Third Girl from the Left Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  ANGELA

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  FOXY BROWN

  MILDRED

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  CARMEN JONES

  TAMARA

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  DREAMLAND

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2005 by Martha Southgate

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Southgate, Martha.

  Third girl from the left / Martha Southgate,

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-618-77338-1

  1. African American motion picture producers and directors—Fiction. 2. African American motion picture actors and actresses—Fiction. 3. African American families—Fiction. 4. Conflict of generations—Fiction. 5. African American women—Fiction. 6. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 7. Grandparent and child—Fiction. 8. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction. 9. Tulsa (Okla.)—Fiction. 10. Grandmothers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.O82T47 2005

  813'.54—dc22 2005040403

  eISBN 978-0-544-40989-7

  v1.0914

  “Theme from Shaft” by Isaac Hayes © 1971, 2000 by Irving Music, Inc. / BMI. Used by Permission. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

  For my father,

  Robert Southgate,

  and mother,

  Joan Southgate,

  who taught me the

  importance of history

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. I have freely and often manipulated time and event (yes, blaxploitation buffs, I know there’s no dialogue in the fight scene in Coffy). I even invented one film (Street Fighting Man starring Fred Williamson is fictional), but I have tried to be true to the spirit of the places and times I describe. Please don’t look to this novel for a strict reporting of fact. In writing the novel, I used many fine works of nonfiction (and watched a fair number of films). In understanding the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, I was greatly helped by Riot and Remembrance by James S. Hirsch, The Burning by Tim Madigan, Black Wall Street by Hannibal B. Johnson, and They Came Searching by Eddie Faye Gates. The Bunny Years by Kathryn Leigh Scott is a detailed oral history of early Playboy Bunny life that is alternately amusing and disturbing but always informative. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind provided useful information about the film industry in the 1970s. What It Is . . . What It Was! by Gerald Martinez, Diana Martinez, and Andres Chavez, as well as Isaac Julien’s documentary BaadAsssss Cinema, were crucial in my understanding of the blaxploitation genre.

  Everything is

  habit-forming,

  so make sure

  what you do is

  what you want

  to be doing.

  WILT CHAMBERLAIN

  MY MOTHER WAS AN ACTRESS. IN SOME WAYS, SHE doesn’t look very different from the way she did back then. She still has honey-colored skin and eyelashes that make you think of fur or feathers. Her movies were all made in the early 1970s, before I was born. You know the titles of some of the big ones: Shaft and Super Fly and Blacula. She wasn’t in those. Then there were the little ones that blew in and out of the dollar theaters in Cleveland and Detroit and Gary inside of a week, until the last brother who was willing to part with $1 had done so: TNT Jackson and Abby and Savage Sisters. She’s in some of those. You wouldn’t know her, though. She was no Pam Grier. These are her credits: Girl in Diner, Murder Victim #1, Screaming Girl, Junkie in Park. She was the third girl from the left in the fight scene in Coffy. When I was little, sometimes she woke me late at night and we sat down in front of the television to watch a bleached-out print of a movie with a lot of guys with big guns and bigger Afros. They ran and jumped and shot. They all wore leather and bright-colored, wide-legged pants made of unnatural fibers. They said, “That’s baaaad” as percussive, synthesized music perked behind them. The movies made their nonsensical way along, and then suddenly my mother said, “See, see, there I am, behind that guy, laying on the ground. That’s me.” Or she said, “That’s me in that booth.” Then Richard Roundtree or Gloria Hendry or Fred Williamson sprayed the room with gunfire, and my mother slumped over the table, her mouth open, her eyes closed. Blood seeped slowly out from under her enormous Afro. I looked away from the television at the mother I knew. She smiled watching the gory death of her younger self. Her pleasure in her work was so pure, even though all she was doing was holding still as dyed Karo syrup drained from a Baggie under her wig onto a cheap Formica table.

  My mother never said, but I knew, that I ended her acting career. I liked to think that my father was somebody like John Shaft, striding through the streets of Manhattan, a complicated man, a black private dick who was a sex machine to all the chicks. But I suspected that my father was a bit player like her. Thug #1. Or Man in Restaurant. Once I learned how dull a movie set is when you’re not running the show, I imagined the two of them, in those endless, drifting hours, slowly beginning to talk to each other, my mother looking up shyly but oddly direct, the low bass rumble of my father’s voice as he asked her name, then asked her out. They didn’t have folding canvas chairs, their names written on them, the way the director or the stars did. They would have started talking as they stood around in extras holding, a few words at a time. I imagine my mother looked at my father’s face and saw in it someone who would make everything perfect.

