Last night, after the surprisingly quiet and dignified drama of Patsy & Loretta, Lifetime ran a rerun of an older film that was if anything even more emotionally wrenching and powerful, I Am Somebody’s Child: The Regina Louise Story, also based on a true story and also the work of a woman director (Janice Cooke) and a woman screenwriter (Camille Thomasson[1]). Most of it takes place in Oakland, California in the 1970’s and involves Regina Louise (Angela Fairley), who at the start of the film is 13 years old when she’s incarcerated in the Locke home for delinquent children after both her birth parents rejected her. She was busted as a runaway after her father, who conceived her as a result of a one-night stand when her mom was just 13 herself, threw her out of his house after she butted heads with her half-brother and half-sister from dad’s new wife. Dad said he’d turned his back on his former lifestyle, become a born-again Christian and turned her out when she threatened his younger, legally “legitimate” kids. Mom — whom we don’t meet until well into the movie — has also put her formerly dissolute lifestyle behind her and is shacking up with a guy she hopes to marry, and doesn’t want him to know she’s got a teenage daughter already lest that be a deal-breaker for him. Locke is run by a fiendishly buttoned-down Black administrator named Gwen Ford (Kim Hawthorne) who runs the place according to strict discipline, though under her are two white women who are considerably more compassionate and caring, Jeanne Kerr (Gennifer Goodwin) and her more heavy-set co-worker Annie (Lauren Cochrane). Jeanne reaches out to Regina with love and affection, crossing the boundaries big-time but also forming a bond with this troubled kid and being the only person at the facility who can actually get Regina to behave. Jeanne invites Regina to her own home for Christmas, they exchange presents — Regina gives Jeanne a rope holder for a plant pot she made in the Locke arts and crafts department, and Jeanne gives Regina a collegiate dictionary to make it clear that she thinks Regina, despite being three grades behind her age in formal education, has the smarts to make it to college and succeed there. Later on Jeanne also gives Regina a mini-cassette tape recorder and the two make a tape together that becomes significant later on.
Indeed, Jeanne is so taken with Regina that after Regina fails in two foster-home placements — in one because she’s placed with a couple of Black senior citizens and most of the wife’s affections are going to her husband because he’s on oxygen; and in another with a school coach and his family, which seems like it’ll work out O.K. except the coach’s oldest son tries to rape her and she successfully fights back and gets the hell out of there — Jeanne applies to adopt her. Alas, that sends Gwen into a hissy-fit that at least to me sounds like reverse racism, saying that Jeanne is not a fit adoptive parent for Regina for no other reason than that Regina is Black and Jeanne is white. The adoption hearing where Jeanne’s request is heard turns into a grim farce that sounds as if it were co-scripted by Franz Kafka and Louis Farrakhan; Gwen goes into the courtroom and announces that the National Association of Black Social Workers has decreed that Black children should only be adopted by Black parents (at this point I was thinking, “I’ve never even heard of the National Association of Black Social Workers, and if I were the judge in this case I’d be wondering what on earth the National Association of Black Social Workers has to do with this case, especially since they haven’t formally intervened as an organization”). Her arguments against Jeanne’s adoption of Regina go so far that in one particularly bizarre courtroom outburst Gwen accuses Jeanne of “genocide” against Black children — and you want to (or wish the judge would) tell her that this is preposterous: Jeanne doesn’t want to kill Black children en masse, simply to adopt one. The ironies deepen when we realize that every Black person Regina has been involved with has treated her horribly: her birth parents have abandoned her, the other Black kids at Locke have bullied her unmercifully (most of the disciplinary “red stars” she’s racked up have been because she fought back against kids who were bullying her), and Gwen has treated her as a statistic and totally ignored her needs as a person.
Amazingly, the judge (a grey-haired old white guy) buys all this racialist crap and sentences Regina to a psychiatric hospital, where — in yet another irony, given that the whole reason Gwen opposed Jeanne’s adopting Regina was that she deserved to be raised among other Black people — there are no other Black people, either among the inmates or the staff, except for one Black orderly. The rules at this facility are so strict and so relentless it seems like the entire staff trained at the Nurse Ratched School of Psychiatric Care. The kids are supposed to take medications in front of a nurse, who makes them stick their tongues out to prove they’ve swallowed them (though Regina, after the meds make her sick, figures out a way to stick them in the back of her throat and then, when she’s alone, get them out again and stockpile them to take all at once in case she wants to kill herself). When Regina actually does attempt suicide with her stockpile of meds — she chooses to take them at the swimming pool, use the pool water to get them down, then drown herself in the pool because one of the few positive memories in her life is of Jeanne teaching her to swim, only the Black orderly rescues her in what’s the first decent thing any other Black person has done for her — the hospital changes the policy so the kids have to take the meds in liquid form. The blonde woman nurse in charge of administering them tells Regina, “Do you know I almost lost my job because of what you did?” Regina responds by spitting the liquid medication in her face. Jeanne attempts to visit Regina at the hospital, but her letters are intercepted (sort of like Lucia di Lammermoor, in which Lucia’s malevolent family intercepts all her lover Edgardo’s letters to her so she’ll think he’s abandoned her and will be willing to marry the upper-class twit they think will rejuvenate the Lammermoor family fortunes — and, not surprisingly, she ultimately goes homicidally crazy), she’s escorted off the premises when she tries to visit, the hospital actually takes out a restraining order against her and Gwen eventually tells Regina that Jeanne has married a foreigner and moved out of the country. (Oddly, we never find out whether or not this is true, though we see at least two men dating Jeanne.)
