Green Book is based on real people, real events. It’s really about two characters: Tony “Lip” Vallelonga, famous for dealing with trouble, from a clannish Italian family in the Bronx ; Dr Donald Shirley, classical pianist from aspirational Jamaican parents, who’s grown up in an airy-fairy virtuoso-land, and happens to be black. In the course of a concert-tour road trip, their mutual awkwardness and antipathy gradually softens to a deep bond of trust and friendship. In the real world of today, the surviving Shirleys deny the existence of that friendship, don’t believe that Don Shirley gave his blessing to the movie just before he died, and claim a string of other factual errors†. Obviously, movies have to be dramatized somehow. Not even memory achieves that, or the recounting of dreams. And everybody likes the film, even critics who call it “problematic‡” or bandy that great shibboleth “racism”.
We came out with one over-riding impression, that what connected Tony Lip and Don Shirely after all they’d been through together—the humiliations, discomforts, scares, outbursts of violence, police injustice and moments of triumph—was an awareness of their equal vulnerability as rejected outsiders. And we saw that prejudice easily infects anyone, no matter who you are. There isn’t some permanent imbalance where you can generalize about white and black. At any rate that’s how it appears to us: one white educated Brit, one black educated Jamaican-turned-Brit.
And as for “racism”, I’d like to add my own perspective on those days. In ’62 I was at the University of Birmingham. The word had only one meaning that I knew of: Hitler’s deliberate policy, as implemented so frightfully in WW2. A supposed belief in intrinsic superiority and inferiority. I knew little if anything about contemporary America. I’d read about the “incident” at Little Rock, Arkansas four years earlier§, but only via the British press, which was keen to show how superior we were to the Americans, politically that is, not racially! And in childish ignorance, I’d seen the “incident” simply as a clash between Supreme Court and State government.
In the night I woke and my mind wandered, coalescing three things: black, vulnerable, my 1962. Suddenly I recalled an extraordinary scene, a vivid memory without any context of what happened before or after. I was in a corner of the Students’ Union. About 20 of us were lounging in armchairs. Through a tall window you could see the setting sun before it slowly darkened. It was one of those English winter afternoons when dusk arrives early, and it feels so cosy inside you delay turning on the lights. A girl was talking, her voice so loud that everyone heard; other conversations stopped. You could clearly see that she was blind. She got more and more animated. Ray Charles was her hero: look what he had achieved despite his handicap. She had written to him and he’d replied encouragingly. It was clear she was infatuated. This tenuous one-sided link was a straw to save her from drowning. We gathered she’d won a scholarship to Birmingham, came from an extremely sheltered life in a school or institution for the blind. She had arrived raw, gauche and ungainly. In this moment she was intoxicated with the attention she got from everyone. I wished she had one single friend there, who could have given her guidance, been her mirror, helped her speak quietly, dress suitably and compose her face to look more normal, blend in. We all knew about Ray Charles, but not as a person. Several of his songs were popular on the café jukebox: “Hit the Road, Jack”, “What’d I Say”, “One Mint Julep”. Her plight, the cruelty of her failure to blend in, linked her in my night-mind with that of Dr Donald Shirley.
From there, I wondered how I’d got into that room in the first place; for when I looked round, it didn’t seem like any old random collection of students. More like everyone had a broken wing. “Vulnerable” would not have been in my vocabulary, not in those days. Some displayed visible disabilities. Others were softened by empathy, as if they had known comparable alienation to the blind girl. Or perhaps my dim reminiscences form themselves naturally into screenplays, as I’ve noticed Bryan’s dreams do. Feelings are displayed in visible form, enough to fill a Cinemascope screen. But this scene certainly happened.
