W.E.B. Du Bois Institute

Transcription

W.E.B. Du Bois Institute
The Shirley Temple of My Familiar
Author(s): Ann duCille
Source: Transition, No. 73 (1997), pp. 10-32
Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute
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Position
SHIRLEY
THE
OF
MY
TEMPLE
FAMILIAR
Frieda brought her four graham crackers on a saucer and some milk
in a blue-and-white Shirley Temple cup. She was a long time with
the milk, and gazed fondly at the silhouette of Shirley Temple's
dimpled face. Frieda and she had a loving conversation about how
cu-ute Shirley Temple was. I couldn't join them in their adoration
because I hated Shirley. Not because she was cute, but because she
danced with Bojangles, who was my friend, my uncle, my daddy, and
who ought to have been soft-shoeing it and chuckling with me.
-Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Ann duCille
I wish to thank my tenyear-old friend Rachel
Woodhullfor calling
Bette Bao Lord's In
the Year of the Boar
and Jackie Robinson
to my attention.
From Shirley Temple
by Robert Windeler
(London: W H. Allen)
Recently, a local news anchor broke for
commercials with a teaser promising
"tap dancing like you've never seen it."
A great fan of tap,I stayed tuned through
at least a dozen commercials, visions of
Bill "Bojangles" Robinson soft-shoeing
in my head, as I tried to imagine footwork more magical than his: that is, tap
dancing like I'd never seen it. When the
newscast resumed, it quickly became apparent that my expectations were not
about to be realized. "Tap dancing has
come a long way since 'The Good Ship
Lollipop,'" the anchor announced, as he
introduced a troupe of young white men
from Australia.
Although I didn't think the group's
performance lived up to its billing, my
point is not to suggest that white boys
can't dance, but to highlight the difference between the anchorman's frame of
reference and my own.While my familiar was African American dance legend
Bill Robinson, his was Robinson's pintsize pupil and frequent partner, Shirley
Temple. Moreover, the universal recog-
10
TRANSITION
ISSUE
nition that the newsman so readily presumed for the white child star can in no
way be assumed for Robinson or for any
of the black performers who brought tap
dance into mainstream American culture. Robinson hasn't been entirely forgotten, but how ironic it is that the ubiquitous Shirley Temple and her signature
song "The Good Ship Lollipop" remain
synonymous with tap nearly fifty years
after she made her last film.
The irony of the newsman's conflation of Temple, tap, and tune is all the
sharper if we consider that, although the
young Shirley Temple sang the lollipop
song in a number of her films, she never
actually danced to it. This misassociation
is so common that in the 195os and i96os
-decades after the tot had hung up her
tap shoes-talent shows like Ted Mack's
OriginalAmateurHourwere overrun with
little girls in sailor suits singing and tapping to "Lollipop" in hopes of becoming
the next Shirley Temple. (As it happens,
the good ship Lollipop was actually a
plane, not a boat.)
73
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..
.
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,,=
.
.
* ,.
.
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...
.......
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5i'
.. ..... .
.. .. .......
.
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.
THE SHIRLEY TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR
11
The dreams of little girls notwithstanding, no child performer (with the
possible exception of Michael Jackson)
has achieved Shirley Temple'ssuccess and
universal recognition. As the starof more
than thirty films-and later as a diplomat and politician-the former prodigy,
who today goes by her married name,
Shirley Temple Black, has been a genuine American icon for almost seventy
years.As she boasts in her autobiography,
The same little girl who spent most
of her film career in the arms and
laps of white men never got closer to
Bill Robinson than a handshake.
Child Star (1988), she had greater name
recognition at the ripe old age of seven
than either Amelia Earhart or Eleanor
Roosevelt, and bigger box-office receipts
than Clark Gable,Robert Taylor,or Bing
Crosby.
Although children helped make her
the number one box-office draw between 1935 and 1939, the diminutive
screen idol was also remarkably popular
with adults. In 1935, the Texas Centennial Exposition made her an honorary
captain in the Texas Rangers (the police
force, not the baseball team) and offered
her $Io,ooo to make a week-long personal tour in Dallas, while promoters of
the New Jersey State Fair offered her
to appear for a single day. Men
$I2,500
and women of means and power, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt
and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, were
among Temple's intimates. In fact, Hoover, who proudly wore a Shirley Temple Police Force badge on his lapel, was
so concerned about his little friend's
12
TRANSITION
ISSUE
safety that he made her security the official business of the FBI.
By her own account, age discrimination cheated her out of the "Best Actress" Oscar in 1934, when she was five
years old. "My name was on the nomination list and odds-makers had me an
almost certain win," she writes in Child
Star. But when a "vicious cat fight"
erupted over the Academy's failure to
nominate either Myrna Loy (The Thin
Man) or Bette Davis (Of Human Bondage), officials rescinded Temple's nomination, awarding her instead what Temple calls a "shrunken Oscar," a special
miniature statuette for "monumental,
stupendous, elephantine achievements."
She may have lost the Academy's"Best
Actress" accolade, but Temple won the
approval of presidents: in the I930s,
FDR praised her infectious optimism as
the antidote to the Depression; in 1969,
Richard Nixon appointed the forty-yearold Shirley Temple Black to the U.S.
delegation to the United Nations; Gerald Ford made her Ambassadorto Ghana
in 1974 and Chief of Protocol in 1976.
Her former costarRonald Reagan passed
her over (perhaps because she endorsed
George Bush in the I980 Republican
primary), but Bush appointed her envoy
to Czechoslovakia in I988. In a recent
episode of A&E's Biography,Ford decreed that Shirley Temple "made all of
America feel good about themselves."
