How would you characterize Cora Unashamed? If you were to describe the story to someone who had not read it how would you describe it?Anne Peacock:
It's a story about unconditional love, and I think, the whole notion of being unashamed. Cora is unashamed of who she is, unashamed of the way she feels. That's what it's about. It's somebody who believes in herself, who doesn't have a voice but finds it ultimately. But I think if you wanted to encapsulate the theme, to me, it's about unconditional love. Mrs. Studevant is everything that Cora is not because her love is conditional.
Q: Partly she doesn't have a voice because she's isolated by race. Maybe you could talk a little about Cora's position in the town.
AP: Well, we have to bear in mind
when the story was set, in the early part of the century. It's in Iowa, which makes a difference. Black people in Iowa were treated differently from black people in the South and of course that was a little
problem that Langston Hughes created for us because of that kind of dislocation between the voice in the story, which is very southern... southern white behavior, and yet he set it in Iowa. But anyway, Cora is
living in this little town, the only black family. She is someone who is obviously accepted to a certain extent by the people in the town, but as long as she knows her place and, as long as she doesn't step out of
line. The racism is ... well in the story itself it's overt, but I think in reality, from my research any way, in Iowa it wasn't as overt as it was in the South. It was a much more restrained kind of racism.
Q: Her isolation increases the price she pays for the action she takes.
AP :
She has absolutely no support, in the story she doesn't have any family support either. She really is out on her own and in a way she doesn't have a cohesive black community to support what she does with the issue of having the baby out of wedlock, she has nothing. It speaks to the tremendous character that Cora has. To me the most descriptive thing in the book is when he says, "Cora was like a sheltering tree." That, to me, is the genius of Langston Hughes because he has such a command of language. He can say so much, so simply, and that was what I had in mind for Cora, weathering all these storms, rooted and nurturing, and loving, and that was the way I saw her, always.
Q: What were your first steps in dramatizing the story?
AP:
Well, I always believe that research is everything, and I researched Langston Hughes first, because no writer writes in a vacuum. I knew nothing about Langston Hughes other than a little bit of his poetry. I had no idea that he'd ever written any prose, actually, I didn't know any of his short stories, so when Marian and Anne gave me this short story to read I was quite astounded. I thought how do you turn this into a full-length movie.
I read everything that I could lay my hands on. I read "The Ways of White Folks," all the short stories. I read his little novel called Not Without Laughter, which is superb.
It surprises me that that isn't better taught and better known. And then I read a biography of Langston Hughes because you've got to know where the artist is coming from. You want to understand
their stories, and that's the attitude I've always had in adapting something. And so I got the spirit of Langston Hughes. I'm looking to see what was the pattern that emerged in all his stories, and there is
a pattern that emerges and it's very clear in the Cora story where the white people's behavior is shown up by the good character of the black person. Sometimes I have heard Langston Hughes accused of turning
people into caricatures. His writing is actually a lot more subtle than it appears, if you read it carefully, because of his language, for example, "Cora was a sheltering tree." Whereas people
might appear to be one dimensional in a very short story, you don't get the nuances of their character, but he gives little clues. With Mrs. Studevant, when she comes back from obviously having aborted Jessie's
baby he says "Mrs. Studevant talked a lot, Mrs. Studevant explained a lot." He doesn't need to say any more than that for us, does he? Immediately we see there's another side, there's a whole thing going on
behind this exterior, this facade that Mrs. Studevant shows for the world.
And so, I went through his short stories, very carefully, obviously millions of times, just looking for all those little clues where I could
take the story and expand on it. The research was important because I went to Iowa, for one thing. I went to Iowa, I went to the little museum, a wonderful little museum in Madison County, and they showed me
what things looked like at that time. I read all the newspapers, the Madison County register from 1915. I read all the newspapers so I got the sensibility of the people. And then I made the most
wonderful contact, a woman called Miss Helen Johnson, a woman who is the same age as Cora. And she was introduced to me by the African-American History Society of Iowa, which I never knew existed. Anyway,
Miss Johnson was an absolute gold mine of information for me, because she lived at the same time that Cora did. Theirs was the only black family in a white town in Iowa. And her father was born in a slave
family in the South, and brought by Union soldiers to Iowa at the end of the Civil War He had pointed out horses on the farm for the Union soldiers. And so they said, "You can't stay," so they put
him on the horse, the thirteen-year-old boy, and they brought him up to Iowa. Miss Johnson was ninety years old when I met her and she's as sharp as a knife, her memory was perfect. She told me all the
details of life for a young black woman that I needed to tell the story. And that's how I got so much of the sensibility, I got to know somebody like Cora.
