Here Comes Mama

About the last movie I ever expected anyone to protest for any reason was “Driving Miss Daisy.” Not even the inequality of a black man serving a bristly white woman seemed especially controversial in a film otherwise sweet enough to cause hyperglycemia.

Had it been the story of a Latino serving a bristly white woman, a situation with which I am somewhat more familiar, I still wouldn’t have felt the theme anymore volatile than, say, the relationship between the space alien and little Elliott in “E.T.”

That’s another movie I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about.

I logged “Miss Daisy” into a category of Warm and Cute, two facets of entertainment most beloved by the American viewing public. Movies about puppy dogs and teddy bears are part of the same genre.

People who liked the film assured me it wasn’t a racial story at all but a tale of “human bonding,” a term generally applied by those who read excessive amounts of film critiques. Also, it wasn’t “mean-spirited.”

Fine, OK, what the hell, who cares anyhow? I’ll tell you who cares. Mama Brilee cares.

She was out picketing the other day in front of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, protesting the nomination of “Miss Daisy” for an Oscar. The sign she carried said it all: “Driving Miss Daisy is racist propaganda” and “Black people do not love their oppressors.”

Mama Brilee was all alone, she was articulate and I learned something I hadn’t even thought about before. Even in a taste of honey, there can be a tang of bitterness.

I didn’t go out looking for Social Awareness that particular day. I was in a spring-drift mood and planned to float through the sunlight like a butterfly in a rose garden, doing what I had to do but not a lick more.

I thought I might drop by a 10th anniversary reception for the Venice-based “Yoga Journal,” then maybe take in a news conference on how to end the Baseball Lockout. God forbid the baseball season not start on time.

You get the point. I was looking for lightness, not importance.

I knew that Mama Brilee, whose real name is Mildred Lee, would be picketing on Wilshire, but I couldn’t believe anyone could be serious about protesting “Miss Daisy.” It was a little like challenging “The Wizard of Oz” for what might have been going on between Dorothy and the Tin Man.

But I stopped by out of curiosity and what I got was a point of view I hadn’t anticipated.

Lee, 44, writes for a small community newspaper in the San Francisco Bay Area and has a radio show for a local cable station. She calls herself Mama Brilee and hands out press kits that say “Here Comes Mama.”

She was in L.A. for a daughter’s birthday and decided she felt so strongly about the movie that she had to make a statement. As far as she’s concerned, “Miss Daisy” isn’t about friendship, but about racial abuse.

Lee is a black woman who grew up working as a domestic servant for a white family in the South. The movie, she says, opens old wounds, but even worse, young people will get the idea that blacks liked being treated the way Miss Daisy treated Hoke, her chauffeur.

“It was racial repression,” she said as we stood in the morning sunlight. “There’s no two ways about it. Hoke did what he had to do to survive. My daughter disagrees with me. She sees the mistreatment of Hoke, but says he overcame it and won Miss Daisy’s respect.”

Lee laughed loudly at that, but the laugh ended with the shake of her head. “Let me tell you, darlin’, black people in that era didn’t care about winning a white person’s respect, and they’d have been suspicious if they’d gotten it. You just had to get by, that’s all.”

Then she said: “Make Hoke a white man and Miss Daisy a black woman. If that’s inconceivable, then it’s racism without a doubt. And if it’s racism, it sure as hell isn’t love or friendship.”

Lee says she’s talked to about 200 other blacks who feel the same. They appreciate the production qualities of the movie but not its theme.

“A little old white lady saw ‘Daisy’ and told me she loved it,” Lee said. “I said, ‘What’s not to love? You’d like a trained pet, too.’ ”

I looked upon the movie as a kind of period piece sweetened for audience consumption. I never saw it as racist. I still don’t.

But we view life through perceptions shaded by experience, and the black experience hasn’t been terrific in white America. Mama Brilee has a point. I thought about that as I drove away.

It made the day seem a little less idyllic somehow, and I wasn’t drifting like a butterfly anymore.