Small acts, writ large

Concord -It is a day perfectly suited to serve as a metaphor for movie making: Things are not what they seem. One moment this January day has gray skies and a chilling wind, then suddenly the sun’s warmth makes jackets a burden. And here in Concord, where a hill gives way to a stream in Frank Liske Park, cast and crew are dramatizing a scene that took place more than 100 years earlier in Raleigh’s Pullen Park.

Director Laura Littman is staging a pivotal moment for Bessie and Sadie Delany, who were raised on the campus of St. Augustine’s College: the first time they encounter Jim Crow laws.

Littman’s scene shows the family -parents and five of their eventual 10 children -going to the park to picnic. Extras in clothes of the 19th century dot the hill, giving the feel of a Monet painting. At the stream are two Charlotte girls, Haleigh Porter, 7, playing Bessie, and Kiara Harris, 9, as Sadie. Before them is a green wooden sign, reading on one side COLORED and the other WHITE.

The Delany girls have already been disappointed by the fact that they can no longer ride at the front of the trolley. Now there is this.

Porter, as Bessie, tastes the "white" water. "It tastes just the same," she says to her sister, and they run up the hill.

It is a poignant scene, racism’s ridiculousness laid bare by a child. But more pointedly, it’s a small act of defiance that was hidden until Bessie and Sadie Delany wrote "Having Our Say: The Delany Sister’s First 100 Years" with Amy Hill Hearth and writer Emily Mann adapted it for the stage (and this movie). Now that Littman has filmed the work for television, a part of history is revealed to an even larger audience.

"People rebelled in subtle ways," says Sarah Willie, an assistant professor of sociology at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, "whether it was not saying Ôsir’ or Ômadam’ or not opening doors or meeting eyes when they were supposed to look down."

Slavery and the civil rights movement have been depicted in film -successfully and not so successfully. But more nuanced moments such as Bessie’s testing of the waters have been overlooked. A medium of things grand, film hasn’t often captured these small struggles, leaving false impressions.

"My students don’t believe resistance against Jim Crow and slavery began until the civil rights movement," says Willie. "That leads to collective embarrassment and shame."

Because such moments were hidden and personal, a black filmmaker might know of them only through oral history, and a white filmmaker might not know of them at all.

"Having Our Say" reveals many small acts of defiance because it is based on the sisters’ words and memories, memories that reveal truths history books wouldn’t record.

Learning to live with bigotry

Sarah Louise "Sadie" Delany died at age 109 at her home in Mount Vernon, N.Y., while "Having Our Say" was being filmed. Dr. A. Elizabeth "Bessie" Delany had died four years earlier at age 104. Both lived remarkable lives.

The sisters grew up at a time when bigotry was legal. Their father, a freed slave named Henry Beard Delany, was the first elected black bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, yet when he delivered a sermon at a white church in Raleigh, the family had to sit in the balcony and wasn’t allowed to take Communion.

All 10 Delany children went to college. Bessie and Sadie and seven of their siblings went to New York, arriving in time for the Harlem Renaissance. Sadie earned a master’s degree from Columbia University and became a teacher. Bessie graduated from Columbia’s School of Dental and Oral Surgery and became the second black dentist in New York.

All their lives, the sisters ignored what was expected of them. And they went further, committing small acts of rebellion, acts that were risky, even life-threatening, but that allowed them to keep their dignity.

The Delanys weren’t unique in that respect. The history of blacks in America is full of defiant gestures. But many of these acts are lost in time and memory and others are losing meaning, which is why "Having Our Say" and other efforts to preserve them are valuable.

At the tiny John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American Documentation at Duke University rests "Behind the Veil: Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow South." It is a collection of interviews with elder blacks documenting the horrors of that era as well as the individual efforts to survive.

One interview explains how blacks avoided the demeaning names and titles foisted upon them:

"But if you notice that most of the people that you talk with . . . the men have their names just signed with initials. Like E.L. Donald. Some of them just sign their names with initials. . . . When you go to the bank or what have you, your signature was just initials rather than giving your first name, and the reason for that was to keep from being called by your first name.