I had to sort of think of a whole history for
Cora. What was life like in Iowa? A black woman with, as Miss Johnson did, no black friends. There was no black community. She said the only blacks they ever saw were at church, and they would have to
travel to the Baptist church because there were only Methodist churches in this little town. And she said all her friends were white, and she said she was very smart but things changed, of course, as a
teenager. She couldn't get a summer job, the only job she could get was working as a maid, as a cleaning person. And of all her friends, she was just as educated as all of them. And her brothers could
only ... The only people who employed black boys were Jews and she said that there was a Jewish garage owner who employed the boys. Otherwise, they had to leave. And this made perfect sense in the story
because it said the boys all left, in the Cora story. These are just the ways that I got to know Cora and how I saw her, as a person who was intelligent, but who hadn't had, or had obviously been denied
opportunities that the average white person had. And then of course there was the white family, we had to sort of make up a little biography for them. What was the issue of Mrs. Studevant? Where did
she come from? Why did she have this need to prove something, as she does? This feeling that she is someone in the community and that the child must not shame her in front of all these other families. And so
I imagined that she was someone who came from Iowa City and had all these pretensions and wanted this little girl to be something, something that the child of hers couldn't be.
But really, it's research that enables you to do something like this, I think.
Q: One of the challenges must have been fleshing out the story in a way that was true to Hughes' intention,
even when you were inventing the scenes.
AP:
Absolutely, but I got to know him through the biography, and just so that I felt what I was writing could be true to him and the spirit of Langston Hughes. Obviously, the details of the story would be different because there was invention, extension of the story. But I really wanted to be as true to him as I could and also bearing in mind that we are entertaining an audience in the nineties, so the sensibility is different. The thing was to get across the spirit of the story more than anything. People can argue about the details, "Oh, Cora never said that," or we don't think Cora would have done that, or Mrs. Studevant wouldn't have worn clothes like that, or something. We can argue about the details but I think the spirit is true to anything I gotten from getting to know him.
Q: Here you have a story that takes place almost exclusively between two women, and it was written by a man. Did you think about that as you adapted it?
AP:
You know I never stopped to think about it for a second. He is such an astute judge of character. His knowledge of human beings is so deep that the fact that he could write from the point of view of a woman or women, it doesn't matter that he's a man.
Q: When you're doing an adaptation of a story how do you interpret or visualize it? At what point do you stop reading the story?
AP: Well, I think every writer will
tell you that a story takes on a life of its own. Obviously the more you get to know the characters and the more knowledge you have around the characters from the research, ideas come to you. But I always
find, and I haven't been in this business for long so I don't have a long and illustrious history and career that I can draw on, but the few that I have done I have this sort of instinct that comes to me instantly and
I'm learning to trust that instinct, which is difficult when you're first in this business because you assume other people know more than you do, which they probably do a large part of the time.
As far as how
we were going to structure the story it was a great deal of collaboration obviously with Anne and Marian, very few writers write on their own. The three of us had to formulate when the story was going to begin and
when it was going to end, and we weren't sure how much back-story are we going to put in here . Were we just going to jump in when Cora's in 1934? Or were we going to write backward? Were we going to
show the whole chronological affair with Joe? How were we going to do it? In fact, as I remember it, we were quite adamant at the beginning that there weren't going to be any flashbacks. Absolutely,
"We are not going to have flashbacks!" And of course, it became quite abundantly clear that we needed them. So, this is what happens with a story, you just have to get the feel for it. You
have an idea and then feel your way through it.
Q: Was there a scene that you especially enjoyed writing?
AP:
There were many, actually. So many of them. But I loved that moment when Cora was finally able, really expressed her frustration by picking up that carpet beater and beating the carpet because obviously you knew that what she absolutely wanted to do was bash Mrs. Studevant to pieces and we all did too. And I can't remember, I don't know where I got the idea from, but I had the feeling that Cora would somehow want to express that anger and frustration and she's not the kind of person that would ever hurt anybody. It's so, sort of, organic that she would pick up some household object and beat the carpet. I felt very good about that.
