1978 Wilmington, Delaware

Elouise Watson

Born in 1961

Wilmington, DE

Interviewed on 2/9/2023

by Naheem Watson

The first movie I remember watching was The Imitation of Life at the Grand Opera House Theatre here in Wilmington, Delaware. It was about 1978 and, if I remember correctly, the movie was about a black mother who was raped by a white man and conceived a child from it. The child, a girl, was born with a very light skin tone and was white-passing. It was such a sad movie and made me mad because the daughter treated her mother very poorly. Due to her white appearance, she got rights and resources that most black people did not get and she acted as if she was better than her mother because of this. She always identified as white and as she got older, she would never tell people who her mother was. The daughter eventually ran away and told her mother that if she loved her, she would leave her alone. I saw many people in real life that was white-passing or had very light skin that acted better than me and others in the black community. It even took me a while to see a movie in theaters as not many places were open for black people to attend.

While I like theaters, I do not like a lot of the movies I saw in them. I did not like the way many movies portrayed black people, but I still watched movies with and about black characters to support them. In these films, many of the characters lack common sense and weren’t able to properly take care of themselves. However, the actors were great and believable. To be honest, they may have been too believable. They brought actually anger and emotion out of me. The colorist mindsets were reminiscent of real interactions I had. Light-skinned people were able to get good jobs and live much better lives. I even heard of some white-passing people being murdered after marrying a white person without telling them. This was reflected in Imitation of Life when the daughter was beaten up by her white ex-boyfriend who found out she was black. I felt terrible for the mother as she died being rejected by her daughter who she loved so much.

While the Imitation of Life was sad, I do have many good experiences with theaters. I went to see this movie with my sister and two daughters, but the children weren’t really paying attention to the movie as they were quite young. However, I’ve loved this theatre ever since I was a kid. Back in the day, I use to go on Saturdays for $0.25 and watch cartoons all day. Candy was really cheap and I would usually get a Hershey’s chocolate bar, but my main go-to was their subs. Their subs were the bomb! Again, for only $0.25, I could get a big, packed sub with any choice of condiments and a variety of meat. My sister and I used to love them! I really miss weekends like those as a kid.