Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 5, 1990 TAG: 9004040378
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV10 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ELAINE VIEL SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Medium
And during one session, "On Truth," Baker and Grosvenor sent sparks flying.
"We're gonna talk about the truth," Grosvenor said. And the "truth is that African Americans' lives have been interpreted by non-African Americans."
The truth of slavery, she said, did not lie in the oft-repeated lines about slaves being happy and well taken care of.
Her grandmother told her the truth about slavery, learned first hand from her parents. Grosvenor said in her deep voice, "I shed tears of sorrow with them. I had touched the hand of a hand conceived of slaves."
Grosvenor, tall and rock-solid, was 18 when she went to Paris and told people she was from Harlem or, "if I wanted to be exotic, New Orleans."
Baker is a frenetic, gray-suited megawatt of a man who dazzled the audience with his fast, rap-like pace.
If Grosvenor left her audience spellbound, Baker, director of the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania, jolted them into the here and now.
His words flew as fast as a flea jumps. Just as quickly as they arrived, they were gone, replaced by new phrases and thoughts.
"Truth is always on the move," he said. "Never static, never in one place . . . always changing. In the break you have to be nimble or not at all . . . it's gotta sound like us . . . the voice becomes the thing."
Grosvenor was host of National Public Radio's "Horizons" and has often been on "All Things Considered." She won the Robert F. Kennedy and Ohio awards for "Never Enough Too Soon," and she won a Cindy award for a profile of writer Zore Neale Hurston.
She has written pieces for the New York Times, The Village Voice and Life. Her publications include "Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap" and "Vibration Cooking, or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl."
Baker's publications include "Long Black Song" and he co-edited "English Literature: Opening Up the Canon."
His poetry has appeared in Ante, Southern Review and Black American Literature Forum.
James Haskins, author of more than 80 books including "The Cotton Club," which inspired the film, was among dozens of writers at the conference.
He said the Cotton Club, which was "run by the mob," was part of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when Harlem became a mecca for Black intellectual in the 1920s.
The club, in the middle of Harlem, showcased black entertainers, including Lena Horne and Duke Ellington - but it was whites-only. "Blacks," Haskins said "were not allowed in as patrons."
As for the movie "The Cotton Club" Haskins said, "I was on set . . . I had a directors chair with my name on the back." But disillusionment wasn't far behind.
By the time the script went through several rewrites, Haskins said he asked that his credit read "suggested by" rather than "based on a book by."
"Art and movies," he said "have about as much in common as a Chinese temple dog to a mutt."
"Evans [producer Robert Evans] wrote the first draft," Haskins said. "Coppola didn't like it, nor did actor Richard Gere like it."
Others were brought in to work on the script including Mario Puzo, author of "The Godfather."
"Evans didn't believe a story based on black entertainers and musicians" would work, Haskins said, so he decided "to make the star a white trumpet player and to play up the mob action."
Haskins said his "was the first book by a black American to be made into a major American movie," but "read the book for accuracy and see the movie for entertainment."
Also appearing with Haskins was Bernard King Jr., a film and theater director and playwright.
"White Americans could not and cannot deal with black people and they cannot and will not deal with black artists," King said, because "to deal with art is to deal with us as people."
by CNB