I loved those interactions between Mrs. Studevant and Cora when there was this incredibly electrically charged atmosphere as I felt it with them. I was with them and I could just feel it. And I could feel
how Core would just have all this feeling in her, but she couldn't say anything because there was this master and servant relationship. I also felt that feeling of Mrs. Studevant, that feeling of people who walk
around with that rage in them and their not quite sure themselves where it's coming from, but they feel put upon. They feel cheated by life for some reason or other and they don't even know what it is
themselves. So I liked writing that dynamic and there was a scene that I just loved when Mr. Studevant had not stood up for Jessie and Cora stopped him on the stairs. I remember saying that Mr. Studevant was
walking out of the house with the demeanor of a man who's bearing a sad and lonely secret. They meet on the stairs and Cora looks him dead in the eye and she says, "That was wrong Mr. Studevant."
He's basically a good man but he just doesn't, as he says to his wife, "I don't have it in me to be cross with you, to be angry with you."
Q:
And was there a scene that was especially difficult for you?
AP:
Well that funeral scene was very difficult, very, very difficult to get right because you didn't want Cora to be diminished by….for the anger to diminish her. As I saw it Cora's fury really came from love of Jessie, love of Josie, rather than hatred of Mrs. Studevant. That was the way I saw it and that's a really difficult thing to convey and that's a hard thing for an actress to do, very, very hard. That was a very hard scene to write to get that balance because you don't get a lot of help in that scene. No, that's not the right way to put it. It works on paper, but it's hard to convey that visually, I think. So that was a very difficult scene for me to write.
Q: To what extent was it possible for you to preserve Hughes' dialogue, or did you have to change quite a lot of it?
AP:
Well you just have to. Because what I know, we all know, only too well, what works on paper doesn't work, necessarily, in the spoken word. And the actress has to feel comfortable. Some of the thing s she said I did not actually write, and that's something that a writer has to be humble about. You have to trust, entrust, your words to the actors. But to answer that question directly, and I do think that's a valid question, people always say, "Oh who do you think you are changing Langston Hughes?" I can tell you it's humbling. It's a scary thing for a writer because you feel that these are big shoes I'm trying to fill in my own humble way. But you've got to look at the flow of the scene, and I can't say anymore other than that.
Q: How do you feel about the two lead actresses?
AP:
I think that they're both brilliant actresses and they interpreted their parts very, very skillfully. Nobody's ever entirely, what's the word? You can't agree on everything, obviously, but overall I would say that they were very true to what I wrote
Q: They were both wonderful in the scene where Mrs. Studevant takes the tray from Cora and takes it up to Jessie herself.
AP:
Oh yes. I'd forgot about that scene. That was the crackle scene that I was talking about, one of the things that I enjoyed writing which I think Regina did very well, was that build up, because we had to show where Cora came from when she had her outburst at the end. You couldn't have Cora be meek and mild and then suddenly one day blowing up. Regina showed that very well, that build. You really could, when I said that electrically charged atmosphere, it was there. You also see a glimmer of Mrs. Studevant starting to crack in that scene when she says, "She's my child and I'll look after her myself." Cora's starting to challenge for the first time by taking the tray and I thought that was a very eloquent act. You were almost sort of waiting for a little tug of war to go on there. I believe that Mrs. Studevant was afraid of Cora and all she had with Cora...She had no moral authority over Cora. Cora had all the moral high ground and that was very intimidating for Mrs. Studevant.
Q: Kathy Honda Stein, who is with me, showed the film to her tenth-grade students after having read the short story.
Kathy Stein:
They were equally mad at Mrs. Studevant's actions and Mr. Art's lack of action during the film.
AP:
Yes but didn't we all want him to act at that moment, and he failed us. I think everyone of us, and this is why the universality of the story, I think we've all been in a position where we wanted somebody to speak up, either for you or on somebody else's behalf, and they haven't. It's almost criminal that they haven't.
KS: The students were wondering what you used from the text to expand Joe's role.
