"Gee Brown boy/I loves you all over...Take my hand and I will read you poetry...Fill your throat up with laughter and your heartwith song..."Harlem Renaissance poet Helene Johnson (Giddings, 1988; p.185).The first Black screen goddess, Nina McKinney, made her debut as "Chick" in King Vidor's musical Hallelujah (1929). Hallelujah took as its theme the age-old problem of the good colored boy gone bad and the battle between the callings of the spirit and the temptations of the flesh (Bogle, 1973; p. 29).The film opens on the idyllic little Johnson farm, where the family -- Pappy Johnson,Mammy, their adopted daughter, Missy Rose, their eldest son Zeke, and their youngerboys -- energetically gather the cotton harvest. Nearing the last rows the group burstinto song, singing to the heavens...Good gentle folk, the Johnsons are pictured as sereneand uncomplicated -- as long as their baser instincts are keep in check. When these areunleashed, however, trouble's a -brewin'! (Bogle, 1973; p. 29).Director's King Vidor’s portrayal of Black folks was both racist and sexist. And the characters he portrayed in Hallelujah were depictions not based on real people -- but hallucinations based upon his fantasies. Thus their problems did not spring from oppression, but from their own animal instincts gone awry.This same surrealistic approach was used to create "Chick" -- a character conjured from Vidor's imaginings. She was his dark meat fantasy. Vidor would pull this same stunt with Native American women in Duel in the Sun (1946) -- branded in “Lust in the Dust” by facetious film critics. For Vidor women, sexual women -- and by definition this meant any woman of color -- were the embodiment of evil and the foil of mankind: the gateway that opened the door to mankind's base instincts.Chick is trouble in paradise. She is Vidor's dark Eve.Chick is a liar and a cheat. She is also a mulatto and thus a woman at war with herself. Her white half represented her spiritual aspect, the black half the animalistic side of her nature (Bogle, 1973). Against Chick's simmering sexuality Vidor placed Hallelujah's good girls: Zeke's childlike asexual true love Missy Rose, and American mythology’s own special blend of mother-virgin, Mammy; who is also asexual. Everyone even her man, calls her "Mammy."African American and White liberal critics did not take kindly to Vidor's portrayal of Black folks. One letter to the editor of a Black paper charged that Vidor's "filthy hands were reeking with prejudice" (Leab, 1975; p. 93). Another writer referred to the movies insulting "niggarisms" (Leab, 1975; p.93).Tragically, King Vidor's intention was to create a film that would dramatically break from Hollywood's mythology of Black Americans. Yet Hallelujah was little more than a remake of Birth of a Nation with Chick starring as the uppity negress.As the British critic John Grierson later remarked: "I note from a publicity puffthat King Vidor freed the Negro from misunderstanding just as Abe Lincolnfreed him from slavery. Both statements are exaggerated" (Leab. 1975; p. 93).Copyright Valjeanne Jeffers-Thompson 1997Valjeanne Jeffers 2009 all rights reserved
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