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‘Bessie’: Unapologetically Black, Female, and Queer

‘Bessie’ is one of the rare mainstream films that shows an unapologetically Black, female and queer protagonist. That alone is groundbreaking in an otherwise straightforward biopic.

Written by Lisa Bolekaja.

See-line woman
Wiggle wiggle
Turn like a cat
Wink at a man
And he wink back

Now child
See-line woman
Empty his pockets
And wreck his days
Make him love her
And she’ll fly away

Writer/director Dee Rees opens the film Bessie with the Nina Simone classic “See-Line Woman” playing as the camera takes in Queen Latifah in close-up, her face drenched in resplendent blue lighting. The color, framing and music told me from jump that the narrative would be coming from a place of womanist Blackness. Nina Simone, the High Priestess of Soul, was signifying musically the proper introduction to Bessie Smith, the woman known in her day as the Empress of the Blues.

The story of Bessie Smith has been a long time coming, and it was quite timely that she should be given her due just a few days after the passing of the Blues legend B.B. King. Most people know very little about Bessie Smith, and it is almost a given that biopics are never truly satisfying, typically following a rise to fame and falling into trouble narrative. All I wanted to know was, would Rees be true to the highly unorthodox life of Smith? Or would we be subjected to a safe narrative that tip-toed around the raunchy, bisexual and profane realness of the Bessie Smith I read about in college?

Rees kept it real. Bessie is one of the rare mainstream films that shows an unapologetically Black, female and queer protagonist. That alone is groundbreaking in an otherwise straightforward biopic. Within ten minutes of the film, we see Bessie fooling around with a male paramour whom she beats up after he gets a little too fresh for her tastes, and then we see her in bed with her longtime female lover, Lucille (the gorgeous Tika Sumpter). It comes off natural, not some forbidden plot device to be used later to create conflict. It is what it is, and Bessie doesn’t waste time fretting over it. When she jumps on a train owned by Ma Rainey (Mo’Nique) to beg for a singing job and observes Ma interacting with her own female lover who prances around comfortably topless, Ma asks her straight out, “Watchu know about it?” Bessie tells her, “Same thing you do.” And that is that.

It was very powerful to see Black queer women openly affectionate with one another, and openly sexual in private spaces, especially for that time period. Black queer women, hardly ever get to see themselves on film without the narrative making them act secretive of fearful. Throughout the viewing, I kept waiting for Bessie’s bisexuality to become a big issue with her family, her band, or even her husband (and many lovers). It didn’t.

Ma Rainey takes Bessie under her wing, teaches her the ropes and how to sing the Blues to make the audience want more. She even teaches Bessie how to dress as a man and enjoy the thrill of smoking and gambling with men dressed that way. It reminded me of the stories I read that told of private clubs where women could be gender fluid and embrace masculine expressions without fear of bodily harm from violent homophobes.

Black love in all forms is front and center, and a new love comes in the form of Jack Gee (Michael Kenneth Williams being fierce and nuanced in this role), a man who sees Bessie perform, and goes to her hotel uninvited. As Bessie lies in bed, still in her nightgown and headscarf, her brother and business partner Clarence (Tory Kittles) watching her back, Jack Gee tells her his personal stats and proclaims without haste, “I’m auditioning to be your man.” He’s bold as brass and Bessie eventually marries him, and keeps her girlfriend Lucille too.

Jack seems very much Bessie’s equal, and they do go toe to toe with their hard loving, hard fighting and hard drinking. It’s a fragile relationship that hinges on Bessie’s Achilles heel, which is a bottomless hunger that stems from the loss of a mother at an early age, and the dysfunctional relationship she has with her older sister Viola (Khandi Alexander). Viola used to lock up food in the family refrigerator and beat on Bessie. This back-story told in flashbacks is the key to Bessie’s insatiable need for more success, more money, more lovers, and more control over her family. She eventually buys a large house without telling Jack, bringing everyone (including her sister Viola and Lucille) under one roof. She ignores her husband’s complaints and forces her will on everyone. She will live the life she felt was denied her, and even brings home a little boy on Thanksgiving to be her and Jack’s son. It’s Bessie’s world and everyone is expected to fall in line and gravitate around her.

The best part of Bessie is how she handles the intrusion of the White Gaze on the storyline. Bessie’s world seems insulated from white intrusion, and this allows us to focus on the Black characters just being themselves without having to focus on the known and ubiquitous racism. Whiteness does seep in through the colorism issues that Bessie encounters with the infamous paper bag test (Black performers, even in Black entertainment spaces of the period, did not hire darker skinned Black women who were not lighter than a paper bag). White intrusion is most prominent in two scenes, one involving the Klan showing up at one of Bessie’s performances, and the other at a prominent white patron’s home.

