The Last Page
Stansell, Christine
AN AMERICAN LOVE STORY, a cinema verite treatment of an interracial family in Queens, aired for five nights on the Public Broadcasting System in mid-September. Compared to the documentary...
...The rhetoric of race is rarely even used...
...Political and scholarly pundits, white and black, treat such problems as occasions for generalization and allegory...
...As the dolor of provincial inertia seeps into him, he launches into a damning critique of the civil rights movement—" integration destroyed us as a people"— and you're mystified at what in the world the man could be thinking—a father of biracial children, a cosmopolitan New York musician...
...in 1960s Marion, Ohio, where they both grew up, Bill was routinely jailed once he began dating Karen...
...Cicily, looped from a night out with her college friends, gives a tipsy paean to her parents on the lessons they've taught her about defying prejudice...
...They were, in fact, an oddly untelegenic family despite their months of exposure to the camera...
...The parents are no strangers to the nastier strains of postwar racism...
...But with the Simses, racial set pieces are drummed up only to be discarded as too cumbersome for the keener demands of making a life...
...It's striking to see how much better than either liberal or nationalist platitudes it serves as a basis of daily practice for people of both races who are living right on top of the color line...
...The Simses laugh a lot in the film, and at first it gets on your nerves...
...Ironic humor has a long, venerable history among black people...
...he is a devoted father and husband—at least he's always around—but you can't help noticing after a while that despite his warm chuckles and continual presence he rarely enters into anyone's talk or problems...
...No one clambers onto a soapbox to orate on the race problem...
...But the bravura pronunciamento fizzles: "Marion makes me crazy," he concludes, and laughs at himself...
...Compared to the documentary about the Loud family shown twenty-five years ago, this exercise in socially conscious voyeurism scarcely created a ripple...
...nor does anyone try to minimize it...
...Bill Sims returns to Marion to help his son from his troubled first marriage cope with a drug charge...
...But then you begin to sense laughter's charms, its antidotal properties to the slights, threats, humiliations, and sheer nuttiness that are racism's stock in trade...
...Karen, an unwed mother of an interracial baby, was threatened with having Cicily removed by welfare authorities...
...AN AMERICAN LOVE STORY, a cinema verite treatment of an interracial family in Queens, aired for five nights on the Public Broadcasting System in mid-September...
...and the small apartment in Flushing, where most of the film takes place, looks like a refurbished set of the Honeymooners...
...It's not the protagonists' human appeal that brought out this side of them...
...In Marion, a shell of the old steel town, the black world Bill remembers from his childhood—the thriving church, the barbershop—is gone...
...and even when they drive upstate to pick up Cicily at Colgate, Bill brings along his passport to fend off any trouble with the police...
...Bill Sims is a black blues musician, moderately successful...
...Karen Sims, the white mother, comes across as cold and controlling, despite her lavish professions of feeling...
...Yet in Florida, where Karen's mother now lives, the Klan is enough of a presence to make it impossible for Bill and the girls to visit...
...but it comes off as a teenager's clumsy attempt at grandiloquence...
...One daughter, Cicily, is at Colgate, the other, Chaney, is twelve: they must have been giggly and self-conscious to begin with, and facing the camera, they often turn into goofy sitcom characters...
...There is a weird out-of-time, claustrophobic feeling to much of the film: no one ever seems to leave the house for long: everyone except the youngest daughter smokes madly...
...What fascinates is the efficacy of the Sims's knowing yet modest approach to racism...
...128 n DISSENT / Winter 2000...
...the Race Question becomes a matter of getting through the day, a journey, a difficult encounter...
...Today, the strains are more mundane, at least in New York...
...It's too bad, because the series turned out to be neither soap opera nor sermon but an entrancing view of a situational ethics of decency, as practiced on America's color line...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
