If They’d Told Me We Were Poor, I Wouldn’t Have Tolerated the Cynics
Though her family sometimes received food stamps and occasionally had their utilities cut off, Marcie Alvis Walker’s parents led her to believe that they were an average middle-class Black family. They encouraged her to pursue her dreams and told her that if she worked hard enough, she’d achieve them. The small catch was that Walker’s dream was an elusive one for any cash-strapped and undereducated Black woman: being a New York Times–bestselling author. Now, as a published non-bestselling author, she wishes she’d had a backup plan.
Last night, I wanted to slap a dude’s face off because he tweeted, “Has anyone else given up on The Bear?”
If you couldn’t tell, I’ve been locked in on The Bear since season one, episode one. I was there with Carmy during the opening scene, crouched down low with him on the DuSable Bridge. The whole city of Chicago, dark as Gotham, but empty, hollow, and sleepless. For the first two or three minutes, there’s nothing but the sound of our breathing. Maybe you watched and you were there too. Scene one invited every outcast to join this ensemble cast of misfits. We were all willing to stand on that bridge and face that bear. We needed to make sense of it just as much as Carmy did.
Last night, my husband, my twenty-two-year-old kid, and I watched episode six of the current season. I don’t think any of us exhaled until I lost it and started bawling about twenty-three minutes in. Watching the scene when Michael and Tina meet for the first time, I grieved my own griefs, my own failures. Here were two people, hearts bursting to be known and seen, reaching for each other. It was true namaste: a soul bowing to another soul. It was ubuntu: I am because you are, and vice versa, from this day forward, forever and always.
I bawled because I’ve been Tina, the old girl, the overlooked woman of color, the has-been mom, having to start all over again, desperate to just keep food on the table and the rent paid and the lights on. I crystallized into a pillar of salty tears because I know Michael. He’s my nephew, handsome, funny, loud, who also was a line cook at some shit dive and who also left his family stunned when he died by suicide. I know these people, and every episode, I’m a weeping willow, offering shelter for each of their stories about how hard it is to just exist. Episode after episode the volume of living is deafening. When the credits roll, the Rolling Stones, or Weezer, or the Geto Boys cue viewers to exhale, clench our beating hearts, and know that our lives, too, are worth shouting for.
Has anyone else given up on The Bear?!? Who does this guy think he is to take a public shit on perfectly good, if not brilliant, art?
The Bear is a show about odd people in odd families working at an odd place of employment hoping to pay their bills. It’s not about romance. It’s not about obtaining some inaccessible, unattainable desired thing. It’s about the endless cycle of living, just continuing to wake up every day and start all over again, and again, and again. It’s about breathing while failing. Such stories are uncomfortable for cynics.
When I was twenty-eight years old, I worked at a very pompous restaurant with a very conceited service staff that used to trade haikus during lulls in the service station. If you’d asked any of those servers, hosts, sommeliers, and bartenders what they did for a living, they’d have claimed to be actors, novelists, poets, screenwriters, jewelry makers, drummers, guitarists, dancers, singers, filmmakers, and comedians. But if you’d asked the bussers, line cooks, and dishwashers what they did for a living, none of them would’ve come up with such nonsense. The Bear is a show about people who can’t afford to pretend to be something else.
When PBS first aired Riverdance in 1997, it was a sensation. Though I was nothing like those dancers, I watched and fell in love. I was a broke-ass twenty-eight-year-old Black server in Chicago who wanted to be a writer. I wasn’t Irish. I wasn’t a wee lass leaping in green fields. But oh, I knew there was something in it just for me. Maybe hope? Maybe beauty? Maybe the audacity of being against all odds yet still leaping?
At work the next day, while folding napkins before a lunch shift, a group of servers panned Riverdance as corny and PBS as an old has-been. Tying napkins around their foreheads, they mocked the dancers. They took an enormous group shit on a perfectly good, if not brilliant, work of art. They did this as aspiring artists. I was pissed and dismissed them as blasphemers using more explicative words I kept to myself. For a bunch of broke-ass bitches, you sure gotta lot of opinions. What the fuck have any of you ever done? What great art have you created that millions of people actually watched? Y’all are dumb. I wish I’d said it. It wouldn’t have cost me anything to clap back at those cynics.
I didn’t need my coworkers to love Riverdance, because I loved it. I don’t wanna bitch-slap strangers who post negative points of view about shows I enjoy. What I need is a world that agrees that it needs all the art that it can get and, therefore, agrees at least to be creative in its critique of any earnest artistic expression. I’m not talking about giving out awards for participation. I’m talking about wanna-be creatives, at the very least, giving a polite nod to any other fellow maker for producing something and not taking a public shit on their creations. By all means, have your opinions, but try not to erase others with them. There’s a difference between an opinion and a critique, and it’s my opinion that too many people shit on art as if that’s a constructive critique, as if their shit is an edit.
What really bothers me is the entitlement of these little shits who consider themselves creatives. This guy whose face I’d like to slap is an artist—a white, male, cis-straight artist. And yes, all that matters.
Not every group gets to see art made in their own image. Not every group gets to see people who identify as they do make art. Not every group gets to see art that looks like them resonate with the entire world. Every group has stories but few get fat off their royalties.
If Black women shat on the very few TV shows, books, movies, dance recitals, musicals, plays, and art exhibits made in our image, as much as white dudes shit on their widescreen plethora of options, we’d only erase ourselves. Marginalized artists who shit on perfectly fine and maybe even beautiful art are like barbarians eating their own hearts. It’s cannibalistic behavior. Artists should never eat artists. But white dudes are like a critical mass of Hannibal Lecters. They love to talk shit.
I grew up not understanding my family was poor, because the only poor Black people I saw on TV were the Evanses on Good Times and Sanfords on Sanford and Son. The Evanses lived in the projects, and the Sanfords in a junkyard. My family lived in the suburbs, but poverty still sat and ate at our table. I could’ve used stories like Sydney’s, Tina’s, or Marcus’s on The Bear. I needed stories of marginalized people who weren’t on welfare but who were the working poor, which is a whole different genre of starvation. As a kid, if I’d seen Michael’s, Carmy’s, and Richie’s story, I would’ve grown up knowing poverty wasn’t a monolith, gated in the ghetto. But I didn’t. Instead, I grew up believing success was only a matter of education and hard work like The Cosby Show and The Jeffersons and The Oprah Winfrey Show had shown me. None of those shows told the truth like The Bear does. And the truth is this: most folks, regardless of race or gender, work hard with not much to show for it in the end. But by God! They keep on living.
Okay, so I wouldn’t slap the guy’s face off. But I do hope that one day he gets his answer: No. Most of us are not over The Bear, because most of us relate too much to the characters. We are the odd ones in our odd families, working in odd places, often finding ourselves at odd crossroads in our odd lives. We are dreamers with dreams too big for the poverty of their circumstances.
And no one commented on his jackass post, anyway. So let me take a minute to do so now: Dude, we’re not over it, because art doesn’t just end like that. I still love Riverdance and dare anyone to shit on it.