The only two slip-ups in the hospital’s relentless regime to get Regina to forget Jeanne by convincing her Jeanne has abandoned her are they let her keep the dictionary and the tape recorder Jeanne gave her way back when — and Regina studies the dictionary relentlessly every chance she gets and plays the tape of her and Jeanne until the batteries wear down and ultimately die. (One decent thing the Black orderly does, besides save her from her suicide attempt, is give her fresh batteries for her machine so she can hear Jeanne’s voice again.) Regina’s rebellious attitude only eases up when she asks for permission to leave the grounds every day to attend high school and is told she has too many demerits to have “away privileges,” so she decides to play by the rules as long as she can, goes to high school, excels, gets a scholarship to attend San Francisco State University (my own alma mater, by the way), goes to work for a hairdresser (the second Black persom in the entire movie who’s treated her with any human decency) and ultimately opens a hair salon of her own. When she was released from the psychiatric hospital — not because they thought she was cured but because she’d turned 18 and “aged out” — she demands to see her psychiatric records. The staff says those are “confidential” (from whom? They’re her records and she’s legally an adult now! Obviously they’re worried that if they supply her documentation on what they did to her, she’ll find a lawyer and sue them) but they give her all the letters Jeanne sent her, many of which included mini-cassettes on which Jeanne recorded messages.
The film ends with Regina writing a book about her experiences called Somebody’s Someone — after the hope she’d expressed throughout her ordeal that someday she could be “somebody’s someone” — and a much older Jeanne running into an adult Regina (played by Sherri Saum, who’s actually a good physical match for Angela Fairley) at a book-signing. The two recognize each other and a title tells us that in 2003, in the same courtroom where Jeanne’s petition to adopt Regina had previously been denied, Jeanne is granted a petition to do an adult adoption of Regina and the ceremony, which weirdly looks and sounds like a wedding, duly takes place. I Am Somebody’s Child moved me to tears (indeed, I’m tearing up all over again just writing about it!), an inherently gripping and emotionally intense story which the filmmakers, Janice Cooke and Camille Thomasson (among other things, last night Lifetime gave us a great case for women directors and displayed that there are quite a few women out there with the chops to direct feature films), trusted to tell itself without either sentimentalizing it or making it nastier and more brutal than it has to be. Regina Louise’s real tragedy was not only that they grew up unwanted and unloved but that the system that was supposed to backstop her and protect her instead treated her in ways that just compounded her problems — yet they did so in the apparently sincere belief that they were helping her. (In one chilling scene Gwen ridicules Regina’s dream of attending college and says it’s her job to make Regina accept what she can do and not try to do things she can’t.) Throughout the film I was reminded of what mystery writer and former Child Protective Services case worker Abigail Padgett told me when I interviewed her for the June 2001 issue of Zenger’s Newsmagazine:
I have a lot of trouble with
systems. I really like the idea of looking at individuals and meeting their needs, which will never be the same needs that have
been outlined for everyone by a system. Of course, you can’t always do that.
You can’t educate each child individually. You have to have school. But when
you’re dealing with something as sensitive as child abuse, I would have been
more comfortable working there [at Child Protective Services] if more attention
had been given to individual situations, rather than, “O.K., this is what we
do, routinely, with everybody.”
That, if anything, is
the moral of I Am Somebody’s Child: The Regina Louise Story. It’s clear from what Abigail Padgett told me in our
interview (and what she wrote in her novels featuring Bo Bradley, a Child
Protective Services worker who’s continually getting in trouble with her bosses
precisely because she wants to work out what’s best for each individual in her
caseload instead of following the standard protocols) that she and Jeanne Kerr
were sisters under the skin. It’s a story I found incredibly moving, at least
partly because while my father was never anywhere nearly as dismissive or
hostile as Regina Louise’s, it was always clear that he thought of me as a
mistake, something he had been stuck with from his brief and ill-advised
marriage to my mother (they divorced when I was 1 ½ and I never had any direct
experience or memories of them as a couple) before he remarried the Stepford
Wife he always wanted, they had the Stepford Daughter they wanted, and she in
turn married the Stepford Boy and gave them the Stepford Grandchildren. Though
I generally avoid Lifetime movies that aren’t sleazy crime stories, last night’s
films — as well as some previous efforts of theirs like For the Love
of a Child, another true-life tragedy about
the founding of the Childhelp Foundation (a film which, as I wrote about it when
it aired in 2009, makes you love humanity for bringing forth the two women who
started Childhelp and also makes you hate humanity for having enough depraved people they needed to start Childhelp) — are among the most powerful
and dramatically moving productions I’ve seen anywhere and need none of the usual apologetic dismissals
like, “Good — for something directed by a woman,” or, “Good — for a Lifetime
movie.”
