Chapter One
My mother was an actress. In some ways ,
she doesn’t look very different
from the way she did back then. She
still has honey-colored skin and
eyelashes that make you think of fur or
feathers. Her movies were all made in
the early 1970s, before I was born. You
know the titles of some of the big
ones: Shaft and Super Fly and Blacula.
She wasn’t in those. Then there were
the little ones that blew in and out of
the dollar theaters in Cleveland and
Detroit and Gary inside of a week, until
the last brother who was willing to
part with $1 had done so: TNT Jackson
and Abby and Savage Sisters. She’s
in some of those. You wouldn’t know her,
though. She was no Pam Grier.
These are her credits: Girl in Diner,
Murder Victim #1, Screaming Girl, Junkie
in Park. She was the third girl from the
left in the fight scene in Coffy. When I
was little, sometimes she woke me late
at night and we sat down in front of
the television to watch a bleached-out
print of a movie with a lot of guys with
big guns and bigger Afros. They ran and
jumped and shot. They all wore
leather and bright-colored, wide-legged
pants made of unnatural fibers. They
said, “That’s baaaad” as percussive,
synthesized music perked behind them.
The movies made their nonsensical way
along, and then suddenly my mother
said, “See, see, there I am, behind that
guy, laying on the ground. That’s
me.” Or she said, “That’s me in that
booth.” Then Richard Roundtree or Gloria
Hendry or Fred Williamson sprayed the
room with gunfire, and my mother
slumped over the table, her mouth open,
her eyes closed. Blood seeped
slowly out from under her enormous Afro.
I looked away from the television at
the mother I knew. She smiled watching
the gory death of her younger self.
Her pleasure in her work was so pure,
even though all she was doing was
holding still as dyed Karo syrup drained
from a Baggie under her wig onto a
cheap Formica table.
My mother never said, but I knew, that
I ended her acting career. I
liked to think that my father was
somebody like John Shaft, striding through
the streets of Manhattan, a complicated
man, a black private dick who was a
sex machine to all the chicks. But I
suspected that my father was a bit
player like her. Thug #1. Or Man in
Restaurant. Once I learned how dull a
movie set is when you’re not running the
show, I imagined the two of them, in
those endless, drifting hours, slowly
beginning to talk to each other, my
mother looking up shyly but oddly
direct, the low bass rumble of my father’s
voice as he asked her name, then asked
her out. They didn’t have folding
canvas chairs, their names written on
them, the way the director or the stars
did. They would have started talking as
they stood around in extras holding, a
few words at a time. I imagine my mother
looked at my father’s face and saw
in it someone who would make everything
perfect.
My mother believed in the power of
movies and the people in them
to change a life, change her life. I can
count on my two hands the number of
stories she’s told me about my father.
And then only when I’ve asked. She
didn’t even tell me his name until I was
grown. But exactly what she wore in
the fight scene in Coffy? And what Pam
Grier said to her before they started
shooting? I’ve heard that story a
thousand times. In that scene, Pam Grier
rips my mother’s dress nearly off her
body. It hangs, ragged, over her
shoulders in two scarlet shards. She
wears a fierce, sexy smile and a
crooked, reddish wig. Her breasts are
very beautiful. Here is what Pam Grier
said to my mother right before filming
began: “That dress looks good on you,
girl. Too bad I gotta tear it.” My
mother held these words as a talisman
against whatever else life might bring
her. Pam Grier thought she looked
good.
When I told my mother I wanted to go to
film school, she was
silent for a long minute. Then she said,
“Not too many women direct movies,
do they?”
“Not too many. But remember that movie
The Piano? You never
saw it, but that was a woman. And
there’ve been others.”
“Any of them black?
I hesitated. “A few. Julie Dash. Euzhan
Palcy. Kasi Lemmons.
You know how it is, Ma. Maybe I can help
change that. Even if I can’t … it’s
what I need to do.”
“How you gonna pay for it?”
“I’ll get a scholarship. I’ll borrow
money. I’ll figure it out, Ma.”
Ma looked at me. “Yeah, you probably
will. I remember when I
came out here. I was broke as hell. But
it wasn’t much that could have
stopped me. Guess that’s how I know
you’re my girl. Hardheaded. Just like
me.”
