The Joy of Doing Things Badly by Veronica Chambers

Author:Veronica Chambers
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767923903
Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2006-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

Like so many people, I knew very little about Beah Richards, except that she played Sidney Poitier’s mother in the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Then my friend Brandi sent out a group e-mail about Lisa Gay Hamilton’s award-winning documentary, called Beah: A Black Women Speaks. I learned that Beah did not get her first paying acting job until she was thirty-six. Until then, Hamilton tells us she “sustains herself with poetry and activism.” Although it took me nearly a month to watch the film after I had recorded it on TiVo, once I started watching it, I knew I would never forget it. Beah’s words epitomize how I feel when I am in the joy place: when I am leaping across the room in an African dance class, when I am running around the yard with one of my nieces and nephews, when I am holding hands with my husband, walking to work. And it’s her words that I want to remember when I am sitting in the courtroom of my internal judge who says that I am not organized enough, that I am not smart enough, that I am not and never will be enough. In the film, Beah gazed into the camera with the full force of her beauty and she said, “Being is mortal insistence in a complete and perfect state, lacking no essential characteristic. Everything you need, you got. Perfect. Maybe not yet realized, but perfect, complete.”

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