Copyright: Lucinda Roy, 2021
Black Brits Matter Too: A Personal Response to Steve McQueen’s Small Axe
March 2021
My husband and I watch “Mangrove,” the first episode of Steve McQueen’s Amazon/BBC anthology series “Small Axe.” My husband is a Black American. I have American citizenship, but my roots are Black-British, West Indian—complicated, proud, biracial. In spite of our different upbringings, there are many things my husband and I don’t need to explain to each other. As we watch McQueen’s portrayal of racism in London in the sixties, we flinch at the same time, narrow our eyes at the same words; we grasp the arms of our chairs more tightly at certain points; cuss in unison; grieve, always grieve together when we think about the intransigence of prejudice.
The first episode of McQueen’s new series is called “Mangrove” because it’s named after the restaurant owned by Frank Crichlow (played by Shaun Parkes), who, in real life, endured chronic harassment from Notting Hill police for decades. Along with eight other people of color arrested during a demonstration, Crichlow was tried in the sixties for inciting a riot.
In an ensemble cast, Shaun Parkes as Frank Crichlow rages against the machine. His fury is elemental. He cannot fathom why he’s being harassed merely because he has dared to open a West Indian restaurant in Notting Hill.
As I watch the movie, Parkes reminds me so much of my late father that it’s almost like seeing him resurrected again. It makes “Small Axe” even more mine. But because my Jamaican father died when I was five, I had to get to know him through his paintings, sculptures and novels. Seeing what he may have looked like when he died far too young filled me with longing. My mother always said that West Indians used to flock to our little house in Battersea to hear him speak about politics. Having been obliged to leave school at eight, my Jamaican father educated himself and became a worker in a Brillo factory, a novelist and an artist.
In the blank and pitiless gaze of Frank Crichlow’s antagonist—a police constable who radiates bigotry with a solar, pulsing hatred—we see the distillation of White British racism. The policeman’s body movements are almost robotic; his outbursts of unmitigated hostility are volcanic eruptions. His actions don’t say, “Law and order,” his actions say, “The law is my accomplice.”
Police Constable Frank Pulley (played menacingly by Sam Spruell) is the wall immigrants can’t climb, the helmeted head they can’t see over. He is the copper with the power to cull, should he choose to do so.
As Ashley Clark has pointed out, the first episode of “Small Axe” shatters the popular conception of Notting Hill made famous in the 1999 rom-com starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. Though it’s set some three decades before the Grant-Roberts’ movie, its relevance is immediately apparent.
McQueen doesn’t tell the story in the same visually-innovative way he told Solomon Northup’s story in “12 Years a Slave.” He tells it as if it’s a play. The light- and shadow-filled landscapes of this dialogue-intensive production aren’t of the America’s South, they are the actors’ faces. The camera pauses on them repeatedly so we can savor their reactions.
The settings are few—the tiny Mangrove restaurant where spicy West Indian curries are served, and a spattering of homes are all we see before we enter the courtroom in the Old Bailey during the second half of the movie. The atmosphere is deliberately claustrophobic, with people huddled together in spaces too small to house their yearning.
Everything is at stake. If the accused lose their case they will be imprisoned for years. For the most part, they represent themselves, speak for themselves as the familiar trope of the White Savior movie is usurped by a Black DIY docu-drama. Letitia Wright of Black Panther fame plays the indomitable Altheia Jones-LeCointe. She and Rochenda Sandall, who plays Barbara Beese, speak as powerful females in a movie that invites them onto center stage alongside their male cast members.
“Mangrove” is a multifaceted celebration of the health and endurance of West Indian communities in Britain. Every so often, when the mood takes them and the reggae is irresistible, characters dance with their whole selves. In the street. Out in the open. Music revving them up like fuel, transfiguring their tired limbs into joy. I danced to those reggae tunes. I was even in a reggae band for a brief time. (They enjoyed some success after I left; I put it down to coincidence.)
The role of the camera lens is often likened to point of view in fiction. The comparison is appropriate. But it’s also true that, in the right hands, the camera establishes tone. Tone isn’t simply mood or atmosphere, it’s the creator’s attitude towards the subject matter. When McQueen and his production team show us legs under a table, we see a gathering of a community that refuses, in spite of tremendous pressure, to be divided and conquered. The shot reinforces the idea that each individual doesn’t need to be identified. What’s important is that they’re all in this together.
I grew up in London decades before biracialness was an acceptable characteristic. My White English mother and Black Jamaican father were race pioneers who paid dearly for their alliance but who decided that their Wuthering-Heights-y love story was feisty enough to make prejudice a bit player. They and their golden children (“Half-caste!” “Wog!” “Go back to where you come from!” Go swing on a tree!”) could marginalize prejudice if only we tried hard enough. I heard the word “Wog!”—the British equivalent of the n-word—so frequently as a child that, until an unforgettable incident occurred that changed my mind, I almost convinced myself it didn’t bother me anymore.
