"A Family Thing" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL March 30, 1996 There have been several books published in the last few years dealing with people who are mixed race white and African American but who look white. One, by a university law school dean talks about his childhood and how he was white when he lived in one part of the country and Black when his father moved him to another part of the country to live with relatives. Perhaps more akin to the situation in the film "A Family Thing" is the experience of some of Shirley Taylor Haizlip's relatives, chronicled in her book _The Sweeter the Juice_. Haizlip, an African American woman, writes about her experiences seeking out members of a branch of her mother's family whose members didn't know they were of African American ancestry. In "A Family Thing," Earl Pilcher (Robert Duvall) wouldn't have dreamed in a million years that he was anything other than 100% Scots Irish like most of the other good old boys in the small Arkansas town in which he grew to adulthood. He owns an equipment rental business where he works with his father and nephew, drives a pickup, and behaves with the characteristic arrogance of someone who knows he's among those at the top of the heap. He's a white, male, property-owning, heterosexual family man and business man who has spent his entire life in this community. A few days after his mother passes away, her minister delivers to Earl a letter from her that changes his life and his self image profoundly. She tells him that she was not his biological mother, that he is the son of her husband and Willa Mae, a Black woman who had worked as a domestic in their house in the 1930s and who died in childbirth. Because the baby did not look African American, they concocted a cover story that involved the pretense that Earl was born a few months later of his white "mother" when she was visiting her home in Alabama, and neither Earl nor the rest of the community was ever any the wiser. But she felt she could not go to her grave without letting Earl know who he really was. And she makes a dying request of him--that he find his half-brother, Willa Mae's older son, Raymond Murdoch (James Earl Jones), who is supposed to be a policeman in Chicago. After a rather odd confrontation with his father to find out whether this revelation is true, Earl, without really knowing why, takes off in his truck for Chicago. With the characteristic arrogance of his class/race/gender he assumes that anything that is news to him is news to everybody else, too, but when he finds his brother, Ray Murdoch knows who he is, knows all about what happened sixty years before, and is not the least bit interested in getting to know his brother. In fact, as it turns out, Ray always know who Earl was, and hated him and his father because it was Earl's birth that killed Raymond's mother. He even threw a rock at little Earl one day before he and his Auntie T moved to Chicago, that left a scar that is still clearly visible. Ray tells him that blood is irrelevant and that in any sense that matters they're not brothers. That would be the end of the story except that the screen writers find a way to bring them together again and bring Earl into Ray's home where he lives with old, blind Auntie T (Irma P. Hall) and his troubled son Virgil (Michael Beach). Auntie T. is blind to skin color, too, and welcomes Earl as her sister Willa Mae's other boy, whose birth she witnessed. Although the film's main focus is on the developing relationship between the two men and Earl's changing perceptions of African Americans and of himself, and, aside from the marvelous Auntie T, the other women's roles are tiny, this film says a great deal, in the interstices, about women's lives and the things they had to do given their situation in life. Suffer the unwanted advances of a white male employer to keep a job to support a child. Live your whole life with a man who slept around and raped the cleaning lady (who was also, quietly because it wasn't allowed, your good friend) and then live a lie your whole life. Go North and work 16 hours a day in laundries and as a domestic to support yourself and your dead sister's boy. Make a difference in the world by ultimately refusing the lie and letting the truth come out. The women, all of them, are the real heros of "A Family Thing" and the part that makes it such a moving film, for they understand the importance of connectedness. For the WMNF Women's Show, this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film.