Blue Patches With Rubber Tips, Bearing the Crutch

"It doesn't have to be a death sentence," --Megan Crowley

It is difficult to adjudicate A Patch of Blue against contemporary standards without viewing it as a public service announcement to maintain silence in the face of differences between ethnic groups not altogether superficial. I must have seen the film a half dozen times, find the echo of my own reactionary fear in Shelley Winters and her recriminating castigation, calling Poitier your black buck, play acting the white trash of which I am a little embodied, or Poitier’s containment of the blind girl’s unintentional disruption, when she nearly topples the fruit pyramid in the supermarket, and yet the movie filters through me like a light urine stream right before a major stool struggle, the arc of the narrative dissipates, leaving behind the poignancy of a connection between a disabled woman and a black man essentially teaching her how to adapt, never actualized, because Poitier’s character realizes the girl’s feelings are based in part on a sheltered dependency. In North Philadelphia, there was, in fact, a blind woman beaten daily and traumatically by a black husband. The dowager was the unfortunate observer of her caramelized face browbeat by crisis counselors and patrol officers, and she disappeared before I relocated to Race Street, a most likely death sentence to an inevitable probable cause, lest you continue to marvel about the scars of the lioness breathing more shallowly beneath my ribs, and so we come full circle, back to my initial rebellion, planting myself in the inner city solely on the basis of a lust to live. To my sensibilities of enduring interior conflict, Shane, (ahem) the paraprofessional tending my shriveled wings, is sexually attractive, and makes me realize what happiness I might have had with such strength as his, and it is rather unfair to discover this, tottering on the brink of  a final weakness towards helplessness I cannot defeat, that the right degree of masculinity ignites my passion, the very will to live, after years of absorbing everything of the emotional pain I’ve written about to my audience. Part of me says to hell with the stigma, and wants to win him despite what I am, despite what he sees every day, and consume him. But I am playing tic tac toe with an aging woman’s embers. He is not the true target, simply a man I like using his strong shoulders as a bulwark for a spastic quadriplegic who was never loved as she wished, with her reactionary anarchist already looking down her nose at having fun with such tensions. It would never work between us, and I know it already because it isn’t a last act of love, merely defiance, fooling yourself the hormones still work in secret. We could not succeed as a couple, as equals in the dynamic of society’s fabric, in any sense. I cannot embrace his world, having sustained such damage in it, any more than he could embrace mine—the world from which I fled, deluding myself in relation to liberal sanctity. Yet I do like him, his energetic man child smile, clinging to him more than a little, like Amy Adams defying narrative frameworks with mystical orthography that eddies linear time. Like the actress, I too ply her thematic imperative, of calling out, “Come back to me,” the life I see as so fulfilling, married to a kindred heart. What sort of love letter is this? One that knows Miss Crowley is in need of a market correction.