Racial politics in MOKEY

The aspect of MOKEY that most interests me is the racial angle. Mokey lives in a poor southern town where whites and blacks live in close proximity. Mokey lives in a small but comfortable house while most of his playmates, white and black, live in much humbler circumstances. His nanny is a black woman, Cindy Molishus (played by Etta McDaniel, Hattie’s sister), who doesn’t seem to have a lot of patience with Mokey nor much affection for him. (Given Mokey’s egregious behavior in the course of the film—lying, stealing, running away—it’s hard not to blame her.) For a significant section of the film, Mokey, having run away from home, lives with his three black playmates, Booker T (Cordell Hickman), Brother (William “Buckwheat” Thomas), and Begonia (Marcella Moreland) and their dotty old aunt (in name only and not “blood kin”), Aunt Deedy (Cleo Desmond). Mokey’s done up in blackface with a cap covering his straight hair and pretends to be the playmates’ cousin “Julius.” Apparently this fools the aunt, who never bothers to wash him or take his cap off during the three or so weeks he spends with them. He stays in blackface chiefly to avoid discovery by the townsfolk combing the area searching for him. It isn’t until the end of those three weeks that Mokey’s hapless father (Dan Dailey) gets the bright idea to finally question Mokey’s playmates about his whereabouts.

While black maids and servants were common in Hollywood films of the 1930s and ’40s, it’s rare that we got a glimpse of black life away from white folks. This film gives us such a glimpse. To criticize this film because the characters speak in exaggerated southern black dialect is to deny the humanity of the characters. There are seven black characters with speaking parts, four of them major characters. Without these characters we wouldn’t get to see these remarkable performances by black actors trying to inject humanity into the stereotypes (especially two of the children, Cordell Hickman and Marcella Moreland). It’s easy to dismiss stereotypes when you don’t see these characters as human beings. Which begs the question of who’s the most racist. The creators of these films who sought to include black people in them to a degree that was rare in that period or the politically correct critics of today?

NOTE: This is a shortened version of the entry I posted in the Reviews section.