Claudine: A Happy Home

I cannot place where or when I first saw Claudine, which debuted six years before I was born. It seems to have always been a film I knew and loved. That’s probably because the people in my family adored it, the film’s language a shared secret I learned almost by a kind of osmosis, the same way I learned other mysteries of my inheritance. Claudine Price—a thirty-six-year-old mother of six living in a four-room, tenement-style apartment in Harlem—is no-nonsense and disciplined, with a sharp wit and an almost-buried yearning for tenderness. Diahann Carroll was considered by some to be too glamorous for the title role. The push and pull between the toughness of Claudine’s circumstances and her grace, manifested in her physical beauty but also in her deftness at problem-solving and air of astute competence, is, for me—and, I suspect, for those I love—key to the film’s realism and enduring appeal.

The gulf between my two older siblings and me is so wide, I often say we had different mothers. Mine was in her forties and tired. She wore glasses every day and sat glued to the television when I wanted her to jump and play and talk to me. Theirs went dancing and wore bell-bottoms that cinched in at the waist, and blouses with wide collars and orange paisley patterns. I’d find clues to that other world at the tail ends of conversations, in my sister’s Prince, my brother’s Stevie, my mother’s stack of albums by Sister Sledge and the Isleys. In the earlier time, my grandmother had still been alive and helped Mama with her two children. Then it was only my mother with us, and soon my siblings grew into their own lives.

We were all artists; films and songs and books gave words and color to our longing. When I saw Crooklyn (1994), Spike and Joie Lee’s homage to growing up in the warmth of a Black Brooklyn seventies summer, I searched for the shadows of my siblings: the inside jokes and dance marathons and sidewalk games I’d missed. With Claudine, I was looking for our mother. What did she long for? What had she given up? Did she believe in love? Even though she had us, was she lonely? There are ways in which our mothers resist being seen.

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It was mostly for jobs that Black people had fled the rural South for New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and other cities in the North and Midwest, and on the West Coast, starting in the early twentieth century. But it was also for a chance at a humane life. With two girls and a boy younger than five years old, my grandmother left her farm in Clarksdale, Mississippi, for work in Chicago and Detroit before settling, ultimately, in Memphis. In our family’s oral tradition, it was the murder of her older brother, a landowner who’d come to town on his own horse, drawing the ire and jealous attention of white residents, that sent her packing. City life, however, offered no rest. “The buildings are old and in desperate need of repair, the streets are crowded and dirty, there are too many human beings per square block,” writes James Baldwin in a 1948 essay on Harlem. Originally Lenape land, settled by the Dutch in the seventeenth century, and eventually stretching from 110th Street up to the Harlem River, Harlem became a locus of African American cultural life after the First World War. By the twenties, it was home to the nation’s largest concentration of Black people. An artistic flowering there—Bessie Smith’s singing at the Lafayette Theatre on 132nd Street; Gladys Bentley’s shows at Harry Hansberry’s Clam House on 133rd; A’Lelia Walker’s parties on 136th—gave birth to the music and dance of the modern world. By the thirties, the opulence seen in James Van Der Zee’s photos, the furs and lace adornments and well-oiled Model Ts, would vanish.

In the late winter of 1935, a worker at a white-owned Harlem five-and-dime store apprehended a sixteen-year-old Black Puerto Rican boy for shoplifting; a demonstration started outside the building, and crowds destroyed the edifices of several other white-owned stores. On an August evening in 1943, a white police officer tried to arrest a Black woman near a hotel at 126th and Eighth Avenue when she, according to the Daily News, grew “loud and boisterous.” A Black soldier intervened and ended up shot, wounded, and admitted to the Sydenham Hospital. Rumors claimed he’d been murdered. Crowds gathered outside of the hotel and the hospital and erupted; some broke windows and burned the buildings of businesses owned by whites. Hundreds of people were injured; six were killed. “If an outbreak of more than usual violence occurs, as in 1935 or in 1943,” Baldwin writes, “it is met with sorrow and surprise and rage . . . speeches are made, committees are set up, investigations ensue. Steps are taken to right the wrong, without, however, expanding or demolishing the ghetto.”

In the mid- to late sixties, uprisings flamed in Watts; Newark, New Jersey; Cleveland; and Detroit. The Kerner Commission Report, compiled by a panel appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, blamed the social unrest on aggressive, occupying police forces; deplorable housing conditions; and the misrepresentation of African Americans in the media.

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