AP:
The question about Joe. What was very interesting to me was who could Joe be? We better bear in mind we're looking at 1916, interracial romances did not happen except in a very, sort of exploitatory way. Obviously it certainly was not legitimate and Langston Hughes gives us two very, very good clues here. He says everybody said Joe was an IWW, which made perfect sense to me. I immediately went to research everything I could find on the IWW and was all set thinking that I actually wanted to write a movie about the IWW (laughs). Anyway, International Workers of the World, who were, of course, anarchists. He was "some kind of foreigner." The IWW at the time was full of foreigners. It also made perfect sense because he would be more likely to have an affair. Not just a wham, bam, one-night-stand like the other Jenkins girls were being used by, as they say, the white farmhands. It seemed to me that somebody who does not come with the same set of prejudices as someone raised in this environment, it's quite conceivable that a relationship, a love relationship, could develop. So that's where I got the idea of Joe. It just seems that Langston Hughes doesn't speak as harshly of Joe as he does of the other white farm hands, not quite as harshly. He says, "Love did not take long." Which... Isn't that beautiful? "Love did not take long." What else do you need to say? I looked though every one of Langston Hughes' poems looking for an appropriate poem because I thought, "God, he could do better than I could!" and it's going to be this boy's own words so it's got to be a very simple poem and its got to be from the heart. So that's where we got this very sweet, simple, little, from the heart poem.
KS: The students, especially the girls, love the poem!
AP: Did they?
KS: They liked how it linked Joe to Jessie in Cora's heart.
AP:
Oh yes. Well the way I thought of the poem was that I was at my wits end. I went though that whole Norton Anthology, I was looking at everybody under the damn sun! Give me a poet, you know. And then I sat down and I thought, "How would I feel if my husband died? How would I think of him afterwards?" I thought I would see him on our farm. I would see him where we walk. I wrote this funny little poem, because that's the way I saw it. It was organic to the story. "I see you in the cornfields. I see you where the blue grass grows." It seemed to me that Cora and Joe were kindred hearts in the notion of love lasting forever as it was for Cora.
KS: We also were very curious about how you created Mr. Studevant. Because we went back to the text afterwards....
AP: Of course.
KS:
...and we picked up a lot of phrases which I bet, if we compared notes, were the same ones that were the inspiration for making him so spineless and so subservient to his wife. Just little phrases like, "If Mr. Art were here..."
AP: "...He would have let them get married."
KS: Exactly.
AP: Well that speaks volumes, and the fact that she chose the moment when Mr. Art
was away, she chose that moment to take Jesse on the shopping trip. She wouldn't do it in front of him, and of course that subterfuge was her whole life. She was a walking subterfuge, Mrs. Studevant,
deceiving everybody. I know in the story Mr. Studevant is not just weak, he's absent and he's also complicit in what happens with Cora, but he's not as bad. And of course we're looking at a movie, which is
different from a book. You can't have two characters that are exactly the same, Mr. and Mrs. Studevant being both ghastly people. You want to show interactions, and that's how I got this triangle. And
it seemed to me that it would be weakness on the part of the man with a woman like this, with a very formidable character, because she is the one who calls the shots. A lot of men that I know love the woman, for
some inexplicable reason. They have some harbor with her. They really loved her, despite all that. We all know love's crazy and complicated but instead of just showing him as a caricature you needed to
show the dynamic of their relationship.
KS: In one of the scenes, he had Mrs. Studevant leave the room for something and he looked at Cora, as a signal.
AP:
Yes he engineered that. That ended up a little bit different because we had to cut some scenes actually. But he was definitely engineering a moment when Cora could be alone and Cora took it.
KS: Yes, and the kids were saying, "Go, go, go!" and cheering her on.
AP:
Yes, he wanted that moment for Cora. I remember when I wrote it I could just feel Cora standing in the house, hearing the car door, and the car go, and thought "if this were me, I would be up those stairs, even though I'm not supposed to be."
KS: The students also talked about the symbolism of the ribbon that Cora gives Josie, and they thought it was profound.
AP:
Isn't that funny? I remember writing the ribbon thing, that whirling dervishes, and I remember the ribbon going off, because I wanted something to remain. Because you know when someone has died, some small object can bring back a huge flood of memories to you, just some simple thing that you wouldn't normally notice. I wanted that moment to evoke the memory of Josie and the memory of the loss. I actually didn't write the tying of the bow, that was either the actress or the director, a very beautiful invention. I had Cora having a more private moment where she just found it and tucked it in her pocket, to herself. It was a very lovely touch where the little girl wants Cora to tie it onto her hair. That's what I mean about collaboration. An actress can feel something, and want to do it and bring something really wonderful to a story, or a director.