Other commentators, including the program's host, Peter Graves, and celebrity
biographer Anne Edwards, attributed
Temple's "universal appeal" and enduring popularity to the fact that the child
is "everything parents want their children to be." "Everything about her was
perfect. Perfect. Perfect io."
73
Outside academic circles, few have dared
to suggest that the prodigy may not have
brought perfect joy to everyAmerican.
Like Ford, most simply assume that all
audiences receive Temple's fifty-six (always fifty-six) perfect blond curls and
snow-white skin the same way. This unspoken assumption-that the "perfect10" white girl necessarily has a "universal appeal"-is the very sign of whiteness,
its privilege and hegemonic power. As
George Lipsitz and other cultural theorists have shown, a silence about itself
is the primary prerogative of whiteness,
at once its grand scheme and its deep
cover. In the fall 1995 issue of the American Quarterly,Lipsitz writes, "Whiteness
is everywhere in American culture, but
it is very hard to see.... As the unmarked
category againstwhich difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its
name, never has to acknowledge its role
as an organizing principle in social and
cultural relations."
Historically, popular culture's "silent"
affirmation of perfect whiteness has occurred at the expense of those who fall
outside the dominant blond-is-beautiful,
white-is-right construct. Like notoriously racist films such as D.W. Griffith's
Birth of a Nation (i 9 i 5) and Walt Disney's Song of the South (1946), Shirley
Temple movies further a patriarchalideology of white supremacy, an ideology
that equates whiteness with beauty and
13
Kid 'n' Hollywood
FromThe Shirley
Temple Story
by LesterDavid and
Irene David (NewYork:
G.P Putnam'sSons)
Temple, playing
Morelegs Sweet
Trick, and Baby
Burlesk producer
Jack Hays on
the set of Kid 'n'
Hollywood
FromThe Shirley
Temple Story by Lester
David andIreneDavid
(NewYork:G.P.
Putnam'sSons)
beautypageants,in which litde girls are
bleached,painted,dolledup in thousanddollardresses,and made to mimic adult
models and movie stars.Prancing and
the 1930s might easily be misread as a paradingacrossstagesandrunways,these
troublingbut not altogethersurprising prepubescentstarletsare not so far rerelic of our racist,sexist past.But while moved fromthe ShirleyTemplewho, in
the mass-mediatedsexualizingof little the Baby Burlesks,appearedin feathers,
girlsmay havebegun with Temple'sde- sequins,andblacklace lingerie,playinga
but as a femme fatalein a seriesof sexy barmaid,a showgirl,and even a hooker.
one-reelerscalledBaby Burlesks,it cer* * *
tainlydidn'tend with the demise of her
film career a decade later. The I996 Much of the critical commentary and
murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the six- scholarlydebateon Templeandher films
year-old whom the media dubbed the hascenteredon her sexuality.In a review
"Barbie-dollbeauty queen,"has called of Captain January (I936), the British
nationalattentionto a little-knownsub- novelist GrahamGreene suggestedthat
culture-an industry,really-of child some of Temple'spopularityseemed"to
makestrue white womanhood a prized
domesticideal.That this simultaneously
racial,sexual,and nationalnarrativewas
written on the body of a white child in
14
TRANSITION
ISSUE
73
rest on a coquetry quite as mature as
Miss [Claudette] Colbert's and on an
oddly precocious body as voluptuous
in grey flannel trousers as Miss [Marlene]
Dietrich's." A year later, in a more explicit review of Wee Willie Winkie (I 93 7),
Greene noted Temple's "agile studio
eyes,""dimpled depravity,"and "neat and
well-developed rump twisted in the
tap-dance."This prompted Temple'sparents and Twentieth Century Fox to file
a libel suit, charging that Greene had accused the studio of"procuring" Temple
"for immoral purposes." The presiding
judge agreed, calling the article a "gross
outrage," and ordered Greene and the
magazineto pay /3,500 in damages.
Greene is by no means the only critic
to comment on Shirley Temple's bawdy
language. As film theorist Jeanine Basinger notes in her book A Woman'sView
(I993),
much has been made of Temple's
"sexy little body, her pouty mouth, her
flirtatious ways"; there has been a considerable flap over "smarmy scenes" in
which the child plays wife to her perennially widowed film fathers, sitting on
their laps, nestling against their chests,
stroking their cheeks, and singing them
alluring love songs with lyrics like, "In
every dream I caressyou. Marry me and
let me be your wife." Basinger herself,
however, views the sexing of Temple
as much ado about very little. Chiding
Greene and other critics for their "sinister interpretations," she insists that all
Temple "really did was tap her guts out
in a series of well-made, unpretentious,
and entertaining little films designed to
lift a Depression audience out of its worries." Once Temple became a female superstar, Basinger explains, Hollywood
had to come up with new ways of show-
casing her talent. This often meant casting her with men who, because she was
too young to get married, had to be fathers or father figures.
There may be something sinisterabout
removing cultural icons from their temporal context: we are certainly more concerned about incest, child abuse, child
pornography, and pedophilia today than
The dutifully cheerful and obliging child
actress may have been innocent, but her
films were not.
most audiences
of the 1930s were. But
when the five-, six-, or seven-year-old
Shirley Temple tapped her guts out, wiggled her baby bottom at the camera
(Gary Cooper nicknamed her "WiggleBritches"), and sang sexy love songs to
handsome male costars, she was under
the direction of grown men-a point
Temple herself comes close to making,
however wryly, in her autobiography:
Beforelong,actingin Baby Burlesksdemonstratedsomefundamentallessonsof movielife.
