On Dave Chappelle’s Shout Out to My Fifth Grade Teacher, the Mother of Emmett Till
I wasn’t expecting two things from the newest Dave Chappelle special on Netflix. And let me give you a huge SPOILER ALERT right here, if you haven’t seen it. I’m about to spill some “secrets.” I have to. Sorry.
Anyway, first, I didn’t expect him to totally teach the same lesson I’d gotten from my Hopi friends and in laws about Trump awhile back: that sometimes the worst things turn out for the best and teach us the most.
See, nothing rattles Hopis all that much. Whatever happens, they examine it carefully, dig down deep to find the “gift” in it, give thanks for it, and move on.
You have to remember that they’re the descendants of clans who ran off from huge, advanced but often brutal pre-Columbian civilizations to find the most inhospitable place in what would become North America to live in.
Deliberately.
The point was to always be pushed to the limit. To always be grateful just to survive each day. And to therefore be constantly and intentionally aware, from experience, that pain always eventually blesses. And strengthens.
Dave said the same thing, sort of, as he recounted his experiences last year when he said some things that seemed almost “pro-Trump” to many of his fans. Now, I heard that clearly the first time, but he took a beating for it on social media and from the press.
So he cleared that up. I hope. I’m surprised he even tried, but I’m glad he did it so beautifully once he decided to.
The second thing I didn’t expect was to hear him link that crazy punch line he gave right at the beginning of the whole special — “Punch her in the pussy” — to the lynching of Emmett Till, the teenage son of my fifth grade teacher.
It’s a strange moment, actually. A poignant pause toward the end in which Dave feels compelled, again, to explain how even someone as evil as the woman who lied about Emmett whistling at her, and kept that lie a secret until she was laying in her death bed, can be a catalyst that leads to something profound and good. Like kicking the Civil Rights Movement into high gear.
A bunch of bastards lynched a child because of that lie. And his mother, my teacher, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted that her son’s casket be left open and that his hideously deformed body be seen just as it was found. Bloated, battered beyond recognition.
I still, after all these years, cannot look at the photos of that boy’s body — you won’t see that here, either. Google it if you want to. Whenever I have to find a photo of her or Emmett, I cringe, cover my eyes, and peek through the Google results as quickly as I can.
But those pictures, as Dave explains, changed the world. Mamie made sure — Google her, too. She was amazing.
And I had the profound honor of being one of her students. And to be relentlessly reminded that I had a duty to get out there on the front lines and do the work her son hadn’t lived long enough to do. To have the life she’d hoped he would have. To make her as proud of us as she wanted to be of him.
She was “gangsta,” as Dave said. Strongest, most articulate and most inspiring person I have ever met. Bar none.
And as I sat there listening to him honor her so proudly, I smiled. And then, when he hit that punch line, using it to explain what he would do to the woman who told that awful, lethal lie, if she ever came back from the dead (thank her and then kick her in that pussy) I laughed my ass off.
Not sure Mamie would have. Words like “pussy” were most definitely not allowed in her classroom or our vocabularies. She used to constantly remind us that the world expected us to use street slang instead of SAT words. But she wanted us to speak even better English than most white people we met.
So if you cussed in front of Mamie, she made sure you felt so guilty about it that you never, ever did it again.
But I forgave Dave immediately. Because he’d given the whole world a history lesson she just might have approved of. And proved, also, that he’s way ahead of the people who tore into him a while back. He sees that “big picture.”
The “God’s eye view,” someone I know once called it. Let me explain it this way.
When I was a little girl back in Chicago, my favorite thing to do was to go the the Art Institute and “play with” the Georges Seurat painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.
If you run up to it, you can see all the tiny dots it’s made of. In fact, the closer you get, the more “out of focus” it goes. And I would get up so close that it stopped being a picture and became just a collection of dots.
Now, that friend of mine said that that’s how we see things, we mere mortals. One dot, two dots, a few dots in the whole universal scheme of things. And it looks pretty chaotic from where we stand.
But God’s sees the whole picture. Like Dave. And my Hopi family and friends. And a few other really cool people you probably know, also, but I’m talking about those ones right now.
Trump doesn’t see it. But he’s forcing the rest of us to try.
And Dave…well, he knew it from jump.
So thanks, Dave. From one of Mamie’s “other” kids.
You’re pretty gangsta yourself.
