1963 Boston, Massachusetts

Dianne Walker (Lady ‘Di’)

Born in 1951

First movie memory in Boston, Massachusetts

Interviewed on 17 September 2019

By Taytum Buford, Pace University

My grandma used to take me to the movies all the time when I was a young child. My mother didn’t care to for it as much but I used to come home and tell her all about the movie grandma and I used to see, whether she wanted to hear it or not. I was a talkative child. Though my grandma was my designated “movie-taking” person, she fell asleep in almost every movie we went to see. At that time, you could sit in the theater all day and continue to watch the same movie for the price of one ticket. Because my grandma would fall asleep so often, I must have seen each movie two or three times in the same day.

Saturdays were the perfect days to go to the movies. It was the day that all of us kids went and it allowed for a more collective experience because we would all show up to school on Monday and talk about it. We always walked to the movie theater because it was in the town square where all the shopping was. The movie theater I went to most often was called ‘The Uptown’ but occasionally we went to ‘The Puritan’ as well. There were a lot of ushers there and my mother would run concessions sometimes so I was there a lot. I could never see a movie without popcorn and I loved the ice cream sandwiches as well. I was never big on the candy but if you gave me popcorn and a soda, I was as happy as could be.

The first movie I went to see; I remember I was about eight years old. Now, I can’t seem to remember the name of the movie or much about the experience so I will tell you about the movie I remember seeing in the theaters. It was called Imitation of Life and I must have been twelve or thirteen years old then. It was about a black woman who had a daughter that could pass as white except the daughter was ashamed that her mother was clearly African-American. She treated her mother poorly and the movie follows her story and how she attempts to come to terms with her ethnicity. I remember just crying over and over again during this movie mainly because I am an African-American woman who is proud but understanding of the hardships during that time in the United States.

The movie had a ‘life-like’ feel and approach to the acting. I remember the little girl being really relatable because at the time, I was the same age as her. She had so many qualities that were similar to my own so I felt myself empathizing with her feelings. Though the actors and actresses were movie stars, I felt that I related to them because I was lucky enough to grow up in the same world as them. I knew many movie stars so it wasn’t hard for me to find connections with them through a screen since I knew some of them on and off the screen. The intense emotional feelings that were conjured up during the movie sensitized me to many many levels of emotions and sympathy. I felt that movies and television raised me as a child and this movie was no different. The life choices that little girl in the movie grew up to make affected not only me but everyone in the African-American community. I noticed things in the movie that I felt the same way about and other things that I could never dream of feeling. I didn’t understand how a girl could hate their mother so much but then I realized that it wasn’t her mother she hated, it was the fact that she couldn’t rub off the color on her skin. She was stuck with it. In some ways, I could relate to that. The disadvantages and prosecution our community suffered in the 1960’s and 70’s were real and the fact that this movie opened up that can of worms was a huge step for our community.