looking from one place to another to another.

[00:37:32]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
But it also, um, in terms of the, um, it was a freedom to be whoever or whatever I want to be. And there were all these kind of role models that were projected in the black press.

[00:37:49]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
Yes.

[00:37:51]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
They promoted the idea of developing black businesses. I mean, there's a whole series of issues of Chicago Defender that talk very deliberately every single week about what new business is developing in Harlem, right? And the fact that the negro, um, national—

[00:38:10]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Black Swan Records and all, right?

[00:38:13]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Yeah, yeah. I mean all of those things were, were— they were news items. They weren't just profiteers, entrepreneurs making money off the community, they were newsworthy items that were usable items for, y'know, for the community, and for people outside of the community.

[00:38:29]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
I'm sorry. I'm really, I'm going off.

[00:38:33]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
It's alright.

[00:38:35]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
But, y'know I really— this is not really something, so much for the article, but y'know, I do have problems with Micheaux that I don't think we really talked about. In reality, it does seem to me that, um,

[00:38:49]
[[silence]]

[00:38:52]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
the African, fully African people in his films—and again I don't claim, I mean I've maybe seen five Micheaux films—are not, well they're certainly not the center of the love triangles, or the love thing. And they're not fully, they're not as human, they're not as centered, and that's really kind of strange.

[00:39:22]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
It's very, it's very troublesome.

[00:39:24]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
It's very troublesome, and it's almost as if the real people are the mulattos, whereas in the— not entirely! But I mean, but there is a, and there's also a good, bad thing that sort of goes with color, in the Micheaux films.

[00:39:41]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
I think in the Micheaux films there's less of a good, bad color than in the other films of that day. I'm thinking particularly the [[guilty player?]] films. But, certainly in these two films, the darkest character is E. G. Tatum, and in both films he's, um,

[00:40:00]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
[[cross talk]] A traitor.
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
[[cross talk]] He's the comic relief. He's the comic relief.

[00:40:03]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
He's the comic relief. He's comic relief in "Symbol of the Unconquered." He's also comic relief in a, in a painful kind of way in, um, "Within Our Gates" since he's the one that sort of sounds the alarm that mobilized the lynch mob, although he gets his comeuppance.

[00:40:21]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
And the other thing that's like, that's uneroticized— I'm sorry.

[00:40:25]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Go ahead.

[00:40:27]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
But, the other thing's uncriticized, and I'm, now I'm going to really personalize and this is probably not for attribution whatsoever, but—

[00:40:31]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
No, leave it on.

[00:40:33]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Alright. The other thing is um, the blackophilia is um, is not critic— there's not, there's no critique of it. It's, it's—

[00:40:45]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
No critique of the what?

[00:40:47]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Of the love of light. It sort of like that's the norm, and that's right. Um, there's no sense that uh— there's pain, but it's right, y'know?

[00:41:01]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
No. In, in "Body in Soul" there's a cri— no, is there a critique? What about, what happens in "Body and Soul" after that scene where the preacher, who is one of the darkest people in the film, calls Lawrence Chenault yellow dog?

[00:41:21]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Yellow niger.

[00:41:23]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
You yellow niger? You yellow niger.

[00:41:24]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
What happened?

[00:41:26]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
Is there? Now that's, um, a kind of reversal of, um, the good, bad value that you get in the other films of the day. Um, do we get anymore—

[00:41:42]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
But the, um, to the, where the color question comes, um,

[00:41:50]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
Where he could take—

[00:41:52]
questionable, is, in "Body and Soul," the comic relief is this, who the guy who's the same complexion as [[Rosy?]]. And so, I mean, his color is not—

[00:42:06]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
Operating. [[cross talk]] As much.

[00:42:08]
Operating, right? And you can find instances in Micheaux's films where the color is not important.

[00:42:14]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Well, I mean yeah, obviously, y'know Chenault in this one is a villain.

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
[[cross talk]] It's not operating.

[00:42:20]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Right, and um, in terms of the romantic lead, I think we're, there's a certain amount of validity to what you're saying, is that within the community at large, this question of color was very operative. There was even, in the earlier period before the movies, y'know talking about 1890s when there was talk of what the race would look like, a hundred years from now.
[00:43:00]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
And when, when there was that aspiration, that feeling that freedom would allow us to become completely ameliorated within the larger society. Meaning, not only would we sort of culturally become ameliorated with— not ameliorated.

[00:43:20]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
Assimilated?
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Assimilated.

[00:43:22]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Assimilated in society, but we would even begin to look less like the African, and more like the assimilated society. And there are, there are articles written about that.

[00:43:32]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
Oh sure, sure. There's a absolute obsession.

[00:43:35]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Yeah, there was, I mean that notion was afoot. So, I guess I mentioned that to say that, for me that is another reality operative in Micheaux's films. I mean, not something that I would critique him personally for, but I would look to the larger society and say, "well yeah, I mean, what is Micheaux doing with this?"
[00:44:02]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
I mean, deliberately, in that scene from "God's Step Children" for instance, where Naomi says, "Oh, I don't want to marry anybody who looks like that!" Y'know, I mean, "that funny looking man!" Or they have that blackface in, um, I think it's "The Girl from Chicago," one scene where [[Wood?]] is frightened by this face in the window, and it's a dark skinned man.
[00:44:30]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Y'know there are a couple of ways to read that. If you think, in terms of what's going on in the society outside of the— I mean in the real world, outside of the—

[00:44:39]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
Within the black community.

[00:44:41]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Yeah, within the black community. Um, there's a certain level of truism to those objects and one wonders if Micheaux is—maybe I'm being to boosterism about Micheaux, but I'll say it anyway.
[00:44:57]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
I wonder if he's not pointing up something which is there, as he sees it, in the African American experience that needs to be corrected or directed.

[00:45:15]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Was Micheaux married?

[00:45:17]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Yes.

[00:45:18]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
What did his wife look like?

[00:45:19]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Um, his wife is the woman in "God's Step Children." She's the mother, in "God's Step Children." She was, uh, beautiful woman. She wasn't, um, fair, [[background noise]] too fair, but she—

[00:45:34]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
She wasn't—?

[00:45:36]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
She wasn't fair.
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
[[cross talk]] Right.

[00:45:38]
[[silence]]

[00:45:41]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
She was a very striking woman.

[00:45:44]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Totally unrelated—
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
[[cross talk]] Something on fair?

[00:45:46]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
No, uh, my niece— my sister's a judge. My niece was visiting with me when Lillian [[Jimenez?]] had come by to visit, and Julia was saying to Lillian, "Oh, what does your mother do?" And Julia said, "Well, my mother's a judge," and Lillian said, "Oh, is she fair?" And she said, "No, she's—

[00:46:11]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
[[cross talk]] Brown?
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
just like [[Lily?]]!"

[00:46:13]
[[laughter]]

[00:46:17]
{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
And I'm just thinking, so Julia has that word already, y'know? That's too bad. But anyway, yeah.

[00:46:27]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Okay.
[00:46:28]

Transcription Notes:
I think she is continuing to talk about Toni Morrison. PEarl is the one giving the interview. There is a dog barking. Sounds like they are in a kitchen or at a dining room table. They are eating because you keep hearing dishes or glasses clinking. Or things being set down.