. .. Starletshave to kiss a lot of people, inones.... Oftenstarcludingsomeunattractive
lets are requiredto wearscantycostumesand
suffer sexist schemes .... Like a Girl Scout,
starletsmustbe cheerfuland obliging,particularly to directors,
producers,and cameramen.
The dutifully cheerful and obliging
child actress may have been innocent,
but her films were not. The Baby Burlesk
shorts deliberately cultivated in the toddler the same erotic savoirfaire that made
Marlene Dietrich the queen of sex, sin,
and song in the thirties. In Kid 'n' Hollywood (I 933), for example, Temple plays
15
..z
N^
. "'N.
~-- ..
.:...
:L .
' :.:...
A ten-year-old
Temple with
George Murphy
in Little Miss
Broadway
Courtesyof the
Academyof Motion
Picture
Arts and
Sciences
a scrubwoman whom a Hollywood director transforms into a starlet named
Morelegs Sweet Trick, explicitly modeled after Dietrich.
However cute and frilly,Temple'sfilms
still work to incite, excite, and satisfy a
paternal white gaze, as cinema so often
does. Sewing and scrubbing one moment, batting her eyelashes the next,
Shirley Temple is at once a pint-size purveyor of true-womanhood ideology
16
TRANSITION
ISSUE
and a make-a-blind-man-seefemme fatale.A young, handsome,skirt-chasing
RobertYounggives up his playboyways
for her in Stowaway(I936), and a jewel-
thieving Gary Cooper attemptsto go
straightbecauseof herin NowandForever
(1934). She is every man's white dream,
the perfect embodiment of the virginwhore that patriarchyloves to look at
-simultaneously Snow White and
BlackWidow (albeitwithout the bite).
73
And although, as Basinger maintains,
Temple is indeed the "center of the universe" in her pictures, her cinematic
community is rarely if ever female. (The
Little Princess[I939] is a notable exception.) Women, especially mothers, die
as predictably in her movies as Jessica
Fletcher's associates do in Murder,She
Wrote.Far removed from what the feminist historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
calls "the female world of love and ritual," the precocious little girl is invariably the darling of men -and lots of
them: a bunch of bookies and gangsters
in Little Miss Marker (I934); a troupe
of vaudevillians in Little Miss Broadway
(I 938); a squadron of aviators in Bright
Eyes (I934); a British regiment in Wee
Willie Winkie; a troop of RCMPs in
Susannah of the Mounties (I939); two
crusty old sailors in CaptainJanuary;and
much of the Union army-including the
commander in chief, Abraham Lincoln
-in
The Littlest Rebel (I935). These
films were successful not only because of
Temple's talent, but also because of a pliant white female sexuality that was indulged, petted, and, quite frequently,
bedded.
Putting Shirley to bed wasn't always
an easy proposition. "I don't wanna go up
there," her character says to Bill Robinson, backing away from his outstretched
hand in The Little Colonel (I935), the
first of four films they made together.
"Why everybody's gutta go upstairs,Miss
Lloyd, if they wants to go to bed," Robinson replies. The six-year-old is adamant. "I don't want to," she repeats, digging in her heels. The famous stair dance
that follows is actually the black butler's
trickster-like way of luring the resistant
white child up to bed. Dazzling as the
duet was for most Depression audiences,
the sight of a black male and a white female holding hands-and heading for
the bedroom, no less-intimated a relation so taboo that the dance sequence
had to be cut from the film when it
played in southern cities. As Temple
Black explains in her autobiography,"To
avoid social offense and assure wide distribution, the studio cut scenes showing
physical contact between us." She also
reveals that it was none other than the
aging D.W. Griffith who approached
Although a man couldn't remove a woman's
bra and panties on screen in 1934, he could,
in an act of sexual displacement,
undress a
little girl playing at being a woman.
Fox executives with the "controversial
idea" to add a transgressive black presence to her films. "There is nothing,
absolutely nothing, calculated to raise
the gooseflesh on the back of an audience more than that of a white girl in
relation to Negroes," she quotes Griffith as saying, proudly adding that she
and "Uncle Billy Robinson" were "the
first interracial dancing couple in movie
history."
Of course, Temple and Robinson
were never a "dancing couple" in the
Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire sense.
From the first time they danced cheekto-cheek, Rogers and Astaire were a sensual ensemble. Restricted to dancing
toe-to-toe, Temple and Robinson, by
contrast, had to work at avoiding the almost organic sensuality of the malefemale pas de deux. The same little girl
who spent most of her film career in the
arms and laps of white men never got
17
closer to Robinson than a handshake.
The popularity of the Temple-Robinson
pairing depended, in fact, on maintaining the distance between them as mistress and slave, on playing up what the
folklorist Patricia Turner describes as the
public's love affair with Little Eva and
Uncle Tom. "With laws against miscegenation on the books in many states,"
Turnerwrites in CeramicUnclesand CelluloidMammies(1994), "the match between
Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson was
the only one that would be tolerated."
Yet Robinson is so much more
mammy than man that he seemingly
poses no threat, sexual or otherwise, to
the pure white child. Rather, his gray
hair and Uncle Tom devotion contest
the very sexual menace that his black
male presence evokes. In a sense, Hollywood gets to have its chocolate cake and
eat it too: to invoke the sexual black
male and deny him at the same time.
