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Emily Alford

Seeing Bessie, and Getting Read

By Emily Alford

This story has no large meaning, no social and political import. It's just a story. It happened in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. I was there on a business trip, and the business was swiftly done. Knowing that would be, and that I had a Saturday stayover on my expense account, I went out fully prepared to make the most of the time I had. I toyed with the idea of a mini full-time, but I was staying in a casual motel and I knew that doing my makeup fully just would not work at their breakfast bar. So I didn't try. As far as I was concerned, I was in boydrag during that brief time. My condition all weekend was myself. As myself, I had a chance to indulge one of my personal delights.

I like the visual arts and I like going around museums. In L.A. the museum of museums is the Getty, of course, but I hadn't planned far enough ahead to secure the necessary parking space... So I settled for the County Museum of Art, on Wilshire Boulevard. I'd been there before en femme, and nobody had bothered me. I don't think anybody even read me.

This time I didn't get bothered either. But I definitely did get read, and I simply didn't care. Here's why. Among the special exhibits that the Museum had was a wonderful show about the Harlem Renaissance. It's probably a sad comment on this country's culture that the exhibit was on loan not from the Met or the Museum of Modern Art or the Guggenheim or even the African-American oriented Schomburg Collection, all in New York City, but rather from the Hayward Gallery on London's South Bank. Oh well, the Hayward has a proud history of mounting exhibits that take a little courage. Perhaps in these crude times it takes a little courage to celebrate the centrality of black people to American specialness. I wandered through the show absolutely fascinated, and nobody paid any attention to me. At all. That, of course, was right. For any thinking American the issue of race is as pressing now as at any time in our messy history. The show addressed that issue. Paintings, photos, sculpture, rare footage: all of these evoked the magical, creative moment six decades ago "when Harlem was in vogue." Both the triumph and the utter pain of black American experience were on display. The other people wandering through the gallery were there to see the paintings, the photos, the sculpture, the footage, not to read me. Black and non-black alike, we were drawn into what these pictures (and the rest) at an exhibition had on show. Who cared if that woman in a button-through green patterned skirt and a plain brown top was not what she appeared to be? Still, I did get read and it was worth it.

Among the exhibits was an hour long compilation of jazz films from the 1920s and the 1930s, shown on a monitor with a few chairs for the truly devoted and standing room behind. I stood behind several times and then walked on. But I noticed that among the clips would be the only surviving footage of the great Blues Singer Bessie Smith.I wanted to see it, and I knew I would have to just wait until it came round again. So I took a seat. Eventually it did come round. She sang St. Louis Blues, against a montage of great pain and degradation. The clip began with her drinking on an open street. It took us into a juke joint, where she is drinking again. And then she sings, in her incredible voice, "I hate to see that evening sun go down . . ." A man enters. She lights up for him and they dance, and he steals the money she has concealed under her skirt. He leaves. Segue to the end, "it makes me think I'm on my last go round." We leave her on the street, drinking again. Theatrical. Contrived. Filmed. Melodramatic. Yes, all those. But Bessie Smith, greatest voice of her time, did die in squalor when she could not find medical help after a terrible car accident in Jim Crow Mississippi. Only once did she perform for a camera, and I had seen it.

While I was watching this matchless piece of film I knew that I was being spotted. An elderly lady sat down next to me, and she kept looking. I betrayed no recognition; after all, this was my moment to see Bessie Smith. But I knew I had not fooled her. Retiring to a ladies room, it wasn't hard to see why. I have dark facial hair, with no electrolysis, and my makeup had slipped. In larger terms having dark hair is great. Laser treatment can work for me, and it's going to be a lot cheaper than hair-by-hair electrolysis. Someday that will get done. In immediate terms what happened was great, too. Yes, a stranger had read me. But clearly she didn't care. She just noticed. For my part, I didn't care either. After all, I'd seen the only footage there is of Bessie Smith.

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