If Only My ‘Negro Super Powers’ Had Kicked In When I Wanted Them To
Watching the late Chadwick Boseman in 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom' made me wish for one super-power in particular.
I watched Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom during the Great Jupiter/Saturn Conjunction, which happened to be the same day as the 2020 Winter Solstice. While I watched, I kept waiting for my Negro Super Powers to kick in, the ones I’d heard about on Twitter and elsewhere on the Internet.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I’d qualify since I’d been Black for a long time now and had no intention of going back to the days when people like me were known as Negro or Colored. Still, if there was any chance I might receive superpowers on behalf of previous generations, I’d be more than happy to accept.
As I watched the film, I checked myself here and there for any signs of x-ray vision, telekinesis, or unusual physical strength. But nothing out of the ordinary occurred during the first 30 minutes or so. In fact, I wasted an entire bowl of peanuts and nearly spilled a good bottle of wine in a futile effort to consume both without firmly grasping them with my fingers. Perhaps I needed to give the powers more time to manifest. Patience has never been my strong suit.
I didn’t begin the film with any special superpower in mind. But as the story began to work its special magic on me, I did find myself wishing for one superpower in particular. The power to bring Chadwick Boseman back to the world of the living — the way he came back in Black Panther.
Art is dangerous
You look at his thin body, already showing signs of cancer’s emaciation in his sunken cheeks, hollowed eye sockets, a face more chiseled than his T’Challa’s or Jackie Robinson. And if you are inclined to forget these things a little, it’s only because the spirit that drove his art was so powerful. Don’t look there, look here, says the Artist. It’s like the magician’s power of misdirection.
Watching this film version of August Wilson’s deeply moving play in December of 2020, we know something the actor does not. We know he will not live much longer. The movie will wrap on August 16, 2020. Chadwick Boseman will be dead 12 days later on August 28th.
Art is dangerous work. Risks of one kind or another are always involved. It is dangerous for an older actor to play King Lear. There is the king’s madness to contend with. To make it real, you’ve got to summon madness, call it up from the depths, let it use you. Something that’s very difficult when you’re old.
It was dangerous for Superman star Christopher Reeve to play a paralyzed police officer in HBO’s Above Suspicion. Shortly afterward, he sustained injuries in a horse-riding accident that left him paralyzed for the rest of his life.
Imagination can be risky
When you use the power of imagination to inhabit another reality in order to make it real in the material world, you take certain risks. It’s a bet you make with the Universe. You roll the dice on the hunch that you can get back to the ordinary world before the effects of masquerade become irreversible.
If I were suffering from late-stage cancer that is especially cruel to Black men, I wouldn’t risk playing a doomed character who has been so damaged by racism that he not only denies but curses God. Even calls God a mother*cker.
I’d be too afraid that I couldn’t get back from that dark place. Not in time. Not with my own physical strength on the wane.
That’s what makes Chadwick Boseman’s portrayal of Levee in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom an act of heroism far superior to his fictional embodiment of Black Panther’s T’Challa. That’s what set him apart, made Boseman a master of his craft. It’s what also made him a sacrificial offering on the alter of Art. A suffering servant who, in this case, took on the weight of an entire race again and again.
Nakedness
August Wilson’s plays stay with you a long time because they touch the psychic wound at the heart of the American experience. You have to be in the right place to watch his plays. They are going to rip the clothes off your surface life. They are going to tell you the truth. They are going to show you things you already know but would rather not think about.
If it requires a courage to put yourself in the midst of all that, imagine what it takes to embody it on stage. Imagine what it took to be Chadwick Boseman.
Then step back from the dream a little. A hero like that doesn’t come along every day. Whether your Negro Superpowers kick in or not, it’s a role not many are able to play.
© 2021 Andrew Jazprose Hill
Thanks for reading.