She is every man's white dream,
the perfect embodiment of the virginwhore that patriarchy loves to
look at-simultaneously
Snow White
and Black Widow.
This strategy is less typecasting than castrating, but even so, Robinson doesn't
actually get to put Shirley to bed. His
staircase play interrupted by her crusty
old grandfather (Lionel Barrymore),
Uncle Billy Robinson rushes his charge
up the stairs and turns her over to
Mammy, who picks her up and says,
"Now, honey, we gonna go to bed,"just
before the camera shifts to Robinson
dancing down the stairs.
18
TRANSITION
ISSUE
If Robinson's approach to his leading
lady is necessarily hands-off in The Little Colonel,Adolphe Menjou's approach
is decidedly hands-on in Little Miss
Marker,in which Temple plays Martha
Jane, a fetching five-year-old whose father leaves her with bookies as collateral for a twenty-dollar bet. As a matter of strict policy, Menjou's character,
Sorrowful Jones, doesn't accept markers, but after picking up the child and
gazing into her brown eyes, the smitten boss tells his stunned underling to
take the kid in lieu of cash: "Little doll
like that's worth twenty bucks any way
you look at it." Predictably, the father
commits suicide when his horse loses,
and Martha Jane, whom the bookies
dub "Little Miss Marker,"becomes Sorrowful's property, his ownership confirmed by the manly way he scoops her
up under one arm and carries her off,
exposing her bare legs and bottom to
the camera.
The scene shifts immediately to the
bedroom, where Martha Jane appears in
a man's pajamatop; Sorrowful, of course,
is wearing the bottoms. "But I can't
sleep in my underwear," she says, when
he asks if she's ready for bed. "OK, well
take 'em off," he replies. "They button
up the back," she counters, lifting the
oversized shirt and poking out her little
derriere for him to see. He dutifully unbuttons the drop seat of the tattered undergarment and loosens the strapsof the
front bib, exposing Temple's bare chest
(and a bit of bare leg) just before she turns
her back to the camera and steps out of
her underwear, presumably leaving herself naked beneath the pajama top.
The leading lady's bedding down (or
waking up) in the leading man's pajama
73
shirtis a staplegag of the romanticcomedy genre.Just what isn'tDoris Day or
Sophia Loren wearing under the man's
shirt?ClaudetteColbert wearsa pairof
Clark Gable'spajamasin It Happened
OneNight(which was releasedthe same
year as LittleMissMarkerand won Colbert the Oscar that Temple Black feels
should have been hers). In one scene,
GablehelpsColberthurriedlybuttonup
her dress,as detectiveslooking for the
runawayheiresspound on the door.But
Colbert right
imagine Gable undressing
before the audience'seyes. Although a
man couldn'tremovea woman'sbraand
panties on screen in 1934, he could, in
an act of sexualdisplacement,undressa
little girl playingat being a woman,her
flatchestpurifyingthis otherwiserisque
gesture,making it censorproof.Titillation without tits.
became a metaphor for quintessential
The columnist WalterWinchell once ar- Americanness.For Lord'syoung heroSixth Cousin, who renamesherself
gued that the international popularity of ine,
at the beginning
performers like Shirley Temple, Charlie ShirleyTempleWong
"the
the
most
famous movie
of
book,
Chan, and Boris Karloff was evidence
that "sex can't be important in films." starin all the world"is not only a namesake but a lifeline that helps the small
Certainly, it was not just her innocent
childbridgethe gapbetween China,the
sexuality and little womanish ways that
land
of her birth,and her new home in
gave Temple such tremendous cultural
NewYork.
power in the 1930S and beyond. The Brooklyn,
if
But
Shirley
Templehasbeen a possurvival-of-the-pluckiest, rags-to-riches
for many,she has also
itive
role
model
class narrativesof her movies also played
been
a
colossal
pain in the neck for
well with audiences in Depression-era
America and around the world. In the others. My own exhaustive ethnographicresearch(pesteringfriends and
mid-193os, her films broke box-office
records in India and Japan, as well as in colleagues)suggeststhat for more than
the U.S. and Canada. Bette Bao Lord's a few white girls whose hair wouldn't
do what Temple's did, those perfect
semi-autobiographical children'sbook In
blond
ringlets represented a kind of
the Yearof the Boar and Jackie Robinson
tyranny.And for manyblack
hair-raising
(1984) suggests the iconographic power
short
with
kinky hair,Shirl'scurls
of Shirley Temple in China, where she girls
19
Temple with
Warren Hymer and
Adolphe Menjou in
Little Miss Marker
FromThe Shirley
Temple Story
by LesterDavid and
IreneDavid (NewYork:
G.P Putnam'sSons)
Bill "Bojangles"
Robinson and
Temple in The
Littlest Rebel
Courtesyof the
Academyof Motion
PictureArts and
Sciences
werejust anothercrossto bear-all the
more so for black girls who, like my
cousin, just happened to be named
Shirley.
Such complaintsnotwithstanding,the
most powerful counternarrativeto the
popularreadingof Templeaseverybody's
darlingis ToniMorrison'sfirstnovel,The
is indeed a blond goddesswho is everything Pecolais not. The looming image
of the perfect,belovedShirleyTempleis
the embodiment of the white,Western
standardsof desirabilitythat lead the
unlovedPecolato believethatonly those
with blue eyes and blond hair are worthy of affection.Raped andimpregnated
Bluest Eye (I970). In the brown eyes of by herfatherandrejectedby her mother,
PecolaBreedlove,the homely blackgirl Pecola retreatsinto madness,believing
at the centerof the story,ShirleyTemple that she has acquiredthe blue eyes that
20
TRANSITION
ISSUE
73
will make her adorable and beloved like
Shirley Temple.
