Robert Charles: Portrait of Fury

While exploring an antebellum house in Vicksburg, Mississippi, over forty years ago, I came upon a ‘crazy quilt’ covering a four-poster bed. The quilt was pieced together with many-colored triangles, rectangles, and no-name angles. From the seemingly random union of the various shapes, held together by a common thread, came the beauty of the whole cloth. Knowing the folklore of crazy quilts, my imagination began to create the quilt’s story. I gave faces and voices to the many hands that stitched lovingly at the present for a friend. Each woman brought cloth cut in her own design to the quilting circle, where the group shuffled and shifted the many pieces to find the perfect fit. Unlike a jigsaw puzzle, that begins with the picture, is divided, and then rejoined, this creation found form in the process.

Later that same afternoon I saw a crazy quilt displayed in slaves’ living quarters. The sign accompanying the quilt indicated that this quilt most likely was sewn by slave women. Seeing this quilt in contrast to the one in the slave owner’s home, my imagination took off in a completely different direction, trying to picture and empathize with the lives of human beings originally torn from their homes an ocean away, held in captivity and denied human rights, and dehumanized by the people in power who were of a different race, ethnicity, and culture.
My imagination didn’t stop, and I began wondering how a quilt would appear if it was made by both American blacks — most of whose stories were born from American slavery — and whites, who automatically have privilege over their black sisters and brothers based solely on their skin color. The story of the people who made the quilt given to a member of the slave-owner’s family began with slavery as well, since the first blacks were brought forcibly to our “new world” in 1619 to serve America’s oldest colony. I asked myself, “How can blacks and whites in our nation tell their own stories without knowing — and understanding — the stories of other people with whom their own lives intertwine?” The same applies to every other culture that has helped and is helping to create the United States of America.

“Robert Charles: Portrait of Fury” is my first crazy quilt. The research and interviews I conducted while writing this screenplay represent my knowledge, experiences, perspectives, and self awareness — as well as those of others — joined together by the thread of my language. I brought together seemingly incompatible ideas and disciplines into a pattern that is unique to me. Much of what I learned about what it is like to be black in America came from literature. With the help of writers such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison I gained a deeper understanding of the personal issues involved with black identity. What I learned from these men and women was enhanced by the history I have studied. I could put their tales in the proper context, that of both the story’s historical context and that of the writer as well. I spiced up my experience with a personal study of African American folklore, both reading what scholars had written and introducing myself to African Americans born in the late 1800s and interviewing them. Finally, I have learned from both scientific information, where truth is discovered through non-biased methodology, as well as knowledge acquired through life experience. Just as I consider both black and white perspectives to be expressions of humanity, I see the apparent opposites of science and personal stories as necessary to gain a universal truth of our shared reality.

I do want to make clear that I will never fully understand what it is to be black in the United States. I was born with white skin, which automatically provides every white, non-Hispanic person a privilege that people of color have never had in our nation. I have not lived through what blacks have experienced; therefore, our perspectives will differ. Just as a man cannot really know what it is to be a woman, a non-LGBTQ individual cannot fully understand the incredible challenges an LGBTQ person goes through in developing self identity, a family that has never had to worry about a roof over their heads or food on their tables cannot speak to the fear and shame homelessness and hunger can bring, or a person who has never been diagnosed with depression or another mental illness cannot feel what it’s like to be in the dark, deep pit of despair where hope, light, and self love do not reside, as a white person I can only hope to gain greater understanding of blacks’ experiences, feelings, and perspectives by reading, researching, observing, and talking to the people who have been through these experiences.
As historian Wendell Berry wrote in his book, “The Hidden Wound,”: “…in an effort to live meaningfully and decently in America, white [people] simply cannot learn all that [they need] to know from other American [whites]. …It may be the most significant irony in our history that racism, by dividing the two races, has made them not separate but in a fundamental way inseparable, not independent but dependent on each other, incomplete without each other, each needing desperately to understand and make use of the experience of the other.”

As I approached my 60s, I began to realize that in order to feel complete as a writer, I am “…needing desperately to understand and make use of the experience of the other.” I continue to try understanding love and hate, whites and people of color, all gender identities and sexual orientations, young and old, healthy and unwell, poor and rich, and my list continues. Each new experience I have, bit of knowledge I gain, question I ask, challenge I resolve, and person I meet is interwoven in the fabric of my life. It is my hope that this fabric, through my writing, will represent truthfully the beautiful diversity of the USA and be enjoyed by individuals walking down the many different paths that is our nation.