I loved this. It made me reflect on some of my favorite movies from my childhood to see if my projected self had changed at all.
One of my all-time favorite movies is Sparkle. Sparkle has all the elements of a Tressie Movie. There are girl singers, sparkly dresses, a man with sideburns, and some August Wilson-esque slice of black life narrative. There is also a soundtrack produced by Curtis Mayfield and sang (on the wax version) by Aretha Franklin. I double-dog dare you to top that.
The cinematography is awful. It’s Belly awful. The move is so dark in some scenes you aren’t sure which characters are in the scene.
But the film has some of the best actors of a generation: Lonette McKee, Dorian Harewood, Irene Cara and Philip Michael Thomas’ hair. The film is a rags-to-riches story of a family singing group derailed by drug use. It doesn’t get more trite than that except the performances make this a different kind of story. Sister, the one with the pipes and the star power, is a pretty black girl in 1960s Harlem when that is dangerous. She wants to be a glamour queen at a time when there isn’t a market for glamourous black girls. She finds the trappings of glamour with a local drug dealer, Satin. Satin beats Sister when her beauty is inconveniently trapped in a human with needs, wants and thoughts. Along the way Sister develops a drug habit — heroine, the drug of choice in 1960s Harlem.
You can probably guess how this ends. But along the way, there is a scene where the girls’ mother Effie tries to save Sister from herself. It’s an icon (Mary Alice) giving an iconic performance. In about 15 lines of taut dialogue and epic acting, Effie tells Sister that she’s lived in Harlem all her life and she knows a gutter rat when she sees one. Satin is a gutter rat of the slickly dressed variety. Effie doesn’t have blinders on. She knows her daughter’s drug habit is eating her alive and Satin will likely kill her child. Sister rejects her mother’s claim crying, “Momma, Satin is as big time as it gets.”
Big time. When I was 10 or 11 years old I thought Satin was some kind of record producer. The drug angle was kind of lost on me. By age 15 or 16 I caught on to the drug bit. Even then, I was rooting for a record deal to save Sister and maybe even for Satin to come around. I loved Effie’s performance in that scene but I could only really see Sister. I cheered for her. I hoped she would get her happily ever after. I rewrote the movie ending in my mind a thousand times. I thought the movie was about Sister when it was a movie about Harlem.
When I taught one of my first classes years ago I mentioned that Sparkle is one of my favorite movies of all-time. My students bought me the DVD as a gift. That was no small feat. This was before Amazon and getting an outdated black film took some serious searching.
I watched the movie as a young adult with a string of relationships and hopes behind me. This time, when Effie tells Sister about gutter rats in Harlem, I could only see Effie. She is telling Sister about the history of a place and a black woman’s place in it. There is no glamour for pretty brown girls in Harlem, not even one as pretty or talented as Sister. Effie is setting a ceiling on her daughter’s dreams because she loves her. In any other context — or without the context — it’s a harsh parental love. In fact, we might well call it abusive in today’s terms.
But, I understood Effie now. Effie had seen a long line of Satins. Effie had seen the drug before smack and knew there would always be another drug like smack. (I imagine Effie in a version during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic nodding sagely.)
Effie is passing on a narrative to Sister about race and gender and place and history. It is about Sister but it is about more than Sister.
Actress Sheryl Lee Ralph tells a story. Ralph is stacked like free pancake day at IHOP. She dances, acts and sings. She is an original Dreamgirl. According to Ralph a casting director once told her:
“Everybody knows that you’re talented and beautiful but what do we do with a talented, beautiful Black girl? Do we cast you in a movie with Tom Cruise? Do you kiss? Who goes to see THAT movie?”
Effie was trying to tell Sister that was the world she had been bequeathed. Sister could not deal. She wanted a love to save her and as a kid I got that. Looking at Sparkle with fresh eyes, I’m more interested in what Effie was channeling. The entire movie changes when I realize that I am rooting for Effie even as I keep rewriting an ending for Sister.
