SPRING 2010

ESSAYS

Ishmael Reed: Have you read the The Help? by Kathryn Stockett?

Terry McMillan: She can write. I’m reading it. I bought it.

Ishmael Reed: Well, she’s got fresh material about how White women in the South think about Black women.

Terry McMillan: I have a problem with that book.

Ishmael Reed: The dialect? Is it pretty bad?

Terry McMillan: When White people read it, they think it is “spot on” as they would say. Not only that, but what really annoyed me is when a White person writes a book from Black characters’ points-of-view it gets on the best sellers list. Then you have Black people writing about the same thing and they can’t get a deal. They can’t get a book contract. People who are writing about our world and our lives. I mean I give the girl [Stockett] credit because it is brave what she did.

Ishmael Reed: Well, let me ask you something. Do the critics know the difference between the fake and what’s real?

Terry McMillan: What do you mean?

Ishmael Reed: Times’ critic Michiko Kakutani fell for this fake book, Love Or Consequences by Margaret Seltzer, about how the author grew up in a gang environment. The author got a $100,000 advance. Michiko Kakutani gave it a rave.

Terry McMillan: And they found out she made it all up. That’s what I’m trying to say. I read the first forty pages of The Help. As a Black writer, I wouldn’t think of writing a book with that title.HH My agent asked me, “Terry, are you going read The Help?” I couldn’t read the book. It wouldn’t even work. I wonder why White people that deal with Black characters for the most part don’t even have pictures of Black people on the cover? In The Help you got birds. In The Secret Life of Bees you got bees when most of the characters are black. When my next book comes out I’m going to have birds and bees on the cover.

Ishmael Reed: So what are you working on now?

Terry McMillan: I just finished a book.

Ishmael Reed: What is it about?

Terry McMillan: It (Getting To Happy, pub. in Sept.2010) is about the women from Waiting to Exhale fifteen years later. The women are in their fifties. It was kind of by accident. I didn’t do it intentionally.

Ishmael Reed: So, what’s happening with them?

Terry McMillan: The women?

Ishmael Reed: Yeah.

Terry McMillan: They are dealing with real life issues.

Ishmael Reed: Like what?

Terry McMillan: Many. They are dealing with various forms of loss. One woman loses her husband. One woman has never been married and she is a single mother. One women lost her job after eighteen years of employment and she was kicked to the curb. She doesn’t think she will find another man. Another one was conned by her second husband years ago.

Ishmael Reed: How did he con her?

Terry McMillan: He was already married to somebody else. He pretended to be a Civil Rights attorney. He was living a double life. His other wife was the one who busted him. Let her know. She had difficulty getting over it and so she started popping pills to deal with it. One of them is dealing with a marriage--she didn’t get married until forty-two-- or something like that, and she married a really cool guy, but he was boring. She has to decide at fifty-one or whatever to get a divorce, but her family thinks it is stupid at fifty-one years of age to be running around. “You ain’t Beyoncé, honey,” they say. But she does it, anyway. But it’s kind of cool and it’s sort of what they’ve had to learn what to do, making adjustments in their lives.

Ishmael Reed: Are these middle class women?

Terry McMillan: Yeah. The one who got conned, her husband kind of took her to the cleaners, so she is in trouble. She doesn’t want her friends to know. She doesn’t want everybody to know.

Ishmael Reed: That she has downsized?

Terry McMillan: Well, she has already downsized.

Ishmael Reed: How?

Terry McMillan: No more BMWs.

Tennessee Reed: A Hoopty?

Terry McMillan: No. She has an eight year old Tahoe or something like that.

Ishmael Reed: How do her friends treat her?
Terry McMillan: They don’t treat her any different. They know that she is going through something, though. She is going to rehab. She doesn’t really want their help because they are all going through something. They are middle class. They aren’t rich.

Tennessee Reed: What about the woman who had the heart attack?

Terry McMillan: That’s Gloria.

Tennessee Reed: What about the one who had the gay husband?

Terry McMillan:   I think that was Gloria. He’s not in this book.

Ishmael Reed: How many characters do you have in this book?

Terry McMillan: Probably about six, seven. They have kids. They have teenage daughters. One is a mixed child. I mean it just worked out this way.

Ishmael Reed: I saw this movie by Tyler Perry called “Meet the Browns.” Angela Bassett was in there. Why would they have these stereotypical characters? Like “Precious.” Angela Bassett is a great actor.

Terry McMillan: She needed the paycheck.

Ishmael Reed: “Precious” was marketed to Whites, too.

Terry McMillan: Of course it was.

Ishmael Reed: They wrote off the Black market.

Terry McMillan:   They didn’t care. I know a lot of Black people who refused to see that film. I didn’t want to see it because I remember the book and I had respect for Sapphire as a poet; I read with her in London.

Ishmael Reed: What kind of reception did she get in London?

Terry McMillan: She scared the daylights out of everybody. She was angry.

Ishmael Reed: She got $500,000 from Knopf. They published Push and American Dream. The people who did “Precious” were inspired by “The Color Purple.” They took it a step further.The
mother is a pedophile.

Terry McMillan: Well, all I can say is that it is disturbing and it really makes me angry.

Ishmael Reed: The 90’s was the decade when Black people bought a lot of books. What happened?

Terry McMillan: Well, people didn’t want to buy all of that ghetto stuff.

Ishmael Reed: What gangbanging? Urban fiction? Chic Lit?

Terry McMillan: Same thing.

