by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night, after Charles
and I had watched the early-1930’s Universal horror films JMurders in the
Rue Morgue and The Black Cat (at least nominally based on stories by Edgar
Allan Poe) since yesterday, January 19, was the 211th anniversary of
Poe’s birth, I put on the Lifetime channel for a movie I had been particularly
looking forward to but hadn’t been able to watch the night before, when it
“premiered: Stolen by My Mother: The Kamiyah Mosley Story. The film was based on a true story that started
in 1996, when Gloria Manigo (Niecy Nash) drives from her home in the small town
of Walterboro, South Carolina to a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida. We’re
originally under the impression that Gloria is a nurse at the hospital —
screenwriters Richard Kletter and Marie Samit and director Jeffrey Byrd don’t
even make it clear that the action is happening in two different cities, let
alone that Gloria is not a
hospital staff member (though she’s dressed in scrubs, albeit with a civilian
shirt over the top of them, which makes us think she’s one of the hospital
nurses) —but what is clear is
that Gloria, desperate to show up with a baby since her own pregnancy ended in
a miscarriage and her abusive second husband, Charles Manigo (Garfield Wilson),
was desperate for a child of his own and threaten to beat her (or worse) if she
lost “their” baby, simply boosted one from one of the Black patients in the
maternity ward, Shonara Mobley (Ta’ronda Jones). She claimed she needed the
child for 15 minutes to take her to another room and have her temperature
taken, but she never returned; instead she took the child back to Walterboro
and raised her as her own. She even called the girl Alexis Manigo instead of
Kamiyah Mobley, the name Shonara had chosen for her daughter. One of the ironies
of this story is that thanks to the responsibility of child-rearing — even
though the child is not only not her own but is in her life because of the
worst and most immoral thing she’s ever done — leads Gloria to turn her life
around. (Though her previous sins aren’t specified in the script, they were
sufficiently serious that her ex-partner sued and won custody of both her
biological sons — and neither these boys nor their father appear as dramatis
personae in the movie.) Gloria
dumps the abusive Charles and raises Alexis as a single parent until, as a
heavy-duty and highly trusted volunteer at her church, she meets the lead
singer in a gospel quartette and marries him. The problem is he comes not only
with his own daughter, Arika Williams (Natalie Malaika) but her child as well — like Shonara Mosley, Arika became
pregnant while still a teenager, and by a rather sketchy guy who quickly
skedaddled out of the Williamses’ lives. Alexis and Arika have the usual
bonding problems of two women who aren’t at all biologically related but are
forced to be — and accept each other as — “sisters.”
Things go tensely but
generally well for the Williamses until Alexis turns 16 and wants to take a job
waitressing at the local coffee shop. The owner is amenable and says the job is
hers whenever she wants it; all she has to do is produce a Social Security card
and a legal I.D. Alexis asks Gloria for these things — and Gloria finally tells her the truth: that Gloria isn’t her legal
mother, she kidnapped her from a hospital in another state, and she had hoped
she’d never have to tell her this but now that the issue has been forced, now’s
the time. Alexis responds to the trauma by pouring her heart out to her
boyfriend Swerve (Kareem Tristan Alleyne) and agreeing to have sex with him for
the first time — which led me to worry that the cycle of Black women getting
pregnant as teenagers was going to continue and become the focus of Alexis’s
life — but instead Gloria agrees to turn herself in to the local authorities
and she finds herself awaiting trial for kidnapping Alexis. Meanwhile, birth
mother Shonara Mosley tries to reconnect with her stolen daughter as soon as
she hears the news that Alexis — or Kamiyah, as she insists on calling her —
has been found at last. Shonara insists that Kamiyah live with her until she
turns 18 and is legally emancipated, but Kamiyah/Alexis insists that as far as
she’s concerned Gloria, the woman who raised her, is her mother and she’s totally uninterested in
having another one. This sends Shonara ballistic; she threatens to get a court
order forbidding Kamiyah/Alexis from seeing Gloria, she gloats when Gloria ends
up arrested and imprisoned pending trial, and when the trial finally occurs and
the judge (Gloria has pleaded guilty so the only open question is whether
she’ll draw the maximum 24-year sentence for the kidnapping or the judge will
be more lenient) asks Shonara what sentence she thinks the judge should impose, Shonara says that
she knows it’s not an option but the only thing that would satisfy her is a death sentence on Gloria. The judge
ultimately decides to sentence Gloria to the maximum, or awfully close to it,
and in the end Alexis/Kamiyah (it’s obvious she prefers Gloria’s name for her
because when she finally does land a waitressing job — courtesy of her lawyer, an African-American, who obtained new and
legal identity documents for her — the name she has her employer put on her
I.D. tag is “Lexi,” short for “Alexis”) is left alone except for her
stepfather’s relatives and the promise that soon she will be 18 and can make
her own way in the world — which she plans to do by attending college, possibly
on the scholarship the state university system in Florida has offered her to go
to school there.