My own relationship to Shirley Temple
is a vexed one. I didn't worship the child
star like the ill-fated Pecola, but I didn't
have the good sense to hate her either.
The truth is, much of the time I wanted
to be Shirley Temple. That is, I wanted
that trademark Shirley Temple Ayou're-adorable-B-you're-so-beautifulC-you're-a-cutey-pie cuteness: the ability to charm the pants off old codgersor, better still, virile young men, whose
mottoes alwaysseemed to be, "Oh, come
let us adore you."
Once, when I was eight or nine, I
asked Nan Ellison, the church lady who
pressed and curled hair in her kitchen
before she opened a beauty shop downtown, to do my hair in ringlets like
Shirley Temple's. I sat through what
seemed like hours of pulling, twisting,
and frying, anxiously awaiting my ascension into the ranks of the adorable.
But when Mrs. Ellison finally put down
the curling iron and handed me a mirror, the gap-toothed, black face that
looked back at me from beneath a rat's
nest of tight, greased coils was anything
but cute.Yet however hideous, silly, and
absurd I found myself at that moment, I
also understood, as only a child can, that
mine was a self-inflicted homeliness, begot of my own betrayal:in attempting to
look like the white wunderkind, I succeeded only in making my black difference ridiculous.
This, then, is what pained me about
the Shirley Temple films that filled my
girlhood: her adorable perfectionher snow-whiteness-was
constructed
againstmy blackness,my racialdifference
made ridiculous by the stammering and
shuffling of the "little black rascals,"
"darkies,"and "pickaninnies" who populated her films. In the opening scene of
The Littlest Rebel, one of Temple's most
popular films, this distinction between
perfect- o whiteness and moronic blackness is played out in the contrast between Temple as Miss Virgie, the light,
bright, beautiful belle of her birthday
ball, and Hannah Washington as Sally
Ann, the dark, dumb, plain pickaninny.
Called from the lavish festivities, Miss
Virgie is met on the porch by a band of
remarkably well-dressed slave children
(a testament to the kindness of massa),
who have come to the big house bearing birthday greetings and a gift for
their little mistress. But Sally Ann, the
designated spokesperson, can't manage
to get the simple greeting out. Although
older and much taller than the diminutive MissVirgie, she stumbles over a simple and presumably well-rehearsed salutation. "MissVirgie. Please, ma'am,"Sally
Ann says. "We all done come here to
wish you many happy ... happy ..."
"Returns," the bubbly,hyperarticulate
Miss Virgie interjects.
"That's it," Sally Ann musters. "We all
done made you a doll and here it is," she
says, handing Miss Virgie a black rag
doll. "There was more I had to say,but
...
I forgot it," the slave girl cries, dis-
solving into tears.
Ever the magnanimous plantation mistress, Miss Virgie, cradling the black doll
against her white dress, tells Sally Ann
not to worry. "This is the very nicest present I got. Thank you ever so much," she
says,promising as she leaves to save Sally
Ann and the other slave children some
21
birthday cake-a promise that makes all UNCLE BILLY:Seems like to me, honey,no
the darkies literally dance with joy. Even one knowswhy.I heara whitegentlemansay
when I was a child, I thought this played dere'sa man up North who wants tofree da
liked a modern-day version of Marie slaves.
Antoinette's "let them eat cake." As a MISS VIRGIE: What doesthat mean,freethe
critic, I know that the gesture is meant slaves?
to make Miss Virgie loom all the larger UNCLE BILLY(walking away with a tray):
for her largess to dim-witted darkies, I don't know what it meansmyself.
who thrill at the thought of crumbs.
MISS VIRGIE (musing to herself): It's
on
in
scene
this
White
Commenting
funny, isn't it?
Screens/BlackImages(I994), film scholar
James Snead argues that the "extreme
Although Uncle Billy is more knowlself-effacement and awe" affected by edgeable and articulate than his fellow
Washington as the taller,older Sally Ann slaves, his ignorance of freedom here is
necessarily augment Temple's "mythic a narrative necessity, since it affirms the
stature as the figure of leisure and beauty dominant belief that devoted darkies
for whom blacks must work and to need slavery to protect them from their
whom they also must defer." The more own stupidity and helplessness. A war
subtle point, however, is not that the that will pit brother against brother has
black slaves must defer to the white just broken out, but the dumb niggers
for whom the nation is being torn asunder don't know or care what freedom is.
No matter how perfect our diction or regal
In fact, Sally Ann and the even dimmerour carriage, we could not escape the
witted James Henry (Willie Best) aid and
abet the Rebels, who are fighting to
shuckin' and jivin' of Algonquin J. Calhoun,
keep them enslaved, but shake, shiver,
Kingfish, and Sapphire on Amos 'n' Andy.
and run whenever Union forces approach the plantation. As James Henry
child, but that they want to defer. The
says to Miss Virgie, "Dem Yankees is
willing submission of happy slaves is mighty powerful. Dey can even change
critical to the film's ideological scheme,
da weather.Whenever dey come around,
which offers such a benevolent portrait I never know whether it's winter or
of the peculiar institution that Uncle
summer. I'm shiv'rin' and sweatin' at da
Billy, the devoted "house nigger" and same time."
