885: Bless This Mess

From WBE's Chicago, it's the American Life. I'm a manual berry sitting in for Irogloss. As a middle schooler, there was always one channel I wanted to watch. TCM, the Turner Classic Movie Channel, an entire channel dedicated to old movies from Hollywood's Golden Age.

I loved these films. The lady Eve on the town, Mr. Smith goes to Washington, shout out to my boy Jimmy Stewart. I was fascinated by the dramatics.

The over-the-top slaps, the sultry looks, the glamorous makeup and hairstyles. To my delight, I recently learned that I was not the only black middle schooler spending her spare time glued to this channel.

Nicole Hill was also sad. Anything with Betty Davis, I was like, her eyes are so big and she's so bad. And I like need to watch everything that she does. Marlon Brando was my first really big crush.

and guys and dolls was my obsession and I used to like every Friday night God bless my mom and my aunt I would invite them up to my room and we would do a viewing of guys and dolls like every single Friday and I would share a new facts that I had learned. What about like what? Okay, so I mean this is like a very basic fact, but Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra hated each other and

And there's the scene where Frank Sinatra has to eat cheesecake and he really hates cheesecake and so Marlon Brando keeps messing up the scene so that Frank Sinatra has to keep eating the cheesecake. And I was like, oh, they are so dramatic! Oh my god, the behind the scenes! Whenever I talk with Nicole, she always has some fact like this. You mentioned some historical figure,

an actor, heck, even a mutual friend. And she'll tell you some obscured detail that you've never heard before. She's always clocking these things.

I think it's why, as a kid, she noticed something about these movies that I never did. I remember the first time I noticed that I didn't want to see a black person

in the films because of the way they were gonna show up, which was gone with the wind. And I remember not knowing anything about how McDonald's history. How do you make Daniel plays Mammy and enslaved house servant?

I just remember feeling really ashamed of like that's what I would have been. I was going to these movies as a form of escapism and then whenever black people showed up in the movies, they were always serving. They were always poor. They were always versions of myself that maybe I feared I was like, I don't know, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want to grow up and be that.

That's not, well, that's not the way you want to be out on the town with Marlon Brando. You don't want to be Scarlett O'Hairs made. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. So I was sort of like, oh man, I see them in the background being like, porters and maids and things. And I would sort of picture like them getting on a

a train, they're in New York City, they get on the train, they go home, and then I was like in then what? And then what? It became this question that drove Nicole.

It stayed in her mind for years. What would it look like if you got on the train and followed those characters home? And what would those actors into their real lives offstage? And the lives of their families, their community?

What was the black version of the diva and diva cheesecake showed down? passions and jellacies where people gossiping about. Where could she find those details? That drama. A couple years ago, Nicole was searching through black newspapers from the 1930s through 60s, researching for her job at the time, and Nicole being the coal, ended up deep in online news

archives and in back rooms of university libraries. Looked at all the microfeatures, tried to try to get her hands on any and every archival black paper from the Chicago Defender to the Detroit Tribune to the Washington Afro-American. And this is where she got the answer to her question and then what?

It was all in there. The drama, The Details, The Lives. Like this from an 1938 paper. I always remember the first thing I noticed is woman in a bathing suit and they're saying like

pretty hot A or something like that. And then on the side, they're talking about, you know, this baseball player that they'd run out of town because he'd been talking wild and they're talking about voting and then I keep flipping through and they're talking about dating and they're talking about people are giving one another advice. The paper had an advice column. It was called the

court of Afro Relations. And they have like a picture of a judge and so you write in and the judge tells you, like gives you advice for how you should handle it. And so there's a woman and she is married and her sister is in town and her sister is seeing a married man. Okay. I might be completing two stories, but there were some type of confrontation at church between the mistress and the wife and it involved an umbrella. Oh my goodness an umbrella at church at church. Like I love triangle and there was another one where it was a This guy wanted to marry this girl, but she loved to spend money and she likes fit the fancier things in life And he's like, oh my gosh, like what should I do and they were just like she needs to get it together

Why is she spending all that money? I'm like, oh my gosh, this is what they were doing when they went home Almost every country everywhere has argued about its history at some point. We are certainly in one of those moments right now.

A couple of months after Trump entered office, he issued an executive order called restoring truth and sanity to American history. The order basically says, stop disparaging America, focus on its achievements, its greatness, and so I read it, just get rid of all the mess.

So like George Washington, he's great, but maybe don't mention the black people he enslaved. Personally, I want to know about that kind of mess, not just the fact that Washington enslaved black people, I want to know who those people were and the details of their lives. I want to know about all of our ancestors' mess.

So that's what we're going to do today.