Keeping Your Head Straight

"At de feet o' Jesus

Sorrow like a sea.

Lordy, let you' mercy

Come driftin' down on me.

At de feet o' Jesus,

At yo' feet I stand.

O, ma precious Jesus,

Please reach out yo' hand."

   --Langston Hughes, The Dream Keeper

Find it hard in this crazy age to keep your perspective or your head straight? Sometimes it seems like this is a full-time job just to keep on an even keel. I've found a movie lately that have helped me refocus my vision.

Precious. Ever since this movie came out I have been intrigued by what I heard. And yet when I saw the previews of that mother screaming obcenities at her daughter...throwing a frying pan at her head--I tought this was the last movie I waned to see. Who wants to pay to be depressed?  My wife and I finally got up the courage to rent the DVD the other night and watched this movie. We were glad we did.

There is a whole lot of darkness in this film. Set in Harlem in the 1980's with crack and the AIDS epidemic in full force, this is Precious' neighborhood. Her name is Claireece "Precious" Jones. She is morbidly obese, sixteen years old and mother of one child and expecting another both by her father who raped her. Just about everything around her goes wrong. All the kids in the neighborhood make fun of her and taunt her. She is forced out of school because she is pregnant. Her life with her Mother is a living hell. The mother vents all her own anger and frustration on Precious. In the middle of the movie Precious discovers that she is HIV positive thanks to her father.

Precious escapes into fantasy-land where she sees herself as beautiful, rich, loved by the boy of her dreams. Not only is she white in her dream world but she is also thin and blonde. After she is expelled from school for being pregnant, she hears about a GED prep school for troubled girls. Her mother wants her to forget school and apply for welfare. Precious winds up in the GED program. There--with a help of a great teacher who takes so much time with her--she begins slowly to break out of he hard crust of her life and realize for the first time she is a person of worth and value.

Watching the abuse which rains down on her head is almost unbearable. Several people hel change Precious' life. Her teacher, who spends infinite hours with her. A social worker who cares about her clients. A male nurse that was in the hospital when her second baby was born.  At the end of the film you know that Precious, despite all the odds, is going to make it.

The movie taught me a lot. It was not sappy or sentimental. What about abuse or rape or HIV could possibly be mushy? I learned something about the resilience of the human spirit. I learned something once more about the power of love that comes from outside the family when nothing at home is but a hell on earth. I leaned something about hope when there are no signs of hope at all.

The author, Sapphire who wrote Push from which the movie was made, said that Precious was a composite of many young, poor black people she met as a teacher in Harlem. I'm glad I saw the movie. It makes me believe in the resilience of the human spirit. I hear that some African-Americans hate the movie because they are afraid the world will  believe one more time in the inferiority of black people. I saw the film as  hope even for those whom seem to have no options. Maybe it's our task to make sure that there really is a safety net for all those who otherwise really will fall through the cracks. Maybe we are the safety net.

I remember a line from another movie several years ago: "If you stare at some one long enough you discover their humanity." I discovered Precious' humanity and  that discovery opened my eyes once again to hope and possibility for all of us in the human family.