So I applied to a lot of film schools.
I got into NYU. I remember
holding the admissions letter, staring
at it, thinking, Spike Lee and Martin
Scorsese, Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese.
Stupid, huh? But that’s all I could
think. I’d lived in Los Angeles my whole
life. I knew New York from only a
thousand noir pictures and Mean Streets
and Sweet Smell of Success.
(Here’s my favorite, favorite scene:
when Burt Lancaster gazes over the lights
of the city, hot jazz blasting behind
him, and he says, “I love this dirty town.”
My second favorite scene: when Burt, a
key light under his chin to give him a
menacing glow, says to Tony Curtis, “I’d
hate to take a bite out of you.
You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”) I
went to grad school in 1999. It took me
three years after college, working like
a dog, to get up the nerve and to earn
the money to pay for it. I knew it
wouldn’t be like a black-and-white movie.
More like Do the Right Thing. But New
York was still … so not LA. I thought
it would be the home I never had, the
place I should have been born.
I got in with a short I made about my
mother. I did it in our
kitchen. A couple of lights, my old
video camera. I’d kept it working, even
though I’d had it since I was twelve.
Her girlfriend, Sheila, was there, like
always, but I framed the shots so that
only her arm and hand were in the
frame. The main thing you saw was my
mother’s face. She was still so
beautiful, her hair slicked back into a
ponytail, her clothes just so, even on a
Saturday afternoon. Maybe she had more
lines around her eyes than she
used to. I didn’t notice them until I
looked through my viewfinder. “So, Ma,” I
asked as the film rolled, “how’d you end
up in Los Angeles?”
“Couldn’t stand the country town I was
from another minute.” She
laughed. It was like the camera was her
home.
“What country town was that?”
“Tulsa, Oklahoma. You don’t get no more
country than that,
sweetheart. That is the countriest I
ever hope to be.”
“Did you always live there?”
“‘Til I was twenty.” A drag on the
cigarette, a look out the window.
“Why’d you leave?”
She looked back at the camera. Her eyes
glowed in the late
afternoon sunlight. “I was gonna be a
movie star.” She smiled a little. “The
biggest there ever was.” A slow lowering
of the eyelids, another drag on the
cigarette. “Didn’t work out that way,
though. It hardly ever does.”
“What do you think it would have been
like if it had?”
She smiled. “Good Lord, Tam, I don’t
know.” She looked airily
around our small apartment, then briefly
at Sheila. “We’d have a house, that’s
for sure. Not this ratty little apartment.
Maybe a pool. You’d have liked that
when you were little, huh,
Tam? I never really have been much of a
swimmer. But that would have been
nice. A house in the hills. Maybe a
garden. And a big-ass car!” She yelled
this last, then gave Sheila a high-five.
“We’d be rollin’. No more piece-of-crap
used cars. That’s for damn sure.” She
paused, picked up her cigarette again.
Took a drag. As the smoke entered her
lungs, she seemed to return to where
she really was, who she was now. A
forty-eight-year-old who was a
receptionist for a plastic surgeon and
rented DVDs and videos and looked for
herself in the backgrounds of old
movies. Her eyes narrowed. “But that’s not
happening, is it?” Then she fell silent.
Later, when I looked at the footage, I
was amazed. I’d never seen
my mother look like this, so serious and
direct. Always, whenever she was
talking to me, her attention was
elsewhere. But now, as I held the camera,
she was there, fully present, every inch
of her focused. Her eyes were shiny
and hard. You couldn’t look away. I
couldn’t figure out why her directors had
never noticed that quality. You couldn’t
see it when she wasn’t being filmed.
But when she was? Good God. I couldn’t
look away. I must have run the tape
for an hour, over and over, looking for
the words that would explain my
mother’s life. House. Car. Damn.
Rollin’. A star. Gonna be a star.
(Continues…)
Houghton Mifflin Company
Copyright © 2005
Martha Southgate
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-618-47023-9
Excerpted from Third Girl from the Left
by Martha Southgate
Copyright © 2005 by Martha Southgate.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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