No, Not the Part of the Mammy!

Three years ago my agent is trying to get me to read this pilot. There is a role: “Lilly Harper.” She thinks I might be right for it.

“I don’t want to play no mammy!”

“Just read it, Regina!” she says.

I’m not at all domestic. An only child of a working mother, I grew up on TV dinners. I pop a Swanson’s Pot Pie into the oven, clear off a space on the futon and begin reading this pilot, “I’ll Fly Away.”

“I got a strange feeling inside of me. It’s not good, it’s not bad. It’s like something’s going to happen, like a turn in the weather. There is part of me that wants to run inside, stay dry and safe, and another part wants to run outside and say let it come, let it come and feel that hard rain on my face,” says Lilly Harper.

At the end of the script she has made a decision to light her candle and join the protesters who are staging a sit-in on the grounds and steps of the courthouse. She’s speaking to me from her journal and I am by now sitting in the middle of my apartment, weeping.

I’m thinking about my grandmother and Ennis, Tex. A town big enough to spit through. My grandmother and grandfather were sharecroppers with nine children. My grandmother later took the children to Dallas and became a kitchen preparer at one downtown hotel.

When I finally sit down to audition to a room full of suits in Los Angeles, I stop. I’m not ready to do the scene. I tell them that I feel like talking. “Sure, talk.” I tell them about where I came from. About the faces of the people who raised me, like my grandmother, a strong woman whose face was touched with dignity and grace. This is what I see in the character of Lilly Harper.

The maid, mother, daughter, neighbor, sister-woman. This face is recognizable in the places where I grew up. A face I had never seen before in the media.

When I was done talking, no one said anything. Someone thanked me. I got up and left. A month later I leave Manhattan for Atlanta, to begin filming the part of Lilly Harper, a woman on a journey to find her voice and visibility in the period of the late 1950s.

I came of age after the fires of the 1960s. After the burning of Camelot, one assassination of the King and Malcolm X and Mr. President, and the Panthers ... after the bombing, after the wars. Nixon would soon fall from grace as we sat on a fence--me and my cousin Charlotte, dreaming of marrying Tito Jackson or Hank Aaron, and wouldn’t we eat fruit of the fires? The first generation of black children to be able to say: “I can become anything I want to be when I grow up.” The doors, we were told, were wide open.

In Muskogee, Okla., I integrated an all-white junior high school. Wasn’t this the dream of Martin Luther King Jr.? The dream of brotherhood, where we would be judged not by the color of our skin but the content of our character?

I had gone back to homeroom during recess to get something from my locker. I heard the word “nigger” and turned to see a red-haired, freckle-faced Huck Finn-looking boy blocking the doorway. He begins to hit me. Trapped in this room, all I can say is, “Why?” He doesn’t even know my name. No more turning-the-other-cheek nonviolent resistance crap. I fight him back. Fighting my way out of that room--escaping his stinging blows of his fists, his eyes, his words.

“You can’t let words keep you down. Can’t let the blindness of others blind you,” my mother said, holding me fast in her arms.

In Atlanta, I finally put on the skin of Lilly Harper. At times she vexed me. She was too patient, too damn righteous. We gave each other dimension. By the end of the second season on NBC she had taken me to get the right to vote for the first time, on freedom rides and registration drives. We fell in love twice and we laughed and cried with Miss Margaret and other girlfriends. We helped raise two households. We learned the complicated steps of the sometimes intimate, sometimes furious employer-employee, black-white, male-female tango between Lilly and Forrest Bedford. We fought compassionately with a beloved father and felt the heat of the rising 1960s

When the series was canceled, I had gone down to Louisville to see a production of two plays I had written when I get a call saying PBS was going to give the show another life. They want us to return to shoot a final episode.

Atlanta feels like home. I have missed the people, the cast, the crew, drivers, folks in the office. Returning is like a family reunion. The kids Aaron and Rae’ven have grown but still have that sweet, wild abandon. Ashley has now stepped over into womanhood. Jeremy London hasn’t returned. He’s shooting another series. Jason, his twin, steps in and nails down the role. Sam Waterston is as jazzy and graciously charming as ever and Bill Cobbs (Pops) is my saving grace.

This episode starts in 1993 and Lilly Harper is now 63 years old. She has lived a million lives in the span of 30 years. Change has come slower than expected. And she has been witness to the variations of racism and social injustice across the globe--the new fires spreading. People searching for words, a way to communicate and the numb silence of hopelessness, of having been here before, had this conversation before, what is to be done?

Now a grandmother, she shares the pages of her scrapbook of memories with her grandson, who at first isn’t interested in those old days. What does it have to do with him?

There is something about passing on the seeds of hope to her children and her children’s children.

Lilly has helped me to define who I am, where I come from and what it took to get me to this moment. I will always carry a part of her with me.

“I’ll Fly Away: Then and Now” airs Monday at 7 p.m. on KVCR and 8 p.m. on KCET and KLCS. Repeats of “I’ll Fly Away,” beginning with the original series pilot, will air Mondays on KVCR at 7 p.m. and on KCET and KLCS at 8 p.m., starting Oct 18.