False Witness by Dorothy Uhnak Read Free Book Online

tilt emphasized by outrageous makeup. Her hair, thick and heavy, took easily to the avant-garde styles required. The fact that she seemed more a deeply tanned white woman with hints of the exotic in her background was all to the good: it was not yet known that “black is beautiful.”
    Her body might have been created specifically for modeling: it was long and thin, perfectly proportioned, flawless with photographically essential bone structure. After a few years of great success in the European fashion world, after she split up with Gerard, Sanderalee was discovered by Vogue and brought home to be the first major black model in the United States.
    The early, most famous photographs showed an ice-cool woman with smoldering interior or, perhaps, just the opposite: smoldering woman with ice-cool interior. She could flash in any direction. The camera never detracted from nor enhanced her. It captured whatever role she chose to play.
    Inevitably, she tired of being someone’s mannequin. She went to Los Angeles where an adventurous young ad agency took a chance: to use a beautiful black woman in an out-and-out sexual come-on TV commercial for perfume.
    The scene was an all-white bedroom, satins, silks, furry rugs, a great musical background; wordlessly, the camera panned the length, the endless length of this golden tan fantastic creature in an unbelievable white evening dress, clinging as she lay stretched and poised, back to camera, facing an obligatory fireplace. The camera explored her body, reached her back, shoulders, neck, then her head turned slowly and sensuously as she propped her cheek against her hand. Sanderalee made love to the camera, her eyes offered the invitation, her mouth, lips parted lustfully, as in a maddening whisper, she named the perfume: Woman. Quick blackout.
    It became the most popular, sensational, criticized, copied and satirized commercial of its day and led to Sanderalee’s appearance on the talk show circuit: Carson and Griffin; a chance to swap wisecracks on Mike Douglas, where an ogling group of fellow guests let it be known they couldn’t care less for her wit, just let us look at her, right, fellas?
    Within a year of the commercial and the guest shots, Sanderalee Dawson had her own half-hour talk show on the Coast.
    Depending on her mood, her guests, her whim of the moment, Sanderalee slipped back and forth from Carolina nigger gal to New York Bloomie’s dream woman. Anger, which had sparked through many of her early photographs as something strong and mysterious, was no longer the I’ll-show- them sort of thing. In recent appearances, both on her show, which was now New York-based and network-syndicated, and in the political arena, into which she was dipping now and then, Sanderalee’s anger was real and a little frightening.
    She and Gerard had been separated for years, although the marriage hadn’t been dissolved until Sanderalee became deeply involved in a search for racial identity. Her fellow-seeker was a well-known black entertainer who abandoned Hollywood and Las Vegas, gave up his open shirts, gold chains and tight pants in favor of matching dashikis. Although physically they were very different, Sanderalee and friend seemed to have gone to the same hairdresser for a tumble-weed natural; the same speech teacher, from whom they emerged with a slow, cadenced, measured way of talking, as though mentally translating from a much older language into a careful, unfamiliar English.
    They had picked up on the same type of condemnation of all things white. Under her new lover’s careful guidance—he became co-producer of her show—there was a self-consciously “black” atmosphere on her set; her selection of guests and topics ranged from angry black welfare mothers to disheveled white civil libertarians who heaped abuse on the white establishment from which they had recently removed themselves. And she surrounded herself with surly, head-shaven black ex-cons. Members of her crew,