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‘Queen Sugar’ TV Review: Face Speckled

Queen Sugar -- Ep 401 -- "TBD" -- Photo Credit: Skip Bolen / 2019 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved

Still in the throes of Nova (Rutina Welsey) revealing family secrets in her best-selling memoir, the Bordelons are picking up the pieces as the book climbs the charts.

The episode opens with Nova having nightmares with her younger self, an image of how her memoir is impacting her as family relationships deteriorate.

Charley (Dawn-Lyen Gardner), Nova’s sister, gets a call from her ex-husband Davis (Timon Kyle Durrett) about his past affairs resurfacing in Nova’s book. Charley says she doesn’t want to be seen in public with him but knows her cleanup skills are impeccable, so she goes to help him.

Meanwhile, Nova is at a fireside chat for her book when a woman in the audience asks why Nova didn’t back her anecdotes with data. The woman argued the anecdotes as just Nova’s experiences are “self-aggrandizing” assumptions about the African-American community. She then calls Nova’s dismissal of data and theory a telltale mark of amateurism. Nova claims to be an “everyday black American,” and that is resounding with audiences.

It turns out the critical woman is Nova’s college professor (Cree Summer!). She was mad she got a sentence of nameless recognition in Nova’s book. She blames Nova for making a conscious effort to not mention her. Then they start making out on the table.

While packing up food from a catering gig, Violet tells Hollywood she’s scared again after Jimmy Dale returned in a previous episode.

Another kid told Blue (Ethan Hutchison) that Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe) is not his father, the secret revealed in Nova’s book. Ralph Angel and Darla (Bianca Lawson) comforts Blue with saying he’ll never abandon him though he’s not his biological father.

One non-book reference that was a meaningful point in the episode involves immigration. Charley sees a thriving health care clinic for immigrants that her boyfriend doctor is running in the Bordelon warehouse. Until ICE shows up and families are separated. It could be said that Charley strives to be more charitable with the sugar cane business to prove its black ownership roots, something Nova criticized in her book.

In the next episode on July 24, Nova is shortlisted for the National Book Award.

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what's lit

‘Queen Sugar’ TV Review: Skin Transparent

Queen Sugar -- Ep 401 -- "TBD" -- Photo Credit: Skip Bolen / 2019 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved

The fallout from Nova’s (Rutina Wesley) memoir is still stirring up drama, but in this episode we get more insight on another family secret unbeknownst to most family members.

The episode starts with Nova’s nephew and her sister Charley’s (Dawn-­Lyen Gardner) son Micah (Nicholas L. Ashe) going to stay with Nova with plans to attend her upcoming book-signing. Sitting with his mother, Micah wonders how long the silent treatment will stay enforced among the Bordelons.

The family matriarch and aunt Violet (Tina Lifford) can’t sleep, claiming recipes are running through her head, but Hollywood pushes for her to talk about the situation with Jimmy Dale (guest star David Alan Grier), her abusive ex-husband who reappeared after communicating with Nova on her book.

Nova creeps around Violet’s restaurant since she had been banned from being around her aunt, but is turned away by an employee. Nova then calls her brother Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe), who doesn’t pick up. News comes about her getting a six-week book tour due to her glowing The New York Times review. That news, of course, moves her attention away from the family and back on her success.

Charley tries to team up with the other female shareholder to go against the Landrys, the sugar cane empire family that had once owned her ancestors. But the shareholder tells Charley to back off because the Landrys are too powerful. So Charley sashays into a country club to approach a Landry about a highway proposal that would gut Bordelon land. The woman tells Charley that she had read Nova’s book with Charley clapping back on the book with a comparison to “sentimental dribble.”

While Charley recovers from her business-heavy moves, she gets home only to meet her ex-husband’s daughter from an extramarital affair. These affairs are described in Nova’s book with Charley paying off another mistress, so that drama haunts her with the publicity from the book and now a breathing part of evidence from an affair is right in her home.

