Josephine premise & timothy fales
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They were like veterans of a war who preferred to make light of their battle scars and never spoke of the horrific side of human nature they'd witnessed first hand.
As I sat in a screening room the other day, watching Loving, director Jeff Nichols's unsentimental and bone cuttingly real cinematic re-telling of the Lovings' story, no "shield of humor" could protect me from its devastating emotional impact.
A still from the movie 'Loving.'
Nichols creates a chilling counterpoint between the normalcy of the Lovings' hopes and daily lives (Mildred Loving balancing her daughter on her hip while she irons, Richard Loving laying his head in her lap as they watch the Andy Griffith Show) and the perversity of a system that views their coupling as contrary to the laws of man and God.
It is an especially ironic and hypocritical condemnation in a country in which miscegenation began with the arrival of the colonials, five hundred years ago.
'Loving' reveals how racism warps our most fundamental human bonds.
Nichols captures the tragedy of two ordinary people forced to play a central role in our country's tormented, and still unresolved, racial history.
Some of the reasons were typical of any couple who'd raised two children, but years after they'd parted, my father confessed to me that he was writing a journal to understand where their marriage had gone awry.
I was stunned to see him puzzling over a decision I thought he'd made himself. The press hounded them.
My parents were like veterans of a war who preferred to make light of their battle scars and never spoke of the horrific side of human nature they'd witnessed first hand.
Like the Lovings, my parents soon left their beloved hometown to take refuge elsewhere, in their case in Europe.
Eliot wrote that the job of literature is "to take blood and turn it into ink." Loving the film turns blood into soul searing images that reveal how racism warps our most fundamental human bonds.
Josephine Premice, Actress born.
*Josephine Premice was born on this date in 1926. She eventually moved her career forward in the later years, appearing on hit shows such as A Different World, The Cosby Show and even the Jefferson’s.
She was also known for her Calypso music and fashion sense.
Josephine Premice died in her Manhattan apartment on April 13, 2001, at the age of 74 from complications of Emphysema. She was survived by her estranged husband, Timothy Fales, and her two children, Enrico Fales (b.1959) and Susan Fales-Hill, a television producer, her son-in-law, Aaron, and her sister, Adele Premice.Her daughter published a biography of her mother titled Always Wear Joy.
TagsDifferent WorldHaitian WomanJefferson'sJosephine PremiceThe Cosby Show
How the Movie Loving Helped Me Understand My Own Parents' Interracial Marriage
The author's parents Josephine Premice and Timothy Fales shortly after their wedding in 1958.
On a side table in my childhood home sat a silver cigarette lighter, engraved with the words "Who Cares?" It had been a wedding gift to my parents from the elegant man-about-town who introduced them, John Galliher, and a rebuke to those scandalized by the 1958 marriage of my father, the scion of an old white Anglo-Saxon Protestant clan to my mother, a Haitian-American actress.
In this of all years, it is a must see.
Susan Fales-Hill is Town & Country's etiquette columnist. Her final Broadway appearance came in 1976 with the musical Bubbling Brown Sugar. My father was immediately fired from his job at shipping company and his name was expunged from the Social Register, as if in marrying my mother he had died in the eyes of "polite society." Both of their families received hate mail from people around the country, both "friends" and complete strangers.
Premice played a supporting role in the 1974 television movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman as Ms. Gautier. After graduating from Columbia University with a degree in Anthropology, she began her theatrical career in the 1945 production of ''Blue Holiday'' at the Belasco Theater alongside Ethel Waters and Josh White, the folk singer.
She starred in numerous Broadway productions, including Tony Award-nominated roles in the 1957 musical Jamaica (with Lena Horne) and A Hand Is on the Gate in 1966, where she performed African American poetry works alongside James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, and Gloria Foster.
They returned to their home state only to be arrested in their own bed for the crime of violating the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited marriages between the "races." They were later sentenced to a year in prison, a sentence which was suspended on the condition they not return to the state of Virginia together for a period of 25 years.
Ruth Negga, center, and Joel Edgerton, right, as Mildred and Richard Loving.
Though my parents, living in New York, didn't suffer such physical assaults—or live under the constant threat of arrest—they weathered their fair share of ostracism and violations of their dignity.
She was born in New York in 1926 to a Haitian couple (Rete, sa Ayisyen yo tap fè Brooklyn byen bonè konsa?), and split her childhood years between Haiti and Brooklyn.
From the beginning of her days, it was clear that she was going to become an entertainer, studying dance with none other than Haitiphile Katherine Dunham and the equally legendary Martha Graham.
An elegant socialite. The Lovings' case eventually reached the supreme court, where the judges unanimously found in their favor in 1967, overturning long standing anti-miscegenation laws, and establishing marriage as a basic human right. “She was the ultimate stickler for sartorial protocol,” recalled her daughter, television producer Susan Fales-Hill, highlighted in this issue’s best-dressed list.
The lighter's inscription was emblematic of my parent's response to the world's disapproval: they shielded our family with a seemingly impregnable armor of defiant humor.
The same year my parents wed, a young black woman, Mildred Jeter, and her white beau, Richard Loving, drove from their small town in Virginia to Washington D.C.
to become man and wife.