[In the following essay, Thompson explores Sayles's representation of African Americans in his films, suggesting that the writer/director has consistently avoided stereotypes and created sympathetic characters.]

“You afraid of me? Don't be,” a minor black character says in John Sayles's 1992 film, Passion Fish. The character is addressing the crippled former soap-opera star played by the white actress Mary McDonnell, but he might be talking to the American moviegoing public. Virtually alone among black movie characters, who are largely either walking history lessons (Glory or Malcolm X), second-banana types whose jobs are to marvel at the daring of the white heroes (Die Hard with a Vengeance or the Lethal Weapon series), or nameless, small-time criminals (you name it), blacks in John Sayles's movies are what real blacks know themselves to be: flesh-and-blood people. That Sayles is a white writer-director constitutes nothing less, in my mind, than a ray of hope not only for the future of American films but also for black-white relations in that Hollywood suburb called Real Life.

Sayles has shown a progression in this regard. The first of his movies to feature a major black character—and the only one to date in which a black heads the cast—was The Brother from Another Planet (1984), starring the woefully under-appreciated Joe Morton. The Brother, a fugitive slave who crash-lands on Earth, is not a fully realized human being, in part for the very good reason that he really does come from another planet, but also because Sayles has idealized him. Morally, the silent Brother can do no wrong, and, given his situation, he is extraordinarily good-natured. Even the frustration he experiences while trying to fit in on Earth is not interpreted by Sayles as being simply the outgrowth of a cultural gap or as a sign of limited patience on the Brother's part. When the Brother tries to enter a nightclub, for example, and is told by the sympathetic doorman that the money he has put down is not enough, he walks away in disgust. His gesture is a comment on human materialism, his anger that of Jesus chasing the money-changers from the temple.

Subtler elements are also at work in the film. In Harlem, the community where the central character finds acceptance, if not exactly understanding, much of the action takes place in a bar, where the black owner, his wife, and their customers present a wonderful mix of humor, foibles, and essential decency—the stuff, in other words, of humanity. (The bar owner, on being asked by his wife what he wants for dinner: “You mean what do I want, or what do I want that you can cook?” The wife, after her husband has suggested that they go out to dinner and asked her where she wants to go: “You mean where do I want to go, or where do I want to go that you can afford?”)

In terms of his development of African-American characters, Sayles took a step up with his sprawling, multiplotted urban tale, City of Hope (1991). His point man again is Joe Morton, in the role of a city councilman seen as too liberal by his colleagues and as too ineffectual and too tied to the ‘system’ by his mostly black constituency. Morton's councilman learns that leadership involves more than good intentions and moral correctness. Just as importantly, he proves to be more than a type, a political opinion wearing a suit; he is instead a complex man whose troubles stem in part from his ability to see more than one side of an issue. “Half of everything you say is true,” he tells a committed, Afrocentric community activist who has just spouted a line of propaganda. “The other half is shit!”

Sayles topped himself again with Passion Fish. In that movie, Mary McDonnell's soap-opera actress suffers a car accident that leaves her unable to walk. She subsequently retires to her large southern home, where she wallows in bitterness and drives away one home-care person after another. Enter the latest applicant for the job, a black woman played by Alfre Woodard. It is easy to imagine this story in the hands of another writer-director: instead of Woodard, Whoopi Goldberg shows up, to do another version of the insufferably all-knowing figure she has perfected in other movies and TV shows, and by film's end she has led the self-pitying McDonnell to accept—nay, to be grateful for the personal growth that has resulted from—her disability. But Sayles knew better. A single parent struggling to overcome a drug habit, Woodard's character is at least as screwed up as her employer, and these two wounded women work slowly, together and separately, to overcome some of their difficulties.

The movie runs counter to our worst fears in other ways, too. When Woodard's father shows up at McDonnell's house, we find that he is not the hard-drinking, unemployed child molester who all along was The Cause of this poor black woman's problems (are you watching, Alice Walker? Sapphire?). Instead, he is a dignified, even stuffy, physician disappointed in his daughter's low station. Woodard's own daughter turns out to be not one of those preternaturally cute, sassy miniadults with one eye on the camera, à la The Cosby Show, but a plain, bespectacled, touchingly shy little girl, one you would never expect to see in a movie precisely because she reminds you of someone you know. ‘There are twenty million African-American stories,’ Sayles as much as says. ‘This has been one of them.’

The most amazing sequence in Passion Fish, for my money, is the one in which McDonnell is visited by a group of her successful actor friends, one of them a black woman played by Angela Bassett (Joe Morton's wife in City of Hope). During one scene, Woodard is working alone in the kitchen when Bassett wanders in. Again, one cannot help but envision their exchange as written by some Hollywood hack. (Woodard: “I don't care how many limos you done rode in. You might think you just like them, but you a black woman, just like me!” A chastened Bassett: “I guess no matter where we go, this”—pointing to some area of her skin—“never changes.”) But with the firm support of Sayles's writing and direction, these two great actresses convey through the hesitancy in their faces and gestures what words could not convincingly get across: the oddness of their relation to each other, the fact that they are separated by social standing but made similar by skin color and, if you like, heritage. We wait with them to see which of these factors will set the tone of their discourse; we share their (unspoken) relief when they hit on a topic of conversation that reflects neither their class difference nor their racial solidarity but their common humanity.

To point to Sayles's uniqueness is to take nothing away from gifted black filmmakers like Charles Burnett or Julie Dash. Burnett and Dash have provided the invaluable service of showing black people among themselves, at home in their culture, in situations that do not call for them to react—at least directly—to the actions of whites. But the truth is that black Americans are not by themselves, and the trick is to show them within the larger society without having the contrast reduce them to one of a number of stereotypes. Sayles has done this repeatedly in the past, and he does so again with his most recent movie, Lone Star. Chris Cooper, as the sheriff of a small Texas town, investigates the death, forty years earlier, of one of his predecessors—an equal-opportunity shakedown artist and killer played by Kris Kristofferson. One of those on whom Kristofferson preys is a black barman, Otis Payne, portrayed in his youth by Gabriel Casseus. In a testament to the power of both Casseus's acting and Sayles's writing, the barman manages to acknowledge that he is up against a force greater than himself while still maintaining his dignity. (Also on hand is Old Faithful himself, Joe Morton, as the barman's son, an army colonel with a compassionate heart beneath his spit and polish.)

For a black writer-director to have pulled all this off would be a cause for celebration; that a white one—Sayles—has done it is something of a miracle. He has shown, through his films, that it is not necessary to actually become a person of another race in order to sympathize with him or her, to understand something of their situation. In these racially troubled times, for even one person to display such sympathy and insight is a justification for hope; and hope, nothing less, is what John Sayles has offered us.