I looked round the room, now softly lit with low lamps, and saw one person only that I knew—Madeleine. She had stood out from all the freshers who’d arrived that autumn: one of a kind, self-willed, wild. Months before, she’d had an accidental baby, left it with her parents to take up her scholarship. Its father was a lorry-driver, she’d met him once while hitch-hiking, never even found out his name. She was fiendishly brainy, or so I supposed at the time, perhaps based on the doorstopper of a book she carried around with her everywhere: Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness). We nearly had a thing together, but stayed friends when it faded. It was plain she sought a man who would love and marry her. That instantly ruled me out. But there she was in that room with a gentle fellow, a little older than she. It was clear they were already an item and would tie the knot, whether studying for degrees or abandoning that charade for a nobler end. I must have gone over to talk to them, possibly then but probably another time. I saw her totally transformed: once a wildcat Pussy Galore, now domesticated, a guardian of kittens.
Never mind if this has strayed off the topic of black-white relations, it’s my story I’m here to tell, not pontificate about “racial matters”. Coming back to that, however, I clearly recall my own attitude in 1962. I mostly hung out with a bunch of male fellow-students, languid, and idle, proudly neglectful of our studies, all white English. We often talked about Spades (“black as the ace of”) but didn’t know any. I knew that many lived in an inner-city suburb called Balsall Heath, which you passed in a bus from campus into town: little Victorian row-houses like the one I live in now. It was often called a slum, but to poor immigrants that simply translated as “affordable”. The Spades we mostly saw worked on the buses, as drivers or conductors. Females were likely nurses. On this basis we erroneously assumed that this was their level, the height of their reach; not knowing as I do now that some had been teachers or doctors in the West Indies but unable to practise as such over here. Looking beyond local encounters, blacks might be jazz musicians, boxers or other sportsmen. We envied their style, physique, noisy enthusiasm at cricket matches.
Was I attracted to black women in those days? I find myself curious today. It’s hard to say. I knew none at University. They were rare even among the student nurses who were routinely given free tickets to our Saturday night Hops at the Union. I instinctively felt an imbalance which would make it impossible for me to approach one (whether boy or girl) to make conversation. You couldn’t by any stretch call it “racism”. I felt handicapped by my privilege as a student who didn’t have to work for a living, and my (assumed) higher social class. I’d no idea how to handle that.
But I clearly remember a question I was once asked, around that time. It was definitely from a young woman I felt to be of a higher class than mine. There was this one at whose spacious flat I first heard records of Joan Baez and Pete Seeger; learned about “protest” as they called it then, or social activism, as it’s now known. She asked me “Have you ever slept with a black woman?” My answer was “no”, while simultaneously thinking, “I certainly won’t tell her that I’ve never yet slept with anyone.”
No, it couldn’t have been the protest girl, that was later, when I was no longer innocent. It was indeed a girl I’d felt was beyond my class, not just by reason of classy background but dazzling beauty. (Who to my chagrin, then had a fling with a friend of mine I’d thought would never have stood a chance.)
I was never good at flings, they were a little awkward when it came to disentangle, probably the next day. For me, failing love, there had to be caring and commitment, armed with which I got through two marriages, each of eighteen years. Love came late, after nearly four decades. Black is beautiful: perennially exotic, but minds and souls have no colour. They simply connect.
There’s just people, each different, bound up in circumstance. I guess ’62 was tough on a lot of people. It may be easier to say on this side of the Atlantic, I get that.
* To Be Young, Gifted and Black—Nina Simone, 1969. I first heard it on the cover version by Bob and Marcia, which peaked at #5 in the UK singles chart on 14th March 1970. My elder daughter Rosemary was born on 4th April. I recall holding her in my arms soon after, dancing together while playing this record again and again, singing along. She remains young, gifted and white.
† https://shadowandact.com/the-real-donald-shirley-green-book-hollywood-swallowed-whole
‡ “Problematic: A corporate-academic weasel word used mainly by people who sense that something may be oppressive, but don’t want to do any actual thinking about what the problem is or why it exists. Also frequently used in progressive political settings among White People of a Certain Education to avoid using herd-frightening words like ‘racist’ or ‘sexist.’” (A definition from the Urban Dictionary)
§See glancing references here and here.