In the Klan sequence, Bessie simply walks outside and cusses the white men out and chases them away. She doesn’t quake in her boots or shrink behind the protection of Black men. She then turns around and goes back to performing, winning over the respect of the frightened Black men and women who were prepared to run away from White terrorism intruding onto Black space. In the home of Carl Van Vechten (Oliver Platt), a controversial patron of Negro artists whom he finds crude, primitive, and folksy, Bessie turns the White Gaze (and cultural appropriation) on its head by being true to her unfiltered Blackness. When a white woman puts her hands on Bessie in an attempt to hug her and says, “I heard that you were wild,” Bessie pushes her away and says, “Get the fuck off me.” Bessie in one fell swoop refused to let the white woman turn her body into a commodity. She turns on Carl Van Vechten too when he tells her about his book Nigger Heaven. This is a tremendous sequence because Bessie doesn’t allow the White characters to hijack the narrative and center the story on Bessie having to impress Van Vechten to get something from him for her survival. Bessie doesn’t give a fuck about anyone in that room except for herself and the two lovers she brought with her. In fact, Bessie doesn’t even care what Langston Hughes (Jeremie Harris) has to say when he tries to warn her about Van Vechten’s fetishizing of Black culture and Black people.

I found it fascinating watching Hughes take in Bessie’s behavior towards Van Vechten, because Hughes had to depend on White patrons much like Van Vechten to supplement his income in order to write and survive. Bessie didn’t. She had her voice and she had regular working class Black people who came out to see her when she travelled. Eventually she made records, (there’s the hilarious moment where she goes to a Black record company called Black Swan Records and discovers the company isn’t as Black as she thought, and that she is too Black for them), and was able to gain new revenue from vinyl sales. Bessie never had to water down her personality to make White folks feel comfortable. Unfortunately Hughes and other writers of their time (like my favorite Harlem Renaissance writer, Zora Neale Hurston) had to walk a thin line of creating the art they wanted without offending Whites who funded that art. It still happens today. Recently, poet and Buzzfeed Literary Editor Saeed Jones wrote about this same issue with his recent piece Self-Portrait Of The Artist As Ungrateful Black Writer.

Bessie is a good primer movie for people who know nothing about Bessie Smith, and it is a breakthrough performance for Queen Latifah. The cast is flawless and I expect Emmy nods for Queen Latifah, Mo’Nique and Khandi Alexander. (Khandi can do anything and just be dynamite. Period.) It was a pleasure watching unapologetic Black, female, queerness. I hope HBO takes more chances on projects like this. Somebody get Dee Rees financing for a new movie stat. It is maddening to think that she hasn’t had an opportunity since Pariah in 2011 to show us her voice. She has more radical stories to tell. I can feel it.

‘Bessie’: A Mainstream Portrait of Black Queer Women by a Black Queer Woman

The difference between ‘Bessie’ and the similar bio-pics about Black performers of the Jim Crow era is in the details. We see Bessie (played by Queen Latifah, in the affable, spirited persona she usually brings to roles: she’s also in good voice even though no one could be Smith’s equal) fail the “paper bag test” a Black impresario uses for the women he recruits to his revue. Smith is darker than the paper bag (as is Latifah, though not as dark as Smith was) so in spite of her talent, she’s out. Later, when she has her own revue, she uses the same test, but this time the recruits have to be darker than the bag, eliminating the women Bessie calls, “high yellow bitches.”

In some ways writer-director Dee Rees’s Bessie (showing tonight on HBO) about “The Empress of the Blues” singer Bessie Smith, is a story we’ve seen before, complete with feathers, spangles, and bootleg liquor as the action meanders through the 1920s, but a script (written by Rees, the late white playwright Horton Foote, plus Christopher Cleveland and Bettina Gilois) about a queer Black woman (Smith was bisexual) by an out queer Black woman who also directed is unusual, especially on a platform as popular as HBO. The only other recent example I can think of is Rees’s last film, the theatrically released, indie, coming-out drama, Pariah.

The difference between Bessie and the similar bio-pics about Black performers of the Jim Crow era is in the details. We see Bessie (played by Queen Latifah, in the affable, spirited persona she usually brings to roles–she’s also in good voice even though no one could be Smith’s equal) fail the “paper bag test” a Black impresario uses for the women he recruits to his revue. Smith is darker than the paper bag (as is Latifah, though not as dark as Smith was) so in spite of her talent, she’s out. Later, when she has her own revue, she uses the same test, but this time the recruits have to be darker than the bag, eliminating the women Bessie calls, “high yellow bitches.”

