Remembering St. Clair
2007-12-20
By Jacquie Jones
One of my earliest memories of St. Clair Bourne was winding up at a party at his old apartment at 105th and Broadway, right in the heart of what was becoming, in those days, in the 1980s, the “Upper West Side.” It was still kind of Harlem, then, old Harlem, fringe and kind of sexy. But what impressed me at the time – and I was barely out of Howard University, mind you, if at all – was the company that was kept there. The writer Quincy Troupe and film historian and scholar Clyde Taylor, Hugh Masekela, Kathleen Cleaver, the father of all Black documentary filmmakers, Bill Greaves – all the people who had chronicled and given life to the history and struggle that had brought us up to that moment. So, I just smoked my cigarette (it was the 80s, remember) and tried to look like I belonged. That was twenty years ago.
Since then, somehow, my distanced awe of Saint and all he represented to me turned into something else, something more.
It is true that with over forty titles to his credit, St. Claire Bourne is easily one of our most prolific filmmakers in any genre. And with a list of titles that reads like the who’s who of great Black men, he had, throughout his career, an agenda no self-righteous “Afro-American” – a term he stuck with til the end, could argue with: Black filmmakers have to right the wrongs of the past, cover our heroes in glory, speak the truth.
Avon Kirkland, director of Street Soldiers a film about the work of MacArthur Genius Joe Marshall and the PBS biography of Ralph Ellison and another real veteran of these wars, said of our friend, “his most outstanding virtue: his bone-deep commitment to black people and racial justice. We argued all the time about craft, didacticism, the nature of the universe, etc., but hugged each other warmly, whenever we encountered each other, as if we increasingly came to understand and eventually celebrate that we were, after all, brothers in a (still) strange land.”
Floyd Webb on his mentor and close friend. Click Here to read more.
Since I heard of Saint’s death, at the age of 64, on Saturday, I have not been able to stop thinking the word “community.” Every time I’ve had to write some words to someone, either informing them or sharing a virtual embrace, this word community appears in the correspondence. Truth is, none of us can think of our collaborator, colleague and friend without it. He was always down for “the community” as he would say with his own distinctly implied quotation marks, eyebrows raised.
And this commitment and concern gave birth to lots of things. Increasingly, he saw his role as one of mentor and facilitator. Before I jumped shipped for Africa, he was acting as my executive producer on a film I started developing about Black debutantes. A more realized venture, was his collaboration with Thomas Allen Harris, executive producing his powerful, very personal documentary, The Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, about freedom fighters exiled during Apartheid. This commitment also gave birth to the Black Documentary Collective in New York and it’s Los Angeles counterpoint BAD/West – two organizations of up and coming new makers that Saint breathed both his enthusiasm for the work and his love of “the people” into with the whole force of his 6’4” being.
And now, as I contemplate this profound loss, I’m thinking that all of this stands in such stark relief to the recently released studies these days that try to siphon off the affluent African Americans from the poor blacks, that try to define where we are today in terms of our consumer behavior and not on the basis of anything that really matters, should matter. The thing Saint taught us is that, at the heart of the matter, is some pretty clear stuff. You are either down for your people or you ain’t.
Saint never got confused about that.
But the last time I was with him, in Jackson, Mississippi, last month, at a gathering of both veteran and young documentarians exploring the new, constantly evolving digital frontier, he told the young folks something pretty deep. He said, and I’m paraphrasing now, that they needed to chart a new path. Forget about rehabilitating the past, he told them. Document the things that are happening in your own time. Create your own archive. We might lose a few moments as we transition but what we will gain will mean so much more.
He laid the groundwork for them, after all. That work is done.
Rest in peace, my friend.
Jacquie Jones is a filmmaker and executive director of the National Black Programming Consortium. She can be reached at editors@ebony.com.