Ishmael Reed: Did they get a lot of money?

Terry McMillan: No. It was quite the opposite. Some of them self publish.

Ishmael Reed: None of them got money?

Terry McMillan: I’m talking about before urban ghetto victimization. People changed that. It’s almost like writers are being pimped. You had a lot of people right out of prison writing their own stories and others who got out of prison and started their own publishing companies. Unfortunately, none of them knew anything about editing, so you had these poorly written books. They still are. Some of them have gotten better, but they still glorify--it’s almost the opposite of films and books like Push, --I mean they glorify violence and sex people get killed.Murdered. There are just so many ways you can give a blow job, but every other page is someone on a pole, and somebody is doing this or that person. They are trying to become more professional, but there are so many of them, they cancel each other out.

Ishmael Reed: Do people buy these books?

Terry McMillan: Some do, but not as many as people think. I remember seeing a Barnes & Noble on 6th Avenue and 22nd Street. They would pull up in their trucks and sell them right in front of the store. They would sell those books; who liked them? White men. There’s nothing but naked Black women on the cover. They love the cover of these books. Every single one of them has nothing but Black women showing all of their body. They don’t have on any clothes. That’s what got on my nerves. Even at Barnes & Noble, at the end of each aisle, they had them all stacked up.

Ishmael Reed: Well, they are Black porno. Porno and violence.

Terry McMillan: That’s it. Some of them live in the Bay Area. I’m not saying any names.

Ishmael Reed: When Blanche (Blanche Richardson, Manager of Marcus Bookstore in Oakland) got robbed they stole those books. They stole those kinds of books. All of these Black bookstores are in trouble.

Terry McMillan: I tried to help them as much as I could. Over the years.

Ishmael Reed: Yeah, I know.

Terry McMillan: No, you don’t know. And now it is just really bad. People think it’s the economy. I don’t think it’s the economy. I think part of it is a backlash. All of these publishers are owned by damn near the same company with all of these buyouts and takeovers and all of this and when they clamp down, they change their plans. They let people go, and back during Waiting to Exhale there weren’t enough bookstores. There were three in New York City and there was Emma Roberts down in Dallas. They are all in trouble. I try to help out as much as I can.

Ishmael Reed: Where do you think people spend their money?

Terry McMillan: Gas, electricity, and the Depression.

Ishmael Reed: We have a Black president.

Terry McMillan: Yeah, I know we have a Black president, but he’s not a magician. I don’t want to get on Barack Obama today because I have a lot of respect for him. I don’t care what anybody else says.

Ishmael Reed: Have you met him?

Terry McMillan: Yeah.

Ishmael Reed: What is your impression of him?

Terry McMillan: I like him. I think he’s brilliant. I think he’s very smart and he gets it. I think he’s an idealist and he took on burdens that someone else had created. The country was screwed up when he came into office. They couldn’t pick a better time for a Black man to come into office to be president.

Ishmael Reed: He saved them from a Depression.

Terry McMillan: And he’s going to save them from a lot more.

Ishmael Reed: These progressives are worse than the right wing.

Terry McMillan: I saw Danny Glover opening up his big mouth.

Ishmael Reed: The Academy of Motion Picture establishment is White. Why can’t he change that? Why can’t Danny Glover, Denzel Washington and Samuel Jackson change that?

Terry McMillan: I don’t know-- I think that--I pissed my agent off. She asked me about The Help and I went off on her. She was surprised. I said, “Its racist. The same thing is happening in publishing. It’s just not about me.” I explained to her that The Help right up there with Push.  When we show our pathology White people get a kick out of it. They see it as art. But write about struggling to pay the rent or we have the same struggles as everybody else, and that’s boring. We want to tell our own stories and the industry doesn’t want to embrace it. You know, I see a lot of hypocrisy out here, you know. I do not need anybody pointing out to me the hypocrisy. The Help is about guilt about Black nannies taking care of White babies. Who better than a White person to write this? White people like the book. Black people are offended by it. There’s going to be a movie.

Ishmael Reed: What? Which Black actor would perform in such a movie? Who wants to see such a movie?

Terry McMillan: You’ll see. Anybody who is behind in their mortgage. They just bought movie rights for my new book. The big thing is, because people assume I know these actors, “Can you get me a…” and I say, “No, I don’t talk to those people.” A lot of what is important to them is not important to me.

Ishmael Reed: What is important to them?

Terry McMillan: Getting a movie role. I can’t speak for everybody, but they don’t have any roles. Just like in publishing. A lot of this stuff doesn’t make sense. I’m not buying it. When I saw “Precious” I complained. I said I couldn’t think of a single Black mother who would treat her children that way or watch their daughter raped, sodomized or whatever by her boyfriend. That’s just unrealistic. And I know people who have been abused all kinds of ways. This film took it too far. Her mother throws frying pans at her and tells her she ain’t shit.  Sapphire stockpiled all of the stories that she heard when she worked in one of these places. She took these characters and put them all under one roof. I know some people are abused. Sapphire looks scary to me. I’ll put it this way. I don’t even know how to say this, but I wanted to walk out of that movie quite a few times.

Ishmael Reed: How many people were present at the theater when you saw it?

Terry McMillan: Not many. I said, you know what, every stereotype, a little girl--Black obese girl from the ghetto, who is illiterate, with a Mongoloid child. She walks away with two babies. She has AIDS. And she’s walking off into the sunset.She went around the corner to another project. Everybody who helped saved her was of mixed race, or white. I have nothing against biracial people.