"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.
Wow that was dope!
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