"And talking to anyone, nobody ever knew my mother’s first name. He referred to her as Mama like we did or it was Mrs. Carter."

As these words show, many of these acts of defiance were done within the black community and without white understanding. In fact, that was the point. The ultimate triumph of defiance was to protest and to live.

Author and Duke professor emeritus C. Eric Lincoln can tell his own family stories of defiance. He remembers his grandmother telling of the times she’d take a piece of glass, pound it into a powder and feed it to a slaveowner in grits. Done a little day by day, it was said to lead to a hole in the gut.

Sitting in his home office in Durham, Lincoln says that lying and stealing were also forms of defiance.

"You learn as you grow up how to avoid the worst of barbs," he says. "Sometimes you use humor, sometimes avoidance."

Lincoln says the old tune "Jinny Crack Corn" actually documents a typical act. A jinny, he explains, is a jackass. The mule is in a cornfield, "cracking" or eating up the slaveowner’s grain. The slave looks the other way as the damage is done. How can he? "My master’s gone away."

Silent defiance

In film, notes of defiance may be few, but they’re memorable.

In a tense scene from "Nothing But a Man," Michael Roemer’s 1964 film about African Americans in the pre-civil rights South, the main character refuses to laugh at a white character’s racist sex jokes even though others give in.

In "NightJohn," the Disney Channel’s 1996 film about a self-educated slave who taught others to read, the black characters refused to show emotion to whites, reserving their feelings for their own community.

Another potent example came in 1977’s "Roots," Alex Haley’s landmark miniseries tracing his family from Africa to the end of slavery, when Kizzy (played by Leslie Uggams) encounters Missy Ann (Sandy Duncan). As a young girl, Kizzy thought of Missy Ann as her protector and friend, despite the unequal relationship.

Years later, Kizzy sees her again and the woman doesn’t even remember her. Missy Ann asks Kizzy to fetch her some water. Kizzy does, but not before spitting into the ladle.

"Having Our Say" features a powerful scene that recalls Kizzy’s defiance, but with more menace. A young Bessie, (portrayed by Broadway star Audra McDonald) is in a Georgia train station waiting room brushing her hair. A drunken white man appears, making lewd remarks. Bessie rebukes him and chastises him for his actions. The man leaves, but not quietly.

Bessie’s actions put her in grave danger, but as she tells her sister more than 70 years later, "I’d rather die than back down."

She is after all, the self-described "spice" to her sister’s "sugar." It’s the kind of trait that on occasion has been taken to caricature on screen. But it also has informed many performances by African Americans who were able to transcend the limitations of a script, to inject notes of defiance into their roles.

Hattie McDaniel in "Gone With the Wind" is a prime example.

McDaniel’s Mammy says what she wants to all the characters and knows everything that’s happening. Although she didn’t write the words in the script, it is McDaniel’s performance that informs it. From Mammy we get no sense of downtroddeness; she has her place, but she does not accept that it is below anyone.

When actors bring this sensibility to a role, it can transform a character. University of Maryland literature professor Mary Helen Washington points to Sidney Poitier and Morgan Freeman as actors who give graceful nuance to characters with their bodies.

Poitier, she says, "always stood ramrod straight. He refused to smile and laugh and kid around. He stays behind a certain mask. There’s real resistance just in body language. Actors make the choice by the bit of business they choose to do in a scene. These are communal kinds of signals."

With the advent of "Having Our Say" -the book, the play and now the television movie -such moments need no longer be communal. The work breaks several barriers. It’s about two old people, two old women, two old black women. And these old black women are telling of their lives of triumph in defiance of a problem we still struggle with. Judith James, who produced the movie with Camille Cosby, says that is what she’d like their film to portray.

"When you see how blatant this movie is, it makes a powerful statement," she says. "[Some people] hated simply because they could. We hope it’s about the absurdity of hatred."

Adrienne M. Johnson won first place in Division II for newspapers with circulation of 75,001 to 175,000. Johnson, a New Yorker and lover of language, was a copy editor at the Los Angeles Times, a position she had held for five years when she decided to move South and switch to writing. Now at The News & Observer in Raleigh, she covers film, television and radio. Her favorite word is assiduously.