If Sally Ann, Uncle Billy, and James
nursemaid (again played by Robinson),
has no interest in freedom. When Miss Henry are good slaveswith no desire for
Virgie's birthday party is interrupted by freedom, Miss Virgie makes a bad, rea messenger bearing news of war, she bellious would-be pickaninny a little
asks Uncle Billy what war is and why later in the film, when she poses as a
men kill each other. The exchange beslave to save herself fromYankee forces,
tween the two-between
child and blackening her face with shoe polish
adult, mistress and slave-is pure planta- and tying up her blond curls in a bantion mythology:
danna.When a disreputable Union ser-
22
TRANSITION
ISSUE
73
geant orders her to remove his boots,
she pusheshis outstretchedleg, sending
him toppling out of the chair.Her defiance throughout the film (twice she
shoots a kindlyUnion colonel with her
slingshotandsings"Dixie"just to annoy
him) standsin starkcontrastto the cowardlyacquiescenceof the realslaveswho
haveno stakein their own freedom.
The filmrn's
other ironic reversalshave
similarlychargedpolitical implications.
Uncle Billymaynot know whatit means
to free the slaves,but when MissVirgie's
father,CaptainCary (JohnBoles),needs
to be freedfromaYankeeprison,it'sthe
loyal slavewho devisesthe plan to raise
the trainfaretoWashington,D.C.,where
he and Miss Virgie will plead for the
Captain'srelease:they sing anddanceon
the streetsof Richmond. Once inWashington, the two have an audience with
AbrahamLincoln himself,who immediately succumbs to the irrepressible
charmsof the "LittlestRebel." Over a
sharedapple,she explainsto the doting
presidentthat her fatherand the kindly
Yankee colonel imprisoned with him
were only tryingto get her to safety.As
she sits on Lincoln's lap and snuggles
againsthis chest,he assuresher that she
23
Shirley Temple
sternly disagrees
with Bill Robinson
in The Littlest
Rebel
Courtesy of the
Academy of Motion
PictureArts and
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need study war no more: "Your father
and Colonel Morrison are going free."
Thus, the curtain closes on a new world
order that looks remarkably like the old
one: the Great Emancipator has freed
the white men, while Uncle Billy still
proudly describes himself as one of
Massa Cary's slaves.
First appearing as maids and missionaryeating cannibals in Kid 'n'Africa (I933)
and other Baby Burlesks, casts of mostly
anonymous black characters provided
Shirley Temple with color, comedy,
and companionship throughout her
film career: they showed her off, she
showed them up. For example, when
Temple as Martha Jane first sees Willie
Best's character in LittleMiss Marker,she
points a tiny white finger at him and
says, "I know you. You're the black
knight." "Go on child, I'm black day
and night," Best replies, displaying his
ignorance of the King Arthur legends
with which the five-year-old is fully
conversant. In Just around the Corner
(I93 8), it is again Uncle Billy Robinson,
this time a doorman, who plays the foil
for the child's superior intellect. When
she asks him where Borneo is, he
replies: "Borneo? Borneo. Oh, uh, he's
moved up in Harlem."
"Borneo isn't a man, it's a place," the
child corrects. "Where is it?"
Trying to save face, the doorman
guesses again. "Oh sure, that'swhere that
big light come from in the sky. Nights.
The rora ... borinelis," he says, mispronouncing aurora borealis. "Everybody's
heard of dat."When the trusting child
says she hasn't, he proceeds to further
miseducate her. "Well, it's sorta north.
Way up north near the North Pole.
That's where Borneo is," he says.Sure of
himself now, he goes on to describe a
land of icebergs and man-eating polar
bears, but of course the joke is that he
couldn't be more wrong: lush with flora
and fauna, with a mean temperature of
seventy-eight degrees, Borneo is in the
middle of the Indian Ocean.
I didn't alwaysget the joke, but I knew
my people were being made fun of, and
I hated the recurrent episodes of black
stupidity that were the brown bread and
butter of these fims. However much I aspired (both vainly and in vain) to a headful of Shirley Temple curls, it was not to
her that I was blood bound, but to the
celluloid mammies and minstrels who
Blacking up?
UPI/Corbis-Bettman
If Willie Best and his protruding lower lip
stammered through a Shirley Temple film on
Sunday, it was a sure bet that we'd hear the
words liver lips on the playground on
Monday.
did her bidding, whose bowing and
scraping across the screen affirmed her
whiteness and superiority while putting
my blackness in what I call "debaserelief." No matter how well I might
speak, how straight I might stand, I was
those ignorant darkiesand they were me.
In the U.S., any black is every black.
It'snot just that we all look alike,but that
we're all the same-guilty of the same
sins, convicted of the same crimes. This
awareness that we are always already
guilty of blackness has kept us ever on
the defensive, in perpetual pursuit of the
elusive innocence that is Shirley Temple's birthright.When I was growing up,
25
26
TRANSITION
ISSUE
73
adults told us that everything we did
reflected on the race; therefore, we were
to go forth and do only good-for the
people. Although empowering for some
of us, these clarion calls to uplift were really like pissing in a hurricane when it
came to combating what whiteness said
blackness was. Tutored by our parents,
my brothers and I could talk that other
talk-a
King's English more precise
than that of our most articulate white
classmates; we could hold our heads
high in deliberate defiance of the bumbling blackness of fiction and film.Yet no
matter how perfect our diction or regal
our carriage, we could not escape the
shuckin' and jivin' of Algonquin J. Calhoun, Kingfish, and Sapphire on Amos
'n' Andy, the protruding lower lip and
bulging eyes of Willie Best's and Stepin
Fetchit's characters in Shirley Temple
movies, and the quintessential coloredkidness of Farina and Buckwheat in The
Little Rascals.
