Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [109]
In the United States we’ve always had our own untouchables—American Indians, blacks, homosexuals. Who knows who will be next?
On my last day of filming, after photographing a child who had died right in front of me, I put my camera down and cried. I couldn’t take any more. I knew that I had to get the scenes I had filmed to the American people and thought if I did so, the whole country would be appalled and do whatever it took to ameliorate this misery. When I got home, I showed the film to Jack Valenti, who became president of the Motion Picture Association of America after serving as a presidential aide; he told me he had shown it to President Johnson, but that was the last I heard of it. I showed it to as many prominent people in Hollywood as I could, but nobody offered to help arrange to show it in movie theaters as a documentary, even though among those who saw the film there wasn’t anybody with a dry eye later, except for the wife of one producer, who said, “You know, Marlon, we ought to take care of our own first”—one of our famous phrases. After striking out in Hollywood, I thought the picture might reach an even wider audience on television, so I showed it to an executive at CBS News, who said, “It’s an effective film, but we can’t use it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
He said, “Because our news department produces all its own stuff; we don’t requisition or use outside documentaries.”
“Why not? I was there. What I’m showing you is the truth.”
“Well, we have policies we have to follow, and we can’t make exceptions.”
NBC told me the same thing, so I never got the film on television and that was the end of it.
43
ONE FACT ABOUT MY LIFE I constantly find amazing: I was born only sixty-two years after one human being could still buy another human being in America. I remember first being amazed by this discovery when I was an adolescent, and wondered how it could be. I read the history of black people, began to empathize with them and tried as best I could to imagine what it would be like to be black—which, of course, is impossible, though it took me many years to learn that. I began thinking of African Americans as a heroic people because of their enormous resiliency acquired over almost four hundred years; despite slavery and torturous treatment by whites, they had never allowed their spirit to be broken. Through every adversity and hardship, they preserved something, even if it was only their music or religion. They were yanked out of their homes in Africa, forced to endure a long trek to a seaport in chains, then imprisoned at sea before being delivered somewhere to be sold. They survived not only these hardships but the uncertainty and shock of not knowing where they were headed or what would happen to them when they got there; then they were thrust into what must have been a terrifying world of a different language, customs and culture. Families were split up and sold to slave owners who forced them to work like animals on whatever diet their masters deigned to allow them. They had to live this way from generation to generation, beaten down and made to feel like animals. The ones who survived had to be very strong, which is why I’ve always thought of American blacks as being different from African ones; their ancestors had to endure so much that only the strongest could survive.
When Lincoln gave blacks their so-called freedom, it was transformed with the speed of summer lightning into the sharecropper system. Then came the KKK, the lynchings, the theft of their constitutional rights and all the modern kinds of slavery. Blacks were free, but discrimination was so complete and insidious that all it did was change the form