PROSE POETRY
I Loved Miss Dorothy And Other Troubled 1950’s Black Starlets
The black female racist experience of stardom
She filled movie scenes with allure and intrigue. She’s like the film noir woman — the one who lurks around for a desperate, love-starved gumshoe detective, hired to fix everything that needs fixing.
Did anyone notice her ebony skin floating in a sea of placid, poetic white winter snow starlets, where men dream dreams about their presence, dreams so endless it would take a crane to wake them.
Natalie would make the heart do what it do, skipping a beat as men raced in defeat. Jane’s porpoise proportions, swam silently in the insane waters of the male melancholic brain.
Marilyn, charmed in step with her intelligible eyes, peppered with strokes of mellow summer sunshine, while white leading ladies like her, are the pandering ones men value, their pale perfect faces of perfection, never looking inward into the sadness and pain, silently projected onto movie scenes, the ones who seem seemingly perfect, but imperfect, their fine, fragile flaws showcased like rivers of wrinkles, the flow of today’s Botox could forever hide.
The darker stars, collided in brown cloves of attractiveness, eyes remembering the cloak of racism surrounding their necks, it rages beneath like deep, vast ocean currents in choppy, steamy waters.
She wasn’t kissed as passionately as her lovely, whiter counterparts; her golden lips gave way to orange lipstick drippings on a hot summer day. She was Carmen Jones and whomever she needed to play in the movies. She longed for stardust stardom, the way her perky, pearly skinned counterparts could easily muster. She was the color of coffee as it stains, her grinds thrown away like discarded flowers dead in a clear crystal vase.
Her darken, dusty mountainous terrains was climbed, hiked, and stepped over. I loved Miss Dorothy anyway. I wondered why people didn’t see the loveliness behind her intelligent, glanced stare, her perennial flair, flourishing like a lost pink flower rising up despite some concrete, planted to diminish it.
Her wise, graceful gaze seemed distasteful to some yet brilliant to others. The colored, as black people were labeled then, struggled with the perception of color. It was a different, difficult, and draining time to be a black female starlet in the 50’s, never waving America’s flag in the process.
They say color doesn’t matter, but in this world, it did. It shouldn’t matter, when raw beauty and talent was ravaged in scene after scene, flying at us like a bald eagle soaring in the blackness of the night. Josephine, Diahann, Pearl, Lena, and Nina Mae.
Today. Hallie, Viola, Angela, Kerry, and Peta. Some you know. Some you may not know. But Dorothy paved the yellow brick road for those still stiffened by race, over the rainbow of her quenched desires. Troubled by color, which she no control over, as God makes each tree separate from the others, yet shaded in his hues of various greens.
Does it matter the skin of race, if the same dreams are chased? Dorothy is now long gone now. But many continue walking in her legacy, despite it all.