As proud black children, we identified
ourselves against these black caricatures,
but for many of our white classmates,
Farina and Buckwheat and Amos and
Andy were everything they ever needed
to know about colored people. My
brothers and I were the fake Negroesthe abnorm to the ridiculous blackness
that popular culture made normative. If
Willie Best and his protruding lower lip
stammered through a Shirley Temple
film on Sunday, it was a sure bet that
we'd hear the words liverlips on the playground on Monday.Whether we fought
with our fists or our wits, we paid a
heavy price-or so I felt as a child-for
the on-screen antics of our fellow African Americans, and we held them, not
something called "Hollywood," account-
able. Although
Hattie McDaniel's
argu-
The mature Shirley
ment that she'd ratherplay a maid for big
Temple
bucks than be one for peanuts makes a
ArchivePhotos
certain kind of dollars and sense to me
now, it wasn't good enough for me as a
child, and I resented the black actors
who I felt demeaned themselves for the
pleasure of white people.
That white folks were watching was
the issue. At home, my family and I
could enjoy Amos 'n' Andy; we sometimes even adopted Kingfish-speak into
our private discourse. (To this day, we
still say "unlax" instead of relax and "jayrage" instead of garage.) And although
Watching blacks on television and film in
the fifties brought both a delight and a dread:
the thrill on the one hand of seeing black
people on the screen, and the anxiety on the
other of knowing that their blackface would
be taken for my own.
no one in my household ever had anything but disgust for Willie Best's moronic, drooped-lipped performances, Bill
Robinson (even playing a slave,butler, or
doorman) was still the best reason to
watch a Shirley Temple movie-behind
closed doors. Outside the home, in the
"real world," whose power to define us
seemed so much greater than our efforts
to define ourselves, we knew that the
minstrelsy, mammyism, tomming, and
buffoonery of black performers constituted the real colored thing for many
white audiences.
It was for this reason that watching
blacks on television and film in the fifties
brought both a delight and a dread: the
27
Shirley Temple
Black, American
Amnbassador to
Ghana, 1975-76
ArchivePhotos
thrill on the one hand of seeing black
people on the screen,andthe anxietyon
the other of knowing that their blackface would be taken for my own. Yet
even greatertraumastemmedfrom the
guilt thatsuch thoughtsproduced.After
all, being ashamed of blackness-like
speaking the King's English instead of
the Kingfish's-is equatedwith wanting
to be white. Both are sins againstthe
racialself,assumedby manysocialtheoristsandchildpsychologiststo be the result of internalizedracism.Perhapsthe
most famousevidencefor this condition
is the Clark doll studies of the I940s.
Givena choice betweena white doll and
a black one, nearly 70 percent of the
black children picked the white doll.
This choice of white over black, the
Clarksconcluded,demonstratedthe extent to which institutionalizedracism
andsegregationhadmadeblackchildren
rejecttheir own kind.
Althoughthe Clarkstudieshavesince
come under fire, the concept of inter-
28
TRANSITION
ISSUE
nalizedracismremainscompelling.This
is especially true, I think, for middleclassblackintellectuals,whose successis
often regardedas an embarrassmentof
richesthatseparatesthem fromthe poverty of "the people."I don't for a moment mean to make light of the disturbingdisparitybetween middle-class
blacks and the millions of African
Americans who live in not-so-quiet
desperation,but it is telling that "the
people" are neverW. E. B. Du Bois or
Anna Julia Cooper or Martin Luther
King,Jr., or BarbaraJordan,but always
and foreverSallyAnn,JamesHenry,and
Uncle Billy.Setting yourselfapartfrom
them is, in the eyes of many,the same as
denyingyour own blacksoul.
I came to consider it so myself as I
grew older,and was embarrassedby my
youthfiulrejectionof the minstrels,mammies, coons, and toms by whom popular culture demarcatedblackness.For
decades,my attemptsasa child to define
myself againstsuch imageshauntedme
73
as a kind of double fault, a shameful
shame that ate at the core of my black
identity and challenged my credibility as
an authentic African American. Revisiting Shirley Temple, Sally Ann, and
Pecola Breedlove in middle age, however, I have come to a different conclusion. To label as internalized racism a
child'sresistanceto mass-mediated blackness is to complete the racist move that
popular culture initiates. Such a diagnosis confuses the reductive fictions of
the screen with the complicated, contradictory lives of real black people, and in
so doing plays into the hands of the
dominant culture. It implicitly accepts
the assumption that "black" is only one
thing, an essence, that is at its heart
funky, criminal, comic: Stepin Fetchit
but not Paul Robeson; Snoop Doggy
Dogg but not Jessye Norman; 0. J.
Simpson when he plays football but not
when he plays golf, when he kills two
people but not when he dines at the
Beverly Hills Country Club.
The real power of whiteness-the actual evidence of internalized racism-is
how readily many African Americans
have accepted the notion that authentic
blackness is first and finally vernacular,
impoverished, illiterate. For every other
racial or ethnic group that has "come" to
these shores, surviving in America, succeeding in America-indeed becoming
meant embracing the
American-has
American dream of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of wealth and property.For blacks,
however-for
"the people"-buying
into the American dream is considered
I
selling out. I want to suggest-no,
want to insist - that this institutionally
validated definition of authentic black-
ness depends on an essentialismas pathological as the ridiculous blackness used
to affirm Shirley Temple's whiteness,
beauty, and superiority more than a half
century ago.