Most of us who’ve been called Black Britons were soon taught that the modifier took precedence over the noun, was capable of squashing it to a pulp, in fact.
My brother describes a kind of racial awakening similar to what we’re going through in the U.S. I like the idea that justice matters and the “little people” can win if they persevere. My brother, who comes from Nottingham, the home of Robin Hood, is familiar with happy endings. Outlaw do-gooder Robin Hood is said to have repeatedly thwarted his nefarious nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham. According to legend, wily Robin Hood, the Brer Rabbit of the East Midlands, maintained the upper hand. Robin Hood was White of course. But still…
The school is Belleville Junior Girls School in South London. It’s the sixties. I’m in the playground. I’m young—no more than eight or nine, with two chipped front teeth that make me look like Dracula, a dirty school uniform, and an attitude. I am the only “half-caste” I know well, apart from my siblings. In the treeless playground in what was then, before it became trendy, the underbelly of London, I am in my own world. There’s a boatload of crap a “coloured girl” like me can forget when she seeks refuge inside her imagination.
I look up. A circle of girls has formed around me. They have all joined hands. There must be twenty of them, at least. My best friend, who is White, is among them. I’m not stupid. I’ve always known she was White and I was not, but I hadn’t imagined she knew it as fixedly as this. We’ve pinky sworn. She’s my best friend. Her ponytail swings as she moves.
I don’t have a ponytail that swings. My hair is disobedient. It does whatever the hell it wants on the top of my head. The wind doesn’t move it. It needs taming, according to the advertisements on TV, but I’ve told myself that Little Joe on Bonanza loves it just the way it is. Flakes of dandruff confetti my hair because e shampoo isn’t cheap and we don’t have a bath, just one sink for all four of us, and kettle-boiled hot water, and that’s the problem. Most of the other girls live in luxury. Most have bathrooms and bottle after bottle of shampoo.
In keeping with the rhythm of their stomping feet, the girls in uniform shout, “WOG! WOG! WOG!” as they circle me. That monosyllable equals me. That slap, that fist, that bullet. I have been called a wog before many times, so it’s not the refrain itself that shocks me. What shocks me is the intensity of the White girls’ emotion, how they move together as a single writhing entity over the asphalt.
Decades later, in a poem-spell I wrote to exorcise myself from the Circle, I said I thought at first they were playing “The Farmer’s in the Den.” But it’s more likely I thought something like this, even though I couldn’t have put it into words: “This is what murder looks like. These girls are a noose.”
The Circle broke up after a while. I would like to say it was because the girls regretted their actions, but my sense is they got bored.
The ambush didn’t stop me from loving my best friend, who was a good person, I realized later. Her only failing: she was more afraid of opposing a tsunami of racism than she was of opposing me, her best friend. She must have known I’d keep on loving her. She was only a child after all.
We never spoke about the White Circle. For decades, I never told a soul about it. One of the most insidious aspects of prejudice is that victims sometimes assume that violations like these are their shame to carry. It’s a trick people play on us and it must be overcome by the counter-spells we make as writers, movie makers, and artists.
Racism is always in a state of readiness, eager to be reborn. We are most at risk when we forget this. And if, as some critics have said, there are times when McQueen’s rendition in Small Axe is didactic, perhaps there are also times when stuff needs to be handed down in a way that does justice to the passion and experience of the creator? Perhaps that experience differs so substantially from that of most majority writers that the tone and mode of delivery has to be different too?
Survival stories have an urgency in African Diasporic culture that is different from the kinds of ironic, dispassionate explorations commonly found in work by those who enjoy artistic and personal security.
The most hopeful moment in “Mangrove” occurs when the jury makes its ruling. We expect to see the faces of the jurors as the verdict is delivered. Or maybe the face of the judge. Or perhaps the faces of the nine accused, herded together in a dock barely large enough to hold them, inside a courtroom whose hierarchical architecture—the court as amphitheater, the accused in a pen-like enclosure, the gallery tiny, tight, and ticketed.
But McQueen doesn’t go with any of these options. Throughout the movie-length episode, he wants viewers to look long and hard at unapologetic, prideful, angry faces. He wants us to love Blackness even when it’s livid about the injustice in the world. By this point, the question isn’t “Why are they so angry?” The question is, “Who has the right not to be angry when there is so much injustice in the world?”
As the verdict is read, the camera has a single close-up of one face only: the face of the restaurant owner whose harassment at the hands of racist police officers was supposed to bring him to his knees. When I see it, I think that his face, shot through with astonishment when the verdict comes down, is as lovely-dark as my late father’s face.
The camera watches Frank Crichlow as intently as Constable Pulley has watched him all through this two-hour episode. But it’s different this time around. This time, the gaze belongs to us. In the U.K. and the U.S., we have yet to determine what we want to do with it.
Novelist and poet Lucinda Roy’s speculative slave narrative THE FREEDOM RACE, Volume I of THE DREAMBIRD CHRONICLES series, is forthcoming in July 2021 by Tor/Macmillan.
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