At the book-signing for Blessing and Blood, Nova reads from a recently added chapter called “Buried Memories” about her father being beaten by three white men at a fishing trip to protect his daughter. She read she would wander the sugarcane fields at night, and on one night, she saw her father bury something into the ground. This is an addition to the book. Her ex-girlfriend comes up to her during the book-signing session and asks about Nova’s family not being there, visible with the empty chairs in the front. She gives Nova a kiss on the lips.

Darla (Bianca Lawson), Ralph Angel’s ex-fiancee and mother of their son Blue (Ethan Hutchison), receives Nova’s book and reads the details of her drug-fueled prostituting nights with baby Blue sitting in the corner. In a flash, she bursts into Nova’s door describing her shock that her past life is in those pages. Nova tries to clean it up; Darla’s name and identifying marks have been changed. This doesn’t sit well with Darla, who keeps telling Nova that she didn’t think of Blue’s feelings since he will eventually read about his mother’s past life.

Charley tells Violet and Ralph Angel at the restaurant that Micah asked about the added chapter in Nova’s book. Violet said she doesn’t know what her brother did that night Nova recalled when she was younger, but he had been worried about Nova getting sexually assaulted by those three white men until that night. Vehemently, Violet defends her brother about him and everyone else having the right to keep a secret between themselves and God.

Darla is hysterically crying on her porch about having to tell Blue the truth while Violet is doing the same in her bathroom with Hollywood hearing the muffled cries as the bathwater runs. As the family falls apart, Nova carries her heavy suitcases out the door for her book tour.

The depth of the secrets are felt in this episode. And Nova switches from concern about the book’s aftermath on her family to excitement when she receives good news from her literary agent and publisher. She still looks bad for unveiling her family’s secrets for money and success, yet she’s torn on what to do about it since her family blocks her apologies. More secrets will be revealed, or at least, there will be more coming out of the secrets we know now.

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experiences

Book Launch: ‘More Than Enough’ by Elaine Welteroth

Elaine Welteroth. Photo: Renell Medrano.

Elaine Welteroth, who reached prominence as the first black Teen Vogue editor and now as a Project Runway judge, stopped in Los Angeles Thursday for her book tour and discussed why she wrote the women empowerment memoir to an estimated 400-member audience.

What appeared to be a well-read black girl magic rally at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park started with the cheerful announcement that Elaine’s book had notched itself to the coveted New York Times Best Sellers list. She was then introduced by her former Teen Vogue colleague and friend Lynette Nylander, who conducted the fireside chat.

Right away, Elaine began reading from Chapter 16 in More Than Enough: Claiming Space For Who You Are (No Matter What They Say), which is dubbed “Disturbing the Peace,” which starts with a quote from Audre Lorde and describes how Elaine returned to work from a Christmas vacation from Rwanda for a surprise racial interaction. Her hair was braided into Senegalese twists down her waist—the first time she came to a corporate setting in an overly ethnic hairstyle—and a white female colleague in disbelief asked how her hair had allegedly grown feet over a short amount of time.

This question is sometimes posed to black women who decide to add synthetic or real hair to their braids for a new look to celebrate their heritage, so Elaine took it in stride after an inner dialogue berating the beauty industry for neglecting what is considered beautiful to women of color with telling the woman, “Oh, you of all people must know these are extensions.”

That set the tone for the evening: Elaine describing her humble background in the San Francisco Bay Area as a first-generation college graduate to a high-ranking editor in a magazine media empire. Starting her career in the beginning of the recession, she said she felt the weight of being “black, young, and female,” the trifecta of the media industry teeming with racism, ageism, and sexism.

“We all live in a 180-character world where we are scrolling each other’s success stories every day, and we’re only getting the shiny slice, we’re only getting the prettiest picture, we’re only getting the clearest caption,” she said. “I felt like I owed this community more than I can fit into a caption on Instagram about the most universal aspects of the success story. The parts that get left out from the messy relationships that so often intercept with how we show up in our careers.”

At 32, she said she feared her audience would doubt she was ready to write a memoir, even as her own brother echoed this sentiment soon after she submitted a manuscript questioning her reason to pen an “autobiography.”