A teenage Shirley Temple made a few
films in the 1940s, playing opposite such
leading men as Joseph Cotten in I'll Be
Seeing You (I944), Cary Grant in The
Bachelorand the Bobby Soxer (I947), and
Ronald Reagan in That Hagen Girl
(I947). Of these pictures, That Hagen
Girl is particularly noteworthy for the
nature of its failure. Temple starred
as Mary Hagen, an adopted teenager
haunted by her much-whispered-about
illegitimate birth. Reagan played Mary's
significantly older "guardian," whom
most of the gossip-mongering townspeople suspect of being her biological
father.When Reagan's character up and
marries the child-woman after rescuing
her from an attempted suicide, the implications of what one review called
"rebated incest" were more than audiences could bear. At nineteen, Shirley
Temple was just too much woman to be
Shirley Temple, too grown up and filled
out to get away with playing wife to her
"father."
The credibility gap evident in That
Hagen Girl plagued most of Temple's
adult films. Shirley Temple made for a
safer sex kitten when she was a kitten.
When the little girl grew up, the virginal vixen was left without vehicle, and
her Hollywood career fizzled.Yet even
though her last movie came out in 1949,
her films (now availableon videocassette)
are still popular today, on the cusp of the
29
UPI/Corbis-Bettman
post-civil-rights, post-affirmative-action,
post-feminist twenty-first century. And
once again, just as grown-ups helped
make Temple a superstar in the I930s,
one target audience for her videos is the
adult consumer looking for, in the words
30
TRANSITION
ISSUE
of one ad,"theperfectway to reliveyour
own childhood."
In actuality,blackpeople todayhardly
need to return to the Shirley Temple
films of yesteryearto see themselvesin
debase-relief.Popularculture'spropen-
73
sity for using "blackness" to brighten
"whiteness" continues, even (or perhaps
especially) in stories that are supposedly
about the lives and historical experiences of black people: The Cotton Club
(1984), MississippiBurning(1988), Glory
(I989),A Time to Kill (I996), and Ghosts
of Mississippi(I 997), for example. In fact,
in its underlying message that a blueeyed blond girl is worth more than a
brown-eyed black one, John Grisham's
novel-cum-motion-picture, A Time to
Kill (which grossed a healthy $109 million in the U.S. alone), is utterly dependent on an opposition of light and
dark-MissVirgie and Sally Ann-that
is even more insidious than its celluloid
film, it is his white daughter, Hannah,
and not her black counterpart, who ultimately serves as the film's cause celebre.
We see remarkablylittle of Tonya,whose
rape merely advances the plot, and hear
almost nothing of her voice beyond her
screams of "Daddy, Daddy" during the
assault. She is local color, as mute yet
The real power of whiteness-the
actual
evidence of internalized racism-is
how
readily many African Americans have
accepted the notion that real blackness is
first and finally vernacular, impoverished,
illiterate.
precursors.
At the outset of the film, Tonya Hai- meaningful as Sally Ann in The Littlest
Rebel (to whom she bears a remarkable
ley (played by RaeVen Kelly), a tenis
black
girl,
brutally raped, resemblance). And as with Sally Ann,
year-old
for
and
left
dead
beaten,
by two good old Tonya's narrative significance lies in the
southern boys. The rapists are caught, contrast she provides between deficient
but before they can stand trial, the girl's blackness and perfect-Io whiteness, befather, Carl Lee Hailey (Samuel L.Jack- tween the sullied, peed-on black daughter, whose very survival annuls her rape,
son), shoots and kills them in the courthouse. Predictably,the drama that ensues and the pure, true-woman white daughrevolves not around the brutalized black ter, whose rape (by black men) is ever
child, left sterile by her assault, or even threatened in the southern white male
her father, who is tried for murder be- imagination, but is always forestalled by
fore an all-white jury, but around the her own virtue. When Tonya's assault is
trials and tribulations ofJake Brigance
referred to, it is often Hannah's blond
hair and blue eyes to which the camera
(Matthew McConaughey), the noble
white lawyer who defends Carl Lee. shifts.
For defending a nigger who dared to
The purpose of the shifting subject
kill two white men, the Brigances have becomes clear in the final moments of
visited on them all manner of Klan- the film, when Brigance asks the meminspired plagues, while the Haileys- the bers of the jury to close their eyes as he
more likely victims of Klan violencerecounts the lurid details of the little
get away without a scratch.
girl's rape. "Can you see her?" Brigance
asks."Her raped, beaten, broken bodyJust as the white man of conscience
holds the lion's share of heroism in the soaked in their urine, soaked in their se-
31
to die.
men, soaked in her blood-left
Can you see her?" The camera pans the
courtroom, pausing on face after face, as
all await the lawyer's last words. "I want
you to picture that little girl,"he says,almost too choked up with tears to continue. "Now, imagine she's white."
The invocation of the white child accomplishes what the image of the violated black daughter-Tonya,
Sally
Ann, Pecola-could not. In instructing
the jury to imagine the victim as white,
Brigance resurrects and reinscribes the
unwritten laws of the Old (and Not-SoOld) South, which hold that the black
daughter, because she is always already
ripe for the taking, cannot be raped by
white men; the white daughter, by contrast, can only be raped by black men.
That Tonya survives her assault (the director makes sure we see her healed and
healthy-looking at the film's end) makes
her violation unredeemable. The substitution of the white daughter for the colored one is, then, a historical necessity:
despite the irony of her married name,
Shirley Temple can never be black.
32
TRANSITION
ISSUE
73

W.E.B. Du Bois Institute

Transcription

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