We see Bessie mentored by the slightly older blues singer Ma Rainey (also the subject of one of August Wilson’s most famous plays) and with Mo’Nique in the role we get a taste of the complex interplay of Black women we saw in Pariah between the main queer character, Alike (played by Adepero Oduye) and her homophobic mother (Kim Wayans). Rainey (Mo’Nique is terrific in the role and made me wish she were in more films) at first is a mother/teacher figure showing Smith that she should deliver her songs teetering at the front edge of the stage as she explains, “If you not riskin’ nothing, neither will they.” She also instructs her to find people in the audience to focus on and sing to, “The blues is not about people knowing you. It’s about you knowing people.”

With these two characters Rees is, again, one of the few filmmakers showing an audience one queer Black woman (Rainey, though she had a husband who was also her business partner, was as out as one could be in those days, singing, “Went out last night with a crowd of my friends/They must’ve been women, cause I don’t like no men”) offering guidance to another (we see Smith in multiple scenes with a girlfriend, Lucille, played by Tika Sumpter). When the two singers are relaxing in a saloon, Rainey is openly affectionate with her girlfriend and when she notices Smith nervously looking around, afraid to be seen in public with her girlfriend, Rainey tells her she shouldn’t care what other people think. Rainey and Smith are both presented as sexual, desirable beings (Latifah in one non-sexual scene reminiscent of Viola Davis in How To Get Away With Murder, removes her wig and makeup while also topless) in spite of both Latifah and Mo’Nique being over 40 and neither possessing the model-thin body type that is the default for most modern-day actresses.

But as Smith develops her stage presence and her great voice (we see the performers don’t have microphones, a condition which favors those who can easily reach the back row with no amplification, as Smith, and later in musical theater, Ethel Merman, did) we see Rainey look warily at her and eventually demote her from a starring role in the revue. Smith with her brother strikes out on her own and eventually outshines her mentor, both because of her talent, but also because of timing. The peak of her popularity as a live performer was just right for the nascent recording industry, which made better quality records of Smith’s work than of Rainey’s.

We see that Smith is reluctant to release “race records” because of the racist imagery used to promote them. But when she fails to be “respectable” enough for the Black nationalist record company during her audition (after a fawning invitation letter the very light-skinned president of the company signs “Yours in negritude”), she makes records for Columbia, a white-owned company, which offers her a flat fee, but no royalties, and features her photo, not a caricature, on the covers. The records become so popular, the Black farmworkers in the fields all stop their work to wave to her train car as it makes its way from town to town for live shows.

Smith grew up in a violent household (like many children of that era) and we see that she doesn’t hesitate to use her fists or a makeshift weapon at hand if she needs to. When we first meet her she receives a scar from one of these fights and we see it throughout the rest of the film, to remind us of these beginnings. I could have used fewer flashbacks to violent incidents when she was a little girl, especially since, unlike the at times violent mother in Pariah, Smith’s abusive older sister Viola (Khandi Alexander) is neither as nuanced in the script nor in her performance as Kim Wayans’s Audrey.

We also see Smith’s relationships with men (even as Lucille remains a member of her revue as well as Bessie’s girlfriend, a portrait of, for a time, fairly happy polyamory) including her husband Jack Gee (played by The Wire’s Michael Kenneth Williams, his distinctive facial scar perfect for this volatile character) who becomes her manager and, because of his propensity for violence, her sometime protector in the business deals that commonly cheated Black performers. We see both how she should get far away from this man and how his presence works to her advantage–and that she may very well have seen this paradox too.

I wish the film had used more period music (as well as more music that includes Smith’s voice, not Latifah’s) instead of the score which could have been lifted from pretty much any movie covering any era, the orchestra always intruding, telegraphing to us what we should be feeling instead of letting us feel. The last time I heard a score that distracted and irritated me to this extent–while still being completely forgettable–it was by the same composer: Rachel Portman. I know we need more women composers in film, but I much prefer the work of innovators like Mica Levi. I also wish the film had made its center the relationships with Rainey and Lucille (the publicity for the film, especially that targeted to queer women makes these two roles seem much bigger than they turn out to be). We’ve seen the story of the abusive husband-manager before (though Smith’s was probably one of the earlier examples) and the performer whose fortunes fall as her popularity does as surely as we haven’t seen complicated relationships between queer Black women, especially not on HBO.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.