Stolen by My Mother: The Kamiyah Mosley Story is a beautifully done story that offers quite a
lot to think about, including some heavy-duty issues about parenting, parental
love and just who a child belongs to,
anyway: the people whose sperm and egg came together in a uterus to conceive
her biologically or the people who put the blood, tears, toil and sweat into
the difficult and challenging task of raising her and bringing her into the
adult world? (I think you can pretty well tell from the way I phrased that last
sentence which side I’m on.)
It’s also a story about the clash between legal and moral justice: one can read
it as Gloria getting her just deserts for snatching another woman’s child and
putting her through psychological hell
for 18 years, or Gloria as a basically good woman who did a really bad thing
but atoned for it by raising the daughter, and raising her so well. The film
also raised some confusing jurisdictional issues, not only with the state of
Florida treating this as an active kidnapping and prosecuting it as if the
crime had occurred 18 days instead of 18 years before — wouldn’t the statute of
limitations have run out, or did the Florida law allow them to define the
kidnapping as a continuing criminal enterprise since Gloria still had custody of her kidnap
victim? Also, as Charles pointed out, wouldn’t the federal government have had
jurisdiction, since under the so-called “Lindbergh Law” (passed in the wake of
the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. in 1932) it’s a federal
crime to take a kidnap victim across state lines? Or maybe Florida’s statute of
limitations didn’t apply but the feds’ one did. As in the film I Am Somebody’s Child: The
Regina Louise Story, also based on a true story about a highly traumatic
real-life case, I felt the judge’s decision fundamentally unjust and untempered
by mercy — if I’d been in her shoes I probably would have cited the famous
anecdote from the Bible of King Solomon having to decide between two women who
claimed custody of the same child (a reference I’m surprised didn’t occur to any
of the characters in the film even though religion is depicted as an important
part of their lives) and given Gloria half the maximum sentence, partly as a sort of Solomonic
splitting-the-distance and partly to acknowledge the moral complexity of
Gloria’s actions — yes, she did evil, and she so deeply wounded Kamiyah’s birth
mother that woman wanted to see her
dead; but she also turned her life around and raised Kamiyah to be a decent,
productive, intelligent and self-actualizing human being.
So I was surprised
when during one of the interstital segments in which the people involved in
making the movie discussed it, producer Robin Roberts (who first encountered
the story as a host on the ABC-TV show Good Morning, America) said she thought the judge’s decision was just. I was startled by that because
it went right to the heart of what I thought was the one flaw in this otherwise
excellent production: writers Kletter and Samit and director Byrd really stacked the deck in Gloria’s favor. Though some of
the time cuts are a bit jarring and hard to follow (especially when the
characters changed their hair style and thus made it harder, especially for we
white people in the audience, to tell who was who), I think this movie could
have used more of a sense of who Shonara was and what she went through from losing her daughter even though
she stayed with Kamiyah’s biological father (something we wouldn’t have bet on since at the time of Kamiyah’s birth
her biological father was serving a prison term) and has had two more kids she
was able to raise normally. I flashed back to the 1949 film Not Wanted, Ida Lupino’s first film as a director, which
tackled a story like this from the other direction — a teenage girl gets
pregnant and is forced to give up her baby for adoption, then goes crazy from
what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder, freaks out whenever she sees a baby because she thinks (or imagines)
the kid is hers, and finally, in a daze, picks up someone else’s kid and is let
go because she obviously did it because she was freaked out and she needs
psychological treatment, not punishment. Making Shonara more of a complex
character instead of cutting away from her and mostly leaving her out of the
story until her daughter’s whereabouts are discovered, whereupon she turns into
a vengeful bitch, would have made an already high-quality film even better. But
that’s the only major flaw I can see in what’s otherwise one of Lifetime’s very
best recent productions, an alternately heart-warming and heartrending story
that challenges our most basic and taken-for-granted notions of parental love,
crime, justice and mercy, and is finely acted by a beautiful and highly
talented cast.