“I wanted to throw the plate in his face,” she said of the interaction over a Christmas vacation while he was washing dishes in the kitchen. “I was so emotional because that was the very question that threatened to keep me from doing this and leave it to be my family—it’s always family—that are your harshest critics. At the time, I was so emotional I can only think to say, ‘They don’t even call it autobiographies anymore, you asshole!'”

A round of laughter erupted from the audience, but she continued with the true translation of that moment.

“Then later I really sat with it. I don’t blame my brother for asking that question. That’s the patriarchy talking. We’ve all been conditioned by this mindset that tells us, ‘Your stories are not valid if you look like me.'”

The two-hour event brought up more gems from Elaine’s book like her decision to attend a state university because the boy she was dating was supposed to be there but turned out to be in jail and how on her first Ebony photo shoot she had a serendipitous moment with the hairstylist who happened to be friends with her aunt.

Eso Won Books, the main black-owned bookstore in Los Angeles, was the official bookseller at the event.

Categories
experiences

Busy Philipps Says Memoir Prepared Her for Sharing Abortion Story

Author-actress Busy Philipps and author-CEO Jaclyn Johnson hold a fireside chat at Aerie REALtreat at Rolling Greens Nursery in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, June 8, 2019 / she lit

Actress-author Busy Philipps shared how her 2018 published memoir inspired her to share a personal story on TV at the Aerie REALtreat conference in downtown Los Angeles Saturday afternoon.

Arriving from an earlier event with BookSparks in conversation with Taylor Jenkins Reid and Abdi Nazemian in Hollywood, the This Will Only Hurt a Little memoirist spoke to about 150 attendees at a fireside chat at Rolling Greens Nursery in the Arts District with Work Party author and Create & Cultivate CEO Jaclyn Johnson about how her recently canceled late night talk show was another vehicle to share her abortion story. Though she told the story in her book, Busy said she hadn’t shared it publicly until last month in response to the Georgia abortion bill.

“It’s all crazy, but writing about it in my book prepared me for when the extreme abortion bans happened,” she said. “First of all, the Georgia ban was passed the Monday after I had found out that my show was canceled. We didn’t tell people for five weeks, so I knew my show was canceled, and that’s when the Georgia ban was passed through their Senate, but the governor hadn’t signed it in yet.

“So my initial feeling was that I wanted to do it that day. However, my husband and I talked about it, and he said, ‘I don’t want E! to think you’re going on television to talk about your abortion in some way because they canceled your show’… I just didn’t want any of the message to be convoluted.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, also known as the “heartbeat bill” on May 7. That same day, Busy aired her story on Busy Tonight, in which she said she didn’t let the network know about her decision to share her story because she felt it would lessen the potency or stop the story from being told. She said the show submitted a full script, which she wrote, while she personally placed it in the teleprompter, so the weight of the impact would be all on her. Her last show aired May 16.

Last Tuesday, she was a guest speaker at the “Threats to Reproductive Rights in America” House Judiciary Committee hearing.

“The timing of things with being able to go testify at the House Judiciary Committee; I wouldn’t have been able to do if my show on E! that 40 people watched was still on,” Busy quipped.

Busy is an #AerieREAL role model. Aerie is the intimate apparel lifestyle offshoot of American Eagle Outfitters. In partnership with Create & Cultivate (disclosure: I’m an insider), the event focused on tapping into women’s power for entrepreneurial success.

Regardless of getting an abortion at 15 years old, Busy said she’s felt the emotional toll on making the decision.

“It’s something I had never spoken about publicly, but I held a great deal of shame about for many many years,” she said. “When I wrote my memoir, I knew I wanted to talk about it. But I knew that it would be difficult for my family. I felt very strongly in sharing the whole story.”

She said her talk show was a creative vehicle for storytelling expression and hopes it can be revived via another outlet.

“It speaks to the other thing which was why I wanted even to do a late night talk show in the first place,” she said. “We know that diversity and representation in the media of all kinds makes a difference in our media and having a female voice in late night television is important, especially when our country is dealing with lots of different issues that affect women.”