  My mother believed in the power of movies and the people in them to change a life, change her life. I can count on my two hands the number of stories she’s told me about my father. And then only when I’ve asked. She didn’t even tell me his name until I was grown. But exactly what she wore in the fight scene in Coffy? And what Pam Grier said to her before they started shooting? I’ve heard that story a thousand times. In that scene, Pam Grier rips my mother’s dress nearly off her body. It hangs, ragged, over her shoulders in two scarlet shards. She wears a fierce, sexy smile and a crooked, reddish wig. Her breasts are very beautiful. Here is what Pam Grier said to my mother right before filming began: “That dress looks good on you, girl. Too bad I gotta tear it.” My mother held these words as a talisman against whatever else life might bring her. Pam Grier thought she looked good.

  When I told my mother I wanted to go to film school, she was silent for a long minute. Then she said, “Not too many women direct movies, do they?”

  “Not too many. But remember that movie The Piano? You never saw it, but that was a woman. And there’ve been others.”

  “Any of them black?

  I hesitated. “A few. Julie Dash. Euzhan Palcy. Kasi Lemmons. You know how it is, Ma. Maybe I can help change that. Even if I can
’t . . . it’s what I need to do.”

  “How you gonna pay for it?”

  “I’ll get a scholarship. I’ll borrow money. I’ll figure it out, Ma.”

  Ma looked at me. “Yeah, you probably will. I remember when I came out here. I was broke as hell. But it wasn’t much that could have stopped me. Guess that’s how I know you’re my girl. Hardheaded. Just like me.”

  So I applied to a lot of film schools. I got into NYU. I remember holding the admissions letter, staring at it, thinking, Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese. Stupid, huh? But that’s all I could think. I’d lived in Los Angeles my whole life. I knew New York from only a thousand noir pictures and Mean Streets and Sweet Smell of Success. (Here’s my favorite, favorite scene: when Burt Lancaster gazes over the lights of the city, hot jazz blasting behind him, and he says, “I love this dirty town.” My second favorite scene: when Burt, a key light under his chin to give him a menacing glow, says to Tony Curtis, “I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”) I went to grad school in 1999. It took me three years after college, working like a dog, to get up the nerve and to earn the money to pay for it. I knew it wouldn’t be like a black-and-white movie. More like Do the Right Thing. But New York was still . . . so not LA. I thought it would be the home I never had, the place I should have been born.

  I got in with a short I made about my mother. I did it in our kitchen. A couple of lights, my old video camera. I’d kept it working, even though I’d had it since I was twelve. Her girlfriend, Sheila, was there, like always, but I framed the shots so that only her arm and hand were in the frame. The main thing you saw was my mother’s face. She was still so beautiful, her hair slicked back into a ponytail, her clothes just so, even on a Saturday afternoon. Maybe she had more lines around her eyes than she used to. I didn’t notice them until I looked through my viewfinder. “So, Ma,” I asked as the film rolled, “how’d you end up in Los Angeles?”

  “Couldn’t stand the country town I was from another minute.” She laughed. It was like the camera was her home.

  “What country town was that?”

  “Tulsa, Oklahoma. You don’t get no more country than that, sweetheart. That is the countriest I ever hope to be.”

  “Did you always live there?”

  “Til I was twenty.” A drag on the cigarette, a look out the window.

  “Why’d you leave?”

  She looked back at the camera. Her eyes glowed in the late afternoon sunlight. “I was gonna be a movie star.” She smiled a little. “The biggest there ever was.” A slow lowering of the eyelids, another drag on the cigarette. “Didn’t work out that way, though. It hardly ever does.”

  “What do you think it would have been like if it had?”

  She smiled. “Good Lord, Tam, I don’t know.” She looked airily around our small apartment, then briefly at Sheila. “We’d have a house, that’s for sure. Not this ratty little apartment. Maybe a pool. You’d have liked that when you were little, huh, Tam? I never really have been much of a swimmer. But that would have been nice. A house in the hills. Maybe a garden. And a big-ass car!” She yelled this last, then gave Sheila a high-five. “We’d be rollin’. No more piece-of-crap used cars. That’s for damn sure.” She paused, picked up her cigarette again. Took a drag. As the smoke entered her lungs, she seemed to return to where she really was, who she was now. A forty-eight-year-old who was a receptionist for a plastic surgeon and rented DVDs and videos and looked for herself in the backgrounds of old movies. Her eyes narrowed. “But that’s not happening, is it?” Then she fell silent.

  Later, when I looked at the footage, I was amazed. I’d never seen my mother look like this, so serious and direct. Always, whenever she was talking to me, her attention was elsewhere. But now, as I held the camera, she was there, fully present, every inch of her focused. Her eyes were shiny and hard. You couldn’t look away. I couldn’t figure out why her directors had never noticed that quality. You couldn’t see it when she wasn’t being filmed. But when she was? Good God. I couldn’t look away. I must have run the tape for an hour, over and over, looking for the words that would explain my mother’s life. House. Car. Damn. Rollin’. A star. Gonna be a star.

