Dreaming at the Movies When Fantasy Had to ‘Pass’

Djimon Hounsou, the actor who portrays Cinque, the African who won his freedom after being kidnapped by slavers in DreamWorks’ long-awaited film, “Amistad,” is from Senegal. A former model, Hounsou’s dark face has the kind of beauty that might fill a young girl’s dreams. I’m no longer a young girl, but he is important to me, too. I am old enough to understand how screen images shape our opinions of ourselves and others.

I began contemplating movie stars and what they mean when I received an invitation to the Los Angeles library’s 125th anniversary celebration not long ago and saw that Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Peck were hosting the affair.

Gregory Peck and I go way back to my North Philly days when I spent my Saturday afternoons staring at movie screens. Peck was making pictures before I was born, but I was a kid when I witnessed his Oscar-winning star turn in “To Kill a Mockingbird” at the Esquire, the local theater in my African American community. As I grew up, I viewed most of his old films on television and recently saw a young, virile Peck shooting it out with his on-screen lover, Jennifer Jones, in “Duel in the Sun.” With that film fresh on my mind, I was all the more eager to see him in real life.

But when I saw Peck at the gala all I could do was stare. I’d witnessed his progression from a youthful Lewt McCanles, to a middle-aged Atticus Finch, to the “Old Gringo” of his later years. His white hair and slightly stooped shoulders neither surprised nor shocked me. Truth be told, he was still gorgeous, resplendent in his dark suit, his bearing proud. I wasn’t so star-struck that I was rendered speechless. I was simply too involved with my own thoughts. How, I wondered, had I ever deluded myself into thinking Gregory Peck wasn’t white? The Gregory Peck of my prepubescent fantasies was a light-skinned “Negro,” as were Tony Curtis, Rock Hudson, George Chakiris, James Shigeta, Jay Silverheels, and every other male movie or television star with full lips and dark hair, especially if it had a tendency to curl. They all “crossed over” in my mind. Looking back now, I realize I must have been confused and perhaps frightened by the absence of people who looked like me in the movies. During the 1950s and early ‘60s, very few black leading men (or ladies either, for that matter) graced the screen, big or little. So I pretended that white stars were “colored.” This was during the time when telling a true story about noble Africans would have been viewed as a joke in Hollywood and the only role possible for Djimon Hounsou would have been that of a spear-carrying “native,” one of the legions who screamed at Tarzan or fled King Kong. On screen, American blacks were usually servants. Yes, occasionally there was Sidney Poitier. But fine as he was, he rarely got to kiss anybody. And the kissing was what I was interested in. Like other little girls, I yearned for images I could conjure up when I practiced puckering in front of my mirror. As I considered the mysteries of womanhood, I needed to view myself as I someday hoped to be: beautiful and sought after by handsome, powerful men. I was only 9 or 10 years old, but I realized that people who looked like movie stars were society’s most acceptable, the worthiest of being loved. When I made believe that the stars I saw came in my shade, I was practicing a bit of mental legerdemain for my own benefit. I was protecting my psyche as best I could from a society that told me by its nearly total exclusion of black screen images that my people and our stories were unimportant, that I didn’t even exist. I knew all along that Gregory Peck was white, but the new identity I forged for him in my mind was as essential to me as trusting my grandmother when she told me during my visits to her home in North Carolina that the water bubbling from the fountain marked WHITES ONLY was hot and nasty. When fantasy is the only sane choice, you either pretend or go crazy. It took me years to realize that the brutish depiction of Africans and the servile presentation of black Americans were as inextricably linked as Africa and all its scattered children. Cinque’s story of survival against the odds resonates with me and probably with a lot of other people, some who look like him, some who don’t. I like watching Djimon Hounsou. I hope that the young man becomes a movie star, and that he will be the first African to have his handprints immortalized in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, along with Gregory Peck’s and all the other stars. I’m grateful that he was chosen to help tell a powerful tale with a message for everyone. And I hope that seeing his face will encourage America’s darkest children to believe that they matter.