  PART I

  ANGELA

  1

  IT WAS 1972. THERE WERE AT LEAST FIFTY BEAUTIFUL girls in the room. Everywhere you looked there was another young woman, each face a different brown, here the color of a puppy’s eyes, there the color of a fallen acorn, all so heartbreaking. And for once, not afraid. There was something about these women, these new young women, that made you think that something must be changing, that the time had come to start giving to pretty black women, not taking from them. Angela sat on a folding chair. The room smelled of Afro Sheen.

  She leaned over her clipboard intently, as though filling it out correctly would get her the part. Name: Angela Edwards. Age: twenty. She had really just turned twenty-two, but nobody told the truth about that out here. It didn’t take but a minute to figure that out once you started trying to get work. The younger the better. Other parts. Hmm. Her parts had been temping, working as a Playboy Bunny, and auditioning. Who would know if she said something that wasn’t quite true? She gave herself small parts in The Liberation of L. B. Jones and in Shaft. Carefully, she attached her headshot to the form and gave it to the bored blonde seated at a flimsy card table in front of the room. She went back to her cracked plastic seat, a dirty orange instead of dirty yellow this time, and dug in her bag for a copy of Jet. She pulled it out to read, her left hand rapidly twisting the hair at the back of her head, the part her mother always called “the kitchen.”

  She waited a long time, watching other young women come and go, some looking defeated, some with an air of grinning confidence. She concentrated on taking deep, slow breaths and reading the “Weddings” page in Jet. The articles, as always, were tiny, hardly enough words to fill a thimble. But she couldn’t concentrate on them at all. She jumped when she heard her name.

  A pale white guy with lank black hair took her into the audition room. His satiny pink shirt had a couple of dingy red spots down the front. Whether they were blood or ketchup was hard to say. In the room, three more white men were seated around another card table. It was always white men around the table. The top of the table was ripped, foam sticking up from the gash. The middle one (was he the producer or the director?) had white hair combed straight back from his forehead. He held his cigarette like Humphrey Bogart in those old movies. He squinted at Angela through a haze of bluish smoke.

  A softly fat man with squinty light blue eyes sat next to him. He nodded slightly when she came in. Then there was a weasely, anxious-looking third man. Angela figured him for the usual mystery man. At every audition she’d been on there was always somebody’s friend or somebody’s brother there strictly to check out the merchandise. She stood, fighting the impulse to twist the back of her hair again, and waited for one of the men to speak.

  “So, Miss Edwards, I’m Jon Solomon, the director. You want to read for the part of Tasha?” That came from the fat, squinty-looking guy.

  “Yes, sir, I do.” Damn. She sounded so country.

  “Well, why don’t you read with Rafe here. Show us what you got.” Solomon smiled. His teeth were small and yellow. They gave her some script pages and gestured to a brown-eyed handsome man she hadn’t noticed before standing in the corner. He looked like one of the boys she knew from back home in front of the five and dime—like he’d lick you as soon as talk to you. He walked over, a slow smile on his face. Angela’s heart squirmed in her chest like a live animal. They began reading the scene.

  “I can’t let no white motherfucker treat my woman like that,” he said, staring at her chest.

  “Yeah, well, I’m a woman who can take care of myself. I’ve got the gams and I’ve got the guns. You don’t need to worry about me,” said Angela. Her voice shook. What did “gams” mean anyway?

  “Baby, you need a man to tak
e care of your business. I don’t want you out there getting hurt.”

  “Nobody hurts me. They better jump back, in fact. They’re going to rue the day they messed with me.”

  “That’s enough, thank you,” said the white-haired man. Solomon looked startled but said nothing. “You can go. But please come here for a second? I need to ask you something.” She walked over and he pushed his business card across the table. “I think you have real potential, young lady. Please give me a call, would you?” he said. If Angela hadn’t been staring at the card in front of her, she would have seen the other two men at the table give each other sardonic looks. But she just picked up the card and slid it into her tight jeans pocket, real slow. Then she looked at the producer levelly. “Sure, Mr. Kaufman. You’ll hear from me tonight.”

  When she was fifteen and she and her friend Louann took turns reading The Best of Everything and this kind of thing came up, the white girls in the book were always terrified, shocked, unwilling. She was scared, but not unwilling. She hadn’t slept with a white man, but let’s face it, they ran things, especially out here. She might as well get it over with. It might even be interesting. She had a brief vision of her mother’s face. But she pushed it away. She knew what she had to do.

  She pulled up to Kaufman’s door about ten minutes late. His building was in West Hollywood, a mini-shopping strip that contained a dry cleaner, a convenience store, and a small suite of dingy offices. Angela checked her lipstick in the mirror. She ran her sweaty hands over her pant legs, and rang the bell, practicing her smile.

  The lobby of the office had greenish carpet and smelled slightly of cat pee. There was a coffee table with some magazines on it and a receptionist’s desk with a typewriter in the corner, but no one else was there. Kaufman greeted her, standing in the doorway of an inner office, smiling at her. “Ah, Miss Edwards, so glad you could come.” He stuck out his hand. Angela took it, careful to hold it a little longer than necessary, and said, “You can call me Angela.”